Tag Archives: Pacific

What’s wrong with Yali’s Question

I finally watched episode one of the Guns, Germs, and Steel TV show last night. Its all on TiVo, but I’m finding it hard to sit and watch – it is a rather painfully made show. So many shots of Jared Diamond looking scholarly: peering out windows, looking at maps, walking back and forth, etc. Ugh! And do they really need to work the title of his book into every other sentence? I mean, in the first episode they don’t even get up to the invention of guns…

The show is framed by the motif of “Yali’s Question.” Yali is portrayed as some local guy (he looks like a worker) whom JD bumps into on the beach one day and asks him:

Why you white man have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little?

But Yali isn’t just some guy on the beach. He’s a politician. This isn’t JD’s fault. Here is what he says in the book:

I had already heard about a remarkable local politician named Yali, who was touring the district then.

But I can’t completely absolve JD for this portrayal. I believe there is something fundamentally wrong about the very question he is asking.

The modern U.S. is the richest, most powerful state on earth. It’s crammed with more cargo than most New Guineans could ever imagine. But why? That’s what Yali wanted to know. How did our worlds ever come so different?

By framing the question in this way, the show is forced to portray New Guniea as a land of poor people, and the US as a land of wealth. Although we are told that there are intelligent people from New Guniea, they are portrayed as hunter gatherers, or poor farmers. While the show does show the hubub of urban New Guinea at the end, one would hardly know that there is internet access in the country.

This gets to the fundamental problem I have with JD’s question. While it is interesting and important to ask why technologies developed in some countries as opposed to others, I think it overlooks a fundamental issue: the inequality within countries as well as between them. I assure you that logging industry executives in New Guinea live better than you or I do! Both New Guinea and the United States are far more unequal (by some measures) than is India. Moreover, inequality throughout the world is increasing more rapidly now than every before.

Although it is a contentious argument, economist Amartya Sen argues that inequality within countries can be more important than inequality between countries. I’ve collected a bunch of writings about this question on my wiki, and there was some lively discussion about it in response to this earlier Savage Minds post. But the main point Sen makes is that people in societies that are objectively poorer, but less unequal live longer than people who are objectively wealthier, but at the bottom rungs of a more unequal society. It doesn’t help to have more cargo if you can’t afford the dental work necessary to meet new standards of beauty. (Read this post about a US woman who couldn’t get promoted because of her teeth.)

Yes, it is interesting to know the environmental constraints societies have struggled against over the course of history, but it is a mistake to see this as an explanation of contemporary inequality.

To take a recent example, Nigeria (environmentally blessed with some of the largest oil reserves outside of the Middle East) used to be one of the richest countries in the world. Corruption, aided by Western banks who provided the means of funneling the majority of the nation’s GDP into private bank accounts, and deep cultural divisions between North and South, destroyed that wealth. Yet there are still many, many, millionaires and billionaires in Nigeria, and their collective wealth would be enough to give them plenty of “cargo” …

So, no offense to Yali, but his question should be:

Why is cargo distributed so unequally both within and between our societies?

Once you frame the question that way, environmental factors seem rather incidental.

UPDATE: Brad DeLong, points out that I overstated my case with the Nigeria example. However, I still think my overall argument still stands. The comparative wealth of Nigeria is less important for my point than the inequitable distribution of that wealth within Nigeria.

I would also add that the poor farming conditions DeLong speaks of are partially a result of the oil economy:

During the oil boom, Nigeria’s small family farms became marginalized. Women and children largely ran the farms as men sought work in the cities’ industrial-development schemes, which were heavily subsidized by petroleum wealth.

UPDATE: My discussion with Professor DeLong continues in the comments section of this post – which also has links to discussion on other sites.

Bound by Recognition

A few weeks ago I finished “Patchen Markell’s”:http://home.uchicago.edu/~pmarkell/index2.html book “Bound by Recognition”:http://www.citeulike.org/user/rex/article/241984 . In my opinion it is utterly superb — and those are not words that I use often. The book has many things to reccomend it but what I like so much about it is the way Markell is able to describe a skepticism about the moral certainty that prods to action which I have long felt inarticulately. In other words the book is not just good, but it snaps neatly into a missing space in the puzzle of my own personal philosophy.

Given the somewhat lefty circles I run in, my friends are often surprised at how unwilling I am to engage in denouncing those who hold political positions antithetical to mine. Those who have never met me in person have perhaps seem the recent discussions comments on the various “posts by Oneman”:/author/oneman/ and the seemingly interminable threads that emerge from them. My hesitancy to speak the anthropological truth to the public — to “make the world safe for difference” — is not due to some sort of cryptoconservatism or cryptoscientism but rather from what I might call a certain ‘Burkean existentialism’ that Markell (drawing on Sophocles rather than Burke and Arendt rather than Sartre and hence probably terrified by this characterization) outlines so well in his book.

Those who advocate anthropology’s ability to command both factual and ethical assent from its ‘public’ also typically imagine the readers of their work to be a different set of people from their research subjects and worry about it’s ‘relevance at home’. Historically, this has been the case — as Pacific Islander scholars often point out, Coming of Age in Samoa wasn’t written for Samoans (and don’t even get me started on Sex and Temperment!). But my concern, like that of many anthropologists, is what it means to be an anthropologist when the people portrayed in my books are the people who are reading them (for more on this see why I think “the Yanomami thing is overdone”:/2005/05/23/yanomami-fatigue/). As several of the commentors pointed out in a very fruitful and insightful discussion in response to “one of Nancy’s posts”:/2005/06/24/perceptions-of-anthropology/, anthropology’s moral certainty and need for self-assertion starts looking less and less pretty the further it gets from home. At its best this sort of anthropology adopts a slightly farcical “my name is Luke Skywalker, I’m here to rescue you” sort of air when applied in the field, and at its worse the ease with which it wears its expertise can be both paternal and colonial as anthropologists begin lecturing local people about what their culture is like and asking who needs to be saved from globalization. Thus the distaste for the moral imperialism that often arises when ‘doing right by the other’ is still in my mouth when I contemplate my ‘relevance at home’.

The usual way to steer the course between ‘relevance at home’ and ‘doing right by the other’ is to adopt the old anthropological tactic of drawing a line between ‘your culture’ and ‘their culture’ and then respecting external difference while being critical of internal disagreements, which results in a situation where ritual homosexuality needs to be understood, but Republicans need to be stamped out. For me, the easy answer of being critical of ‘my culture’ while ‘respecting theirs’ doesn’t work because it relies on a bright and clear boundary dividing ‘one culture’ from ‘another’ that doesn’t exist and which (pace Markell’s understanding of ‘the anthropological notion of culture’) probably never has. As someone who studies mining in Papua New Guinea, my research subjects includes corporate executives and indigenous negotiators. Both have lawyers. My accounts of my fieldsite could very well be used as ‘expert evidence’ in their own endless legal wranglings like the work that my colleagues have written. Moreover, as a settler on O’ahu I find myself a participant in debates about who gets to speak about and for ‘traditional Hawai’ian culture’ in which anthropological authority has been substantively and importantly challenged. The situation is complicated by the fact that Hawai’i is a place which began producing indigenous scholars just as soon as the alphabet was introduced. How can I teach native Hawai’ians about ‘their culture’, and how do I engage in scholarly debate with indigenous scholars about it?

These are the sorts of issues that Markell’s books can speak to. While the majority of the book is concerned with technical issues in the political ontology of agency and identity which, despite how luminously well written it is, will be slow going for people who can’t immediately jump into discussions of Arendt, Hegel, Herder, and Taylor, the chapter on multiculturalism is perhaps the easiest way in to the argument for nonspecialists. Here his focus is on the politics of recognition (think Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth, Will Kymlicka, etc.). The politics of recognition has emphasized the way in which recognition and affirmation of one’s identity and culture is itself a social good which ought to be recognized in multicultural liberal states, and particularly Canada (home to Taylor and Kymlicka). However, Markell argues that this aspiration to mutual recognition is appealing but ultimately unsatisfying and even incoherent.

In general, Markell is critical the idea that people can come to have a ‘sovereign’ knowledge of themselves — that identity can in principle become a settled thing. Thus while the politics of recognition demands that others “recognize us as who we already are. Invoking ‘identity’ as a fait accompli precisely in the course of the ongoing and risky interaction through which we become who we are (or, more precisely, who we will turn out to have been).” But this attempt to achieve an “independent and masterful agency” papers over “our basic condition of intersubjective vulnerability” — in fact, our very desire for self-certainty often ends up displacing our the burden of bearing an unsought identity onto other sectors of social space, making the project of recognition itself a medium of injustice and people become ‘bound’ by recognition as we displace our uneasiness and make them bear the weight of our self-confidence.

Drawing on Povinelli’s account of settler guilt in Australia (which I’ve always felt was better-executed “here”:http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/issues/v24/v24n2.povinelli.html rather than “here”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0822328682/qid=1120508674/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_ur_1/002-3949094-5952040?v=glance&s=books&n=507846), Markell points out how multiculturalism is often figured as “a moment of redemption” that can “salve liberal anxieties.” For liberals in multicultural societies seek both “redemption from their past” and its history of injustice as well as “their lingering discomfort with the exercise of power in the present.” But not any sort of redemption will do. As Markell writes “the imagined prospect of an ‘infinite’ emergence of new groups and new demands would prolong the process of atonement, never quite releasing these liberals from the obligation and discomfort in their own historical skin… perhaps even more threatening than the prospect of a permanent stain on the historical record is the possibility that the wrongs in which liberal societies are implicated are not just past but present and ongoing… and that justice might therefore require sacrifices that cut deeper than the explicit renunciation of the acts of past generations.” Thus demands which are not ‘appropriate’ and “are phrased in ways that restore the liberal agent’s sense of sovereign agency” are labeled radical and inappropriate. In Hawai’i, for instance, teaching Hawai’ian culture in primary school in the form of myths and legends is appropriately ‘multicultural’ but “pursuing land restitution for indigenous people through international law”:http://www2.hawaii.edu/~anu/index.html is labeled “a dangerous scam”:http://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/fraudperfecttitle.html. The very recognition that multiculturalists believe to be so empowering turns out to empower them, while those who are ‘bound’ by the limits of their recognition are only allowed to be different in safe and nonthreatening aways.

In contrast to this approach, Markell points out that “the weight of history” does not “always come tidily packages in rules and prescriptions for action.” Following Arendt, he argues that our identities are the “results of action and speech in public, through which people appear to others and thereby disclose who they are.” It is only in the moment of applying the lessons of the past to the present that who we are is established. Following Sahlins, we might want to call Markell’s approach an ‘ethics of the structure of the conjuncture.’ Markell calls this fact tragic because it creates in us a “constitutive vulnerability” — who we are is the result not of the past that lies at our backs, but in our openness to a future that we cannot control because of the ‘impropriety’ of our action: “the very conditions that make us potent agents also make us potent beyond our own control, exposing us to consequences and implications that we cannot predict and which are not up to us. Our acts, you might say, are always improper in the sense that they are never our property — neither as choosers, nor as the bearers of identity.” This “constitutive openness of action to worldly contingency” is demonstrated again and again as our actions have consequences that we did not anticipate, and are subject to interpretation that we cannot control by the people we share our lives with.

Thus our identities are always simultaneously predicated on our actions, but slip beyond our control and the idea of a “democratic justice” which requires “that all people be known and respected as who they really are” aspires to a project which not only binds its interlocutors in a recognition which, ironically, was meant to liberate them, but is incoherent because it is based on a theory of agency and identity which is incorrect. This is not to suggest that we ought to live in a “spirit of resignation” but rather, to undertake a ‘politics of acknowledgment’ in which “no one be reduced to any characterization of his or her identity for the sake of someone else’s achievement of a sense of sovereignty.” Such a politics “demands that each of us bear our share of the burden and risk involved in the uncertain, open-ended, sometimes maddeningly and sometimes joyously surprising activity of living and interacting with other people.”

I like Markell’s account because it speaks to “many other”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1580230113/qid=1120510130/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_ur_1/002-3949094-5952040?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 approaches to “human life”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0942299795/qid=1120510169/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_ur_1/002-3949094-5952040?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 that mean “so much”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0226733580/qid=1120510196/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_ur_1/002-3949094-5952040?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 to me and that focus on the relation between tradition, innovation, and the human experience of novelty. But what is important for my purposes here is the way it suggests anthropologists personally (not professionally) deal with their research findings. Typically, when an anthropologist begins dealing with someone else our first reaction might be to avoid making assumptions — rather than tell a Papua New Guinean ‘what their culture is’ and how we might help them ‘defend it’ we might wait and see what they want and need. For our part, we might reciprocate in turn by some sort of self-disclosure in which we articulate to them who we are ‘honestly’ are so they could become aware of our ‘biases’ and how terribly terribly upset we are when brown people like themselves are trampled underfoot by the ‘bad’ white people who have so little in common with us ‘good’ white people. But the ‘acknowledgment’ in Markell’s politics is not an acknowledgment of the other, but about how little self-knowledge we are capable of. Identity is retrospective, which means in the present one can only know that in the future they will turn out to have been someone. Thus acknowledgement is “self- rather than other- directed; its object is not one’s own identity but one’s own basic ontological condition or circumstances, particularly one’s own finitude; this finitude is to be understood as a matter of one’s practical limits in the face of an unpredictable and contingent future, not as a matter of the impossibility or injustice of knowthing others; and, finally, acknowledgment involves coming to terms with, rather than vainly attempting to overcome, the risk of conflict, hostility, misunderstanding, opacity, and alienation that characterized life among others.” Whatever you think of this argument more generally, it captures for me perfectly the experience of culture shock that one is undergoing when entering a foreign fieldsite and making introductions when (in my experience at least) you have already begun a transformative personal experience and have lost your moorings, identity-wise.

I also like this approach because it describes how I attempt to deal with people who live on the island to which I have just moved. My first step when meeting Pacific Islanders is not to explain to them how anthropology can help them, how I am ‘an expert in their culture’, or to explain how terribly, terribly sympathetic I am to people with brown skin. It is to realize that I don’t even know how much I don’t know. I try to live with them as we negotiate who we will both become. I am not quite sure who I am going to be in this situation. An expert? A colonizer? An ally? An absurd clown? (my favorite is the first and last options combined). I try to approach people with a strong sense that we are going somewhere together, but our destination is not something I can know before hand. Hence the ‘Burkean Existentialism’ I mentioned above. This approach keeps me both humble and prudent — two virtues that I admit are not exactly my speciality. It reminds me that anthropology makes me a “hedgehog rather than a fox”:http://www.cc.gatech.edu/people/home/idris/Essays/Hedge_n_Fox.htm — I know one trick, and it’s a good one. I do a certain kind of research that is good at describing certain sorts of things, and answering certain sorts of questions that have developed over the course of my discipline’s intellectual history. But what good does this do for others? How could I possibly know when I am not sure who I myself am becoming as I immerse myself deeper and deeper into the lesser works of Rodney Needham? Neither politically quietistic nor overly self-assured in my opinion of what people need to learn from me, I have tried to live a life which “does not promist the pleasure of sovereignty” but provides what Markell has called “the less grand and more tentative pleasure of potency — simply having (and being carried along by) effects in the world.”

New Société Des Océanistes Website

The Société Des Océanistes has a “new website”:http://www.oceanistes.org/ that is well worth checking out. It seems these days we are being deluged by francophone Vanuatu scholars, and this is a good way to keep up with the European scholarly community. The site also has table of contents for all of the back issues of its journal, which has published numerous gems but about which information is incredibly difficult to locate. Now if they could just get the entire thing CSS’d properly the site would really be humming…

Two Anthropologists, One Piece of Meat

A “while back”:/2005/06/14/cores-peripheries-and-bridges/#comment-301 Nancy wrote that:

A bridge is a bridge in a very concrete way, [and] social and cultural elements are not necessarily as tangible. The anthropologist is not just learning about an unchanging and concrete thing when s/he is learning about a social phenomenon. S/he is interpreting it as s/he is observing it and learning about it so that the very entity that s/he presents as “fact” or “reality” is already affected by her assumptions… Two people trying to understand the same social structure will understand it differently because of their assumptions.

Just how different do two anthropologists interpret ‘the same social structure’? At the time I thought this maybe wasn’t quite right (not that Nancy was mistaken somehow, just that the issue was more complex than the comment indicated). On the one hand, I felt that it was obvious that your research interests shape your focus, so of course two people with different focuses will look at the same thing differently. On the other hand, I strongly feel that cultural systems are sufficiently stable and coherent that they can be studied without giving into some sort of wishy-washy postmodernism on the one hand or vulgar positivism on the other. Culture isn’t as tangible as a bridge, but I still think it’s tangible enough — it’s telling, for instance, that refering to two interpretations of ‘the same’ social structure implies there is one ‘thing’ there.

This is a real issue for me — I did fieldwork at the exact same time with (roughly) the same ethnic group as as another anthropologist, my good friend “Jerry Jacka”:http://sasw.chass.ncsu.edu/s&a/faculty/jacka/jacka.html (who appears here with his permission). At first I think Jerry and I were a little nervous about this since this sharing a fieldsite can sometimes lead to trouble and strife so intense it is spoken of only in hushed tones over beer at hotel bars during AAAs. Lucky, Jerry and I got on famously and are good friends, and the only tales of fieldwork rivalry we talk about over beer are other people’s.

In fact, Jerry and I were often relieved to find out that we had discovered similar things about ‘our culture’ independently of one another. Although untangling the outlines of cultural structure in the field is hard (in our case only one other anthropologist had done fieldwork in our area) it was really gratifying to find the way we both came to recognize the prevailing themes in our area. “Did you ever hear about these spirit women?” I’d ask him. “Yu Angini Wanda? Oh yeah, people won’t stop talking about them. Have you run across these hired assasin/berserker types?” “Akali peyapeya? Sure.” This sort of thing.

So — just how different do two anthropologists (in roughly the same demongraphic, to be sure) interpret ‘the same social structure’? Well recently one of my “ASAO”:http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/asao/pacific/hawaiki.html homies asked members of our email list to describe their experiences in Papua New Guinea with lambflaps, cheap cuts of meat from a sheep’s belly that are sold throughout the country. Jerry and I both replied to her independently of each other, without knowing what the other had written. This makes an excellent example of how anthropological accounts of the same thing observed at the same time in the same place (more or less) differ.

Here’s what Jerry wrote:

I have a lot to say about lamb flaps as I initially found them revolting (not being used to eating mutton), particularly the boiled variety, but within months developed an insatiable craving for fried ones.

Lamb flaps (or sipsip as they are known in Tok Pisin) have taken on a huge significance in the Seventh Day Adventist community in eastern Porgera where I worked. As John Finch noted, they allow SDAs to engage in pig-like exchange functions and SDA celebrations/marriages use both sipsip and chickens to replace pork.

Ipili women have created a cottage industry out of selling raw and cooked lamb flaps. Early every morning Dyna trucks leave Mt. Hagen with boxes of frozen lamb flaps (at least women told me they came from Mt. Hagen, they may be coming from Wabag) and stop at places along the highlands highway where women buy the boxes and carry them back to their home communities, some as far as 10 km into the bush. I think the standard box is about 25(?) kilos and makes for a rather unwieldy trek through the forest as the boxes are shallow and wide and women carry them in netbags across their foreheads.

Around May or June of 1999, the boxes sold for K65 apiece (exchange rate then was about 33 cents for one kina), but in July of 1999 they shot up to K90 apiece. Women weren’t sure why the price went so high in one month, but most of the women I interviewed averaged K20 to K70 profit per box, so for some of them, they had a very restricted profit margin (if any at all) after this raise. Interestingly enough, prices didn’t change for the consumer.

Cooked sipsip, either boiled with watercress or fried, had a fairly standard size for price ratio. A 50 toea piece was about one and a half inches by one and a half inches, and one kina pieces were about twice as large. At the sipsip shacks alongside roads and in hamlets, these are the standard sizes/prices. At tradestores one can buy larger pieces that have been cooked for more money.

Women will also sell larger hunks of raw meat for people to take home to cook. A K5 piece was about 8 inches by 8 inches (around 5 or 6 rib pieces). People tended to buy these rather furtively so that others wouldn’t know they were intending to have meat at home as you’re obligated to feed people that drop by during dinner time. As you can guess, I was pretty unsuccessful at being unobtrusive while buying sipsip and inevitably had someone come by to “story” with me shortly after buying meat.

Children, from what I could tell, would spend every last toea they could wheedle from anyone on lamb flaps. SDAs don’t have a lot of chances to eat meat (chickens sold for K20 per chicken) so the ability to get at least a little bit of meat for 50 toea was very significant. I can attest, as others have, that lamb flaps don’t have much meat, but people didn’t care as the fat seemed to be relished just as well. In fact, the fat comes off in a nice strip, crispy on one side, juicy on the other, which you can eat and then gnaw on the bone to get what little meat there is.

Women that had successful sipsip shacks on two occassions were targets of accusations of menstrual blood poisoning. In both cases, younger, unmarried women were alleged to have cooked sipsip while menstruating thus making men ill. One of the women had to pay K20 to the person who accused her and I don’t know the amount the other one paid. Far worse than the fine was the public shaming they received and neither one of them cooked sipsip for some time afterward.

And here’s what I wrote:

In Porgera — at least the bit where I lived — lambflaps were ubiquitous. As mentioned elsewhere, they were used by SDAs and tref-avoidant anthropologists like myself in group mumus they wanted to participate in, but without eating pork. They were more popular than slaughtering a goat. Most people found goats scary.

Whole cases were available for purchase at large stores at the government station, after having been shipped in via truck from Lae. Typically they were still more or less frozen when they got there. Individual tradestores with refrigerators would also sell ‘racks’ of unsliced lamb flaps to women. They then cooked individuals slices slowly in large low sided pans around the edge of the village square (ama). They thus fell into the same category as ‘palawa’ (flour — fried dough pancakes right out of Grapes of Wrath), betelnut, single cigarettes, and home made popsicles — pre-cooked food that women (often from migrant families) sold when they felt like it. It wasn’t something you’d get in a tradestore (which were more or less run by men, although there were exceptions). People would occasionally buy lamb flaps to eat at home when they had more money than a can of tinpis cost, but not enough for a whole chicken. Occasionally after very long and cold walks or trips (very common in Enga) we would buy lamb flaps to eat to get some energy into us ‘or else we’ll die’. Of course, at that point, the last thing I wanted were lamb flaps. There are ways to make virtue a necessity, but it is a very poor cut of meat for straight frying. Nevertheless, I ate them frequently since they were the only readily available meat I could eat, and it was common for people walking with friends to buy small things such as this for each other.

I suppose if your kink is liquified or semi-liquified pig fat, then lambflaps would seem a natural substitute for pork and quite tasty. If your idea of fun is a hanger steak with béarnaise sauce and a nice robust Bordeaux, they’re not really for you 🙁

What does this show? Well first, thre is probably a lot of stuff in there (Wabag, K50, etc.) that only make sense if you already know a lot about Papua New Guinea. But overall it seems to me that our accounts are remarkably similar. On the other hand, there are differences of style and approach. I was going to comment on what they were, but as I read through our responses I see that I don’t have the distance necessary to pull back and compare them – I’m too close to my data. So let me post it as a question instead — what are the differences in style, interpretation, and emphasis that you see in these two responses?