The Quest for the Good Life in Precarious Times Ethnographic Perspectives on the Domestic Moral Economy
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THE QUEST FOR THE GOOD LIFE IN PRECARIOUS TIMES ETHNOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES ON THE DOMESTIC MORAL ECONOMY THE QUEST FOR THE GOOD LIFE IN PRECARIOUS TIMES ETHNOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES ON THE DOMESTIC MORAL ECONOMY EDITED BY CHRIS GREGORY AND JON ALTMAN MONOGRAPHS IN ANTHROPOLOGY SERIES Published by ANU Press The Australian National University Acton ACT 2601, Australia Email: [email protected] This title is also available online at press.anu.edu.au A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia ISBN(s): 9781760462000 (print) 9781760462017 (eBook) This title is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). The full licence terms are available at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ legalcode Cover design and layout by ANU Press This edition © 2018 ANU Press Contents List of Figures . vii List of Tables . ix List of Abbreviations . xi Contributors . xiii Preface . xvii 1 . Introduction . 1 Chris Gregory 2 . The Good Death? Paying Equal Respects in Fijian Funerals . 11 Matti Eräsaari 3 . Changing Standards of Living: The Paradoxes of Building a Good Life in Rural Vanuatu . 33 Rachel E . Smith 4 . ‘According to Kastom and According to Law’: ‘Good Life’ and ‘Good Death’ in Gilbert Camp, Solomon Islands . 57 Rodolfo Maggio 5 . ‘This Custom from the Past Is No Good’: Grassroots, ‘Big Shots’ and a Contested Moral Economy in East New Britain . 87 Keir Martin 6 . A Moral Economy of the Transnational Papua New Guinean Household: Solidarity and Estrangement While ‘Working Other Gardens’ . .105 Karen Sykes 7 . Cycles of Integration and Fragmentation: Changing Yolngu–Balanda Sentiments of the ‘Good Life’ in Northern Australia . .139 Fiona Magowan 8 . ‘The Main Thing Is to Have Enough Food’: Kuninjku Precarity and Neoliberal Reason . 163 Jon Altman 9 . The Rise of the Poverty-Stricken Millionaire: The Quest for the Good Life in Sargipalpara . 197 Chris Gregory List of Figures Figure 3.1: Vanuatu, South-West Pacific Ocean .................34 Figure 3.2: Map of North and Central Vanuatu, with Lamen Bay in Epi Marked ......................................36 Figure 4.1: Map of the Archipelago of Solomon Islands ...........58 Figure 4.2: Map of Gilbert Camp and the Honiara Town Boundary ...59 Figure 4.3: Kinship and Spatial Relations Connecting the Opposed Parties. 66 Figure 5.1: Map of the Gazelle Peninsula ......................88 Figure 5.2: Map of the Rabaul Area ..........................89 Figure 6.1: Traditional Marriage, While Land is Under Development ................................125 Figure 6.2: Non-Traditional Marriage, Changing Residence .......127 Figure 6.3: Non-Traditional Marriage, Including Traditional Adoption ................................128 Figure 6.4: Marriage Across Regions Occurring over Four Generations ...................................131 Figure 8.1: Map of the Maningrida Region ...................169 Figure 9.1: Map of Sargipalpara Ward, Kondagaon, India ........203 Figure 9.2: Map of Settlement Patterns of the Clans and Sub-Lineages of the Ganda Community of Sargipalpara .....210 Figure 9.3: Genealogical Relationships Between the Households of the Korram II Sub-Lineage. 211 Figure 9.4: The Social Embeddedness of Chamru’s Household .....215 Figure 9.5: The Kinship Relationship Between Members of Chamru’s Household. .216 vii List of Tables Table 4.1: Timeline of Events, 2000–12 .......................67 Table 4.2: Key Terms Used During the Meeting .................70 Table 6.1: PNG-Born Migration to Australia, 1954–2011 ........111 Table 6.2: Ancestry Responses of PNG-Born Migrants, 2011 Census ......................................112 Table 6.3: Geographical Distribution of PNG-Born, 2011 Census ......................................113 Table 9.1: Sargipalpara: Classification of Households by Official Caste and Unofficial Class ...................207 Table 9.2: Socioeconomic Differentiation of the Ganda (Weaver) Community of Sargipalpara ...................209 Table 9.3: Sargipalpara Land: Contemporary Market Values Versus Traditional Productive Values ....................213 ix List of Abbreviations AHED Arnhem Human Enterprise Development ATSIC Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission BAC Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation BJP Bharatiya Janata Party CAEPR Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research CDEP Community Development Employment Projects CPO Chief Police Officer ESRC Economic and Social Research Council GRA Gazelle Restoration Authority MAC Maningrida Arts and Culture OBC Other Backward Castes PNG Papua New Guinea RSE Recognised Seasonal Employer SC Scheduled Castes ST Scheduled Tribe TCU Traditional Credit Union xi Contributors Jon Altman is a research professor at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University in Melbourne and an emeritus professor with the School of Regulation and Global Governance at The Australian National University (ANU), Canberra. Altman has a disciplinary background in economics and anthropology and has been institutionally embedded at ANU since 1978, including a period between 1990 and 2010 when he was the foundation director of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR) in which he sought to refine his ability to combine sound scholarship with progressive policy advocacy. Since 1979, Altman has worked with Kuninjku-speaking people in western Arnhem Land, advocating for their right to maintain their distinct life ways and to live on their ancestral lands. In 2011, he joined the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) ‘Domestic Moral Economy in the Asia–Pacific’ project, first as a Hallsworth Visiting Professor at the University of Manchester and then as the International Visitor for the duration of the project. Matti Eräsaari is an Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Researcher in social anthropology at the University of Helsinki. His research interests span time and value, food and drink, ceremonial exchange, money and the early contact period in Fiji. He has carried out field research in Fiji since 2003. Eräsaari earned his PhD in social and cultural anthropology at the University of Helsinki in 2013. He is the author of ‘We Are the Originals’: A Study of Value in Fiji (2013), and co-editor of Ruoan kulttuuri (2016), a Finnish-language volume on the anthropology of food. Eräsaari worked as a Newton International Fellow in social anthropology at the University of Manchester in 2015–17, before returning to Helsinki. His current research deals with the comparative valuations of time in Fiji and Finland. xiii THE QUEST FOR THE GOOD LIFE IN PRECARIOUS TIMES Chris Gregory has been a member of the Anthropology Department at ANU since 1983 and was a visiting professor of Political and Economic Anthropology at the University of Manchester from 2008–15. He has been conducting fieldwork on the economy and culture of rice cultivation in Bastar District, India, periodically since 1982. He lived and worked in Papua New Guinea (PNG) for three years (1973–75) and Fiji for four years (2008–12). His books include Gifts and Commodities (2nd ed., 2015), Observing the Economy (with Jon Altman, 1989), Savage Money (1997) and Lachmi Jagar (with Harihar Vaishnav, 2003). Rodolfo Maggio is a social anthropologist currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. He leads ‘Mothers: Early Intervention Ethics’, an empirical research study into the social, political and ethical dimensions of early intervention in maternal health and child development. He has conducted ethnographic research in a variety of cultural settings, including the metropolitan areas of Dublin, Rome and Prague, the suburbs of London and the Asia–Pacific region. As part of his doctoral research, he conducted 13 months of fieldwork in an illegal settlement on the outskirts of Honiara, the capital of Solomon Islands. Residing with local families, he closely observed the concretion of ordinary ethics in their everyday dealing with moral dilemmas, confrontations and tensions over the meaning and significance of their values. This gave him an empirical understanding of how people construct, negotiate and defend their sense of belonging, identity and life trajectory. Fiona Magowan is professor of anthropology and a fellow of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Security, Peace and Justice, Queen’s University, Belfast. Her research interests span religion, ritual and value in the domestic moral economy, music, sound and movement, and art, emotion and the senses. She has conducted fieldwork among Yolngu of the Northern Territory, Australia, at different times since 1990, and has also worked with stolen generations artists in South Australia (2010–12). Her publications include Christianity, Conflict, and Renewal in Australia and the Pacific(with Carolyn Schwarz, 2016), Performing Gender, Place and Emotion in Music: Global Perspectives (with Louise Wrazen, 2013) and Melodies of Mourning: Music and Emotion in northern Australia (2007). Keir Martin is associate professor in social anthropology at the University of Oslo. He completed his PhD in 2006 after two years of fieldwork in East New Britain Province, PNG, working among the Matupi community in the aftermath of the volcanic eruptions of 1994. He is the xiv CONTRIBUTORS author of The Death of the Big Men and the Rise of the Big Shots (2013) and articles covering issues of contested transactions, social movements, land tenure, tourism and possessive individualism. Rachel E. Smith is a