Reviewed by Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern²
(University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA)

 
Studies of concepts of the self and of the person have become legion in the anthropology of the last twenty years. Interest in the topic has stemmed partly from the realization that cross-cultural differences in the ways in which people conceptualize their own identities and modes of living in the world hold the key to the understanding of inter-cultural processes implicated in processes of development and change generally. An approach to the "elementary ideas" of what constitutes the person in society has also been taken as a way of grounding our epistemological understanding of overall features of cultural and social life. Crucial issues of universalism versus particularism inevitably emerge in this enterprise, including arguments about the psychic unity of humankind and the relationship of language to world view (for example in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis derived from the study of some Native American languages). Discussions regarding cognition, the significance of metaphor, and the biophysical versus the social construction of the emotions also figure prominently in debates about the person. In the anthropology of Pacific societies a major debate continues regarding the construction of the person in relational terms. An insistence on particularistic "difference" between cultures may lend itself to the possibility of "Orientalism", that is, in the terms introduced by Edward Said, the viewing of "others" as the mirror opposites of a stereotypical picture of "the West". Many scholars attempt to base their studies on indigenous concepts themselves without arguing that these point to a "solution" to the wider issues that continue to be canvassed. One reason for doing so is that local concepts are usually rich and complex in themselves and do not necessarily lend themselves overall to dichotomous categorizations but rather to transcending these in terms of more nuanced perspectives. While a former social science model that took certain notions of the individual as cross-culturally axiomatic is now decidedly out of fashion, more recent models which declare that a concept of "the individual" is simply not present in a given cultural context equally run the risk of a priori legislating a phenomenon out of existence, making it harder to dig beneath the particular analytical-descriptive language the author chooses to use. Some of the debate falls into semantics and the use of flexible definitions in different contexts.

A.L. Epstein, whose life-work spanned a remarkable number of themes and diverse field sites in Africa, New Guinea, and elsewhere, has left us as a part of his overall legacy a very thoughtful set of reflections on this difficult topic, appropriately centered on his fieldwork and interpretations of life among the Tolai people of the island of New Britain near the northern coast of Papua New Guinea. His book brings together a number of classic topics, including one long essay which has for long been considered a fundamental contribution to Melanesian studies, called "The experience of shame in Melanesia", originally published as a Royal Anthropological Institute Occasional Paper. It includes also some much less well-known pieces such as his chapters on adoption, naming practices, and senses of privacy among the Tolai. As well, he provides a lucid overview on concepts of person, self, and individual as these have been used generally in anthropological analyses and in Melanesianist writings in particular.

Epstein's view of ethnography in general is reminiscent of that which was attributed to Sophocles, who "saw life steadily and saw it whole"; and also to Aristotle with his maxim that "the middle way is best" (to meson beltiston). He does not give himself readily to extreme views, even if they are striking ones, and this helps him to avoid the errors and arrogances of both Occidentalism and Orientalism. For example, he notes in his Introduction (p. 10) that "there are those who would insist that the notion of an individual self is a Western one, not to be encountered in "traditional" societies". He quotes James Clifford's suggestion that among Melanesians the notion of an "inner life" is best seen as a recent phenomenon (i.e. one derived from colonial contact and change). But he quickly notes that this opinion was not shared by Marcel Mauss in his works on the self and the body and he cites Michele Stephen's work on the Mekeo of Papua New Guinea as based on the idea that self-consciousness or self-awareness appears to be a human universal. (The term self consciousness is particularly used by Anthony Cohen, whose position Epstein also cites. Cohen attributes the reluctance of anthropologists to recognize "interiority" and "individuality" of experience among those they study to their unwillingness to recognize "that the people they study can bear much resemblance to themselves", Epstein ibid. citing A.P. Cohen). And in his Chapter 1, after a careful review of group-related ideas of person and self among the Tolai, Epstein notes (p. 50) that the self has a more private side to it "that pertains to a world of inner experience", revealed in expressions of feeling and emotions. He further states that concepts of individuality and achievement show in the practice of recognizing a person's "name" after death, where the "name" indicates the person's "fame" derived from their accomplishments in lifetime. Needless to say, perhaps, the individual and the collective feed into each other here rather than being antithetical. Achievement may depend on support and recognition, and the individual name of a person may become over time a marker of the collectivity. The Tolai therefore do not espouse a version of individuality that amounts to individualism (a distinction which Anthony Cohen makes). Instead their life-world "discloses a fine balance between the claims of the individual and the community" (p. 27). The importance of the community in defining identity is shown in the concept of gunantuna which is in the book's title. Gunan is "land" and tuna means "real" or "true". This expression derives from the practice of burying or planting a newborn child's umbilical cord in the land of one's birth. A Tolai child's father or grandfather does this, circling the infant with a cordyline plant and planting this along with the cord (p. 32). The Tolai use the expression gunantuna to mean "person", linking the person strongly to identity through land. What a person does as an achievement becomes an addition to the prestige of the land. Epstein's findings here can be strikingly paralleled from materials on Mt. Hagen, in the Central Highlands of Papua New Guinea, where traditionally the same custom of planting a cordyline with the umbilical cord is found, and the same relationship between individuality and the group is found, mediated by the concept of the noman or "mind" (see Strathern and Stewart 1998; also Stewart and Strathern 2001). In synthetic terms it is vital to see how the personal/individual element dovetails with the collective. In analytical terms, however, it is also important to keep the two frames of reference separate and not allow one to obliterate the other. In the Tolai social world persons gain status by their achievements, that is, their individual actions, which are later commemorated in collective contexts. The "individual" and the "collective" belong together as points along a plane of temporal process. Presenting things in this way is not a misplaced imposition of western social theory but a way of representing the Tolai people's views as interpreted by the ethnographer. In this way a balanced analysis is presented.

Epstein himself gives a sound overview of his book's arguments in his Introduction. The themes are linked together in terms of ideas about the person, naming being an important aspect of the self. Also, privacy has to do with aspects of the self which are protected against public scrutiny. Shame, an emotion that has appeared centrally in Melanesianist ethnographies since the work of Bronislaw Malinowski and Ian Hobgin, mediates between the internal and external aspects of the person, belonging both to the inner world of the self and to the outer world of social relations (and hence in Hagen is described as "being on the skin", the boundary between self and others). Epstein's long essay on shame, with its emphasis on experience, remains a foundational study, on which later work such as we find in the volume edited by White and Kirkpatrick (1985) has sought to build. The same topic has begun to return into contemporary analyses of historical change in Papua New Guinea contexts, where the significance of shame and pride in contradictory circumstances begins to emerge from such matters as choice of adherence to a church or suicide in the face of community difficulties. These new contexts give us an opportunity to pursue further the depth of these emotions in human interactions.

The theme of the individual returns again in the last chapter of the book. Here, and indeed throughout his whole corpus of work, Epstein shows an informed interest in psychological and psychoanalytic concepts without allowing these to dominate or displace his ethnographic focus. He is also concerned with another aspect of the supposed distinction between sociocentric and egocentric ideas of the person (corresponding to the collective and individual aspects noted above, and deriving from the work of Shweder and Bourne on this topic). In sociocentric societies, Shweder and Bourne argue, the idea of individual privacy has little space, since the individual is not opposed to society and is simply seen as a constituent part of the socially defined life-milieu. However, Epstein points out that actions by people have to be seen as strategic, not as an unthinking set of habitual practices based on a lack of notions of privacy. Ideas of privacy are in fact to be found in contexts such as those of conjugal relations. The very concept of "shame", we might add, is linked in many ways to notions of privacy, as well as of responsibility and blame in relation to action. Privacy relates to ideas of bodily functions, such as those of defecation or sexual intercourse, and these in turn have deep relations with notions of the life and death of the self. Among the Tolai a person's stock of shell money is seen as acquired through the expenditure of life-juices and sweat and to steal it is tantamount to "destroying the owner's very life" (p. 209). Although Epstein does not mention this at this point in his text, the observation gives us a good understanding of basic ideas about the conjunction of wealth and life. Important forms of wealth in New Guinea are kept wrapped up and hidden, so that unauthorized persons cannot "see" too much of the essence of their holder's "life". In Hagen, for example, areas that are to be protected are marked, often indeed with cordyline plants, the same plant that marks the burial place of a child's placenta. They are in Tok Pisin tambu, taboo (the same word here that the Tolai use for their nassa-shell wealth). In the Hagen language this concept is expressed by mi, a term which also refers to the group's ancestral source of life and the morality that flows from this source. The importance of such boundary markers, among the Tolai and elsewhere in New Guinea, again brings home to us the significance of ideas of privacy in either individual or collective contexts. Secrecy, followed by revelation, followed by secrecy: this is one of the plans of ritual processes found among both the Tolai and the Hageners. Such markers in turn point up the same elicitatory dialectic between the "individual" and the "collective" that we have noted earlier. In the final sentence of the book Epstein notes that "while privacy relates to the most intimate aspects of the self ... it only becomes validated when it has been socially acknowledged" (p. 226). The cordyline marks the place where that dialectic is made visible.

This is a fine, reflective and reflexive, set of papers, illustrating the measured tenor of the thoughts of an anthropologist who lived through a long period of historical changes, spanned the worlds of colonial Africa and post-colonial Papua New Guinea, and has left us these well-crafted essays as one of his last major works, filled with the careful cadences of his voice and his enthusiasm for the pursuit of understanding the Tolai and through them aspects of humanity at large.

 
Notes

1.  Information about this book can be found at the following URL: http://www.chp.com.au/gunantuna.html

2.  We wish to thank Scarlett Epstein for bringing to our attention that the late Bill Epstein's book, Gunantuna, had received few reviews. We also want to thank the Oceania Newsletter for reprinting this review essay which first appeared in the Journal of Ritual Studies, 16.2, pp. 127-130, 2002 (permission for reprinting was granted by the Journal of Ritual Studies).

 
References

Cohen, A.P. (1994) Self Consciousness: An Alternative Anthropology of Identity, Routledge.

Stewart, Pamela J. and Andrew Strathern (2001) Humors and Substances: Ideas of the Body in New Guinea. Westport, Connecticut and London: Bergin and Garvey.

Strathern, A.J. and Pamela J. Stewart (1998) Seeking Personhood: Anthropological Accounts and Local Concepts in Mount Hagen, Papua New Guinea. Oceania Vol. 68, No. 3, March 1998, pp. 170-188.

White, Geoffrey and John Kirkpatrick (eds.)(1995) Person, Self, and Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnohistories. Berkeley: University of California Press.