Securing Modernity: Towards an Ethnography of Power in Contemporary Melanesia (Introduction) (Report‪)‬

INTRODUCTION Using Melanesia as its ethnographic focus, this collection documents and analyses some contemporary transformations in governmentality, in the art of making people governable. We are often blinded by a view of power and governance as repressive and as stifling innovation whereas, in fact, power itself can have creative and productive dimensions to it. This is not only in the sense that power relations produce social orders, wealth and subjects but also in the sense that power itself is being socially and culturally produced. Power is also engaged in processes of becoming, in process of being formed and transformed. Power can be experimented with to create new practices and technologies for articulating itself. This collection studies how the 'arts of government' can involve the development of new assemblages made up of institutions, practices, knowledges and tactics for controlling subjects and achieving security. These new assemblages of power have frequently involved not a radical creation of new technologies of social control but more a creative borrowing, reuse, amalgamation and regrouping of established technologies of control that have other institutional sites (Deleuze 1992; Foucault 1977, 1980; see also Kapferer 2005a, 2010). For us a key issue is how the state in Melanesia is borrowing and reinventing its relationship with technologies of governmentality belonging to religion and customary big men. In many rural areas, the contemporary state has been withdrawing its everyday presence whilst empowering and acting in alliance with large scale private companies, missionaries, churches, and aid organizations which have developed their own private ways of securing control (see also Benson and Kitsch 2010; Foster 2010 ; Lattas, this collection; Macintyre 2008).