Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Page 1
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 2
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 3
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 4
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 5
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 6
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 7
These kinds of requests were a regular feature of Leachs time on the Rai Coast. They always made him uncomfortable,
because he felt that his response could never satisfy his interlocutor. Moreover, he was vaguely frightened by all this talk
of the dead and graves. It appeared that white people were sinister figures in the local cosmology. At issue was perhaps a
critique of globalization and colonialism, a critique that tacitly situated Leach at its sharp end. But with some distance, and
therefore less discomfort, the issues in the interaction between Pereng and Leach appear more clearly. Perengs intent,
we argue, was to elicit a response from Leach which would change his feelings of bereavement and ineffectiveness in the
world. Pereng wondered whether Leach was willing to link his project with Perengs own.
Perengs dream appears to be about loss. A loss of one kind (wives) is compounded by a loss of another kind (money). In
the uncomfortable position of feeling obliged to deny knowledge of where his money was, the ethnographer began to view
the old man as manipulating him. In the immediacy of the discomfort, he failed to reflect on the limits to his own
understanding of money and death. The substitution of persons for wealth, especially women-as-wives for wealth, is
consistent with quotidian practice along the Rai Coast. An active and powerful man has relations with affines. It is through
these relations that wealth comes to the man and new persons, most obviously children, are generated.
The association in Perengs narrative is not merely between wives and wealth but between dead wives and white peoples
wealth--money. The dead, and by extension white people, appear analogous to, or linked with, affines, the source by
which wealth comes to the man. It is the final factor in the narrative, the tambaran, which indicates what Pereng
understood to be the context of the request. The tambaran is a male spirit cult, but in contrast to the situation in other
areas of the north coast (see Tuzin 1980), women also have a form of tambaran. Tambaran [kaap] in the villages where
Leach conducted fieldwork indicates a technology of exchange with the ancestors. Tambaran is not merely the
- Reprinted with permission. Additional copying is prohibited. -
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 8
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 9
In ethnography organized by modernitys meta-narrative, colonialism would hardly appear as the first phase of restitution.
Nor would violence and extraction appear as preconditions of productivity. Rai Coast villagers views of liver thieves
resonate not only with their understanding that violent separation is necessary to marriage but also with the cannibalism
that affinity is seen to entail. The loss of a woman is compensated by a pig which is eaten by her kin. As their narratives
suggest, before pigs had assumed their place as "bodies" in bride compensation, the first-born was sent to the mothers
brothers, who would "eat" the young child in recompense for their loss. As potential affines, white people may require
similar acts of cannibalism. Far from being involved in a contentious moral argument, Rai Coast villagers interpret through
their stories the fact of relatedness. Their ethnographer must bear the burden of accepting them as partners in envisaging
human sociality. Modernitys meta-narrative would make at least two crucial observations redundant. One is that bodies
do not belong to persons as possessive individuals. The other is that productive relationships are predicated on violence
and extraction.
Passions of Born-Again Christianity
PENTECOSTALISM AND MODERNITYS META-NARRATIVES
From a Papua New Guinean periphery our focus moves to a capital city in southern Africa, a region known for its long and
tumultuous history of slave trade, international labor migration, political turmoil, and religious pluralism. Malawi, a
landlocked country of some 10 million people, has been a particularly important source of male labor for South African
mines during both colonial and postcolonial times. This form of labor migration was abruptly ended by the Malawian
government in the early 1970s. Many returned to smallholder agriculture, but migration to plantations and urban areas
within the country became important for both men and women. Rural-urban migration among the poor is largely
circulatory, with periods in town interspersed with visits to villages. The building of Lilongwe as the new capital in the
1970s has made it the fastest-growing city in this predominantly rural country. The continuing expansion of its poorest
areas, such as Chinsapo township, indicates that urban amenities fail to increase at the pace of migration to the city.
In his attempt to study the complex religious and healing practices in this impoverished township in 1996-97, Englund was
- Reprinted with permission. Additional copying is prohibited. -
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 10
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 11
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 12
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 13
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 14
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 15
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 16
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 17
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 18
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 19
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 20
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 21
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 22
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 23
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 24
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 25
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 26
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 27
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 28
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 29
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 30
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 31
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity
Current Anthropology
Page 32
GALE GROUP
Information Integrity