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5. Colonialism & the Dissolution of Secret Reality
- University of Michigan Press
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chapter 5 Colonialism & the Dissolution of Secret Reality since secrecy has long been suspect—a source of subversion, abuse of power by brokers and nefarious agents of the state, and social ill—we should not be surprised to discover that precolonial male agents of ritual secrecy and colonial agents from Western powers competed for hegemony in Melanesia. With endemic war, troubled relations between the genders, questionable subversive activities in secret cults, and weird stories of cargo cults prevalent following ‹rst contact, the view evolved among colonials of a civilization at war with itself—a worldview reminiscent of the cynical attitudes noted in chapter 2. There seems little doubt that this political perspective supported the colonial policy of intervention at certain times and places, as we shall see. Especially in matters of suspicious secret ritual practice, colonial agents provided force when necessary to support missionary zeal in the destruction of secret cult objects and practices. As these things go, the “problem” of secrecy was not a very large one for the colonial powers. However, long after the male cults and cargo movements had begun to dissolve, the antisocial cynical and romantic views of male ritual secrecy in these societies continued to belabor and undermine their cultural historical interpretation. When social relations are built upon the contrast of public and private —and considering that trust between males was created through the homosociality of ritual secrecy in the men’s house, as it was in precolonial New Guinea—what happens with the introduction of colonialism? In a word: secrecy dissolved as the social order was radically breached from outside. Warfare was typically suppressed, and missionaries followed. As 173 ritual secrecy was a counterforce to the instability of warfare, its demise undermined the men’s house and defused attempts to regulate gender and intergenerational relations. Radical change forced men to redraw the lines of their reality precepts. With ritual gone, what remained was the rhetoric and morality of public affairs—the other side of the public/secret duality. However, those discursive controls were not up to the task of managing intimate relations, including those between the genders. Increasingly, individuals were left to their own devices. Hence, a new subjectivity began to unfold, characterized by the development of the concept of a “jural individual ,” harboring notions of “privacy” and private property, where once the tightly bound clubhouse territory of ritual secrecy reigned supreme. This change is the focus of this ‹nal chapter. The study of secrecy must always highlight the analysis of unfaith—of what is challenged and incoherent within cultural traditions that relied upon the uneasy truce of ritual secrecy. And this unfaith is a dif‹cult arena for the operation of Western science, and no less so for anthropology. Indeed, the very fabric of faith and fundamentalism is made from deeply seated beliefs and ritual practice of the person, and not just in the politics and public appearance of the cult. Faith in a sacred core of ritual is as signi‹cant for what it extols as for what it forbids. We have seen this repeatedly demonstrated in the exclusions of ritual secrecy and the means by which coherence is created in a hidden world that rejects secular ideas and sentiments as inimical to it. As the late Ernest Gellner put it, “Fundamentalism is best understood in terms of what it repudiates” (1992: 2). Nowhere is this insight of more value than in understanding male ritual secrecy in New Guinea and its postcolonial dissolution. The Last Governor-General’s Confession Seldom are we granted the testimony of the chief colonial of‹cer who assisted in the dissolution of an entire tradition of ritual secrecy, and for this reason alone the account of the late Jan Van Baal’s time among the Marind-anim is unique. For in the colonial history of Dutch New Guinea (before it was annexed by Indonesia in 1961 and became Irian Jaya) we have been given the gift of how Marind-anim secret practice was curtailed. Van Baal’s story is troubling and incomplete, being the sole surviving record; indeed, this is the testimony of the highest authority of the colonial administration, since he would become the last governor-general of the 174 • secrecy and cultural reality [3.90.35.86] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:13 GMT) colony, and the last surviving viceroy in the world, facts in which Van Baal took glee. Beginning in the mid-1930s the great Dutch anthropologist was charged with administering a vast...