The Heart of the Pearl Shell: The Mythological Dimension of Foi Sociality

The Heart of the Pearl Shell

STUDIES IN MELANESIAN ANTHROPOLOGY

General Editors

Gilbert H. Herdt

Fitz John Porter Poole

Donald F. Tuzin

1. Michael Young, Magicians of Manumanua: Living Myth in Kalauna

2. Gilbert H. Herdt, ed., Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia

3. Bruce M. Knauft, Good Company and Violence: Sorcery and Social Action in a Lowland New Guinea Society

4. Kenneth E. Read, Return to the High Valley: Coming Full Circle

5. James F. Weiner, The Heart of the Pearl Shell: The Mythological Dimensions of Foi Sociality

The Heart of the Pearl Shell

The Mythological Dimension of Foi Sociality

James F. Weiner

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley • Los Angeles • London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

Copyright © 1988 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Weiner, James F.

The heart of the pearl shell.

(Studies in Melanesian anthropology; 5)

Originally presented as the author’s thesis

(doctoral—Australian National University).

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

I. Foi (Papua New Guinea people) 1. Title.

II. Series.

DU740.42.W43 1988 995’.0049912 87-25531

ISBN 0-520-06132-2 (alk. paper)

Printed in the United States of America

123456789

Contents 1

Contents 1

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Orthography

CHAPTER 1 Introduction

CHAPTER II The Ethnographic Setting

CHAPTER III The Responsibility of Males

CHAPTER IV Oil, Shells, and Meat: The Media of Foi Sociality

CHAPTER V The Solicitude of Affines

CHAPTER VI Metaphor and Substitution

CHAPTER VII Obviation and Myth

CHAPTER VIII Intersexual Mediation

CHAPTER IX Female Reproductivity

CHAPTER X The Anxiety of Affines

CHAPTER XI Complementarity, Exchange, and Reciprocity

CHAPTER XII The Hidden Myth

Notes

References

Index

Foreword

Social scientists often write the signature of their age in the unstated assumptions they make about the nature and reality of their subject. For anthropologists of the colonial era, the reality of society corresponded to a native administration—official conventions for the adjudication of person and property. The more recent regime of political independence overlaid by economic colonialism has favored the realities of obligation, circulation, and reciprocity. Although it is intriguing to speculate as to what tokens of solidity and credibility a future anthropology might develop, the more pressing issue is that of the unstated assumptions themselves. Where is the reality of society, and what ought we make of the idea? What guarantees the credibility of social exchange and relationship?

The Foi people of the Mubi River say that the heart of the pearl shell is nowhere, that its reality is, as their myth paraphrases Catullus, written on the wind, and inscribed in running water. Among the finest achievements of Dr. Weiner’s supple and powerful argument is its fidelity to this penetrating indigenous insight. Dr. Weiner does not seek to cash in the heart of the pearl shell for a wealth-equivalent in economic exchange, to invest it in a sociology of invidious rights and interests, or to materialize it as putative groups or systems.

A telling and successful study of the meanings of a sociality implies more than the acceptance of local insights, however; it requires the analytical penetration of a world of unfamiliar significances. It may be tempting enough for those with no patience or no head for theory to take the myths, the practices, the art objects of another people at face value. Idealism of this sort has much to offer; it salves the ethical conscience and it monumentalizes the data. But insofar as a viable anthropology is concerned it is the kiss of death. For projection is the inevitable consequence of unstated assumptions: when it is assumed that the meanings of another culture are self-evident, the only meanings that are evident at all are one’s own!

Dr. Weiner has made his grasp and understanding of Foi meanings the cornerstone of this book. A fluent speaker of the Foi language, he is in every respect a superb fieldworker, and the high standards he has brought to the collection and translation of the myths are evident on every page. Those who are familiar with his personal circumstances, and who know something of the difficulties encountered in his field situation, will also know him as one of the most courageous anthropologists to have worked in Papua New Guinea. He is no stranger to the notion of obviation, and I remain very much indebted to him for the advice and insights he offered when I was working through the concept with a corpus of Daribi myths. Before I comment on his own subtle application of the idea, a few words are in order on its epistemological scope and implications.

If meaning were a self-evident property of things, a given of the world around us, then we would scarcely need an anthropology. We could make do well enough with museums, art objects, documentaries, and lavishly illustrated coffeetable books. But meaning is instead something that human beings learn—after the fashion of their cultures— to perceive in the happenings around them. It is a specialized form of perception, as is binocular vision, and it may even be related to the capacity for binocular vision. The forms in which this perception is elicited and encoded, trope in all of its identifiable varieties of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, iconicity, might be said to project the third dimension of language and cultural convention, a dimension that is invisible to those who espouse the flat perspectives of systematic rule and process alone.

The problem is not so much that anthropology has been indifferent to meaning as that it has not known what to do with an allegedly static, subjective effect. And this is largely because trope itself, as the elicitor of meaning, has been understood as something detached and incidental—a by-blow of the businesslike logics that structuralism and semiotics use to model culture. But what if trope were, instead, a dynamic process, a constitutive principle that elicited not only the meanings but their sequence and organization as well? What obviation mod els is just such a processual form of trope, a sequence of contagious tropes that expand into the composite trope of a larger cultural frame—a myth or ritual.

As perception, of course, meaning remains as purely subjective and personal as the sense you or I make individually of a certain color or sound. What we can share of such an intimate experience (and what makes of such sharing a cultural phenomenon) is its conventional means of elicitation. Because it is the means by which personal perceptions can be shared and expanded into larger cultural forms, obviation is also a means of rendering the integral unity of cultural meanings accessible to us. Melanesians have always insisted on the central significance of certain myths and rituals for their way of life but, without a way of reading this significance in its totality, its indigenous sense could scarcely be grasped. Thus an approach to Foi sociality through myth becomes a privileged entree to the meaning of Foi social life in its own terms, through the indigenous meanings rather than through the application of typological glosses.

Obviation is not a methodology, nor is it a recipe for myths. It comes into its own not as a free form of interpretation, but precisely because of the constraints it places on interpretation. Diagrammati- cally it images the limits a myth places on the range of its possible interpretations. Add to this the conventions of a particular culture— those of exchange, the fastening of a woman, affinal protocols, the abia relationship, and the other usages that Dr. Weiner has learned so well—and the interpretive possibilities are further constrained by Foi culture. Using this coordinate set of constraints as a positive advantage, Dr. Weiner has managed, with suave dexterity, to elicit an indigenous commentary on social structure from Foi oral literature. What if pigs were substituted for affines, a man’s bow or his fishing spear for his masculinity? What of the remarkable Foi practice whereby a man adopts his daughters’ husbands by fostering their bridewealth payments? The implications of these as ifs, in what Victor Turner called the cultural subjunctive, spell out an amazing Foi discourse on topics such as gender, relationship, mortality, destiny, autonomy, and personhood.

The cultural person contains implicitly the relationships that contain it; where else but in the mirroring dimension of myth can this reflexivity be articulated? And if it were not so articulated, then sociality could not enter the world of personal meaning, and would represent a merely imposed arbitrage.

What are pearl shells without people, without the person? The mag nificent Foi myth tells us that the heart of the pearl shell is blowing in the wind, streaming beneath running water. It is motion without substance, just as life would be if people did not imbue this motion with their lives, their wishes, their own thoughts. Pearl shells carries human life and human destiny on its wings because it has a place in human thoughts, human meanings and emotions, and in the person.

Charlottesville, Virginia Roy Wagner

Acknowledgments

This book is a revised version of my doctoral dissertation, completed while a Research Scholar in the Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University. My fieldwork among the Foi took place between July 1979 and May 1981, December 1982 and February 1983, and November 1984 and January 1985. It was funded primarily by an Australian National University Research Scholarship. My third field trip was partially subsidized by a small grant from the Southern Highlands Province Department of Education.

There are many people whose instruction, encouragement, and friendship made my work possible. My debt to Dr. Roy Wagner is profound and needs no special elaboration since his theoretical influence is evident throughout this book. He supervised my Master’s work during my first year of graduate study at Northwestern University in 1973—1974. During that year, following Dr. Wagner’s timely advice, my interest shifted away from economic anthropology and West Africa to kinship and social structure in interior New Guinea. At the end of that year, Dr. Wagner suggested that I enter the doctoral program at the University of Chicago, and I joined the anthropology department there the following year.

Over the next five years I was fortunate enough to continue my studies at Chicago under the supervision of Marshall Sahlins and the other members of my academic committee, David Schneider, Nancy Munn, and Valerio Valeri. Along with Dr. Wagner and Dr. Raymond C. Kelly, these people are responsible for the theoretical background of this thesis. For their training and experience I would like to express my deepest gratitude.

Because of difficulties in obtaining financial support for my proposed fieldwork, I left the University of Chicago to accept a research scholarship in the Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University in 1979. With the advice of my supervisors, Michael Young, Marie Reay, and James Fox, I went to the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea to live among the Foi-speakers of the Lake Kutubu area.

While in the Southern Highlands I was greatly assisted by Dr. Lyn Clarke, who was then chairperson of the Provincial Research Committee and expedited my entry into the field. To those friends who occasionally saw me in Mendi, the provincial capital—Bruce French, Dinah Gibbs, John Millar, Eileen Sowerby, and Robert Crittendon— and to Gregory Tuma and Simon Kowi who were members of the government staff at Pimaga Patrol Post from where the Foi were administered, I offer my thanks for their hospitality and continuing interest in my work.

After I settled in Hegeso Village in a comfortable house on the bank of the Faya’a Creek, I began what proved to be over two years of a most intense and satisfying personal involvement with that community. Most of my data during the first year and a half of fieldwork were obtained in formal interview situations. I would spend most of the days visiting men and women in their homes and gardens and sago stands. Other time was spent with the several young men who undertook to teach me the Foi language. I accomplished this task primarily through transcribing and translating myths and other narrated speech. In the last twelve months of my fieldwork, however, I was able to follow conversations the Foi people held amongst themselves, and most of my material on observed social interactions was obtained during this phase of my time in Hegeso.

But whether it was sitting at a desk, on a tree stump in a garden, in the back of a canoe, or in people’s houses and bush camps, Foi people with very little self-consciousness undertook to present their selves to me, which demanded a corresponding willingness on my part to fabricate for them an image of the Westerner and of my own self. In a very short time I realized that this process was continually at work no matter what the ostensible social context.

In one way or another, each of the 266 souls of Hegeso helped to make my stay there a rewarding one, both emotionally and intellectually. I would like to single out, however, the following individuals: Viya Iritoro, who has grown from boyhood to married adulthood since I first arrived in Hegeso; Fo’awi Kuhu, who, sonless, adopted me during what proved to be the last years of his life, and who instructed me in the secret lore of the Usi cult and his own personal magic; Dabura Guni and his brother Horehabo, who both offered their complete personal loyalty and enthusiasm for my inquiries and who spent long hours with me in myth-telling and in the description of the healing cults; Kora Midibaru and Egadoba Yabokigi who acted as my translators, interpreters, and linguistic instructors until I learned the Foi language myself; Memene Abeabo, for his personal friendship and his precise knowledge of Hegeso genealogies which he shared with me; the women Gebo Tamani, Kunuhuaka Deya of Barutage, and Ibume Tari; Yaroge Kigiri, Iritoro Boyo, Dosabo Gu’uru of Fiwaga, Tirifa Tari, Midibaru Hamabo, Haganobo Wano of Barutage, and Fahaisabo Ya’uware and his brother Mabiba of Barutage who both excelled as myth-tellers. To these people and the entire village of Hegeso, I acknowledge an immense debt for their patience, friendship and support—a debt I can never repay adequately and which binds me yet to the dark forest and quiet rivers of the Upper Mubi Valley. I would also like to thank Murray Rule and Hector Hicks of the Asia Pacific Christian Mission for their hospitality and interest in my research.

During the writing of the original doctoral thesis I was aided greatly by the supervision of Dr. Michael Young, who was then working on his own manuscript on the social and personal uses of myth on Goodenough Island (his work appeared in 1983 as Magicians of Manu- manua). Dr. Young’s careful attention and insightful criticism as well as our many conversations on mythic interpretation were crucial to the presentation of the argument in this book.

Although I had read Dr. Wagner’s book Lethal Speech before I arrived in Australia in 1979, I did not think about the application of the concept of symbolic obviation to my own data on the Foi until well after I had returned to Canberra. While working through my notes on Foi bridewealth and mortuary exchanges, it occurred to me that obviation, as a central property of metaphor itself, could be applied to a wide range of semiotically based social processes apart from myth. The implication that myth and social process could thus be tied together within a unified theory of symbolization thus constituted the framework within which I analyzed the relationship between the myths, spells, and poems and the social structural data which were the main subjects of my inquiries. Certain other properties of the six- staged obviational triad, including what Wagner calls axial encom- passment, became apparent to me at the same time that Wagner was describing them in more detail in his recent book Symbols that Stand for Themselves. Without the many discussions we had concerning the mechanics of analogic transformation and the properties of obviational sequences themselves, this book could not have been written.

In addition to Dr. Young and Dr. Wagner, I would like to thank Dr. Marie Reay for her careful reading of and commentary on every chapter and her insistence upon a high level of stylistic performance. Dr. Andrew Strathern also followed the writing of the original thesis at every stage and is responsible for a great deal of my understanding of Foi society and my subsequent interpretations.

To my closest friends Wayne Warry and Leanne Greenwood, and to Mark Francillon, I offer my love and gratitude for their unquestioning devotion and for all the moments of joy and hardship, all equally precious, that we shared. To Martha Macintyre and Jadran Mimica, my deepest admiration for their professional competence and enthusiasm and my thanks for their friendship. To Charles Langlas, who worked among the Foi fourteen years before I arrived in Hegeso, my gratitude for his guidance, friendship, and hospitality.

Ann Buller and Ria Vandezandt looked after my needs while in the field, smoothed out many of the bumps of fieldwork and thesis writing, and finally typed both the original thesis and the manuscript of this book. To both of them go my great thanks for their loyalty and professional diligence. Marc Weiner, my brother, created the cover design and never flagged in his enthusiasm for my work.

Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to my parents, David and Barbara Weiner, for their complete faith in my work and their devotion to me during what has proven to be a long absence from home.

Orthography

The Foi language was first analyzed by the linguist—missionary Murray Rule. Along with his wife Joan Rule, he produced an unpublished grammar and dictionary of Foi during their stay at the Asia Pacific Christian Mission station at Inu, Lake Kutubu. I thus employ Rule’s orthography (1977:8-10).

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The best way I have found to define ethnographic interpretation is the classic analogy of three blind men attempting to describe an elephant by touch—one holding its trunk, one its tail, and the other its tusk. Different ethnographers see things different ways, and the contrasting subjective viewpoints of each fieldworker determine the nature of the resulting ethnographic portrait. We, as much as the people who are our subject matter, create the reality of social and cultural phenomena, for we too are acting culturally by doing anthropology.

While as outside observers we know this to be too self-evident to warrant extended argument, I feel at times that we lose sight of the fact that it is also true of the individuals who are our subjects. Perhaps it is because we do not appreciate them as individuals until well into our field stays that we tend to assume that their knowledge and information about their culture is more uniform than ours. And if such is not the case, as in societies with graded ritual knowledge, certainly it is assumed that their interpretive perspective, their general structural vantage point, is covalent. This is a function of our belief that cultures, particularly those of small-scale societies, can be typified by a single set of structured propositions.

But even if we grant that our subjects can have conflicting theories of their society—even, in other words, if we admit this second degree of interpretive relativity—few of us identify a third level of subjectivity, that of differentially constituted domains within a single culture. We may, it is true, scrupulously note that such-and-such an element is given conflicting associations, names, values, meanings, or what have you, in different contexts. But having reached that point, many ethnographers feel compelled to identify one meaning, one value as the real one, while the others are extensions, figures of speech, or inversions or transformations, as if the last two were necessary characteristics of culture and meaning itself.

The problem is most acute in the study of myth and its relationship to the rest of social and linguistic discourse. The examination of this relationship has been dominated for the last twenty years by structuralist approaches, in which oppositions pertaining to assumed objective phenomena—up versus down, male versus female, and so on— are inverted or transformed and then resynthesized. Myth therefore emerges as a looking-glass of reality, a reflection of real life, a derivative semantic form; in brief, an extension of primary cultural meanings.

It is no surprise that the analysis of myth has been most commonly and closely associated with that of ritual for, like the former, ritual too is often interpreted as a topsy-turvy world of inversion, an inside- out morality. And yet, enthographers always seek in myth and ritual the semantic equations that are the missing links in completing the structures of secular institutions. Must we then conclude, paradoxically, that it is only by subverting the semiotic and symbolic foundations of secular life that their integrity and moral force are maintained?

This dilemma can be sidestepped, however, by a symbolic anthropology that takes the distinction between the factual and the representational as itself a symbolic construction, one whose parameters must be determined by observation and analysis in each society, rather than assumed as self-evident. My aim in this book is to constitute the dimensions of Foi sociality out of the images presented in their myths and their secular institutions, to demonstrate the role of each in the elaboration of the central Foi tenets of intersexual and affinal mediation, and to express the force of these principles in terms of how the opposed functions of conventional and innovative symbolization are given shape in Foi thought.

How, first, do I define sociality? Rather than approach separately the phenomena that many anthropologists have distinctly defined as, for example, culture and social structure, I wish to begin with the notion of a single domain of socially apprehended reality which is simultaneously conceptual and phenomenal. Roy Wagner in his book The Invention of Culture thus defines as convention

the range of… contexts … centered around a generalized image of man and human interpersonal relationships. … These contexts define and create a meaning for human existence … by providing a collective relational base. (1975:40)

Clifford Geertz (1973), in speculating on the origin of the Balinese person, similarly notes that human thought is consummately social in its origin, functions, forms, and applications. These interpretations ultimately owe their inspiration to the father of social anthropology, Emile Durkheim, who first defined this set of shared concepts which simultaneously embodies ethos, world view, and collective solidarity as the field of morality (1966:398). Morality for Durkheim was the set of collective representations that pertained to the cohesiveness of social units. I therefore define sociality as those symbolic domains that constitute the collective image of human interaction in any society. These domains provide the conceptual parameters for the definition of individual and social units and their interrelationship (see also Schneider 1965).

Many social anthropologists, however, begin with the notion of the irreducibility of the biogenetic facts of human reproduction. The functional relationship between such facts and the institutionalized means of ordering and expressing them—rules of marriage, recruitment, and descent for example—is, by similar reasoning, assumed to be universal in all human societies. Radcliffe-Brown, who was social anthropology’s most important interpreter of Durkheim, started with this premise in distinguishing social structure from other cultural institutions (Radcliffe-Brown 1952). It is implicit in Levi-Strauss’ model of the atom of kinship (1967:29-53), which formed the basis of alliance theory, and in Fortes’ ideas, which are the most representative of descent theory, even though these two schools of thought can be considered to represent diametrically opposed views of social structure (see Schneider 1965).

The point I wish to make, however, is that kinship and social-organizational rules are first and foremost a system of symbolically constituted meanings and that their relationship to genealogical parameters is problematic. The dimensions of social interaction and organization are therefore contiguous with other realms of conceptualization (Wagner 1977:627). I therefore use the word sociality to mean the culturally defined and symbolically ordered nature of social phenomena. The meaningful attributes of sociality reside not only in the normative system of social rules but also in every other cultural domain; the manner in which the Foi and other peoples order and define their interpersonal and intergroup relationships must be related to the way they order their microcosm and macrocosm at the most inclusive level. The relationship of humans, for example, to the animals species, the spirits of the dead, and the cardinal and geographic orientations of their social space—these too partake of a similar symbolic constitution.

In much the same manner that Marcel Mauss in his classic essay The Gift described reciprocity as a total social fact in many archaic and non-Western societies (1954), I describe the domains of intersex- ual mediation (that is, pertaining to the relation between male and female) and affinal mediation as the most pervasive conceptual foundations of Foi sociality. The central role of gender differentiation as a cultural system—in Geertz’s (1973) sense—in Melanesian societies has already been well documented (see chapter 3 below). However, in this book I have avoided the use of word gender with its implicit emphasis on sex roles in favor of a term that stresses the fact that for the Foi sexuality is a relationship, and that this relationship encompasses much more than the differentiation of men and women. Marilyn Strathern speaking from her experience among the Melpa people of the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea has in a similar vein argued that the logic inherent in the way such notions [of male-ness and female-ness] are set up must be understood in relation to general values in the society (1978:173). Thus, the relationship between male and female and between affines, though comprising distinct normative ideologies for the Foi, encompass one another at the conceptual level with which I am analytically concerned. As domains of extreme importance to the Foi, they inform a wide range of relationships and analogies within the Foi cosmos. It is through their myths that the Foi make explicit the relationship between these analogies.

But there is an important methodological distinction to be made at the outset. On the one hand, there is the normative relationship between the institution of myth-telling and other institutions of social discourse. On the other hand, there is the relationship between myth as a context for symbolic transformation and the symbolic operations in other social processes. I have restricted the focus of this book chiefly to the second of these analytical viewpoints.

Thus, although I preface my analysis of Foi mythology with a de scription of Foi social organization, the images emerging from myth analysis do not formally correspond to those that emerge from statistical or normative statements about social structure, since the two represent distinct analytical views.

In chapter 5, for example, I present an image of Foi social structure that explicates the relationship between contrasting properties of asymmetrical and symmetrical exchange in the bridewealth system. This analysis stems from the comparison of different kinds of data, primarily statistical and normative, and represents one view of Foi social process. But there is no a priori reason to expect myth to reflect the intersection of these principles in the same way. It is true that several Foi myths comment on the implications of direct exchange and others on the implications of affinal asymmetry, but it is only in the interests of a functionalist methodology that one would conclude that those myths are related to one another in some exclusive way.

But it is also true that it is one of the aims of this book to establish both how myths are related to each other and how they are related to social process. And so I now turn to a description of the kind of model I feel can answer these questions, a model pertaining to the symbolic foundations of sociality.

Anthropology has at its core a commitment to making the social component of human life visible and, in this interest, the whole idea of human sociality, since the time of Durkheim, has been taken for granted. But the necessity of sociality, and all the functions attributed to it, are themselves aspects of a complex metaphor by which we assimilate the different practices of our ethnographic subjects to our own model of society.

In this book I employ a model of symbolic analysis devised by Roy Wagner, depicted most clearly in his sequence of publications Habu (1972), The Invention of Culture (1975), Analogic Kinship: A Daribi Example (1977), and Lethal Speech (1978). It is one of my purposes in this introduction to explicate the relationship between the stages in a unified symbolic theory that these works represent, and to introduce how I have employed them in my description and analysis of Foi society.

Social anthropology is about relationships, although up until fairly recently, most anthropologists preferred to restrict the content of relationship in this context to that between persons. But I prefer to begin with a more basic and encompassing definition of relationship, grounded in a semiotic approach to the conceptualization of the world, and so I start with the atom of relationship, the metaphor.

Although any linguistic phenomenon depends ultimately on the establishment of arbitrary relationships between signifiers and signifieds, I will defer discussion of such sign relationship for the moment and merely note that signs themselves are the building blocks of metaphors, or tropes, in Paul Ricouer’s phrasing. Regardless of the taxonomic differences some authors specify for metaphor—metonymy, synecdoche, iconicity, rhetoric, and others—the crucial characteristic of a trope is that it is a relationship between two elements that are simultaneously similar and dissimilar. A symbolic operation that focuses on the similarity between elements in a tropic (trope-ic) equation can be termed collectivizing symbolization, in Wagner’s scheme, while the converse operation that takes the differences as the focus of intent can be labeled as differentiating symbolization.

Because the two properties of metaphor are in direct opposition, identity as against difference, they cannot simultaneously embody the context of human intention; they cannot at the same time manifest themselves in the act of metaphorization itself, lest the intent of the symbolic construction be compromised.

I now assume that the nature of any particular metaphorical relationship depends upon the relative emphasis of either its collectivizing or differentiating function at the expense of the other, and that this relative emphasis corresponds to the conventionally defined mode of human intention itself. As an example, let us consider the Foi metaphor of clan identity. Each Foi clan has an associated group of bird, animal, and vegetable species which stands for it in a manner that anthropologists characteristically define as totemic. A member of the Momahu’u clan is thus for example represented by the Raggianna bird of paradise, the sena’a species of sugarcane, the Black Palm tree, and others. In fact, each Foi clan has standing for it an element or species in the garden vegetable, tree, fish, bird, marsupial, and wild vegetable domains, and perhaps others that I am unaware of—in other words, in every domain that the Foi see as comprising their cosmos, in all the spheres that together make up the Foi universe. A human differentiation—that between clans—differentiates species. To the extent that the distinction between the domains themselves is backgrounded, their congruent assimilation to one clan collectivizes this distinction: the difference between items in different domains (say, the Raggianna bird of paradise and Black Palm tree, both of which stand for the Momahu’u clan) is not as significant as the difference between elements within a domain (such as the Raggianna and the Sulphur-crested Cockatoo, which stands for the So'onedobo clan). The relationship between the domains themselves represents a series of homologous distinctions—that between Foi clans—and in this sense every generic domain the Foi recognize functions to distinguish clans from each other. To the extent thus that the domains themselves stand in homologic relationship, in contrast to the analogous distinctions within each domain, then every Foi clan has an unlimited number of totems, every generic domain the Foi recognize can serve as a field of totemic differentiation.

Analogy is the background against which the Foi articulate the distinctions that are the focus of their social life, just as difference is the background against which Westerners impose the collectivities of family and kinspeople. The corresponding emphasis on differentiating and collectivizing symbolization respectively comprises the domain of convention for the Foi and for Westerners, and such a contrast deserves more detailed scrutiny.

In an analytic framework that takes social relationships themselves as the result of tropic construction, convention can only be defined in terms of its complementary aspect, innovation or invention. Let me return to the distinction between culture and social structure with which I began earlier, with the rules that many anthropologists elicit and which form the framework for their eventual description of the content of a particular culture. What is the ontological status, as it were, of these rules? Most, if not all, are direct results of the anthropologist’s questioning. But how do these anthropologists conceive of the whole notion of a rule itself? Is it not a product of their own cultural milieu, Western society, which posits an external and artificially constructed social contract opposed to the individual? In such a milieu, rules are the focus of conscious human articulation, since they are designed to regulate and systematize an inherently chaotic and differentiated cosmos. Our view of social artifice basically derives from such early social philosophers as Thomas Locke: society is the systematic application of constraints upon the inherent willfulness of the self-contained individual. The meaning of all social and cultural forms—including myth—is thus above all else referrable to their function in maintaining societal order.

Convention in this worldview thus emerges as a result of progressive acts of collectivizing symbolization, focusing on the artificially imposed similarities among elements and statuses to arrive at the occupational, educational, and geographic specializations (to name a few) that comprise our social categories and the system of laws, written and unwritten, that govern their relationship to each other. In such a system, the differences that are also a part of the metaphor of social identity are seen as innate or inherent; and indeed, the morality of convention lies in the fact that it is seen to accommodate and control such difference.

Any person assuming a social role—as husband, wife, employee, citizen, and so forth—metaphorizes that role to the extent that his idiosyncratic personality is seen as hampering or promoting his performance of that role. There are punctual employees, domineering bosses, neurotic housewives, bad children, and not even the most punctilious diplomat is a perfect follower of protocol. The dissonance we feel when our individual motivations clash with the expectations of our social roles is what we perceive as the resistance to artificially imposed behavioral strictures, but the resistance itself is a function of the relative weighting of collectivizing and differentiating symbolization in our cultural tradition.

It is thus evident that a social convention only achieves its force and reality through individuals who recognize that convention as playing some determinate role in their action and intention. The relationship between the individual and the social, then, is also a metaphor, for each individual approximates more or less the image of a social form or action. Thus Wagner writes:

Since … convention can only be sustained and carried forward by acts of invention, and since invention can only result in effective and meaningful expression when subject to the orientation of convention, neither can be regarded as a determinant. Both are equally involved in, and equally products of, the successive acts of combining and distinguishing cultural contexts that constitute man’s social and individual life. (1975:78)

Let us now suppose an inverse situation. Let us imagine a worldview that takes human sociality, its rules, as given or innate, in the same way that we take the individual’s idiosyncratic personality as given for the purposes of social analysis. In this worldview, the energies and forces maintaining that sociality are not distinct from those that animate the universe in general: the cycle of birth, growth, and decay; the similarity between animal and vegetable species; the giving of food and ceremonial gifts or prestations; the proliferation of household groups; in general, all the characteristics of the kind of non-Western society that early anthropologists labeled as animistic. It is not, however, humanity that is projected onto an inanimate nature—the people we are speaking of do not make that distinction—but rather the self-evident continuity of cosmic forces that is seen as also encompassing the force of human action.

The Foi live in such a world of immanent continuity and transcendent human intention. The resemblances between—indeed, the essential unity of—all the different human, animal, vegetable, meteorological, and other vitalities is for them given or part of the innate nature of things. The moral foundation of human action, that contrastive realm that they view in opposition to this given cosmic flow, is to halt, channel, or make distinctions in it for socially important purposes.

In this type of society, what the anthropologist perceives as social process, the flow of events, can perhaps best be rendered in terms of the replacement or substitution of tropes by other tropes. Because metaphor is self-signifying—because it encompasses its symbol and referent within a single construction—this succession of tropic differentiations creates its own context, precipitating convention (and making it visible to the anthropologist) by means of successive differentiations against it. To put it another way, convention becomes apprehendable as a felt resistance to the improvisatory and particularistic actions of individuals that are opposed to it. Thus, in chapter 5, I discuss the various affinal and maternal payments that devolve upon wife-takers subsequent to a betrothal. To the extent that betrothal payments, bridewealth, maternal payments, and the special exchanges between cross-cousins succeed each other, they serve to shift the focus of the initial affinal differentiation across generations. What emerges from— what is precipitated by—these exchanges is the conservation of male as against female lineality. I thus argue that intersexual and affinal mediation emerge as the chief modes of social differentiation for the Foi. They model the successive acts of differentiation from which result the categories of Foi social structure, and to characterize the content of Foi society, perhaps nothing more need be said than that it is the constant re-creation of male and female (re)productivity out of affinity and vice versa.

However, let us now recall that a metaphor, unlike a sign, is not an arbitrary relationship between elements. Because each element in a trope can equally serve as the context for the other’s articulation, it follows that the relation between the collectivizing and differentiating functions of metaphor is relative—it is not fixed, as is the relation between a sound image and its conceptual referent in a sign relationship. To return to my example of Foi totemic usages, people are divided into groups that are represented by various natural species. The relationship between person and totem is a metaphor that serves to both differentiate people from each other and to collectivize species from different series, depending upon one’s point of view. If it is thus true that any metaphor encompasses this contrast between similarity and difference in a relative and not fixed manner, then the possibility exists of focusing on differentiation in a collectivizing tradition, or of focusing on collectivizing in a differentiating one in certain contexts.

In Wagner’s terms, any symbolic operation that exposes the simultaneously differentiating and collectivizing modes of a tropic equation can be defined as obviation. In a tradition such as ours, which focuses on bringing individual variations in personality and temperament into conformity with a collectively defined social role, any act or role that is consciously articulated in contradistinction to these conventions obviates them. Artists, writers, musicians, and any other adherents of a contrastive counterculture innovate upon these conventions by locating the creative impetus of their identity in opposition to them. To the extent that they render apparent the symbolic operation that maintains the moral force of these conventions—the collectivizing operation that makes itself felt as morality—such differentiating acts extend their associations and attributes. Thus, for example, idioms used by black Americans, Hollywood scriptwriters, and so on, gradually achieve a widespread conventional meaning.

But in a tradition such as that of the Foi, where differentiation is convention, where the drawing of contrasts accounts for the shape of social action, then innovation results when such contrasts are collapsed, when the distinction between elements in a tropic construction is backgrounded to their similarity. This is the force of those noncon- ventional acts such as magic, oratory, naming, and cult activity, all of which I will discuss in ensuing chapters.

Obviation can be alternatively defined as the manner in which the realm of the innate and that of human responsibility come to stand for each other. In the collectivizing tradition of the West that I have been broadly characterizing, it emerges as a result of deliberate focus on differentiation. The emergence of women’s political consciousness in recent times is a good example of this. The dilemma of the