ABSTRACT

​          Jane C. Goodale played an important role in the development of ASAO. One part of that role was encouraging her students to participate in ASAO early in their education and academic careers. The results of that encouragement are evident in the number of Bryn Mawr students (both undergraduates and graduate students) who went on to play important roles in that association themselves, the quality of their academic and intellectual careers, and the ongoing presence and importance of students at ASAO meetings. At my very first ASAO meeting—in Asilomar—I was privy to hearing the first use of "Bryn Mawr mafia." At that time, it was in reference to just how many of us (Jane and her brood of Bryn Mawr postgrads, graduate students, and undergraduates) were present at that 1978 meeting.

ABSTRACT

          I want primarily to explore what I see as some of the unintended consequences of the way that ASAO has developed over the last half-century. From what I know of the early days of ASAO, Mike and Alan and the other founders thought it was of great value to do good comparative ethnography, and they knew that it could not be done in an organization like the AAA. Out of their vision there grew slowly what I think of as "the long conversation" with small groups of our colleagues in multiple sessions often leading to publication in monograph form. But there is much more that has happened as this process has developed and as it continues. Some of the unintended consequences that I want to explore include the following:

1. Many of us have been led to return to our research communities as we were prompted to consider new questions raised by ASAO.
2. The legacy of long-term research and all of the long conversation is a body of publication that surely makes the Pacific Islands one of the most well studied and well understood ethnographic areas on the planet.

            There is a great deal of concern these days about the loss of biological diversity and the extinction of species as a result of human carelessness and global climate change. I think that the public is far less aware that we are also losing much of the magnificent diversity of human cultures at a similarly devastating rate. How fortunate we are that a small group of scholars began the project 50 years ago that provides so rich an account of this oceanic cultural diversity in a world where not only is cultural uniqueness under threat, but even their Island homes may disappear.

ABSTRACT

          This paper examines the growth of ASAO from a society primarily focused on Eastern Oceania and Austronesian-speaking peoples to an umbrella organization that, today, encompasses the entire range of Pacific cultures. A primary decision towards this end was to include the very large number of researchers who work with speakers of non-Austronesian languages on the mainland of New Guinea. ASAO began as ASAEO, the Association for Social Anthropology in Eastern Oceania. Its members employed a controlled comparison approach to explore social variation in Austronesian (mostly Polynesian) societies. Meanwhile, Melanesianists, especially those working on the mainland of New Guinea with Papuan-speaking peoples, were without a comparable professional organization. Starting around 1980, a regional newsletter called NEWS (The NorthEast Wantok System newsletter) was begun with the goal of keeping Melanesianists located in the Northeast area of the USA in touch. It quickly grew and morphed into a regular newsletter with much wider (actually worldwide) distribution. But as the participation of Melanesianists in ASAO grew, NEWS became redundant with the ASAO Newsletter, and NEWS was terminated in May 1995. In this paper, I use NEWS as a focal point to trace the increasing involvement of Melanesianist anthropologists in ASAO and the concomitant broadening of ASAO’s comparative ethnographic base.