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| Panel : Kneeling: Dr. Linus Digim'Rina and Dr. Michelle Rooney, standing from left Dr. Orovu Sepoe, Steven Winduo, Ms. Vanessa Uiari, and Dr. Stephanie Lusby. Photo Credits: Almah Tararia |
Valuing destabilization, resistance, and agency in a continuing and changing Papua New Guinean Anthropology, [Roundtable] Panel 09 at conference AAS2019: Values in Anthropology, Values of Anthropology
In my mind the issue on agency is so critical here. I am an agent in both worlds. I am trained in Western theories, histories, and cultures. I have read Ancient Greek Philosophies, European literatures going as far as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Medieval literature via the works of Chaucer, the 16th-18thCentury British literature, Modern writers in the likes of William Butler Yeates, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot to American, Canadian, New Zealand, and Australian literatures. I have studied courses in cultural studies, literary theory, Anthropology, American studies, linguistics, developmental studies, and film.
In the many years of reading these diverse and complex worlds of knowledge, I have only scratched the surface of what in totality is a total knowledge system. I have never mastered any of it to the extent of professing any of them in total confidence.
As a Western educated Indigenous Pacific Islander/Papua New Guinean, I am exposed to the criticism that I represent the “Western Educated” self and the “Indigenous Pacific Islander” self to the detriment of my own desire to speak for myself without needing to always respond in those selves. Is it a conflict of the self, ideologies, or positions we take in our responses to the notion that we have always to define our speaking voices? In reality these voices have become convoluted over time that I have lost some of these voices and I have kept others useful to me. Other voices are also finding their way up in between the differences as a consequence.
It is impossible to articulate our total experiences at the essentially pure unaffected level of indigeneity. Any notion that there is pure Indigenous thought or level of thinking is an utterance made out of ignorance. Our Pacific worlds have been through a lot of changes in the last 50 plus years. Many of our cultures and communities are no longer maintained in their original shape and form. Most traditional dances in Melanesian societies are no longer the exact replica of the form in the past. People no longer remain immobile and static in the socially productive relationships within a strict traditional boundary. People have moved out of their traditional societies resulting in comingling and redefining their relationships.
There is always a redrawing of boundaries in many Pacific societies. Many of us today live in both the modern world and maintaining our links to our traditional societies.
We live within different sets of rules as members of our modern societies. We operate within certain parameters that define us and the relationships that are formed around them. Our claims on identity and social cultural affiliations are loosely defined, though in no way compromises our desire to hold on to ideas and knowledge we may have already lost along the way.
In one particular genre of writing I held a very strong view that my writing has to be simple, unsophisticated, and easier to understand. I was writing for public readers in the categories of semi-educated street vendor to a highly educated public servant. It was easy to recognize that a newspaper reader is not the same as a group of PhD students discussing theories with their professors in an academic setting. The newspaper readers do not read theories as their lives centre around their every day survival or the routine in performing their duties.
As someone read in theory it was sometimes tempting to slip a theoretical discussion in to the social commentaries I publish in a newspaper column weekly. The way it worked for me is to break the abstract ideas down to the level of application of a theory to elucidate a complex idea. As long as it does not cause confusion, but gives meaning in a situation where any other way of discussion the concept will not work.
In the process I learnt that I give agency to the ideas that are part of me as a result of the training in Western institutions, my lived experience as a writer scholar, and as a Papua New Guinea with strong connections back to my village and traditions. I become the agency without ideological borders. I can operate in both modern and traditional worlds without needing to have someone speak on my behalf.
Intellectual and Methodological Challenges
We deal with different intellectual challenges and methodological presuppositions in our teaching and research programs on cultures and societies of Oceania. The magnitude of these challenges is experienced at both the theoretical and practical senses. Some of these ideas have been made in the past, others remain like shadows of ideas that refuse to depart from us.
Our discussions will center on my experiences as a Pacific scholar with teaching, research and writing interests in the area of Pacific Studies. These are reflections and ruminations, of an Indigenous Pacific writer and scholar.
The positions of indigenous Pacific scholars are constantly being renegotiated, reinvented, and reformulated within and outside of disciplinary boundaries. Various relationships are established by their interactions with each other and within the Pacific communities. By looking at the region, one is able to sketch the limitations of one’s work. It is within these limitations that we locate the basis of our discursive practice.
In A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, some of these limitations are presented as responses to Hau’ofa’s essay on the reinvention of a Pacific identity based on its smallness and tapestry of cultures, racial composition, economic struggles and political sovereignty (Hau’ofa 1993). There are movements, differences, reformulations and relationships that are established within this limitation that are important to our discussion (Thaman 1998; Vasques 1992; Gundara 1992).
The departure point, for me, at least, is not in where we come from, but in what we do as Pacific scholars to intervene, mediate, and formulate new relationships. David Hanlon’s suggestion for a “decentering” of historical narratives and practice has currency in this formulation. The indigenous and local practices of history must be used to differentiate localized production of knowledge from the master narratives produced about the Pacific.
Hau’ofa argues in his poignant essay “Past to Remember” that acknowledging the Western notion of history written about Oceania must go hand in hand with notions of history constructed from within the Indigenous societies of Oceania. Pacific scholars must consider the history of the people, as it was before the arrival of Europeans as well as through the many ways in which history is transmitted in contemporary times: “When you view most of a people’s past as not history, you shorten very drastically the roots of their culture or even declare their existence doubtful” (Hau’ofa 2008, 63).
Many academics make the mistake of holding the view that cultures and societies in “Oceania are inventions of imperialism,” which leads to the promotion of a certain kind of truth at the expanse of a people being “sidelined from their histories and conceptually severed from most of their pasts” (Hau’ofa 2008, 63). Hau’ofa’s view of the cultures of Oceania is that a process of hybridization happens in the meantime without such a realization: “As far as I know, our cultures have always been hybrid and hybridising, for we have always given to and taken from our neighbours and others we encounter” (Hau’ofa 2008: 63). We can extend the argument here to support the notion that even the “dominant culture” is also a hybrid culture, “but looted unconscionably the treasures of cultures world over” to make its own: “Like cultural constructionism, the prevailing Pacific historiography is hegemonic. With only minor concessions it admits of no other than mainline historiography (Hau’ofa 2008: 63).
Hau’ofa considers a number of questions pertinent to the construction of culture and history from the perspective of the Indigenous Pacific scholars. Constructing of history must first begin with acknowledging the different paradigms and the shifts that are inclusive of the Pacific peoples and their cultures.
Hau’ofa asks: “Where do we go from here? What should we do? If we are to go beyond adding our viewpoints to history as usual, we have to devise other methods, using our own categories as much as possible for producing our histories, our cultures” (Hau’ofa 2008: 63).
We need to acknowledge and “learn from the works of ethnographic historians and historical anthropologists, as well as from mainline historians, but we Oceanians must find ways of reconstructing our pasts that are our own.”
Acknowledging the works of non-Indigenous scholars helps us see ourselves better. The deflection of a work that is written by a Non-Oceanian as a way of making sense of ourselves is the encouragement Hau’ofa is making in his treaty: “Non-Oceanians may construct and interpret our pasts, our present, but these are their constructions and interpretations, not ours. Theirs may be excellent and very instructive, but we must rely much more on ours” (2008, 63).
This is an instructive argument for indigenous Pacific scholarship in cultural and historical constructions of their peoples and society. Hau’ofa further develops his argument by considering the interactions between peoples in time and space within Oceania before Europeans began inscribing them. The history that began with Europeans should be reversed in order to see the reasons for grassroots resistance and other unnoticed events important to the people: “The new knowledge and insights we might gain from this reversal of historical roles could open up new and exciting vistas” (Hau’ofa 2008, 65). Hau’ofa’s view of others reconstructing the Pacific past is that a dialogue must develop between the Pacific peoples and the others: “But we must have histories—our roots and identities—that are our own distinctive creations” (Hau’ofa 2008, 65).
That history for the Pacific Islanders has always been predominantly viewed in non-linear terms, more so as cyclical, which Hau’ofa links to the ecological cycles of Oceania. In Oceania time is circular and is linked to the natural surroundings and society: “It is very important for our historical reconstructions to know that the Oceanian emphasis on circular time is tied to the regularity of seasons marked by natural phenomenon such as cyclical appearances of certain flowers, birds, and marine creatures, shedding of certain leaves, phases of the moon, changes in prevailing winds, and weather patterns, which themselves mark the commencement of and set the course for cycles of human activity such as those related to agriculture, terrestrial and marine foraging, trade and exchange, and voyaging, all their associated rituals, ceremonies, and festivities” (Hau’ofa 2008, 67).
Learning from people, their cultures, histories, and knowledge systems must observe the rules of respect for how knowledge is produced within cultures.
Example 1:
Language and Meaning: Once a cousin in my village used the English word “Loaf” in correctly in a sentence “A loaf of biscuit” to which I the university student quickly corrected him saying that the word loaf is used only with bread. My cousin replied that the use of the word loaf with bread is only an example. It can be used with other food items manufactured in a factory. I laughed at him at first, but much later in life I realized the cultural logic in my cousin’s response.
Example 2:
Attended a AASO in Honolulu. I walked into a room full of anthropologist who were talking about lamp flaps and nutrition in Madang. I was the only Papua New Guinea in the room full of American, Australian, and British Anthropologist specialists on Papua New Guinean ethnography and cultures. The conversation was in a way offensive to me because I felt that these people were accepted in PNG families, tribes, and communities without reservation, These Papua New Guineans opened their world of knowledge and their way of life to these western scholars who received everything and gave nothing back. They earned their PhDs and wrote volumes of scholarships on the people who took them in as their respected family members. Now removed from the environment, the PNG environment, they had the liberty to discuss negatively and constructed narratives that denigrated the people who took them in on trust. There was no voice challenging the dominant view in the room full of European anthropologist. I think that is a form of epistemic violence against general principles of humanity. In PNG society you do not talk behind my back.
Example 3
I once worked as a lecturer on board a tourist ship travelling through the Melanesian Islands of New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. There were 75-80 tourists on board. Most of them are retired elderly Australians, Canadian, and Americans. My principle responsibility is to talk about Melanesian cultures of each countries as we travel through them. I was the hired as a cultural expert on tour with the tourists ship. I also served as the cultural mediator, and chief protocol officer. In this experience I felt like a educated informant, a cultural expert, and a agency between my Melanesian people and the Western world. In the role I played I felt as if I was mediating between my cultures and the Western cultures. The realization later after the duty of cultural tour I felt that I had just participated in a postcolonial narrative of validating the power/knowledge production, tourists gaze on native bodies/cultures, and having a glimpse into the ugly past of colonialism and its remnants. This too me is a form of epistemic violence perpetuated through travel narratives, tourism development, and geographic narratives.
Speak People
They are people
who share my little room.
These people speak
They are not ghosts or
spirits of my ancestors.
They are real people,
living in different places.
In my little world,
we interact with each other.
In their world
I am not even
there with them.
Somehow they are
always there watching me-
sizing me up
and forcing me
into a subject
of curiosity.
They are young,
versatile
and all looking
very important.
In my world of silence
I meet another group of people.
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