Return to Culture: Oral Tradition and Society in the Southern Cook Islands By Anna-Leena Siikala and Jukka Siikala Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica. 2005 Pp: 327 Price: not given

Anna-Leena and Jukka Siikala, in Return to Culture, combine theoretical perspectives from anthropology

They argue that oral narratives are an integral part of social life and are intelligible only within a context of ethnographic and historical information. They take the basic Boasian notions of culture and combine this with the ethnoscience of the sixties and seventies; culture is to be treated as Saussure treated language, and 'what makes a difference' is determined empirically by an examination of observable instantiations. This system as a whole provides the 'foundation of discursive practices and the interpretive ability of members of a cultural group.' (p. 12). Culture provides a communicative device specific to a cultural system and oral tradition mediates between this cultural system and life as it is lived.

The Siikalas describe their methods: 'Each narrative context reorganises the reference of the text in a different way ... [with] numerous factors at work.... 1) the goals and interpretations of the individual, 2) the contextual interactions, and 3) the cultural conventions governing them.' (Siikala, p. 134).

Subsequently, the Siikalas apply these methods to narratives about pigs, greed and Moenau. The analysis focuses on what is being communicated: reciprocity, particularly among extended kin, is required; greed is bad; the greedy Chief is a bad chief. This, in turn, is tied to food as a metaphor for love and extended to a metaphor for position and rank. In this section, they provide a very convincing demonstration of the productivity of their approach.

The book is based on thirteen articles published earlier by one or both of the authors between 1992 and 2003. Return to Culture is poised, sometimes uncomfortably, between a book, with an integrated and developed set of theses, and a collection of articles. A brief introduction gives a general discussion of theory, method and goals. None of the articles is discussed; there is no attempt in the introduction to tie the book together as a whole. A page of the six page introduction gives a brief ethnographic description of the Cook Islands.

In the introduction, the Siikalas discuss the dangers of applying distinctions and categories from one's own culture to another. They quote Roy Wagner: '... social anthropology developed into a kind of heuristic pretending; concepts with a very broad base of acceptance and understanding in Western society, like "politics", "law", "rights" and "property" were applied to the collective usage of tribal peoples, with a sort of "as if' attached to them.' The Siikalas go on: "The analogical pairing of dissimilar phenomena in this kind of scholarly practice is in fact based on supposed and unobservable features.' (p. 36). Instead, classifications are to be established 'on the ground'.

In Chapter One, the Siikalas provide a literature review, devoting more attention to the problem of anthropological bias. They attempt to cover too much material in a brief space and end up 'cherry picking' or setting up straw anthropologists. They appear to choose an 'ideal type' (or target) from each theoretical perspective and ignore divisions within these perspectives. It provides a good bibliography but a poor discussion of issues in the two fields.

For example, they refer to 'cross-cultural analysis' and use the same term for two different problems: an anthropologist interpreting another culture in terms of his/her own (p. 16) and the process of comparing and analysing different cultures. They are only very superficially the same.

Cross-cultural analysis involves very different sorts of methodological and theoretical problems. Categories and definitions must be independent of any individual culture and each individual culture must be capable of being mapped onto the anthropologist's proposed model. Different theoretical perspectives can be used to provide successful studies using data from different cultures/societies.

The concluding two sections of the book are most concerned with cross-cultural analysis. In the section titled 'Metaphors for Society', where the author examines geneologies, Jukka Siikala deals most impressively with genealogical material in legitimating existing hierarchical relations. Among other topics, he discusses the elder/younger sibling classification. He establishes a series of oppositions which be uses in his analysis of migration, political hierarchy and the control of land and people. If you ever need to demonstrate the importance of geneologies to your students, this article does so.

The final section of the book is much less successful. Discussions of colonialism, the State, the global economy, need to be much more firmly grounded in factual material. Siikala ignores the specificity of the history of the Cook Islands and discusses 'colonialism' 'global economy' and 'oppression' as global phenomena. The South Pacific is not Africa or Asia. Oppression, most certainly, but of a different sort.

Rarotonga's first continuous contact with the West came with the arrival of missionaries, who also brought disease. A major part of the population of Rarotonga died as a result. The remaining population converted to Christianity. Disease played a major role in the history of the South Pacific--comparable to the effects of disease in parts of central America.

Later, the Cooks repeatedly petitioned Great Britain for Protectorate status. "Blackbirders", slavers, were a constant threat and people wanted the protection of the British Navy. Great Britain finally and reluctantly accepted the Cooks as a Protectorate.

It is very hard to make exploiting the Cooks pay: true for multinationals as well as historical colonial powers. Lack of natural resources provides a kind of protection from globalisation much as it provided a kind of protection from imperialism. (Missionaries were another matter.)

Transportation costs, lack of water, poor beach and swimming facilities preclude mass tourism. Air New Zealand now has one, rather than two, flights into Rarotonga from Los Angeles every week.

Ecology, like history and economics, is ignored. The islands in the Cooks group, like other small island communities, have firm regulations enforced by sometimes draconian penalties to conserve vital resources. The majority of the world's peoples, regardless of their technological status, blithely use up whatever is available and move on--behaviour the New Zealand Maori adopted when settling on a large land mass. Any comparison of New Zealand and Cook Islands Maori needs to at least allude to these different resources.

In summary, some of the articles are less successful than others, but I think the book demonstrates the value of the Siikalas' theoretical approach--which is original and attempts to do something worth doing.

Wenonah Lyon

University of Kent