Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Roy Wagner (1938–2018)

2023; Wiley; Volume: 125; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/aman.13847

1548-1433

Ira Bashkow, Justin Shaffner,

Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture

Roy Wagner at University of Virginia in 2009. (Photograph by Johannes Neurath) Roy Wagner, a visionary theorist of cultural meaning and creativity, died on September 10, 2018, at his home in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was known for his work on kinship, ritual, and myth in Papua New Guinea and for his experiments in representing anthropological thought as a "reciprocity of perspectives" that helped to inspire the "ontological turn" as well as reverse, symmetrical, and cross anthropologies. Born on October 2, 1938, Wagner grew up in a Central European immigrant community on Cleveland's west side. His parents were both the children of German-speaking immigrants from Metzenseifen (now Medzev), near Slovakia's border with Hungary. His father, Richard Robert Wagner, was a hardworking organization man who became Cleveland's chief of police. His socially reserved mother, Florence Helen (Mueller) Wagner, who raised Roy and his younger sister, Nancy Elliott, was a widely read intellectual humanist. It was Florence who introduced Wagner to anthropology when he was a teenager through books written by Alfred Kroeber. An avid science fiction fan coming of age after World War II, Wagner was fascinated by atomic scientists like Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, and he aspired to be an astrophysicist. But when he arrived at Harvard with a scholarship, he soon changed his major to medieval history (Macfarlane, 2011). Reading Oswald Spengler (1927, 21), he became engrossed by Spengler's critique of Eurocentrism and by the cultural pluralism of his sweeping vision of history in which "there is not one [art and] one physics, but many," each culture having its own unique "possibilities of self-expression." In 1961, Wagner started graduate study in anthropology at the University of Chicago, where his mentor was the kinship maven David Schneider. The two became very close, speaking and corresponding frequently until Schneider's death in 1995. Wagner's dissertation fieldsite was determined by a grant he received from the New Guinea Native Religions Project organized by James Watson and Kenneth Read at the University of Washington. They sent Wagner, a 25-year-old who had never traveled outside the United States, to a particularly isolated part of the New Guinea Highlands along the Papua-New Guinea frontier. Mt. Karimui is a towering, dormant volcano girdled by a high-altitude plateau that is lushly rainforested and cut by deep gorges. Cool, wet, and cloudy, this tropical forest was the home of 3,000 Daribi people who lived in two-story, barrel-roofed longhouses surrounded by their large swidden food gardens (Wagner, 1967, 9). In this area that was accessible to foreigners only by small plane and lengthy treks, the people had been subject to de facto colonial rule for only two or three years (Wagner, 1979). Here, Wagner would study kinship, social structure, and religion in the Daribi village of Kurube. He was befriended by Kagoiano Bapo, who became his host, "informant, analyst, companion, and confidant" (Wagner, 1967, x; 2012, S161). Living at Kurube from late 1963 into 1965, Wagner learned the language and forged relationships with Kagoiano's clan relatives. One of these was the knowledge-keeper Yapenugiai, who became Wagner's field mentor. An experienced orator, dream interpreter, healer, hunter, and spirit medium who delighted in the fine points of lore and ritual, Yapenugiai, Wagner liked to say, was the master to whom he apprenticed (Wagner, 1972, xii; 1978, 12; 2012, S163). While Wagner was in the field, Schneider sent him the manuscript of his 1963 lecture "Some Muddles in the Models," which criticized structural-functionalist descent theory, then the dominant theory of kinship, for "imposing our way of thinking on their systems" of thought (Schneider, 1965, 28–29; see also Bashkow, 1991, 230). In his field home at Mt. Karimui, Wagner carefully read this lengthy essay 11 times over (he said he counted them), and he took it as a model for his doctoral thesis, which described Daribi kinship and social structure in terms of Daribi cultural concepts. This was an innovation inasmuch as earlier anthropologists who had studied New Guinea Highlands societies had described them as having lineage-based clans and subclans, using models derived from British social anthropological research in Africa (Barnes, 1962). Moreover, the Daribi concepts formed an Indigenous kinship theory that Wagner (1967, 1977) put on par with the theories of anthropologists, arguing that it was similar to (and, indeed, an inversion of) the "alliance theory" of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Upon receiving his PhD in 1966, Wagner was hired as assistant professor of anthropology at Southern Illinois University, where he met Brenda Sue Geilhausen, the department secretary. They married in June 1968 and left the next month for a year at Mt. Karimui. Wagner's dissertation had just been published as a book, The Curse of Souw (Wagner, 1967), featuring a glowing foreword by Schneider and Wagner's own drawings and poetry. When the couple returned from New Guinea, Wagner began a new job at Northwestern University, where their daughter, Erika, and son, Jonathan, were born. (Sue and Wagner divorced in 1994.) But at Northwestern, Wagner clashed with Paul Bohannan and was, as he described it, "thrown out." In 1974, he was hired as the first chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Virginia, where a joint department with sociology was splitting.1 Wagner would chair the Virginia department from 1974–1979 and 1982–1986 and teach there for the next 44 years, until he died. In the 1970s, Wagner became fascinated by the substitution of paired elements that is a pervasive device in New Guinea rhetoric and ritual. When a speaker brings together two elements, like a man and a sago palm, in a figure of speech, the juxtaposition can reveal characteristics of each that are otherwise unapparent (Rumsey, 2002, 4). One element can alternately stand for and hide the other, and one can be used to magically influence the other by symbolically manipulating their differences and similarities. This analogical mode of creativity, Wagner observed, is the same as that at work in familiar figures of speech like metaphor and metonymy, and in all symbolism that works by a relationship of resemblance between a signifier and a signified. In his 1972 monograph, Habu: The Innovation of Meaning in Daribi Religion, Wagner used this model to explain the creativity of Daribi origin myths, rain magic, naming practices, dream interpretation, poetry of lament, and mourning rituals. He then turned the analogical model on anthropology itself, using it to describe how anthropologists experience and construct "cultures," both their own and others, in tandem. Schneider was editing a book series at the textbook publisher Prentice-Hall, and he urged Wagner to write an anthropology textbook. The result was The Invention of Culture, where Wagner introduces anthropology not as the study of preexisting "cultures" but as a process in which anthropologists personally experience two different ways of living and interpret them analogically. Reasoning from the archetypal scenario of a solitary ethnographer immersed in an unfamiliar society, Wagner explains that the juxtaposition between the fieldworker's own ingrained expectations from home and the new situation they are dealing with in the field leads them to experience the field situation as a "culture" that is both similar to and different from their culture at home. In this way they "invent" both cultures as "equivalent entities" that are analogically linked: the concept of culture "draws an invisible equal sign" between the two realms (Wagner, 1975, 3, 4). Arising as it does from the fieldworker's experience, no understanding of culture can be absolutely objective. But in continually reworking and refining it, criticizing and improving it recursively in light of their deepening experience in the field, conscientious fieldworkers will themselves be affected by the analogy between their home and their field culture: they may come to "realize new. . . possibilities for the living of life, and may in fact undergo a personality change" (4). For their part, the people studied will be reciprocally studying the fieldworker, and constructing their own analogies, thereby inventing the fieldworker's culture as the fieldworker invents theirs. They will be doing "reverse anthropology" (11, 31). Building on his teacher Schneider's (1968) critique of the Euro-American assumption that "blood" kinship is natural, Wagner (1975, 46, 49, 141–42, 149; 1978, 21–23) argued that people everywhere treat some symbols (like blood) as unalterable givens of reality, while accepting that others are social creations for which humans are responsible. But as the ethnographic record shows, what counts as "given," as opposed to created, varies greatly across cultures, proving that the perception of what is unalterable is itself constructed by culture, usually supporting the status quo. Analyzing paired elements is also the key to explicating myths by a technique Wagner propounded in his 1978 book Lethal Speech: Daribi Myth as Symbolic Obviation and that he taught for many years in his University of Virginia graduate course Mythodology. Similar to the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss then in vogue, Wagner's "discovery procedure," as he termed it, starts with analysis of the transformations that form a myth's plot (Wagner 1978, 13). A plot may be thought of as a succession of situations that supplant one another in turn. For this to make sense, any adjacent pair of situations must be meaningfully substitutable. (For example, when an eagle flies off with an infant and nurtures it, it is substituting for, i.e., analogous to, the infant's parents.) In Wagner's idiom, the one state of affairs is obviated by the analogous successor state. In Lethal Speech, Wagner used this technique to explicate Daribi origin stories that Yapenugiai had narrated (11–15). Wagner found that, in addition to situations themselves, the two successive transformations between three situations were also often analogous, and that a good story tends to circle back to its beginning so that the initial and end states may be analogous, too. He diagrammed such "obviation sequences" by triangles within triangles. He created many such analyses throughout his subsequent work, analyzing all manner of processual sequences (see, e.g., Wagner, 1986b). Wagner also studied Papuan "wandering hero" tales in which a mythic hero journeys across the lands of one group and then another, creating prominent features of the landscape by his activities. Each group owns only that part of the hero's story that took place on their land, so storytellers say things like, "to find out what happened next, ask the people who own that land over there where the hero went after he left our area." Such stories are similar to Indigenous Australian "Dreamings," and they are found across a wide swathe of southern New Guinea, to the south and west of Karimui. Wagner (1972, 20; 1996) pieced together such hero journeys across 400 miles. Roy Wagner at his field home in Kurube, Papua New Guinea, in 1964. Roy Wagner at Mt. Karimui, Papua New Guinea. But one of Wagner's most profound contributions may be his questioning of the basic social scientific concept of the "social group." In The Curse of Souw, Wagner showed that Daribi do not just have culturally distinctive concepts of social units, but they apply them in unexpected ways. They will say that two individuals descend from a common ancestor and so share "blood," using an apparently English-like idiom that standard theory expects, but they do not then use this commonality to define them as members of a single descent-based clan group, since, as Daribi see it, everyone shares a tie of common descent to everyone else. Instead, they define clan membership by who participates in exchanges of meat and wealth. Individuals who exchange together as a clan group become the clan, differentiating themselves as a unit from the others to whom they give and receive. As a result, a clan's membership is "constantly changing": dividing, amalgamating, dispersing, and regrouping (Wagner, 1967, 182). Taking this argument further in his now-classic book chapter "Are There Social Groups in the New Guinea Highlands?" Wagner answered "no." True, Daribi people have names for groups and sometimes talk as if these are descent groups. But the membership is not determined by descent, nor does descent truly determine who an individual may or may not marry. Rather, it is the reverse: when marriage and acts of exchange take place, they "elicit" a group's membership (Wagner, 1974, 107–11). Groups are entailed and improvisatory, generated out of each person's historically informed but ultimately creative political choices and activities. Anthropologists, Wagner suggested, have tended to project their own preconceptions about social groups onto other societies. In this way, they have been like the colonial administrative officers who tried to "straighten things out" by having Daribi build new settlements that consolidated them "into clear-cut, Western-style groups"—only to find that these foreign-impelled units quickly disintegrated (114, 119). In summer 1979, Wagner brought his children Erika and Jonathan to a second Papua New Guinea fieldsite, Bakan village, on the north-central coast of New Ireland, where he did fieldwork for nine months and later another summer among the Barok. In a resulting monograph, Asiwinarong: Ethos, Image, and Social Power among the Usen Barok of New Ireland (Wagner, 1986a), he further developed his ideas of paired elements, obviation, and social structure as elicited by creative action. Barok leaders generate social power by "eliciting" collectivities. They craft and decompose artful images that encompass, bound, or "contain" collectivities and their power, and they increase their own personal power by rhetorical performances, deceptions, and ritualized tricks that induce in others an experience of awesome revelation by a shift of perspective and figure-ground reversal. In identifying elicitation, containment, and revelation as basic modes of socially creative activity, Wagner helped inspire the "New Melanesian Ethnography," a movement emphasizing that Indigenous cultural forms involve creativity and innovation (see Scott, 2007). In the late 1970s, he also began a long, productive intellectual exchange with Marilyn Strathern, who similarly constructed dialogs between Indigenous and anthropological theories (in particular with regard to gender), comparing their respective presumptions about what is "given" in nature as opposed to created (Strathern, 1980, 1988; McKinnon, 2017, 160–64). In fall 1986, Wagner spent a semester as a visiting fellow at Strathern's institution, the University of Manchester. Over the next 30 years, Wagner continued writing about Daribi and Barok figures of speech and creativity, but he increasingly shifted from describing these ethnographically to abstracting them and exploring the lessons they might reveal by analogy about anthropological knowledge creation, the nature of reality, and the human condition. This was, of course, a path he had started upon in earlier works like The Invention of Culture, but now he took it into realms of ramifying complexity and self-referentiality. In 1982, Wagner developed a lecture course (taught annually for the next 36 years) about the novels of Carlos Castaneda, which narrate an apprenticeship with a purported Yaqui Indian shaman in the southwest United States and Mexico.2 The fact that Wagner himself had apprenticed with a shaman, Yapenugiai, in New Guinea took on new meaning in light of this comparison. With his close colleague Edith (Edie) Turner and others, Wagner engaged in shamanistic experiments, interpreted people's dreams, and read their auras. He began teaching two additional staple courses about science fiction, the literature of fantasy, and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's language games, and he highlighted the fantastical paradoxes and puzzles in the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, whose logic-defying style he now adopted in his own books and articles (e.g., Wagner, 2001, 2010, 2018). He became increasingly an intellectual trickster, staging mind-bending, rhetorical shifts of perspective between mysticism and science to playfully confound tired Western distinctions between fantasy and reality, wisdom and scholarship, spirit and matter, and nature and culture. He also employed rhetorical devices he had learned in Papua New Guinea. Daribi, Barok, and other Papua New Guinean orators are adept at speaking indirectly, their surface discourse both covering up and alluding to deeper meanings accessible only to skilled listeners. In the Daribi language, this form of power oratory is called porigi po (the speech of remote intentions) and described as "talk that turns back upon itself as it is spoken."3 Wagner used this rhetorical device himself in much of his writing. He loved folding an idea back on itself, especially a linear one such as "time," and then stretching and refolding it like taffy, leaving the reader tied in a knot. Wagner's final visit to Papua New Guinea was in summer 2000. Accompanied by his PhD student Michael Wesch, he returned to Karimui, arriving at Kurube just hours after his Daribi mentor, Yapenugiai, had passed away. Early one morning after the burial, Wagner awoke and saw a black bird outside his tent. It was a kauwari, the bird whose actions in Daribi myth lead to mortality but also to the creation of game birds and animals (Wagner, 1967, 40). Returning to his tent to take notes, Wagner fell asleep and dreamed that he was possessed by a black trickster bird who "perched on my shoulders, with its wings upraised, pouring light into the back of my head" (Wagner, 2010, 55–56). Daribi people interpreted the dream as a communication from Yapenugiai. Like other great shamans, and, indeed, like the hero of the myth, Yapenugiai had become a "place-soul" merged with the landscape, sending dreams to aid the living (58). This meaning of the "place-soul" was the departed shaman's last lesson for his longtime white friend. In 2011, Shaffner accompanied Wagner for a month in Brazil, where The Invention of Culture had just been published in Portuguese translation. In Manaus, Rio de Janeiro, and elsewhere, Wagner met Amazonian shamans, leaders, students, and scholars who found inspiration in his ideal that anthropology and Indigenous knowledge should be a "reciprocity of perspectives" among equals (Rizoma Audiovisual, 2022). He commented many times that this trip was a highlight of his life. In his long career, Wagner taught generations of anthropologists, including Sandra Bamford, Jaimie Pearl Bloom,4 Tatiana Chudakova, Brenda Johnson Clay, Doug Dalton, Gary Dunham, Matthew Engelke, John Farella, Marianne (Mimi) George, Alma Gottlieb, Joe Hellweg, Chris Hewlett, Barbara Jones, Alex King, Roger Magazine, Anjana Mebane-Cruz, Charles Piot, Alessandro Questa, Joel Robbins, Giancarlo Rolando, Margo Smith, Elizabeth Stassinos, and Michael Wesch.5 He supported his students generously on the model of Schneider's support for him, and he was as a rule a strikingly generous reviewer of work by other scholars, writing innumerable supportive manuscript reviews and tenure letters. Many who knew Wagner remember approaching his office door and hearing the sound of typing on an archaic mechanical typewriter coming from within. A conversation with Roy might wander through medieval history, Barok initiation rites, Mayan calendrics, quantum physics, number theory, Bigfoot, Grimms' Fairy Tales, baseball, chess, cats, Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Gregory Bateson, Escher drawings, Russian choral music, Chinese landscape painting, Coyote stories, Māori cosmology, and Castaneda and shamanism. Talking with Roy could take up a large part of your day. He had long trains of thought and was uncannily untouched by hurry. He could seem impractical, if not otherworldly. And yet this police chief's son could also be politically savvy and effective. In Karimui in 1968, Wagner saw that people from the neighboring Gumine region, where land was scarce and the population was burgeoning, were entering Daribi lands, looting their forests, and using force, intimidation, and deceit to access Daribi resources. One such man, who carried a shiny badge and pretended to be an official, was welcomed hospitably by the credulous people of a Daribi village, who, knowing no land scarcity, greatly underestimated the threat that he posed. He claimed that their land had belonged to his own ancestors "in the time of Adam and Eve," and to retain it they must work for him without pay (Wagner, 1971, 29). Wagner complained to the Australian colonial administration, which eventually dispatched a bona fide officer to Karimui and forced the impostor to leave. Wagner was surprised to learn, however, that some administration officials were themselves actively encouraging land-hungry people around Gumine to resettle at Karimui, where the population density was a thousandfold less. Administrators were even planning to build a 40-mile-long road across the rugged landscape to hasten the move (Hicks, 1971). Foreseeing that exploitation, dispossession, and misery were in store for Daribi people, Wagner sounded the alarm. He published an incisive exposé in the magazine of the high-profile Australian Council on New Guinea Affairs, writing that he sought not to keep Karimui "untouched," but to forestall "ethnocide" (Wagner, 1971, 27). He rebutted the colonial rationalizations that the resettlement was inevitable, that it would do the "greatest good for the greatest number," and that the settlers would help Daribi people "progress" (30, 31). Wagner argued that it would bring the same "senseless misfortune" as centuries of settler dispossession of Indigenous people in the Americas, Africa, India, Polynesia, and Australia (30). Wagner also tipped an Australian newspaper reporter about the planned resettlement program, and the reporter confronted the Australian Administrator of Papua New Guinea, even traveling with him to Karimui to investigate. Soon the "crisis" of a New Guinea people's impending "subjugation" was making headlines in Sydney (Hicks, 1971). The resettlement program and planned road were shelved. Still today, Karimui is reached by no vehicular road, though one is now being built, construction having begun in earnest only in 2020—coincidentally, since Wagner's death (Nii, 2019; Tabie, 2020a, 2020b). Wagner's work is widely read outside the United States (see, e.g., Dulley, 2019; Kelly Luciani, 2010; Pitarch and Kelly, 2018). Credited with anticipating the "conceptual reflexivity" of the ontological turn (Holbraad and Pedersen, 2017, 70), it is carried forward in the "symmetric" turn of Brazilian anthropology (Abaeté Network, 2005; Viveiros de Castro and Goldman, 2012), exemplified by the Indigenous anthropology research program (Santos and Dias, 2009) of the Núcleo de Estudos da Amazônia Indígena (NEAI) at the Federal University of Amazonas in Manaus, the heart of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest region.6 Wagner's ideas are also woven into the work of other Indigenous anthropologists, such as the Papua New Guinean scholar and museum curator Andrew Moutu (2013). In these and other ways, like his Daribi mentor, Wagner continues to send inspiration to aid the living. His papers are currently in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the care of Shaffner, who plans to transfer them to the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center in Regenstein Library. In addition to published sources, we have drawn on our recollections, Bashkow's notes of conversations with Roy, and Roy's presentation about his intellectual biography in Bashkow's graduate seminar on the anthropology of Papua New Guinea on September 30, 2015. We each have many typed sheets of miscellany—letters, sonnets, drawings, philosophical musings, syllabi, and student prompts—that Roy created and presented us with over the years. We have benefited from conversations with his colleagues and friends Ellen Contini-Morava, Fred Damon, Eve Danziger, Iracema Dulley, Jeffrey Hantman, Dawn Houston (formerly Hayes), Adam Louis-Klein, Susan McKinnon, Gilton Mendes dos Santos, George Mentore, Peter Metcalf, Jack Morava, David Sapir, and Michael Wesch. We thank the aforementioned as well as Doug Dalton, Lise Dobrin, Marcio Goldman, Richard Handler, Yu-chien Huang, Dan Jorgensen, Joel Robbins, Giancarlo Rolando, Marilyn Strathern, and Jon Wagner for reading drafts. Our special thanks go to Jonathan Wagner, Erika Wagner, and the late Brenda Sue Wagner.