 |
Roy WagnerWe are pleased to nominate Roy Wagner for an Honorary Fellowship of
the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania. Wagner conducted
extensive fieldwork in Papua New Guinea among the Daribi of Karimui
and the Usen Barok of New Ireland. His books and articles have had
a profound Born in 1938 in Cleveland, Ohio, Wagner received his Ph.D. in Anthropology
from the University of Chicago (1966), where he studied under David
M. Schneider. He has taught at Southern Illinois University, Northwestern
University, and the University of Virginia, the last for 35 years. Wagner’s works have introduced many far-reaching concepts to
Anthropology. In The Curse of Souw (1967) and “Are There Social
Groups in the New Guinea Highlands?” (1974),
Wagner offered a radical critique of descent and alliance theories
of kinship, establishing our current understanding that Melanesian
kin groups are brought into being through creative acts, such as the
giving of gifts and the sharing of meat, rather than being bounded
decisively by consanguinity as formerly understood. In The Invention
of Culture (1975), which has achieved the status of classic, Wagner’s Habu (1972) provided the ethnographic basis
of a novel theory of metaphor, while wrestling with larger questions
of human mortality and the attendant metaphysics of immanence and transcendence.
In Lethal Speech (1978) and Symbols That
Stand For Themselves (1986),
Wagner developed the theoretical method of obviation, to show how metaphor
generates meaning. Obviation attempts to model how symbolic categories
figure and ground each other in perception, a process crucial to the
making of meaning in mythology and culture as well as in ethnographic
interpretation. Eluding the rigid arbitrariness that haunts certain
models of symbolism, Wagner’s theory of obviation evokes a recursive
framework, which operates through a process of substitution, self-cancellation,
and return. Such concerns with re-perception are carried forward in
Wagner’s latest book, The Anthropology of
the Subject (2001),
where meaning, indeterminacy, epistemology, and technology are brought
together in an elaboration of what Wagner terms a “holographic
theory of the subject.” Wagner is by any measure one of Anthropology’s most adventurous
thinkers, and he has spawned such seminal concepts as wandering hero
stories (1972, 1996), analogic kinship (1967, 1977), the fractal person
(1991), and the invention of culture (1975). He was influential in
creating the genre known as the New Melanesian Ethnography, which emphasizes
creativity and innovation in the crystallization of cultural meaning
(Josephides 1991). Consistently throughout his career, Wagner has been
profoundly engaged in developing theory from ethnography. His anthropology
offers a limitless invitation to think creatively. Submitted by Ira Bashkow, Andrew Moutu, and Justin
Shaffner |