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Oceania Newsletter 55, September 2009
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EINFÜHRUNG IN DIE ETHNOLOGIE
OZEANIENS Mückler, Hermann. 2009.
Einführung in die Ethnologie Ozeaniens.
Kulturgeschichte Ozeaniens No. 1. Wien: Facultas. 320 pages. EAN: 978-3-7089-0392-7 (pb). - reviewed by Thomas
Widlok, Radboud University in Nijmegen This book is an introduction
into the ethnography of Oceania, written primarily for German-speaking
students and with the explicit aim of raising their enthusiasm for the study
of this region. It remains to be seen in how far this aim will be achieved
and whether it has the desired effect on its prime target group. In the
meantime, and from the perspective of other potential readers, this volume
provides an excellent opportunity for reflecting on regionalism in
anthropological research more generally and with regard to Oceania in
particular. The book is
regional in scope and in a threefold way: 1. It explicitly focuses on
"Oceania" (minus Australia). 2. It addresses a German-speaking
audience. 3. It takes its perspective from the Vienna school of ethnology. It
is worthwhile to consider these aspects separately, even though they are
connected. Not everyone
will agree with the author's delimitation of Oceania, covering Melanesia,
Polynesia and Micronesia only, leaving out Australia. Even more disagreement
may arise on the justification for this exclusion, according to which
Australia used to be seen as being part of Oceania in the past but that this
now no longer makes sense (p. 15). Quite to the contrary, recent works on the
region (for instance contributions to Rumsey and Weiner 2001, 2004) have
explicitly emphasized the continuities between Melanesia and Australia in
such diverse fields as mythology and current conflicts on mining.
Institutionally, the European Society for Oceanists, for one, does include
Australia in the picture and I have elsewhere (Widlok 2009) given some
reasons why I think this inclusion makes sense in the context of many current
scientific and public debates. To be sure every author may for practical
reasons want to delimit what a study covers, especially when dealing with an
introduction. There is therefore no necessity that everyone, for all
purposes, agrees on the regional boundaries of fields of study. Having said
that, the legitimate right of the author to limit oneself to what one knows
best, needs to be matched with the legitimate right of the beginning student
to start off with a broad comparative perspective. Co-authorship may be a
solution to this problem. In any case, students should be made aware that
many current works in anthropology and beyond do explore and underline the
links between Australia and the rest of Oceania. Similarly,
selecting the language used for publication, in this case German, is
obviously a matter of choice for the author and there is something to be said
for authors using the language one feels most comfortable with. Whatever
language you chose you may exclude some potential readers. My own view is
that English is the least exclusive strategy and that scholarly debate
advances best if it is as inclusive as possible. In fact, I think that this
is particularly true for regional studies, or rather cross-regional studies
where the researcher happens not to live permanently in the region that he or
she is writing about. Underlying this debate are probably two (at least two)
rather different conceptualizations of what the role of the scholar in
regional studies is. If we see the role of the ethnographer primarily as a
broker and cultural translator from faraway places to, in this case,
German-speaking Europe, then the use of the home language of the researcher
makes sense. If, instead, we see the role of the researcher as engaging with
a diversity of evidence, views and perspectives from a variety of positions,
then the use of English is the logical choice since it raises the chances of
many voices and many sources of evidence to be included from the region of
the researcher, from the region of research and from yet a third or fourth
region where someone happens to be positioned who has something to say about
the subject matter at hand. Personally, I think that this is the way forward
for regional studies as much as for academic discourse more generally. It
does not deny the fact that all researchers are strongly influenced by their
own positioning in the world. We are not free-floating, independent from time
and place, even when we do use English. Finally,
Mückler's strong identification with the Vienna school may come as a
challenge to many colleagues working in or on Oceania. Here we have an
introduction to the ethnography of Oceania, published in 2009, that has
basically no mentioning of many of the "big names" in the New
Melanesian Ethnography (e.g. Marilyn Strathern, Roy Wagner) nor any
mentioning of alternative introductory works on the region (for instance those
by Paul Sillitoe). The exclusions are so marked that it is clearly not a
matter of mere "oversight". Instead, the reader is referred to
numerous, often unpublished works of students from the Vienna school, both
the "original" Vienna school as well as PhD research from recent
years. This may be a reaction, occasionally found outside of the dominant
English-speaking anthropology, against the tendency that works published in
the UK and the USA or Australia in turn do not include any works that are not
published in English and that are not the product of a US or Commonwealth
university. In any case, I wonder whether this is just a faint signal from
dated debates from the last century when English was emerging as language of
science or whether it is a signal from a future situation of increased
competition between universities and countries that are offering university
degrees and compete against one another over students and dwindling research
budgets. As much as many of us are wed to the idea of international scholarship
that is not limited by national boundaries, the new structures of education
and research as a market may in fact support the profilation and
proliferation of regional or local schools of research such as the Vienna
school. The critical question is as to whether this enhances the books we
write or not. In the case under discussion here the fact that the book is
richly equipped with maps, with pictures from material culture and with
tables of historical events is to some extent thanks to the influence of the
Vienna school and will probably be appreciated by many students. I am not
sure whether this also holds true for some of the explanations provided, for
instance those that attribute cultural elements to "an earlier epoch of
mother-right" (p. 73) in order to make sense of them. This is a
diffusionist pattern of explanation that has very rarely resurfaced in
anthropological writing since it was so convincingly criticized by
Radcliffe-Brown back in 1924 (see Radcliffe-Brown 1952). References Rumsey, A. and J. Weiner (eds). 2004. Mining and Indigenous Lifeworlds in
Australia and Papua New Guinea. Wantage, SK Publishing. Rumsey, A. and J. Weiner (eds). 2001. Emplaced Myth: Space, Narrative, and
Knowledge in Aboriginal Australia and Papua New Guinea. Honululu:
University of Hawai'i Press. Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1952. The Mother's
Brother in South Africa. In: A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society: Essays and Addresses
(pp. 15-31). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Widlok, T. 2009. Van veraf naar dichtbij: The Standing of
the Antipodes in a Flat World. Inaugural lecture. Nijmegen: Radboud
University. Retrieved September 7, 2009. from the World Wide Web: http://webdoc.ubn.ru.nl/mono/w/widlok_t/van_venad.pdf |
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