its significance‘mind’. A person for Hageners, for example, is someone
who has a mind (noman petem) and is mindful (noman-oronga pitim).
But, as we have pointed out in other connections, in practical usage the
idea of thenomancan be deployed to index all states of mind, from those
most individually oriented to those most collectively oriented.Noman,in
other words, is a holistic concept that realistically embodies what Anthony
Cohen referred to as the complexity of the self as a general point.
Hageners, therefore, signal in theirnomanconcept what we have called
the relational–individual, or we might as well call‘the social person’.It
follows that the dividual versus individual dichotomy is a non-issue, and is
in fact merely a product of various persistent trends and biases in socio-
logical and culturalist theory.
How, then, can we account for the phenomenon that occurred in
Melanesian studies of the person, that where there had been individuals as
social actors, now there were simply dividuals? A semantic transposition
occurred. How did this shift of perspective occur? We have to ask now,
how does academic knowledge or what passes for it, get produced and
reproduced? The suggestion about dividuals was an act of breaking frames,
and the suggestion itself was progressively simplified by eliminating all forms
of complexity and replacing these with an essentialized dichotomy. In one of
his insightful and reflective essays, Fredrik Barth explored an anthropology
of knowledge, in which he distinguished between semantics (or substantive
assertions), communication, and the production of knowledge via social
relations (Barth 2002 :3). In academia, as in other human arenas of competi-
tion, the production of knowledge is determined by social and institutional
power and the effects of mimesis linked to power. If we ask again, then, how
could a semantic volte-face have occurred in the Melanesian ethnography
about persons as individuals as against dividuals, two answers are at hand.
One is that fashions are very important in academia, and just as in clothes
fashions for women long skirts may be replaced with short ones, so in terms
of concepts if a familiar way of labeling phenomena is eclipsed by a new one,
it is often done by replacing it with its polar opposite. And with concepts as
arguably with clothes, whole philosophies of being are tied up in them.
Hence shifts tend not to be partial or mediated, but holistic and essentia-
lized. Before there were individuals. Now there must be dividuals. But in
this process of upending and reversing concepts ethnographic accuracy and
plausibility are sacrificed. One possible reason why our own concept of the
relational–individual did not greatly catch on was that it was altogether too
realistic and middle of the road to attract a set of cult followers who could
44 BREAKING THE FRAMES