Culture of
Stone. Sacred and profane uses of stone among the DanI by O. W. “BUD”
HAMPTON
College Station: Texas A & M
University Press. 1999, xxv + 331 pages, 181 figures, 8 colour plates,
9 tables. Hardcover ISBN 0-89096-870-5. ($69.95)
It is well known that many Pacific Islanders mistook
early whites for their ancestors. It is less well recognised that white
people generally made the same mistake (Gosden and Knowles 2001). For
white explorers from the nineteenth century onwards places like Papua
New Guinea were not just geographical locations but stages in the history
of the world. Many books were written with titles like I come from
the Stone Age or The technology of a modern Stone Age
people (Blackwood 1950). This book is very much in this genre. It is
a piece of good old-fashioned ethnography, documenting the activities
of groups of stone tool makers, from quarry to use and exchange, in
the highlands of Irian Jaya (also known as West Papua) the western half
of the larger island of New Guinea, which is presently, and unhappily,
a province of Indonesia.
This book is a strange hybrid, by an individual scholar
who lived and worked in Irian Jaya, provided painstaking documentation
of some of the peoples of the highlands, in rescue ethnography mode,
and then found an academic context in which to write up his results.
At the core of the book’s explanatory structure is the evolutionary
model of bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states. The Dani and their neighbours
are classed as tribes on the brink of becoming chiefdoms and there is
a brief explanation at the end as to why they have not made it to the
next stage of social complexity, which is to do with the nature of their
tropical environment, the perishable form of root and tree crops and
consequent lack of storable surplus. It is also a piece of ethnoarchaeology,
using the present to increase the robustness of inferences that can
be made about the past, in good Binfordian mode. But grafted onto this
is a recognition of the spiritual world in which the Dani live and the
sacred, as well as functional, purposes to which stone tools can be
put.
At the core of the book is an excellent set of observations
of the making, and to a lesser extent trade and use, of stone tools.
From West Papua through to New Guinea runs a mountain chain, with the
highest mountains east of the Himalayas. There is a range of habitats,
but in the larger river valleys live dense populations of people based
on intensive agriculture of taro, yams and sweet potato, bananas, sugar
and nuts and fruits. People throughout the region put on large exchange
events based around pigs, which have become the subject of countless
ethnographies. Hampton carried out a large number of field trips during
the 1980s, walking through twelve different language groups, interviewing
people usually through the medium of interpreters, observing and participating
in quarrying and other activities. The practical and physical difficulties
of such work cannot be overestimated and Hampton is obviously a tough,
resourceful, observant and articulate fieldworker. He took 20,000 slides,
collected specimens and made countless fieldnotes, which must contain
more detail than comes through in this already large book.
The central chapters of the book (chapters 5-7) document
a series of quarry sites across the region with descriptions of the
geology, the manufacturing steps taken, the social and economic organisation
of quarrying expeditions and the outcomes of each expedition. Hampton
is adept at describing the processes of manufacture and illustrates
various steps clearly with photographs and diagrams. These chapters
are followed by one on trade, which looks at trade routes, objects exchanged
for axes and the sets of social connections. The final chapter contains
an odd assortment of topics, ranging from a restatement of thoughts
on technology, to an excursus on the sacred use of stones and reflections
on the cultural ‘stage’ the Dani and others are at –
ie relatively low.
Hampton is only partially read in the literature from
the region and could have set his work in a broader comparative context
by reading. The major omission is the Pétrequins’ (1993)
work in Irian Jaya (their French work is referenced), which has significant
overlaps with Hampton’s own. Further east along the mountain chain
is, but in Papua New Guinea, is Burton’s (1984) thesis on axe-making
in the Wahgi, which has a mass of data on production and trade of axes,
specifically looking at the axe as an element of the growth of the wealth
economy through the Holocene.
Finally one has to wonder about the political context
of Hampton’s work. The Dani and their neighbours are carefully
framed as Stone Age tribes, excluding all reference to the present.
This might leave the reader unaware that the province of Irian Jaya
is engaged in a long term armed struggle to free itself from Indonesia.
Many of the most repressive aspects of the Indonesian regime have been
witnessed in the province, ranging from successful attempts to flood
the province with Javanese migrants (Melanesians are now in a minority)
to arrest and execution. The author thanks the Governor of the province
and the Heads of Army and Police for their ‘early and continued
cooperation’ (p. xxiii). At this point the fiction that the highland
peoples of the region are stone age survivals shifts from an academic
archaism to a much more conscious political act.
This is a varied book in quality and intent. The observations
of stone quarrying and making are acute and well described. We are all
aware that there is no such thing as an innocent observer and the framework
within which the observations are described allow the author to ignore
the very real post-colonial struggle in which the West Papuans are engaged.
Here are stone using people at the cutting edge of the contemporary
world, fighting for self-determination and independence. The continuity
and change in all their activities needs to be understood against this
background.
Chris Gosden
School of Archaeology and Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.
References
Blackwood, B.M., 1950. The Technology of a Modern Stone Age People
in New Guinea, Occasional Papers on Technology 3, Oxford: Pitt
Rivers Museum, University of Oxford
Burton, J., 1984, Axe makers of the Wahgi: precolonial industrialists
of the Papua New Guinea Highlands. Unpubl. PhD thesis. Australian
National University, Canberra
Gosden, C. and Knowles, C., 2001. Collecting Colonialism. Oxford:
Berg
Pétrequin, P. and Pétrequin, A-M., 1993. Ecologie
d'un outil : la hache de pierre en Irian Jaya (Indonésie).
Paris: CNRS
Review Submitted: May 2004
The views expressed in this review are not
necessarily those of the Society or the Reviews Editor.
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