Encompassing Others: The Magic of Modernity in Melanesia

by Edward LiPuma

An engaging, beautifully written account by an ethnographer who lived in the mountains of Papua New Guinea, Encompassing Others is at once a history of the encounter of two cultures and an attempt to challenge theoretically the main concepts that have informed the study of modernity. Going beyond accounts that grasp modernity solely in terms of domination, imperialism, and local resistance, it explores how capitalism, Christianity, and mass commercial culture enchant the senses, create a carnival of new goods, and open up new possibilities for thought and action.
Focusing on the Maring people of Highland New Guinea and on the Westerners who interacted with them, Edward LiPuma presents issues from the perspectives of both sides. We hear the voice of the Anglican priest from San Francisco as well as the most powerful Maring shamans. Further, the book seeks to develop a theory of generations that helps explain how change accelerates and societies take on new directions across generations.
Theoretical, descriptive, but almost entirely free of jargon, this book is intended for all those who are interested in how the West's encompassment of other peoples influences how these others conceive of their past, imagine their future, and experience the present. It will have wide appeal for anthropologists and others concerned with colonialism, globalization, and the formation of the nation-state.
Edward LiPuma is Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology, University of Miami.

360 pages, Paperback

First published July 25, 2000

Reviews

[Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

A central concern in Edward LiPuma’s account of the Maring culture of Highland New Guinea is cultural transformation – the processes by which a society is shaped (and reshapes itself) “as a consequence of being inexorably encompassed within a state … and inundated by Western capitalism, Christianity, and commercially driven mass culture.” LiPuma names these processes encompassment and explores how they “progressively and simultaneously subsume, enchant, and engulf others”:

If there is a major feature of the globalization of modernity, it is the West’s relentless embrace of other histories and territories. From island Oceania to the New Guinea Highlands peoples who have long stood at the epicentre of our discourse now join labour unions, form women’s rights organisations, consciously engage in the politics of the nation-state, contemplate the nature of democracy and human rights, invoke the images of MTV and Christian broadcasting, attend Western-like schools, learn to speak English, appropriate a wide variety of Western technologies, and are increasingly immersed in mass commodity culture: and this is only for starters. The West has effectively othered others.

In reviewing Melanesian conceptions of personhood, LiPuma stresses that, rather than seeing the differences between Western and Melanesian personhood in opposition to each other (effectively making these two forms of society incommensurable) that dividuality and individuality are two modes of personhood which may be ubiquitous, but that different cultures exhibit more of a tendency towards one or the other pole. Indigenous Melanesian society, he suggests, emphasizes the relational and marginalises the individuality of persons (individualistic behaviour is frequently linked to accusations of sorcery), whilst Western societies valorize the autonomous and bounded aspect of personhood, whilst de-emphasizing the relational aspect.

“…it is a misunderstanding to assume either that the social emerges out of individual actions (a powerful strain in Western ideology that has seeped into much of its scientific epistemology) or that the individual ever completely dissappears by virtue of indigenous forms of relational totalization (such as those posited for certain New Guinea societies). It would seem rather that persons emerge precisely from that tension between dividual and individual aspects/relations. And the terms and conditions of this tension, and thus the kind (or range) of persons that are produced, will vary historically.

LiPuma’s analysis of encompassment eschews the simplistic notion of a monolithic Western juggernaut erasing other cultures, yet he is clear that the relationship between the West and the Maring people is asymmetrical: “the degree to which the Maring could transform the West was nowhere near the power of the West to transform them” – adding later that the Maring have been compelled to come to terms with wage-labour and commodities, but that they cannot, in turn, compel Westerners to accept the logic of the gift. He pays particular attention to the ways in which encompassment operates within the practices of everyday life – in transforming the habitus of dispositions – changing the ways in which a people think about their world. These are the less obvious modalities of power which is visible only through changes in habits and everyday routines.

There is much of interest in Encompassing Others – particularly in respect to issues around the cultural appropriation debate, the romanticisation of tribal peoples, and the relationship between ethnography and colonialism. A thought-provoking read.