690 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
the symposium, focusing as much on the causes
of warfare as on the processes of pacification. In
my view his appeal to “conflict management
theory” fails to generate any testable
hypotheses.
On balance, this is a useful collection that
will be read with interest by ethnographers and
historians of Melanesia; it can be profitably
read as a complement to Epstein’s Contention
and Dispute.
Do Kamo: Person and Myth in the Melane-
sian World. Maurice Leenhardt. B. M. Gulati,
trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1979. xxxiii + 205 m.
$15.00 (cloth).
Roy Wagner
University of Virginia
If, after nearly a century of Melanesian
studies, Melanesians appear rather too monoto-
nously in the literature as obdurate pragmatists
caught up in a shell game of women, land, and
pigs, people with an outside but no inside, then
this book is a welcome and very important ex-
ception. And if the phenomenological mode of
interior decoration, with its lurid contrasts of
the subjectively objective and the objectively
subjective, has begun to pall somewhat, the
book is a refreshing exception as well. Maurice
Leenhardt, confidant of Lucien Uvy-Bruhl,
successor to Marcel Mauss and predecessor of
Claude Uvi-Strauss in the chair of the History
of Primitive Religions at the &ole Pratique des
Hautes Etudes, was also a dedicated Protestant
missionary skilled in presenting the most effete
Christian tenets in imagery resilient enough to
earn a Melanesian’s respect. That he did some-
thing of the same for the Melanesians’ concepts
is no insignificant measure of the value of his
work.
Itself a rediscovery (the original French ver-
sion was published in 1947), Do Kamo deals
largely with the peoples of New Caledonia -where
Leenhardt’s mission activity was concentrated -
virtually a terra incognita for modem Melane-
sian studies. Its “ethnography” is far less con-
cerned with the shape of the peoples’ lives than
with the synthesis of their ideation. And because
such a synthesis is as deeply involved with the in-
tellectual motivation of the synthesist as it is
with the world of hia subjects, a comprehensive
and critically astute introduction, like the one
provided here by Vincent Crapanzano, is an ab-
[82, 19801
solute necessity. Leenhardt’s “Canaque,” as he
terms the subject of these essays, may live every-
where and nowhere; his elusive notions of myth
and ancestral name share a peculiarly Gallic
sense of quasi-evolutionary Golden Age with
Mauss’s regime of total prestation and LCvi-
Strauss’s realm of elementary structures, but at
least, as Crapanzano points out (p. xvi), he does
not systematize the results of his insights as mere
“cultural difference.”
Although it deals constantly and exhaustively
with linguistic examples, Do Kamo is not
“about” an order or a structure: it does not treat
of “native categories.” Leenhardt is most elo-
quent on this point: ‘ I .. . as Aristotle
said . . . logical, therefore empty, formal. To
the degree that language plays the role of an ex-
cellent technical instrument it ceases to parti-
cipate in the word’ (p. 141). Rather, we might
say, the book is about the vivification of sym-
bols; not simply their use, but their attainment
of a compelling, creative power. Examples are
presented ironically and with cryptic brilliance;
their precision respects the figurative essence of
an expression rather than its lexical or gram-
matical skeleton. Accordingly, the chapters are
organized around overarching syntheses of Ca-
naque ideation: the word, or speech (chapters
1, 9,lo), the body and the person (2,11). myth
(4,8, 12). totemism and the ancestors ( 5 , 7),
and time and death (S, 6).
The exposition is not as random or incoherent
as this outline might suggest, however. A care-
fully constructed linguistic philosophy, at times
almost Humboldtian and at times virtually
structuralist, portrays the Canaque as a being
whose capacity for perception and reflection is
intrinsically immersed in a number of relational
webs. These include what Leenhardt calls
“spatiomphic” domains: relationships with
totemic spirits, ancestors, uterine kin, etc.. kin
dyads, the relation between totem, or spirit.
and altar - all of them summed together under
the concept of “mythic thought.” As is the case
with the Caledonian notion of “word” or
“speech’ (where we learn that a feeling, a de-
mand, a decision, an act, or even a person on
some errand or calling may be “a word”), each
of these relational settings amounts to a means
of encompassing the concrete and particular
within the general and the abstract. A kind of
sacramental transformation occurs, then, with
each use of a word or performance of a mean-
ingful act, suffusing circumstance with mythic
significance.
Leenhardt’s Canaque may not be necessarily
 ETHNOLOGY
prelogical, whatever that may mean; he is cer-
tainly not incapable of abstract thought. He
would appear, however, to be in some sense pre-
particular, especially in a reflexive manner of
speaking. Individuation and the appearance of
the person are possible only upon liberation
from mythic thought. And this liberation, for
Leenhardt, is the inevitable effect of missioniza-
tion as well as colonialism.
Arguments that “the natives think differently
than we do” have seldom been phrased carefully
enough to screen out oversimplification or that
exaggerated psychologism that results from the
reification of thought considered apart from its
objects. Do Kamo, with its wealth of linguistic
and idiomatic example, has much to recom-
mend it in this respect, though one might ques-
tion whether a thoroughly generalizing mode of
thought could possibly function without points
of particularizing contrast. Nevertheless, it
would appear that Leenhardt, like his friend
Levy-Bruhl, contributed significantly to what
has become a major theme in French anthropol-
ogy, one that was later to receive extensive treat-
ment from both Sartre and Uvi-Strauss.
If Leenhardt is correct in his understanding
of Melanesian thought, or even if (which is
much more probable) he is anywhere near cor-
rect, then his bold and cryptic style, which cap-
tures the general so exquisitely in the particular,
is certainly the most appropriate expression of
that understanding. Overlooking some rather
wooden obeisances to the anthropology of his
youth (e.g., chapter 4), and some factual over-
sights (on page 77, what might it mean that “the
Australian aborigines make their cultivation
season begin with the rising of the Pleiades”?),
Leenhardt has assembled and distilled some of
the most profound insights into Melanesian life
and thought ever written. Do Kamo deserves the
careful consideration of everyone seriously in-
terested in the thought of Melanesians, and of
other traditional peoples.
The Melanesian Environment. John H. Wins-
low, ed. Canberra: Australian National Univer-
sity Press, 1977. xxxiv + 562 pp. $12.50 (cloth).
Eugene Ogan
University of Minnesota
Waigani Seminars, the ninth of which pro-
duced the book under review, are not purely in-
691
tellectual symposia. Held at the University of
Papua New Guinea, they are notably socio-
political “happenings,” a fact recognized by
Brookfield and Yen in their “Concluding Re-
marks.” Therefore, the papers presented are
likely to be a vaned mixture of political state-
ments and sober academic reports.
For example, The Melanesian Environment
includes a ritual exhortation by the prime
minister of Papua New Guinea (Somare); a
Bougainville Copper representative’s apologia
for his employer’s rapacious activities (Gilles);
an attack on the capitalist system illustrated by
Hawaiian history (Kelly); and a series of state-
ments by Papua New Guineans linking their
views on conservation to policy, planning, and
ideology in the Somare government (Tago et
al.). Each of these contributions is of interest in
its own right, but they contrast oddly with more
technical papers like Loffler’s “The Impact of
Traditional Man on Landforms in Papua New
Guinea” or Soemanvoto’s “Energy Flows in the
Rural Tropics.” Nor does the books title
prepare the unwary reader for the handful of
papers focused on Southeast Asia and Hawaii.
A brief review cannot encompass all the
material presented in this sizeable volume, so
the present effort will simply discuss a few
themes of particular interest to anthropologists.
The section “Prehistory and the Environ-
ment” will attract the most attention, although
here, too, the articles are by no means uniform
in approach or quality. Oram’s meticulous ac-
count of Port Moresby is better defined as eth-
nohistory. Golson, Bulmer, and others present
the exciting results of their recent archaeolog-
ical fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, while Dut-
ton and Lynch offer a synthesis of others’ work
on the classification of Pacific languages.
Questions about the meaning, goals, and
methods of “development” were raised in the
fifth and sixth Waigani Seminars, and the ninth
continued this trend. Of particular interest in
this regard are articles by Yen and BrooWield
on changes in agriculture, and the sections on
mineral extraction and forest industries. Too
many of the papers on appropriate technology
deal in generalities, but there is plenty of food
for thought in such work as that of Cluck on
practical village development programs.
The editor (p. xxi) is understandably pleased
by the participation of Melanesians in the
seminar, and certainly the papers of Maenu’u,
Waiko, and Kwapena, among others, go far
beyond mere tokenism or political window
dressing. People who have suffered the effects of