Suomen Antropologi Volume 34, 4/2009
Book Reviews
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Editor's note
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society Volume 34(4) 2009: 3-4
Abstract
This issue of Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society (in cooperation with Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Helsinki) is primarily devoted to the re-presentation of discursive exchange between its contributors, and between contributors and a larger public—a project which is an integral part of editorial policy. Thus we are honoured to begin with the annual Westermarck Memorial Lecture which was delivered by Professor Marilyn Strathern in Helsinki, 9th December 2009—an event which all who attended found memorable. Her lecture, entitled Comparing Concerns: Some issues in organ and other donations, explores the problem of information overload in contemporary society via the example of organ and tissue donation and the debates to which current practices give rise. Throughout the paper, Strathern follows her hunch that anthropology’s comparative method offers a path through “the fraught and infinitely expandable nexus of public concerns” to some kind of reasonable account that meanwhile conserves the complexity of the issues involved—not only in this specific field but in areas of public (and anthropological) concern more generally.
This is followed by an article written by Anu Lounela (Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Helsinki)—Sovereignty and Violence: Contested forest landscapes in Central Java—which is drawn from her recently completed doctoral research into land rights in the district of Wonosobo, Central Java, which she situates within the framework of state formation and sovereignty. While an analytical distinction between modern and traditional forms of power in Java is explored during the course of her discussion, ultimately Lounela argues against their polarisation, suggesting that conflation occurs in local struggles for sovereignty, creating hybrid forms of power.
Lounela publicly defended her dissertation at the University of Helsinki on 26th September 2009, and was privileged to be facing as opponent Professor Anna Tsing of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Appended to the article, therefore, are the comments Professor Tsing made about Lounela’s doctoral research and dissertation as a whole on that occasion. Here Tsing notes that two kinds of scholarship are relevant to Lounela’s focus: firstly, the thesis suggested by political scientists and anthropologists to the effect that contours of power in Java, and Indonesia more broadly, are not universally fixed but, rather, created within cultural systems of meaning; and secondly, the questions raised by political ecologists concerning the perspectives of rural populations who live with the resources which states and corporations want to use. Tsing goes on say that Lounela has creatively addressed some inherent contradictions between these two approaches by incorporating two further concepts into her analysis: plural law and dispute settlement.
The second article in this issue is authored by another ‘young’ scholar at the University of Helsinki (Development Studies)—Henri Onodera—with the title, The Kifaya Generation: Politics of change among youth in Egypt. Basing his discussion on data drawn from his recent fieldwork in Cairo, Onodera examines the emergence of youth-based action groups in Egypt since the beginning of the 21st century, arguing that their grievances are connected with the wider predicaments and uncertainties that Egyptian youth face in their everyday lives.
Finally, it has been a real pleasure to work with four extraordinary scholars on the expanded ‘Forum’ section of this issue. In September 2009, John Liep, who received his magister degree (equivalent to a British Master of Letters, Finnish lisensiaatti) in anthropology in Denmark four decades ago, defended his doctoral production at Aarhus University in Copenhagen. Liep and his controversial monograph, entitled A Papuan Plutocracy: Ranked Exchange on Rossel Island (2009: Aarhus University Press), faced a powerful trinity of opponents: Joel Robbins (University of California, San Diego), Chris Gregory (Australian National University, University of Manchester) and Ton Otto (University of Aarhus). The issues raised by the book and critically explored in the subsequent debate are of a wideranging and substantial nature, and the resultant Forum is an exciting one.
Finally we would like to remind subscribers and readers that the annual Finnish Anthropology Conference (conducted in English/Finnish/Swedish) is being held in Helsinki, 11–12th May; proposals for sessions will be considered until 30th February, for individual presentations until 30th March. The event promises to be entertaining both scholastically and socially, and a selection of papers will be published in a future issue of Suomen Antropologi.
MARIE-LOUISE KARTTUNEN
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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Comparing Concerns: Some issues in organ and other donations
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society Volume 34(4) 2009: 5-21
Abstract
EDVARD WESTERMARCK MEMORIAL LECTURE
In an information society, where overload has become a problem, might anthropology’s comparative method find a new lease of life? This Lecture sets out to test the hunch that it might. A field ever more densely populated with information is that of organ and tissue donation, and the debates to which current practices give rise. Donation is only one of several modes of procurement, organs only one kind of body part that can be donated, and people offer comparisons just as commentators do. Perhaps here is an answer to the question of how to make a reasonable account out of a fraught and infinitely expandable nexus of public concerns. Is it possible to conserve the complexity of the issues while not letting the sheer quantity of information run away with itself? Would following through the comparisons do the trick? -
Sovereignty and Violence: Contested forest landscapes in Central Java
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society Volume 34(4) 2009: 22-39
Abstract
The article explores the ongoing dispute connected with land rights in the district of Wonosobo, Central Java, within the framework of state formation and sovereignty. It is argued that in many places in Indonesia and Central Java, local landscapes have become sites of violent struggles for sovereignty more broadly. An analytical distinction between modern and traditional forms of power is made and ethnographically explored, but it is argued that, rather than being separate entities, both forms become conflated in the struggle for sovereignty in various spheres, creating hybrid forms of power.
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Politics, History, and Culture: Comments on Anu Lounela’s “Sovereignty and Violence”
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society Volume 34(4) 2009: 40-43
Abstract
Comments delivered during Anu Lounela’s public defense of her Ph.D. Dissertation, ‘Contesting Forests and Power: Dispute, Violence, and Negotiations in Central Java’, September 26, 2009
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The Kifaya Generation: Politics of change among youth in Egypt
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society Volume 34(4) 2009: 44-64
Abstract
In this paper, I aim to shed light on the lived experiences of young opposition activists in today’s Egypt. I discuss the emergence of youth-based action groups, such as Youth for Change, since the beginning of 2000s and argue that much of their grievances have to do with wider predicaments and uncertainties that Egyptian youth face in their everyday lives. The activists’ main political assets, however, pertain to a simultaneous engagement on the street—as the physical realm for public dissidence—and the internet—as the primary means and compensation for political communication in authoritarian settings. I suggest, although with reservations, that the activists’ collective actions are better viewed as ‘submerged networks’ rather than through the conventional analytical prisms of civil society and social movement. Furthermore, I argue that while the young activists assume a degree of autonomous political action from the various structures of the existing political establishment, they operate on the margins of larger processes of contentious politics and, at the same time, their social interactions continue to be structured by the prevailing social norms.
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FORUM: An Overview of Rossel Island Exchange
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society Volume 34(4) 2009: 65-70
Abstract
In the enchanted archipelagos east of New Guinea known as the Massim by anthropologists, remote Rossel Island is the last outpost facing the trade wind from the southeast. Its 4,000 inhabitants diverge from the rest of the Massim peoples by speaking an extremely difficult Papuan language. They thus represent the last remnant of the autochthonous population that peopled the Massim islands before the invasion of Austronesian immigrants into the region some two thousand years ago. In some respects Rossel culture differs from that of the Austronesian-speaking societies to the west but Austronesian influence is also marked, notably in matrilineal descent and in the exchanges of valuables of shell and greenstone that permeate the social life of the Rossel Islanders. Ranked exchange of shell decorations is well known from the Massim kula but the hierarchy of Rossel Island money is outstanding by virtue of its extraordinary complexity.
The question is thus posited of the derivation of such an objectified hierarchy in an island otherwise characterised by the absence of descent group ranking, and with what, on the face of it, seems to be a common Melanesian big man system. It is my hunch that this shell hierarchy and the ranked financial operations in which it is activated must be understood in connection with the wider Austronesian environment in the Massim.
A majority of students of Pacific prehistory now agree that the Austronesians who entered Melanesia some 3,500 years ago had a hierarchical social organisation with chiefs, nobles and commoners. In Polynesia and Micronesia, which were settled only by Austronesians, their hierarchies survived and expanded. But in western Melanesia, where the invaders mixed with Papuan populations, they devolved into so-called egalitarian big man systems although there are traces of hierarchy in many places. This is also the case in the Massim. I believe that the ranked system of exchange on Rossel is a legacy from a time when the island was in articulation with Austronesian hierarchical formations to the west. In the prologue of my book I therefore describe the Massim as a background to Rossel Island. I analyse Trobriand hierarchy and asymmetric exchange and I trace remnants of hierarchy in decomposed forms in the rest of the archipelago.
I do not want to give only a synchronic analysis of an isolated island society. I speculate on pre-historic formations and transformations far back in time and account for colonial and post-colonial changes in history. Further, my understanding of Rossel exchange has profited by comparison with other systems of ranked exchange in Indonesia and the Pacific. My aim has been to widen the scope of analysis in time and in space from Rossel Island as a small Papuan outlier in an Austronesian sea.
The bulk of my book is of course concerned with explicating Rossel Island society and the complex system of ranked exchange that permeates the social life of its people. Part one sets out the general background. I first present the colonial history of the island. I then zoom in on the village of Pum on the north coast of Rossel that has been my base during my periods of fieldwork. I describe settlement history, the clan system and the importance of cognatic kinship. The following chapters outline dimensions of power, the positioning of women and domains of economic life. Part two is the detailed exposition of ranked exchange on Rossel Island. I describe the two types of shell money and the other kinds of valuables and go on to analyse institutions of exchange: bridewealth and mortuary exchanges—which both constitute important moments in the cycle of social reproduction— the complicated pig feast and remaining forms of payment. Chapter Ten—‘The rules and practice of ranked exchange’—is a grand attempt to interpret the various financial operations that allow ranked payments to be launched and the strategies which participants employ. In the epilogue I argue that ranked exchange on Rossel produces a social stratification where a minority of big men dominate the rest of the people through their monopoly of high-ranking shells and superior skill in operating exchange.
Joel Robbins provides a summary of Rossel shell money exchange in his following contribution. I shall therefore present only a selective outline of it from my own perspective. -
FORUM: Equality, Inequality, and Exchange
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society Volume 34(4) 2009: 71-80
Abstract
In hindsight, once an anthropologist has published a successful ethnography, it often looks as if they have been extremely lucky in their choice of a society to study. How fortunate for Margaret Mead, for example, that she happened upon a group of Pacific Islanders who handled adolescence in an almost perfectly inverse way to North Americans. And the gods must have been smiling on Evans-Pritchard when they put him down among the Nuer, who turned out to be the most elegantly politically ordered stateless society on earth. And someone must have been looking out for Roy Rappaport too, when they led this budding ecological anthropologist to the Maring, a group of people whose elaborate pig killing rituals just happened to keep their populations in perfect homeostatic balance with their surrounding environment. Great anthropologists almost always seem to get just what they need by way of ethnographic circumstances to help them push forward the theoretical line they want to develop.
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FORUM: On the Ranking of Shells and People
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society Volume 34(4) 2009: 81-90
Abstract
This is a magnificent piece of scholarship. It has been a lifetime in the making and it shows on every page, in every paragraph and every sentence of this meticulously argued and beautifully produced ethnography. If the ethnographic studies of the Massim can be likened to ndap shells of different rank, then this book will find its way into the very high division where it will circulate alongside the classics such as Malinowksi’s Argonauts and Young’s Fighting with Food.
Liep not so much resolves the theoretical controversies about exchange theory that Armstrong’s 1922 book on Rossel Island shell money generated, but dissolves them and raises a whole new set of more interesting questions. Rossel Island has been defined as exceptional in Melanesian studies because of its extraordinarily complicated shell-money system and its exceptionally difficult language that bears no family resemblances with the Austronesian languages found on the neighbouring islands. Insofar as the exchange-system is concerned, Liep convincingly demonstrates that it is a variation on a familiar Oceanic theme. He does this by presenting original data on the rules and practice of Rossel shellexchange and situating it expertly in a broader comparative perspective.
What makes this book especially valuable is that Liep is well aware of its limitations and makes no attempt to hide this. Of course, every ethnographic report is limited to some extent but what sets Liep’s book apart is that he does his best to define precisely the boundaries of his knowledge and understanding. He is careful to distinguish what he knows well from what he is unsure about and what he does not know. What he gives us then are, respectively, persuasive arguments about which there can be little debate, speculative propositions about which reasonable people may disagree, and questions that require more research. I am primarily concerned with the latter two issues here. -
FORUM: Exchange and Inequality, Time and Personhood
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society Volume 34(4) 2009: 91-98
Abstract
This is a book that captures the reader’s attention from the start, not only because of its beautiful lay-out and illustrations and the exotic phenomena that it describes, but also thanks to the author’s academic assiduousness that transpires through its pages. It is the culmination of more than 35 years of dedicated study of a curious and complex system of monetary exchange that exists on Rossel Island, an eastern outlier of the Louisiade Archipelago, far to the east of the mainland of Papua New Guinea. In Part I ‘The Setting’, the book provides an overall ethnography of the Island, which forms the background for its focus on ranked exchange in Part II. Rossel Islanders have developed a system of monetary exchange which is unique in the world because of its complexity. Two distinct shell currencies (ndap and kê) each comprise as many as twenty ranked categories of shells that play different roles in various exchange practices. It is a prime achievement of this book to describe these practices in detail and to develop an original set of theoretical concepts to be able to do this. Thus the shells can variously be used to make a deposit, provide a security, constitute a replacement, solicit a gift, offer a pledge, or return a (reduced) substitution (see p. 298 ff.). Ranked exchange is of course not limited to Rossel Island, but the unique complexity of the Rossel system derives from the combination of three features: the extraordinary number of categories in the rank order; the feature of ‘licensing’, which involves the use of inalienable shells in initiating exchanges (making a deposit that is later returned); and the mobilisation of high-ranking shells as pledges along a chain of serial incremental transfers. I find John Liep’s description of ranked exchange on Rossel an impressive ethnographic and analytic achievement and believe that it will be a touchstone for future work on monetary exchange.
In the following I will suggest some limitations in Liep’s theoretical rendering of his ethnography, which have to do with his overall theoretical position, a relative neglect of the time dimension in exchange, and a lack of interest in the possibilities of newer theory on Melanesian exchange and personhood. I describe these limitations not to diminish the outstanding importance of this book, but to highlight the areas where in my view further theoretical and analytical work could be beneficial and could cast new light on the phenomena described. I give my views with due respect for Liep’s inspiring and imposing accomplishments, well knowing that it is always easier to find areas that are underdeveloped in a book than to prove an author wrong on the arguments and analyses he has chosen to pursue. -
FORUM: Response to Comments
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society Volume 34(4) 2009: 99-112