1 BATESON'S NAVEN: TOWARDS AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF PERFORMANCE by Ian Patrick Flavin Thesis submitted in fulfilment of requirements for the degree of MPhil in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology,School of Oriental and African Studies,University of London May 1989 ProQuest Number: 10672784 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10672784 Published by ProQuest LLC(2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 2 ABSTRACT The thesis is an attempt to deal with two topics. The text consists of a detailed reading of Gregory Bateson's ethnography of the Iatmul of New Guinea, Naven (1936: 1958). In this classic work Bateson attempted to analyse a nexus of ritual and ceremonial activities among the Iatmul. The theoretical and methodological questions raised by Bateson in his book are of profound importance for anthropology in general, and for studies of "ritual" in particular. The tensions explored in Naven, between explanation and understanding, between action and interpretation and between intellectual coherence and social context, are crucial concerns for anthropologists working in the 1980s. Bateson's book was written at a time when structural- functional ism was the ascendant paradigm in British anthropology, and it dealt with problems which that paradigm was unable to formulate or to discuss. The thesis argues that many of the questions which anthropologists have raised about ritual would be better phrased as questions about performance, and it sets out to show that Naven can be read as a contribution to an anthropology of performance rather than as a contribution to an anthropology of ritual. This constitutes the second topic. The thesis considers critically the work of other scholars in this field, notably Edmund Leach, Clifford Geertz, Claude Levi-Strauss, Gilbert Lewis, Victor Turner and Richard Schechner. Turner and Schechner have recently been responsible for the development of a "dramaturgical" model of ritual and of broader social contexts, and the thesis concludes with a critique of some of the pre­ suppositions implicit in their work. The notion of performance is not offered as an alternative category to that of ritual, for this would only replace one essentialism by another. It is suggested that the development of a theory of performance would constitute a useful strategy in contemporary concerns with the decentering and deconstruction of traditional anthropological categories. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract 2 Foreword 4 Chapter One Introduction 5 Two Gregory Bateson - The Background 29 Three The Ethnographic Setting 41 Four Naven: Theory and Strategy 70 Five Id en tity and Id en tifica tio n 90 Six Kinship, Sociology and Structure in Naven 109 Seven Ethos 131 Eight Ethos and Naven 156 Nine Schismogenesis 176 Ten Eidos and Epilogues: From System to Context and Back 194 Eleven Deconstruction versus Dramatism 228 Twelve An Ecology of Mind: Bateson's Work A fter Naven 267 Thirteen Towards an Anthropology o f Performance 293 Fourteen Conclusion 303 Bibliography 306 Diagrams 1 Iatmul Kinship Terminology 48 2, 2a From Biosphere to Culture in Naven 77 3 How an Anthropologist Studies a Culture 78 4 Bateson's Five Functions as Analytical Stages 87 5 From Bateson, (1936: 89) 112 6 FZD Marriage 117 7 WB as Focus for Alliance 121 8 Z as Focus for Alliance 121 9 Skewing Rule, Trio/Iatmul 122 10 Repetition of Wau-Laua Link over Three Generations 126 4 FOREWORD No writer writes alone. Friends, loved ones and teachers are not ancillary workers but prerequisites for any work at all. My interest in Gregory Bateson stems from my time as an undergraduate at the London School of Economics. I have to thank my teachers at the Department of Social Anthropology there, particularly Dr Alfred Gell who, with an appreciation of the Grand Alliance which the author of Naven and the sometime husband of Margaret Mead would have appreciated, included a lecture on Bateson in a course on American anthropology. Dr Michael Sallnow's perceptive and imaginative teaching led me to an interest in theories of ritual and performance. I would also like to thank another of my teachers at the LSE, Dr Joanna Overing, for her continuing interest in my work as an undergraduate and as a research student. Her guidance and her friendship has been invaluable. My preliminary research at the School of Oriental and African Studies was funded by a grant from the Social Science Research Council from 1982 to 1984. I must also thank the Royal Anthropo­ logical Institute for a generous award which has financed the final stages of the preparation of my thesis. I recall with warm appreciation my teachers at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art who inspired me with a life-long love for the performing arts, and for the theatre in particular. I would specially like to mention Keith Johnstone, who is not only a teacher of acting blessed with genius; he was also responsible for my firs t taking a serious interest in anthropology. I would like to thank all my friends for their encouragement, companionship and support. Thanks, particularly, to Jude Alderson, Suki Huntington, John and Vera Bolton, Eve Grace and Penny Ward. This thesis is for Kathleen Bradley, 1906-1983. I owe her more, much more, than I can ever say. 5 CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION FIFTY YEARS AFTER its publication, Gregory Bateson's Naven remains arguably one of the great unappreciated classics of social anthropology. Indeed, his published work other than the ethnography of the Iatmul probably has a wider readership outside anthropology than within it. This is because from the mid-1950s until his death in 1980 Bateson became well known for his research in other areas, particularly animal communication, family groups of schizophrenics and ecology. His following during the 1960s amongst the radical mandarins of anti-psychiatry, ecology and the other movements which made up the 'counter-culture' had little or nothing to do with his reputation as an anthropologist. This is despite the fact that his earliest work, anthropological field-work carried out in the early 1930s amongst a stone age people living on the Upper Sepik River in New Guinea, contained the seeds of many of his later achievements. This thesis is in part an attempt to demonstrate this continuity in Bateson's thought by means of a detailed analysis of Naven. In doing so, I hope also to show him to have been a seminal figure in the history of social anthropology, and one of crucial relevance for anthropologists working in the late 1980s. Further, the thesis is an attempt at an original critique of Bateson's Naven which examines the work as a contribution to the theory of performance in anthrop­ ology. In using this term I am referring to a disparate collection of writings which do not constitute an accepted corpus of literature but which I will use as references, particularly in this Introduction and in the last section of the text. These are largely drawn from anthropological studies of ritual in general and, more particularly, recent work which has employed the " dramaturgical" model not only of ritual but of society (or, at least, various societies) at large. I refer here in particular to the writings of Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz and Richard Schechner, as well as to the symbolic interaction- ist approach of Erving Goffman. The thesis also draws on philosoph­ ical perspectives from Derrida, Girard, Wittgenstein, Sartre and 6 Taylor. In using the term “performance theory" as a generic label for these and other references I may be setting a precedent, but I hope to show that it is a useful one for social anthropology. The thesis will, I hope, indicate something of the possible subject matter, scope and implications of an approach to performance. In the main body of the thesis I hope to show that Naven (1936 1st edition; 1956 2nd edition) is a crucial early contribution towards an anthropology of performance. My basic argument here is that Bateson's text continually attempts to transcend a structural- functionalist model of ritual by opening up several lines of theoretical debate which, I suggest, can usefully be considered as pointing towards the possibility of an anthropology of performance. Even apart from this, however, I will try to show why this book proves Bateson to have been a major figure in social anthropology despite the self-confessed failures noted by the author at the end of his text and that these failures contribute towards, rather than detract from, the success of Naven as an exposition of anthropological argument. Further, these failures contribute in no small measure to the importance of the book as an exercise in an anthropology of performance, since the very theoretical closures which Bateson regretted not achieving by the end of his text would actually work against an anthropology of performance in my sense of the term. Bateson himself does not use the notion of performance in his text, whereas the terms 'ritu a l' and 'ceremony' occur frequently. These terms are used as conventional common-places, and imply what can be called an essentialist meaning of 'ritu a l' and of 'ceremony'; that is, that all rituals and all ceremonies share a common essence which allows them to be placed within the same analytical categories.