Above I present one of the many diagrams from her essay, ‘Deciphering a Meal.’ Douglas was a prolific diagrammer. Sometimes this created difficulties. Natural Symbols, for example, is a notoriously deceptively clear account of body symbolism. This website presents the different versions of the grid/group diagram published in different editions of Natural Symbols and some of the difficulties engendered by the various versions of the diagrams.

Douglas explains the diagram above:

Obviously the meanings in our food system should be elucidated by [close] observation. I cut it short by drawing conclusions intuitively from the social categories which emerge. Drinks are for strangers, acquaintances, workmen, and family. Meals are for family, close friends, honored guests. The grand operator of the system is the line between intimacy and distance. Those we know at meals we also know at drinks. The meal expresses close friendship. Those we only know at drinks we know less intimately. So long as this boundary matters to us (and there is no reason to suppose it will always matter) the boundary between drinks and meals has meaning. There are smaller thresholds and half-way points. The entirely cold meal (since it omits a major contrast within a meal) would seem to be such a modifier. So those friends who have never had a hot meal in our home have presumably another threshold of intimacy to cross… It would be simplistic to trace the food categories direct to the social categories they embrace and leave it at Figure 16.1 [above]. Evidently the external boundaries are only a small part of the meaning of the meal.

Here Douglas puts an analytic frame around common sense: sharing a meal expresses shared social identity and relationship. The essay of course goes on to decode the sharing of food and food categories through a range of social circumstances. Critics of Douglas have often seized upon her penchant for reducing cultural meaning to statements about social life, where social life is largely understood to be a matter of structuring forms of inclusion and exclusion. (See pages 117-120 in this book.) Critics of Douglas may be right. Nevertheless, her style of analysis can yield groovy results. Even the grid/group analytic, something of a blunt instrument, can be fun to play with. It has been used to understand the cosmological biases informing everything from millenarian movements to marketing strategies.

Below I juxtapose her ‘original’ grid/group diagram and New York magazine’s brilliant ‘approval matrix.’ To me, the approval matrix is like Douglas + Bourdieu for hip New Yorkers. Convince me, in fact, that the particular combination of taste and status (highbrow/lowbrow, brilliant/despicable) diagrammed each week does not in fact describe perfectly Douglas’s understanding of the way that grid and group work.

At root, ‘spatializing the state’ refers to metaphors for space used by people to describe the state’s relationship to its subjects. Thus the state is ‘above’ the people, it’s agents are ‘everywhere’ watching you, and so forth. These metaphors, when taken as texts which orient people to action, enable the coordination of action across time and space and produce congeries of behavior that eventually are attributed to a ‘state’ in whose name all of this action is attributed. Thus we might want to talk about the two related by distinct meanings of how ‘spatialization’ — on the one hand a very familiar symbolic-anthropological (Fernandez or even Geertz) notion that there is a ‘metaphorical space’ of images of the state which can be described and explored on the one hand, and on the other an analysis of action across space carried out in the name of, or at the bequest of, ‘the state.’ The second, clearly, is related by the first

But _what_ is the nature of that relation? That, it seems to me, is the question that an anthropology of the state must post. To do so it would have to work between the crack of these two meanings of ‘spatialization’. We as social scientists can demonstrate that the self-accounts of state agents are actually very poor descriptions of the complex relationship between cultural logics of the state-cum-organizing metaphor and how they are actually instantiated in (as it were) reality. This is most clear in the case of ‘weak states’ where ‘corruption’ blurs the line between actions carried out qua individual and qua office holder. But in ‘strong states’ where the seam between state imagery and state practice is stronger we can still see that, as it were, the glue holding them together might not be what they thing it is. Managing the complex reflexivity of all this is a difficult task, however, and I fear that language like ‘spatializing the state’ may make it harder rather than easier.

Gupta and Ferguson’s discussion of ‘encompassment’ and ‘verticality’ as ‘methods of spatialization’ (I think this means central tropes in the metaphorical space used by people to describe the state) is a good example. Clearly, these idioms will vary across space and time, and exploring the nature of this variation is an important project. Do these idioms of ‘encompassment’ and ‘verticality’ carry different charges in Hindi? Do people even speak this way in India? In the article we get brief and relatively unnuanced analyses of states being ‘above’ people or ‘swooping down’ on them, we are never told who, in particular, discusses things in this way, nor do we get a very detailed description of this metaphorical space. In fact it seems that the brief ethnography of suprise inspections in India are read _by the ethnographer_ in terms of verticality and encompassment. But demonstrating that the analyst can use these metaphors to subsume a wide variety of different practices is a different (and, to me, less interesting) project then analyzing how they are used by actors to produce a certain type of social practice. I’m sure the article’s length is a factor here, but there is a danger that this could lead to future hand-waving of the “you know, _encompassment_” variety.

I am also not sure that the material described in the paper is ‘neoliberal’ in any distinctive way, unless ‘neoliberal’ is just code for ‘the present.’ I don’t doubt that there’s something distinct about the current moment, but if you take narratives of neoliberalism as your subject rather than take them for granted, then one cannot use bits of that narrative uncritically. Metaphors of rulers being ‘above’ people are typical not just of ‘neoliberalism’ but also of ‘divine kingship’ and NGOs like, you know, _The Church_ have been battling with ‘sovereign states’ for influence in their territories for some time now.

This is not a negative criticism, but rather an invitation to wider theorizing. ‘Big actors’ have been around for a long time, and it’s been thousands of years since people realized that speaking and acting in the name of a collective subjectivity is a great way to coordinate large-scale action. I think that ultimately an account of ‘how states are spatialized’ would benefit from consideration of adjacent semiotic phenomena — divine kingship in Europe, Nancy Munn’s analysis of ‘fame’ in Gawa, Knorr-Cetina’s work on how individual currency traders become ‘global flows of capital’ and so forth.

So in sum the idea of ‘spatializing states’ is an intriguing one, and the stakes are even larger and more important than the already-formidable concept of ‘governmentality’. But I do think that the problem might be more precisely specified and fruitfully hooked up to other bodies of theories than that on ‘governmentality.’ Realizing the project’s potential will, I think, require casting a large net.

looking at it again this morning i can imagine virginia would have revised it over the years (i recall her passing it out amidst a barrage of caveats on its casually-thrown-together nature for her student heading to graduate school). i can see it moving into some sort of spreadsheet type format, endlessly expanding, etc.. but it’s the sense of completeness arising from apparent spontaneity that gives it a magical aura and suggests contesting or revising it is the wrong way to think about it. hopefully widespread reproduction won’t take that away. in this regard, it carries with it something of what giddens talks about as the formulaic truth of guardians, in contrast to the propositional knowledge of experts. and if we need guardians these days, which anthropology could use, i think virginia’s about as good as they come.

Something about the contrast this handout poses to the technological smorgasbord of information and research tools at our disposal captivates me. Part of it is, as Thom points out, the clear need for certain kind of guardian–not just in anthropology, but in any domain where apprenticeship is an essential component of progress in knowledge. Sometimes it’s better to have a hand-scratched, seat-of-the-pants expression of deep knowledge over a real-time, social software, scale-free, really simple, ajax-enhanced, web 2.0 instant access to scholarship. If you know what I mean. Part of it is the “*Still alive, as far as I know” note, which is useful for the earnest anthropological grad student seeking out mentors and influences. Part of it is the emphatic national, tiered grid–I wish I had the guts, and the knowledge to organize my stories of scholarship with such gusto. In any case, I though our readers might enjoy a little bit of the old school, both in form and in content….

This is why I like the image of the personal trainer — it helps people understand what they _are_ getting for their money: an opportunity to undergo a personal transformation which they may or may not take advantage of. It also helps underline another aspect of the teacher-student relationship which I believe quite strongly in despite the prevailing egalitarianism of our times: students do not know what they want or need out of an education — that is why they need us to guide them through it. Like Dante or Luke Skywalker, they need old guys in robes to guide them and unleash their potential.

That’s why I was struck by 37 Signals’s “recent blog entry”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/people_dont_know_how_to_ask_for_what_they_really_want.php. As designers of websites and other things, they note that

Nobody knows what they really want before they get it. Not consumers, not conference goers, not programmers, and certainly not clients. Delivering greatness requires you to let go of the safety in mediocrity where you just do as you’re told.

For people working in the private sector, this is quite an insight. But my general feeling is: _duh_. I am reminded of the shift that has occurred in restaurant menus over the past couple of decades. Today menus are elaborate paeons to the food diners are about to consume. But traditionally the menus at America’s great restaurants had menus that read ‘five courses of fish in different sauces.’ They didn’t elaborate, because the chef was clearly more capable of deciding what you ought to eat then you were. The client, after all, waits on the souffle — not the other way around.

The wonderful thing about 37 Signals’s entry is that it helps to remind educators fearful of creeping consumerism that people who Get It — and 37 Signals is an outstanding company that does Get It — come to understand what they do as similar to education. This is, of course, the exact opposite of the trend that educators fear. Contrary to Hannah Arendt’s disparaging remarks about academics’ fear of anything not inherently mediocre (which are, unfortunately, not _entirely_ off the mark), this is a case where people who excel at what they do have come to an understanding that is in line with, not opposed to, the ideals of the academy.

***

The anthropological view of history we present in Yali’s Question is crucially unlike Diamond’s in its emphasis on what needs to be taken into account. Diamond, less by default than by design, denies significance to cultural differences — to particular, historically located visions of the desirable and the feasible. The dissimilarity in our approaches is clarified by what we make of Diamond’s book cover. This cover reproduces a large oil painting by John Everett Millais (1845) entitled “Pizarro seizing the Inca of Peru.”

The painting, hanging in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, is part of a collection (begun in 1852) representing the various, often diverse, aesthetic currents of the Victorian age. In the center, Pizarro, sword in hand, is seizing a darkly handsome, grandly exotic Inca leader from his partially overturned palanquin. On the left are massed Spanish soldiers with a priest holding up a cross for their inspiration. In the right foreground, two Peruvian women and a child are clutching each other in fear. In the right somewhat blurred and darker background, Spanish soldiers are putting Peruvians to the sword. The painting (perhaps anticipating Millais’s later anti-Catholic work) seems directly critical of Spanish conquest. Certainly, this is the perspective of Joseph Kestner, who describes the picture (in the Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies) as an “anti-Imperialist canvas during a decade of British expansionism and colonial defense” (1995: 55).

When we look at this painting and think about the place in which it hangs, we reflect on a particular and complex history — on the range of sensibilities and political perspectives that existed within this age dominated by capitalism and empire. However, when we look at this painting as it appears on the cover of Diamond’s book, we find it interesting because of the extent to which it is decontextualized, and we think, misunderstood. Rather than a historically located castigation of Spanish imperialism, it is offered as a synopsis of human history in general — a history of morally neutral conquest through the use of techniques and technologies of physical domination. In other words, from our anthropological perspective, we see Millais’s vision, itself critical of the dominant expansionist perspective of his age, transformed into a model that justifies as well as universalizes expansionism: one used to explain what happened to “everybody for the last 13,000 years” (1997: 9). Such a transformation of Millais’s critique of imperialism strikes us as consistent with Diamond’s position about the irrelevance of cultural and historical contexts in understanding what people do. Indeed, given Diamond’s view of history, the conquest that he (rather mechanistically) entitles “Collision at Cajamarca” (1997: 67), was inevitable. From his perspective, if it wasn’t Pizarro who had seized the Inca of Peru, it would have been some other European at some time.

Interestingly, in Kestner’s discussion of Millais’s painting, he quotes Bartolome de Las Casas, whose Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552) was a primary source of information concerning the incident depicted in it. De Las Casas, citing eye-witnesses and writing only two decades after the event, conveys the massacre as remarkably cruel and entirely unjustified. From his contemporary Spanish perspective, Pizarro was, even by the standards of the time, a “great villain” whose “cruelty came to outstrip even that of his predecessors…. His wickedness was on such a scale that nobody will ever really learn the full extent of it until all is revealed on the Day of Judgment” (as quoted by Kestner, 1995: 54).

We do not think that Diamond, given his history of grand inevitability, would be much interested in such alternative voices as de Las Casas’s. From his perspective, there is little value in extended conversation to probe the perspectives of anyone. Certainly, the voices of those like Yali would scarcely register: their concerns and sense of injustice would not be heard, their claims to moral worth would not be recognized. Moreover, in the absence of such conversations, voices would be eliminated that might challenge and contextualize our own more familiar ones. And this would come about, in our view, not just as a function of the scale on which history was written — not just as a function of an interest in broad patterns.
***

How, then, might we respond to Yali’s question? Why did white people deny equality and full humanity to black people? Our full response would be more proximate, more complex, and more messy than Diamond’s. It would consider, as essential background, the rhetorics, practices, contingencies, and exigencies of 19th and 20th century global expansionism. Such a consideration would involve, among other matters, the often contesting perspectives concerning how human beings might legitimately derive profit through the use of others, at home and abroad: whether used as slaves, indentured laborers, piece workers, or wage earners. It would also consider, as we have done in our book about one PNG sugar plantation, the often contesting perspectives concerning what might be done for Yali and others to achieve worth in an independent PNG. Although our book is only a partial answer to Yali’s question, and one addressed more to the several generations that have followed Yali than to Yali himself, it is, we think, an example of the form any answer should take. It is the kind of answer that anthropologists (and many historians) do provide in its willingness to listen seriously to others and scrutinize their own taken-for-granted understandings.

It is the kind of answer that reveals the differences between the necessary and sufficient causes of historical phenomena — that insists that people who have the power to dominate others in faraway places do not automatically find it desirable to do so. It is the kind of answer that shows colonial expansionism and domination to be the product of the historical and cultural circumstances of capitalism, rather than the product of the inevitable workings of human nature. Moreover, it is the kind of answer that shows capitalism (as well as expansionism and domination) as often justified through narratives about human nature — narratives like Diamond’s of the seemingly inexorable.
This kind of answer would also be appropriate to the question of what Yali and the other PNGuineans might do if they were long the ones with significant power — if various historical shoes had been, as it were, on other feet. In fact, we are often asked by students whether Yali, with such as guns, germs, and steel on his side, would have acted as a Pizarro. Our response must be that it all depends on what conditions — on what contexts — are assumed. If Yali was the product of the sort of history that produced the concentrations of power that made Pizarro’s conquest feasible, Yali would not be Yali. Under such conditions, he might be Pizarro — or he might be de Las Casas. On the other hand, if Yali and the other PNGuineans who feature in our story were the products of the history they actually had, we venture that (at the very least) they would be reluctant to leave kin for lives of reckless and ruthless conquest on behalf of the likes of God, King, and gold. Their preferred world, while doubtless still of assertiveness and contention, would, we think, be one of maximized entailments rather than of maximized annihilations.

It is, as we have said, that people not only make war, but also make peace; they not only employ techniques and technologies, but also think about how these should, or should not, be used. And they not only pursue outcomes, but also evaluate outcomes. To understand all of this — to understand how history happens — requires attentive listening. It requires conversations that probe and interrogate the range of perspectives held by culturally and historically located actors, ourselves included.

Diamond’s view of an inevitable and inexorable course of human history, one driven by the operation of ultimate causes over the span of its 13,000-year course, rests (as some of you suggested in earlier postings) on what seems to us to be an implicit view of human nature. It is this human nature which, in his vision, keeps ultimate causes active and decisive throughout history. This is a view of human beings as necessarily leading lives so as to extract maximum advantage over others: give a guy — any guy — half a chance and he will conquer the world; give a guy a piece of appropriate metal and he will inevitably fashion a sword to cut you down; give a guy a piece of appropriate metal and he will inevitably fashion a chain to enslave you within the hold of a ship bound for a New World sugar plantation. In a way that many in the contemporary West find seemingly self-evident — in a way that does not problematize the way the world works — Diamond suggests that people everywhere and at all times, if they had sufficient power, would necessarily use it in seeking to maximize their own advantage through the domination of others. This implicit view of a trans-historical and trans-cultural human nature is consistent with Diamond’s explicit rendering of both historical context and cultural perspective as irrelevant. In fact, Diamond works hard to exclude such perspective and context from his scientific history.

Correspondingly, Diamond describes the rise of mercantilism and capitalism as only “proximate forces” in the course of world history (1997: 10). From his perspective, mercantilism and capitalism are just epiphenomena — just passing examples of history’s general law. From our perspective, however, mercantilism and capitalism provide particular historical contexts in which (and in different though related ways) expansionist conquest appears an especially desirable activity — and one made especially feasible by the availability of guns, germs, and steel. This is to say, rather than merely proximate causes of lives more fundamentally and inexorably determined, mercantilism and capitalism impel the use of guns, germs, and steel in particular manners for particular ends.

Mercantilism and capitalism have spurred people to be bold — to go to the ends of the earth if necessary — in a search for ever greater profits. They have justified the subjugation of the New World as well as parts of Africa. They have also authorized the creation of lucrative, slave-run plantations in the Caribbean whose profits sustained the lavish lifestyles of the absentee planters and whose sugar sustained (in nutritionally imbalanced sweet tea and treacle-smeared bread) the impoverished lives of the British workers — those who manufactured the guns, chains, and instruments of torture.

Thus, we see such lives and historical outcomes as made possible by (for instance) guns, germs, and steel but as importantly propelled and shaped by cultural visions of what was worth pursuing and at what cost: of winning favor from God and King, acquiring gold and silver, attaining certain lifestyles, or achieving national strength. However, where we see the likes of guns, germs, and steel as necessary but not sufficient causes of such lives, Diamond sees such lives — apparently all lives — as inevitably seeking as much conquest and domination as possible. For Diamond, in other words, the necessary is the sufficient. To have the power is to express the power; to have the power to dominate is to use it to dominate in the maximal way possible. Where we see human activities as propelled and shaped by historically located visions, Diamond sees these activities as determined (presumably) by hard wiring — as part of the biological nature of the human animal. In these regards, activities of conquest and domination are simply in the nature of things — just as, for instance, lions by virtue of their size and armament will inevitably slaughter lambs.

Where Diamond sees activities of conquest and domination as simply in the nature of things – as the inevitable outcome of human nature. — Raymond Kelly’s recent comprehensive analysis of the origins of human warfare provides a relevant and contrasting view of human nature and of inevitability. In this critique of the Hobbesian notion that there is a “trinity of interrelationship between human nature, war and the constitution of society” (Kelly, 2000: 121), he writes:

Warfare is an episodic feature of human history and prehistory observed at certain times and places but not others. Moreover, the vast majority of societies in which warfare does occur are characterized by the alteration of war and peace; there are relatively few societies — only about 6 percent — in which warfare is continual and peace almost unknown. It is only in this relatively small percentage of cases that something approaching a Hobbesian social condition of pervasive and unending warfare can be found. It might thus be said that it is “the nature of man” (or humankind) to conclude episodes of armed conflict between neighboring social groups by breaking off hostilities, by truce, and/or by reestablishing peaceful relations (Kelly, 2000: 124).

Kelly concludes:

The human propensity to peacemaking, so strikingly evident from the characteristic alteration between war and peace, is central to the nexus of interrelationships between human nature, war and society — and this bodes well for the future (2000: 161).

It is the case that Yali was poor and that the people of the New World were brutally conquered by representatives of the Old. It is also the case that those who beat up on other people have the capacity to do so. But are these facts inevitable by virtue either of the nature of history or the nature of humans? As Kelly indicates, human beings always are capable of a range of behaviors and they always are capable of engaging with each other and their neighbors in a range of ways. They might make war, but they also might make peace. Whether they choose one or the other is powerfully affected by particular historically and culturally located ideas about the desirable and the feasible.

To our position concerning history’s rootedness in human culture, rather than in human nature, we would add an emphatic stipulation. Since it has become clear to anthropologists that cultures contain multiple perspectives about alternatives and how they might be pursued and otherwise dealt with, it follows that human beings have a measure of choice about how to act. Thus, for instance, from American ideas of the worth of the individual, one can generate political perspectives as diverse as libertarianism and welfare statism, the first position holding that no individual should be interfered with or regulated, the other, that no individual should be neglected or deprived. The existence of such alternatives means that human beings may, realistically, be held accountable for the choices they make. We find this stipulation important both in combating Diamond’s general world history and in constructing an aspect of Papua New Guinea’s more particular one. Pizarro (for example) had the capacity and resources to behave with remarkable brutality in the New World — he had both the technology and will to conquer. But the mere capacity to behave brutally does not absolve him from having done so. Likewise, Europeans had the resources to treat Yali and other Papua New Guineans with contempt. But that position should not absolve them from having done so. Such considerations, we argue, are important in rethinking historical outcomes. Indeed, the haves may be prompted to do such rethinking themselves by recognizing that the have-nots may already have come to their own conclusions.

In Road Belong Cargo, Lawrence describes the attempts of Yali and his neighbors to acquire this cargo with a definition of what is now known as the cargo cult:

“It is based on the natives’ belief that European goods (cargo) — ships, aircraft, trade articles, and military equipment — are not man-made but have to be obtained from a non-human or divine source. It expresses the followers’ dissatisfaction with their status in colonial society, which is to be improved imminently or eventually by the acquisition of new wealth. It has, therefore, a disruptive influence and is regarded by the …. Australian Administration … as one of the [its] most serious problems ” (1964: 1).

Deeply resenting their inferiority in colonial society, PNGuineans sought for decades to improve their status by gaining access to cargo. In fact, during Fred’s early PNG research in New Britain on the island of Karavar (in 1968 and 1972) local people remained preoccupied with gaining long denied respect from Europeans. In discussing their contemporary cargo activities (which focused on learning how to place an order such that a small payment would elicit a shipload of manufactured items), they described a history of their efforts to compel Europeans to recognize mutual human-ness. In particular, they referred to the “dog movement,” a series of meetings they held during the 1930′s. The question addressed with perplexity and anger at these meetings was why the Europeans persisted in treating them with contempt — driving them away, telling them to get out, as if they were unwelcome dogs. Through obtaining cargo, they sought to win European respect by having that which Europeans so obviously valued.

Over a considerable period of time, hence, PNGuineans frequently sought to acquire and master the ritual techniques by which Europeans accessed cargo. Influenced by Yali or other cargo-cult leaders, they tried a combination of recalcitrance and ritual experimentation. They interrupted and transformed normal routines: they refused to pay taxes, repudiated the directions of colonial administrators, established alternative governments, wrested theological control from missionaries, and mobilized villages, if not whole regions, in fervent invocation and prophesy.

Diamond, hence, misunderstands what many PNGuineans desired when he explains the background to Yali’s question (about the differences between white and black people). In Diamond’s words: “whites had arrived, imposed centralized government, and brought material goods whose value New Guineans instantly recognized, ranging from steel axes, matches, and medicines to clothing, soft drinks, and umbrellas. In New Guinea all these goods were referred to collectively as ‘cargo’” (1999: 14). Because Diamond misunderstands that Yali really was asking less about cargo per se than about colonial relationships between white and black people, he describes the introduction of centralized government as almost parenthetical to the indisputable fact that whites and their goods had arrived. Thus, he presents local resentment as directed not at the nature and use of concerted colonial power so much as at the differential access to goods.

We might also note here that in using the term “goods” Diamond implies that such items were inherently desirable — instantly recognizable as worth acquiring. In defining cargo as goods, Diamond suggests that local people will do whatever it takes to get such things: that in their desire for goods, local people are the agents of their own domination. In so doing, he displaces our attention from the nature of colonial power relations. These relationships are not vested in the “nature of things.” They are not inevitable because of the instantly recognized value of manufactured items. Instead, colonial relationships have been forcefully imposed, often to the resentment and resistance of local people.

PNGuineans such as Yali wanted cargo not because of its inherent and instantly recognizable value, but because of a desire to transform the relations of inequality between whites and blacks that were pervasive in colonialism. They wanted cargo primarily because they objected to the ways in which the centralized, colonial government used power and, correspondingly, diminished their relative worth.

Some of what we have to say is inspired by Marilyn Strathern’s discussion of how Australian prospectors misunderstood the PNGuineans they met when they first entered the interior Highlands during the 1930’s. The Australians assumed that these PNGuineans were impressed with their complex technology — for example, their guns and steel. However, in Strathern’s view, possession of this novel technology initially marked these explorers as spirits, and from the perspectives of PNG Highlanders, the appearance of spirits among the living was extraordinary but ultimately not very important. Spirits, after all, would likely disappear without affecting social life very much. Only when Highlanders discovered that these Australians not only had large quantities of pearl shells but wished to transact with them did the Australians become plausibly human. Pearl shells, traded up from the coast, were for a long time central in the Highland exchanges through which marriages were contracted, compensation for death or injury was paid, and alliances were established. In other words, only when the Australians showed that they apparently valued what the Highlanders already valued and desired did the Highlanders regard them as interesting and socially significant. Only then could the Highlanders fit these otherwise strange and peripheral beings into their own ideas about full human beings: only then did they become persons with whom they could, and would want to, engage.

Of course, Yali’s, and other coastal groups, had a much longer history of European contact (often dating from the latter part of the nineteenth century). Yali, himself, had especially extensive contact with Europeans. He served as a policeman in New Guinea’s colonial administration before World War Two and as a member of the Allied Intelligence Service during the war. In fact, there is a photograph taken in 1944 in the Australian War Memorial archives commemorating his military service. In it, Yali is inside the Dace, an American submarine, together with other members of his company of intelligence-gathering “Coastwatchers.” In advance of a major Allied landing, Yali’s group of twelve — seven Europeans, one Indonesian translator, and four PNGuineans — was sent to Hollandia, then Dutch New Guinea, on a hazardous mission to gather strategic information. After the war, as a distinguished veteran, Yali embarked on a controversial political career, one which kept him in extensive contact with Europeans. Indeed, he was sent to Australia to learn European ways.

Yet, like for the Highlanders Strathern describes, Yali’s life and aspirations remained largely PNGuinean. He remained concerned less about the material attributes of things themselves than about the social uses to which things were put. For him and many other PNGuineans both then and now, things have value because they can be used in transactions to establish relationships of recognition and respect. They are more like gifts than commodities. They are exchanged to establish relationships of obligation, alliance, and friendship rather than to get “good deals.” Therefore, when Highlanders desired pearl shells, and they did desire them with a passionate intensity, it was not for the sake of the shells alone. Indeed, men acquired the coveted shells so as to be able to give them away at a later time.

Because the Highlanders were relatively inexperienced in European ways, they apparently thought that the prospectors were generous in offering them the coveted pearl shells that affirmed their fundamental worth — their shared humanity. In contrast, Yali’s coastal peoples had long before learned that the colonists were stingy, offering them only meager wages (often for plantation labor) that denied a common humanity. More than lots of stuff, they wanted (just a little) respect.

More later – about “cargo” and “cults.”

Hurricane Katrina Relief

If you haven’t already (and even if you have), please consider making a donation to the American Red Cross Hurricane 2005 Relief campaign.

I’m going to pull a Cory Doctorow on this one and post the link after having looked at it for mere femtoseconds. So you tell me — suck or not suck?

You’d expect me to have an opinion on this, and I do, but I’ll spare you the political posturing. What interests me here is the impact of PRISP in terms of disciplinary history, which is, I think, Price’s (among others) underlying concern. The history of anxiety over the intersection of anthropology and the military-intelligence complex dates back at least to Boas’ 1919 letter to The Nation, “Scientists as Spies”, but it was not until the Vietnam War that concerns over secrecy, and the potential of intelligence-related work to have serious consequences for both anthropologists and their subjects, became part of the mainstream in the discipline. Since then, though, American anthropologists have generally (though in no way entirely) rejected efforts by the state to build closer ties — though, it must be noted that over the same time period, the government has rarely reached out to anthropologists, so this commitment hasn’t been oft-tested.

A question which, in the heat of the Vietnam War, had serious on-the-ground consequences (as, for example, in anthropologists’ involvement in Thailand counter-insurgency efforts) has since developed into a concern for academic autonomy from the state (even as much of that autonomy was being “captured” by corporate interests), and it is here, I think, that PRISP presents a threat. Anthropologists have largely been worried about the uses of their data and conclusions by military and intelligence agencies, where anthropologists cannot control or temper how their information is used and interpreted. When publishing, we can impose a filter of sorts — pseudonyms, composite characters, selective reporting, etc. — which is a bit different from putting one’s self and one’s knowledge into the direct emply of the state. So most anthropologists (but again, far from all) have declined to work for the government in military-intelligence capacities.

PRISP seems like an end-run around that position — if the CIA can’t get anthropologists to work for them directly, PRISP places us indirectly in the CIA’s employ, as teachers of a new wave of intelligence-oriented area and language experts. While to a degree this has always been the case — anthropology BAs have long been considered good recruits for intelligence work — PRISP makes the arrangement explicit and foreordained.

This is what makes us nervous, I think — the idea that PRISP students will be in our classrooms, without our knowledge, not to learn anthropology as a discipline, and not to learn anthropology as part of a solid liberal arts education, but to glean from us whatever data and theories might be particularly useful in the field of intelligence. Ultimately, even those of us who are critical of US intelligence work will find ourselves perpetuating it — and our critiques falling on the deaf ears of PRISP students who know what side their bread is buttered on.