[Anthropgrad] Anthropology seminar 3 September

[Melinda Hinkson]

Anthropology Seminar, 9.30 am Wednesday September 3, Coombs Seminar Room
A
 
Mark Mosko, Anthropology, RSPAS 
 
The Fractal Yam: Recursive Holography and Human Agency in the Trobriand
Islands.

Anthropologists have long appreciated that animals are 'good to think'
(Levi-Strauss 1966; Tambiah 1968). In this essay I ponder whether plants
might be good to think too, and particularly whether there is any sense
in asking if plants (along with animals) might also be 'good to act'.
The botanical metaphor of 'base', 'branch' and 'tip' animates the
'origin structures' of many if not most societies of the Austronesian
world. Less attention has been directed at indigenous elaborations of
base-branch-tip in other cultural domains of the region. This seminar
traces such ramifications through numerous dimensions of the Trobriand
culture based partly on new ethnographic data collected at Omarakana
village, the home of the Tabalu Paramount Chief. I argue that the
recursiveness of base-branch-tip across contexts is fractally structured
- borrowing a notion from chaos theory. Here the production of 'fruit'
from every categorical 'tip' becomes the condition or 'base' for further
transformations. In this way, the Austronesian botanical metaphor serves
as the cultural template for a variety of processes including human
social action - what I term 'action scenarios'. Re-examining several
Trobriand cultural contexts in this manner sheds new interpretive light
on many topics of long-standing anthropological interest (e.g. the
production, display and exchange of yams and other values, the
classification of village and garden spaces, human procreation, the
relation of dala 'subclan' to valu 'village', and kula and sagali
mortuary exchange). In particular, I suggest that the
base-body-tip-fruit scenario structures human agency as it is understood
by Trobriands, thereby providing a theoretical alternative to Munn's
(1986) phenomenological treatment of value transformations in the
northern Massim.  

All welcome.