Description, difference and history, in Melanesia, for example

Abstract

This article is about the relationship between common history and specific cultures. Specifically, it seeks a resolution to the ongoing problem of which of these should be given logical priority in anthropology— that is, which should be given the status of first cause. This problem is exemplified in the 1990s debate between proponents of the so-called ‘New Melanesian Ethnography’ and those of the ‘New Melanesian History’. Thinking through the Parliament House sculptures controversy that erupted in Papua New Guinea in 2013, we draw an analogy between the work of Marilyn Strathern and Dipesh Chakrabarty to argue that difference can be located in practices of description. Drawing on the ideas of Elizabeth Anscombe and Ian Hacking, we suggest that descriptive practices are inextricably linked with intentional actions—that is, intentional actions exist ‘under a description’. On this basis, we argue that neither culture nor history can be a first cause, since both are created by specific descriptive practices—history and ethnography as accounts of the world, for example, but also indigenous accounts embodied in state-building, Pentecostal Christianity, or gift exchange. We close by suggesting how anthropologists might allow the times and differences of others to flourish in their own descriptive practices and avoid the kind of metaphysical impasse that marked Melanesian studies in the 1990s.