Difference, Equality and the Austronesian Approach to Life
Thomas Reuter, Monash University
Ethnographic research conducted over several decades - by members of the Comparative Austronesia Project, founded by Prof James Fox, and others - has revealed a number of important thematic features in the social practices and socio-cosmological theories of Austronesian cultures. The most important of these thematic features can be traced back to just two different categorical procedures that are both used for drawing social distinctions, namely incremental and binary dualism. Binary dualism is found in every human conceptual scheme and in many social institutions worldwide, while incremental dualism or precedence is arguably the more distinctively Austronesian feature, though it is not unique either, nor separable from binary dualism. What then does this notion of precedence actually entail for Austronesian status systems and what are the fundamental problems of life that it means to address? What can we learn from the Austronesian way? I will examine these questions in this paper by drawing on the theories of Bateson, Dumont and Jung, as well as my own research in Indonesia.
