Department of social anthropology seminar with Michael Scott

The Department of Social Anthropology has the pleasure to invite you to a seminar with Michael W. Scott from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He will present the following paper:

"The Wonder of Being Makiran: A Legacy of Maasina Rule in Solomon Islands"

Abstract
In this paper I analyse the discourses of Jonah Dehimarau (a pseudonym), a Solomon Islander in his mid-fifties from the Arosi region of Makira. Since civil conflict disrupted his country between 1998 and 2003, Jonah has become deeply interested in new and unusual stories about his island. Allegedly, for example, a passing foreign vessel recently detected a powerful signal that nearly burned out its electronic equipment, and when Jimmy Rasta Lusibaea, the feared leader of a group of militants known as the Malaita Eagle Force, tried to approach Makira, two ships mysteriously appeared, disabled his boat with flashing lights, and disappeared again.

Such reports have prompted Jonah to research older Arosi stories from Maasina Rule, a post-World War II socio-political movement sometimes interpreted as a ‘cargo cult’. Consulting with senior people, he has discovered a rich legacy of ideas about the nature and destiny of Makira. He has studied the ‘Seven Wonders of Makira’, a set of place-names, landmarks, and kastom stories that, interpreted in tandem with biblical prophecy, foretell imminent Makiran development and prosperity, heralding the end times. And he has sifted the remnants of rumours that Makira is the site of a secret subterranean military-industrial complex that is storing up and will one day release prodigious natural and technological bounty.

Based on field research conducted in 2006, I explore how Jonah’s project of reconstructing Maasina Rule teachings as the key to understanding the present and anticipating the future is also an end in itself. It is, I suggest, the production and experience of an insular ontology, a condition in which he and other similarly questing Arosi inhere as the wonder of being Makiran. As such, Jonah’s project has further implications for the anthropology of ontology; it indicates that, wherever there is a strong or intensified mood of wonder, this may be a clue that received ontological assumptions are in crisis and undergoing processes of transformation.

Bionote
Michael W. Scott is a Lecturer in Anthropology at the London School of Economics. His area of study is Oceania with a primary focus on Melanesia. Since 1992 he has been conducting fieldwork in the nation-state of Solomon Islands in the southwest Pacific. Currently, his chief theoretical interests lie in the anthropology of ontology (being). In recent and forthcoming publications, he has contributed critical analyses to debates in this field and proposed an agenda for the comparative study of wonder. Among other areas and topics, he has also written and lectured on Christianity and the anthropology of religion, myth-making and ethnogenesis, place-making, and medieval Britain.