Over at the ARC, our own CKelty comments on a recent editorial in Nature pertaining to the problem of defining life in an age of synthetic biology. Kelty points to divisions between vitalist and mechanistic epistemologies, between religious and scientific worldviews, and he also references JD Faubion’s work on contemporary vitalisms. Faubion responds by drawing both supernaturalist and scientistic dispositions within the field of ‘the cultural’ and writes: “cultures may have been blown to pieces, mixed, merged, decontextualized and recontextualized, shuffled like a deck of cards of the whole history of styles of suits, or perhaps may have never existed in the pluralizable form, but The Cultural is Still Out There and It still inhabits even the most otherwise sterile of corridors. To fieldwork!” Yes. Definitely. But where?

‘Vital supports for living’ is one of Marilyn Strathern’s memorable phrases and pertains to the importance Melanesians place on relationships. The phrase encapsulates Strathern’s sense that the complex holistic and relational constructs of Melanesian cultures offer a critical foil to the reifications and objectifications of Euro-American ways of constructing the world, including those that go under the label ‘science.’ Might her interpretations of Melanesia be understood as ‘vitalistic’ ruminations on inchoate philosophies of ‘life’?

New Guineans work to ‘engineer’ fertility in plants, pigs, and persons. These are people very much concerned with the politics of life. After all, they grow (almost all) their own food! Melanesian cultures like the one I study in the upper Asaro are all about the vital spark that animates living, but that vital spark is never of or in or even for itself. ‘The Industrial Gene‘ would be unthinkable in Melanesia (as represented by Strathern), and not just because ‘molecular biology’ is a Western invention (but note the excellent work at PNG’s Instutitue of Medical Research). The vitality of Melanesian cultures is located always already in other people. Social life consists in showing and recreating that condition and is thus always emergent. Quoting Nature, Kelty writes:

“cells do not live alone, but in colonies and, in general, in ecosystems. Life is not a solitary pursuit, nor can evolution happen without the opportunity for competition.” Life is social. Whoa. What a neat idea, I wonder where one might find people who have thought about this? Hmmm… maybe amongst (neo)-vitalists?

But do anthropologists need Deleuze to think about this? There are much more pedestrian places one could look–like, say, gardens. Melanesians long ago cornered the market on rhizomatic philosophy. Consider the personification of yams and sweet potatoes.

Here are details of traditional initiations (no longer practiced), reported by Rohatynskyj for Ömie speakers in Papua New Guinea’s Oro Province, whom she compares with folks in the Sepik and the Siane (who live quite close to the Asaro valley populations I work with):

Yams in the ground, like boys in [initiation huts], are kine’e [spirits]… It is forbidden at any time to say the word kine’e in the gardens by the same logic that forbids the saying of the word in the [initiation hut]: it would spoil the growth of the yam or the boy. Tuzin documents a similar equivalence between yams, spirits, and children for the Ilahita Arapesh. Yams are seen by these people as the only plants with spirits, and they are accorded an active life underground, moving about and visiting friends in other gardens. Yams are equated to the human body and treated as children. In pantomime episodes among the Siane, the players who are ‘korova‘ [spirits], enact an equivalence between the production of children and large piles of vegetable food. The Ömie practice of growing boys like yams and in the growth process equating both with spirits of the ancestors is paralleled by similar beliefs and practices among the Ilahita Arapesh and the Siane.

Vitalists indeed. The important point here is not merely the identity constructed between persons and plants, an identity established by the shared life (spirit) between them, but that the desired effect and the point of life is growth or emergence. ‘Life’ is constituted as a process of gain or depletion. And growth and senescence are only contrived by routing/rooting them through the agencies of people: the men who grow yams that feed people, the boys who become men who grow yams that feed people. Analysis should track the way that those relations can only be activated in gendered or reproductive form (thus the growth of yams is in part an effect of the gendering of boys, and vice versa). It should further connect the conventional gendering of growth to the structured social relations produced by particular kinds of marriage rules. It is in this context, where relations transect clan and land through the bodies of persons and plants, that I think Melanesian materials can provide interesting glimpses of forms of life that ‘begin’ with premises quite different than those of our current prophets of power, sovereign or otherwise. (I merely attempted or hinted at this in a recent essay.)

So this is a plea to our readers and to our kind convener of this summer’s reading circle to consider Bamford’s Biology Unmoored. As I already noted, the Bamford text might help us to find creative connections between current concerns with life, sacrifice, personhood, and ecology. Moreover, Bamford’s text shows the influence of Roy Wagner, whose ‘holographic’ thinking inspired Dame Marilyn and others. Wagner’s trippy holography defies description and would be fun to read around in on the side. Rumor has it that in recent years, Professor Wagner has talked of designing a perpetual rocket engine using principals derived from his analysis of symbolic obviation.

[Addendum:  The essay that Rex mentions in his post below on the ANU land tenure volume is directly relevant to the ’emergent’ sociality theme I gesture toward in this post.  I have been thinking that surging anthropological interest in ‘sovereignty’ as power over/through life, where that power is exercised in and as territorial nationality, would benefit from critical scrutiny based in the cultural analysis of socialities that also tether life to land, but that do not necessarily do so through the logic of law, the logic of the ‘ban’ or the ‘exception.’]