Keir Martin

Your Own Buai You Must Buy: The Ideology of Possessive Individualism in Papua New Guinea

Possessive individualism is asserted by an emerging indigenous elite among the Tolai of Papua New Guinea as a means of differentiating themselves from grassroots villagers. The grassroots are accused of a dependency culture and not taking responsibility for ownership of their own persons. The grassroots accuse the elite of ignoring their customary obligations to their kin. Central to this moral contest is a dispute over the meaning of ‘kastom’ (custom). For the grassroots it tends to embody an ethic of reciprocal interdependence that covers all areas of social life. The elite increasingly try to limit it to certain areas of ritual performance in which their ties to kin are publicly acknowledged, but to deny that it has relevance to their lives in town or in the running of their businesses. Hence, the attempt to limit the social scope of kastom becomes simultaneously an attempt to assert a ‘possessive individual’ view of themselves as persons who are the owners of their own capacities in contexts such as business.

The concept of neoliberalism has become an obstacle to the anthropological understanding of the twenty?first century

The following discussion developed from a debate held on the motion: ?The concept of neoliberalism has become an obstacle to the anthropological understanding of the twenty-first century?, held at the 2012 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT) at the University of Manchester. The debate was organized and edited for publication by Soumhya Venkatesan. A full transcription of the debate is hosted on the JRAI website: http://www.jrai.net; a full podcast of the debate can be heard at the Talking Anthropology website: http://www.talkinganthropology.com/2013/01/18/ta45-gdat1-neoliberalism/#t=2:49:40.219.

Brexit Referendum: first reactions from anthropology

My immediate reaction to the results of the British Referendum on leaving or remaining in the EU was to remember Alexei Yurchak’s book, Everything was forever, until it was no more (Yurchak 2006). In the book, Yurchak describes the feeling of many people in Russia when the Soviet Union broke up: it came as a complete shock because they thought it would never happen; but once it had happened, it was not really a surprise at all. The United Kingdom has had a tempestuous relationship with the European Economic Community (EEC) and then the European Union (EU), ever since it joined in 1973. The discussions against this huge European border experiment (one of the most radical border experiments I can think of) have been unceasing, and came from left and right (and of course from anarchists), from the centre and the peripheries, from populists and internationalists. Those in favour of whatever ‘Europe’ might mean were always much less newsworthy. Anthropologists were among many who lined up to critique everything about the politics, economics, ideology, structure and especially the bureaucracy of the EU (and some of them have contributed to this Forum). Yet once the referendum result was published, I realised that there is also much material in my field notes that shows that people did not really mean that the EU should cease to exist. Like the constant complaints against the habits of one’s closest kin, roiling against the EU is serious, but it does not really mean disavowal or divorce. Until, apparently, it does. This Forum represents the immediate reactions of 24 colleagues in anthropology about ‘Brexit’. The commentaries were all written within five days of the news coming out. Apart from having to trim the texts for space reasons, they have been left as they are, documents of immediate, often raw, reactions. In that sense, these texts are as much witness statements as they are observations; as much an echo chamber of all the endless discussion that came in the aftermath of the result as it is considered observation; as much an emotional reaction as it is analysis. I did ask all contributors to think about how to engage their knowledge of anthropology in addressing this issue. As their responses describe, there are many hugely serious and frankly alarming political, economic and ideological challenges facing both Europe and the world at the moment that have become entangled with Brexit. So this is not the time to sit back and say nothing. Others have been speaking out too, of course, including Felix Stein’s

The Death of the Big Men: Depreciation of Elites in New Guinea

Recently, Tolai people of Papua New Guinea have adopted the term ‘Big Shot’ to describe an emerging post-colonial political elite. The emergence of the term is a negative moral evaluation of new social possibilities that have arisen as a consequence of the Big Shots’ privileged position within a global political economy. Grassroots Tolai pass judgment on the Big Shots’ through rhetorical contrast with idealised Big Men of the past, in a particular local version of a global trend for the emergence of new words to illustrate changing perceptions of local elites. As such the ‘Big Shot’ acts as an example of a global process in which key lexical categories that contest, trace and shape how global historical change is experienced are constituted through linguistic categories.

The ‘potlatch of destruction’: Gifting against the state:

Appropriations of anthropological theory by political radicals are often treated with suspicion by academic practitioners of the discipline, who are particularly wary about ethnographic descriptions of ‘pre-capitalist’ societies as the radical Other of western capitalist modernity. On first examination, the Situationist International, a revolutionary group active in France in the 1960s would seem to fit this problematic romantic appropriation of anthropological theory. However, on closer examination, the Situationists’ use of anthropological theory, and in particular their development of Mauss’s theory of the gift as a revolutionary weapon to be directed against ‘commodity enslavement’, was, despite its rhetorical militancy, more nuanced than many contemporary developments of Maussian theory within the academy. The Situationists’ revolutionary engagement with Mauss led them to develop potentially important aspects of Maussian theory decades before they were taken seriously in anthropological theory. First, in contrast with many anthropological uses of the gift–commodity distinction, that have seen entire cultural orders as being structurally determined by a particular kind of exchange, the Situationists stressed the importance of the co-evality of different types of exchange and the potential for objects to move between different types of exchange well before this became a significant theoretical problem in anthropology. Second, the Situationists’ revolutionary engagement led them to develop an analysis of the relationship between different types of exchange and processes of ‘cultural humiliation’; an issue that has been brought to the forefront of anthropological theorizing of colonialism and social change in recent years by Marshall Sahlins and others.

Trump: Transacting trickster

Donald Trumps recent election victory has been greeted with horror and disbelief by many. In particular, the glaring inconsistencies and open self-contradictions that marked his campaign should have rendered him unelectable by the standards of conventional reasonable political practice. But rather than being a problem to be explained away, it is Trumps open embrace of contradiction that explains much of his appeal. By holding contradictory trends and opinions simultaneously, he presents himself as being capable of embodying seemingly mutually exclusive social trends, such as an intensification of economic competition on the one hand and a radical denunciation of that competitions effects on some of the losers from that process on the other. By doing so, he presents himself as a powerful figure with charismatic abilities to contain such contradictions within himself – abilities that are not available to ordinary career politicians, but that are strikingly reminiscent of the powers attributed to so-called ‘trickster’ figures in anthropological literature.

The Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT), The University of Manchester: The 2011 annual debate – Non-dualism is philosophy not ethnography

Does the concept of non-dualism have ethnographic purchase or is it mainly of philosophical interest? This article comprises the edited presentation and discussions of the 2011 GDAT debate on the motion ‘Non-dualism is Philosophy not Ethnography’. The debaters proposing the motion were Michael Scott and Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov. They were opposed by Christopher Pinney and Joanna Cook. Marilyn Strathern acted as jester – playfully and rigorously engaging with all four speakers. The presentations and the discussions that followed were wide ranging, lively and stimulating.

Creating and dissolving social groups from New Guinea to New York: on the overheating of bounded corporate entities in contemporary global capitalism

ABSTRACT Attempts to create and fix the boundaries of various social entities have always been central features of modern capitalism. Such entities have always had the potential for either instability, on the one hand, or a lack of flexibility that is experienced by many as threatening, on the other. Such tensions have reached a point of intensification with the overheating of contemporary global capitalism. In this paper, we compare two examples of the changing and problematic nature of attempts to redraw the boundaries of such entities in an attempt to shape changing economic circumstances. The first is based upon research in Papua New Guinea, where attempts to create ever more bounded land holding groups with increasingly exclusive rights to parcels of land have exploded since the 1990s. The second is the changing nature of the corporation, perhaps the most significant entity in the history of global capitalism, whose boundaries have become increasingly unclear and permeable with the rise of finance capital. Whilst the move towards bounded landholder groups might seem to fit a narrative that would predict that a move towards capitalist modernity would entail the creation of ever more fixed and bounded social groups, the latter trend suggests that contemporary capitalist accumulation tends to simultaneously both fix and deconstruct the boundaries of such entities in different contexts. Contemporary overheated capitalism brings both tendencies to a head in a manner that makes the ever-present tension between them increasingly difficult to successfully manage or control.

Tolai tabu as wealth and money: A shifting and unstable distinction

ABSTRACT Distinctions between ‘wealth’ and ‘money’ such as the competing classifications of ‘bridewealth’ and ‘brideprice’ have a long pedigree in anthropology. Equally important has been the terminological struggle between ‘shell-money’ and ‘shellwealth’. In this paper, I explore the ways in which a well-known example, Tolai tabu, circulates in the twenty-first century. I argue that whilst describing it as a form of wealth (in contrast to market-based idioms such as ‘money’ or ‘price’) continues to make sense, this distinction only comes into being from certain perspectives. In an era of rapidly emerging socio-economic inequality, the best starting point is not an assumed holistic opposition between Western commodity idioms and their non-Western Other. Ethnographic observation reveals how perspectives on tabu that stress its difference and similarity from money come in and out of being in different conversational contexts as an attempt to shape the limits of future relations and obligations.

Transcultural histories of psychotherapy

Abstract Both proponents of and critics tend to assume psychotherapy’s origin and status as a ‘Western’ practice. The history of the emergence of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are far more complex than this picture allows for. Today as we enter a more multipolar era of world history, the easy identification of psychotherapy with ‘the West’ will become increasingly difficult to sustain, as Bangalore and Shanghai are likely to rival Hampstead and Manhattan as centres of influence for the development of therapeutic practice and theory in the coming decades. Adapting to this new world will necessitate a different conception of the role of ‘culture’ than we have been used to in recent discussions in psychotherapy. Rather than simply seeing ‘culture’ as a factor that needs to be added to discussions to counteract the alleged ethnocentrism of ‘Western’ psychotherapy, we will need to begin to pay more careful attention to the work that is done by appeals to the ‘culture concept’ in different contexts. In particular ‘culture’ can be constructed as an object of evaluation that makes it part of the ‘check-list’ of skills that characterise the reconception of psychotherapy in an era of neoliberal instrumental manualised therapy training and practice.