The Hidden God: Communication, Cosmology, and Cybernetics Among a Melanesian People.

The thesis concerns the social organization of the Paiela, highl and s, Papua New Guinea, and related theological themes. Paiela social behavior is organized as communication. The act transmits a message to its observer concerning the decision the actor made before acting. There are two communicational modes: (1) mediated or indirect communication, in which an aesthetic code of beautiful/ugly is used between spouses within the context of magical practices and display; (2) unmediated or direct communication, in which a behavioral code of giving/not giving is used between brothers within the context of "descent" and exchange. This demonstration is brought to bear on a theoretical issue concerning the nature of social organization. Is behavior organized to the extent that it is determined by rules of behavior? Is predictability an index of social organization? If behavior is organized as communication, organizational principles necessarily conform to the principles of communication. The most important of these is that behavior (as message) is not predictable. Were it predictable, it would lose its informational value and cease to be communicative. The "hidden God" theme pertains to this principle. Paiela rules (descent, marriage, residence) do not determine actual behavior. They determine the set or range of possible acts, much as a phonemic paradigm determines possible utterances. The organizational property derives not from any regulation of behavior before the fact but from regulation after the fact, when undesirable outcomes or mistakes are transformed into the possibility of desirable or correct outcomes through the operation of the Paiela "incest taboo." Paiela social organization is a self-regulating system premised on dual-- and therefore upredicatable--outcomes, the "good" outcome of correct behavior but also the "bad" outcome of incorrect, deviant behavior. Deviance is thus axiomatic to Paiela social organization, which is to say that choice is axiomatic to Paiela social organization. The dissertation proposes a cybernetic model of Paiela social organization whose organizational principle--regulation of undesirable outcomes--is reactive rather than generative. Given this principle, Paiela social organization seeks a final state in which the last erroneous outcome is eradicated and exhibits evolutionary, self-organizing, and teleological properties. These properties, as far as the Paiela are concerned, are theological and cosmological in their nature. If Paiela social organization is to be analyzed as an organization of behavior as communication, its nature and principles become mental rather than behavioral. Against the background of the cybernetic model of Paiela social organization proposed in the dissertation, a broad-gauged contrast between the "primitive" and the Western mind is essayed in which it is suggested that each specializes in a different cosmological principle (choice or selection v. determinism or causality). Given these contrasting specializations, the metaphysic of each is diametrically opposed to the metaphysic of the other ( and they become mutually unintelligible). It is then suggested that this discrepancy in principle reflects not merely upon an anthropological dualism but upon a cosmological dualism in which mind opposes matter in a meta-metaphysic.Ph.D.Cultural anthropologyUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/158060/1/8106102.pd

Chapter 4. Beyond “Cargo Cult”: Interpreting Mata Kamo

“New Guinea equals the Stone Age in the popular imagination; for better or worse, it is in dialogue with various versions of this myth that every scholar of the region must write.”(Rutherford 2005: 136) In Writing Culture and what is widely regarded as its companion text, Anthropology as Cultural Critique, Clifford, Marcus, and Fischer reoriented anthropology away from “the field” and exotic others and towards a critique of anthropology as an exoticizing, orientalizing discourse. Instead of t..

University of California Press eScholarship editions

Across the humanities and the social sciences, disciplinary boundaries have come into question as scholars have acknowledged their common preoccupations with cultural phenomena ranging from rituals and ceremonies to texts and discourse. Literary critics, for example, have turned to history for a deepening of their notion of cultural products; some of them now read historical documents in the same way that they previously read "great" texts. Anthropologists have turned to the history of their own discipline in order to better understand the ways in which disciplinary authority was constructed. As historians have begun to participate in this ferment, they have moved away from their earlier focus on social theoretical models of historical development toward concepts taken from cultural anthropology and literary criticism.Much of the most exciting work in history recently has been affiliated with this wide-ranging effort to write history that is essentially a history of culture. The essays presented here provide an introduction to this movement within the discipline of history. The essays in Part One trace the influence of important models for the new cultural history, models ranging from the pathbreaking work of the French cultural critic Michel Foucault and the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz to the imaginative efforts of such contemporary historians as Natalie Davis and E. P. Thompson, as well as the more controversial theories of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra. The essays in Part Two are exemplary of the most challenging and fruitful new work of historians in this genre, with topics as diverse as parades in 19th-century America, 16th-century Spanish texts, English medical writing, and the visual practices implied in Italian Renaissance frescoes. Beneath this diversity, however, it is possible to see the commonalities of the new cultural history as it takes shape. Students, teachers, and general readers interested in the future of history will find these essays stimulating and provocative