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Table of Contents
Develop-man
Develop-man
Ryan Schram
Mills 169 (A26)
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
August 10, 2016
Available at http://anthro.rschram.org/1002/3.2
Talk pigeon?
Papua New Guinea Pidgin (Tok Pisin) is sometimes called Neo-Melanesian English.
pait (v.): fight, strum.
Man i paitim gita. The man strums the guitar.
stap (v.): stop, be.
Ol i stap long Mosbi. They are in Port Moresby.
rot (n.): road, road, way, method, plan, strategy.
Husat save rot? Who knows the way?
Develop-man
“The first commercial impulse of the local people is not to become just like [the West], but more like themselves” (Sahlins 1992, 13).
As a Kewa leader once told an anthropologist (paraphrase): “You know what we mean by 'development?': building a hauslain [a village community], a men's house, and killing pigs. This we have done” (quoted in Sahlins 1992, 14).
“Developman: the enrichment of their own ideas of what mankind is all about” (Sahlins, 1992, 14).
The two traps
- The trap of nostalgia: Cultures are dying.
- The trap of modernism: Everything is getting better.
Positive thinking
Positive thinking has deep roots in Western culture, going back to the Enlightenment:
- There is a reason for all of this.
- Everything is getting better.
Yet there has also been a critical tradition in Western culture which has been skeptical of this.
Voltaire's Candide and Doctor Pangloss
Doctor Pangloss believes:
- There is no effect without a cause, and
- All is for the best in, this, the best of all possible worlds.
For Doctor Pangloss, there is no other way that things could turn out
- “Legs are visibly designed for stockings–and we have stockings.”
- “Pigs were made to be eaten–therefore we eat pork…”
What's next
- We look more closely at buying and selling
- Capitalist societies make buying and selling possible
- Karl Marx provides a social theory of capitalism and its rules
- Capitalism is organized into classes, and people of each class play distinct social roles
- Capitalism is contradictory. It alienates value from workers to benefit owners, but it also needs people to belong to a social whole based on interdependence and reciprocity.
If you would like to learn more about Marxism, visit: http://marxists.org/ for online editions of the Manifesto, Capital, and other key writings of Marx and Engels.
References
Strathern, Andrew, and Pamela Stewart. 2004. Empowering the Past, Confronting the Future: The Duna People of Papua New Guinea. Basingstoke, Eng.: Palgrave Macmillan.