Heroic History on the Australian Frontier
by Alex
Some day I want to write a paper emphasizing the personalistic nature of kiap rule during Papua New Guinea’s colonial period, perhaps by discussing it in terms of the ‘heroic’ mode of history Sahlins discusses in Islands of History. Where were PNGians supposed to learn about bureaucratic rationality when they were governed by this sort of system? And is it really surprising that ‘corruption’ today takes the form of an equally personalistic (but less disciplined) form of governance.
Someday, someday.
It’s interesting that a number of histories seem to work this way. Ancient Mesopotamia, which developed the first writing in the world to support the first bureaucracy in the world, was always more or less patrimonial too (a point I’m emphasizing for my Media and Power class by having them read “The Forlorn Scholar” (State Archives of Assyria X:294), an obsequious harangue from a 7th-century BCE palace functionary which makes clear that multiple layers of bureacrats and intellectuals owed allegiance directly to the king of the Assyrian empire. Though of course Weber already talks about this…
Mesopotamia, which developed the first writing in the world to support the first bureaucracy in the world, was always more or less patrimonial too (a point I’m emphasizing for my Media and Power class by having them read “T