Pakeha, Palagi, Whiteskin: Reflections on Ethnographic Socialisation and the Self

Abstract

This paper argues for conscious descriptions of the processes of socialisation that ethnographers undergo within their host communities. It also explores the roles of identity and self in the ethnographic process as applied to the other and to the researcher. As understandings are arrived at through a process of engagements and through relationships the key quantities in these exchanges deserve a closer consideration than they have traditionally received in ethnographic texts. Using examples from fieldwork in Southern New Ireland, this paper examines the ways in which understandings about the culture and society arise through an embodied and reflexive engagement with concepts of ‘self’ and the ‘other’.

Keywords:

• Socialisation
• Self
• Fieldwork
• Secret Societies
• Nataka
• New Ireland
• Papua New Guine

Notes

1. Lattas's (1998) work in West New Britain is remarkable for his striking analysis of Kaliai as internalising a Western view and consequently contributing to their own alienation and subjugation. Jebens (2010) points out that Lattas is an active contributor in the process of interviewing and soliciting statements from his interlocutors, and that Lattas seems not to recognise the ways in which he may have contributed to the material he collected and the outcome he observed.

2. The individual's relationship with cultural issues of identity arguably began with W.H.R. Rivers and his exhibition to the Torres Straits island in the 1890s. Issues of identity became popular in anthropology and among the wider American and European societies in the 1930s and 1940s through the work of Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead.

3. With some notable exceptions including Wormsley 1993, Kirsch 2006, Bashkow 2006, Jebens 2010.

4. The term ‘masta’ has its orthographic origins in the English word ‘master’. The colonial associations of the word are not implied when the word is used by people in the Lak region. The word is used simply as a term for ‘whiteman’.

5. Nataka are known in Tok Pisin as Tubuan. Their origins are believed to be in Southern New Ireland where the secret men's society forms an important part of the region's mortuary rites (see Wolffram 2011).

6. I use the word ‘independence’ here cautiously because it is not particularly appropriate within a Melanesian context. As Strathern (1987) presents it, Melanesian ‘persons’ are not unitary ‘individuals’ but ‘dividuals’ constituted by contributions and relations of other persons. In acting, the ‘person’ externalises the internal parts of contributions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Wolffram

Paul Wolffram is a lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington