简介

Entering the fall of my years—I started at UVa during the 1976-77 academic year—I have thoroughly enjoyed my teaching and research and value both for personal and professional reasons. Sprinkled among my primary teaching and research obligations I have participated in or organized a series of conferences, the two Kula Conferences (1978 at Cambridge University, 1982 at UVa) and most recently, with Carlos Mondragón from El Colegio de México and Wang Mingming from Beijing University, two workshops called ‘Ecology and Time Systems in Australasia and the Americas: New approaches to value systems and calendrical transformations across the Pacific Rim.’ These were held at UVa (2009) and Beijing University (2011) (See here for Programs). My initial research in the Kula Ring of Papua New Guinea intended to use a structuralist version of exchange theory to describe Muyuw-Woodlark Island-as it existed in its regional setting. Indigenous understandings forced me to consider production, not exchange, as the organizing value among the people with whom I lived. Tensions between exchange and production views of society continue to animate my teaching and research. And I maintain an interest in the problem of how to understand and describe the regional systems in which all social life is embedded. If understanding the modern world-system remains one pole of that research and teaching, understanding the regions and regionalism centering on the Asias and Australia—the whole Indo-Pacific—is the other. It has a deeper and perhaps more useful history. For the remainder of my professional life I expect to consider these issues in light of recent concerns with chaos theory. I thus hope to be engaged in dialogues with fractal mathematics, perhaps knot theory and problems of climate and culture. As intended, eleven returns to PNG between 1991 and 2014 along with new teaching interests have generated shifts in my original topical, theoretical and areal stances. Added to the exchange/production orientation are interdisciplinary research and teaching to explore how anthropogenic environments relate to better-known social structural and cosmological transformations in and beyond the Kula Ring. And I now view that area against the backdrop of the whole Indo-Pacific and its natural and human history going back to the mid-Holocene at least. Recent publications reflect the initial stages of this work and should climax soon in a book entitled TREES, KNOTS AND OUTRIGGERS: Reflections on Environmental Research in the Northeast Kula Ring. I was in China during the summer of 2008 to initiate language learning and to explore new research locales proximate to the separation between what became East Asia on the one hand and the Austronesian world on the other. I returned for the first half of 2013 in and around Quanzhou in Fujian Province further developing these interests; I return again in 2015. Questions about social organization, including socio-ecological contexts, and collective forms of thinking will animate this research. On the plate at the moment are two interstitial projects: One contrasts Austronesian sailing craft I know from the Kula Ring with those that plied the waters of southeastern China from at least the Tang through the Qing Dynasties; the other is an inquiry into the use of flora references in Austronesian languages and cultures and in Chinese. The future is a pleasure with new friends and new ideas to explore.