A Society Through Its Other

Abstract

A Society Through Its Other Rupert Stasch Reed College Ira Bashkow, The Meaning of Whitemen: Race and Modernity in the Orokaiva Cultural World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, June 2006, 328 pp. It is an anthropological home-truth that communities construct their Others in their own images. At least since Durkheim posited that societies get the deviants they deserve, scholars have regularly read figures of alterity for the ways they invert, reflect, exaggerate, and thematize a collectivity's own core principles, values, and contradictions. Yet strangely, Ira Bashkow's new book is one of the first anthropological monographs ever to be entirely organized as an examination all sides of a major figure of alterity in one society's life. Thus, it is also one of the first monographs to stage an ethnographicallygrounded deep consideration of the theoretical implications of people's culture-internal imaginings of cultural otherness. The book's interest is all the greater given that the specific figure of alterity it examines is the whiteman as he circulates in the speech and other practices of Orokaiva people of Papua New Guinea. The Meaning of Whitemen is a nuanced account of a culturally-specific logic of racial categorization and racial evaluation, and of the sophisticated theodicy of white economic prosperity held by one southern-hemisphere, non-white, rural population. The ethnographic and theoretical seriousness of Bashkow's engagement with is unprecedented in Melanesian studies (despite that this field has racialization in its very name). Beyond setting a new standard for regional specialists, though, the book also challenges scholars of all times and places to address questions of with new theoretical complexity. The work does this in several ways: by describing a culturally-particular system of constructs, in which race itself is very different anything most Westerners are likely to expect it to be; by documenting how certain people experience global-scale inequality, economic development, and cultural modernity as intrinsically racial phenomena; and by arguing that people's most constant experiences of involve categorization of objects and types of actions, rather than persons. Orokaiva number about sixty thousand people. Their owned lands lie toward the eastern extreme of the New Guinea mainland, in lowland and hill country behind the north coast. All Orokaiva are intensely, if heterogeneously, involved with town spaces and with capitalist logics of commodified social relating, but most of them make their main livelihoods growing their own food in gardens. Bashkow emphasizes throughout his book that the whiteman figure he discusses is an Orokaiva cultural phenomenon, in the sense that the figure's attributes are dominantly shaped by Orokaiva people's own cultural principles and values, not by the characteristics of actual persons racialized as white. One of Bashkow's warrants for this approach is the distinctive colonial and postcolonial history that has led to a pronounced absence of whites as actual social actors in Orokaiva life. White colonization of Orokaiva social space dates to the 189Os. The 1960s and early 1970s saw the high-water mark of white expatriate presence and paternalistic development initiatives. By 1990, fifteen years after Papua New Guinea's independence, the number of Australians in the area had dropped from a high of 379 to a mere 32 (48). Other expatriates had left in similar proportions. Their flight, and Orokaiva people's decreased interaction with those still present, followed partly increase in violent crime, and general deterioration of the public sector as Papua New Guinea became a postcolonial weak state. Yet even in the absence of racial whites, at the time of Bashkow's main fieldwork in the mid-1990s Orokaiva in their relations with each other and with the extra-Orokaiva world constantly articulated a complex vernacular stereotypy of whiteman as a type of being. …

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