The South Pacific: in Fiction, Film, and Culture

Prof. Bruce Harvey

Review Sheet for M. Sahlin's excerpt from How Natives Think;

 or, How to Make Obscure Academic Writing Fun (I Hope)

158                   --classification is "an interested selection of relevant perceptible attributes out of all of those possible" (=we categorize according to practical need or ideology; if you need to know about frogs, for poison say, you'll have many words for different frog scents)

                        --Western science uses "taxonomy" that "pretends to be determined by things in and of themselves" & "systematic biology would be the language of nature itself … a self-expression of nature in the form of human speech" (=the West thinks of scientific categories of nature as being "real," but thinks of native taxonomies as being fanciful.   Ponder this: are there categories of nature that are "really there"?)

159                   --native categories "are embedded in a total cosmology from which it is possible to abstract them as things-in-themselves only at the cost of their social identities" (= you cannot look at a native concept of a plant, animal, etc. without locating that plant or animal within an elaborate cultural fabric.  Modern science proclaims the opposite—one goal of the Enlightenment (1700-1800, roughly) was to create objective encyclopedias of knowledge; i.e., Linnaeus

160                   --example: Kalam (a New Guinea native group) organize natural species by distance from domestic space and from underground to vertical/arboreal zones.   Household has refuse and rotting corpses nearby; cleanliness and regeneration occurs away from house in trees ("the clean bones are finally deposited in a tree a the forest edge"—so, say, Captain Cook sees piles of bones far away from village and says "yuk!"; you, as knowledgeable anthropologist would say, "ah, Captain Cook Sir, the natives believe sanctity and regeneration occurs in the locales away from the palm-frond houses…").  You also might say to Cook, as it were, "ah, Sir, don't eat that lizard… the natives only like to eat clean tree food.  Also, don't eat other ground-scampering food; it decays; let the women eat it.  But if you can find a big rat in a tree, cook it; big rats in trees are OK."

163                   --the long intellectual/religious tradition of Christianity, from Augustine and on, says "God is not of this world; God is transcendental; otherwise you'd 'trample a part of a god, and in slaying any living creature, a part of a god must be slaughtered.'"  Polynesians, though, see attributes of deities, or deities themselves, in, say, a pig or potato.

164                   --Christianity (which puts God into a transcendental sphere) conveniently fits with Western science which wants to see the world as materiality to be manipulated technologically (thus Sahlin: the Christian "cosmology is the metaphysical ground of" an "instrumental rationality").  Say that five times as fast as you can!

166                   --for the native: "the Southwest Kona wind was also a body of Lono, the sweet potato was a body of Lono, and Captain Cook".  A question: is it marvelous that the world and things in it would be full of presences, vital with deity power? Or would it be scary? We control our unpredictable world of economic depressions and hurricanes by technology and statistics; the native controls his/her world by attempting to propitiate the gods.   What causes more anxiety--fear of unpredictable natural events, or fear of angry gods?

169                   --"The coconut tree is a kino of Ku; it is a man with his head in the ground and his testicles in the air"—sounds sort of silly.  But try to feel the world being a criss-crossing, inter-involved set of presences—not some cold, detached swarming mass of atoms/materials that we manipulate to our utilitarian ends.  Well, you might say, "I look upon nature as being sublime and beautiful"; exactly so, only man/woman who is fundamentally alienated from the natural environment, who finds no social/god inter-relations with it, will look nostalgically upon nature and call it beautiful.  A native would not understand our aesthetics of landscape.   A sense of nature being beautiful assumes a detachment from it.  Of course, all this natural connectedness is not really more natural: "Forest birds whose feathers adorn warriors and chiefs' capes are again realizations of Ku. Ku: the term also means 'straight' or 'erect,' hence things high and straight in nature are manifestations of Ku's virility."  Got it—that which is sexist is not all that "natural"?

172                   --"The pig … also has its own manifestations, including varieties of banana, some fishes, and various other things that are food of pigs, have the color of pigs, the oiliness of pig fat, or otherwise remind Hawaiians of pigs by their shape, name, mode of action, habitat or habits" (=if time, we'll do an exercise in class about associative links).