(From interview with George Marcus, September 12, 2023)
In this particular field work moment I encountered a figure who was, for lack of a better term. in a state of alienation from his own embedded culture. And that's a difficult place to be in these small exhaustively ranked communities. He never lost the tinge of the rank that he had lost. So his adaptation was basically, a kind of alienation, a kind of eccentric, but one who was tolerated because of who he had been, but had lost the outside demonstrations of the ring. The probing segment from the novel by Albert Wendt was what the internal sensibility of such a person might be, in that he wasn't an eccentric. His decline in rank was not recognized, but silently, personally he couldn't stand the discipline of his own society. And so he portrayed, which is his right as a novelist, a deeply understood kind of alienation. And so what was useful was to juxtapose him to [Taveka]. I didn't know who he was there before; I knew of the controversy where he lost his rank. But I had no idea that he would become such a focusing figure for me in my fieldwork. The novel was only published in 1997, but it would become extremely powerful for me not only because of the quality of its writing, but it evoked this character in the field who I have to say carried me through my field work as a puzzle which was never solved. So only in draft form do I have a write-up of this case. Given where anthropology was at the time, and what the shaping discourse of study of that part of the world was, it only comes in tangentially. Whereas that was the main plot of my fieldwork, because it had been such an important case twenty years before I was there. Any place I went, I could use it as a kind of grounding. In a place like Tonga, which was extremely rank oriented and built around a chiefly authority, rank was everything. So it was very hard to understand the affective sensibilities, the personhood of Tongan society, outside this scope of rank. When I was doing this research it was, not the first, but the last great period in anthropology when the question of a person, or the cultural construct of a person, was guiding at least American cultural anthropology in a lot of places, for instance Japan. Japan studies were dominated by the Japanese self, the Japanese person, and the same for a lot of other areas in Oceania in which I was sort of in conversation with as anybody would be who's working in those areas as a young scholar: the Tongan self, the Samoan self, the Japanese self.
The story I'm telling here is also based around winning and losing in the hierarchy game of Tonga, but nobody understood what it meant to be a loser. It was a kind of radical and somewhat irresponsible thing to attach cultuiral models of dissidence or something else, to resistance or something like that. One could have done that, but I don't think it was as rich as the nuances of being in the position that that guy was.
My key problem in film work was to manage my own very rich relations with this guy and to be understood, or not lose standing among all the other people.I ccould never give, by ethnographic knowing, the kind of account that is in the fiction of Albert Wendt. I only saw glimmers of it, like in this fieldnote, but I was always attentive to this guy's position. I had several conversations with him, but I never identified with him or was identified with him, except that I wanted to know more. So when I left that particular village, wherever I went I would ask about that case. It attracted attention at one point that I thought was kind of risky. People were uneasy; they thought, why is he asking this? But I never started a campaign to relive this conflict, I never stood up for this guy. But it was a peculiar thing to be asking about -- of course, they never understood what anthropologists were doing anyway. Typical of a lot of societies.
