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Men, money and machines : the making of a modern society in highland New Guinea

University of British Columbia

The Siane are a Highland New Guinea tribe who represent, in their modest way, many of the issues and arguments surrounding the unequal meeting of village and kinship encapsulated societies with the imperium of the world money-economy. The thesis is directed to the question of identifying change, and those volatile elements within the contact situation which precipitate movement in otherwise static traditional economies; and to understanding in what sense change can be something that is planned for. R.E. Salisbury, from whose book "From Stone to Steel" it develops, argues with an economist's sense of axiom that the Siane are free to decide the lineaments of their future society, in as much as the act of choice is the matrix within which economic and social organization takes form; and he searches for the structuring of Siane choices in terms of the competition of ends and means. His postulations of a certain order of development founder, however, on their own test case. This is the attempt to ascertain the economic potential of the steel axe - which reveals an unexpected preference for investing not in the increment of material wealth, but in a ceremonious trade in shell "valuables". Closer attention to this phenomenon discloses a highly politicized network of debt integrating Siane socially and economically; and the analytic point made concerns the logical primary of the notion of exchange as the systematizing factor in society. In particular, the "codifications" of the medium by which exchange activity takes effect are shown to differ empirically in respect to the degree that choice is a value of a transaction. It is the substitution of one medium (native valuables) by another (modern money) that in Siane begins the processes of cultural and social change and holds out the possibility of sustained economic growth, though this raises problems both about specifying the nature of money in relation to different social systems, and about the sort of pattern which at this incipient stage might be discernible in the fluxions of recent events. Much of the reasoning is pursued with reference to the literature in transactional and symbolic analysis; while the themes of money, its impact on subsistence systems, and the moralities subsumed by money exchanges, are especially those of Burridge and Belshaw. A subsidiary theme, included as the more cogent test case, is the Cargo Cult: for in New Guinea the presence of a Cult confirms a process of cultural re-evaluation. The features of cargoism give scope to theorists of a contrary persuasion - Lawrence, Worsley, White and Steward are discussed - who interpret social history deterministically, or who would see man as a tool of his own technology. The Siane material shows, though, that the manner in which a material resource feeds into, or can influence, economic organization is restricted by conventions that govern the relations of people. Beyond this, the criticism of their respective standpoints flows from the same inspiration with which Victor Hugo once wrote: "There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world and that is an idea whose time has come". In Siane the watershed was reached in two ideas conjointly, both finding their locus in the symbolic properties of modern money. These axe the conception of a factorial as opposed to binary expression of social value, and the realization by individuals that the power of self-determination they can activate varies relative to this variation of social condition. Though Salisbury denies evidence of Gargoism, the conclusion suggests the inevitability that Siane is riven by millenarian stirrings.

Text

2010-03-17

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/22035

Anthropology

University of British Columbia

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