Totem and Transaction: The Objectification of 'Tradition' Among North Mekeo (Melanesia‪)‬

Much of the recent discussion over post-contact change in Melanesia and the Pacific has focussed on the processes by which cultural practices considered to be 'traditional' have been historically objectified (e.g. Keesing and Tonkinson 1982; Linnekin and Poyer 1990; Linnekin 1992; Hanson 1989; Thomas 1991; Jolly and Thomas 1992; Norton 1993; Foster 1992, 1995; LiPuma 2000). The preponderance of these analyses contend that such objectifications have intensified and proliferated in response to the forces of colonialism and the penetration of the nation-state. Harrison (2000), however, has recently argued that these objectifications of culture are neither new nor necessarily the effects of colonialism. Pre-colonial no less than post-colonial Melanesians, he suggests, characteristically construed their cultural practices and identities as objectified 'possessions' which in many ethnographic instances could be readily exchanged or transacted. Harrison posits, moreover, that the processes by which cultures were objectified in the two historical eras differed in accordance with 'changing conceptualisations of the nature of property' (2000:663); namely, in pre-colonial times Melanesians conceived of their cultural property with reference to 'the prestige economies, and in the trading and gift-exchange systems typical of this ethnographic region', whereas post-colonial cultures and identities have been objectified in accordance with concepts of 'private property' and the logic of 'possessive individualism' (Harrison 2000:676).