Labour Processes’ Across the Indo-Pacific

Towards a Comparative Analysis of Civilisational Necessities

Dados Bibliográficos

ID7429196
AutoresFrederick H Damon (autor correspondente)
Ano2012
Volume13
Fascículo2
Páginas170-198
Data de publicação2012-04-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoCanberra Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0314-9099 • E-ISSN: 1740-9314
EditoraTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14442213.2012.656695
OpenAlexW2018450607
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas2
Referências citadas29

This paper initiates a comparative analysis of the labour process in three different social systems in order to shed light on the singularities of East Asian social forms. The point of departure for the project highlights the place of substitution central to the labour process in the West. There time's flow entails the replacement of human ingenuity by mechanical power and so distils into Western culture a fascination with the possibilities of substitution that governs much private and public life. It suggests the problem of 'Civilisation' derives from this process. By contrast, social life in the South Pacific, amidst cultures historically contiguous with those in East Asia, focuses on flows from original conditions. In this context social life follows organising sequences, not substitution. There follows and features a mimetic singularity of ascribed, ranked socially appropriate and chained action and reaction. East Asia shares with the South Pacific a mimetic aesthetic of sequence, rank and singularity, but there social process transforms into a centralising mass defined by epochal discontinuities organising the flows of life: Understanding that result is the 'problem' of East Asian sociality. Keywords: LabourSocial SystemsEast AsiaSouth PacificWest Acknowledgements The central ideas for this paper came to me while reading and discussing Christopher A. Gregory's unpublished essay 'Political Economy and Theology of Rice in Monsoon Asia', originally presented in Manchester in 2006; by continuing interaction with David Gibeault about the nature of Chinese society; by contemplating James J. Fox's ideas about 'precedence' in Austronesian societies, a model about the configuration of hierarchy or ordination (Do we see it in China?); and by a dialogue with Stephan Feuchtwang and Michael Rowlands whose work, in the hand of Yongjia Liang, created the workshop Empire, Civilisation and the Anthropology of China, organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, 4–5 March 2010. Gregory draws on and elaborates Francesca Bray's The Rice Economies (1986). Gibeault is a product of Dumont's former Paris equip ERASME. Gregory, Gibault, Fox and Feuchtwang read earlier drafts of this essay. I thank them for their interest, but relieve them of any responsibility for errors. This version of the paper also benefits from a reading by Yongjia Liang, and two anonymous reviewers, all of whom I thank. I also thank the American Philosophical Society for a Franklin Research Grant that enabled my 2009 research on the boats of the Eastern Kula Ring. Notes 1. I refer to Mark Twain's use of 'Sivilization' in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). 2. The workshop 'Empire, Civilisation and the Anthropology of China', organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, 4–5 March 2010. 3. Zhang, an Assistant research fellow in the Chinese Academy of Arts in Beijing personal communication, 15 September 2010. Huang Yu-chien confirms this idea (personal communication, 10 August 2010) referring me to: http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterASP/CharacterEtymology.aspx?characterInput=%E6%98%8E&submitButton1=Etymology. 4. I follow questions about the nature of symbolism Lévi-Strauss (1945 Lévi-Strauss, C. 1945. "20th Century French Sociology". In Twentieth Century Sociology, Edited by: Gurvitch, G. and Moore, W. E. 503–37. New York: New York Philosophical Library. [Google Scholar]) charted out against the position subscribed by and to Durkheim. 5. I use without elaboration the anthropological idea of exchange sphere derived from Mauss, Malinowski and Firth, but not fixed in the discipline until Paul Bohannan's work in the 1950s (e.g. Bohannan 1955 Bohannan, P. 1955. Some principles of exchange and investment among the Tiv. American Anthropologist, 57(1): 60–70. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). From that time it became part of a set of beliefs that assumed Western societies did not have exchange spheres. That understanding is mistaken. I have discussed ideas relevant to this problem in Damon 1993 Damon, F. H. 1993. Representation and experience in Kula and western exchange spheres (or Billy). Research in Economic Anthropology, 14: 235–54. [Google Scholar]. Aspects of the argument I make here touch on kinds of analyses brokered by a discussion of 'ideal types'. An anonymous reviewer of an earlier draft of this paper suggested this way of organising my data be considered, invoking Collier 1988 Collier, J. F. 1988. Marriage and Inequality in Classless Societie, Stanford: Stanford University Press. [Google Scholar] to do so. In some hands such an analysis might prove useful. For my purposes it would entail a degree of reification I do not find useful because the different social dynamics I describe are in conflict with one another across the ethnographic terrain this paper treads. 6. Marx wrote about this quality of Western organisation, i.e. the experiencing of 'internal' relations as if they were 'external'. More ethnographic accounts are found in Anthony Wallace's Rockdale, and Robert Jackall's account of upper level corporate managers (Jackall 1988[2009]). 7. Michael Lewis may be the best contemporary journalist recording this aspect of culture in the United States. See his Liar's Poker, about the re-organisation of debt in the US financial system in the 1980s; and The New, New Thing, about computers and the internet via Jim Clark's creation of Netscape. New forms of communication tend to make the previous ones irrelevant. In the academic domain it is of interest that, proverbially, mathematicians and physicists make their signal contributions early, before their heads are too cluttered up with realities. 8. Shineberg's (1967 Shineberg, D. 1967. They Came for Sandalwood: A Study of the Sandalwood Trade in the South-west Pacific, 1830-1865, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. [Google Scholar]) study of the nineteenth-century sandalwood trade shows how European Australians were forced to move pigs from one island to another to get what they wanted. Though obviously not because of Shineberg's work, this well-known quality accounts for Mauss's criticising Malinowski, in essai sur le don, for overstating the uniqueness of the Kula Ring. 9. 'Archives are the embodied essence of the event' (Lévi-Strauss 1966 Lévi-Strauss , C. ( 1966 [1962] ) The Savage Mind , University of Chicago Press , Chicago . [Google Scholar], p. 242). Although I have replaced Lévi-Strauss's 'event' with orders to capture the didactic nature of China's history-marked countryside, Stephan Feuchtwang's Foreword to Wang Mingming's book (op.cit.) makes me wonder if 'pulse' needs to be used here in place of event. 10. Zheng Miaoling, personal communication 31 August 2010. 11. For a rich discussion of Austronesian boat symbolism see Manguin (1986 Manguin , P. 1986 ' Shipshape societies: Boat symbolism and political systems in Insular Southeast Asia ', in Southeast Asia in the 9th to 14th Centuries D. G. Marr & A. C. Milner , Institute of Southeast Asian Studies , Singapore & Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University , Canberra , pp. 187 – 215 . [Google Scholar]). 12. Orthopraxy dominates orthodoxy: See Watson (1988 Watson, J. 1988. "The structure of Chinese funerary rites: Elementary forms, ritual sequence, and the primacy of performance". In Death Ritual in Late Imperial & Modern China, Edited by: Watson, J. and Rawski, E. 1–19. Berkeley: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]). 13. It has been identified by K. Damas as Manilkara fasciculata (Warb.) H.J. Lam. Sometimes another tree is substituted for it, also extremely dense: Ixora cf. asme Guill. 14. As evident from the Photos 1a/1b, two long pieces of wood run underneath these four. They cover close to 60 per cent of the boat's length and help tie this pivotal spring into the entire keel structure. These two pieces are also very carefully constructed from just one type of tree. Although not usually perceptible to the eye, one piece is slightly larger than the other to offset the forces of the mast, which as can be seen from this shot, are not symmetrically positioned in the keel. 15. Sahlins (1972 Sahlins, M. 1972. Stone Age Economics, New York: Aldine de Gruyter Press. [Google Scholar]) captured some of this quality in his chapters (2&3) on The Domestic Mode of Production. I explored some of these features long ago in Damon 1980 Damon, F. H. 1980. The problem of the Kula on Woodlark Island: Expansion, accumulation, and overproduction. Ethnos, 45(III–IV): 176–201. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]. 16. A slightly reworked version of the argument is presented in Damon 2008a Damon, F. H. 2008a. Apprehending the material and the social world, rethinking 'religion' and 'production' along the south side of monsoon Asia. Trans. Li Xiaomin, Chinese Review of Anthropology, 7: 181–99. [Google Scholar], 2008b Damon, F. H. 2008b. The significance of cybernetic structures: Wind and water ideas in the outrigger sailing craft of the eastern Kula Ring. Trans. X. Liu, Chinese Review of Anthropology, 7: 200–15. [Google Scholar]. 17. Here I refer to the fantasy sports, which in the United States are big business. One might also note the emphasis in novelty in the production of our music, movies, books, and so on. A new form should be substituted for an old one. 18. 'It was really uncomfortable to do thirty cycles of amplification and difficult to keep track ... That went on for several months until me and another guy in the lab told Tom, "If you don't get us a machine, we're quitting"' (Rabinow 1997 Rabinow, P. 1997. Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar], p. 141). See also p. 80. 19. In our event-way of thinking Mullis is credited with inventing PCR. Initially discounted as not significant PCR rapidly became a fundamental technique in many DNA health and research activities; hence the 1993 Nobel Prize. 20. In the Workshop for which this paper was first presented Joel Robbins delivered the keynote address, 'Transcendence and the Anthropology of Christianity: Change, Language and Individualism', which raised many issues pertinent to this paper and alerted me to the isomorphism between the orientation contained in Rabinow's account, his ideals for anthropology, dominant forms of Christianity, and interesting speculations about Axial Age transformations. This is at least the second coming of these probings. See the papers in Daedalus, vol. 104, no. 2, (Spring, 1975), 'Wisdom, Revelation, and Doubt: Perspectives on the First Millennium B.C'. 21. In our discussion of these points in 2008–9 Gibeault continued this way: 'I am actually working on the relation between the king and the mountain, but I did not relate it with the fields and productivity. This is specially pertinent as not only water comes from the mountain, but rain as well, as Chinese believe that mountains produce clouds. Clouds and rain are the figure of fertility in China, and they call male-female intercourse 'the plays of clouds and rain'. 22. With a Mauss-inspired sensitivity Billeter does capture these realities: 'The Chinese calligrapher's one concern is to endow the characters with life, to animate ...them...the brush is not a tool like a pen but an instrument that registers every move of the hand...Chinese calligraphy is in essence an art of movement' (Billeter 1990 Billeter , J. F. 1990 The Chinese Art of Writing , SKIRA Rizzoli , New York . [Google Scholar], p. 11). 23. Among the sources I have in mind for this claim is a lecture in April 2010 by James Wilkerson, Associate Professor of Anthropology, National TsingHua University, Taiwan. See Wilkerson, James n.d. 24. As a meeting point for South and East Asia and the Austronesian world Steve Lansing's work on Balinese rice agriculture probably set a standard for studies that simultaneously take on the analysis of skilled labour and sophisticated management (Lansing 1991, 2006). Dean and Xheng Zhenman (2010 Dean , K. & Zhenman , X. 2010 Ritual Alliances of the Putian Plain. Vol. One: Historical Introduction to the Return of the Gods , Brill , Leiden and London .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) meets that standard showing how the religious forms along the coast line of Fujian Provence serve as intensifications of everyday life (p. 4) and so thus serve to make and monitor the dynamical, complex systems which are irrigated rice fields. 25. This summary derives not only from considering Bray's account; Tim Flannery argues for the gross energy forms found amongst Europeans in both Australasia and North America (Flannery 1994, 2001). 26. Geoffrey Irwin, personal communication, 28 February 2010. See also Irwin 1985 Irwin , G. 1985 ' The emergence of Mailu ', Terra Australis 10 , The Australian National University , Canberra . [Google Scholar]. 27. Perhaps not. In the eastern corner of the Kula Ring the word usually translated as 'knowledge', kakin, is the duplicated form of the verb 'see', kin. 'Knowing' is seeing continuously, which is also one of the outcomes of successful kula (kun in Muyuw) action. This idea is semantically cognate to the Chinese wenming, . Additional informationNotes on contributorsFrederick H. DamonFrederick H. Damon is a Professor

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