Seminar Series: Abstract

09:30
August 19 2009
Seminar Room A

Materializing Values: Outrigger Structures on the Eastern Half of the Kula Ring
Fred Damon (Anthropology, University of Virginia)

Based on new research between June and early August 2009, this lecture revises a paper presented earlier this year devoted the analyzing the place of outrigger canoes in the cultural systems of the eastern half of the Kula Ring in Papua New Guinea. Drawing on a comment Dumont directed to Marx’s analysis of the commodity form, I explore the similarities and differences between Dumont’s ideas about encompassing orders and the notion of ‘keystone species’ employed in several works in ecology. Data to be explored begin with the landscapes created to furnish the materials used to create these craft, includes the place the craft occupied in the constructed exchange spheres that composed relations between the region’s island cultures but focuses on the ways by which the boats’ emblematic features enshrined its technical details. These details, the relationships between material properties and conditions of sailing, fashioned a calculus of relations that encompass the region’s fundamental problems with order. Such relations included what we understand by the word ‘power,’ but more importantly speak to the general place that forms of communication have in the organization of a social system. These relations are now, of course, being eclipsed by new forms of communication, their attendant organization and senses of order and power. If time permits the lecture will note some of these obvious transformations.