also back here, in a certain way, with Fredrik Barth and the Swat Pathans.
Neither descent alone nor exchange alone (‘the gift’) explains how New
Guinea Highlands social life works. It is human choices, choices made by
individuals, that turn out to be crucial, as Paul Sillitoe has consistently
(indeed, insistently) argued for the Wola people of the Southern
Highlands Province (e.g., Sillitoe 1979 ).
So we have individuals, and as Sillitoe has also insisted we have indivi-
duals of either (or any) gender. Both women and men are seen as having
minds and as potentially autonomous persons. The earliest Anglophone
anthropologists in the Highlands were all struck by the individuality of the
people they got to know. Indeed this characteristic was built into the work
of applied social scientists (notably Ben Finney) who saw how readily some
persons took to entrepreneurial activities once cash cropping and business
opportunities were introduced by the Australian colonial administration.
Of course, this stress on entrepreneurship would also have to be balanced
against the reentry of entrepreneurs into the production of social capital
through their pouring of resources into communal exchanges. But in the
event the stress on individuality was overtaken by a phenomenon called
the New Melanesian Ethnography in which individuals were decon-
structed back into a world of Durkheimian-style‘sociality’and trans-
formed by the magic wand of the post-structural imagination into an
entity called‘dividuals’, following work by McKim Marriot on (the very
different) societies of South India. Dividuals carry society within them.
They are already society. There is therefore no true individuality. Dividuals
are simply a part of society (or culture, if you wish). They have no
ontological basis outside of this context of society.
The suggestion that we look on New Guinea Highlanders as‘dividuals’
was an innovative twist in its time.
We reviewed this topic and commented on it in earlier publications, for
example in our edited volumeIdentity Work (Stewart and Strathern
2000b). The original formulation on the theme was couched in a sophis-
ticated way, recognizing both individuality and dividuality. This was not
particularly surprising, since it is patently clear that in all social contexts
there is a tension between individual wishes and a countervailing desire to
conform to custom. This was not, however, what the formulation meant,
because the intention was to focus on indigenous concepts and ideas, and
to foreground the hypothesized‘dividual’aspects of these. But what was
the dividual supposed to be, other than a person who carried within
himself or herself an awareness of being a part of a wider society?
42 BREAKING THE FRAMES