AUTHENTICITY AND AUTHORSHIP
IN PACIFIC ISLAND ENCOUNTERS
ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology
General Editor: Rupert Stasch, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge
The Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO) is an international organization dedicated to studies of Pacific cultures, societies, and histories. This series publishes monographs and thematic collections on topics of global and comparative significance, grounded in anthropological fieldwork in Pacific locations.
Recent volumes:
Volume 11
Authenticity and Authorship in Pacific Island Encounters: New Lives of Old Imaginaries
Edited by Jeannette Mageo and Bruce Knauft
Volume 10
Money Games: Gambling in a Papua New Guinea Town
Anthony J. Pickles
Volume 9
Dreams Made Small: The Education of Papuan Highlanders in Indonesia
Jenny Munro
Volume 8
Mimesis and Pacific Transcultural Encounters: Making Likenesses in Time, Trade, and Ritual Reconfigurations
Edited by Jeannette Mageo and Elfriede Hermann
Volume 7
Mortuary Dialogues: Death Ritual and the Reproduction of Moral Community in Pacific Modernities
Edited by David Lipset and Eric K. Silverman
Volume 6
Engaging with Strangers: Love and Violence in the Rural Solomon Islands
Debra McDougall
Volume 5
The Polynesian Iconoclasm: Religious Revolution and the Seasonality of Power
Jeffrey Sissons
Volume 4
Creating a Nation with Cloth: Women, Wealth, and Tradition in the Tongan Diaspora
Ping-Ann Addo
Volume 3
The Death of the Big Men and the Rise of the Big Shots: Custom and Conflict in East New Britain
Keir Martin
Volume 2
Christian Politics in Oceania
Edited by Matt Tomlinson and Debra McDougall
For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/asao
Authenticity and Authorship in Pacific Island Encounters
New Lives of Old Imaginaries
Edited by
Jeannette Mageo and Bruce Knauft
First published in 2021 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
2021 Jeannette Mageo and Bruce Knauft
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mageo, Jeannette Marie, editor. | Knauft, Bruce M., editor.
Title: Authenticity and Authorship in Pacific Island Encounters: New Lives of Old Imaginaries / edited by Jeannette Mageo and Bruce Knauft.
Description: New York: Berghahn Books, [2021] | Series: ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology; vol. 11 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021005942 (print) | LCCN 2021005943 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800730540 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800730557 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: OceaniaCivilization. | EthnologyOceania. | Authenticity (Philosophy)
Classification: LCC DU28 .A95 2021 (print) | LCC DU28 (ebook) | DDC 995dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005942
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005943
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-80073-054-0 hardback
ISBN 978-1-80073-055-7 ebook
Contents
Jeannette Mageo and Bruce Knauft
Joyce D. Hammond
Jeannette Mageo
Bruce Knauft
Alphonse Aime
Doug Dalton
Sarina Pearson and Shuchi Kothari
Margaret Jolly
Figures
Introduction
On Authoring and Authenticity
JEANNETTE MAGEO AND BRUCE KNAUFT
Perhaps the most important contribution of this volume is a fresh perspective on how histories of ideas actually happen in social practicehow the transformations they entail are endlessly promiscuous. They spin out of and refract back onto relations of inequality, informed by relations of power and authority, yet everyone tries to appropriate what seems useful to them. Authenticity and authoring are projected objects (or subjects) of reference while also being traveling concepts. They are ideas transformed and rewritten in every culture that uses them, and they cross-fertilize in new contexts along the geographic and historical routes they traverse. This is not just a textual or intertextual or academic process of sedimentation. It is rather a dynamic of active social appropriation and recontextualization. Hence, we engage the morphing expression of authenticity and authoring among both Westerners and Pacific Islanders. This clues us in to their recursive and metamorphic histories.
Indeed, it is hardly a new notion that ideas and concepts as well as material renderings mutate and resolidify, crisscrossing and reconstituting over time. In different permutations, such awareness has been central to a range of highly theorized and sometimes highly abstract Western intellectual stratagems. These relate to: hermeneutics and phenomenology; semiotics and deconstruction; speech genres and heteroglossia; epistemic subjectivity; sociologies of knowledge; interdisciplinary conceptualization; and the attribution of artistic or academic categories.1 In the present volume, we do not concretely engage these perspectives, and we do not attempt to amalgamate much less synthesize them. Our interest is more practical and applied: how is it, we ask, that influential or powerful notionsin this case, authenticity and authoringget creatively used, changed, and reinvented in practice? This entails the power or privilege of assertion or promulgation, and also the counterforce of response, resistance, or appropriationor seeming refusal or farce or parody (see Scott 1987, 1992; Knauft 1996: chs. 68; Mageo 1996, 2008, 2010; Clifford 1988; Ortner 1995; Abu-Lughod 1990). Beyond such an antipodal or polarizing mode of phrasing, however, our deeper goal is to see how these ideational asymmetries and interchanges themselves render inadequate simplistic dichotomies of opposition between the powerful and the relatively powerless, especially as change ensues over time (cf. Hallam and Ingold 2007; Knauft 2019; Ortner 2016; Mageo 1998, 2002; Robbins 2013). In the insular Pacific, authoring and authenticity have a particular valence and historical character. Yet, we suggest, this valence and character throw into relief patterns that are common but may not be as obviously evident in other areas and regions.
