The Matter of Makira: Colonialism, Competition, and the Production of Gendered Peoples in Contemporary Solomon Islands and Medieval Britain

Abstract

Since civil tension disrupted Solomon Islands between 1998 and 2003, the Arosi of Makira have elaborated discourses according to which their island contains a secret and preternaturally powerful subterranean army base. These discourses have clear antecedents in Maasina Rule, a post-World War II socio-political movement sometimes analysed as a “cargo cult”. Offering an alternative interpretation, I compare Arosi discourses about the Makiran underground to the Matter of Britain as represented in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain (completed c. 1138). I argue that both sets of discourses arise from the dynamics of mutually precipitating communities mythologizing themselves and each other in terms of the analogous oppositions colonizer is to colonized as allochthon is to autochthon as male is to female. This comparison, I conclude, recommends the medieval European phenomenon of a “matter” as a productive model for understanding contemporary ethnogenetic myth-making in and beyond Melanesia.

Keywords:

• Ethnogenesis
• Gender
• Colonialism
• Geoffrey of Monmouth
• Solomon Islands

Acknowledgements

This article draws on field research carried out in 1992–1993, 2003, and 2006. I am greatly indebted to the people of Arosi for sharing their hospitality, experiences, thoughts, and stories during these periods. I acknowledge the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the Social and Economic Research Council of the UK (Grant No: RES-000-23-1170) for their generous support. Earlier versions of the article were presented in the Social Anthropology Seminar Series, University of Edinburgh (Oct. 2008); the Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, London School of Economics (Nov. 2008); the Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group and the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, University of Western Australia (July 2010); and (in abstentia) to participants in the “Cargo Cults, Kastom, and Kago Kalja” working session at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania, Alexandria, VA (Feb. 2010). I thank the participants at these venues for their thoughtful engagement with the paper, in particular, Magnus Course, Marc Tabani, Lamont Lindstrom, Debra McDougall, and Andrew Lynch. The article has also benefitted from the constructive comments of three anonymous reviewers for History and Anthropology. But, I especially recognize Krista Ovist for co-conceiving the comparison, consulting on its development, and collaborating on translations from Jean Bodel.

Notes

Sightings of non-routine but conventional air traffic may have stimulated these claims. People may have seen, for example, aircraft deployed by the New Zealand Defence Force as part of its 1999 “Exercise Tropic Twilight” (http://www.oag.govt.nz/2003/east-timor-health/docs/timor-health.pdf [accessed 2/7/2008]) or transport used by expeditions such as the 2006 Galathea 3 search for gingers on tropical islands (http://www.dalbergpoulsen.com/recent.html [accessed 31/8/2007]).

For additional analyses of Maasina Rule (also termed Marching Rule), see Akin (1993: 319–383), Burt (1994: 171–201), Keesing (1978), Laracy (1983) and Scott (2007: 105–129).

Others have argued against this interpretation, however (e.g. Keesing 1978; Worsley 1968).

Historian Pocock (1975) coined this term to overwrite “British Isles” with a neutral name inclusive of Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Orkneys, and the Shetlands. Such relexification maps ongoing transformations of this conflict.

By “romance of place” I do not mean an idealized, dreamy, or exoticizing representation of a place. Rather, I mean “romance” in the sense of a vernacular treatment of pleasurably exciting incidents and adventures that may contain fabulous elements but also make claims to historical verity (Auerbach 1974; Baugh 1967: 173–199; Strohm 1971).

My use of the concept of dialogic polyphony is informed by the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, especially 1984.

Here, I take as my methodological precedent Sahlins' (2004) project of interrogating prima facie similarities between the mid-nineteenth century “Polynesian War” in the Fiji Islands and the Peloponnesian War of the fifth century BCE in order to render these very different histories mutually illuminating.

The chief secondary source for the biography of Geoffrey of Monmouth is Curley (1994).

On developments towards “modern” authorship in the medieval period, see Bennett (2005: 38–43).

For example, discourses about what some Makirans refer to as a kakamora stone, which they describe as the source of the underground army's extraordinary powers (Scott, forthcoming), could be compared to aspects of the Arthurian grail cycle, especially as represented by Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival.

See Reeve (2007) for the Latin text of the Historia Regum Britanniae.

In his later work, The Life of Merlin, Geoffrey presents the possibility that Morgen of Avalon may be able to heal Arthur's wound. As Faletra (2000, 2008: 200) points out, however, in the History of the Kings of Britain, Geoffrey never unequivocally asserts that the prophesied agent of British restoration will be Arthur. That understanding appears only in later texts, many of which represent the hope of Arthur's return as longstanding popular belief in Brittany and Wales (e.g. Loomis 1941, 1959a, 1959b).

Historically, the island has also been known as San Cristoval.

The parallels are even closer between the Matter of Makira and those versions of the Matter of Britain according to which Arthur and his men lie sleeping under a mountain (see Loomis 1959b), a motif likewise attached to a myriad heroes and kings in the folkloric traditions of Europe.

Others appear to be turning to Islam, Sharia Law, and theories of Arabic origins for renewed Malaitan identity (McDougall 2009; Moore 2008).

Boirayon's (2003a, 2003b, 2009) sensationalist conspiracy theory publications about what he calls UFOs and dragon or diamond snakes operating from subterranean bases on Malaita (and Guadalcanal) could be read as evidence of such accounts.

Some academics have avoided applying terminologies of unilineal descent without qualification to the Solomon Islands contexts they study (e.g. Dureau 1998; Hviding 2003; Keesing 1971). In recent accounts of social tensions in Solomon Islands, however, I detect an increased willingness to employ them (e.g. Braithwaite et al. 2010: 19; Kabutaulaka 2001; Moore 2004: 95), perhaps in response to new forms of insular self-essentialization.

Solomon Islanders from other regions, including Malaita, would likewise describe their local kastom as mandating and prizing such qualities and behaviours (e.g. Gegeo 1998).

I cannot confirm that Malaitans refer to Makirans as women. But some Malaitan matter-making seems to express such a view of Guadalcanal people. An origin story told by the Malaitan Michael Kwa‘ioloa claims for example that:

the Guadalcanal people are descended from Malaitans from Siale in central Kwara‘ae who lived in the area of Rere on Guadalcanal. …When those people returned to Siale they left a woman on Guadalcanal who died and was buried at a place called Vunuanuli, at Ruafatu. That is why in Guadalcanal the woman is the head of the family or clan, because it was a woman who was left when they returned to Malaita. (Kwa‘ioloa & Burt 2007: 114)

This is a myth of colonization and a colonizing myth. It hierarchically encompasses both the people of Guadalcanal and their matrilineal ideology as derived from and subordinate to the people of Malaita and their agnatic ideology on the grounds that Malaita is to Guadalcanal as male is to female. With similarly gendered colonizing connotations, some Langalanga Malaitans assert that “‘the Langalanga control the whole country’” (in Guo 2006: 35) because a certain type of shell money that only they produce is widely used in bride price payments. Through this money, the Langalanga stand as a collective father in relation to the children born to women purchased with their money: “the women would then give birth to children. Therefore, Langalanga shell money and [Langalanga] power is in their blood” (in Guo 2006: 35).

This same consultant attributed to some Malaitans an awareness that their bellicose nature derives from Hauhuari‘i: “People of ‘Are‘are know about Hauhuari‘i; ‘You Makirans have spoiled us’ [they say]. …They know it is a rock from Makira. Some old men know the story of the rock”. Like the Kwara‘ae and Langalanga discourses described in note 19, these representations could be said to entail colonizing implications. Without employing myths or metaphors of descent, this man nevertheless suggests that Makiran masculinity is, in effect, the father of Malaitan masculinity.

While I recognize the many parallels between Arosi discourses and those Clark (1997) documents in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, it seems to me that Clark's identification of a “Gothic world view” in Melanesia might imply, perhaps inadvertently, such a developmental approach.

For example, http://www.thesolomongiants.com/ (accessed 10/11/2003); http://www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/dragonsnake.htm (accessed 16/3/2005); http://www.thewatcherfiles.com/giants/solomon-giants.htm (accessed 7/12/2010).