Notwithstanding numerous gestures in folklore studies to attend equally to expressive forms and the social base, rarely are sociological considerations brought to parity with text, performance, or tradition. Siikala and Siikala, however, skillfully and thoroughly wed two analytical approaches that have increasingly become disparate tasks among academic disciplines, despite a shared intellectual kinship. In Return to Culture they seek to integrate a folkloristic analysis with social anthropology, a much welcome union. In American folklore studies the relationship between folklore and anthropology has proven at times complementary, but often tenuous and strained as humanistic and social scientific interests have struggled over disciplinary territory. The anthropology that has informed folklore, especially the performance-centered approach, has come primarily from cultural anthropology and a variety of iterations of linguistic anthropology. Alternatively, the Siikalas’ folkloristic anthropology (or anthropological folklore) displays attachment to the sociology of British anthropology with additional roots in continental social historians. What makes their sociology of folklore so refreshing is that neither disciplinary perspective is privileged and their ethnographic gaze moves beyond cultural areas that have dominated both disciplines (i.e., Europe, Africa, and the Americas with an occasional glance to Asia) to the Southern Cook Islands of Oceania.
In this collaborative project, the authors assume accountability for their respective pieces of the interdisciplinary effort. Anna-Leena, the folklorist, attends most assiduously to the oral traditions, while Jukka, the social anthropologist, methodically explores Cook Islander society. After an integrated introductory overview, the book splits into distinct authorial parts, written from their respective disciplinary vantage points. Occasionally this brackets off the two perspectives and resists the assimilated approach they seek. Nonetheless, both authors reach back and forth across the divide in search of a complementary and integrative lens. For instance, while Anna-Leena addresses such folkoristic considerations as textual traditions, repertories, and genres, she situates them within a sociology of authority and politics. Or when exploring narrative interpretations or the practice of entextualization, she contextualizes these processes historically and within contemporary social events that have shaped and continue to shape Cook Islander society. On the other hand, while Jukka addresses such sociological considerations as the chiefly polity, or the cosmological underpinnings of historical relations, he illustrates how traditional discourses interweave to engender social relations. Or when exploring local, national, and transnational relationships beyond modern state structures, he demonstrates how folklore informs both a historical vision and the dynamics of contemporary society. These complementary trajectories “return [us] to culture” in a double sense: first, they return the analysis to a more overt theorizing of the cultural process itself, and second, they foreground the practices of the Cook Islanders themselves, because it is they too who interpret a system of “schemes, themes, and categories” of their culture to “encompass and assimilate novel situations and events.” What we get in this treatise on Cook Island oral traditions and society is an exemplary presentation on the interrelationship of form, function, and meaning. They do this, however, not with worn-out conceptualizations of form and function, but by attending to the dynamic interplay of form and function in the patterning of both cultural and sociological meanings. Their study provides a laudable work on how folklore, in part, constitutes social life, and how society reciprocally animates traditional discourses.
Given the interdisciplinary breakthrough this book offers, a more nuanced contribution lies in its thorough ethnographic presentation of a society and culture of Oceania. Both authors enter into a conversation with the broader regional scholarship, mindful of salient Pacific considerations such as migratory history, genealogy, cosmology, social power, and contemporary social transformations that are distinctive throughout Oceania broadly, and Polynesia particularly. While very aware of these matters that have occupied the "area" scholarship, they nonetheless bring a refreshing European formulation to a culture area dominated by American, Australian, and New Zealand theoretical and topical frameworks. Unencumbered by routinized academic priorities that take shape in area studies generally, they are free to re-read the sociological landscape of the Cook Islands and bring to bear folkloristic considerations that have been almost entirely absent from Pacific scholarship. At the same time, they also begin to remedy a notable absence of Oceanic materials in both anthropology and folklore. After a meritorious start in the Pacific in early twentieth-century anthropology (Malinowski, Mead), ethnographies on islander culture and society find themselves only minimally part of the larger disciplinary conversation, despite recent grand debates that have come out of Oceania (Mead vs. Freeman, Sahlins vs. Obeyesekere). Even more significant is the almost total neglect of Oceania by folklorists. In a quick perusal of most world anthologies of oral tradition or folklore publications, one will note the near absence of Pacific texts and examples. As with all canons, what is excluded often reveals as much as what is included, and folklore’s neglect of Pacific traditions identifies a disciplinary blinder that favors other regional priorities. To be fair, few trained folklorists (with either humanistic or anthropological inclinations) have worked in the Pacific, but this paucity only reconfirms the discipline’s map of the world. Anna-Leena and Jukka Siikalas’ book on the Southern Cook Islands goes a long way toward providing a representative folkloristic ethnography, one worthy of attention by those within and without the region.
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[Review length: 859 words • Review posted on October 31, 2006]