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Article Excerpt
In a series of publications with significant comparative implications for Oceanist anthropology, Edvard Hviding (1993, 1996, 2003) analyzes unilineal representations of social structure in relation to marine and land tenure in Marovo Lagoon (Western Province, Solomon Islands) as instances of 'indigenous essentialism' in the face of neocolonial development pressures. Hviding shows how Marovo people truncate the complex, flexible and potentially limitless cognatic and bilateral mode of relatedness they call butubutu in order to isolate simple unilineal principles of rights to land when negotiating with global business and development interests. Sometimes, he reports, Marovo people put these attenuated unilineal models into practice in ways that bar whole sets of bilateral kindred from claims to marine and land rights that might otherwise find support in the broader category of butubutu. At other times, he argues, they debate competing unilineal constructions of their customary land tenure and strategically play them against one another to frustrate resource extraction they do not want. In both types of situation, interaction with external agents elicits partial essentializations of Marovo thought and practice and precipitates internal disputes (cf. Foale and Macintyre 2000).
In ways that crystallize challenges to any analysis that appears to take indigenous representations of customary land tenure based on unilineal descent at face value, Hviding's interpretations of such phenomena in Marovo intersect with and reinforce the insights of the two most influential theoretical orientations in current Melanesianist anthropology--namely, those that Robert Foster (1995, drawing on Josephides 1991) has labelled the 'New Melanesian Ethnography' and the 'New Melanesian History' (cf. Jorgensen 2001).
The New Melanesian Ethnography refers to the development and application of the so-called Melanesian model of sociality associated with Marilyn Strathern, Roy Wagner and others. Motivated in part by the inability of classic descent theory to describe sociality in Highland New Guinea, contributors to this model and their forerunners have emphasized that descent in Melanesia is either cognatic or--even where indigenously figured as unilineal--implies recursive relations of male/female complementarity (e.g. Lawrence 1984; Scheffier 1965; Strathern 1988, 1992a: Chapter 5; J. Weiner 1988). Kinship is, accordingly, bilateral and unbounded, situating persons as the particle composites of pre-existing, ongoing relations. Given this immanent and always present sociality (Strathern 1992a: 74, 83), diverse symbolic acts and forms reveal or eclipse selected layers of social relations to precipitate partial, fluid identities at particular moments. These fluid identities are, furthermore, according to some, situated within a larger cosmos of essential unity in which the precipitation of particular implicit social relations and identities is analogous to the precipitation of relations and differences at every level (Wagner 1967, 1977; J. Weiner 1988; cf. Gell 1999, on Mimica 1988; Strathern 1995: 15-22).
Although Hviding (2003) does not analyze Marovo sociality as a Solomon Islands token of this type of Melanesian sociality, the structure and language of his discussion suggest that he recognizes important parallels between the two. In particular, Hviding rehearses the same history of the deconstruction of anthropological descent theory that informs the New Melanesian Ethnography to make the point that Marovo sociality is, if not part of a total cosmic flow, at least a local flow in which people say that 'everyone is related to everyone'. Thus, as modelled by Strathern for Melanesia in general, for Marovo people there are no absolute and fixed social identities but a plenitude of relations within which 'complex polysemous categories' are needed in order to 'identify, establish, activate and deactivate relations among people' (Hviding 2003: 93; cf. 1996: 131). Taken together, then, both the situation in Marovo and the New Melanesian Ethnography promote a presumption that indigenous representations of unilineal identities are likely to be elicitations--exaggerations, in Hviding's (1993: 813) terms--of one aspect of sociality at the temporary expense of others. They are partial identities released in a process of decomposition through which 'forms appear out of other forms' (Strathern 1992b: 245, in Hviding 2003: 73).
A different approach--what Foster dubs the New Melanesian History--has shown that indigenous appeals to custom (kastom or kastam in many Melanesian pidgins), including representations of social relations and land tenure, must be contextualized as emergent within colonial and postcolonial history. While rejecting the idea that reifications of tradition in current Pacific Island discourses are culturally inauthentic, contributors to this approach have nevertheless emphasized that, precisely because such objectifications are always the mutable products of ongoing social relations, 'what appears customary may be much more recent than it would seem at first glance' (Carrier 1992: 19). Much of the literature that constitutes the New Melanesian History aims, therefore, to situate Melanesian discourses and practices as creative responses to confrontation with an external other (e.g. Keesing and Tonkinson 1982; Keesing 1992), or as artefacts of a shared history of 'entanglement' (e.g. Errington and Gewertz 1995; Thomas 1991).
Hviding acknowledges that Marovo people activate and de-activate different aspects of their sociality in 'any number of contexts, external and internal' (2003: 104), yet his concentration on how they do so as a culturally consistent means of managing encounters with outsiders effectively brings the New Melanesian Ethnography together with the New Melanesian History (2003: 72-73, 81; cf. 1996: esp. Chapter 8). Hviding's argument that Marovo people deploy essentialized models of their sociality in 'intercultural encounters' (2003: 100) in ways that extend their intra- and inter-butubutu modes of interaction points, I suggest, to a certain formal congruency between these analytical approaches (cf. Foster 1995: 8). Both approaches assume that there are no static pre-constituted social identities, groups, or even societies, and that, in a world of constant social flows, these entities are generated and transformed through social interaction (see esp. Carrier 1992: 19). It could be said, therefore, that human sociality at large--like Marovo and other Melanesian forms of sociality--is a process of mutual difference and identity elicitation through engagement; or, put differently, the Melanesian model of sociality can function analytically as a putatively regional and cultural variant of a universal process, a point to which I return in my conclusion.
Furthermore, Hviding's analysis, according to which--not the content--but the process of Marovo kastom formulations in relations with outsiders exemplifies an enduring cultural practice, may be read as reconciling a tension between these two approaches (cf. Foster 1995: 3; Jorgensen 2001: 103-105). If, as he intimates, Strathern essentializes Melanesian culture as a 'time- and place-less status quo' (Hviding 2003: 72; but see Strathern 1988: 16), he provides a case study of how, to the extent that Marovo sociality exhibits key features of Strathern's model, this culturally particular sociality is inherently a process of continuous historical transformation 'generative of new forms in and beyond' local contexts (Hviding 2003: 79). In this way, through a focus on cultural processes rather than content in indigenous essentialism, Hviding's implicit coordination of the New Melanesian Ethnography and the New Melanesian History acknowledges an important element of cultural continuity in historical change. At the same time, however, the Marovo case and these two analytical approaches combine to cast doubt on the long-standing character and centrality of the cultural content of land claims in Melanesia that appeal to unilineal identities.
Against this weight of counter-indicative ethnography and theoretical resistance, my aim in this article is to show that articulations of matrilineal connection to place among the Arosi of the island of Makira (Makira/Ulawa Province, Solomon Islands) are more than the partial delimitations of a broader sociality precipitated by the socio-political entanglements of the recent past. With due consideration of the ways in which colonial history has made land tenure a central concern among Arosi, I acknowledge that Arosi do indeed essentialize the relationship between a matrilineage and its territory as a given isomorphism. Through analysis of the distinctive features of Arosi land disputes, I also argue, however, that they do so in ways that recover and revalue culturally persistent mythic models of ultimate origins and narratives of place-making. These models represent Arosi socio-spatial order as predicated on an original plurality of autonomous pre-human categories of being that give rise to human matrilineages via transformative processes of inter-relationship and territorial emplacement. Yet, despite being constituted by processes of inter-relationship, human matrilineages remain, according to Arosi, fundamentally different: each is the bearer of a unique essence consubstantial with the essence of a particular pre-human category; collectively, they reproduce the plurality of the pre-human categories as an ongoing plurality of fundamental elements. When Arosi today seek to secure their matrilineal ties to land, they index these mythic models and narratives in discourses and practices that collapse the distinction between actual matrilineages and their core essences and objectify the unity of a matrilineage with its territory as a pre-constituted, static whole.
These Arosi understandings of a primordial and continuous plurality of fundamental elements resist analysis in terms of the always-ongoing plenitude of relations modelled in the New Melanesian Ethnography. In a manner analogous to some mortuary rituals elsewhere in Melanesia (e.g. Fortune 1932; Foster 1990, 1995; Macintyre 1987, 1989; Thune 1989; A. Weiner 1978, 1980, 1988), Arosi essentializations of their landholding matrilineages disarticulate matrilineal identities from a wider sociality. In Arosi--and perhaps in some of these mortuary contexts as well--this process effects an approximate return to a mythic primordial condition in which autonomous pre-human categories existed in absolute isolation. Recognition of this fact highlights what the New Melanesian Ethnography has so far obscured: practices that reassert primordiality in this way indicate that some Melanesians conceptualize something antecedent to, prerequisite for, and ultimately beyond the plenitude of all possible relations. Some Melanesians, it seems, recognize irreducible elementary essences characterized by an original absence of external relations (contra Strathern 1992a: 74).
AROSI REPRESENTATIONS OF MATRILINY AND LAND TENURE
Arosi assert that the ongoing essential unity of a matrilineage, often termed a waipo (umbilical cord), remains pure despite the exogamous 'mixing of blood' ('abu haidorari) that situates each lineage member in a particular bilateral kindred. For Arosi there is a fundamental difference between their connection to members of their own matrilineage and their connection to other kin. The former is regarded as an inherent, permanent consubstantiality; the latter a socially achieved, temporary intermingling. Whereas the members of a waipo are 'simply one' (ta'i moi), relatedness to a matrilineage and its ancestral spirits through a male diminishes generationally, as does relatedness between the descendants of two opposite sex siblings. The shared blood said to constitute the latter types of relatedness is thought to become increasingly diluted. After a debated number of generations, the descendants have become 'different people'. One man pointed this contrast precisely: 'A waipo is long; the father's blood is just short.'
Matrilineages that are said to be autochthonous to the island of Makira are called auhenua. The word auhenua is a compound of au, meaning 'person' or 'thing', and henua, the Arosi exemplar of a widespread group of Austronesian cognates for 'land'. Arosi use this compound to refer to any denizen, object, or quality...
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