Since the rise of the movement for indigenous rights a half-century ago, many indigenous activists and scholars have worked within a paradigm defined in large part by nationalism and primordialism. Indigenous claims to justice are rooted to primordial autocthony for several reasons: an interest in revitalizing indigenous lifeways; the political efficacy of primordiality in public debate; and legal frameworks which require proof of primordiality.

It’s a wide and broad field, but its fair to say that there is a lot of disenchantment setting in: it makes cultural innovation (which is healthy and necessary) look like deculturation, it overlooks the role of legal regimes in eliciting the ‘ancient’ land tenure and kinship systems they use to make native title claims, and some indigenous scholars find the western national form a limiting and constrictive way of organizing their communities.

Nowhere is this more a problem than the Pacific, where long-standing tropes of isolated islands, missionized natives, and dying cultures have made finding positive self-understanding elusive.

Voyaging and Recovery

I think it’s in this light that Diaz takes us the task of thinking through voyaging. Pacific navigation has had a renaissance — people have sailed from Hawaii to Tahiti, and practically everywhere else (google it if you’re not familiar with this stuff, since it’s totally incredible). Instead of rolling this activity into a politics of patrimony and primordiality, Diaz seems to be saying, what if we used it as the raw material for a project of modernist, indigenous self-forging?

The key here is Diaz’s absolutely lovely inversion of traditional tropes about Pacific culture: for him, the heart and soul of Pacific culture is not the island, it’s the canoe: the expansive impulse of travel and innovation. It’s a wonderfully playful reversal.

By putting the canoe rather than the island front and center, Diaz is doing more than invoking, dude-like, the truism that culture is “about the journey, not the destination”. Once you catch the wave of this metaphorical reversal you can ride it for quite some time.

I think this is what he is trying to do in his discussion of etak. What sort of analytic horizons open up if we feel free to play with the concepts we’ve inherited? Maybe islands ‘move’ in the sense that their populations live in diaspora – so what happens if we make that circulation central to our understanding of island cultures rather than peripheral to authentic ‘life in the village’? And if this riffing on the concept insists that we find examples of islands literally moving then suddenly climate change (descending beneath the waves), mining (disassembling islands) and volcanoes and lava (volcanic growth). It’s not like people haven’t thought about these things before, but it puts the spotlight on them in a new way, enables novel configurations, and justifies scholarly focus in new moral terms.

Wisdom and Postmodernism

One of the things I like most about Diaz’s project is the way that it connects with something that anthropologists have often felt but rarely expressed — that fieldwork changes one in a way, leading not just to data, but to a fuller self and even a sort of wisdom about the contours that life can take. In the context of indigenous anthropology, I see scholars like Diaz actively using this insight and yoking it to an explicit project of — as they put it — (re)membering.

I do have one gripe with this approach, however, which is the debt that it owe to postmodernism. Much of the work done by scholars like Diaz emerges out of Santa Cruz’s History of Consciousness program and James Clifford. This upsets me a great deal because I wish that my brand of anthropology had been responsible for authors of this calibre. In the 80s authors like Marshall Sahlins and Greg Dening did a great job encouraging major Pacific scholars like Epeli Hau’ofa (Dening kept on encouraging right until the end, in fact). But somehow their message of the vitality of indigenous culture, the importance of innovation, the empowering nature of mixing orthodox Western and Pacific modes of knowing somehow burned itself, perhaps in the culture wars of the 90s? At any rate, we are left in a situation where there isn’t a base of collegiality and friendship to reconnect mainstream anthropology and Native cultural studies.

Even worse, Clifford’s work on indigenous articulation, so influential to Diaz, reads to me as a derivative, less well-written version of Sahlins’s article “Good Bye To Tristes Tropes”, which was published eight years earlier. How is it that Clifford gets credit for coming up with the ideas that have influenced Diaz? I want to blame postmodernism for denouncing a straw man version of anthropology while quietly poaching our insights. But on reflection I think we have not done enough to welcome the scholarly projects of Native scholars into our intellectual conversations.

This is one reason why I wanted to read the Diaz right after the introduction to HAU — I see strong overlap between the two projects. Both seek to mine concepts for new meaning, using them to stretch existing understandings. Both seek these concepts in what the layperson would consider ‘exotic’ cultures. Both are focused on ethnography, but also veer off wildly in inventive new directions. Both Diaz and Wagner see their scholarship to be about remaking the subjectivity of the scholar — in Wagner’s case this is almost a sort of gnostic mysticism.

But Diaz’s project is also so clearly one which is totally uninterested in ‘exoticism’ — it is about cultural heritage and finding the way in which one’s own personality has been shaped by tradition, and the using that understanding to shape the future of tradition. It would be like the editorial board of HAU immersing themselves deeply in Catholic theology in order to make a New Anthropological Humanism featuring reworked Patristic philosophy and huge, postmodern mitres ostentatiously worn in the lobbies of academic conferences as signs of connection with one’s cultural past. In this respect HAU, which claims not to be but I suspect paradigmatically rooted in the exotic, and Diaz, who is self-consciously decolonizing himself of unsavory foreign powers, differ.

My dream AAA panel is a huge, star-studded affair of in which we get Native Cultural Studies and Ethnographic Theory together to forge anthropology’s future. But sadly, I think the personal differences between the people involved would prevent the intellectual commonalities from emerging.

Further Reading

One thing is for sure: Pacific studies has done a killer job making their work available open access — mostly because the editors of The Contemporary Pacific have made sure their journal is the home of so much energy surrounding these issues, and that it is free to download. This includes Hau’ofa’s seminal essay Our Sea of Islands and Diaz and Kauanui’s programmatic introduction to a special number of that journal entitled Native Pacific Cultural Studies On The Edge. There is a lot more as well if you just google around.

Conclusion

I am a bit late getting this out, but I will try to follow the usual schedule of letting it run until Wednesday, when I’ll post a new reading. As always, try to be polite and collegial to the authors featured in the reading circle.

I want to say more but I’ve been putting off posting this long enough, so I’ll hit ‘publish’ and see what happens — I hope we have a good discussion, everyone!

I think people will see interesting parallels with the ‘ethnographic theory’ I discussed last time, but the piece is coming from a very different subject position and intellectual heritage position. And best of all, it’s only seven pages long. Seven pages – surely you can manage to read seven pages and then drop by the site to talk about it. So download Voyaging for Anti-Colonial Recovery: Austronesian Seafaring, Archipelagic Rethinking and the Re-Mapping of Indigeneity

As usual, I’m posting this on Wednesday. I’ll write up my thoughts on Friday and open it up for comments after that. We can run through the weekend and then by next Wednesday we’ll be ready to move on to the next piece to discuss.

These journals are small and specialized — despite the size of the Pacific, the scholarly community is pretty small — but despite this they are all being made more and more available online. Or maybe I should say because of this. I also think that we, like the physicists, are a group of people with a strong sense of community and a commitment to the values of our discipline — and the Pacific is a place where people value share and community.

I was absolutely thrilled to learn the other day, for instance that Pacific Studies has posted over thirty years of back issues available for free on its website. This contains a lot of great articles, including both ‘classics’ and work that is still relevant today.

Here at the University of Hawaii the Center for Pacific Island Studies has done a superb job of making its work available open access. This material deserves far more attention than it gets. It includes a occasional papers series that began with relatively staid titles like Pacific-Related Audiovisual Materials for Secondary Schools to truly new and exciting scholarship by Pacific Islanders such as Indigenous Encounters: Reflections on Relations Between People in the Pacific edited by Katerina Teaiwa and The Space Between: Negotiating Culture, Place, and Identity in the Pacific by Marata Tamaira.

Moreover, CPIS (yes, they call it ‘sea-piss’. Get over it) has put over twenty years of The Contemporary Pacific online as well for people to read and download. TCP (as its known) is more than an anthropology serial — it’s a deeply engaged journal committed to life in the Pacific and has led the way in Pacific cultural studies and in creating opportunities for Pacific Islanders to publish. It’s an incredible resource for anyone interested in our neck of the woods.

The University of the South Pacific is also moving forward to open up some of its journal the Journal of Pacific Studies (which is different from Pacific Studies, which is published by Brigham Young University-Hawaii). Pacific Studies currently has 8 volumes of its back issues available open access and has abstracts and tables of contents for the remaining issues online.

We have a long way to go — most of the Australian journals are in the hands of Wiley, for instance, but I think sometimes we wring our hands about the fate of our journals without reminding ourselves of the resources out there already. In the case of the Pacific, it seems more and more that the challenge is building software and tools that will help non-experts discover and use the content that is already available… and that is a great problem to have!

(Update: Pei-yi Guo points out that Pacific Asia Inquiry is also available open access. It’s young yet, but the second issue is chock full of great people. Back issues of the intriguing ISLA: Journal of Micronesian Studies are also available and I use them in teaching sometimes.

Also, although I totally forgot to mention it, the Journal de le Société des Océanistes is also available online for more or less all of its back catalog. Don’t be fooled by the accents aigus — a good chunk of the articles are in English and there are some classic and important pieces in there. Alternately if Dutch colonialism is more your thing, the Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde features more adatsrecht than you can shake a stick at, all open access.

And last but certainly not least, the mac-daddy of them all (is there a hyphen in mac-daddy?) the Journal of the Polynesian Society has an absolutely sick amount of material up on their website. ) 

Unfamiliar Fishes is a popular history of American colonialism in Hawaii dressed up as a light travel narrative. Vowell builds her historical narrative up out of anecdotes of her own visits to Hawaii to research the book: tourist locations she goes to with her family, interviews she did with local scholars, interesting but not quite topical documents she found in the archives. Although the book is supposedly about New Englanders who traveled to Hawaii to preach the gospel, much of it is actually about Hawaii and Hawaiians itself, with long diversions about different aspects of the culture: hula, kapa, ahupua’a, and so forth. Along the way you also learn a lot of about 19th century American protestantism, of course, but it’s clear that Vowell’s goal is to provide a relatively detailed sketch of Hawaiian culture and history in its own terms, and she succeeds at this goal.

One of the reasons that Vowell is successful is the circles she moved through. Throughout the book she recounts meetings with some of the premier scholars of Hawaiian history and politics, as well as sovereignty activists (who want to secede from the United States, basically) and of course missionary descendants themselves. She quotes from some of the most recent influential books on Hawaiian history (Aloha Betrayed by Noenoe Silva, for example) as well, which indicates that she’s done her homework. In sum,the book’s success is due in large part to the way Vowell has tapped into and reported on a pre-existing community of scholars and the body of work they’ve produced, some of whom are played by Keanu Reeves in the audiobook.

Haoles in Hawaii is even more a summary of local research in our islands. Rohrer worked closely with many of the people that Vowell cites, and her work presents a much more distilled and careful reading of their arguments — indeed, if you are an academic wanted a run-down (complete with citations) of contemporary critical scholarship on Hawaii, this is is the place to come. The topics she deals with are also very topical: lawsuits attempting to demonstrate that a Hawaiian-only school is unconstitutional, and the ongoing debate, fueled largely by white immigrants to Hawaii, about whether the term ‘Haole’ is itself racist — because for many of these people being on the receiving end of a minority identity is a major shock, apparently.

At times, however, Rorher’s book is too closely related to the literature she cites. One of the main audience of Haoles in Hawaii is haoles in Hawaii, and the book clearly wants to help them get a clue about the history that informs the race relations that they encounter when they arrive here. I don’t think Rorher succeeds in doing this in her book. To a certain extent this is because the tone is ‘too academic’. It lacks the autobiographical, vulnerable voice of “Haole Girl”, a genre-bending article of Rohrer’s that I often assign my students and while it is clearly written, it is still identifiable as an academic text.

And this is, really, the biggest issue I have with the book: the critical tone it borrows from ethnic studies, indigenous studies, and critical race theory that she draws on. It is one thing to write for scholars who oppose hegemonic anglo-protestant narratives, but it is another thing to write for an audience of hegemonic anglo-protestants. The book is too full unveilings and critiques to appeal to a readership that is simultaneously audience and target. So while I agree with what Rohrer is saying, I am afraid that her book will turn off haoles who read it, even those who go out on a limb and try to meet her halfway. Issues of style, rather than substance, may keep the message from getting across.

In contrast, Vowell is readable — at time even cloying. As a refugee of the early-oughts blogosphere explosion I recognize Vowell’s post-David Foster Wallace style and, frankly, it drives me nuts (perhaps this is the narcissism of minor differences at work). Additionally, much of the prose seems formulaic. There is a strong tendency, for instance, for every paragraph to end with a droll and incongruous sentence to make sure the reader decides to read the next paragraph. Still, Vowell calls it like she sees it morally, giving the thumbs down both to the terrifyingly close-minded missionary Hiram Bingham even as she condemns King Kalakaua (venerated in Hawaii for his support of traditional cultural activities) as spendthirft who subsidized his sybaritic lifestyle through the opium trade. Vowell’s frankness, and her ability to pain herself as a sympathetic narrative voice, make the normative elements of the book go down pretty easy.

The historical element in both books are strong. In fact, both authors take books that are ostensibly about Haoles and turn it into a history of Hawaii. But again there are differences, notably in terms of evidence. At time Rorher’s book focuses so much on the wrongs done to Hawaiians that the haoles of her title disappear from sight altogether and the books becomes a history of Hawaii. What little evidence she does use take the form of (oldish) newspaper clippings, rehashing the histories of court cases, or some extremely brief analysis of economics indicators — as a result there is little in the way of data bout the lifeworlds of Hawaii and where concepts of haoles (and the actual white people themselves) fit in. It may be that as a short introductory volume the book isn’t suppose to have much in the way of data, but a more skeptical audience would want to see more proof in the pudding.

In contrast, Vowell has done a much better job of historical research than anyone could reasonably expect her to. It’s clear she loves quoting salacious bits from the archives — and in the case of the incredibly repressed Yankees who landed on Hawaii’s shores, it’s not hard to find salacious bits. In fact, Vowell accomplishes most of the work of denouncing the evils of colonialism simply by quoting the colonizers, who were frankly, shockingly brutal people. At times this tendency goes to far. The last third of the book pretty much gives up inserting bits of travelogue into her book and lapses into straight narrative history (think: book report). In fact, towards the end certain pages are mostly cut-and-pastes of legal texts.

In sum, I eventually came to like Vowell’s book because of its level of detail and its unique personal voice. Rohrer’s book will doubtless be taught more often here in Hawaii and probably works better in an academic setting, but it lacks ethnographic thickness and fails to meet skeptical audiences half way. The lesson I take from the two is that it is the how, not the what, of writing that makes it accessible to a broader audience. It is not that certain positions are unacceptable to the public, but rather that ways of conveying them and creating one’s self as an authoritative, trustworthy author are key to getting your message across.

Trashing of Margaret Mead is to date the most definitive and thorough analysis of the Mead-Freeman ‘debate’ that has been published so far. Most readers of the blog will be familiar with this debate: After Mead’s death Freemon wrote a scathing critique of her book Coming of Age in Samoa which claimed that she had totally misunderstood Samoa and (to make a long story short) this proved that a more sociobiological version of anthropology was needed. Things got extremely ugly, extremely personal, and extremely well-publicized as some people claimed Mead’s defenders relied on a knee-jerk political correctness, while others claimed the Freeman was an evil lunatic. And then…

Well as it happened the entire affair ground more or less to a halt under an increasingly heavy weight of arguments, counter-arguments, and evaluations. The take-away for most anthropologists was “Mead was right” and the take-away for everyone else was “Mead was wrong”. But it was difficult to see the forest from the trees as the literature surrounding the debate grew and grew.

Paul Shankman’s book is first book which steps back and covers the entire debate, rather than taking part in it. Or at least mostly. The book is half a history of the debate and half an analysis of the claims made in it — i.e. the book attempts to decide whether Freeman or Mead was ‘right’. Shankman, who works in Samoa, was involved in the debate and this work benefits from that involvement. As a result he demonstrates a thorough — really, comprehensive — knowledge of it from an insider’s perspective, and the piece reflects his own position within the debate. But his reflexive tone and mastery of the literature convinces me, at least, that he has written an impartial overview.

Impartial, but not noncommittal. Shankman describes the personal stakes and intimate social networks on both sides of the debate, and is frank in his assessment of how people’s personal commitments and backgrounds influenced their arguments. In addition, a major part of the book deals with the question of who is right about Samoa and this involves making judgments about the scholarly adequacy of Mead and Freeman’s work. As judicious as Shankman is, then, you still get a sense of where he stands.

And where he stands is overwhelmingly against Freeman. Freeman’s bizarre personal life — including his mental breakdown — is documented here in a scholarly monograph by a major press for (as far as I know) the first time. The stories that had been circulating about his atrocious behavior, such as contacting universities and demanding that they revoke the Ph.D.s of his opponents, finally get their full airing. Freeman’s arguments about Mead are shown not to hold very much water, and his own claims about Samoa don’t seem to stand close scholarly scrutiny either. At times one feels the book should be called The Trashing of Derek Freeman. But Shankman’s criticisms never seem vindictive and his discussion of Freeman’s psyche never degenerate into ad hominems — despite how easy it would be to do so. In reality, Freeman’s own worse enemy is himself — or at least himself and a scholar willing to rigorously document his actions.

Shankman is not uncritical of Mead and points out the ways in which Coming of Age reaches conclusions about American life that Mead quite liked but which were not really supported by the Samoan data. Still, it is clear from his book that Mead was basically a decent fieldworker and a careful scholar while Freeman was, frankly, a nutcake.

One of my favorite parts of the book is the middle section that deals with the reception of Coming of Age in Samoa in Samoa. Here Shankman documents how Mead’s book was received and understood both amongst people who read it (not very many) and those who heard of it secondhand (most). Although not exactly a Pacific Island voice (since Shankman is not himself a Pacific Islander) it is great to see the community where Mead worked get some coverage. Most Samoans, apparently, are pretty upset that Mead portrayed them as frisky and promiscuous since Samoa is really a pretty church-going kind of a place. What is nice about Shankman’s book is he demonstrates the difference between Mead’s presentation of the Samoan past, the Samoan past as Samoans imagine it, and as it looks through the lens of the broader scholarly literature. He does more than just report on the book’s reception: he explains the complex patterns that have shaped it.

At some point in the future some scholar may sit down and write an extensive archive-based analysis of the Mead-Freeman debate and all of the participants therein. But until that day comes, Shankman’s book is the closest thing we have to a definitive account of the controversy and, frankly, the more scholarly version might not read as well as The Trashing of Margaret Mead. If you’re interested in getting to the bottom of Mead-Freeman, this is the place to look.

Kapah (Young Men) /Lyrics & Music: Suming

Are there any young men who can sing out there? Are there any men who can dance? Are there any men who are good in school? Are there any men who are good at making money? Are there any men who are good at planting crops? Are there any men who are good at gathering? Are there any men who are good at spearing fish? Are there any men who are good at cooking? Are there any fun men out there? Are there any strong men? Are there any hard workers? Are there any men that work together? Yes, there are the young men from A’tolan!

A brand new music album with complete Amis lyrics by the Amis artist, Suming, was released in May 2010. It is not the first Amis music album but is the first one attempting to crossover into popular music market in Taiwan, combining indigenous melodies such as Amis polyphony and flutes together with techno-trance, hip-hop, and Taiwanese folk music. Among these songs, “Kapah,” which means “young men” in the Amis language, is the theme song. Lungnan Isak Fangas, a documentary filmmaker, who is also an Amis, made two music videos for this album, one of them is Kapah. Both the song and the music video not only represent aspects of local A’tolan Amis culture but also attempt to make this culture appealing to Taiwanese society at large.

There are currently 14 indigenous ethnic groups (referred to as “Aborigines”) officially recognized by the Taiwan government. The Amis is the largest of these austronesian speaking ethnic groups in Taiwan. There are two conspicuous characters of Amis society and culture relevant to understanding this video: One is that it is widely considered a matriarchal society, although its status as such is still under debate. Nonetheless, the image of the mother holds a central place in Amis society. The other one is the age-grade system with its rigid regulations. Age sets are organized around males who have passed the coming of age rites in the village within a given time period. Each age set (kapot) will include men born within a few years of each other. It is the main political unit, handling the affairs of both outsiders and insiders.

The song Kapah differs from earlier indigenous music in its depiction of indigenous modernity. Previous music portrayed indigenous peoples as being close to nature (with lyrics about the sun, wind, ocean, or grasslands) and the accompanying visuals focused on the authenticity of their traditional culture. In both the style of this music video and the song’s lyrics, Kapah seeks to present the Amis as not only modern, but fashionable as well. Suming often says to his audiences: “We indigenous peoples in Taiwan are living in modern times. In the future, I don’t want to have to visit a museum to learn about our culture.” Suming does not want to follow the stereotype of indigenous peoples as living in the past, but tries to connect the past to the present in a uniquely Amis way. His music and art seeks to create a fashion-conscious modern Amis lifestyle.

The music video for Kapah is produced with the same goal of creating a unique Amis-fashion as we find in the song. The music video is a representation of the key concept makapahay, which generally would be translated as beautiful; however the quality of “beautiful” implies many other values: shining, dazzlingly, and vitality. This is because the word is based on the root “kapah” (i.e. “young men”). Therefore, makapahay also can be translated “to be as young men.” The music video adopts feathers as a metaphor for the concept of makapahay. Feathers are the main part of the traditional headdress worn by Amis young men. The flying rhythm of these feathers as the men dance is a way of being makapahay. As for the dance steps, they combine not only the Amis styles but also steps from Korean songs popular in Taiwan, such as “Sorry Sorry” and “Nobody but You.”  And the use of the umbrellas while dancing is regarded as a traditional dance of A’tolan Amis, called kulakur – a guardian dance performed by the young men. Traditionally spears were used, not umbrellas, but it is said that Japanese colonial authorities banned spears, afraid that the Amis would use the weapons to resist Japanese rule. While this story is unverified, one thing can be confirmed is that it must be decorated with colorful ribbons to express makapahay not only because of the brightness of the ribbons but also the flying movement made when the dancers jump and fall.

The feathers are the headdress’s decoration of kapah.

Another noticeable way in which the music video tries to package the Amis traditions in modern fashion, are the depictions of the male age-grade system (kapot) and the of mothers. In the music video, Suming invited his mother and all his mother’s sisters to join the performance to dance the steps borrowing from “Nobody but You”, and to present a plot that how they exhort Suming just like the Amis mothers do in daily life. The Amis age set system is rather unique, especially with regard to the hierarchical relation between the upper and the lower age sets, which is very strict: the lower age set should always obey and respect the older one, and the upper age set should always take care of the lower one. In the music video, a teenage boy is shown about to serve a cup of alcohol to his elder brother in the Amis way, but when another elder brother appears behind him the seated brother stands up and himself serves the alcohol to the newly arrived elder brother. Finally, the eldest brother (portrayed by me in the music video) comes in and the preceding person has to stop drinking and serve the alcohol to him. This sequence eloquently epitomizes the relationship between the age sets. In Suming’s home village, A’tolan (Dulan 都蘭 in Mandarin), on the east coast of Taiwan, such age set practices are still an important part of both daily and ritual life. [Editor's note: Although he is not from A'tolan, Futuru was adopted into the local age set system.]

Without a doubt, the song Kapah and its music video mark a seminal moment in the history of indigenous music in Taiwan. Mainstream music here is heavily dominated by Mandarin, Taiwanese, American, Japanese, and Korean popular music. When Suming proposed a pure Amis music album to his record company, the boss was just afraid of the Amis music would be unable to compete. Suming argued that there was at least as much of a market for Amis music as their was for French music. Taiwanese don’t understand French, yet French albums are still successful here. Moreover, Suming argued that it was possible to create a fashion trend for things Amis just as there exists for things Japanese, Korean and American. Perhaps it could even find an audience outside Taiwan, on the world stage. (The lyrics of each song has Chinese, Japanese, and English translation in this album). Suming’s hope is that by making Amis culture fashionable, young Amis would be drawn back to their own culture, and take up learning the language and traditions.

The English translation of each song in Suming’s new album.

Indigenous languages in Taiwan are endangered languages; most members of the younger generation cannot speak or understand their mother tongues. Most young and middle aged Amis must migrate far away from their home villages in search of work and more and more young Amis are losing the ability of speaking Amis. The reasons are complicated, including official language policies which suppressed  indigenous languages as well as the rapid industrialization of Taiwan. If Suming can make Amis culture fashionable, the fans will be eager to learn Amis language just like fans of Japanese, American, and Korean fashions do.

I believe that Suming and Lungnan Isak Fangas are engaged in an alternative form of cultural activism, trying to break the rigid stereotypes of indigenous cultures in Taiwan in order to revitalize Amis language and music. But popular culture is not just about fashion, it is also about sales, and in the end capital. Unfortunately,  these artists have yet to make a significant profit for their work. Still, I still admire what they are doing and I also believe that as long as they keep showing their talents either on music or film, the drops of water will one day wear down the stone.

I hope so, because, I consider myself a “fan” of Amis culture.

Another music video by Suming, Tangfur (Bells), also made by Lungnan Isak Fangas, using a documentary style.

The government of Papua New Guinea recently amended the country’s Environment Act to make it illegal to appeal permitting decisions made by the minister. The immediate reason for this change is clear — the national government relies on large, internationally-financed resource developments to fund it budget. The Ramu NiCo mine in Madang province, majority-owned and operated by a Chinese firm, is planning to dispose of tailings by dumping them into the sea — a move that many, many people in Madang oppose. When anti-mining groups got an injunction against the mine, the government responded by making it illegal to oppose their decision to let the mine go ahead.

The issue is actually more general than this. Landowner groups and others who oppose mining and petroleum developments often challenge environmental permitting in order to pressure or halt operations. Mining leases are rarely reviewed and renewal is largely a matter of course, but water use permits (for toilets on site, for instance) more regularly come up for renewal — and miners need toilets. The Ramu case is just one instance of a much broader tactic used by people opposed to mining.

The big picture is that Papua New Guinea is torn — between politicians in Moresby who are want to use mining revenue to enrich and develop the nation, and grassroots Papua New Guineans who don’t see why they should suffer so others can gain the benefits of mining revenue. When Papua New Guinea became independent in 1975, the country inherited the benevolent paternalism and technocratic confidence of its colonizers — the first generation of educated Papua New Guineans were going to lead the country forward and help develop the grassroots in the name of national progress. Now the worm has turned and Papua New Guinea’s leadership seems to see Papua New Guineans as ungrateful and stubborn — after a peaceful protest organized by Transparency International outside parliament, the prime minister called those who participated “satanic and mentally insane”.

In an article I am working on right now, I examine newspaper coverage of these issues in order to understand contemporary transformations of nationalism in Papua New Guinea. My conclusion – which at this rate will not be published until my kids head off to college! — is that Papua New Guinea is torn between two different idioms to express this conflict between grassroots and the political elite. Within the country, the language used is that of the nation: ironically, the nation-making project of the independence period was so successful that many Papua New Guineans now see themselves as uniting against the state in the name of national unity. Externally, however, the language used to describe these conflicts is that of indigeneity. Coverage of recent events by a UN-sponsored website, for instance, describe the problem as one in which “indigenous people lose out on land rights”.

What I do not say in the article — since it is all scholarly and everything — is how incredibly disappointed I am in the government of Papua New Guinea. Democracy is not fun or easy, and the paralysis induced by lawsuits can be a huge pain, but the solution to these problems is not and can never be removing people’s rights to participate in the processes that will affect their lives. This is particularly true in the case of Ramu, where environmental concerns are justified and deeply felt, not simply cynically used as tactics in a political process. Transparency, accountability, and participation are all incredibly stupid and ridiculously ineffective ways to run a government — but we chose them because democracies put people’s rights ahead of convenience or practicality.

Additionally, I am very uncomfortable with labelling this as a conflict featuring ‘indigenous’ people — despite the fact that I know appealing to international forces using the idiom of indigeneity is often yields useful leverage in political contests like the one at Ramu. But in fact Papua New Guineans are indigenous only in the (often oppressive) eco-authentic sense: they are brown, they have ‘exotic’ languages and cultures, and they live in a place full of endangered species of animals. They are not, however, ‘indigenous’ in the much more important political-emancipatory sense: there is (and was) no real settler colonialism in Papua New Guinea, no large scale expropriation of land, and not even an ethnic majority to oppress minority groups. Despite how easy it is for outsiders to shoe horn Papua New Guinea into popular and easy paradigms of indigenous struggle, such a construal of Papua New Guinea’s story does not do the country justice.

Eco-authentic definitions of indigeneity perpetuate stereotypes of Papua New Guinea as savage backward by giving them a positive moral valuation. They obscure from sight the large number of educated Papua New Guineans, and they stigmatize Papua New Guineans’ decisions to take part in urban, cash-based economies as an abandonment of precious indigenous heritage.

Most importantly, however, these idioms tempt Papua New Guineans to give up on their country and its  government. With corruption in the civil servant rampant and elections in Papua New Guinea too-often a mere shadow of genuine democracy (there is video footage of political henchmen unapologetically — and literally — stuffing ballot boxes), it is easy these days for Papua New Guineans to opt out, to declare the government an illegitimate opponent of the grassroots rather than to hold it to account as the voice of the people. Perhaps they do not need the ‘indigenous alternative’s’ help in abandoning any conception of state legitimacy. But I think Papua New Guinea loses something important when it gives up on its dreams of independence and self-government. Even though it may require people to dig deep, I would urge Papua New Guineans not to give up on the light at the end of the tunnel, and to insist that they are citizens, not indigenes, of Papua New Guinea.

What I think is truly important about this case – beyond the obvious fact that Wemp deserves justice – is that it represents the fundamental ethical issue that anthropologists will have to face for decades to come. Anthropological collaboration with the army may directly impact more human lives, but collaboration is an old problem that we have talked about for a long time. The great ethical debate prior to HTS was the ‘Yanomami Scandal’ stirred up by Patrick Tierney, a debate that centered on anthropologists (and others) behaving badly in the field, and not being held to account by the powers that be in the metropole. Some people like Rob Borofsky want to fetishize this debate as _the_ issue in anthropological ethics, since it involves what they imagine must be the paradigmatic anthropological situation: powerful white outsiders, (relatively) supine brown people.

I admit that _L’affaire Shearer_ does have a whiff of that dynamic. But overall it is about a relatively new issue which will I think will become increasingly central to anthropological ethics in the future: the radical answerability that researchers increasingly have to the people they depict. While this should always have been important to us, it is a topic we can no longer ignore in a world where their ‘informants’ are more connected than ever before to the flows of media and communication in which ‘we’ depict ‘them’. If the Yanomami controversy was about anthropologists suddenly being held responsible in the metropole for what they did in the field, the Jared Diamond case is about an author suddenly being held responsible in the field for what they did in the metropole.

Shearer’s report is long and detailed and I will not attempt to do more than summarize it here. Basically, Jared Diamond wrote an article in the New Yorker in which he told the story of Daniel Wemp, a man he met in Papua New Guinea who described a tribal fight he had been in which allegedly involved killing dozens of people and paralyzing his enemy in a quest to seek revenge for the death of his uncle. What did Diamond do wrong, according to Shearer? We can summarize as follows:

*Poor research and inaccurate facts*
Shearer conducted punishingly scrupulous research on Diamond’s story, which included contacting Wemp and having researchers in Papua New Guinea investigate Diamond’s story. It looks like the New Yorker article is a hodge-podge of Diamond’s recollections of the stories Wemp told Diamond when Wemp drove him around the Southern Highlands. The actual history of fighting in the area Wemp describes is quite different — for instance, the man that Diamond says was paralyzed in a wheelchair is photographed standing and walking in Shearer’s piece. Diamond presents what appear to be verbatim quotations from Wemp which are probably Diamond’s reconstruction of the conversation, and so forth. So both the facts and their presentation are problematic.

*Poor ethical standards*
Separate from the fact that Diamond appears to have gotten the story wrong is the fact that he followed few of the ethical standards which anthropologists (and journalists, apparently) follow in writing about their research subjects. Calling someone a murderer in a venue like the New Yorker is a serious claim indeed. Add to this the fact that Diamond used Wemp’s real name in the story, and that Wemp had no idea that his stories would ever be published, and you have serious ethical problems. There was, in other words, no informed consent and no attempt to provide anonymity for informants.

Shearer’s points here are largely factual and perhaps in the future there will be more delving into the minutiae of this case — as someone who lived in the province just north of Southern Highland and who has visited this area I am extremely impressed with the quality of her research, the experts she has contacted, and her collaboration with Papua New Guinean journalists. But for non specialists the issues of what did or did not happen in 1992 will probably be less important than some of the wider issues raised by this piece:

*Let’s hope this doesn’t turn into The Great Counterattack*
Many anthropologists dislike Jared Diamond because he has done what they fantasize of doing — writing readable nonfiction for a general audience. One possible outcome of this case is that it turns into The Great Counterattack in which every possible error in Diamond’s reporting is used to trash him by people who care less about Papua New Guinea, geography, steel, collapse, etc. and more about getting the taste of sour grapes out of their mouths. To the extent this becomes a witchhunt, it will get more and more boring and, of course, more and more cruel.

*Questions about scholarly competency and institutional licensing*
Diamond is like some sort of great Victorian polymath — geographer, ornithologist, anthropologist, historian… in his books it appears there is nothing he can’t do, and to experts in each of these fields it appears that he can’t do any of them. While popular audiences love Diamond’s work, the scholarly consensus on it has been pretty firmly established: much of what the public thinks is Diamond’s original ideas are cribbed from other authors, often with the bare minimum of acknowledgments performed in footnotes to stave off accusations of plagiarism. Overall, what Diamond gets right, he gets from others. What he gets wrong tends to be the stuff he has made up himself.

It is one thing to have Diamond’s book show up on the shelves of airport bookstores, but quite another for it to be described as ‘anthropology’ in the subheading of a story in the New Yorker. Now that Diamond has tried his hand at some ethnographic ‘research’ in a public forum, I think we are beginning to see the differences between avocational anthropology and the real thing. So what _is_ an anthropologist? Is it someone who follows the best practices of our discipline, or do we really feel there must be some sort of institutional licensing in the form of a departmental appointment of degree in order for someone to take up this mantle? Its an interesting question that Diamond’s piece raises.

*Could anyone sustain this level of scrutiny?*
Shearer takes Diamond to task for not meeting anthropological (and journalistic) standards of evidence, methodology, and ethics. Yet I have to wonder if Diamond is the only person who would be snared in a net as tightly woven as Shearers. After all, anthropologists have a long history of failing to meet their own evidentiary standards. Those of us who work in PNG can think of several authors whose work is not widely taught because we ‘all know’ about the quality of their fieldwork. It is important to hold Diamond to professional standards if he is going to act like a professional. At the same time, we must recognize that he is taking his place in a field where those who have come before him have often failed to distinguish themselves.

*Shearer is not reporting the story, Shearer _is_ the story*
Anthropologists understand that social life is a constant process of narration and renarration — and I’ve always felt this is particularly true of highlands PNG, somehow. I am not Melanesian (obviously) but looking at this case through a Melanesian lens it seems to me that there is something complex and fascinating about the way Shearer’s report has elicited a whole series of responses from people in PNG and is yet another step in the ongoing reentextualization of events that happened a decade ago in Southern Highlands as it twists and turns into various forms of compensation/litigation.

As I said at the beginning of this piece, the central and most important point of this debate is that it is about what we write at ‘home’ circulating back to the ‘field’. But this is just another way of saying that the line between these two is increasingly porous (as Gupta and Ferguson noted some time ago). Diamond’s case is a cautionary tale for all anthropologists who write in the comfort of their homes imagining their fieldsite is far away. It is answerability that is at stake here — Diamond’s and our own. Answerability is something that journalists have been struggling with longer than anthropologists and I think what they have to teach Diamond offers lessons we ourselves will have to learn in the future (if we haven’t already): get your facts straight, report them fairly, and let people know that you are doing so. It is not only the right thing to do, but in a world where ‘they read what we right’, your audience is also your informants.

I just wonder how it is that Apple finds an application in which people can throw shoes at a virtual Bush unacceptable, but find the virtual torture of Pacific Islanders perfectly OK? And how is it that after weeks of being one of the bestselling iPhone games, hardly anyone has commented upon the game’s racism? Just imagine, for instance, a game in which one were presented with a virtual shtetle filled with Jews one could torture, or a plantation full of African slaves? How is it that such applications would certainly be rejected by the Apple Store, and yet Pocket God does not even provoke controversy?

I suppose that most people who play this game think of the island’s inhabitants as fictitious primitives, rather than representatives of a particular ethnic group. I doubt people playing the game bear any hatred towards Pacific Islanders. And yet, I can’t help but see our inability to view cartoonish depictions of indigenous peoples, such as sports mascots, as representations of living peoples as problematic. In particular, I feel it ties in with the myth of a vanishing race, of a people who, defined in terms or their primitivism must have already given way to the forces of modernity, their very existence denied.

UPDATE: I don’t personally think Apple should be in the business of censoring applications based on content, but here is another story that is relevant to the current discussion:

The release (and subsequent removal) of an iPhone app called Baby Shaker this week has Apple in hot water with angry parents and children’s groups, who are demanding answers from Apple.

UPDATE: Seems that Canterbury University Lecturer Malakai Koloamatangi is now raising a stink about the game. See here and here (via Indigeneity)

UPDATE: Looks like the developers are going to make some changes in response to criticisms. (They are also hiring a PR firm.)

Most central for, as someone who was not raised in the Pacific (or at least, grew up on its right coast) was his essay “Our Sea of Islands”:http://savageminds.org/wp-content/image-upload/our-sea-of-islands-epeli-hauofa.pdf. In Our Sea of Islands Hau’ofa argued against the then-common (and still-common) presumption that Pacific Islanders lived in small, isolated, remote communities separated by a massive ocean. Instead, he argued that Pacific Islanders were connected by an ocean which facilitated movement and connection. Like all great ideas, it was an inversion of popular understandings that was so true and so timely that in retrospect is seems impossible to imagine how we lived without it.

If anyone reading this blog teaches courses on the Pacific, or simply wants to learn more about the area, this seminal essay is a must read. As unfortunate as his passing is, I hope that it will refocus attention on his life and work — even though his pen is stilled, we still have much to learn from Epeli Hau’ofa.

On 28 November 2008 The Nation, one of Papua New Guinea’s two largest newspapers, ran a story entitled “Male Babies Killed To Stop Fights”:http://www.thenational.com.pg/281108/nation5.php which claimed that women in the Gimi area have decided to kill all their male children in an attempt to stop an ongoing tribal fight by, as it were, cutting off the supply of reinforcements. The story, sensational as it was, got picked up by “the Australian Broadcasting Corporation”:http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/12/01/2434537.htm and even made its way to “Fox News”:http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,460166,00.html.

Now, on the one hand this story is so outrageously exoticizing, so sensationalistically othering, so reliant on tropes of primitive, savage black people that it pushes all the buttons of Politically Correct Anthropologists. On the other hand, Melanesianists like myself often are wary of overly-eager professors who denounce myths of cannibalism and so forth because, well, Papua New Guinea is a place where cannibalism _was_ practiced, a place where real cultural difference _does_ occur, were there is fighting, and so forth: no one ever told anyone in PNG that we in the academy had developed an elaborate set of rules about how they were supposed to live their lives, if you see what I mean.

But even given these reservations, _even given these reservations_, this story still sounds absolutely ridiculous to me and stands, in my opinion, as a classic example of Papua New Guinea being trotted out again to serve Australian and American fantasies of primitive savagery.

For one thing, the Salvation Army has been in the Gimi area (so much for being ‘untouched’) and has worked to try to end the dispute, and they are quoted in the original news story. However, in a follow-up story the ABC has reported that “the Salvation Army denies that these killings took place”:http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/12/01/2434824.htm. According to this report “the Highlands women are making the point that there are so many murders they might as well kill their newborn boys themselves, rather than go through the pain of losing them in tribal fights.” Now _this_ I believe, as this sounds very much the way that people talk about pain and suffering in PNG.

Moreover, experts on Gimi say that this area fits the pattern that we see in a lot of the world — that female infanticide, not male infanticide, is common. In an email to me Paige West, a professor at Barnard College, wrote

Historically Gimi in Lufa and Unavi practiced infanticide through subtle neglect and exposure if a baby was unwanted or if the mother was simply too overwhelmed by other young children (especially if there was one already breast feeding when the new one was born) to care for the newborn. This was more often than not done with female infants – so much so that in the census reports in the 60s and early 70s there was a marked gender imbalance among Gimi. Gillian Gillison’s work shows that in general in the 70s and 80s first born babies were more likely to die than to survive (See Between Culture and Fantasy: A New Guinea Highlands Mythology for Gillison’s in-depth discussion of Gimi ideas about conception, birth, and death).

Additionally, she writes:

No Gimi person I know would actually attribute the cause of fighting to their own immediate family (if between patrilines), to their own extended family group (if between ‘clans’), to their village (if between villages), or to their ethnic group (if between Gimi and others). They would attribute the cause of the fighting to whomever they were fighting so to kill male offspring in ones own line in order to stop fighting is nonsensical.

and

The thought process that is ascribed to the mothers in the story in some ways seems to be a Foucauldian management of population which is hard to imagine that any Gimi would apply to their own children and kin. The idea that eliminating one’s own child to create some future social benefit to all seems like a kind of governmentality that does not exist in Gimi society. Essentially the extent to which kinship controls social relationships means that that arguement would be a radical departure from Gimi social world views.

In sum, we have a typical story: inaccurate reporting which is picked up on on global media because readers find it exciting to read about Papua New Guineans behaving badly. Is anyone willing to defend the original National article in public? And, more importantly, when are we going to have some positive news coverage of everything that is going right in Papua New Guinea?

UPDATE: Its fascinating to watch this story mutate — now “Women on the Web”:http://www.wowowow.com/ is linking to the original story with the headline “Male Infanticide on Rise as Papua New Guinea’s Women Attempt to End War”:http://www.wowowow.com/post/male-infanticide-rise-papua-new-guineas-women-attempt-end-war-150858#comments. This headline makes it sound like the whole country is getting into the act (although to be fair the body of the article just repeats what is in the original National article).

UPDATE UPDATE: Here’s a link to “the Times version of this story”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article5265057.ece

The second show, “Pacific Clues”:http://wetserver.net/teleschool/pages/programs/program_home.jsp?programid=16&programpageid=30&programpagetype=programpages discusses the archaeology of the Pacific, with a special focus on Polynesia. The “first episode”:http://www.teleschool.k12.hi.us/tlc/IR_CR_PC_1.html features Terry Hunt discussing the destruction of Rapa Nui’s (Easter Island) environment, and his own interpretation of what led to its downfall. Terry’s objections to authors such as Jared Diamond’s interpretation of Rapa Nui’s history is well known, and now you can watch the man explain it in person.

All of these shows are available for free, as a series of 20 minute web episodes — so far only a few episodes are up, but as the season progresses more will be available. They’re meant for kids, so they are a great opportunity for you and your little ones to curl up together in front of a glowing LCD screen. But of course they’re great for people of all ages — especially people who want to know more about what the experts _really_ think about the Pacific, but don’t want to read a bunch of scholarly articles.

To keep a long story very, very short: it appears that although Mead’s work on Samoa was problematic to the point that she probably ‘got it wrong’, Freeman himself was so vitriolic and (probably) mentally ill, that it is difficult for anyone to write a measured, reflective criticism of Mead without sounding like they are allying themselves with Freeman.

All of which is to say that if you are looking for a measured, reflective criticism of Mead, look no further than Ira Bashkow and Lise Dobrin’s “The Historical Study of Ethnographic Fieldwork: Margaret Mead and Reo Fortune among the Mountain Arapesh” which is “available free and open access for anyone to read”:http://www.virginia.edu/anthropology/faculty/Bashkow-Dobrin-2007.pdf. It is a great piece and I recommend it to all and sundry. It is very clearly written, short, and elegantly relates their analysis of Mead’s Arapesh research (which she got wrong) to a more fruitful discussion of how the fieldsite is co-constructed by anthropologists and their hosts.

So… if you only read one 7 page PDF on the history of Melanesian anthropology before World War II today… make it this one!

The basic idea of the article is simple. In it, Diamond contrasts a tribal fight in Nembi distict, Southern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG), and the death of his father in-law’s mother (wife’s father’s mother, or WFM as we say in the kinship biz) in the holocaust. In PNG, Diamond’s friend Daniel undertook a long vendetta to avenge his uncle and was eventually successful. In the holocaust, the killer of Diamond’s WFM was arrested, detained for a year and then freed. Daniel was well-adjusted and emotionally reconciled to his uncle’s death — vengeance satisfied him. Diamond’s father in-law was haunted the rest of his life by the fact that justice was never delivered. The moral of the story, Diamond says, is that procedural justice under a state may not be as obviously superior to vengeance in tribal fighting as we might think. Its a typical anthropological technique: compare The West to The Rest, and open people’s minds by pointing out that They might know something We don’t, and that Our Ways may not be as hot as we imagined.

In its factual reporting, Diamond’s account of tribal fighting in PNG more or less rings true to me, and the things that don’t ring true are most likely simply variants between what is done in Nipa and what is done in west Enga, where I lived. I also appreciate Diamond’s spin on the topic — that tribal fighting is comprehensible and not mere barbarism, and that the people who do it are humans who live normal, albeit culturally distinct, lives.

That said, I do have some issued with what Diamond actually _does_ with his data.

First, throughout this article, as in his other work, Diamond fails to _think_ anthropologically even if the people he discusses are stereotypically anthropological subjects. Anthropologists insist that culture is a force which has its own unique power to shape people’s lives and cannot be reduced to an effect of an underlying, deeper cause. So when Diamond remarks that pigs are valuable to highlanders because they (the highlanders) are ‘protein starved’ an anthropologist is not satisfied. This has probably been true of different places in different times in the highlands (Nembi being a good candidate), and nutritional needs obviously effect human behavior, but so does culture.

Pigs are always valuable in culturally specific ways. When highlanders in PNG give pigs do they exchange live pigs or pork? Who gets the piglets from the live pigs, and who gets the pork when it is eaten? These questions are deeply tied up in issues of nutrition, but they are also culturally structured. Equally, Diamond writes that in Nipa fighters exhibit ‘unchecked’ aggression and then goes on to describe in detail the culturally specific ways in which they fight: rules regarding engagement (or nonengagement if you have relatives on the other side of the fight) and so forth. So in fact while the human desire may be universal (and that’s a big ‘may’), so is the fact that it is always shaped and channeled in culturally specific forms. The more you know about people’s lives, the less easy it is to explain them wholly in terms of protein, geography, genetics and what have you.

There is also a more serious problem with the article which is also the most obvious thing about it: it contrasts ‘tribal societies’ with ‘modern state societies’. On the surface, there is nothing wrong with contrasting Nipa in 1992 with Poland in 1944 — in fact its quite a fascinating exercise. But describing this as an example of a ‘state’ society versus a ‘tribal’ one is kinda loopy. But what makes us think that Nipa is a ‘tribal’ society since it had experienced decades of contact before the events described in the article? And Eastern Europe was a lot of things during World War II, but its not exactly clear to me that ‘state run’ quite fits the description of a warzone superimposed on an ethnic mosaic of Poles, Jews, Russians, and Germans.

Diamond hedges and says that state presence is weak in the highlands, and so we can see fighting in Nipa as an as-yet-barely-touched remnant of a pre-state way of life. I don’t think this ‘historic preservation’ approach to tribal fighting in PNG holds much water, however, and I think I can safely say that most experts agree with me on this. Consider, for instance, the following facts: These events started in 1992, under the Namaliu administration, during which PNG experienced its first major law and order crisis. The feud ended so that the two clans involved could oppose an ethnic Huli in elections. Diamond’s friend was actually hundreds of miles away on the north coast and had to be recalled to his home area in order to avenge his uncle. And of course, Diamond actually met his friend Daniel at an Oil extraction project which has profoundly changed life in Southern Highlands Province.

What Diamond’s article is _really_ about is the transformation of clan politics and tribal fighting in the context of Papua New Guinea’s rise to independence as a nation. These transformations are no less complex for the fact that PNG’s police force and justice system don’t work like our own (or how we imagine our own work). But this doesn’t mean we can simply assume that there’s been no change at all. What Diamond’s article tells us is not ‘how people used to live 5,000 years ago before states developed, as preserved in Highlands PNG, compared to us, The Latest Word In Social Complexity’.

At root, the problem — and it is not a fatal flaw, just a problem — with Diamond’s article is that it teaches us that Other Ways Of Life Have Something To Offer Us, but the only way it can do so is by making Papua New Guineans appear more Other to us than they really are. What it tells us is that we modern Americans have something to learn from modern Papua New Guineans about our shared modern condition. But, ironically, this is a broad-mindedness that rests on the back of a deep divisiveness: we moderns only find their ways of life interesting if they are ‘primitive’. Anthropologists have argued for decades that this tendency to exoticize other people – ‘deny them coevalness’ is how some put it – is ultimately morally pernicious even if it leads to a shallow relativism which has a surface appeal.

And even if anthropology’s ethical hang-ups are not your own, the fact of the matter is that this sort of thing is just bad science. Treating contemporary violence in the PNG highlands as an example of ‘life without the state’ rather than ‘life with a particular kind of state’ would be like asking what Saddam Hussein’s rule can tell us about Assyrian domination of the fertile crescent. There’s nothing wrong with comparing the two cases, it is just that doing so in this way simply misses most of what could make the comparison interesting. Can PNG tell us about vengeance? Of course. But we will only get the message if we listen carefully, and are willing to realize that familiar models of ‘tribal’ versus ‘modern’ societies may not, however comforting and familiar they are to some, actually be telling us the whole story.

I know I have hurt you. But I want to make (it) up to you, repair the rupture, bridge the rift between us, heal the pain that I have caused. I want us to imagine a place where the possibility of our hurting each other does not exist. Where we can each be our different selves without shame, without fear, without alienation. True partners in peace. A world of brothers and sisters. A world of recognition and enhancement. This is the right thing to do: to heal, to move on, to found and never a New Society

versus (edited)

The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future. We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry. For the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history of our great continent can now be written. We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians. A future where this Parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again. A future where we embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have failed. A future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility. A future where all Australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal partners, with equal opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping the next chapter in the history of this great country, Australia.

I am not sure what to make of this overlap, except to say that Povinelli got it right?