Controlling Fictions: Methodological Paradoxes and Political Dead Ends of the New Melanesian Ethnography

Abstract

The paper contributes to the anthropological debate surrounding the methodology of the New Melanesian Ethnography and the model of the dividual personhood it is based on. The author introduces a disciplinary and historical context in which the theory was formulated and proposes an extended explication of the monograph The Gender of the Gift that is generally credited as the seminal work for the theoretical movement. Two points of critique are introduced and foregrounded in the ethnographic material from Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu: the limited heuristic potential of the dividual model and its ideological relativism that is fraught with dangerous political consequences for the disciplinary project of anthropology.