Leaving the Magic Out: Knowledge and Effect in Different Places

Abstract

In 2010, Porer Nombo and I launched a book about indigenous Papua New Guinean plant knowledge to a large audience at a university near to his village on the north coast of that country. Members of the audience commented that the book made a record of important practices. But they asked if those practices were dependent on secret magic to be effective? What gave us the right to include such secrets? Or, if there was in fact something fundamental missing from the book (magical formulae to activate the processes described), then what was the use of publishing the book? Thinking through their questions suggested the need to analyse what ‘knowledge’ is in different places, and why plants might be effective in some, but not others. In this paper I attempt an explanation that does not rely on a ‘social’ explanation of magic but instead suggest that what we call ‘magic’ are mechanisms whereby a gardener (or healer, or hunter) positions an action, or a thing in relation to other things. I liken the way myth works in these systems to the way intellectual property law provides a comparable ‘mythic’ structure that locates effect in the places that have developed ‘knowledge economies’ and I conclude by asking; if places embody their history and politics, and generate different understandings of effect, then what are the implications of calling Porer's practices with regard to plants, ‘knowledge’?

Keywords:

• Knowledge
• Magic
• Plants
• Myth
• Intellectual Property

Notes

[1] Long-term collaboration with Porer Nombo and others in Reite made this paper possible, and their generosity is gratefully acknowledged here. Martin Holbraad commented helpfully on an early draft. I thank Marilyn Strathern, Eduardo Vivieros de Castro, Kath Weston, and the anonymous reviewers for Anthropological Forum for the stimulation, inspiration and suggestions they generously provided. I also record my gratitude to Alexis and Anita von Poser, Jerry Semos, and Linda Crowl for hosting the launch at Divine Word University in 2010, and Holly Wardlow for the image from that event. Richard Davis gave me the idea of structuring this paper around questions asked by Papua New Guinea students that day. I am very grateful to him, to the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Western Australia for funding the workshop ‘Recognising and Translating Knowledge’, to the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Western Australia for a visiting position, and to the Royal Society of Edinburgh for additional support from their Scholarly Exchange Programme.

[2] ‘wa’ – garden, ‘ting’ – shoot. ‘Ting’ in the Nekgini language designates a complex of things linked by a characteristic of vital motility, of things-that-are-movement in local understanding. The shoot of a growing plant is ‘…-ting’, as is a water spring gushing up from the ground. It is also is used to describe the fontanel of a newborn, the sharp edge of a knife, the human eye as it extends into the world and explores it, and the light pouring from the sun as it rises above the horizon. The wating then, is the vital growing shoot of the whole garden.

[3] As defined in Reite, that is.

[4] As described in detail by Latour (1993), including under the analytic of ‘immutable mobile’ (1987).

[5] Detached from persons and effective without reference to them, effective on nature or the physical world.

[6] I was at the time resident in Reite village for 21 months of doctoral fieldwork. My presence was enthusiastically accepted by people in Reite on the grounds of my interest in kastom and my ability to record it for people there. Kastom is a term in the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea denoting ways of doing things that are seen as drawing on ancestral practices (See Leach 2003, 9-12).

[7] http://epress.anu.edu.au/reite_plants_citation.html.

[8] I am indebted to James Weiner for emphasising this point.

[9] A necessary element in a collectivising symbolisation, where each person and each action are different to start with, and need to be understood and judged against common norms—a fixed context that makes sense of each individual action. In other words, it is no wonder that Western anthropologists such as Malinowski projected ‘law’ onto ‘myth’: they were compelled by their assumptions about individuals and society into finding equivalent institutions to those that constitute Western civilization. This also informed the debates about rationality and proto-science in magic.