Category Archives: Pacific

by | 24 October 2008 · 6:08 pm

India’s Diverse Diasporas

From India: The Rise of an Asian Giant, by Dietmar Rothermund (Yale U. Press, 2008), pp. 233-235:

The cultivation of sugar-cane in colonies such as Mauritius and the Natal province of South Africa, in Trinidad, Guyana and Surinam in the Caribbean and Fiji in the Pacific Ocean created settlements of Indian labourers as many stayed on as free labourers after their contracts had expired. In some of these places the Indians emerged as the majority of the population, but with few exceptions they did not rise above the position of labourers. Therefore the diaspora in the ex-sugar colonies is not much of an economic asset to India. Mauritius is an exception to this rule. It has shown encouraging signs of economic growth and its Indian majority dominates the politics of the island but has maintained equitable relations with the other ethnic groups. Mauritius has become a major offshore banking centre for investors who channel their investments in India through the island. This has led to the strange phenomenon whereby tiny Mauritius ranks high among the nations investing in India. Being well aware of the benefits of good relations with Mauritius, India is even prepared to protect the maritime economic zone of the island with the help of its navy….

The era of decolonization did not provide much scope for re-migration from the diaspora to India. Nor did the erstwhile colonial powers invite people of Indian origin to settle in their home countries. There were only two striking exceptions to this rule. The Netherlands became the target of a mass exodus of Indians from Surinam after that colony gained independence in 1975. This was due to the fact that the Dutch had granted citizenship to the people of Surinam and since the Indians did not get along with the Afro-American majority, they left for the Netherlands before their right of citizenship could be revoked. A similar exodus of Indians from Uganda to Great Britain had taken place after Idi Amin had established his tyrannical rule in 1971. The Indians of Uganda were not the offspring of indentured servants but had followed the Uganda railroad. The workers who built that railroad had also come from India, but almost all of them had returned to their homes in the Punjab. The subsequent immigrants from India were for the most part literate Gujaratis who manned the administrative posts of the railway or set up shops in the hinterland which had been opened up by the railway. When these people were persecuted by Idi Amin and shifted to Great Britain they did very well there as a result of their business acumen. This group of the Indian diaspora is of considerable importance for India. But, of course, the Indians who came from East Africa are only part of the Indian diaspora in Great Britain, which also consists of Indian professionals and businessmen who migrated from India to the ex-imperial country in search of greener pastures.

Another post-colonial migration which had some similarity to the export of Indian manpower in colonial times was the recruitment of Indian labour by the countries along the Persian Gulf when those countries earned millions of petro-dollars. This recruitment benefited all South Asian countries. Most of them sent unskilled labourers to the Gulf; India had the lion’s share of skilled administrative jobs. For quite some time the ample remittances of these skilled personnel filled the gap in India’s balance of payments which was usually affected by a negative balance of trade. When the first Gulf War of 1991 disrupted this profitable connection, India was hit very hard, the more so as the disaster was sudden and unexpected. When Indira Gandhi was asked in 1981 whether she could envision an Indian exodus from the Gulf similar to that from East Africa precipitated by Idi Amin, she jauntily replied: ‘The Arabs need US.’ Her successors also took this for granted and were rudely awakened by the Gulf War.

The Indian diaspora in the countries along the Persian Gulf was very different from that everywhere else. First of all it was of very recent origin. This diaspora had no second or third generation members born in the country of residence. Moreover, the Indians who came to the Gulf did not intend to settle there for any length of time. There were many educated people from Kerala among them who simply wanted to earn enough money to build a house back home. Busy construction work in the villages of Kerala provided striking evidence of this trend in the 1980s. Under such conditions there was hardly any incentive to establish Indian community centres in the Gulf countries. The Indian diaspora was not concentrated in anyone place and its members fluctuated. Nevertheless, this was the diaspora which was most important for India, due to the economic effect of its remittances. Other Indian diasporas would be less inclined to send money to India as they would rather invest it where they lived. The occasional support of poor relatives in India did not give rise to substantial remittances.

Today’s Wall Street Journal weighs in on one of the barriers to the expansion of India’s diaspora in the U.S., where “the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin which was founded in 1984 has 42,000 members” (Rothermund, p. 235):

The Chandrayaan-I blasted off about dawn from the Satish Dhawan Space Center. It is expected to reach lunar orbit by November 8. The probe, whose principal goal is to “conduct mineralogical and chemical mapping of the lunar service,” carries five scientific payloads from India and others from NASA and the European Space Agency. With this achievement, India joins the U.S., Japan, Europe, Russia and China in the lunar club.

India deserves congratulations for the Chandrayaan-I, which attests further to that nation’s remarkable strides as an economic and scientific power. That said, we cannot fail to draw attention to how this event bears on the continuing lunacy of Congress in limiting visa quotas for highly skilled immigrants.

American universities are filled with foreign students, not least from India, getting degrees in engineering and science. Many dearly wish to stay and work in the U.S. Instead, we basically kick them out after training them, owing to the Congressional limit of 65,000 H-1B visas, which are used up the day they are released in March.

Would calling this the “pre-emptive export of jobs overseas” make it any less attractive to economic protectionists?

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Filed under anglosphere, Caribbean, economics, education, Fiji, India, migration, South Africa, U.K., U.S., Uganda

by | 23 October 2008 · 9:50 pm

Siassi: A Culture of Maritime Trade in PNG

From Alice Pomponio’s “Seagulls Don’t Fly into the Bush: Cultural Identity and the Negotiations of Development on Mandok Island, Papua New Guinea” in Cultural Identity and Ethnicity in the Pacific, edited by Jocelyn Linnekin and Lin Poyer (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1990), pp. 51-52:

For the Siassi Islanders, trade implies sailing. Knowledge of the sea, winds, and stars is crucial to overseas sailing in the precarious Vitiaz and Dampier straits. In pre-European times men who were renowned sailors and good navigators were therefore highly regarded. Along with maritime knowledge, such a man would also possess the magical incantations to control the weather, wind, and seas, and in some cases, the sorcery by which to control or destroy his rivals. A traditional leader would combine as many elements as possible to expand his wisdom and enhance his renown. However, merely having the talent or the personality to lead is not enough: one must demonstrate that power continually. Before pacification and missionization, demonstrating prowess entailed aggressive overseas trade, navigation and sailing skills, competitive feasting, sorcery, multilingualism, and social networking to establish and maintain trade alliances. Definitions of manhood stressed creative abilities, mental shrewdness, knowledge concerning economic investment/return ratios, and manipulation of social relationships. Finally, all of these displays and trading exploits must be carried out with the aplomb of a “man of wisdom.”

Out of this constant travel and trade emerged a big-man status system oriented not toward the accumulation of land and wealth in a sedentary environment, but toward manipulation and management of others’ products through mobility and trade—that is, the control and redistribution of wealth. I call this kind of system “middleman culture.” Though recognizably Melanesian, it is distinct from the more familiar patterns of entrepreneurship studied to date in Melanesia in three crucial respects: (1) the relative lack of land or utilization of land resources (horticulture and pig husbandry) as a basis for the local economy; (2) the emphasis on trade as a primary, rather than secondary, feature of the subsistence economy, and as a standard for evaluating entrepreneurial talents and achievements; and (3) a social and distributive system that militates against the accumulation of significant amounts of wealth and favors instead the control and manipulation of goods, food, and people.

Siassi big-men are not “men of anger” or warriors. They are craftsmen, clever investors, and men of knowledge. They succeed not by overpowering their adversaries physically, but by outsmarting them—not by production, but by clever manipulation. Through generations of trading they have transformed a landless society of maverick immigrants into a patterned system of seagoing salesmen, trading their own and others’ products for a profit. This profit is then recycled into their own system of exchanges, politics, and prestige.

This sounds rather more benign than the cultures of maritime raiding that have also plagued the coasts and islands of so many parts of the globe, including PNG before the imposition of a pax Germanica in New Guinea and a pax Britannica in Papua.

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Filed under economics, Papua New Guinea, piracy, travel

by | 23 October 2008 · 8:56 pm

Lamarckian Identities in PNG

From James B. Watson’s chapter “Other people do other things: Lamarckian identities in Kainantu Subdistrict, Papua New Guinea” in Cultural Identity and Ethnicity in the Pacific, edited by Jocelyn Linnekin and Lin Poyer (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1990), pp. 17, 26:

The aboriginal peoples of Papua New Guinea’s Eastern Highlands are organized in autonomous polities, some with as few as one or two hundred members. Many if not most of these local peoples experience episodes of radical revision in their membership. Most groups are formed in a highly fluid sociopolitical field, intermittently marked by relocations, realignments, and the patriation of alien immigrants who have been expelled by hostile neighbors from their own lands elsewhere. Restless or disgruntled insiders split off to form new groups; refugee outsiders are recruited from time to time to reinforce the ranks of those remaining. To the literal-minded genealogist, the long-term kinship and continuity of each such group seem confused, even compromised.

A truncated local sense of history nevertheless contains the frequent events of fission and fusion. In spite of ongoing exchanges of personnel, a common and ostensibly continuous local identity immerses not only long-established elements of the community but, in time, the descendants of recent immigrants….

Over half a dozen languages are spoken in the immediate vicinity of Kainantu, and all the communities I resided in have close social ties to at least one community of alien speech. Often two or three other languages are represented in these linkages. Many communities of the vicinity have incorporated refugees who arrived speaking a language other than that of their hosts. With time, if the refugees remain, their original language may be lost, but probably not without a distinct residue of the sounds, words, attitudes, and cultural practices they brought with them. In some communities in the 1960s there were refugees or their descendants still speaking their original language, … resulting in their designation by the community (from Pidgin) as “hapkas” [half-caste].

What does this mean for language documentation and conservation efforts in the area? To whom does any particular language belong, and for how long?

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Filed under language, migration, Papua New Guinea

by | 12 October 2008 · 9:33 am

Numbami Kin Terminology, PNG

Speakers of the Numbami language in Papua New Guinea employ bifurcate merging, Iroquois-type kinship terminology. One of the major classificatory criteria of such a system is whether a chain of relationships crosses sex lines or stays within the same sex. For instance, siblings of the same sex (parallel siblings) are distinguished according to whether they are elder or younger than oneself (ego). Siblings of the opposite sex (cross-siblings) are not. Similarly, one’s father’s brothers and mother’s sisters are distinguished according to whether they are elder or younger than the respective parent, and their children (parallel cousins) are classified as either elder or younger parallel siblings in accordance with the relative age of their parents.

In contrast, relative age is not regularly distinguished for relatives linked across sex lines, such as one’s father’s sister’s children or mother’s brother’s children (cross-cousins). This lack of age-ranking among cross-cousins (and perhaps marriageability) may suggest why the gode-lu-gode (‘cousin-to-cousin’) relationship is considered the most open and easygoing kin relationship among the Numbami.

Nearly every major kin category is indicated by a pair of forms that distinguish female from male members of the same category. The term for females is usually derived from the base form by means of a suffix, usually -ewe, that is transparently related to ewa ‘woman, female’. (The nasal that often intervenes is discussed below.) Whenever there is a derived female-specific counterpart, the base form usually refers only to males, but it can also be used to refer to all members of the particular kinship status, whether male or female.

amba ‘great-grandfather’
ambanewe ‘great-grandmother’

tumbuna ‘grandson, grandfather’
tumbunewe ‘granddaughter, grandmother’

tama ‘father’ (somewhat archaic or technical in usage)
tina ‘mother’ (somewhat archaic or metaphorical in usage)

mama ‘father’ (both referential and vocative)
awa ‘mother’ (both referential and vocative)

mama bamo‘father’s elder brother, mother’s elder sister’s spouse’
awa bamo ‘mother’s elder sister, father’s elder brother’s spouse’

mama kae ‘father’s younger brother, mother’s younger sister’s spouse’
awa kae ‘mother’s younger sister, father’s younger brother’s spouse’

sika ‘elder (usually male) parallel sibling (father’s elder brother’s son or mother’s elder sister’s son)’
sikanewe ‘elder female parallel sibling (father’s elder brother’s daughter or mother’s younger sister’s daughter)’

kapa ‘younger (usu. male) parallel sibling (father’s younger brother’s son or mother’s younger sister’s son)’
kapowe ‘younger female parallel sibling (father’s younger brother’s daughter or mother’s younger sister’s daughter)’

lu ‘cross-sibling (woman’s brother or male parallel cousin)’
lunewe ‘female cross-sibling (man’s sister or female parallel cousin)’

gode ‘cross-cousin (mother’s brother’s or father’s sister’s child, usu. male)’
godenewe ‘female cross-cousin (mother’s brother’s or father’s sister’s daughter)’

asowa ‘spouse (husband or wife)’
asosika ‘spouse of one’s elder parallel sibling’

asokapa ‘spouse of one’s younger parallel sibling’
iwa ‘spouse’s (usu. wife’s) cross-sibling’ (Tok Pisin tambu)

iwanewe ‘husband’s cross-sibling’
kolamundu ‘cross-sibling’s spouse’ (Tok Pisin tambu)

wowa ‘uncle (mother’s brother or father’s sister’s husband)’
wawe ‘aunt (father’s sister or mother’s brother’s wife)’

natu ‘offspring, son (of self or parallel sibling)’
natunewe ‘daughter (of self or parallel sibling)’

tamota ‘nephew (son of cross-sibling or cross-cousin)’
tamotewe ‘niece (daughter of cross-sibling or cross-cousin)’

The female suffix is most likely responsible for preserving the last vestiges of an intervening set of possessive suffixes that have been lost everywhere except on a handful of these kin terms. Even where the suffixes survive, however, they do not constitute a full paradigm (only singulars) and are highly variable in usage. Moreover, they are always redundant. Except when they appear on vocatives, they are always accompanied by the preposed possessive pronouns. Whenever there is doubt about which form to use, the ending -n-ewe, which used to signal a 3rd person singular possessor, appears to be the safest choice.

naŋgi lu ‘my (usu. male) cross-sibling’
anami lu ‘thy (usu. male) cross-sibling’
ena lu ‘his/her (usu. male) cross-sibling’

naŋgi luŋgewe/lunewe ‘my female cross-sibling’
anami lumewe/lunewe ‘thy female cross-sibling’
ena lunewe ‘his/her female cross-sibling’

naŋgi gode ‘my (usu. male) cross-cousin’
anami gode ‘thy (usu. male) cross-cousin’
ena gode ‘his/her (usu. male) cross-cousin’

naŋgi godenewe/godeŋgewe ‘my female cross-cousin’
anami godenewe/godemewe ‘thy female cross-cousin’
ena godenewe ‘his/her female cross-cousin’

It may not be coincidental that the word bumewe ‘European[s], white[s]’ looks like a term for females. Compare Iwal pupkawe ‘European’, avie ‘woman’, but Jabêm bômbôm ‘European’, bômbômò ‘European female’.

Bifurcate-merging terminology also shows up in older varieties of Tok Pisin (and other Pacific pidgins/creoles/Englishes), where for some speakers brata (< ‘brother’) can mean ‘parallel sibling’, while susa (< Eng. ‘European’) can mean ‘cross-sibling’ (as defined above). So a female might be referring to her brother when she says susa bilong mi and might be referring to her sister when she says brata bilong mi.

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Filed under family, language, Papua New Guinea

by | 11 October 2008 · 10:18 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Susokman

From Village on the Edge: Changing Times in Papua New Guinea, by Michael French Smith (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2002), pp. 164-165:

In the mid-1990s, Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington interviewed dozens of Wewak’s more affluent Papua New Guinean residents, including “lawyers, doctors, nurses, bankers, clergy, teachers, managers, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, army personnel [and] civil servants,” both male and female. They also mingled with them at Rotary Club events, the Yacht Club, and the Wewak Resort and Country Club where these business and professional people went to socialize and network….

[I]n order to take part in the life of the urban elite, Papua New Guineans generally have to weaken their ties to their village kin. In villagers’ eyes, attending the university, working for the government, or habitually wearing shoes and socks should not dissolve the bonds of kinship. But the wearers of shoes and socks (the susokman, as they are called in Tok Pisin) find that it is difficult to live up to village definitions of their kinship obligations and simultaneously provide for the basics of urban life—housing, food, business clothing—and take part in urban elite social life, including the professional networking that goes on in restaurants, in clubs, and on the golf course. Gewertz and Errington argue that villagers tend to define success as meeting a wide variety of kinship obligations; but for the urban elite, success means providing an affluent life for one’s immediate family, and that usually means putting strict limits on generosity to more distant kin.

Village kin may see this as lack of generosity, but they are judging by the moral ideals of village society. In terms of those ideals, material wealth is for creating and maintaining social bonds, and wealth gained at the expense of social ties is tainted. But what looks like antisocial greed to the village is necessity and prudence to the urban elite. If they fall on hard times because they have given unstintingly to their village kin, their urban peers will not praise their generosity; they will criticize their moral weakness. To join the elite, then, Papua New Guineans have had to work hard; but they have also needed good luck, and they have had to enter a different world of morality.

When I arrived in Papua New Guinea in 1976 to start linguistic fieldwork, the first thing I did was to throw away the worn-out tennis shoes I had traveled in. All during my student years in Hawai‘i during the 1970s, I rarely wore any footwear but Japanese zori (rubber slippers). When Hawai‘i Loa College required caps and gowns when I graduated in 1973, I went barefoot beneath my gown.

The second whimsical thing I did in PNG, on the taxi ride in from the airport to Port Moresby, was to stop by Koki Market to buy betel nut. (I got some for the taxi driver, too.) It was my first chance to use the Tok Pisin I had studied in grad school to prepare for fieldwork.

I arrived from Australia during Easter holidays and had trouble reaching my contact at UPNG, so I spent the first night at a downtown hotel, where I discovered that the dining room required shoes and socks. That was a new way to distinguish the elites from the hoi polloi in the newly independent nation, since discrimination on the basis of race was now prohibited. That evening I decided to order supper to my room.

Betel chewing was also prohibited inside the hotel, so before dinner I took the makings of several betel quids—areca nuts, betel pepper catkins, and slake-lime powder—outside onto the near-empty holiday streets. A young Papua New Guinea man soon came up to chat and I offered him a chew. It was my second chance to practice Tok Pisin in country, but it ended soon after I figured out what my new acquaintance meant when he asked me, “Masta, yu laik takim kok o nogat?” His native language must have been one in which [t] and [s] are allophones of a single phoneme, which sounds like [s] in front of /i/ (as in Kiribati) but sounds like [t] elsewhere. When I belatedly deciphered his accent and understood his intent, I laughed it off with “Ah, nogat ya!” and turned my unshod feet back toward the haven of the shod and socked.

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Filed under democracy, economics, education, language, Papua New Guinea

by | 7 October 2008 · 9:13 pm

Pentecostal Feminism in PNG

From Village on the Edge: Changing Times in Papua New Guinea, by Michael French Smith (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2002), p. 133:

Age aside, women tended to find charismatic worship more appealing than men. They liked the “freedom” said Kauref, using the English word. Although the principal charismatic leaders in Kragur were men, there seemed to be no barriers to anyone plunging enthusiastically into the praying and singing or stepping forward to offer an individual prayer or testimony. Women as well as men, I was told, could speak in tongues, and some could interpret such speech.

Pentecostal worship has made new space in religious life for both women and the young in other parts of the world as well. Pentecostal theology, writes Joel Robbins, “tends to downplay the importance of all identities except that of believer.” And the worship itself, as Harvey Cox points out, focuses on “breaking out of the constraints and limitations of everyday life,” including the social constraints, and communion with the Holy Spirit is typically open to all. In many parts of the world, women in particular have seized the opportunities this affords, and they are often found in the forefront of the Pentecostal movement.

Kauref approved of this equality in worship, but it did not please everyone. The pacing, gesticulating woman I saw at the first prayer meeting had looked every inch a leader of the proceedings. She turned out to be someone I knew, but, many years older now, I did not immediately recognize her. When, the next day, I asked Paypai who the female “leader” was, he practically spat out the words “She’s no leader!” Kragur people take offense at any pretensions to leadership they see as unjustified, but my guess is that Paypai found the idea of a woman as a prominent public leader especially galling.

According to Brother Pawil, some Kragur women’s enthusiasm for charismatic worship had angered their husbands. In addition to weekly evening services, there were also occasional prayer gatherings that brought together worshippers from several villages. These were church-sanctioned events in which women participated equally with men. They also took women away from home and their endless chores for entire days at a time. Pawil’s sympathies were clearly with the women. “Women have been controlled by men for a long time.” he told me (in English). “This offers anew freedom from male-dominated society. The long hours of prayer [and the women’s absences from home] are a way of indirectly telling men they can go wash clothes and so on.”

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Filed under democracy, Papua New Guinea, religion

by | 4 October 2008 · 3:48 pm

Mistrust All the Way Up in PNG

From Village on the Edge: Changing Times in Papua New Guinea, by Michael French Smith (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2002), pp. 65-66:

Many Papua New Guineans probably were easily convinced that the World Bank was up to no good because they had no faith in their own government, which had sought help from the bank. In fact, many private citizens I spoke with in 1995 distrusted the Papua New Guinea government even more than the World Bank. They mistrusted not just the current government but the government as an institution. The staff of local-level government organizations expressed deep distrust of every level of government above their own, and some village representatives to these local bodies did not trust the staff. People in provincial towns spoke with disdain of the “people in Moresby” the capital, who were “living in a different world” as one activist put it. Activists in rural areas sometimes made the same complaint about those in the provincial towns. As a representative of a rural women’s organization in the East Sepik Province told me, “the bigshots in Wewak” [pop. 25,000!] did not understand what life was like still farther afield.

Such criticisms might sound familiar almost anywhere, but mistrust of government has a special flavor in Papua New Guinea, and this distinctive and pungent mistrust provided fertile ground for the reaction to the bank’s ERP [= Economic Recovery Program] policy prescriptions. In light of conditions in 1995, many Papua New Guineans felt that the government—not just the sitting government, but every government since independence—simply had not proven itself. Many also felt that the elite Papua New Guineans who ran the government treated the citizens of the country unfairly and unequally. Europeans working in Papua New Guinea or reporting on events there often complained of corruption in the higher circles, but they were no more vocal on this issue than rank-and-file Papua New Guineans themselves.

Many Papua New Guineans probably also distrusted the government because they still saw it as a foreign entity. Papua New Guineans had taken the tiller at independence, but the boat itself was built on the European model. The electoral and parliamentary political system was nothing like precolonial political systems, and these differing systems were only awkwardly coordinated.

Above all, the idea that the people of Papua New Guinea were all members of a single nation and that this identity transcended narrower affiliations—with family, kinship group, village, and speakers of the same language—had not taken hold. There had been no prolonged, popular struggle for independence in which disparate groups throughout the country might have forged a sense of unity or acquired a stake in new national institutions. The nation, too, was an unfamiliar concept to many. Indeed, some Papua New Guinea peoples did not regard themselves as having ceded their autonomy and accepted subordination to the greater power of the state. In fact, to some the state appeared positively menacing. In the 1990s, Papua New Guineans caught up in Christian revival movements in parts of the country associated the state with the Antichrist.

Doesn’t sound that different from everywhere else on earth these days.

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Filed under democracy, economics, NGOs, Papua New Guinea

by | 29 September 2008 · 10:35 pm

Anthropologist Rethinks Missionaries, PNG

From Village on the Edge: Changing Times in Papua New Guinea, by Michael French Smith (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2002), pp. 16-17, 20-21:

My desire to avoid areas of strong Catholic Mission influence was rather misguided, because Christianity was ubiquitous in Papua New Guinea and an integral part of the social and cultural change I intended to study. Just a few years later, in 1980, the Pacific Council of Churches would report that 85 percent of all Papua New Guineans considered themselves Christians. Catholicism was the dominant denomination in the East Sepik. German Catholic missionaries of the Society of the Divine Word entered the Sepik region in 1896, just a dozen years after the German New Guinea Company began the first sustained European effort to establish a commercial presence in the region. In Wewak itself, the mission headquarters at Wirui was a local landmark. It was the seat of the bishop of Wewak and headquarters of a diocese that covered most of the province and was staffed by approximately 227 priests, brothers, sisters, and lay personnel. Most of these mission staff were from overseas. Nevertheless, Catholicism was clearly a significant part of the local scene.

Many anthropologists have seriously neglected the importance of Christianity in Melanesia. Perhaps, like some tourists, they have been looking for “the last unknown” and have found Christianity insufficiently exotic. Whatever the reason, they have often failed to recognize the extent to which Melanesians have made Christianity their own. I harbored some personal prejudices against Christian missionary activity. Raised in a liberal, church-going Protestant family, I acquired a stern Protestant Christian conscience—enough in itself to account for an aversion to churches—but I failed in my efforts to believe in God in more than a terminally abstract sense. I also found the idea of going around the world denouncing indigenous beliefs and raising the specter of eternal damnation—as many Christian missionaries have done in Papua New Guinea and elsewhere—extremely distasteful.

I had little firsthand knowledge of Christian missionaries in the Pacific. One of my uncles, however, had been sent to Australia as a Mormon missionary in the first decade of the twentieth century, when he was only seventeen years old. He had left school before he was ten to help support his neglected branch of a polygamous family and, as he told the story, he set off on his mission ignorant, illiterate, and reluctant. He left the Mormon Church long before I came to know him, and the stories he told of his misadventures in Australia were very funny and portrayed the missionary endeavor in a most unflattering light. Told that God would put words in his mouth, he had received no such assistance and had, he claimed, turned more people against Mormonism than any missionary before or since.

Fortunately, despite such prejudices and influences I managed to keep a somewhat open mind. This allowed me to learn as the year progressed that Catholicism was very much apart of the local culture in Kragur and that there was no simple way to describe or evaluate its contribution. Kragur villagers’ own understanding of Catholicism tended to encourage the kind of painful self-doubts colonialism often sows. Kragur people also, however, had found ways to use Catholicism to assert their independence and moral worth. Looking too sharply askance at Catholicism in Kragur would have made it very difficult for me to understand life there in general.

Keeping my anti-mission bias in check also let me accept, without feeling too hypocritical, the considerable assistance and hospitality that mission personnel offered me. This began with a free passage to Kairiru on the St. John’s Seminary boat, a small, hard-used inboard with an ungainly open wheelhouse. We arrived late in the day at St. John’s, where the staff offered me a hot shower, a clean-sheeted bed for the night, a cold bottle of good homemade beer, and a seat at the dinner table. Such hospitality took some of the edge off my prejudices….

I also saw that many of the St. Xavier’s [school] staff had no interest in imposing their own religious beliefs on their students. Largely members of Catholic orders, principally the Society of Mary, they took their religion very seriously; but they did not seem alarmed that some of their students, themselves raised in Catholic villages, asked pointed and skeptical questions about the faith.

Had I known more of either Catholicism or the mission in Papua New Guinea I would have been aware that both had changed significantly since the early years of the twentieth century. In those days, missionaries conducted mass baptisms of the living and sometimes baptized the dying by stealth and tallied the souls they thus saved. Since then, the Catholic Church and the Catholic Mission in Papua New Guinea had been moving away from emphasizing individual conversion, religious ritual, and the veneration of religious artifacts toward what some of my mission acquaintances in the East Sepik called “building Christian communities.” And the daily business of many Catholic Mission personnel I met in and around Wewak was not gaining converts but running health and education programs.

I was to find that some Kragur people were not comfortable with the mission’s diminishing emphasis on religious rites and were themselves rather intense in their devotion to Catholic ritual. Had I first come to Kragur only six months later I would have encountered along the way rather dramatic evidence of many villagers’ deep involvement with Catholic rites and symbols: the statue of the Virgin Mary that Kragur people would erect in a broad clearing at the top of the trail over the mountain in April 1976. Villagers passing the statue on their travels often paused to stand reverently in front of it and recite the rosary.

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Filed under education, Papua New Guinea, religion, scholarship, U.S.

by | 22 September 2008 · 6:44 am

Combining Manner and Path in One Clause

Speakers of most languages have the means to describe a motion event in such a way as to indicate both the Manner of motion and Path of motion in a single clause. Some of the most interesting work along these lines has been done by Leonard Talmy, who compared semantic structures in two utterly different languages, English and Atsugewi, for his doctoral dissertation at the University of California at Berkeley in 1972. I first heard a bit about his work in a course on lexical semantics taught by Charles Fillmore at the 1977 LSA Summer Institute in Honolulu, when I was a grad student just back from fieldwork in Papua New Guinea.

In subsequent work, Talmy (1985) proposed an interesting typology of motion events based on the encoding of Manner and Path. The seminal insight can be summarized thus: Languages like Spanish and Japanese tend to encode Path in the main verb when describing motion events, while relegating Manner to a satellite role, expressed, for example, by gerundive constructions. An English analog would be ‘They entered the house running’. In contrast, languages like German or Finnish tend to encode Manner in the main verb, while relegating Path to a satellite role, expressed, for instance, by adpositional (prepositional or postpositional) phrases. An English analog would be ‘They ran into the house’.

The language on which I did fieldwork, Numbami, renders motion events by means of verb serialization, encoding both Manner and Path in fully inflected verbs, which perform many of the functions of adpositions or adverbs in other languages. However, it resembles Japanese in requiring a Path verb when describing motion events (see Shibatani 2003). The Manner verb sounds strange conveying motion without the support of a Path verb. Numbami is Austronesian, and Talmy (2000) notes that Polynesian languages (and possibly other Austronesian languages) resemble Japanese in requiring a Path main verb when describing motion events.

JAPANESE

*Kodomo-wa gakkoo-ni arui-ta.
 child-TOP school-to walk-PAST
‘The child(ren) walked to school.’

Kodomo-wa gakkoo-ni arui-te it-ta.
child-TOP school-to walk-ing go-PAST
‘The child(ren) went to school walking.’

NUMBAMI

*Ekapa-kolapa ti-dodomu su lumana.
 girls-boys   3P-run    to school
‘The children ran to school.’

Ekapa-kolapa ti-dodomu ti-wesa su lumana.
girls-boys   3P-run    3P-go to school
‘The children ran off to school.’

MOVE verbs

Numbami verbs describing Manner of motion include -dodomu ‘run’, -kota ‘swim, wade’, -lapa goleme ‘row’ (lit. ‘beat oar’), -lapa woya ‘dance’ (lit. ‘beat dance’), -lowa ‘fly’, -nggewe ‘chase, hunt’, -ngguni ‘punt, pole’, -nzolo ‘scatter, scram’, -paandalowa ‘walk’ (< -pai ‘do, make’ + andalowa ‘path, road’, akin to Indonesian jalan), -so golonga ‘dive’ (lit. ‘stab deepwater’), -tatala ‘sink’, -usi ‘tread, step’, -wose ‘paddle’ (akin to Hawaiian hoe), and -yele ‘steer, sail’. We can classify all these verbs as examples of a prototype verb we can label MOVE.

But Path itself is a complex notion that involves at least three components: starting point, trajectory, and destination. Three classes of verbal prototypes that often co-occur in Numbami renditions of motion events are: GO, AIM, and REACH.

GO verbs: Deictic directionals

Numbami deictic verbs distinguish three directions: -ma ‘come toward speaker’, -uwa ‘go toward addressee’ (glossed here ‘go.to.2’), and -wasa ‘go away from either speaker or addressee’. They are ubiquitous in Numbami discourse—although -uwa ‘go toward addressee’ is by far the rarest of the lot. Not only do these verbs cover the functional range of ‘come’ and ‘go’ in most other languages; they also add directionality to manner-of-motion (MOVE) verbs, and deictic directionality to other directional (AIM) verbs. Finally, they also perform functions similar to directional adverbs such as here and there in English (or hither, thither, hence, thence, and yonder in more archaic English).

Inami bingsu   Lene   i-woti i-ma.
Our missionary Lehner 3S-descend 3S-come
‘Our (excl.) missionary Lehner came down toward us.’

Mana-paandalowa bouna    mana-uwa.
1XP.FUT-walk    overland 1XP.FUT-go.to.2
‘We’ll (excl.) walk overland in your direction.’

Although deictic directional verbs in many languages are intransitive, Numbami GO verbs can take overt direct objects, so long as (a) those objects indicate target locations, and (b) those target locations are compatible with the deictic target direction of each verb: toward speaker, toward addressee, or away from either. Unlike most Austronesian languages, Numbami makes no morphological distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs.

Another important point to note about GO verbs in Numbami is that they denote movement toward a target location, but make no claim about arrival at that target. Thus, ti-wesa Lae (lit. ‘they went Lae’) is more precisely translated ‘they left for Lae’ or ‘they went Lae-ward’ instead of ‘They went to Lae’. The presence of a REACH verb or preposition is required to specify arrival at the endpoint of a path.

AIM verbs: Other directionals

The other directional verbs resemble the deictic directionals but lack any correlation with first, second, or third person. They include -kawewe ‘steer, turn toward’, -kole ‘turn around’, -leleu ‘return’, -pi ‘ascend, climb up’, -woti ‘descend, climb down’, -sakiya ‘embark, climb up onto’, -kosa ‘disembark, climb down from’, -sake ‘ascend into’, -supula ‘round (a point)’, -weke ‘leave, abandon’, -yowa ‘move aside’.

Balus    i-lowa i-leleu   i-ma.
airplane 3S-fly 3S-return 3S-come
‘The airplane flew back here.’

Ma-kota  tina  ma-sakiya teulu.
1XP-wade river 1XP-embark side
‘We went through the river and up the other side.’

REACH verbs/prepositions

The roots of two specialized REACH verbs in Numbami also serve as prepositions when they lack subject prefixes: -su(wa) ‘reach; arrive at, onto, into (a place)’ is matched by the more general locative/goal preposition su(wa) ‘at, onto, (up)on, to’; and the fairly rare verb -ndenga ‘reach; arrive at (a person)’ is matched by the far more common generalized dative preposition de(nga) ‘to, at’. The same root -ndenga appears in the multifunctional verb –ndengama ‘reach, match, suffice; be possible’, often intertranslatable with Tok Pisin inap (< Eng. enough).

Other verbs of motion can serve as REACH verbs when they occur at the ends of path constructions, as in the examples below. When the REACH component of a motion event is represented by a preposition rather than its corresponding verb, the resulting construction may still be considered a Path construction, even though it may not be considered an serial verb construction unless it also contains at least two inflected verbs.

Wangga i-supula bubusu i-solonga molou.
canoe  3S-round point  3S-enter cove
‘The canoe rounded the point into the cove.’

Wa-dodomu wa-mi   wa-su    nanggi kapala.
1S-run    1S-stay 1S-reach my house
‘I kept running on down to my house.’

Numbami, like many other New Guinea-area languages, thus relies heavily on verb serialization to render complex events by means of a sequence of simplex verbs. In the terminology of Talmy (2000), verbs in languages like Numbami can be said to exhibit low conflation—in other words, minimal incorporation or lexicalization of multifaceted verbal events into individual verbs. For instance, Numbami has no equivalent of the English verb fetch, which conflates three aspects of a motion event—going, getting, and returning—into a single verb. In Numbami, you must use three verbs to render the same event.

REFERENCES

Shibatani, M., 2003, Directional verbs in Japanese. In E. Shay and U. Seibert, eds, Motion, direction and location in languages: In honor of Zygmunt Frajzyngier, 287–297. Typological Studies in Language, vol. 56. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Talmy, L., 1985. Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In T. Shopen, ed., Language typology and syntactic description, vol. 3, Grammatical categories and the lexicon, 57–149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Talmy, L., 2000, Toward a cognitive semantics, vol. 2, Typology and process in concept structuring. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

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by | 18 September 2008 · 9:22 pm

Underwater Pyramids in Okinawa?

Somebody who is trying to market an underwater diving business in Okinawa has been interviewed on video about a new discovery of “10,000 year old pyramids” in the offshore waters near Yonaguni, no doubt within easy reach of their embarkation point.

“One of the greatest discoveries in the history of archaeology was made last summer, off Japan There, spread over an amazing 311 miles on the ocean floor, are the well-preserved remains of an ancient city. Or at the very least, a number of closely related sites.

In the waters around Okinawa and beyond to the small island of Yonaguni, divers located eight separate locations beginning in March 1995. That first sighting was equivocal – a provocative, squared structure, so encrusted with coral that its manmade identity was uncertain. Then, as recently as the summer of 1996, a sports diver accidentally discovered a huge, angular platform about 40 feet below the surface, off the southwestern shore of Okinawa. The feature’s artificial provenance was beyond question. Widening their search, teams of more divers found another, different monument nearby. Then another, and another. They beheld long streets, grand boulevards, majestic staircases, magnificent archways, enormous blocks of perfectly cut and fitted stone – all harmoniously welded together in a linear architecture unlike anything they had ever seen before….

One would imagine that such a mind-boggling find would be the most exciting piece of news an archaeologist could possibly hope to learn. Even so, outside of the “Ancient American” and CNN’s single report, the pall of silence covering all the facts about Okinawa’s structures screens them from view more effectively then their location at the bottom of the sea. Why? How can this appalling neglect persist in the face of a discovery of such unparalleled magnitude? At the risk of accusations of paranoia, one might conclude that a real conspiracy of managed information dominates America’s well-springs of public knowledge.”

Indeed! Why trust “managed information” when you can so easily find the mismanaged variety, which is way more interesting? Ancient American is obviously a very rigorous and reputable source. In their own words:

Our task is to translate often complex research into accessible, attractive language in a visually appealing format ordinary readers can understand and enjoy. Ancient American writers and artists appeal as much to the imagination as to the intellect in the conviction that mankind’s past belongs to all inhabitants of the Earth; it is not the exclusive property of establishment academics. Each issue features articles submitted by the world’s leading authorities on prehistory in clear, non-technical language, and illustrated by a wealth of original color photographs and artwork published nowhere else.

Features include reports of Scottish mariners who sculpted the images of New Mexican cactus in a Highland church nearly a century before Columbus was born, and Vikings who left evidence of their visits behind in Minnesota and Oklahoma. Our research traces influences from 4th Millennium BC Japan in Ecuador, and prehistoric African themes throughout the earliest Mexican civilizations. We describe Semitic visitors, whose trek across ancient South Dakota is commemorated by native American Indians in four bluffs still referred to as “the Hebrew Brothers”. Our writers examine a huge stone wall underwater 55 miles east of Miami, Florida, together with a Phoenician altar for human sacrifice found in Chicago, Illinois. These are only some of the puzzling enigmas showcased in every issue of Ancient American magazine.

CNN’s Worldview coverage in 2000 (surprisingly!) includes a good bit more skepticism about the age of the structures and the extent to which they are manmade.

Masaaki Kimura has a different story, based on the theory that the Japanese archipelago was once part of continental Asia. He says the most likely reason it and other similar sites nearby are now underwater is because they suddenly sank after an event like an earthquake.

MASAAKI KIMURA, RYUKYU UNIVERSITY (through translator): From our investigations of surrounding organisms, such as coral, we estimate this ruin was made approximately 2,000 to 3,000 years ago.

KAMIMURA: A geologist by training, Kimura says he’s found evidence of chiseling, even a stone instrument.

(on camera): Kimura’s findings already have locals excited about the opportunities. Okinawa’s governor says if there’s more conclusive evidence, he’d like to propose the ruins for designation as a world heritage site…

(voice-over): … a finding that would be a boon for local tourism.

World-renowned dive enthusiast Jacques Mayol is already convinced.

JACQUES MAYOL, DIVER: My impression is that it’s a natural sight, of course, it’s a natural sight but that has been improved, enhanced, embellished, if you want, by man. We don’t know who did it, what kind of men did it, how long ago they did that.

KAMIMURA: Questions that only seem to add to the rock’s intrigue for those that believe it’s more than just a natural phenomenon.

Marina Kamimura, CNN, Okinawa, Japan.

via Japundit‘s Japan News Junkie

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