Here and There – Trobriand Islands
One weekend, staying overnight on the Saturday, is scarcely enough to claim I have spent time in the Trobriand Islands. The suggestion is almost laughable. However, the impact of that brief visit was far from trivial, combining anxiety, images of an inaccessible good life, fascination and anger. However, to explain all that I should start at the beginning, not 1981 when I was there, but back in 1964, or even in 1884.
Bronisław Malinowski was born in 1884, in Kraków, a descendant of an old Austrian-Hungarian titled family. His father was a university professor, his mother came from a land-owning background. Despite rather frail health, he excelled in his academic program, and after obtaining a doctorate in philosophy from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków he began travelling. In 1910 he went to England and enrolled as a postgraduate student in social anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE). His initial research was on Australian Aboriginals, his first book in 1913 was The Family Among Australian Aborigines.
In June 1914 he left for a six-month visit to Australia. However, the timing turned out to be close to disastrous, as he was in Australia at the outbreak of the First World War. Although ethnically Polish, he was a subject of Austria-Hungary, and if he returned to the UK, he was likely to be interned. He decided not to return to Europe and the British authorities allowed him to stay on in Australia. He undertook field trips, the famous of which were to the nearby Trobriand Islands. His time there included two major expeditions from May 1915 to May 1916, and October 1917 to October 1918, together with several shorter visits. He returned to London in 1921, at the same time as his classic field study, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, was published. Over the next 20 years he carried out fieldwork in Africa. At the end of his career, he took a position at Yale University in 1941, only to die there a year later.
Why is he regarded as such a major figure in social anthropology? To put it simply, he demonstrated the importance of fieldwork where the researcher experiences the everyday life of the people he is studying. Malinowski emphasised the importance of detailed participant observation on a daily basis, seeing the goal of the social anthropologist, “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world”. This approach was subsequently labelled ‘ethnography’, a technique in which he was a pioneer, even the ‘inventor’ of the approach. He did this by setting up a tent in the middle of village where he studied, living there for prolonged periods of times, weeks or months. Those emphases on ‘his’ were mine and deliberate: Malinowski was a researcher of his time, with its barely acknowledged understanding that looking at the lives of others was principally about men.
Malinowski carried out his fieldwork from his base on Kiriwina Island. It is hard not to smile, even laugh, when you see the photographs he took. There are the indigenous islanders, close to naked, and Malinowski in his tropical gear, right down (or up) to a pith helmet. There is his tent, table, chair and equipment, looking almost misplaced among the village huts and gardens. At the forefront of developing participant observation, for which he was both a pioneer and advocate, he retained many of the comforts and practices of his home country. It makes a fascinating comparison with contemporary participant observers, who almost go native. However, the differences are superficial, and he was developing a methodology that is still used today: although not the first, he practiced an approach to ethnographic research that remains central to social anthropology.
The approach began as a matter of necessity. On his first field trip, he found he was woefully underprepared. He didn’t know the language of the people he hoped to study, and on this first occasion he was based with a local missionary, making daily trips to the village. His troubles increased when he lost his translator. To him the only solution was to immerse himself in the life of the people he was studying. This wasn’t just a methodology; it was a counter to many other anthropologists whose work was based on second-handed accounts. Indeed, James Frazer, one of his mentors, was just such an armchair anthropologist. Frazer was credited with inspiring Malinowski to become an anthropologist. However, Malinowski was critical of Frazer from his early days, and it has been suggested that what he learned from Frazer was not ‘how to be an anthropologist’ but ‘how not to do anthropology’.
Influenced by observation and questioning, Malinowski was an early exponent of ‘functionalism’. Unlike those that advocated a functionalist view that culture was developed to meet the needs of society, he argued that culture functioned to meet the needs of individuals rather than the society as a whole. In Argonauts of the Western Pacific, he observed: “Besides the firm outline of tribal constitution and crystallized cultural items which form the skeleton, besides the data of daily life and ordinary behavior, which are, so to speak, its flesh and blood, there is still to be recorded the spirit—the natives’ views and opinions and utterances” (page 22 of the 1961 edition of Argonauts).
A hundred years later, Argonauts of the Western Pacific remains an outstanding book. It is a classic in social anthropology, but also a wonderful account of the people of Kiriwina, their lives and their practices. Of course, the language is less than ideal for modern readers, as he refers to Trobrianders as ‘savages’ for example, but if you can set aside modern sensibilities, it is a very revealing account of life in the Pacific. It is probably most famous for his explanation of the Kula Ring, a complex exchange system between the Trobriand Islanders and other island groups in the same region of Melanesia.
His account of the Kula Ring exemplifies his functionalist approach: “Yet it must be remembered that what appears to us an extensive, complicated, and yet well-ordered institution is the outcome of so many doings and pursuits, carried on by savages, who have no laws or aims or charters definitely laid down. They have no knowledge of the total outline of any of their social structure. They know their own motives, know the purpose of individual actions and the rules which apply to them, but how, out of these, the whole collective institution shapes, this is beyond their mental range. Not even the most intelligent native has any clear idea of the Kula as a big, organised social construction, still less of its sociological function and implications…The integration of all the details observed, the achievement of a sociological synthesis of all the various, relevant symptoms, is the task of the Ethnographer… the Ethnographer has to construct the picture of the big institution, very much as the physicist constructs his theory from the experimental data, which always have been within reach of everybody, but needed a consistent interpretation”. (this quote comes from pages 83-84 of the 1961 edition of Argonauts). His ethnographic approach, distinguishing between between description and analysis, and between the views of actors and analysts, was central to much of the teaching in my undergraduate course in 1964. The book is still used today.
All that was background! Now we can move forward to 1981, when I was asked to run a training course to develop the management skills of local oil company staff in Papua New Guinea. More about that exercise will appear in another blog. However, working in Papua New Guinea had another, quite unexpected bonus. An air traffic controllers based in Port Moresby offered to take me and a couple on holiday over to the Trobriand Islands. For social anthropologists, this is like going back to the birthplace of the discipline. A fourth passenger joined us, Charles Lepani, an elegant young man who was studying at UNSW. Conversation soon revealed he was the grandson of a chief of the Trobriand Islands, where the Lepani family had been important for generations. He was later knighted, and as Sir Charles Lepani he was the High Commissioner for Papua New Guinea in Australia from 2005-2017, after stints as the ambassador to the EU, and to several European countries. That day he was returning to attend a funeral, and I couldn’t believe it when he invited me to go along.
Here was I, a student of social anthropology, and by chance I had the opportunity to see one of the Trobriand rituals. What did I do? I chickened out! Not entirely. I did go along and see some of the initial stages of what I could see was going to be long and elaborate evening of feasting and performance. However, I was also aware that I was an outsider. I knew some of the events would be restricted by gender, but I felt another restriction was in relation to outsiders. I was an outsider, a white businessman. After seeing a little of what was probably preparations as much as anything, I went back to the ‘hotel’ we were staying in overnight.
I was a tourist and enjoyed being taken around the island in an old, open jeep. Already subject to a great deal of outside influence, I was still able to see the evidence of what an unspoiled tropical paradise had been. There were beautiful beaches, cultivated and uncultivated land, lots of birds, and, above all, a sense that this was a place of escape, far away from everyday life of people like me. It was seductive. To live on an island like this. As if deliberately put in place for visitors, I saw a couple of children, probably not yet teenagers, walking back into the village, carrying two fish I imagined they had caught just a few minutes earlier. It is the strongest image I have of Kiriwina. Yes, I know, the sight of those two happy children masks over all the real issues in living in a tiny poor island. Is the life there a good life? Perhaps it is, but it is far too unrealistic for a soft, western-brought-up person, who needs his electricity, comfortable bed, computer, and so much more.
The island wasn’t unspoilt. There was an older man (I think German by background) who had lived on Kiriwina for many years. He was the owner of the jeep, and he ran the visitor accommodation. The ‘hotel’ was basic, on the foreshore, and it was fine as a place for the night. However, if my strongest image from the Trobriand islands was of those two youngsters and their fish, the other lingering recollection is very different, depressing evidence of outside influence. Did I say depressing? Actually, the word should have been angry. I hadn’t known this when we arrived in Kiriwina, but this one place to stay was advertised as a love hotel: young Trobriand women were claimed to be promiscuous, and the hotel owner arranged for women to come to the hotel at night for guests to enjoy. Someone knocked on my bedroom door during the night: I ignored the sound, and whoever it (she) was gave up. A perversion of culture to encourage prostitution. I still have a confusing mixture of feelings about that visit, a paradise spoilt by a western interloper, but away from him the superficial evidence of an island paradise lived on, however misleading it was.
One final recollection was that of anxiety. To fly to the Trobriand Islands in a small plane meant we had to fly over the mountain range that runs northwest to southeast, up close to Mount Victoria, roughly following the path of the Kokoda Trail. Looking out of the aeroplane window, there wasn’t much to see, and the pilot cheerfully told us his plane couldn’t fly more than a thousand feet or so above the peaks we were crossing. I had the privilege (?) of sitting next to him, and every so often he would point out a landing strip. Yes, a landing strip carved into the side of the mountain. He told me if we had to land, the strip was short but steep, and we’d stop easily. Of course, we would then have to leave on that same strip. He tried to reassure me, by explaining we’d drop for a bit as we left the strip, but the plane would eventually regain control!
As if that wasn’t enough, when we arrived in Kiriwina Island, the first task was to refuel the plane. There were a few large oil drums, filled with aviation fuel. It had to be hand-pumped into the aircraft wing tanks. While this was done, I looked at the drums. They were awfully rusty. Was the fuel okay? It must have been, because we got back, but the flight, both ways, was enough to make anyone anxious! I know I was being ridiculous. People often fly in equally demanding conditions in Australia. Not only was this a paradise I was unable to imagine as home, but I was used to jet planes, in the foolish belief they were much safer.
I shouldn’t have been surprised by what I saw in that short visit. I could have been in outback Australia, were it not for that ocean, blue and calm (probably quite unlike that many other days on Kiriwina). Although the impact of the western world had been much greater in Alice Springs when I was there, there were many similarities. In both places I was able to see some small part of a culture, a way of living, utterly different from my own. In both places evidence of traditional activities, stories, rituals, social structures, and so much more was still present. However, in both outside influences were eroding what had been the case, with the presence of missionaries, government agents, businesspeople, and tourists. Western dress, western technology: in some cases, the impact was small, locals wearing shorts and t-shirts, but in other ways the outside influence has been to diminish what had been there before, television and video replacing traditional Aboriginal storytelling. You can imagine the many ways our culture casually crushes traditional ways of life. On Kiriwina, it was perverting local cultural to ‘offer’ young Trobriand women to visitors, free sex, but paid for, of course.
The problem is twofold. The obvious issue is that some cultures swamp others, wiping out appreciation of the knowledge, history and values of traditional cultures as modern practices replace them. However, the bigger issue is that we can’t go backwards. Knowledge is dangerous and insidious. Once you know and see something, you can’t undo its presence. If Putin continues along his megalomaniac path to crush Ukraine and re-establish Russia as a dominant force in the world, it won’t be the Russia that was once there, not will Ukraine go back to the way it was. In the outback and in Kiriwina, people are aware of cars, packaged food, cheap alcohol and drugs, other peoples’ stories, religions, and beliefs. Alongside the destruction we visit on other cultures, we also diminish what was there before. As the Covid-19 pandemic begins to recede and people travel more, so tourism will keep seeking new, exotic places for the affluent to visit. Maybe that’s already the case in the Trobriand Islands, and the ramshackle hotel I stayed in has been replaced with a modern four-star hotel.
Anthropologists, linguists, and historians try to preserve knowledge about other places and other times. Decade by decade, fewer distinct dialects languages are spoken in countries like Papua New Guinea, Malaysia, and China, and soon most will disappear. I admire countries like Wales, where they work hard to keep their language alive, preserving the names of places and activities, but change is against them, as it seems younger generations are less likely to be interested in preserving the past, and more interested in riding the waves of the new. However, the story isn’t only about disappearance. While cultures are being eroded, knowledge grows. We are learning more and more about traditional medicines. In fifty years’ time, discoveries from researching what Trobriand people did will have become part of advanced agricultural and medical knowledge. It won’t be lost, but I doubt we’ll remember where the knowledge came from. We can’t go back, and as we go forward, we forget where we came from. Despite his photographs and diaries, Malinowski’s Kiriwina is lost forever.
