1 a History of ASAO Sessions

A History of ASAO Sessions: Formats and Topics Alexander Mawyer Program Coordinator 2014–2017; ASAO Board 2017–2019 Alan Howard ASAO Executive Committee 1971–1973; Program Chair 1973; ASAO Board 1995–1997; Website Manager 2000–2015 Much can be learned about an academic organization by examining its activities in historical perspective. In this paper we focus on the development of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO)’s unique structure of annual conferences. Among the topics we address are: What was the original justification for holding meetings? How did the format for meetings evolve? Who were the main actors in shaping the structure and functioning of the organization’s activities? And what does an analysis of sessions held during the annual meetings over the past fifty years have to tell us about changes and continuities in the direction of ASAO? Our sources include ASAO Newsletters dating back to 1967, the recollections of some of the surviving founders of the organization and long-term members who were involved in the shaping of ASAO’s policies over the years, and a database we compiled of some 700 sessions from the nascent origin of the association in 1967 through 2017, which includes the organizers of sessions, the names given to the sessions, and the authors and titles of papers contributed to sessions where such information was available. ASAO Beginnings In order to understand the way in which the organization of meetings and the topics dealt with evolved, one has to begin with the initial vision that prompted the organization of ASAO, or more appropriately its forerunner, ASAEO (the Association for Social Anthropology in Eastern Oceania). The idea for an organization that would focus on anthropological issues in the Pacific 1 Islands had one of its defining moments during a luncheon meeting between Vern Carroll and Alan Howard at Lynn’s Delicatessen at Ala Moana Shopping Center in Honolulu in 1966. Carroll had recently returned from three years on Nukuoro Atoll (1963–1966) and Howard had spent two years studying Rotumans on Rotuma and in Fiji (1959–1961). In the course of their discussion, the topic of comparative research came up, especially the work in Africa and the publication of African Political Systems (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940) and African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (Radcliffe-Brown and Forde 1950). A. R. Radcliffe-Brown had made a strong case for regionally based comparative studies. For example, in the preface to African Political Systems, he argued that the “comparative study of political institutions, with special reference to the simpler societies, is an important branch of social anthropology which has not yet received the attention it deserves” and that doing so will allow scholars to “discover the universal, essential, characters which belong to all human societies, past, present and future” (Radcliffe-Brown 1940: xi). And in a 1951 article entitled “The Comparative Method in Social Anthropology,” he wrote: For social anthropology the task is to formulate and validate statements about the conditions of existence of social systems (laws of social statics) and the regularities that are observable in social change (laws of social dynamics). This can only be done by the systematic use of the comparative method, and the only justification of that method is the expectation that it will provide us with results of this kind, or, as Boas stated it, will provide us with knowledge of the laws of social development. It will be only in an integrated and organised study in which historical studies and sociological studies are combined that we shall be able to reach a real understanding of the development of human society. (Radcliffe- Brown 1951: 22) Carroll and Howard both subscribed to the idea that above all, social anthropology must be a comparative endeavor if any real progress were to take place in our understanding of social dynamics and social history. 2 At the time, the idea that Polynesia in particular was a natural laboratory for comparative research was in the air, stimulated in large measure by Marshall Sahlins’s publication of Social Stratification in Polynesia (1958). Carroll felt that Micronesia, too, should be included in the “laboratory,” insofar as, like Polynesia, it also manifested enough of a shared cultural template to warrant comparative investigations. Credit for translation of these ideas into an organizational mode—the decision to form an organization to conduct comparative investigations in the Eastern Pacific—was entirely Carroll’s, and accordingly, he, along with Roger Keesing, organized the first “symposium” in March 1967 at Keesing’s home institution, the University of California–Santa Cruz. The sole topic of the first meeting was adoption in Eastern Pacific societies (initially including Island Melanesia). Papers on adoption were first solicited by Carroll in the summer of 1964 during a break from his fieldwork, and a symposium on the topic was held at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in November of that year. As noted in a prospectus for the volume Adoption in Eastern Oceania (Carroll 1970), the papers from that AAA symposium, along with some additional papers, were circulated among the invitees to the UC–Santa Cruz meeting, and the authors commented on one another’s papers through correspondence. Why the focus on adoption? This was a period in sociocultural anthropology when kinship issues were of great prominence. In 1949, George Peter Murdock had published Social Structure, a book in which kinship terminology played a major role; Claude Lévi-Strauss published Les Structures Élémentaires de la Parenté (The Elementary Structures of Kinship) in the same year; and componential analysis of kinship terms was still in vogue (eg, Goodenough 1956; Lounsbury 1956; Wallace and Atkins 1960). All of these approaches proved highly 3 controversial and stimulated spirited debates (eg, Sahlins’s 1963 review of Murdock’s 1960 edited volume Social Structure in Southeast Asia; Homans and Schneider’s 1955 critique of Lévi-Strauss; Leach’s 1971 criticism of componential analysis). Within kinship studies, a number of anthropologists were interested in adoption in relation to the transmission of rights in land and other forms of property. While in Africa unilinear (primarily patrilineal) kin groups readily lent themselves to the formation of corporate entities, most Oceanic societies were characterized by cognatic kin groups, which resulted in blurred boundaries and the possibility of multiple and overlapping memberships. The driving question became how such ill-defined groups could function effectively as property-holding corporations, a topic that stimulated considerable discussion and debate in the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps the strongest critic of prevailing kinship theories at the time was David Schneider, Carroll’s mentor at the University of Chicago, where Carroll had done his graduate work. Schneider was a strong advocate for an empirical approach and disdained theoretical and formalistic approaches to kinship based on European concepts of consanguinity. He asserted that the notion of kinship exists in the minds of anthropologists rather than in the minds of the people they study: “Kinship has been defined by European social scientists, and European social scientists use their own folk culture as the source of many, if not all, of their ways of formulating and understanding the world about them” (Schneider 1984: 193). Schneider’s involvement in the adoption project from the beginning is apparent in a July 7, 1965, memo from Carroll, circulated to colleagues, that stated, “If there are any who would like to do a paper towards a later seminar (and eventual publication) on this topic [adoption], please declare yourself now to David Schneider, University of Chicago.” 4 In his introduction to Adoption in Eastern Oceania, Carroll reflected Schneider’s approach, and the relevance of adoption to understanding kinship: The answer to questions about the nature of kinship can only be determined on the basis of investigations into the precise extent to which adoptive relations are construed as tantamount to “biological” relationships. To what degree does adoption really rearrange ties of consanguinity? Is it possible that, appearances to the contrary, adoption is not perceived as not changing the “natural” relationship of the child to his “biological” parents (as I have argued in chapter 6)? Or is it perhaps the case, as [Robert] Levy has suggested (chapter 4), that biological parenthood may, in some societies, be usefully construed as “contingent” in the same way that an adoptive relationship is contingent? (Carroll 1970: 14) As Michael Lieber recalled, Schneider’s role in the adoption symposium was significant in several respects. One outcome of his role was the nearly excruciating tension that characterized that session. Harold Scheffler, Paul Kay, and Ward Goodenough represented approaches to interpretation of data to which Schneider was unalterably opposed. Is genealogy a scientific representation of biological reality or a cultural construct? Everyone in the room was wary of starting a row. “We never resolved this tension, in great part because we had no experience in how to talk to one another” (Lieber, personal communication, March 2015). The significance of kinship for the nascent organization, at least in Carroll’s mind, was clearly manifest in the February 1968 ASAEO Newsletter (#2: 11) in which he proposed possible topics for the symposium to follow the adoption session (see table 1). Table 1: Carroll’s Proposed Topics for Next Symposium 1. Incest 2. Primary kin roles (mo, fa, child) 3. “close” kin vs. “distant kin” 4. Kinship terminology 5. Affinity as a principle of social organization 6. Marital stability and divorce 7. Wives as quasi-kin 8. Friends as quasi-kin 9. Domestic economy 10. Male/Female 5 11. Age as a principle of social organization 12. Economic implications of extended kin ties 13. Sex practices and their implications 14.

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