Ignorance is cosmos; knowledge is chaos: articulating a cosmological polarity in the Solomon Islands

Abstract

In an article often cited as the crystallization of a widespread socio-cultural paradigm in the precolonial Solomon Islands, Roger Keesing (1985) sought to recover the lost complementarity between Melanesian big-men (peace-keepers) and warriors. He theo rized that in north and central Malaita these two roles gave agency to corresponding psychological profiles and cultural values. Big-men represented a peaceful and stable per sonality type associated with cohesion and creativity; warriors, on the other hand, represented an aggressive and violent personality type associated with conflict and destruction. Keesing's observation of these correlations constituted an important con tribution to the understanding of traditional Melanesian leadership patterns; yet, by presenting his analysis as salvage anthropology, Keesing (1985:237, 242, 251; 1992:19-32) erroneously assumed that the socio-cultural paradigm he identified was either defunct or seriously distorted outside the domain of the still pagan Kwaio. South-east of Malaita, on the island of Makira, the post-colonial Anglican Arosi prove Keesing's approach to the study of the complementarity between the Melanesian big-man and warrior both insightful and inadequate. What Keesing perceived as a socio-cultural polarity between forces of stability and destruction is still prominently operative among Arosi today. Analogous to the scenario Keesing outlined for Malaita, precolonial Arosi socio-cultural organization could express this polarity in the form of the opposing but interdependent activities of the chief and warrior. In Arosi too, colonial history has dra matically impinged on these figures. Chiefs (mwaeraha or araha) are no longer groomed from childhood and ritually installed; the men termed chiefs (Solomon Islands Pijin, sif) in contemporary Arosi are elected officials with limited prestige and authority. The warrior (ramo or wa'animae), in his turn, has been curbed by law and reformed by the Christian call to brotherly love. Nevertheless, the polarity between stability and destruction that the chief and warrior formerly articulated has not died with the customary forms of their roles. Today this polarity is evident in Arosi attitudes and practices surrounding the construction and deployment of knowledge and ignorance regarding lineage and land tenure histories. The central endeavor of this paper is to demonstrate that current Arosi management of knowledge and ignorance respecting lineage histories reflects a transformative reproduction of the social polarity previously negotiated, in part, through the agency of chief and warrior. At the same time, this demonstration further argues that the key to tracing meaningful continuity within historical change is anthropological attention to the ontological premises of cosmology. As an alternative to Keesing's presupposition of socio-cultural processes of depletion and distortion, 1 offer as a methodological precept Fredrik Barth's (1987:8) admonition that must always struggle to get our ontological assumptions right: to ascribe to our object of study only those properties and capabilities that we have reasonable

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