Common Worlds and Single Lives: Constituting Knowledge in Pacific Societies (review)

Common Worlds and Single Lives: Constituting Knowledge in Pacific Societies, edited by Verena Keck. Explorations in Anthropology. Oxford and New York: Berg, 1998. ISBN cloth, 1-85973-164-3; paper, 1-85973-169-4; vi + 417 pages, notes, bibliographies, index. Cloth, US$57.50; paper, US$22.50. Distributed in North America by New York University Press.

This edited volume is a thought-provoking collection that touches on several fundamental long-term concerns of the discipline of social anthropology. It comprises sixteen chapters by individual contributors plus an introduction by the editor. The topics of the individual chapters range across almost the full breadth of social anthropological inquiry, and the reader is struck that a decade or so ago they would not have appeared in a single cohesive volume. Their present juxtaposition is made possible by the fundamental nature of the inquiry that focuses their common topic: the nature of culture and of knowledge.

The chapters are based on a selection of papers from those presented at the Conference of the European Society of Oceanists held in Basel in 1994. They are ordered under five headings: Embodied Personhood, Changing Life Histories, Local Recasting of Christianity, Experiencing Outside Worlds, and Appropriating New Forms of Knowledge. The first chapter, "Reflection on Knowledge in an Oceanic Setting," by the venerable Sir Raymond Firth, is presented as a prologue. The last chapter, "The New Modernities" by Marilyn Strathern, is presented as an epilogue. If fault were to be found with inappropriate juxtaposition of various chapters, it could be queried what the commonalities are that link the common-sense reflections of the prologue with the abstract, often cryptic, logic of the epilogue. But then, an argument could be made that Sir Raymond's contribution stands firmly on the collective wisdom of the founding period of the discipline, while Strathern's highlights contemporary struggles and future directions.

The introduction by Verena Keck reviews the theoretical problem reflected in the title of the volume, and that is the link between personal experience (single lives) and extant common knowledge (common worlds). Indeed, this is the fundamental issue of much of the discipline of social anthropology and sociology. Keck states that the consideration of the problem at the end of the century must be done in the context of questioning the basic utility of time-honored concepts such as culture, the individual, and knowledge (16). But it is culture that receives the most attention and seems to lie at the base of the entire inquiry, and not only because of its ubiquitous appropriation outside the discipline, as noted by several writers. Keck summarizes the difficulties with the concept as understood in the present. Although it is still possible to accept that culture is learned, acquired in the experience of everyday life, the link between a culture and a territory cannot be maintained. Second, it is no longer possible to accept that it is equally distributed among all people who are "members" of a "cultural group" (3).

This logic dictates that what had been conceived as culture must now be treated as knowledge, either as an "abstract pool of information" or as "knowledge in practice" (10). Turning to Bourdieu's concept of habitus, Keck sees a possibility of its operationalization in the investigation of "which form knowledge/knowing is mentally at the disposal of the actor" (12). Keck states that the aim of the collection is "to provide an analysis of the nature of knowledge transmission in post-Colonial Pacific societies" (16). An array of instances follows.

The identification of the transmission of knowledge as the focus of inquiry implicates methodology and the disciplinary reporting of findings. Several chapters reflect on the manner and context in which knowledge is transmitted by Pacific Islanders, to the researcher as well as to the audience of scholarly texts. Andrew Strathern in "A Twist of the Rope" writes about the contrasting experiences of producing a life...