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Honorary Fellows Douglas
Oliver Deceased Honorary Fellows Gregory Bateson |
ANNETTE WEINER Not only was Annette Weiner an active member of ASAO during her most formative years as an anthropologist, but her interest in Oceanic ethnography and her depth of commitment to the ethnographic project there has been profound and illuminating. Since the seminal work of Malinowski and Mauss, Oceania has long been a cultural area that has contributed significantly to anthropological theory, in areas of kinship, exchange, gender, and the invention of tradition. This has continued in the way the growing body of ethnography from Papua New Guinea, especially in the 1950s and 60s, first addressed the descent models derived from Africa and later critiqued culturally-bound notions of gender, reproduction, and personhood. Since her dissertation and first book on the classically central Trobriand Islands, Women of Value, Men of Renown, Annette Weiner has been a leading figure in Oceanic contribution to anthropological theory. Annette's work is characterized by a profound originality in recognizing the gendered and political ramifications of exchange and kinship, rethinking such classic questions as "reciprocity," "incest," "inalienability," and "hierarchy." For example, the first publications she made on the Trobriand material recognized not only that women were involved in exchange (and therefore corrected androcentric biases in Malinowski), but further that women's exchange in sagali (mortuary) rituals occupied a central role in the total Trobriand system of social organization—through which subclans (dala) reproduced themselves. They did so, she showed, by reclaiming dala valuables that men had "given" to their sons and daughters, who were not members of the matrilineal dala. Such reclamation was a central political moment in the subclan's reconstitution, a show of its strengths. These gifts were significant components of the larger exchange cycle, not to be understood as Malinowski had— preoccupied with the Western, ethnocentric problem of "reciprocity"—as a "free gift," an expression of love. This approach to exchange is reflected finally in the brilliant discussion—in The Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea—of gifts to children, sexuality, and kula in the Trobriands as representing different media and cycles of exchange, with distinctive attributes for producing power and hierarchy in the system. The question of recognizing women's value in social systems, in Annette's work, is never satisfied by an acknowledgment of women's power. Rather, she has used the gendered perspective to stretch social theory further. Thus, she points out that Trobriand men's gardening for their affines, rather than for their wives, is part of a system in which the ongoing bond between brother and sister, rather than husband and wife, is critical. Subsequently, her comparative work in Samoa and using ethnographic materials from other Pacific societies emphasized the relative importance of the brother-sister tie, as opposed to the husband-wife emphasis on women as centrally offering sexuality in marriage. This emphasis drew attention to the centrality of reproduction, seen as a complex and total cultural phenomenon, as a framework for understanding men and women, a framework that did not, nonetheless, reduce women to the role of mothers, but placed reproduction in a broader cosmological framework. One of the keys to following this in Annette's work has been attention to "women's wealth" and its circulation, usually in the form of cloth. The failure to recognize the significance of such forms of value, she showed repeatedly, has led to an inability to recognize the nature of exchange and the role of different actors within a system. The book she edited with Jane Schneider on Cloth and Human Experience was a major contribution to this project. Finally, Annette's work on exchange, gender, and kinship culminated in a series of papers and the book Inalienable Wealth, drawing her insights into exchange and gender into a theoretical confrontation with some of the most enduring confusions about "reciprocity" as the central question involving exchange. Instead, pursuing the most subtle intimations of the field imagined by Mauss, Annette challenged the simple "gift"/"commodity" dichotomy for exchange and argued that exchange should be understood as having the capacity to express identity and to produce hierarchy—ranked or valued difference. Hierarchy is produced or sustained in the ongoing political struggle of social agents to claim one's identity through holding on to valued objects or forms of property, such as those claimed by Trobriand subclans in mortuary. This is a theory that recognizes not a class of objects called "inalienable" but rather a set of social processes in which the capacity to exchange or withhold can become a marker of social strength and identity. In recent years, the insights deriving from her theorizing of what she called "inalienability" have become significant not only in Oceanic ethnography but in many areas of work on material culture and consumption. These contributions were matched by an equal commitment to anthropology as a discipline. Beginning rather later than most in her professional career, Annette became Professor and Chair of NYU's Department of Anthropology in 1981 and built it into an excellent environment for research and teaching. Shortly thereafter, in rapid fashion, Annette became President of the Society for Social Anthropology, President of the American Anthropological Association, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and Dean of Social Sciences at New York University. In this ascent to recognition, she carried with her and promoted generally the significance of anthropological research in Oceania for broader questions of modern intellectual life. Fred Myers, New York University (April 1997 Newsletter) |