Knowing Minds Is a Matter of Authority: Political Dimensions of Opacity Statements in Korowai Moral Psychology (Social THOUGHT & COMMENTARY SPECIAL SECTION: Anthropology and the Opacity of Other Minds) (Report‪)‬

In this essay, I want to set forth briefly the hypothesis that New Guinea people's statements about the opacity of other minds are often statements not only about knowledge and meaning but also about authority. Melanesian sensitivity about not presuming to know others' minds is intertwined with sensitivity about not presuming to impinge on each other's self-determination. Reflexive models of the possibilities and problems of knowing other minds are also models of the political terms of people's coexistence. I make this suggestion based on patterns of talk about minds among Korowai people of the southern lowlands of West Papua. There are about four thousand speakers of Korowai dialects, who live dispersed on clan-owned lands across five hundred square miles of forest, as well as increasingly in centralized villages along the region's major waterways (van Enk and de Vries 1997; Stasch In press). It is a feature of the generally egalitarian, fractious tenor of Korowai collective life that people overtly represent otherness of thoughts as a matter of politics, and politics as a matter of otherness of thoughts. The central item of talk illustrating this point is the commonly-heard verbal formula yepa yexulmelun, literally "Herself her thoughts," or "Himself his thoughts," an expression closely parallel to canonical statements about opacity of other minds reported from many other New Guinea communities. The word I translate as "thoughts" here, xulmelun, could also be glossed as "thinking," "mind," "intention," "will," "plans," "consciousness," "awareness," "feelings," or "reasoning." The word xulmelun also means "guts" or "viscera." Korowai like many other people identify cognitive and emotional deliberation with spaces of bodily interiority, specifically the internal cavity of a person's torso, and the organs there. (1) The statement "Herself her thoughts" or "Himself his thoughts" juxtaposes two noun phrases, which add up to the proposition: "She herself has her own guts," "She thinks for herself," or "She decides for herself."