BOOK REVIEWS

Big Men and Great Men: Personifica­tions ofPower in Melanesia, edited byMaurice Godelier and MarilynStrathern. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press and Paris: Editions dela Maison des Sciences de I'Homme,1991. ISBN 0-521-39°18-4, xvii + 328pp, figures, tables, maps, notes, bibli­ography, index. US$47.50.

This important volume resulted from aworkshop expressly convened by theeditors to consider the typologicaldistinction between big men and greatmen developed in Godelier's The Mak­ing ofGreat Men. Godelier's inventionof the great man both upset the easyconvention of identifying Melanesianpolitics with big-manship and reinvigo­rated the comparative analysis thatfirst gave rise to this convention. Heextended Sahlins' influential argumentthat differences in the power personi­fied by big men and chiefs indicatedifferences between entire sociopoliti­cal systems. The construct of greatman is above all a welcome addition to

. the vocabulary of comparison inPacific studies.

In Godelier's view, big-manshippresupposes a particular conjunctionof kinship and economy, such thatthings and persons substitute for eachother in a range of transactions thatespecially includes bridewealth. Thatis, the qualitative "non-equivalence" oftransacted objects practically links theproduction and exchange of food, pigs,and shells (things) to the exchange ofwomen and the reproduction of kin(persons). A principle of quantitative"non-equivalence," moreover, under­pins the competitive ceremonialexchanges in which big men create

their status. By contrast, great men donot acquire their status through themanaged circulation of accumulatedwealth. They emerge instead wherepublic life turns on ritual initiations,where marriage involves the direct("equivalent") exchange of women,and where warfare similarly prescribesthe balanced exchange of homicides.Accordingly, the typological distinc­tion between big men and great menabbreviates a difference between logicsof social reproduction, and it is thesealternative logics rather than the fig­ures of prominent men themselves thatproperly merit comparative treatment.

Happily, few contributors testGodelier's typology in a dull exercise offalsification-an exercise that would inany case be restricted by the prepon­derance of Papua New Guinea ethnog­raphy. The volume neither validatesnor refutes Godelier's comparison.Instead, most of the fourteen papersbend and stretch his typology; someviItually dissolve it. Put differently, thepapers explore the limits and exploitthe potential of the big man-great mancontrast, but not in order to proposean alternative. Godelier devotes thelast chapter to speculation about theevolution of great-men societies intobig-men societies. This concludingattempt at reconstructing causal rela­tions counterpoises the gentle decon­struction of his typology that the rest ofthe book accomplishes.

A process of unmaking the great­man construct organizes the book. Thefirst three papers establish the coexist­ence of big-man societies and great­man societies within particular regions-Highlands New Guinea, the Mas­sim, and north Vanuatu. Each author

THE CONTEMPORARY PACIFIC· SPRING 1993

advances some idea of a continuum ormatrix of transformations that definesbig men, great men, and chiefs as logi­cal possibilities of each other. Thisanalytic strategy softens Godelier'sradical contrast. It also opens the ques­tion, engaged by subsequent papers, ofwhether the types or societies are his­torical transformations of each other.Lemmonier, in line with Godelier,specifies the evolution of war into com­petitive exchange as a key factor in theemergence of big-man societies; Liepand Jolly suggest that big-man societiesand great-man societies might havedevolved from earlier chiefly societies.

The next set of papers locates thedistinction between great men and bigmen within particular societies ratherthan between them. Battaglia andTuzin, for example, map the distinc­tion on the basis of dichotomies offemale-male and elder brother­younger brother, respectively. Juilleratand Schwimmer argue as well that bigmen and great men should be seen asexpressions of contradictory possibili­ties within a single encompassing logicof social reproduction. Consequentlythe comparative question becomes oneof determining which possibility domi­nates or eclipses the other, that is, ofdetermining the ratio between the twopossibilities. This question, in turn,allows one to ask whether certain his­torical circumstances favor the devel­opment of big-men societies. Several ofthe papers in this regard suggest (butunfortunately do not pursue) the ideathat the social practices associated withbig-manship developed in articulationwith the effects and conditions of capi­talism and colonialism.

Wagner introduces the third set of

papers by posing a methodologicalquestion shared by several contribu­tors: Is typology or classification amethod of comparison appropriate toMelanesian societies? EchoingMosko's interpretation of north Mekeoculture and society as a "total system,"Wagner argues that typologies inevita­bly and arbitrarily decompose irreduc­ible wholes, indigenous sequences ofthought and action that replicate andpermutate a specifiable core of mean­ings or relations. Gillison traces a com­plex sequence of such transformationswhile turning Godelier's "principle ofnon-equivalence" into a postulateabout metaphorical substitutionsbetween persons and things in Gimimyth and ritual. Strathern then extendsGillison's understanding of substitu­tion (and recovers it for the announcedproject of the volume) by treating bigmen and great men as "substitutes" for(or visible embodiments of) distinctmodes of social relationship. Sincethese two modes of relationship­unitary identity and particularizeddifference-appear in social action asalternatives to each other, it is not sur­prising that the typological distinctionbetween big men and great men contin­ually threatens to collapse.

At this point in the volume, Gode­lier's materialist and evolutionary con­cerns appear to be subsumed within theconduct of a different sort of social~nalysis. However, the final threepapers, all based on Highlands NewGuinea ethnography, gradually rein­troduce Godelier's initial dichotomyand the themes taken up in his conclu­sion. Lederman, while advancing theprovocative methodological critique ofcomparison-by-typology, shows how

BOOK REVIEWS

the structure of exchanges in Mendicurtails the scale of collective transac­tions and hence the "size" of big men.Modjeska returns to developmentquestions, using the Duna to exemplifyhow the expansion of sweet potato orpig production enabled the (pre)histor­ical displacement of ritual-mythicalpractices by gift-economic ones.Jorgensen correlates the distinctionbetween big man and great man withdifferences in the evaluation of men'sand women's (re)productive capacities-a consideration given less emphasisin the volume than one might expect.

Perhaps because of its unusual gene­sis, the volume is unusually coherent.Each paper separately enriches thenewer literature inspired by the figureof the Melanesian big man (see forexample the papers in volume 29 of thejournal Ethnology), but together theyrender further discussion of big-man­ship as a style of leadership, or even asa form of politics, unacceptably sim­ple. This outcome is the positive legacyof Godelier's effort at comparing"alternative logics of society." Thepositive value of this volume for a non­Melanesianist audience likewise con­sists in its double demonstration of thefamiliar limitations and untried possi­bilities of comparative analysis.

ROBERTJ. FOSTER

University ofRochester

Stealing People's Names: History andPolitics in a Sepik River Cosmology, bySimon J. Harrison. Cambridge Studiesin Social and Cultural Anthropology71. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1990. ISBN 0-521-385°4-0, xvi

179

+ 221 pp, plates, maps, figures, tables,notes, bibliography, index. US$47.50.

Harrison's much-anticipated mono­graph, Stealing People's Names, is thefinest anthropological picture of aSepik society since the work ofMargaret Mead and Gregory Bateson.The book focuses on Avatip, the largestof three Manambu villages, locatedalong the upper reaches of the middleSepik River. Until now, there has beenlittle anthropological informationabout this unique Sepik culture. Basedon twenty-two months' research from1977 to 1979, Stealing People's Namesinvestigates the political order of thesociety as it inheres in the symbolicrealm of culture.

Harrison arrived in Avatip preparedto investigate the male-dominatedprestige exchanges of material wealththat constitute a dominant mode ofpolitical process in Melanesia. But hewas soon presented with a problem,for Avatip lacks these exchanges.Moreover, the village seemed remark­ably preoccupied with the ownershipand disputation of totemic names.Indeed, political process in Avatip,culminating with dramatic oratorialdebates, revolves around these namesrather than such material wealth asshell valuables, pigs, and land. In otherwords, the political economy and his­tory of Avatip were being played out inan arena of symbolism and cosmologyrather than one of wealth objects.Harrison's goals were to describe andexplain these processes.

Manambu cosmology is a fixedsystem of timeless categories that orga­nize the world and human society. Thiscosmology, enshrined in totemic names