Speaking for ourselves. Kwato Perspectives on Matriliny and Missionisation
Date
2017
Authors
Lawrence, Salmah Eva-Lina
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Publisher
Canberra, ACT : The Australian National University
Abstract
Narrowly conceived, this is an historical ethnographic study of the indigenous people who participated in the Kwato Mission. More broadly, it is an examination of how people responded to the arrival of the culture of whiteness and the fundamental changes to practice and consciousness that took place through the processes of missionisation and colonisation. Changes were simultaneously subjective and objective, mental and material. In what ways did the Massim peoples engage with the new introductions? How did our own history shape those engagements with whiteness? And in what ways did they respond to attempts to coerce and dominate? At an even broader level, what can the Kwato Massim people’s experience tell us about contemporary dialectics of culture and power, ideology and consciousness, such as through the process of ‘developmentisation’. Attention to power leads me to also engage with the question of knowledge production and to ask how is it possible to know the Massim without fluency in Massim ways of knowing and languages. My conceptual lens is decolonial feminist theory and critical race theory. From Luce Irigaray and Iris Marion Young I borrow the concept of wonder as a theoretical construct to shift the gaze on how Massim peoples have often been represented by whiteness. Since a balanced comprehension of the world we live in must necessarily include different perspectives, social justice must allow for epistemic difference. There is, thus, both an epistemic and ethical impulse to name whiteness and to disrupt its hegemony. Guided by this decolonial imperative I delve into the deep past of the Massim peoples demonstrating the biological indistinguishability of Homo sapiens and examining the wonder-full Austronesian migrations across millennia which more deeply inform contemporary Massim languages and culture than do missionisation and colonisation, or indeed, whiteness. The empirical part of my decolonial methodology draws primarily on oral history supplemented by archival work. I examine the disruptions presented by external forces of colonisation and missionisation and demonstrate how the Massim peoples responded to these. I delineate the Kwato-specific history into the genealogical periods of the tanuwaga, the isibaguna and the isimulita past and the isimulita present. I conclude that Kwato, the mission, could not have existed without the support of the Massim peoples and that this shaped Kwato personhood indelibly. I propose, too, that the matrilineal descent system of the southern Massim produces a distinct form of gender relations and particular structures of governance that are grounded in relational autonomy. The space of Kwato was created from this matrilineal sociality fused with missionisation. My thesis is neither an exhaustive history nor a comprehensive anthropology of the Massim in the Kwato Mission. It is certainly not the definitive work, if ever there could be such a thing. There remains great scope for other Massim people to write Kwato history from perspectives different from mine, which has been shaped by belonging to two genealogies that were influential in the politics of the Mission.
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Keywords
Kwato, Milne Bay, Massim, matrilineal, matriliny, decolonial, postcolonial, critical race theory, whiteness, indigenous epistemology, relational autonomy
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Type
Thesis (PhD)
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Restricted access
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DOI
10.25911/5d5142f77298f