DISCUSSIONS AROUND A SAND-DRAWING:CREATIONS OF AGENCY AND SOCIETY

IN MELANESIA

Knut Rio

University of Bergen

This article considers the social circumstances of making a marriage diagram, on theisland of Ambrym in Vanuatu. It offers a reconsideration of the rather famous case of the‘six-section marriage system’ as demonstrated by Cambridge anthropologist BernardDeacon. It relates this idea of a system to the indigenous practice of making figurativedrawings in the sand. The argument is that the marriage diagram drawn for BernardDeacon was merely an instance of Vanuatu people’s institutionalized capability of total-izing social flows and making them into aesthetic shapes.

Introduction

Agency has become a fashionable word in contemporary anthropology ascentral to the post-structuralist reappearance of the subject and practice (seeMoore 1999). Although agency now appears to be the right concept for ourtime, the necessary eschewing of such concepts as culture and society demandsthat we find other ways of accounting for influence. What is it that influencesagency in the first instance? And what kinds of social configurations of agencydo people imply in the events that they experience? In the Western contextwe have useful reminders of this in Althusser’s idea of the state and its ‘inter-pellation’ of subjects (Althusser 1993: 44-50), and we have Foucault’s relatedwork with ‘technologies of self ’ (see Rabinow 1984: 369) and the idea of self-governmentality installed in the historical creation of subjectivity (see Fou-cault 1991; see also Carrithers, Collins & Lukes 1985).1 In this article I wishto assess the possibility of reaching a comparative resonance in Melanesianethnography with these issues crucial to anthropology. I will use a well-knowncase from the arena of kinship studies, the Ambrym ‘six-section marriage class’system as portrayed by the Cambridge anthropologist Bernard Deacon (seeDeacon 1927). I believe that this case of the Vanuatu intellectual and hisencounter with Western academia can illustrate the potential for Melanesianethnography to escape its tendencies of regionalism and re-enter the biggerissues concerning humankind and sociality. If we acknowledge the hegemonicplace of individualism and liberalism in our own thinking about society (seeDe Coppet 1992; Dumont 1980), it may still be crucial to address larger ques-tions about sociality and agency from a different perspective. Melanesian

© Royal Anthropological Institute 2005.J. Roy. anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) 11, 401-423

instances of constructing agency and social systems can provide the compar-ative science of anthropology with clues to an alternative view, here docu-mented through the creative acts of constructing marriage patterns over time,making non-figurative art in the sand, and building up images of sociality inceremonies.

Marriage patterns as sand-drawing

Let me first introduce the debate about the Ambrym marriage system. LaterI will try to approach the problem of what it means in the context of Vanuatusociality when a man draws up a kinship diagram in the sand for an anthro-pologist.This consideration has in fact been remarkably absent from the longdebate over Ambrym marriage practices.2

The anthropologist Bernard Deacon visited Ambrym for six weeks in 1926,and in 1927 the paper was published that revolutionized the theory about‘marriage-classes’ in kinship studies. Deacon found that Rivers had been com-pletely mistaken in his view of Ambrym society as a fossil of Melanesian socialorganization – and in his imposition on it of ideas of gerontocracy and ‘anom-alous’ inter-generational marriage (see also Langham 1981). Deacon insteaddissolved the system into a classificatory marriage system of six different cat-egories of kin.This was the logical outcome of a combination of three patri-lineal ‘lines’, each divided into two matrilineal ‘sides’ for the purpose ofmarriage between subdivisions. This work brought a new realism into thestudy of kinship in Melanesia, most of all because Deacon’s analysis was basedupon the direct narration of his Ambrym informants. In his paper he assumedthat what he had learned on Ambrym was the direct representation of themarriage system as understood by the informants themselves. Deacon com-mented on this in a letter to Haddon in Cambridge: ‘It is perfectly clear thatthe natives (the intelligent ones) do conceive of the system as a connectedmechanism which they can represent by diagrams.The way they could reasonabout relationships from their diagrams was absolutely on a par with a goodscientific exposition in a lecture-room’ (Deacon 1927: 329; see also Lévi-Strauss 1949: 126). He based the paper and the theory of the six-sectionsystem on a conversation with one specific informant on Ambrym.The infor-mant educated Deacon by means of two visual presentations of the way inwhich marriage worked as relationships between patrilineally organized places.In the first instance the informant started out with three stones:

My informant placed three large white stones to form the apices of an equilateral tri-angle. Each stone he said represented one bwelem [patrilineal descent group]. Then, if awoman of A married a man of C, her daughter in C would marry a man of B, herdaughter’s daughter in B would marry a man of A again, a man of her MMF’s line(Deacon 1927: 329).3

The second diagram (see Fig. 1) was more complex, but really only repre-sented the same logic as the first one.

My informant drew three very long lines, each representing a man in each of the threebwelem. Each of these three married and had a boy and a girl; the children belonged to

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the other ‘line’ of each father’s bwelem.Thus D marries c1, and has children A and in theopposite ‘line’ of his bwelem, similarly, E marries a1, and has offspring B,b; and F marriesb1, and has offspring C,c.

Now my informant proceeded to explain that a1 was really a, b1 b and c1 c. That isto say, that E really married a woman of ‘line’ A,a; F a woman of ‘line’ B,b; and D of‘line’ C,c. He emphasized here that marriage went round the bwelem in two directions– clockwise and counter-clockwise. One lot going round counter-clockwise (as he indi-cated, by drawing lines from a1 showing the passage of a to her husband, E, from b tob1 and c to c1) was indicated, but, as he pointed out, there were men left, A, B, and C, who had no wives. But he explained now, that since E took a, a’s brother, A, wouldtake E’s sister, e; a sister, e, was duly marked for E, and she was married to A. Similarly,C would take D’s sister, and B F’s sister; the marriages, as he explained, now ‘going roundthe other way’ … He now proceeded to point out that the children of the newly marriedcouples … would have children in the ‘lines’ of the original men, D, E and F, respectively;that, for example, the child of the marriage A = e1 would be a brother or sister of D,and would therefore again marry, like D, a woman who was a sister of C. This was thesystem as explained at Balap (1927: 331-2).

The informant hence replaced the three stones with three lines (see Fig. 1).He began by drawing these three lines in the sand that represented three menof different bwelem (Fig. 1:1). Each of them married and had a boy and a girl,and he represented these by shorter lines next to their fathers, the boys a bitlonger than the girls (Fig. 1:2). As a demonstration of his mastery of the clas-sificatory system, he pointed out that each of the daughters was really thewife of the original man from the next bwelem, and this was illustrated by

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1 2

3 4

Figure 1. Deacon’s Ambrym informant’s drawing in four stages.

circular lines that showed how the daughters would have married the nextman (Fig. 1:3). But some women also went around the other way. To illus-trate this he added sisters (short lines) beside the first men (the longer lines),and illustrated these marriages going the other way (Fig. 1:4).

Within this cycle all Ambrym relational terms could be found and mappedin relation to each other. We see, for instance, that father and son marry dif-ferent sides of the cycle and that a daughter marries back to where her grand-mother came from.We also realize the cyclic triadic nature of Ambrym kinshipand see that relations between two parties always depend on previous rela-tions involving a third party. Once this diagram became known to Britishanthropologists, they immediately realized that this understanding of marriageand kinship could explain away their problems with Australian kinship, andthus this diagram became a standard way of representing Australian marriagesystems (see Barnes 1967: 126).Thereby the Ambrym informant had becomethe teacher of kinship to a whole generation of anthropologists.

Although the informant’s lecture to Deacon had been ‘on a par with a goodscientific exposition in a lecture-room’, it did not take place in Cambridge.We should, therefore, seek to account for his performance in Ambrym terms.Even though Guiart (1951) and Scheffler (1970) later suggested that thediagram was not a representation of a marriage-system, it did have the formof an enclosed cycle and it did suggest a coherent system of relation terms(see also Guilbaud & Lévi-Strauss 1970). What, though, was the ontologicalstatus of the system among the Ambrym informants? Deacon himself was con-vinced that his six-class-system was a one-to-one representation of theirsystem in reality, and he commented that ‘my surest evidence came from theremarkably lucid exposition of the class-system by the natives themselves’(1927: 328). Lévi-Strauss broached this issue in pointing out that the peoplesof Melanesia were actually working with diagrammatic models of kinship. Heargued that in these societies it was a specialized task of ‘intellectuals’ to workout such models as answers to foreseeable problems in social organization (seeLévi-Strauss 1965: 15).The Ambrym example was of course also the ultimateproof of the ability of the pensée sauvage to think abstractly.4 I will, however,try to point to some wider implications of this act of sand-drawing. I willargue that Deacon’s informant was not an exceptional native intellectual butsimply an islander manifesting a general ability among his people to workwith totalizations in relation to sociality.

Sartre and Lévi-Strauss meet the man from Ambrym

European academics were attracted to the intellectual brilliance of theAmbrym informant (unfortunately we do not know his name).The clarity ofhis mind and his exegesis of abstract systems also became the focus of a well-known controversy between Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude Lévi-Strauss (Lévi-Strauss 1966: ch. 9; Sartre 1991 [1960]: 479-504, see also Delacampaigne &Traimond 1997; 1998; Lévi-Strauss 1998). The debate had much in commonwith that between Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown concerning the status of abstracted and general systems in anthropological analyses (see, e.g.,Malinowski 1930), but it went deeper into the relations between system and

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agent and between dialectic and analytic thought. This controversy brings usright into the question I address here concerning the status we can attributeto the act of making a diagram in Ambrym.

Sartre had been inspired by Lévi-Strauss’s kinship theory, and tried to jointhis new structuralism with Marxism and phenomenology in the Critique ofdialectical reason (Sartre 1991 [1960]; see Caws 1992). Here he investigated theontological status of group-formations and reciprocity. His claim was that the‘practico-inert’ – the structured field of practices and materiality – has, in acrucial way, a mediating capacity in the dialectics of group and subject (seeSartre 1991 [1960]: 64-70). The group is not a transcendental, abstract socialformation but a material reality being totalized and made concrete by whathe refers to as ‘mediating thirdness’ (1991 [1960]: 100-9; see also Flynn 1992:244-6). Thirdness becomes central here insofar as it indicates the capacity ofsubjects to take up a perspective on social wholes. Thirdness is for Sartre thepoint in the dialectical process of social life when the subject totalizes hissocial relationships, transforms society into an object, and makes it his own.5

Sartre addresses this issue with a reference to the meeting between Deaconand his Ambrym informant (1991 [1960]: 501-2).

Opposed to Lévi-Strauss’s idea of the outstanding achievements of nativeintellectuals, Sartre approached this event from the point of view of a phe-nomenology of social relations. His disbelief in a distinction between thesubject and sociality itself,6 his attention to the logic and intentionality ofpractice, and his focus on group-coming-into-being made him react stronglyto Lévi-Strauss’ propositions. Sartre’s basic claim was that the subject, that is,Deacon’s informant, could not in this event act as something other than thegroup itself.7 The subject was entangled through practice in his experiencedfield of relations, and, with reference to the Ambrym informant, Sartre claimedthat:

In fact, the decision to make the kinship system into a fabricated, inorganic object (linesmade on the ground) corresponds, for the native, to a practical attempt to win the supportof inorganic materiality in order to produce the structures in the form of inert abstract schemata.The reason for this is that he is explaining them to a stranger who is situated in theexterior, and who therefore thinks in terms of exteriority … it is obvious that this con-struction is not a thought; it is a piece of manual work controlled by a synthetic knowl-edge which it does not express (1991 [1960]: 503, italics added).

Sartre hence maintained that it was not enough to point out that people werecapable of analysing themselves, as in a sense had been Lévi-Strauss’s positionon the kinship diagrams. The knowledge of the informant was merely aninstance of presenting to the outside something experienced on the inside.Sartre claimed that the task of making diagrams and the solving of social puzzles was in fact a ‘specialised organ’ of the organization itself, depicting ‘therelational system as ossature’ (1991 [1960]: 502), that is, making it inert andunchangeable. He indicated that it was a specialized task of people like Deacon’sinformant to practise totalizations: ‘The organiser therefore has an immediate,practical comprehension of the structures in all their complexity and this is the basis of the abstract analysis which he then performs on these structuresasskeleton’ (1991 [1960]: 502). Making a closed circuit – a finished and com-pleted version – of a social system that is in fact unfinished and developing

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is an expression of the informant’s, or the ‘organiser’s’, ability to take up theposition of the whole, of the group as One. Importantly this referred not onlyto the objectification of social relations but also to the agency of objectifica-tion as offered by the ‘organiser’.8

I will make use of this debate between these two leading figures of Frenchphilosophy to point to a possible reinterpretation of the Ambrym material. Inthis effort I shall try to see Sartre’s theories in relation to my own ethno-graphic experience with Ambrym society. There is an intriguing relationbetween Sartre’s ideas about reciprocity and this Melanesian material. Eventhough Sartre has references to Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, and some specificinstances of Melanesian ethnography, he essentially builds his theory aboutthirdness and totalization on a completely imaginary foundation meant onlyto explore the ontological possibilities of group-formation. In contrast to the‘series’ that dominates Western society, wherein the subject only encountersother versions of the self in all others and thus experiences total alienation,the ‘group’ could be imagined in non-Western contexts in instances where allsubjects would be intentionally directed towards the group as One (Sartre1991 [1960]: 256-405). In the dialectical shifting between the whole and itsparts, the subject would then variously take up position as part and as whole.In this imagined group-formation ‘the third party is everyone and everybody’(1991 [1960]: 108) and each subject no longer sees himself in all others, hesees all others in himself. Each member of the group would realize the dialec-tical foundation of the group and the exteriority of the practico-inert (aswhen drawing the marriage diagram). In such a group-formation there istherefore a constantly turning totalization at work – on the part of the alter-nating subject position of the mediating third.

Let us leave this internal debate between Paris intellectuals in order to bringMelanesian ethnography into focus.Whereas Sartre drew his ideas from appar-ent underlying structures of contemporary French society, opposing the trendsof dualisms in the academic world and the historical materialism of the com-munist party, the issue in this article is to recapitulate and revisit the insightsthat can be gleaned from the episode with Deacon and his informant. Keepingin mind some of the concepts formulated by Sartre, I will try to rethink thiswhole issue against the background of fresh empirical material from AmbrymIsland and social theory from the region of Melanesia.

Marilyn Strathern has pointed out in her The gender of the gift (1988) howdifficult it is to approach Melanesian agency. She finds it necessary to locatea completely new model of cause and effect in agency specifically for thisregion. She begins her reconstruction of Melanesian agency in New Caledonia with Leenhardt’s claim that persons there are completely absorbedin various relationships to the degree that the self is an empty space and theperson is ‘unaware of himself ’ (Leenhardt 1979 [1947]: 154, in Strathern 1988:269). Strathern, however, points out that the self can only be perceived asmissing if we observe from a Western viewpoint that locates the self as thecentre of relationships (1988: ch. 10; see also Battaglia 1995: 4-6). To makeher point she turns to Sabarl Island, where the self is not missing but impli-cated in a specific theory of agency that takes a triangular shape analogous tothe elbow or the ceremonial axe used in mortuary ceremonies. In this imagery

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the self is built up from the two sides of the triangle, but depends on a thirdparty to bring these sides together at the ‘joint’ (Strathern 1988: 270; see alsoBattaglia 1983: 296). Strathern sees this triangular shape of agency as a specif-ically Melanesian model of relationships, and I wish to follow this up withregard to North Ambrym sociality.We should, however, be aware of the poten-tial of these insights to blend in with the larger philosophical discussions ofthe Paris intellectuals. In my view the Melanesian relationalist paradigm ofStrathern and Battaglia ought to be confronted by these wider comparativediscussions.9 After Wagner’s idea of ‘the fractal person’ (Wagner 1991) andStrathern’s idea of ‘dividuals’ (see also Battaglia 1995) – persons as variouslyparts of relations and encompassments of relations, variously revealing them-selves in the form of subjects or in the form of objects – we would hope tosee ethnographically informed reports of how these concepts are actually man-ifest in social life, and how specific to the Melanesian scene these definitionsreally are.

Strathern has drawn attention to a characteristic tendency in Melanesianethnography for the mobilization of a ‘microvocabulary of dissolution’(Strathern 1992: 76; also Strathern 1993) – terms such as ‘making incomplete’,‘decomposition’, ‘obviation’, ‘disassembling’, ‘severance’, and ‘dissolution’ –when ethnographers in the region seek to describe social processes. In aMelanesian ontology of social relations the person embodies a compositionof social relations which is regularly picked apart and reconstructed. Since‘relations are intrinsic not extrinsic to the living person’ (1992: 83), any holistic conception of society will be irrelevant in Strathern’s framework –except for the case of the person as a multiple configuration encompassingsociality.

Strathern’s analytical apparatus consists merely of persons interacting – ofpersons composing and decomposing, internalizing and externalizing theirconstituent relationships. It comes, as such, close to a transactionalist approach.Even though I believe that many of her insights are also relevant to Vanuatusociality, I will try to complement them here by pointing to a presence inVanuatu of a totalizing agency that may in fact allow for a revised concept ofsociety that is pertinent to the Melanesian context as well. The power of aman making a diagram is not merely about his internal relationships; it ani-mates and makes manifest a larger assembly of relationships that overrides theperspective of each person and each relationship within it. By seeing total-ization as a crucial social process we can perhaps resolve some of the tensionsat the centre of anthropological theory – tensions between system and agentand between idealism and materialism. Such a revisioning could also benefitthe larger philosophical discussions, even though the tendency in currentdebate is to leave out the non-Western scene altogether.10

The influence of third parties in Melanesia

In order better to understand Deacon’s informant’s sand-drawing, I suggestthat we begin by looking at how the practice of sand-drawing works in thisregion. This might also be a good place to begin approaching the issue of

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how Melanesians posit third parties at the centre of agency. Sand-drawing isa widespread activity in the Vanuatu archipelago (see Deacon 1934; Rowe1936).The black volcanic earth of these islands represents a canvas onto whichpeople constantly write and draw. People have developed iconic images thathave names and correct ways of execution. Some images can be used forleaving messages: for instance, the image called ‘garden’ can be drawn outsidea doorstep to indicate that the drawer is away in his garden. Images are,however, also drawn for fun, and children and adults alike squat in the sandto try out and display their drawing skills. Many images have stories attachedto them, and the movement of the story runs parallel with the execution ofthe drawing. Knowing both story and design is, however, limited to oldermen, who also hold significant influence over other domains of Ambrym sociallife.

When we see sand-drawings as accompaniments of stories, we should alsokeep in mind that black earth, compared to paper, has more depth. As adrawing develops, it creates a many-layered field of lines crossing and buryingeach other and produces a spatio-temporal effect enabling the drawer to followthe movement of the personae of the story across space–time. Drawers typi-cally start out by making a grid on the ground in order to limit their drawingwithin a frame. As they start to tell the story they put their finger in the sandand trace symmetrical figures as they follow the mythical personae throughthe narrative. Intriguingly at the end of the story a figure appears out of thearray of lines, for instance a plant or an animal.To illustrate this I will presentan example of a sand-drawing I was shown in Faramsu village in NorthAmbrym.

A man came to look for another man in the man’s garden. The man he was searchingfor was not there, but instead he found the man’s wife and he had sexual intercoursewith her. Just as they were having intercourse, the husband came back and saw them,without them knowing it. He didn’t say anything, but went right back to his house andwaited for the man there. When the other man finally came down from the garden andpassed through the hamlet, the man called him. He asked him to walk to the gardenwith him to help him with something.The two of them walked to the garden.The manthen asked the other to help him dig out a yam from the ground. They started to digthe hole and when the hole became very deep the man who had had sex with the wifeof the other went into the hole to keep on digging the huge yam. They kept diggingfor a long time, digging, digging, digging, digging, digging.When the hole was finished,the man who stood up on the ground suddenly hit the other man with a club so thathe died and fell down in the hole. He cut down a banana tree and threw that on topof the dead man. He then went back to his house to fetch his wife. He dragged her upto the garden to see the hole of the yam. She just saw the bananas in the hole, and thenher husband cut the dead man’s penis off and told her ‘You eat this banana. If you donot eat it I will kill you’. His wife ate the penis, while singing

Tengwelie, tengwelie (Tengwelie, tengwelie)nar long ngene tengwelie (I will not eat this tengwelie)Weli, weli, sam bwerange (Weli, weli, he pushed him in)Nar long ngene tengwelie (I will not eat this tengwelie)

After she had finished the whole penis they both went back to their house.

The sand-drawing that is the conclusion to this story – and the outcomeof its tracing of events – takes a holographic form (see Fig. 2). In a

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surprising way it condenses the whole story into a multi-layered imagery.Looking at it from different angles we can see a human face, sexual inter-course, male and female genitalia, a banana plant in growth, and a yam tuber.It is as if all the moments of the story come together in one image. If we seethe two circles as eyes, we realize that they can be the eyes of the betrayedhusband who observes the couple having sex in the midst of the yams andbananas in the garden. Perhaps the most plausible meaning of the title of thestory and theme of the song, tengwelie, is ‘something looking for hole’. Thishas a wide variety of associations, since hole not only refers to the grave ofthe man, but also the hole of the yam, the food-baking hole that the bananasgo into, as well as the woman’s mouth and vagina. By being simultaneouslyan array of lines, the concrete ‘route’ taken by mythical personae, and a com-plete formation of a recognizable being, the drawing represents a totalizingmotion. Not only does it follow the acts and subjectivities of the actors intheir immediate framework of events, but it also presents us with the final-ized shape of all these acts and intentionalities – as one image. This effect ofpresenting a dual perspective is characteristic of all sand-drawing designs.Whatseems to be of prime importance is that in the end the story can be encom-passed by one totalized image. This image is not visible from the perspectiveof the story itself or from the point of view of the actors but arises from thestory as a totality. This also makes it evident to spectators how the charactersof the story are oblivious to the real purpose of their own acts. Only the nar-rator sees them and understands them, so that out of the array of their move-ments he can produce a holistic design.

Both Lévi-Strauss and Alfed Gell commented on the ability of Vanuatuislanders to make abstract diagrams (Gell 1998: 90-5; Lévi-Strauss 1949: 126),but while Lévi-Strauss saw this capacity as an expression of the universal capa-bility of analytical reason, Gell interpreted it as an expression of ‘primitive art’as mind puzzles. None the less both writers saw these performances as first

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Figure 2. Tengwelie drawing.

and foremost intellectual achievements abstracted from ongoing social life.Gell, I would argue, is mistaken when he draws attention to the ‘cognitivestickiness’ (1998: 86) of these designs. He associates them with maze figuresand geometrical tattoos that protect against evil forces because they are logi-cally impenetrable. The problem with this is that these designs do not figureas durable art, and even though they may entrap our minds when we look atthem, this is not their function. The designs are, after all, wiped out immedi-ately after execution since they have no importance after their completion.Both Lévi-Strauss’s and Gell’s approaches fail to conceive of the intentional-ity of these diagrams as performances.

We could say that the drawing of the marriage diagram is an instance ofthe same logic of performance as other sand-drawings that the Ambrymeseperform.The marriage diagram, like other sand-drawings, represents social cir-cumstances, in this case the directions women move through marriageexchange and the patterns by which the social transformations of generationstake place. Similar to the drawing of the tengwelie design, the marriage drawingwhen complete is seen to fulfil an overall form, a moving circle.This gives furtherholistic meaning to the story of marriage itself. In Deacon’s case the form ofthe full circuit shows us that even though women marry away from theirbwulem, as Deacon’s informant stated, ‘they always come back’. The diagramshows that even though marriage seems to go in all directions, and criss-crossesin an array of lines, the circular motif – and hence social reproduction – isits overall form. The power of the diagram is to represent society in an aes-thetic of completion, continuation, and growth. Contrary to what Lévi-Straussand Gell argue, the effect of these diagrams is produced by the almost magicalmoment of turning an array of lines – of women going in different direc-tions, people tracing up paths here and there – into a complete design whereall ends meet. In both sand-drawings and kinship diagrams there are no looseends.

I would argue that sand-drawings are part of a larger concern in this societywith totalizing sociality. As elsewhere in Melanesia, the concept of power inNorth Ambrym is translatable into many different expressions. It can simplyrefer to people who are strong and well built. It also, however, refers to animportant ability to see things. An expression in the North Ambrym tongueis ‘vanten ngele meje foforo’, literally meaning ‘this man opens his eyes and turnsaround’. It expresses the ability of such people to be able to grasp every sideof a matter and see things from several perspectives simultaneously. This canimply knowledge in itself, knowledge of history, of how to make a gardengrow, or how to see the symptoms of a garden in decay. It also describes theability to ‘foresee the road’, to discover sorcery, and to be able to talk per-suasively about how things and issues relate to each other (see also Lindstrom1990).The act of making all the acts and events of a story into one compre-hensible figure is also part of this concept of power.

Mimica (1988) touches on a similar diagram-mindedness in his account ofthe Iqwaye of New Guinea and their ability to count large numbers. In theIqwaye counting system all the fingers of the hand amount to One (i.e. onehand), and all the twenty fingers and toes of a man amount to One (i.e. oneman). To count large numbers, for instance the totality of a community, the

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number will approach One since all sets of numbers eventually reach the com-posite number of one. Infinity, or the cosmos, is also One since the cosmoswas originally made out of the body of the One creator. In this kind of fractallogic, all entities are simultaneously composed of other parts that are simul-taneously wholes.The act of counting itself is then an act of totalizing whichbrings all the things in the world into a cosmic totality reminiscent of thecreator. The ability of the person counting to make unity encompass plural-ity is then also a power of perspective, of being able to draw together thingsto reconstitute the unified creator. My point here is that sand-drawings illus-trate the tendency in these societies of always installing an outside perspec-tive on social process.Among the Iqwaye all things in the world can potentiallycome to be One in the eyes of the original man, and on Ambrym all the actsand trajectories of a story come together as One in the moment of finishingthe design. The performance of sand-drawings is after all also the mastery ofsocial and historical circumstances, of knowing places, peoples, and past trajectories.

I will further suggest that it is not the mastery of sand-drawing itself that manifests power so much as it is the resemblance of the act of sand-drawing to the act of drawing sociality itself: that is, of making sociality andrelationships conform to a materialized imagery. This makes manifest thepower of ‘turning sociality around’ – of giving social process a structuralappearance. I believe that here we are approaching an interesting capacity ofAmbrym social life. The amazing thing is not the activity of drawing itself,the ability of abstract thought, or indeed the intricacy of the designs.What isamazing is the dialectical relationship between perspectives. As the drawingsare executed, the perspective is that of the actors in the story, but once the design is finished, the perspective of the totalizing drawer ‘overrides’ thewhole social process of the story. The finished design encompasses the per-spective of social process and places it under the objectified gaze of a thirdparty.

This is even more amazing when we also find that this capacity – to turnprocess into structure (to keep within the parameters of anthropological lan-guage) – is crucial in the constitution of Ambrym society itself. It is in factbasic to the Ambrym ontology of social relationships that all sociality dependson third parties and their capacity of ‘seeing’. This is evident within thedomain of Ambrym Island marriage relations.

The role of the totalizer in Ambrym marriage relations

I will now try to extend some of the perspectives that Deacon’s paper stimulated towards Ambrym sociality and agency. Since Sartre used the manfrom Ambrym to explicate the role of the ‘organizers’ – persons who take itupon themselves to totalize social flow and make it into inert matter in theform of diagrams or reified systems or statements and who at the one andsame time participate in a group and present the group to the exteriority –I think we can start there. This figure of the ‘organizer’, or totalizer, in factbecame crucial to Sartre in supporting his view that reciprocity always depends

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on a third party. As I have shown elsewhere (Rio 2002b), this is especiallycharacteristic of sorcery relations on Ambrym where people become relatedagainst their will, through the sorcerer. The same is, however, true of kinshiprelations and especially marriage relations. Sartre argues that the totalizer iscrucial to the constitution of relationships even if he is cut off from the rela-tion itself. This must be understood as a dialectical shifting of perspectivesbetween, on the one hand, that of the internal relation – as it appears to the two parties engaging with each other – and, on the other, the externalperspective of the third party which aligns that relationship with others andshows it to be part of a system. Here I will show how people on Ambrymoperate concretely with ideas that in Europe have only obscurely surfaced inphilosophy.

As we have seen from the diagram drawn for Deacon, marriage in Ambrymis, from one point of view, about the substitution of one generation for thenext between the three different categories of kin. A current way of talkingabout marriages is indeed in the idiom of a growing spiral that Deacon in asense illustrated: you marry your sister away to a man in another place; herdaughter again moves in marriage to another place and the daughter of thismarriage then comes back in order to marry your son – having thus com-pleted a round of the spiral circle.11 It is the blood of women – passed onthrough women – that is led in a circle and is seen to come back throughFSDD marriage after a round of productive input from other places.This cir-cularity is the basic dynamic of the symbolisms of production and reproduc-tion on Ambrym.12

An important point here is that during kinship ceremonies, be they formarriage, youth initiation, or death, this circular triadic structure – of ‘our own’ place, ‘mother’s place’, and ‘wife’s place’ – dissolves into a dual structure as if a wedge has been driven through the middle of the triad. Theadherence of people then divides into two sides, the make-up of the sidesvarying between the ceremonies. This dual organization is perhaps more rel-evant to daily life than the diagram above (Fig. 1) may indicate. Most villagesI have been to in fact distinguish between their two sides.13 This tendency offorgetting the triadic structure is also part of the aesthetics of kinship cere-monies. In these ceremonies the whole community takes shape as a two-sidedwhole. Since all people are closely related in all directions, either throughmother or father, this composition of ceremonies is, however, not self-evident.When a couple marries, all people who attend the wedding have to decidewhich side they are on, even though they are equally related to both parties.The side of the groom contributes to the bride-payment, while the side ofthe bride helps in her marriage preparations and contributes food and thehousehold utensils and expensive suitcase she will take with her into marriageand her new household. We must realize here that this shifting two-sidedstructure of ceremonies and group-formation is the intended effect of cere-monies on the triadic structure, in order to open it up to reciprocity. I willmention, however, some examples of how the triadic structure none the lessreveals itself.

It is a particular feature of marriage ceremonies that one category of rela-tives is missing – the bride’s mesong (mother’s brother). It is said that he istaboo to the marriage ceremony, even though he is not taboo to any of the

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parties being married. In fact he stands in a joking relation to both the brideand groom, and can normally frequent the places of both parties freely. Stillhe is made invisible at the scene of the marriage. In marriage ceremonies youtherefore often see a group of mesong sitting outside the wedding arena as ifthey were surveying the whole thing from a distance. And, as it turns out, therole of the mesong is very much that of an absented presence. Even if these rel-atives are at a distance from the couple getting married, it is still they whoare at the centre of attention.Their implicit function is in fact to monitor theceremony in relation to a totality of past and present kinship. I think that thisis indeed a structural outcome of the position they have with reference to thetriadic structure that is forgotten during the wedding. In the North Ambrymclassifications of relatives the mother’s brother of the bride (who by classifi-catory kin reckoning is also the mother’s father of the groom – their tubiung)is the category of kin that stand at the farthest distance from this marriagerelation.

The presence of the mesong is only emphasized before and after thewedding. Before anything can commence in the marriage preparations thefamily of the bride must first go to her mother’s brothers and give them foodand kill pigs before them.This is in a sense a first demand for permission fortransferral of the bride, since the mother’s agnates have primary rights in off-spring. At some point before the marriage, the bride herself also kills a pigand gives it to her mesong.14 After the marriage ceremony the mesong is againgiven his share of the food assembled during the ceremony.

In order to understand the position here of the mesong we have to look at the marriage from his perspective. The MB of a girl stands in a joking

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Ego

mama

bride

papa

groom

Place 1

Place 2Place 3

mama

papa

Ego2

Through thismarriage, the egoanticipates the futurebirth of his own‘mother’ and therenewal of his owngenealogical set.

Figure 3. The perspective of the mesong of a bride in marriage. Her mesong is here ego – whostands to look at his own reproduction. In this system, ego’s son marries his ‘mother’and thereby gives birth to his classificatory brother – re-creating ego’s own stand-ing in the kinship cycle.

relation towards her. Her marriage is a very important point in the trajectoryof his social reproduction since as she marries she will be transferred frombeing his sister’s offspring into a new position. She will now marry into hismother’s family by marrying his tubiung (MF/MBS), and her offspring will beeither his mother or MB (see Fig. 3). So even though this marriage hasnothing to do directly with the mesong of the bride, he is all the time in thebackground of the events and has a hand in the regulation of events.15 Themarriage is, from his perspective, the road to replicating a new set of kin forhimself since it will eventually produce for him a new mother who will beable to marry his son and finally give him back his own category of kin, toreproduce himself. We see here that even though the ego belongs to neitherof the places of marriage, he is from his own perspective the future purposeof the marriage alliance. The marriage is the turning point of his owngenealogical set and it is not merely out of self-interest that he occupieshimself with this. Keeping in mind the parallel to sand-drawing, one sees thathe is taking care of the aesthetics of the completion of the drawing of themarriage cycle. It is hence my argument that the mesong of the bride – sittingin groups outside the ceremonial ground – see this event as a micro-captureof the larger drawing of a marriage cycle, effectively the same one drawn upfor Deacon in 1926. The marriage fulfils the ongoing motion of the rollingcycle of women going and coming back.

Even at points of the cycle where people themselves are not directlyinvolved, they actively participate in the ‘seeing’ and management of the con-tinuation of the cycle. The enormous power of this role of surveillance forAmbrym sociality is made particularly visible when the cyclic social process is threatened. At this point the ‘sand-drawer’ comes to the centre ofattention.

To bury the road

When the mesong of the bride enter the wedding arena, despite the taboo ontheir doing so, it is indeed a serious situation. It is called tafohal, literally ‘tobury the road’, and the occurrence of this is condoned in certain circum-stances. If the mesong of the bride are not content with the way either of theparties has acknowledged his or her position, they can step into the ceremonylegitimately.The mesong then actually bury the road that leads to the scene ofthe marriage by felling big trees over the passage into the village so that it isclear that the marriage is stopped, and the two concerned parties are detained.The participants in the ceremony have to remain in the village until all thingsare settled between the parties. It is said that the MBs come to fer he afa –literally ‘to kick the money stick’, an expression for describing the bride’sMBs’ action when they are not happy with a marriage. The afa is a stickplanted in the open ceremonial ground to which the bride-price of pigs andmoney is fastened. When the mesong feel that their position as the mediatingparty between the two groups is neglected or disrespected, they will demon-strate this by going to the centre of attention and planting another afa along-side the afa already set up, thereby implying that a pig or money should be

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given to them as well. This is done aggressively, with the mesong expressingtheir displeasure with regards to the totality of the situation, including pastand future kinship bonds.

This action on the part of the mesong produces a halt in all relationships.What the mesong present to the audience of the ceremony – both in rhetoricand in the performance of burying the road – is a finished diagram of thevarious relationships which presents a totalized image of the past and futurerelationship between the various places involved.The crucial point is that thisimage, presented by the third party, has now to be exchanged for paymentsof pigs and money in order for sociality to be released once more – releasedfrom its shape as a diagram. For the relationships to be set free, for the roads tobe reopened, for the relational cycle to start anew, the totalized perspective ofthe mesong must be acknowledged, paid for, and absolved. When the mesongleave the ceremonial ground, things can again take place under the pretenceof there being reciprocity between two parties.

With reference to sand-drawing practices, we can now realize the powerinvolved in finishing a diagram. People are made to realize that they are alwaysacting under the gaze of third parties who place their actions in the contextof a larger understanding of society. People can do as they please, marry whomthey want, go where they wish – like the people of a sand-drawing story –but they have to acknowledge that sooner or later they are caught in thetotalizing gaze of third parties. The maker of the finished design can poten-tially turn their actions upside down and force them to change course. Thepotential sanction against people who attempt to resist this power is the threatof permanent blockage which promises the social death which would followthe cessation of all circulation.

The direct extension of this crucial moment of tafohal is the practice oftalan, which implies the continued surveillance by the mesong after the mar-riage ceremony itself. Talan is a noun form of the verb tal, which is an expres-sion for growth and reproduction.16 I must repeat here that the man who ismesong (MB) to the bride is tubiung (MF) to the groom. By exercising thetalan, the mesong of the wife is now looking after the marriage relation andespecially monitoring the relationships of the husband with people in his com-munity.The relation between tubiung is a joking relation, wherein matters canbe taken up in a humorous and friendly tone.17

The talan takes place if a man neglects his marriage and other relationships.We must remember here that a village community is a closely knit networkin which people can easily listen in on and participate in domestic affairs. Ifthere is more than momentary trouble in a household, people will know about it. However, since the household is to a large degree a closed unit, andsince agnates take up trouble only among themselves, there is normally noway for people to interfere with what is going on there. While women canwalk between households, it is harder for men since they stand in taboo relations to other hamlets. A man is taboo both to the place of his wife andto some degree also to that of his mother’s kin, since they are positioned to marry his own children. The joking relation between tubiung is thereforecrucial since this relation, with its neutralizing laughter at the centre, can transcend these invisible boundaries between hamlets. If there are problems in

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one household, if the man drinks excessively and makes noise during thenight, if he is aggressive, if he abuses his wife, if he is discovered to betray hiswife, and maybe ‘stealing’ the wife of his brother living in the same house-hold, it is the responsibility of his tubiung kin to address his problem and to restore his relationships with the other people. Depending on the degreeof harm that he has inflicted on his social environment, they will choose the sanctions to reprimand him. One or several of his tubiung will then come into his hamlet and tear down his house, rip up his clothes, destroy hisgarden, or cut down his fruit-trees. These actions are immediately recognizedas talan, and call for a payment to the tubiung. It is often commented that ifyou choose to ignore the tubiung and forget to make up with your mother’skin you will not be able to pass through their place after death.18 If you donot fulfil your obligations, the spirits of the place of your mother will eat youand blood will run in their ceremonial ground.This is a parallel to the block-age of the road in the tafohal; it represents the realization of a totalizing per-spective on one’s life course. The institution of talan is essential to themaintenance of marriage-relations as well as other relations that a person hasin that it brings problems to the exterior, where they can be settled by thirdparties.19

So, with reference to people’s marriage-relations, it is the mesong of women(and tubiung of men) who take up the position of third parties in the system.These men are not allowed to take sides in the marriage dealings since theirposition requires them to be the totalizer of the past and future outcomes ofthe relation between the two parties. When the system as a totalization, thatis, on the level of Deacon’s diagram of the continuing circle, is endangered,it is these men who also interfere. The mesong has the right to interfere sincehis sister’s daughter is carrying his blood and is thus an extension of himself.He himself is distanced from the relation between the husband and wife buthe is in a sense both the cause and the effect of that relation. He is the causeof it, since the wife is the offspring of his sister, and the outcome of it, sincethe marriage will bring into life his mother who reproduces him. So, of coursehe has the right to interfere.

The power of perspective

Thinking about the famous Ambrym system of relations and terms, I haveoften during my stays on the island been stunned by some people’s ignorance,inability, or unwillingness when it comes to putting themselves in the placeof another and try to figure out hypothetical kinship terms. Adolescent boysand girls especially have problems with that, and they for the most part leavetheorizing over kinship matters to their adult male relatives. This of courseunderlines Malinowski’s point that we need to take a ‘biographical’ view ofkinship insofar as kinship is an experiential domain of which the full viewonly emerges at a mature age (Malinowski 1930).

I think, however, that this also reflects a gendered division; this is an impor-tant arena in which men can reveal their influence. A crucial aspect of men’spower on Ambrym has been to make powerful representations. A centralexpression of this is manifest in men’s climbing of ladders during status

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ceremonies, thus concretely performing the rhetorical tropes of ‘seeing’, ‘beingon top of things’, and ‘standing high’ (see Allen 1981). The term of addressfor a high man is jafo, and significantly this is used to address men of highrank as well as men in certain relationships of kinship. It is a term used forin-laws as well as for addressing strangers and the ‘white man’. It is a term of respect, setting up the other party as higher than oneself. In the early colonial era Ambrym male power was strongly tied to the world of grade-taking, but we can also see how this became an asset for the men who under combined French and British colonial rule could present District Agents with powerful packages of cultural meaning such as the idea of kastom(see also Jolly 1992; Thomas 1992). The act of producing kinship diagrams –presented to white representatives in order to convey a power over Ambrym social life – was part of this package in the new situation of cultural encounter.

The domain of male power in this part of Vanuatu has in many ways beendemocratized during recent decades (see Tonkinson 1981). Power is no longerbound up with grade-taking or ceremonial imagery. I will argue, however,that at least in the domain of kinship and marriage there is still room for therelativized power of men taking the totalizing perspective on society.To standat the top of a reproductive cycle, like the mesong does in the case of mar-riage transactions, necessarily demands skill in seeing and understanding(luksave – ‘seeknow’, to understand – as they say in Bislama) how relationswork and how complicated arrays of relations adhere and operate.

To produce pledges and debts out of these relationships is likewise some-thing that we can easily relate to leadership in Melanesia. The organizationand participation of kinship ceremonies, particularly in the wake of the colo-nial era, is now the most important arena for obtaining respect and esteem.It is here that people make manifest their positions within the social wholeand where they try to attach themselves to ever-larger networks of relations.Conversely, there is no doubt what the characteristic of ‘low men’ is. Eventhough some men hold rights to large plots of land, or to major carving rights,what is crucial to their esteem is whether they can make kinship ceremoniesinto major social events. Some men typically do not arrange circumcision cer-emonies for their sons or marriages for their daughters.Their inability to carryout diagrammatic work is in turn crucial to their reputations as men of littleinfluence.

Conclusion

The Ambrym philosophy of interconnectedness and split agency builds on thenotion that reciprocity always involves at least three parties.When two peoplemeet and engage in relationships in order, say, to work a garden, to engagesexually, to be married, or to carry out any other common project that they might have, they implicitly know that they are thereby interiorized inside a third person’s project as well. Hence there is always the distant regardto the exterior, towards the totalizing perspective that absorbs relationships and moulds them into the past and future continuation of the productivecircles.

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As Sartre has shown, this logic of reciprocity is in fact universally valid forsocial relationships. We are always already inside social and cultural circum-stances when we define ourselves with regard to others. Here we can see how,in the West, the state is a third party to all relationships. An obvious effect ofthis is that people have to pay tax on economic relationships to acknowledgetheir dependence on this third party. If people exchange favours and moneywithout the acknowledgement of the state, it is called ‘black labour’ and therelationship is illegal and must not be acknowledged. Another instance is therole of the state as a mediating third party with regard to the gift economy:when gifts are given by wealthy persons to poor (in development aid) or byhealthy to sick (in donor transplants and blood donations), these must alwayspass through agencies of the state to be acknowledged. Similarly social rela-tions such as marriage, birth, and death have to be registered by the state andcan also be blessed by God. Important bonds between people and their sta-tuses are acknowledged by the state/God, and these specific relationships arethen implicitly seen against the background of all other relationships in theworld; this totalizing view is believed to make them into real relationships.What may seem surprising about the Ambrym instance of this logic is that itis so immediately and concretely present in close relationships and does notinvolve abstract figures such as the state or God.The third party can be anyoneat any time. Insofar, however, as the triadic principle forms the backgroundof kinship terminology, of relations between places, and of enactments ofpersons’ roles, this proves less surprising. It is an immediate realization thatone’s body and the way one disposes of it is directly important to other peoplein other places.

A major problem with exporting a specifically Western ontology of socialrelationships to other places is the division between concrete relations andabstract relations which pertains specifically to relations with the Westernstate.20 I would insist that we cannot characterize a priori how Ambrym peopleconceptualize social distance. As we have seen, certain categories of relativesare in fact made absent so that they can be even more powerful in their absentpresence. There is not a clear boundary here between public and private,between bodies and politics, between self and others. So when people cry,when they get sick, when they do not eat properly, or when they commitadultery, these things are treated as social phenomena that must be dealt withthrough acts of totalization which encompass these events into larger designs.If we compare this Ambrym logic of thirdness with Strathern’s ideas aboutMelanesian part-whole relationships (Strathern 1992), the former’s aspects ofinfluence and governmentality in social process do not seem to be present inthe latter. I have tried, however, to demonstrate that totalization is also presentin Melanesian social process through the creation of images of society that areat certain moments separated from social flow and distributed for people tosee and recognize.These images make for realistic conceptualizations of societyand are seen to be the creations of totalizing agencies.

I have presented here a way of thinking about how relations to others workand a theory of how one is involved in these relationships. What is remark-able in this is the collapse of social distance and the tendency for collectiveformations and singular relations to be entangled in people’s performances of

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totality not only in diagrams in the sand but also in the living diagrams ofsociality itself.

NOTES

This article has grown out of my work with my doctoral dissertation, which was based onfieldwork on Ambrym Island during the years 1995-6 and 1999-2000 (see Rio 2002a). I wantto thank Bruce Kapferer, Olaf Smedal, and Edvard Hviding in the Department of Social Anthro-pology at the University of Bergen for comments during the earlier stages of this work. I havealso received feedback from Arve Sørum, Roy Wagner, Tony Crook, and Stephen Zagala onvarious versions, and am especially grateful to the former Honorary Editor of the JRAI, SusanBayly, and three anonymous readers for invaluable advice. I have also received help from Vivienne Knowles with English language.

1 For a sustained critique of the use of Foucault and Althusser in anthropology and the currenttendency of ‘Leviathanology’, see Sahlins (2004: 138-50).

2 See Deacon (1927); Guilbaud & Lévi-Strauss (1970); Jorion (1986); Josselin De Jong (1966);Lane & Lane (1956; 1958); Löffler (1960); Patterson (1976); Radcliffe-Brown (1927); Scheffler(1970); Seligman (1927). For a detailed account of Deacon’s role in the controversy betweenRivers and Radcliffe-Brown, see Langham (1981).

3 We here begin to realize the importance of the Ambrym system to modern kinship theoryand indeed to the writing of Lévi-Strauss and his ideas about ‘generalized exchange’ and the‘savage mind’. In an article on the future of kinship studies he characterizes kinship systems asintellectual solutions to practical problems, thought out ‘among a small minority of learnedindividuals’ (1965: 15). He also makes the rather important point that the model of a systemand the practical formation of the system are equally real and that the natives’ kinship diagramsare as much empirical realities as their kinship practices – although representing different kindsof social activity.

4 At this point the hegemony of Radcliffe-Brown’s comparative science of kinship systemswas on the verge of breakdown. This also meant the end of classical kinship studies as ethno-graphers started to doubt the objectivity of kinship systems and their dominance over othersocial institutions. In a commentary on Scheffler’s discovery that the Ambrym marriage systemwas an ordinary classificatory system Needham remarked: ‘Scheffler’s re-examination of theAmbrym case seems to have demolished the accepted idea that a six-section system existedthere and thus to have relieved anthropology of an incomprehensible arrangement which wasimpossible to relate to other section systems and tended increasingly to become a theoreticalembarrassment’ (1971: civ).

5 As Flynn points out, ‘The “mediating third” is a functional concept denoting the praxis ofthe organic individual as group member, that is, as communicating identity of interest andpurpose … without claiming an impossible unity within some superorganism’ (1992: 244-5,original emphasis).

6 In The transcendence of the ego (1957) Sartre refutes any essence of the self, and his wholephilosophy revolves around the phenomenological idea that the self is always only manifestedoutside of itself in relation to other people or objects (see also McCulloch 1994). Strathern’sMelanesian ‘dividual’ (1988: 13) is not far removed from such an idea.

7 This idea of course runs through all of Sartre’s philosophy – that we are always finding ourcircumstances to be defined by others. It is only in the realm of the practico-inert that wereally see ourselves.When we think of it, Melanesian ontologies are full of the same insistenceon the defining role of others. We have for instance Strathern’s account of Hageners’s self-decoration – and the whole idea that the self is a capacity of the person first and foremost asan exterior (see Strathern 1979).

8 This treatise on the Ambrym native offended Lévi-Strauss, and made him defensive onbehalf of the ‘primitive man’ whom Sartre had postulated. Lévi-Strauss took up the defence ofthe Ambrym native, and as a response to Sartre’s comment – that Deacon’s informant had notexpressed a thought through his diagram, but produced ‘a piece of manual work governed byunexpressed synthetical knowledge’ (Sartre 1991 [1960]: 503) – he commented dryly that ‘then

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the same must be said of a professor at the École Polytechnique demonstrating a proof on theblackboard, for every ethnographer capable of dialectical comprehension is intimately persuadedthat the situation is exactly the same in both cases’ (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 251). Sartre’s proposedresearch programme of engaging in a dialectical pendulum between practice and structures wasto Levi-Strauss’s mind not what analytical science was about; it was in fact too close to theway the savage mind itself worked (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 249).

9 There are in fact many similarities between Sartre’s project in Critique of dialectical reasonand Strathern’s in The gender of the gift. As Alfred Gell has pointed out, Strathern’s ‘Melanesia’is not a real place but an artefact of an imaginary thought experiment through which she setsup ‘Melanesia’ as representing itself in idealist terms and mirroring the ‘West’s’ representationof itself in realist terms (see Gell 1999: 34). Likewise Sartre, in his Critique of dialectical reason,tries to uncover by way of his imagination of empirical episodes in history the possibility ofalternatives to the material realism of the communist movement. Both projects aim at retriev-ing alternative potentials in the status of group and subject, and both actually find the solution in rebuilding the concept of the subject. Strathern’s ‘dividual’ is no less also anautonomous agent than Sartre’s ‘mediating third’, and both concepts intentionally de-centre thesubject as self. Similarly, the idea of thirdness is as much open to subject-object dialectics as isStrathern’s Melanesian protagonist’s processual shifts between states of ‘personification’ and‘objectification’.

10 We see this, for instance, in contemporary discussion around the gift (see Derrida 1992;Horner 2001).

11 This totalization of women’s movement is explicitly similar to the growing of large yams.Here the work consists in circling the vine of the yam plant by tying it carefully to long polesthat are set up in a spiral shape around the yam mound.When the vine ‘comes back’ to com-plete the circle, it is said that the yam is ‘ready to grow by itself ’. It is mature and soon readyfor harvesting.

12 The situation is quite similar to the one described by Mimica for the Iqwaye, where thefather in a sense reproduces himself by marrying away his son to his classificatory mother(Mimica 1988: 93)

13 The people who live on ‘the other side’, beyond some imagined boundary, are referred toas tahiwere, literally meaning ‘the other half of the place’.

14 This prestation is called livii – literally banana tree.15 From examples like this and many others in Melanesia, Strathern finds it useful to distin-

guish between what she calls ‘person’ and the ‘agent’.The agent is set up as the character ‘whofrom his or her vantage point acts with another’s in mind’ (1988: 272). He/she is the ‘turningpoint of relations’, and can be coerced by others into acting.The agent cannot him- or herselfbe the cause for his/her own acts. By reference to the role of mesong in the institution of tafohaland talan, we see that the structure here is similar. The bride is set up as the agent, and sheacts with reference to the mesong as the ‘reason’ for the marriage as well as its ‘revealed outcome’.

16 Tal is also the word used for fertilizing magic used in gardens, and for the prestation oflive pigs and yams from the family of the bride to the family of the groom during the mar-riage ceremony.

17 This nature of this relationship may be explained by the fact that tubiung relatives stand in the position of inter-marrying each other’s children. Unlike the four other categories ofmen, the teta (F,WS), the mesong (MB, DH), the wunjong (WF), and the taovjen (WB), the tubiungis the only relative who is not immediately related to one’s own wife. It might just as well bethat the joking of the tubiung is inimical to his structural position as a third man in relationto the marriage relation. This joking relation between the groom and the mesong of the brideis actually crucial to the marriage institution itself, through the talan, where the joking takesa more serious character than it normally does.

18 Mother’s agnates in North Ambrym are referred to as wuren, which literally means ‘passage’and denotes mother’s home place as a place where one can pass through legitimately. Thisapplies not only for practical matters, such as going there for loans and aid, but also cosmo-logically, as mother’s place is considered to be the place that gave birth to you and that youhave to pass through after death. It is therefore also considered to be important to keep ongood terms with people of this place.

19 Interestingly, when Patterson described this as emro talfon she claimed that the practice hadto do with the reaction of the mother’s agnates towards a man who has been humiliated or

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insulted, that is, seemingly the opposite of what I experienced (see Patterson 1976: 261). Pat-terson in her tracing of the relationships leaves out of consideration the relation of that tubiungto the wife and forgets to consider that he is equally related to her as her mesong. I believe thefocus of the talan is about the neglect of the relationship itself, and in my experience it comesup especially in cases where the future trajectory of the relationship is threatened. Whether itis the man who is insulted or the woman is therefore also irrelevant, since this has not to dowith personal emotions, but with the state of relationships.

20 My argument here relates to Harrison’s critique of Sahlins’s typology of reciprocity (seeHarrison 1993: 15-16; Sahlins 1972). Sahlins’s view that ‘generalized reciprocity’ belongs to closerelationships between close kin, and that ‘balanced’ and ‘negative reciprocity’ take place in moredistant relationships, seems to be founded on a Euro-centric idea of social distance.

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Autour d’un dessin dans le sable : création des acteurs et dela société en Mélanésie

Résumé

L’auteur examine les circonstances sociales de la réalisation d’un dessin de mariage sur l’îled’Ambrym, au Vanuatu. Il propose de reconsidérer le célèbre « système matrimonial à sixsections » décrit par l’anthropologue de Cambridge Bernard Deacon en associant l’idée desystème à la pratique indigène de faire des dessins figuratifs dans le sable. L’auteur argue quele dessin de mariage tracé pour Bernard Deacon n’était qu’un exemple de l’aptitude insti-tutionnalisée des habitants du Vanuatu à totaliser les flux sociaux pour les transformer enformes esthétiques.

Knut Rio is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. He hasconducted long-term fieldwork in Vanuatu in the western Pacific, and his research themes relateto ideas about social ontology, production, and ceremonial, and the relation between the mon-etary economy and sorcery in Vanuatu.

Bergen Museum, University of Bergen, Haakon Sheteligs Pl. 10, 5007 Bergen, Norway.Knut.Rio@bm.uib.no

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