ANNETTE WEINER
1933-1997
Not only was Annette Weiner an active member of ASAO during
her most formative years as an anthropologist, but her interest in Oceanic
ethnography and her depth of commitment to the ethnographic project
there has been profound and illuminating.
Since the seminal work of Malinowski and Mauss, Oceania
has long been a cultural area that has contributed significantly to
anthropological theory, in areas of kinship, exchange, gender, and the
invention of tradition. This has continued in the way the growing body
of ethnography from Papua New Guinea, especially in the 1950s and 60s,
first addressed the descent models derived from Africa and later critiqued
culturally-bound notions of gender, reproduction, and personhood.
Since her dissertation and first book on the classically
central Trobriand Islands, Women of Value, Men of Renown, Annette
Weiner has been a leading figure in Oceanic contribution to anthropological
theory. Annette's work is characterized by a profound originality in
recognizing the gendered and political ramifications of exchange and
kinship, rethinking such classic questions as "reciprocity,"
"incest," "inalienability," and "hierarchy."
For example, the first publications she made on the Trobriand material
recognized not only that women were involved in exchange (and therefore
corrected androcentric biases in Malinowski), but further that women's
exchange in sagali (mortuary) rituals occupied a central role in the
total Trobriand system of social organization—through which subclans
(dala) reproduced themselves. They did so, she showed, by reclaiming
dala valuables that men had "given" to their sons and daughters,
who were not members of the matrilineal dala. Such reclamation was a
central political moment in the subclan's reconstitution, a show of
its strengths. These gifts were significant components of the larger
exchange cycle, not to be understood as Malinowski had— preoccupied
with the Western, ethnocentric problem of "reciprocity"—as
a "free gift," an expression of love. This approach to exchange
is reflected finally in the brilliant discussion—in The Trobriand
Islanders of Papua New Guinea—of gifts to children, sexuality,
and kula in the Trobriands as representing different media and cycles
of exchange, with distinctive attributes for producing power and hierarchy
in the system.
The question of recognizing women's value in social systems,
in Annette's work, is never satisfied by an acknowledgment of women's
power. Rather, she has used the gendered perspective to stretch social
theory further. Thus, she points out that Trobriand men's gardening
for their affines, rather than for their wives, is part of a system
in which the ongoing bond between brother and sister, rather than husband
and wife, is critical. Subsequently, her comparative work in Samoa and
using ethnographic materials from other Pacific societies emphasized
the relative importance of the brother-sister tie, as opposed to the
husband-wife emphasis on women as centrally offering sexuality in marriage.
This emphasis drew attention to the centrality of reproduction, seen
as a complex and total cultural phenomenon, as a framework for understanding
men and women, a framework that did not, nonetheless, reduce women to
the role of mothers, but placed reproduction in a broader cosmological
framework. One of the keys to following this in Annette's work has been
attention to "women's wealth" and its circulation, usually
in the form of cloth. The failure to recognize the significance of such
forms of value, she showed repeatedly, has led to an inability to recognize
the nature of exchange and the role of different actors within a system.
The book she edited with Jane Schneider on Cloth and Human Experience
was a major contribution to this project.
Finally, Annette's work on exchange, gender, and kinship
culminated in a series of papers and the book Inalienable Wealth,
drawing her insights into exchange and gender into a theoretical confrontation
with some of the most enduring confusions about "reciprocity"
as the central question involving exchange. Instead, pursuing the most
subtle intimations of the field imagined by Mauss, Annette challenged
the simple "gift"/"commodity" dichotomy for exchange
and argued that exchange should be understood as having the capacity
to express identity and to produce hierarchy—ranked or valued
difference. Hierarchy is produced or sustained in the ongoing political
struggle of social agents to claim one's identity through holding on
to valued objects or forms of property, such as those claimed by Trobriand
subclans in mortuary. This is a theory that recognizes not a class of
objects called "inalienable" but rather a set of social processes
in which the capacity to exchange or withhold can become a marker of
social strength and identity. In recent years, the insights deriving
from her theorizing of what she called "inalienability" have
become significant not only in Oceanic ethnography but in many areas
of work on material culture and consumption.
These contributions were matched by an equal commitment
to anthropology as a discipline. Beginning rather later than most in
her professional career, Annette became Professor and Chair of NYU's
Department of Anthropology in 1981 and built it into an excellent environment
for research and teaching. Shortly thereafter, in rapid fashion, Annette
became President of the Society for Social Anthropology, President of
the American Anthropological Association, Dean of the Graduate School
of Arts and Sciences, and Dean of Social Sciences at New York University.
In this ascent to recognition, she carried with her and promoted generally
the significance of anthropological research in Oceania for broader
questions of modern intellectual life.
Fred Myers, New York University (April 1997 Newsletter) |
