Reply.

Mimica, Jadran

I am grateful to all the respondents for their comments some of which, most notably Hirsch's, substantially elaborate on, and extend, from their respective positions, the issues addressed in my piece.

Rather than engaging each commentary individually in these closing remarks, I refer to select points in order to sketch some of the more significant ramifications of my critique, which aims to sustain the possibility for a genuinely critical inquiry into Melanesian realities and their ethnographic renditions.

First a clarifying remark on the archetypal 'All-seeing-Eye' configuration and its problematics. Irrespective of whether such a representation may or may not be present in any particular life-world, every human self and collective is subject to the self-structuration qua gaze, regardless of whether one is congenitally blind or not. The phenomenon of 'gaze' and its correlate 'mirroring' are not restricted to the ocular-optic register; they pertain to the totality of bodily-intersensory envelopment and primary psychic activity, specifically projection and introjection. It will suffice to refer to Sartre, Winnicott, Lacan, Schilder, Merleau-Ponty, and in respect of animal life-worlds, to von Uexkull and Portmann. As Hirsch concurs, the concrete what and how of the dynamics of the gaze is an ethnographic (empirical) problem. I hold to the view that only further elucidation of the actual dynamics of human 'surveillance', the associated character and physiognomy of actual 'disciplinary practices', and of the Ipili experience of the sun as a living subjective presence, can advance our understanding of the sun as 'All-seeing-Eye' in that context.

It is from this standpoint that we should claim significance for phenomenology; Biersack ends her comments by saying that '[t]he trick is to choose the right philosopher or philosophers and the right vocabulary. For me, it is phenomenology rather than Foucault that beckons'. I share her affirmation of phenomenology but not without losing sight of the need to constructively bracket any theoretical framework in order to understand the phenomena from within the internal horizons of spatio-temporal self-constitution, intelligibility and opacity. The requirements of bracketing are not simply matters of fit (Biersack) or nuance (Knauft) and I remain of the view that they are not marginal to contemporary Melanesian ethnography (Knauft) but at the core of its supposed problems.

This leads directly to the question of 'Melanesian modernity' which assumed a prominent position in the responses. Why restrict the academic talk of modernity to 'capitalism and money' (Jacka) or 'civilising pastoral forms of policing' (Lattas) as the sole salient figures of the Melanesian appetites, desires and moral orientations titillated and shaped--as they are by the 'global', world-historical envelopment of their present existence? The world-horizon of 'modern identities' and development scenarios entertained by many past and present day Papua New Guineans has a much longer history than academic discourses of globalization and modernity conditioned as they are by the upsurge of post-modern self-consciousness of epochal change. More to the point, there was and there is a greater spectrum of aspirations derived from the global geopolitical menu, notwithstanding the predominance of neoliberal globalizing 'capitalism'. Nevertheless, what any of these Western (or African and Islamic) derived world-historical figurations are, capitalism and socialism included, in the context of PNG life-worlds--what they are as the vehicles of the indigenous self-understandings, self-interpretations, local practices and actualities of the enveloping geopolitical world-horizon, and what new activities they may motivate in any local (or international) context requires critical ethnographic elucidation. On this account I reaffirm my experience that in all the years of frequenting PNG, with a focus on the Yagwoia life-world, I also as a matter of course researched the vicissitudes of senis, divelopmen, taim bilong senis, that have been taking place ever since the gavman (originally colonial) established itself in their abode. And I also have had numerous encounters and relations with Papua Niuginians, many among them way outside of the Yagwoia realm. They range from marginal individuals and zx-raskols (organised criminal gangs) in towns (mostly Moresby, Lae and Goroka) to the 'ordinary modern' as well as those well 'educated and ... exposed to modern ways of living' in conformance with the 'modern national laws', to quote Jacka quoting Justice Inja. In all these years none of these people articulated him/herself by characterising their situation as their 'modernity' although both they and I used all the lingual registers that Lattas and Jacka listed above, as well as a whole range of derogatory and exhortatory characterisations from both Tok Pisin and Tok Pies (specifically Yagwoia), including 'kanaka' (bush yokel, primitive) and 'wailman' (wild man, savage). I am not surprised that Jacka's research assistant told him that the Porgerans were not 'very much clear about modernity'. But precisely as such it would be important to know what he thought about it.

My point is that 'modernity' as it came to figure in the current academic discourses, is their bone fide product whose purpose, to quote one of Jacka's authorities on the authenticity of Melanesian modernity as a 'native category', is to satisfy 'postmodernist scholars (who) have successfully challenged the Eurocentric notion of a singular western modernity' (Bashkow 2006:10). In this perspective, the academic 'multiple modernities' of the postmodern discourses seem to me to function primarily as a way of making their proponents comfortable with the global consequences and realities of the civilising/modernising/ development project, historically conceived, implemented, supplemented and redeveloped by the practitioners of the modern Weltanschauung (Rist 2008). And it cannot be any other way since it is a singular desire of modern self-consciousness to ceaselessly keep on modernizing itself and others, always on the way to be beyond whatever hitherto it might be, so long as it is moving on.

To sum it up: change originating historically with Western colonial-civilizing mission/ modernization/development has been going around the planet for quite a while irrespective of multiple theorisations and critical re/evaluations of these processes (well surveyed by Rist op cit). However the resulting planetary social-cultural forms of humanity do not need, for that reason, to be rendered as the manifestation of 'local modernities'. By the same token, regardless of how they regard themselves, modern or of any other ilk, in terms of my orientation, all humans are coeval although I don't assume that other people take me as such within their umwelten and purviews. On the other hand, the bracketing of my own world-historical-epochal sense of being is part of my vocational bildung and practice which intensifies with every new bout of fieldwork.

Going back to the Papua Niuginian contexts of self-understandings and epochal self-projections and interpretations, their predicaments have to be understood in terms of their own self-syntheses, discursive and non-discursive, totalising or otherwise, independent as they are of the motivations which dictate academic constructions. From this perspective, the intelligibility of the multiple articulations (see also Hirsch) of the local conditions of the indigenous pasts qua the ongoing present and into the future, within the envelopment of the world-historical geopolitical dynamics, are freed from the supposedly well-intended yet unduly distorting and questionable constructions emanating from the predominantly Anglophone academic fishbowls. Under the guise of self-decentring and self-critical relation to their Western/Euro-centric cultural-historical matrix, these constructions turn others into multiple refractions of their own temporal existence deemed as either officially correct or no-longer-so, ergo morally-politically compromising. Correlatively it is not just that Melanesian modernity (one or multiple matters but little) has emerged as the bone fide indigenous reality. The region itself, hitherto known as Melanesia, is a wholly colonial and modern construct (authored by the French aristocrat Dumont d'Urville). Given that it is a product of Eurocentric modernist epistemic perceptions and interests, some corrective application surely is in order. In the light of this kind of problematisation of the traditional approaches to area-based ethnography the region has been reassessed as an object of the 'Post-Melanesian Studies' (Knauft 1999). The critique of this enterprise, however, I leave for another occasion.

I hope that all respondents may discern in the above at least some statements that more directly pertain to their individual comments and the positions from within which they think and write. Within the limits of this reply I can only make a few final remarks focussed on Hirsch's comments, which make up a paper in themselves. I take advantage of the thematic self-unity and expository completeness of Hirsch's response, which both complements mine and reveals our differences. To a lesser degree this is also true of the comments by Lattas who is singularly invested in Foucault's work. Hirsch's position, being quite impartial to Foucault, is an autonomous one although he relates it to Marilyn Strathern's ideas developed in her Gender of the Gift and on that basis he proceeds to discuss the problematic of the use of Foucault via carefully chosen ethnographic examples. In terms of the social institutions they explore (e.g., hospital administration and prisons in PNG, created during the colonial period which also created the PNG nation-state) these seemingly lend themselves more straightforwardly to interpretations that can readily draw on Foucault's studies. In this way he makes the case for the 'bottom-up' approach which can more cogently control the chosen interpretive framework rather than it taking over and thus unduly turning a given human life-world into a vehicle for Foucault's dramaturgy. In this respect I would like to point out that in his own writings Foucault himself tends to fall prey to his own dramaturgy. The way I see it, reflection on this dimension of his work allows one to get a better critical perspective on Foucault as both a historian and a philosopher. Furthermore, the last phase of his work, dealing not with modernity but with the world of Classical antiquity, is even more driven by his inner motivation, i.e., Foucault's own self-image as a philosopher who 'thinks differently' and practices parrhesia (fearless speech; Foucault 2001).

My critique of Foucault-dramaturgy is not intended as a rejection of Foucault's works. However, this body of thought would be far better served in the context of ethnographically grounded anthropological theorising if his works were thought through in relation to Foucault as a philosopher situated in his cultural-historical philosophical tradition and if one tried to become familiar with the trajectory of Western civilizational transformations as an ethnographer willing to behold them on a presupposition that the purview ought to correspond, at least to a degree, to the authentic native human strivings, desires and generative intellectual forms that had produced these human life-worlds.

DOI: 10.1002/ocea.5041

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Ute Eickelkamp and Neil Maclean for their excellent editorial suggestions and their masterful scissor-work which gave my reply the optimal short length while retaining all the essential points necessary for this sort of exchange. For any shortcomings I am entirely responsible.

REFERENCES

BASHKOW, I. 2006. The Meaning of Whitemen. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

FOUCAULT, M. 2001. Fearless Speech, (edited by J. Pearson). New York: Semiotext(e).

KNAUFT, B. 1999. Post-Melanesian Studies? A Contemporary Look at the Anthropology of Melanesia. Chapter 5 in his From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesian Anthropology. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

RIST, G. (1997) 2008. The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith. 3rd ed. London: Zed Books.

Jadran Mimica

University of Sydney