Managing Modernity in the Western Pacific

Macintyre.

INTRODUCTION

Capitalism, cosmology and globalisation in the Pacific

Mary Patterson and Martha Macintyre

Debates about the usefulness of terms like globalisation and modernity are now quite common in the social sciences. Anthropologists have been prompted to investigate the intersections of global and local forces that throw into sharp relief deeply entrenched assumptions about the impact of such forces and their presumed impetus, namely modernity itself. While the history of anthropology is replete with a variety of dichotomies emanating from this particular notion that have been remarkably resilient, they are not readily dissolved by modernity in the plural. As Sutcliffe suggests in this volume, chapter 1, to speak of ‘multiple modernities’ is a useful relativising strategy that unsettles a hegemonic perspective on ‘the West’ (itself a problematic category). However, ‘it is also necessary to guard against the tendency to allow this expansion of the notion of modernity to flatten out the genuine socio-cultural and civilisational differences that exist in the contemporary world: modernity should be distinguished from sheer contemporaneity’.¹ Much of what emerges from a renewed focus on the nature of modernity should force us to confront ‘images of modernity that privilege rationalism, acosmism, secularism, and reflexivity at the expense of other prominent dimensions of human experience’.² This suggests that management is required both in anthropological theorising and in the framing of ethnographic projects that have traditionally focused on how Others deal with and transform the aspects of material and lived experience that we so readily categorise. The prevalence of the trope of ‘enchantment’ in contemporary writing on capitalism, for example, while useful, relies for its force on the notion of the secular, rationalist modern that is in implicit contrast to the always already-enchanted worlds of the exotic Other. However, critical consideration of the enchantments, in the sense of illusions and the ‘magicality’ of late capitalism at home and abroad have been prominent in much recent work, particularly that of Jean and John Comaroff.³ Focused primarily on Africa and recently on post-Soviet Europe, this work is also tied to a critical comparative assessment of law and disorder in the postcolonies of those regions.⁴ In a critical application of many of the insights of this work to the Western Pacific, we aim to shift the focus to an area that has long achieved prominence in anthropological theorising. We also hope to mitigate a common tendency for analysis of Melanesia to take most of its ethnographic purchase from the vast island of Papua New Guinea. This edited volume includes chapters based on ethnographic fieldwork among peoples of Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, the Cook Islands and among Austronesians of small islands off the coast of Papua New Guinea.

Ruminating recently on the relation between magic and power, Martha Kaplan notes that anthropologists and historians have seen the battles over the category distinctions between magic, science and religion as characteristic of peculiarly Western power struggles in a certain tradition.⁵ At the same time, Kaplan also notes that there is a counter-tradition in social science that sees magic ‘at home’ in capitalism as Marx did, as some medical sociologists have done, or more recently as the Comaroffs have done in their work on African metamorphoses of what they call the ‘occult economy’ – the pursuit of material ends by occult means. If the ‘magic of modernity’ is now somewhat of a cliché, disagreements about what ‘modernity’ might be are only rivalled by disputes about the meaning of globalisation. And of course the two are linked. Shifting away from Eurocentrism also accounts for the rise of ‘multiple modernities’ in anthropological works that seek to give local expressions their due.⁶ But local expressions of what? Englund and Leach are critical of the way that modernity in the now almost-ubiquitous plural is a meta-narrative that undermines the ‘knowledge practices’ of the ethnographic method in which the anthropologist’s interlocuters are given ‘a measure of authority in producing an understanding of their life-worlds’.⁷ While the production of modernity is multiple, its ‘invariable’ set of ruptures in relation to personhood, property, exchange and so on belie heterogeneity at the source of modernity itself, and therefore the possibility of many different continuities. For example, Englund and Leach criticise the Comaroffs, who, they allege, must point to the necessary acceptance of a certain sociological meta-narrative of the disenchanting ‘key feature’ of modernity for the acceptance of the proclaimed re-enchantment that modern subjects might experience. This theme is addressed explicitly in chapter 1 of this volume.

In many parts of the world, the discourses of sorcery, modernity and politics have been shown to have a disconcerting ability to reinforce each other.⁸ But then we might also note that the attribution of deaths to the malevolent supra-natural activities of other human beings tends, as any historian of early modern Europe knows, to be historically contingent, becoming more or less important according to the particularities of a complex set of circumstances. Recent historical research in European archives and contemporary European rural communities also suggests that folk knowledge and practice have been much less vulnerable to the impact of scientific secular knowledges than previously thought.⁹ In other parts of the world where such knowledges have had less widespread institutional support we should expect a similar tenacity for local systems of thought but also a tendency for their importance to wax, wane and transform as we see in Africa, Asia and, indeed, the Pacific.¹⁰ Two brief examples from Melanesia make the point. Knauft notes that Gebusi no longer accuse one another of witchcraft as they once did, while Stewart and Strathern document that Melpa lack of interest in sorcery as a causal explanation for death and illness is valid only for the pre-colonial period. In recent times sorcery ideas have become much more important to them.¹¹

Managing the Pacific

Pejorative descriptions of the management of the postcolonial states of the Pacific have recently been referred to as ‘Africanisation’.¹² It is also common in commentary on the Pacific for disillusion and disenchantment with local politics and economic management, and more particularly with politicians and leaders, to be voiced both by the government and media representatives of powerful neighbours and by local leaders, NGOs, urban poor and rural subsistence farmers – though for very different reasons. Even without consideration of the extreme social dislocation and violence of recent events in Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Solomon Islands, Pacific states have been described as the hole in the Asia-Pacific doughnut, sucking vast quantities of aid monies into their unresponsive economies. Economists in particular, while they may grant that Pacific states suffer from a range of disadvantages in relation to climate, geography, poverty, population growth, limited infrastructural capacity and susceptibility to the fluctuations of distant markets, rarely if ever mention the legacy of colonialism. They offer a remarkably similar set of solutions. The market should be disencumbered of restrictive land policy, tariffs and taxes that are protective of local production, and interference from the state. The role of the state, rather, is to facilitate the operation of the free market by instituting and encouraging market-friendly institutions such as individual property rights, transparency and consistency in the application of the law in relation to the economy. In promoting ‘good governance’ in general, it is implied and taken for granted that the model is the capitalist economies of the West/North. There is universal acceptance of the folly of state intervention in the operation of the economy, of welfare economics and the good sense of allowing free markets to do their work in producing social equity and universal prosperity. But what is this free market now like?

The ‘casino capitalism’ appellation was coined – or at least widely disseminated by the publication of Susan Strange’s book of that title in 1986.¹³ The Western financial system she described in the 1980s as being ‘like a vast casino’ has transformed further since that time through the increased involvement of states in the profits of real privately owned casinos and other forms of gambling. The ending of fixed exchange rates and the floating of currencies against the USD in the 1970s produced a proliferating range of financial strategies to avoid private risk as currencies shifted on a daily basis.

Millennial or casino capitalism no longer has production at its core, leaving ‘the paradox in many Western economies, of high official employment rates amidst stark deindustrialization and joblessness’.¹⁴ It is now the flow of finance capital and of the market and speculation that determine wealth and value. This paper economy, as Strange so presciently pointed out, is short term and almost entirely speculative. Perfectly legal hedge funds are commonly found registered in tax havens in places such as the Caribbean, Vanuatu, Cook Islands, Luxembourg and Dublin. Strange commented in the 1980s that, as in the casino, high finance

offers the players a choice of games. Instead of roulette, blackjack, or poker, there is dealing to be done – the foreign-exchange market and all its variations; or in bonds, government securities or shares. In all these markets you may place bets on the future by dealing forward and by buying and selling options and all sorts of other recondite financial inventions. Some of the players – banks especially – play with very large stakes. There are also many quite small operators. There are tipsters, too, selling advice, and peddlers of systems to the gullible. And the croupiers in this global finance casino are the big bankers and brokers. They play, as it were, ‘for the house’. It is they, in the long run, who make the best living.¹⁵

It seems astonishing now that this was written more than two decades before the crisis that engulfed global financial institutions and most economies of the global North in 2009. The pundits who lament that no-one predicted that the house might lose – something incidentally that never happens in the casino – simply hadn’t read Susan Strange or some of the other authors she quotes. In the 1998 sequel to Casino capitalism, titled Mad money: when markets outgrow governments, written just after the collapse of the so-called Tiger economies, Strange noted that financial markets had become the driving force of the rest of the economy. This meant that governments had less control than ever over their economies so that the development of new credit instruments like derivatives had been completely unregulated. The increased ability of citizens, corporations and organised crime cartels to avoid tax by moving themselves and/or their corporations offshore, the acceleration of the economic concentration of corporate business, the ubiquitous condemnation of insider trading and its equally ubiquitous practice, Strange argued, provided further evidence of the weakening of state powers. The obscene bonuses paid to traders and CEOs go hand in hand with moral ambiguity that makes bribery and corruption a fact of life everywhere, not just in ‘Asia, the Arab states and the corrupt autocracies of Africa and Latin America’.¹⁶ The unequal access to credit all contribute, she notes, to the widening gap between Big Business and small business, creating a changed landscape characterised by extreme wealth and extreme disadvantage at either pole.¹⁷ Although she made no prediction, pointing instead to the ignorance of those who think they can – particularly economists, about whose abilities she is most scathing – she drew attention to the difficulties of re-regulation in a globalised system. There are two reasons, Strange concludes, ‘for regulating the behaviour of international financial dealers and the conduct of international financial markets. One is to moderate and restrain greed. The other is to moderate and restrain fear’.¹⁸ Neither is well dealt with by abstract economic modelling of the behaviour of allegedly rational homo economicus.

In this volume, in chapter 9, Rawlings provides an excellent example of the way in which anthropologists are turning their attentions to the phenomena of global investment, finance and trade. He reveals some of the consequences of casino capitalism in the Pacific and the ways that expatriates from non-Pacific countries can avoid the constraints of taxation on personal wealth. The fiduciary relationships established in these transnational transactions are crucial elements in both the flows of money across Pacific nations and the fantastical ideas about the global economy that inform the money scams discussed by Cox in chapter 5. Those frameworks that have long informed anthropological analysis of transaction and exchange, especially the relations of trust and kinship involved, acquire new dimensions and meanings as they expand to encompass national and international monetary flows.

When international aid and development agencies instruct new Pacific nations on the probity and moral imperatives of monetary and fiscal restraint, on the necessity of allowing free trade across their borders and of freeing up their land for sale and alienation, it is commonly in the name of democracy rather than capitalism. Though, as we know, Milton Friedman regarded the two as inseparable: ‘History suggests’, he said, ‘that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom’.¹⁹

Australia is not alone in its use of the neoliberal rhetoric of Western democracy. All of the major aid donors use a similar language in isolating what they see as the road to stable and effective statehood, linked to prosperity, which is in one sense a code for the unfettered operations of global capitalism. Challenges to states do not come only from international organisations of a particular sort and non-government organisations.²⁰ Indeed, the neoliberal economic policy that underpins structural adjustment fosters other kinds of strategies for intervening or even bypassing states and their regulatory protocols. The tax haven status that makes Vanuatu a desirable place for offshore interests of a dubious nature has ironically attracted threats from Australia and the US, whose interest in free trade is limited by national interest in extracting tax from its citizens and ‘safeguarding the region’. The locally shocking revelation that Optus was involved in a million-dollar internet porn trade routed through Telecom Vanuatu for which the local subsidiary was paid a fraction of the profits caused some consternation in 2005, while, in the following year, the funding of Vanuatu by the Millennium Challenge Corporation was criticised in the US House of Representatives over the Vanuatu Government’s lack of cooperation with US investigators about money laundering through Vanuatu’s offshore financial centres (see Rawlings, this volume, chapter 9).

Small Pacific nation-states are not entirely powerless, knowing when to raise the spectre of neocolonialism. As we have recently seen, they are also increasingly adept at playing off the Asian aid donors who compete for influence in the Pacific (see Alexeyeff, this volume, chapter 7). National interest can be well served by paving roads in Honiara even if Japan did not succeed in having Henderson airfield, the site of its rout in World War II, renamed. Solomons did not vote to save the whales despite the infrastructural encouragement of Japan. China and Taiwan have recently competed vigorously for state recognition but, in some cases, the influx of Chinese traders has been used by local politicians and apparently established traders to provoke a more ancient ethnic tension in these states with selectively drastic consequences such as the burning of Chinatown in Honiara in 2006.

Parochial responses to an increase in Chinese businesses in the urban communities of Melanesia have been antagonistic, especially in Papua New Guinea and Solomons. But local antipathy has to be examined alongside the dramatic increase in large-scale investment by Chinese in resource-extractive industries and formal international agreements between governments that facilitate the flow of aid in various forms. As Wesley-Smith has observed, ‘China’s growing regional presence allows Pacific Islanders to contemplate alternatives to long established networks of power and influence, as well as entrenched models of economic and political development’.²¹ Asian interest in the region is increasing and Melanesian governments have been quick to respond, not only in terms of encouraging development but also as a strategy for reducing their dependence on the neo-colonial power of Australia and New Zealand.

Development and its dilemmas

Since the 1970s, Pacific countries have been beguiled by the prospect of economic development that would enable them to participate in a world market economic system. Thereby enabled to improve their standards of living, they would take their places as independent nations in a modern world. But ‘development’, like globalisation, is a contested notion both in theory and practice, not least in those island nations seen as weak states in a region characterised by corruption, an absence of ‘good governance’ and ‘civil society’ and increasingly subject to violence. Shaped by the agendas of distant, ‘developed’ nations and their linked corporations, development encompasses the financial, economic and political policies and practices of this imagined entity – the global economy – including the emergence of global culture with its accompanying dissemination of knowledge, ideas and desires.²²

Security and development are increasingly linked in attempts by regional powers to slow particular kinds of global flows. Since the mid-1990s, the Australian Government has stepped up its emphasis on what it sees as the most effective counter to regional instability, namely fostering good governance and civil society in Pacific states. Tensions between the Fijian Military Government and Australia, and between the Papua New Guinean Government and Australia, have in recent years been expressed in a series of expulsions, counter-expulsions and mutual criticism. The vehemence of these, especially by the respective Melanesian prime ministers, reflects the resentment that years of dependence have generated and the hostility occasioned by neo-colonial emphasis on the failures of Melanesian governments since independence.

It might be useful to point out that the discourse about ‘failed’ and ‘weak’ states in the Pacific has obstructed consideration of their status. In what sense did those entities resemble in their structural efficacy, or even as the imaginary of the ‘big S’, as Michael Taussig calls it, the states of the colonisers and neighbours who enjoined them to be free and well-governed citizens only 25 to 30 years ago?²³ And if the answer is ‘very little’ or ‘not at all’ in what sense can those states be said to be ‘weak’ or to have ‘failed’? In the decolonisation period it would have been ideologically inappropriate to ask whether the state could be imposed from above, as part of the state imaginary – then as now – is its public reification as a representation of the will of the people.

Globalisation and development are loaded with contradictions. ‘Development’ as a term spread long ago from the developed into the developing world, yet another semantic escape to meaningfully colonise the postcolony. ‘Develop-man’, the pidgin English version of this word, with widespread currency in the Pacific, is used by Marshall Sahlins as an analytic marker for the process of culture change in which he continues his arguments with world systems theorists like Wolf, who emphasise the force of world capitalism’s capacity to destroy and refashion traditional cultures in its own image. For Sahlins, develop-man privileges the motive force of culture in which ‘non-Western people use their encounter with the world capitalist system to develop their own culture in its own terms ... the ends of social life remain much the same, only the means of attaining them and the scale on which one can do so change’.²⁴ In modernisation theory, a dominant paradigm, particularly in influential government agencies until relatively recently, all societies are meant to move through stages of development in which the significant break is the period of ‘take-off’ when the cultural impediments to rationalist economic decision-making are overcome. In one influential scheme, take-off is superseded by the ‘drive to maturity’ that heralds the final ‘age of mass-consumption’.²⁵ For Sahlins, ‘take-off’ signals the true coming of development and the demise of develop-man – but at a cost. True development proceeds out of a ‘global inferiority complex’, a sense of humiliation that makes people view their own culture as worthless, and another as worthy of emulation.²⁶

Conventional understandings of development projects as a kind of global social work, designed to improve the material circumstances of developing world citizens, necessarily signal Sahlins’s ‘develop-man’ as a dismal failure. Small businesses funded by aid dollars are meant to funnel their profits into education and improvements in living standards, not into pay television beaming American evangelists and their prosperity gospel to the residents of overcrowded tin sheds in urban squatter settlements in every Melanesian town. Nor should they fuel the inflation of bridewealth and mortuary payments from pigs, mats and other kinds of indigenous wealth to very large sums of cash, vehicles and a vast variety of conspicuous consumption. In other words develop-man is a failure of ‘development’. Desire is the global flow perhaps least susceptible to mitigation.

In their work on Lihir, a small group of islands to the north of New Ireland in Papua New Guinea that now hosts a goldmine, Macintyre and Foale note the complexities of Lihirian attitudes to mining development, ranging from its incorporation in the cosmological frame of a cargo cult to some leaders’ sophisticated manipulations of the mine managers’ compensation schemes.²⁷ Bainton’s chapter on the Personal Viability movement on Lihir further illustrates the diversity, range and contradictions of popular responses to capitalism and modernity. As other anthropologists of the region have also stressed, analysis must pay due attention not just to the varied aspirations and understandings of local people, but to the actions of those with disproportionate power in the Pacific, a group that includes ‘not only Europeans but Asians and, in increasing numbers, Melanesian themselves’.²⁸ Macintyre and Foale comment of Lihir that ‘loans from foreign governments and various forms of infrastructural aid feed into a range of misconceptions about capital and investment’.²⁹ For some, the misconceptions facilitate fraud.

As two of the authors in this volume (Cox and Bainton) tell us in more detail, hundreds of Papua New Guineans and Solomon Islanders have lost millions of kina in pyramid schemes, including Lihirians who invested their compensation from the mine in a most notorious scheme, U-Vistract, whose leader, Noah Musingku, is now in an armed enclave in Bougainville. In 2006, the new Autonomous Government of Bougainville requested help from the Australian Federal Police to control armed violence between Musingku’s Fijian ‘advisers’ and rebel gunmen calling themselves Bougainville Freedom Fighters. Australian intervention was perceived differently in this part of Papua New Guinea. Nor is it only the rural naïve who succumb to such schemes. In Papua New Guinea, the ombudsman, several politicians and well-educated businessmen invested in U-Vistract.

Pyramid schemes and various other financial scams have the same attraction wherever they are found – and lately they too have proliferated across the world. In many Melanesian societies such schemes are no more preposterous than the inherent powers ‘we’ label magical and ‘they’ regard as the secret technologies that cause things like stones, pigs and all kinds of wealth, including money, to multiply. And it was Marx of course who famously recognised money’s magical properties. A problem with reporting the cupidity of Pacific politicians and the gullibility of Pacific islanders is a frequent failure to set it against what we know at home – the corrupt behaviour of politicians in Western democracies, for example, and what can only be seen as a universal propensity to be gulled that is not necessarily mitigated by exposure to education or media or the secular rationalism seen as characteristic of modernity. For a really impressive case of duping, we need look no further than Bernie Madoff: prominent New York philanthropist; past nonexecutive chairman of NASDAQ, an American stock exchange with enormous trading volume in global terms; contributor to the Democratic and Republican parties; and proprietor of a firm that was the sixth-largest on Wall Street in 2008. Madoff achieved what has been referred to as the largest investor fraud ever committed by a single person. His vast Ponzi scheme, involving billions of dollars, was only the most notorious tip of a vast iceberg of dubious financial practice spawned by the pursuit of a certain kind of economic endeavour now increasingly well documented. At the same time, it is the increasing reliance of states on gambling revenue that makes any kind of market regulation of the virtual financial casino an ever more unlikely prospect.

All of the chapters in this volume place this global economy in perspective. Local and regional experiences reflect the variable and varied reactions to economic changes that are determined elsewhere. Melanesians are aware of their relative powerlessness but they can be both innovative and imitative in their responses to the demands of foreign aid donors, agencies such as the World Bank and the forces of global capitalism. In her close and detailed examination of gambling in the Cook Islands, Alexeyeff explores the parallels between the economic strategies of government and the gambling by individuals who take their chances playing ‘housie’ as a way of dealing with unemployment, social disadvantage and marginalisation. Rawlings’s work on tax havens in the Pacific demonstrates the complex power relations that enable the free flow of capital in the Pacific and to whose benefit such arrangements accrue. In Bainton’s chapter, Lihirian responses to the inequitable distribution of the benefits of mining royalties include adherence to a doctrine of entrepreneurial activity and the enthusiastic embrace of ideals of ‘possessive individualism’ that simultaneously threaten and are compromised by the enduring patterns of customary social relations based on very different notions of competitive exchange. Macintyre’s chapter deals with a different aspect of engagement with the monetary economy, employment in government and in industry and the changes wrought by access to work and money. Modern aspirations and modes of managing the fruits of one’s labour are generated by new economic relationships. Patterson focuses on the curious entanglements of desire played out where European fantasies encounter and subvert indigenous attempts to secure a future based on ancient prophesy yet securely attached to current disadvantage.

In the newly independent island states of Melanesia, the impact of modernity has frequently reinforced outmoded notions of an unproblematic link between economic development, education and ‘progress’ on the one hand, and a decline in what was and frequently still is seen, both locally and externally, as traditionalist and ‘backward’ modes of life and ways of thought on the other. As Knauft puts it, ‘the confrontation with modernity ... houses a hierarchy of value’ that challenges ideologies of achievement that have informed earlier customary modes of social exchange.³⁰ Bainton’s chapter on Lihir illustrates the ways that new values are incorporated, while McDougall’s shows how introduced, exogenous agencies (in this case, a logging venture and a Christian church) can generate conditions whereby people dispense with established collectivities, creating new ones that serve their changed circumstances.

In the Pacific, as elsewhere, social relations are frequently disembedded from their contexts yet at the same time promoted as a reified tradition in nationalist ideologies of new postcolonial states. It is suggested in much of the anthropological accounts of the impact of modernity in such states that ways of imagining the world and its constituents emerge strategically from difficult encounters with a familiar yet altered cosmology and environment that do not make a transition to the ideals of Western economic and political practice either simple or, as some would add, even desirable. The local and the national in the emergent states of the Pacific are frequently in a state of uneasy truce where unifying discourses of custom and tradition contain within them the seeds of discord.³¹ The considerable literature on so-called ‘cargo cults’ in which occult knowledge is centrally implicated and which persist and constantly metamorphose in their relations with technology, institutions of the state, nationalist discourse and development express in recent work the realisation that such movements are best understood as the expression of a ‘universal human proclivity’ that we find at home as well as abroad.³² As McDowell has suggested, cargo cults, like millenarian movements elsewhere in the world including Christianity, deserve to be contextualised by the religious imaginations of those involved in them.³³ In chapter 2, Patterson examines the curious imbrication of two utopian movements, one regularly labelled cultic, the other not. Ironically, the legitimacy of the Vanuatu movement Nagriamel, embodying the aims of secular development (which, as suggested below, has its own cosmological frame), is reinstated in contemporary Vanuatu, while the philosophy that formed the impetus for the illegitimate other, the Phoenix Foundation, mainstreamed in global policies some time ago. Both movements display their secular rationalisms and cosmological imaginaries in unexpected ways, unsettling foundational categories.

Being personally modern?

A categorisation in the anthropology of Melanesia that has proved extremely influential over the past few years – becoming paradigmatic of ‘the Melanesian’ – is one that seems to arise directly out of the sort of grand partition Giddens gave us between the premodern and the modern that Sutcliffe addresses in chapter 1 of this volume. Melanesian persons are dividual and relational; Europeans are oppositionally individual and, presumably, social isolates. In a recent paper, Michael Scott sets this notion within the broad frame of the demise and resurrection of kinship studies where descent theory that was initially tested and found wanting when applied in the New Guinea highland ethnographies of the 1950s and 1960s produced, eventually, a radical reinterpretation of social life. Kinship in the new paradigm, according to Scott, is ‘bilateral and unbounded, situating persons as the partible composites of pre-existing, ongoing relations’.³⁴ The debates within anthropology about personhood, subjectivity and relationality have particular relevance in anthropological understandings of modernity as a transformative process. Recent exchanges between Mosko and his critics illustrate the way that Strathern’s initial hermeneutic device – the insistence on a radical alterity between Western and Melanesian notions of the person and sociality – has been developed into a rigid ‘social fact’ by others.³⁵ Several of the authors in this volume present material that contests the fixity of notions of personhood in contemporary Melanesia. In Macintyre’s surveys and interviews with working women, the participants reveal ways that they reconfigure their subjectivity in respect to their earnings and their obligations to kin. McDougall demonstrates that individuality and distinction within and between lineages can alter in contexts of litigation. The popularity of the courses designed to promote Personal Viability on Lihir (see Bainton, this volume, chapter 8) similarly suggests that as people observe new forms of inequality emerging in the context of economic development, so different forms of self-fashioning are perceived as the means of gaining advantage and accumulating wealth.

That a move to possessive individualism characterises the emergence of capitalism, as CB Macpherson argued, has been taken up in the Pacific by several scholars who saw it as characteristic of the local elites of new nations. In a recently edited volume on the topic of the Western Pacific, Karen Sykes, unlike her co-contributors, demonstrates not complete rupture but the ‘perseverance of a customary moral order’.³⁶ In an uncanny resonance with Sahlins’s narrative of the dominance of the Fall in Western social theory, Sykes tells us of Adam, the Papua New Guinea Entrepreneur of the Year, ‘held