https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3157-0773
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ABSTRACT
Hierarchy is often discussed in anthropology in terms of models that are specific to, and to an extent determinant of particular cultures. For example, the contrast between Big Man and Chief drawn by Sahlins not only appears as an emanation of distinction between two cultural orders in his account, but also as being a fundamental determinant of that cultural distinction. Likewise, the Dumontian conception of hierarchy that has been applied to a number of recent analyses of Oceanic societies is also one that emanates from and is foundational to the establishment of a distinction between Western and Indian societies. In this paper, I explore an alternative conception of emerging hierarchies in the South Pacific, that do not fit so easily into such schema. Based on fieldwork in East New Britain, I argue whilst such issues are sometimes locally glossed in terms of an ideal-type opposition between Western and local cultures, that often an understanding of these different hierarchies is not so easily contained within such a perspective.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
ORCID
Keir Martin http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3157-0773
Notes
1 As beautifully illustrated by the title of another paper by Tcherkezoff (Citation2008b), ‘Hierarchy is not Inequality, in Polynesia for Instance’.
2 Likewise, ‘At the time of early contact, Polynesian ontology was holistic … ’ (Tcherkezoff Citation2008a, 140).
3 This is the sense in which, as Robbins (Citation1994, 28) observes, that, ‘Central to the definition of the kind of structure in question is Dumont’s notion of hierarchy.’
4 On reflection Levi-Strauss’ structuralism, whatever its drawbacks, has proven to be more sophisticated than Dumont’s by virtue of the way in which a constantly changing ‘infrastructure’ of environmental factors provides the human mind with a flow of impressions it seeks to categorise after the event, as opposed to Dumont who appears to see structure as the emanation of an unexplained and inexplicable ideological value hierarchy.
5 Hence Strathern’s analysis of Melanesia as ‘relational’ (itself in large part derived from Marriot’s (Citation1976) anti-Dumontian analysis of Indian society in the 1970s) is easily taken as the basis for a Dumontian style structural analysis of Melanesian society/ies as a whole, despite the tendency on occasion to present it as a challenge to structuralist analyses.
6 Matrilineal clans are known as ‘vunatarai’ in the local Kuanua language.
7 Customary Tolai shell-wealth.
8 Tabu belonging to the vunatarai.
9 The work of turning the raw shells into tabu is often performed as a form of wage-labour by less wealthy Tolai in what some informants described to me as ‘tabu factories’ (see Martin Citation2013, 125).
10 The term ‘Grassroots’ is commonly used throughout PNG to describe those, most often village residents, leading a simple life without the financial resources of the emerging economic elite.
11 In Kuanua this relationship is described as being, ‘warwarngala na vunatarai’; literally one ‘begotten’ or ‘reared’ by the vunatarai; that is a child of a male member of the vunatarai.
12 The tubuan is a masked dancing figure that is raised by a men’s secret society among Tolai people.
13 It is worth stressing at this point that ToNgala and those close to him would dispute this version of events.
14 Eli provides a particularly interesting example of the ways in which Tolai at the time of my fieldwork grappled with the enduring tensions of how to acknowledge and contain relational obligation that I discuss in more detail elsewhere (Martin Citation2007).
15 I decided not to raise this question with ToNgala directly for political reasons. I have no doubt however, that he would have denied these claims.
16 See also Graeber (Citation2013, 235–238) for a general account of a similar perspective and Gibson (Citation2013) for a description of structure as the outcome of ongoing value contradiction. Similarly, Lambek (Citation1993), McIntosh (Citation2009), Geertz (Citation1957) and Gibson (Citation2008) all in their different ways provide pictures of the co-existence of contradictory values whose hierarchy is never clearly established. Likewise, Raheja (Citation1989, 81) demonstrates the importance of context in determining the shifting hierarchies of value in an Indian Hindu context in explicit contrast to the failures of Dumont’s fixed structure of value hierarchy to capture their actual use.
17 In this piece, I also discuss how the characterisation of the Big Shot builds on a long-noted ambiguity at the heart of the social position of the traditional Big Man between acknowledging his relational obligation to his followers and imposing his individual will upon them, most notably described in Burridge (Citation1975). The characterisation of the new generation of leaders as ‘Big Shots’ not ‘Big Men’ marks to a large extent a fear that this new generation can no longer be held accountable by relational obligation to the same extent as in the past, and a sense that in many contexts that this ongoing tension is now no longer embodied in the person of the Big Shot who is able to a large extent to free himself of the demands of reciprocal obligation due to his ‘money power’.
18 Indeed, the recent trend in anthropology to ‘take seriously’, Christianity as a topic of analysis often runs the risk of underplaying this context-dependent framing of Christianity’s effects and meanings, and recreating the kind of scriptural ‘essentialism’ that anthropologists of other world religions such as Islam have long been aware of (for example Bowen Citation1992).