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Kokua viewer hover height12/17/2023 After all, the man who was a circular migrant was only in town long enough to save the money that would allow him to go back to the village, carry out a fully traditional exchange, and take up a fully traditional life. ![]() But I was also aware-rightly or wrongly-that these were overlays, a thin frosting on a cake that was traditional. Of course I knew that villagers near urban areas had become urban villagers and those from further afield had experience as migrant workers and as temporary urban residents. Were accustomed and whose recording equipment was not of sufficiently high fidelity. Of course I was aware of the anthropological oral tradition of villagers disappointed with the researcher whose conventional camera did not produce photographs in the 30 seconds to which they This reaction to the partiality of conventional anthropological description is not one that I could have predicted, for that partiality did not really become apparent until I thought anthropologically about Ponam Island, and hence until I had to try to reconcile what I confronted with what I had read about Melanesian societies. But to present them this way would have been to stress the separation between me and them, between Western society and village life, and to ignore the institutions, practices, habits, beliefs, and constraints that contradicted that separation, that made them not alien people in an alien place and time but that made them something more prosaic: another set of people living in the world. They had elaborate kinship organization, extensive ceremonial exchange, clouds of ancestral spirits, and all the rest. Certainly Ponams were fit subjects for conventional ethnographic presentation. What did I see? I saw a society that was firmly situated in the late twentieth century, a set of people who were not at all the inward-facing and isolated villagers who seem to populate the societies presented in so much Melanesian ethnography. But underneath what I say there, motivating my arguments, has been a growing sense that what many were writing about Melanesia did not resemble, describe, or even really refer to what I saw in my own fieldwork, on Ponam Island, in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea, together with a growing sense that what I saw there may not have been all that unusual. ![]() In the Introduction I lay out that frustration in academic language and with proper regard for academic form. This collection developed out of a growing frustration with the way anthropologists have thought and written about Melanesian societies. Preferred Citation: Carrier, James G., editor History and Tradition in Melanesian Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1992 1992.
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