Strathern's Melanesian ‘dividual’ and the Christian ‘individual’: a Perspective from Vanua Lava, Vanuatu

'Dancing for joy': Gender and relational spaces in Papua New Guinea

“…Consequently, people situate themselves in a network of relationships that generate a variety of opportunities for, as well as constraints on, action and agency. This has been debated and disputed in various contexts (see for example Hemer 2013;Hess 2006;Mosko 2010;Robbins 2002;Smith 2012;Strathern 1988), and arose largely out of Marilyn Strathern's Gender of the Gift (1988), in which she proffered a primary metaphor for Melanesian sociality: that of the Melanesian person as multiple and relationally conceived. In this conception of the Melanesian person, people stood as 'a microcosm of social relations' (176).…”

“…Various ethnographers have pointed to the problematic nature of positing (even metaphorically) an incommensurability between the 'Melanesian' and 'Western' person, which LiPuma (1998:75) notes is actually a comparison of ethnographically informed patterns of personhood in Melanesia with Western ideologies of personhood rather than its lived reality (see also Hess 2006;Mosko 2010). Several have pointed to the ethnographic reality of both the 'dividual' or partible and the 'individual' in both Melanesian and Western personhood (see for example Hemer 2013;Hess 2006;LiPuma 1998;Mosko 2010).…”

“…Several have pointed to the ethnographic reality of both the 'dividual' or partible and the 'individual' in both Melanesian and Western personhood (see for example Hemer 2013;Hess 2006;LiPuma 1998;Mosko 2010). Nonetheless, Melanesian societies do exhibit a primary focus on what Robbins (2002:190, 203) refers to as 'relationalism', which has at its base a paramount value for relationships and is based on 'relationalist assumptions'.…”

From dividual and individual selves to porous subjects

“…The anthropological literature is rife with critiques of this distinction (see, e.g. Shweder & Bourne 1984; Josephides 1991; Ram 1994; LiPuma 1998; Hess 2006). By the turn of the century, Englund and Leach (2000: 229) observed that it had become ‘current anthropological wisdom’ that ‘all persons are both dividuals and individuals’.…”

“…As critique and reconceptualisation of the individual:dividual distinction is well established in the anthropological literature (e.g. Ram 1994; Busby 1997; LiPuma 1998; Hess 2006)—and accepting Englund and Leach’s claim that all persons are both dividual and individual to some degree—my aim is to attempt to further clarify these issues by introducing and developing an idea recently formulated by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age (2007)—specifically, his distinction between porous and buffered selves. Indeed, there are very strong parallels between the philosophy of the self that Taylor outlines in his earlier work—most systematically in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)—and, for example, LiPuma’s discussion of the problematic distinction between modern and Melanesian persons.…”