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46(2):237–244

© 2008 The AuthorsJournal compilation © 2008 Institute of Australian Geographers

is found wanting, both in resources and in com-mitment to working with local people. This hasto change. Second, the model of transition thatseems to have worked in Machakos – not fardistant in Kenya – is faulted, at least as far asTanga is concerned. Finally, the key to farmers’choices is put in terms of risk avoidance, andthe task ahead is framed in terms of a strongerconvergence of research and local knowledgethrough participatory action.

Methodologically, the book is a model for theinterdisciplinary analysis of Africa’s complexsystems, especially in its use of widely differentprocedures for analysing data. It is unusual tofind water balance model simulations betweenthe same covers as an erudite recounting oflong-term change based on economic, social,biophysical, cartographic and other data, all pre-sented with panache and to good effect.

Interestingly, Porter declines to situate hiswork within any of the conceptual paradigmsbriefly summarised in the first chapter – culturaland political ecology, risk and hazard analysis,sustainability science – though claiming itsrelevance to them all. The nearest he comesto taking a stand on conceptual issues is inadvocating awareness of ‘framings’, such as the‘environmental imaginaries’ of western trainedprofessionals. This is curiously introduced withcitations of Marxist writers whose theoreticalapparatus does not always seem to support hisown ideal, which is to make ‘every effort toframe the approach to drought hazards in TangaRegion so that data and ideas emerged fromwhat people told me’ (p. 238).

On the controversial Machakos story, Porteradds some flavour from his own experience to anicely integrated account of what some havecalled a successful ‘sustainability transition’.However, in quoting critics of this defining study,he exposes himself to the only methodologicalcriticisms this reviewer wants to make of hisbook: a thesis of long-term change through localpeoples’ initiatives is not invalidated by anuncertain future, which affects all of us; claimsthat conservation trends have gone into reverseneed to be substantiated by recent evidence;and micro-scale data from one village does notinvalidate meso-scale findings for a district with-out proper testing. The authors of the Machakosstudy did not claim that poverty and inequitywere eliminated; sustainable environmentalmanagement was brought nearer but economicwelfare (which improved up to 1987) is neces-sarily affected by macro-economic management.

Unfortunately, the large body of evidence onwhich the Machakos ‘model’ was based is pre-sented in a book which Porter does not cite(Tiffen

et al

., 1994); furthermore, its critics havebeen answered in a recent article (Tiffen andMortimore, 2006).

This is important territory because Machakosand Tanga clearly offer differing profiles overthe past four decades. Policies need to be basedon balanced evaluation of the changes thatAfrican farmers have achieved over the longterm, or their failure to do so, and an under-standing of the interaction of internal andexternal factors. There is much to learn froma comparison of such studies. As an input tothis debate – all-important for Africa’s poorpeople – Porter’s book is a lucid, measuredand fascinating contribution.

REFERENCESTiffen, M., Mortimore, M. and Gichuki, F., 1994:

MorePeople, Less Erosion: Environmental Recovery in Kenya

.John Wiley, Chichester.

Tiffen, M. and Mortimore, M., 2006: Response: forwards tonew challenges, not backwards to prescription.

Develop-ment Policy Review

24, 87–104.

Michael

Mortimore

Drylands ResearchSherborne, United Kingdom

The Making of Global and Local Modernitiesin Melanesia. Humiliation, Transformationand the Nature of Cultural Change

Joel Robbins and Holly Wardlow (eds), Ashgate,Aldershot, 2005, xiv + 227 pp, ISBN 0 75464312 3 (hardback) £60.00.

Robbins and Wardlow have put together a fasci-nating collection of chapters that reflect on howthe relationships between tradition, modernityand development – however each of these elu-sive concepts might be interpreted – fluctuate invarious Melanesian contexts. The collection,despite being entirely about Papua New Guinea(and mostly the highlands) with one excursioninto Solomon Islands, offers powerful perspec-tives for other quite different regions in its chal-lenge to many conventional considerations oftrajectories of change and the nature of develop-ment, and in its persuasive analysis of the earlyphases of transition from tradition.

Reviews

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The book revolves around the distinguishedAmerican anthropologist Marshall Sahlins’ ideasabout cultural change and stability especially aselaborated in his initial chapter of ‘The Economicsof Develop-man in the Pacific’ first publishedobscurely (and ignored) in 1992 and now rescuedand reprinted. It is the central text around whichthe other chapters circulate. From Sahlins’ ownexperiences, mainly in Fiji and to a lesser extentPapua New Guinea, he links cultural change,symbolism and structural change, broadly point-ing to continuity, significant cultural integrityand change centred around indigenous agency.He argues that ‘modernity’ only follows despond-ency, when people are humiliated by their tradi-tional cultural context and the self-deprecatingremarks they consequently make comparing theirown status to those of the more ‘developed’colonisers. But before this occurs, if indeed itdoes, there is an efflorescence of the old order,as newly acquired modern resources are directedinto a ‘traditional’ order despite its inevitablechange.

There is a particular focus on the role ofChristianity as the primary ideological challengeto the traditional order, but challenges were asevident in the new materialism that capitalismbrought – however it was interpreted and in-corporated. And in every case the chapters reflectthe hybridity and syncretism that were central tochange and stability, whether involving religiousbelief, exchange, money, stores or even class,as Melanesians sought to understand and beinvolved in the outside world on their ownterms.

Joel Robbins provides a valuable Introductionthat situates Sahlins’ work in a broader culturalcontext. The following chapters, all by anthropo-logists, elaborate, challenge and contest Sahlins’arguments, but all give them a certain utilityin terms of the quite different ways in whichMelanesians have constructed and conceptualisedmodernity. Several focus on religion both as thecore of indigenous perceptions of self-hood andself-worth and as the most powerful componentof hybridity. Others emphasise more evidently‘economic’ phenomena. Throughout these variousengagements with the outside world Melanesiansstruggled valiantly to retain the order and cer-tainty of the past, in the face of poorly under-stood (and often poorly articulated) westernvalues, often effectively forced upon them(hence the primacy of religion).

Sahlins interjects the neologism ‘develop-man’originally a misinterpreted and overheard word

from Melanesian

Tok Pisin

as his own summa-tion of the distinctive nature of Melanesiandevelopment. It is not clear whether Sahlins’own use of the word ‘develop-man’ was chosento emphasise male primacy in the traditionalorder. None of the contributors seeks to addressthis or to query issues of gender relations pastand present.

Equally Sahlins fails to discuss when or whyefflorescence may fade away in the future (orhas already faded) though, particularly arguingfrom an Asian context, he emphasises that anytransition may last centuries. In most contextsthey overlap, as in the Papua New Guineancontext with which I am most familiar (Siwai,Bougainville) where older leaders sought to retainand elaborate old ways, while being challengedby young western-trained men (and sometimeswomen) who had mastered new worlds of tech-nology, economics and politics but who in turnwere threatened by younger men who sought tocombine old and new ways. There was thereforeno necessary linearity in any trajectory of change.Indeed some, like the Maring, who had rapidlymoved towards the despondency that Sahlinsfeared, ultimately moved further away from it asthey were able to restore an older order, embel-lished by the new, within a more acceptablehybridity.

Those who have worked in Melanesia willrecognise how powerful Sahlins’ ideas continueto be. Others may be wholly unfamiliar with theplaces and peoples described here, and perhapsfrustrated by anthropologists’ focus on thesymbolic and emotional aspects of change – yetemotion and symbolism have a centrality oftendenied to them. However, the various chaptersemphasise very clearly how any process ofchange is messy and uncertain, non-linear andembroiled in emotion and contestation, not leastaround gender relations (although much moreon this would have been welcome). It raisesissues of post-development, alternative develop-ment, the role of the local, the significance ofculture and is a very necessary prelude to amore subtle political economy of change.

Above all this is a valuable text in its re-cognition of the primacy of the social within‘economic’ life, and what is true of Melanesia iscertainly true elsewhere.

John

Connell

University of SydneyAustralia