Rethinking Trobriand Chieftainship

Abstract

This article develops a new perspective on Trobriand chieftainship and local leadership in light of recently developed theories of personhood, sociality and historical agency for the Pacific. The first section surveys the diverse and contradictory ways in which the Trobriand case has been incorporated in anthropological models of Pacific sociopolitical and taxonomic variation, historical change and evolution. The second section reinterprets classic and contemporary ethnographic accounts and posits that Trobriand leaders and chiefs, and the knowledge and agency on which they rely, have been constituted in historical times quite differently from the ways they have been ultimately represented in anthropologists' models. It is argued that chiefs and hamlet leaders stand as metaphorical fathers to their constituencies; specifically that their agency is analogous to the 'feeding' and 'forming' contributions by fathers in procreation, infant care, the provision of food, the bestowal of magic, annual yam exchange ('urigubu') and mortuary de-conception, among other contexts.

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