Abstract
By theorizing space as a capacity for motion, Schneider’s analysis reveals how Pororan islanders objectify relations through mobilities. Her main argument emerges from detailed ethnographic work that interprets a specific situated island sociality that may well have an influence on island studies beyond the regional Melanesian anthropology literature. In the year 2000, Pororan was an island with a land area of about two square kilometres and a population of 1225. Social relations in that tiny place, created on ‘rubbish drifting across the lagoon’ that ‘might sink soon’ (pp. 8−11), as research participants refer to their island, are forged through ‘going around’ (roror in Hapororan) at sea and on land, and returning in unpredictable patterns. These movements are captured analytically through the author’s research strategy that incorporates observing and following people, listening and paying careful attention to verbs of motion and distinctive gestures.
Because they live on an island that is constantly shifting − acquiring sand on one end and losing it at another – and because islanders must relate to constantly changing natural phenomena on land and sea, they display a distinct lack of interest in the dichotomy between mobility and rootedness. Pororans are primarily concerned with making particular kinds of movements that appear against a background of indeterminate ‘going around’.
The particular vitality of island life, characterized by the distinctiveness of a land in motion and an identity that is not land-related, is best presented in chapters about fishing as a key quality of island sociality (pp. 25−50) and resistance to governmental claims to revive local culture that implies a formalization of power relations (pp. 146−85). While fishing, Pororans make their relations disappear by not knowing where they will fish, what might happen at sea, or when they will return. Relations re-appear through certain actions upon return that transform movement into kinship, parenthood, or mutual help relations of a particular form. Temporality, the time-space expansion at sea, best characterizes island life. ‘Going around’ is not escapism to islanders; rather it is a chance for them to rest and the freedom to re-create relations through distinctive saltwater aesthetics.
Regarding power relations, the Pororan interest in keeping relations open-ended through movement works against the Bougainvillean government’s suggestion of reviving local culture through the documentation of kinship, rank, clan, and resource management on the island. Pororan relations cannot be ‘fully exposed all at once in a single form and moment’ (p. 176). The capacity to cause others to move is intrinsic to social organization. The power of rank appears in movements that pull people to particular settlements and unfolds in a range of particular movements. The author reveals the islanders’ fear that the government’s requests would carve up place into bounded bits of land and thus put saltwater sociality, grounded in the capacity to move freely, at serious risk. Pororan sociality is incompatible with assumptions of bounded and territorialized versions of traditional leadership.
Schneider not only demonstrates how the freedom to create relations anytime and anywhere on land, at sea, and in the connections to places beyond is crucial to the localised sociality of a Melanesian island, but also provides an important theoretical contribution to broaden our understanding of the spatiality of small islands.