Life with and without its antithesis

Abstract

The impetus for this reflection on well-being comes from the way the sustainability of life itself seems under threat from climate change. The terms of debate, what is meant by ‘life’, are ripe for re-imagining. When anthropologists take the contemporary valorisation of life as obscuring social realities of a destructive kind, they promote a certain kind of antithesis; attempts to re-balance a positive with a negative emphasis re-valorise the positive tenor that life carries. What is in turn occluded in such valorisations are other ways of assessing destruction and rupture. This contribution returns to the old adage about death as the regeneration of life in order to discuss ethnographic materials (from old Melanesia) best served by dismantling the antithetical structure. Death does not just emerge as a part of everyday life but as something for and with which people must actively work in order for there to be any future at all. This gives their sense of misfortune and bodily affliction a very particular resonance. Perhaps, too, such a sense challenges assumptions about just what is taken on board in evaluations of sustainability.

In the course of expounding the yearly decay and revival of life once personified as a god who died and rose again, Frazer describes the force with which Adonis (Tammuz, Osiris), in his guise as a corn god, is cut down. Adonis perishing under reapers’ sickles or trodden to death under ox hooves depicts, he insists, no natural vegetative decay: ‘it is the violent destruction of the corn by man, who cuts it down on the field, stamps it to pieces on the threshing-floor, and grinds it to powder in the mill’ (1932 [1914]: 193). The force of the statement comes in part from the reader recognising common cultivation practices, occluded in the feat of imagination by which Frazer brings into view a more ominous interpretation. For all that we know Adonis will be reborn, the violence of the language is disturbing. Someone is being slain; indeed Frazer supposed that a living man might be killed on the harvest field to pacify the ill-treated god. And for all that the dead return as sprouting corn, Frazer evokes their individual plurality [my phrase] as so many ‘slaughtered victims’. A spectre of limitless killing: the reader is meant to be disturbed. ¹

Many people existing now deploy similar ways of disturbing themselves, while alongside lie other sources of deep disquiet. Every corner of the earth yields its own limitless possibilities for catastrophe. Yet even as the fragility of planetary life is exposed, a hopeful sense of life continues to strengthen. It is life that is under threat and it is life that survives and overcomes. For all its secular formulation, the paradox would have been familiar to Frazer's readers (consciously Christian or otherwise). It would be surprising if today's anthropologists were not engaged with forms of life and the unequal and radically changing conditions under which it is sustainable. For them, life includes trajectories for social-cultural continuity and the exercise of adaptability and human ingenuity.

One of the shocking revelations encapsulated in the notion of the Anthropocene is that of too much ingenuity, an excess of human agency: where Frazer put a corn god is instead a ghastly personification of earth's recent geology. The potential termination of species life by human hands will also involve the countless lives whose expected terminus is otherwise an individual death, one of the inevitable, everyday events that makes humankind a part of ‘nature’. How, then, to scale the imagination? ² The idea of ‘life’ balloons to embrace everything that might be lost, its valorisation taken to new horizons. While the possibility of extinction displaces the regular cycling of life and death with a terminus in ‘non-life’ (Povinelli 2016), it is hard not to draw on life's vernacular antithesis and equate non-life with everything's death. The imagination is invariably animated thus by everyday circumstances and vernacular understandings, and I ponder on some of the values ordinarily attached to life and death. They colour the contemplation of the apocalypse. Such imaginings in turn imply evaluations of health and well-being.

The valorisation of life

Diverse disciplinary twists and turns in the social sciences have over the last half century endorsed an enduring valorisation of life. Not unlike the English concept ‘relation’, ‘life’ carries a sense of the positive, as we may also find in neoliberal affirmations of productivity and creativity, ³ a positive value that in turn becomes criticised for underpinning unsustainable fantasies of perpetual growth, economic and otherwise. In anthropology, descriptions of the liveliness or vitality of people's existence, whether or not presented as narratives of hope, can also be turned around to criticise the anthropologist. Thus, it may be objected, insofar as ‘life-affirming’ accounts imply social continuities, they conceal the evident negativities that analysis of discontinuity or rupture would bring. The charge is that evocations of people's vitality conjure the romance of societal wholes and cultural coherence that has long been the target of a critical history that would put in its place what – by contrast – appear the realities of profound turbulence.

However inadvertent or unintended, such evaluations often lie in the connotations that such terms carry over from vernacular usage. The analogy of the concept of life with that of relations is not trivial. Theoretical ambition to deploy ‘relations’ coolly and neutrally may be undermined, in English, by the benign warmth it so often conveys. As a consequence, insofar as the would-be analytic (relations) is imbued (by observer, listener, reader) with positive value, the anthropologist's relational account can too appear all too life-affirming, as witness attempts to fashion alter-concepts (e.g. Candea et al. 2015; Reed 2016). This is not only an academic preoccupation. People seeking relief from insistent networking obligations have been understood as responding to a kind of relational overload. ⁴ Here, interestingly, life appears equivocal: one kind of life (online interactions) may be seen to prevent or divert the course of another (alternative manifestations of self-hood). More conventionally, constructs to challenge the benign (even saccharine) connotations of ‘life’ are frequently fashioned through counterposing an opposite – discontinuity for continuity, say – that keeps the initial evaluation intact. That said, discerning what anthropologists read into particular usages is one thing; what about their interlocutors’ explicit values? It might be of interest to delve into a classic anthropological exegesis of positive and negative attributes that ties life to an apparently ubiquitous antithesis. Life is equated with regeneration, articulated and prized as fertility, while its antithesis, manifested in various lethal dangers to life, is death. ⁵

Forty years ago, Bloch and Parry's (1982) collection, Death and the Regeneration of Life, addressed varying evaluations inferred from mortuary practices; I draw mainly from the introduction outlining the editors’ overarching schema. They take their cue from numerous antecedents, among whom is Frazer's voice, asserting that death may not be the terminus it seems. Through the life-giving transformations of mythical figures, death is revealed as (re)birth: ‘religious thought consistently denies the irreversible and terminal nature of death by proclaiming it a new beginning’ (1982: 9). Their study is of the ideological [their term] devices by which people articulate such a state of affairs to themselves. What is interesting for present purposes are the evaluations entailed, both in the material investigated and in the anthropological evaluation of these evaluations.

Time and again, they argue, anthropologists encounter political regimes that ‘endeavour to overcome the spectre of a tyrannous biology’ (1982: 23). Such regimes construct ideal notions of a social order to which they accord transcendental value, as when a kin group or community seeks to purify itself by discarding the alien or dangerous on which it has depended. Notably, among the cases they consider, maintaining the ideal order – and its authority structure – entails promulgating self-sufficient reproduction. Hence the often reported desire to reproduce asexually, or without marriage and thus dependency on in-laws, avoiding interactions (exchanges) that diminish energy and resources alike. The desire crescendos in the possibility of perpetuating life without death. Gender is pressed into the symbolic repertoire.

Victory over death – its conversion into rebirth – is symbolically achieved by a victory over female sexuality and the world of women, who are made to bear the ultimate responsibility for the negative aspects of death. … [D]ecomposition and decay are often (though not always) pre-eminently associated with women; and … this world of biology is elaborately constructed as something to be got rid of so as to make way for the regeneration of the ideal order. (1982: 22, 27)

The writers see this ideological template as a parable for the fate of ideologies themselves, for ‘the necessity of coming to terms with what ideology would prefer to eliminate altogether, and with the dangers [to the regimes it supports] of doing so’ implies its ‘unavoidable compromise … with the practical world of nature and exchange’ (1982: 40, 41).

We shall return to one of the cases that provide Bloch and Parry with evidence of just how death is negatively valued. Here I note that death keeps this value, even where it is regarded as life-giving. ‘Every death makes available a new potentiality for life, and one creature's loss is another's gain’; tellingly, they add, when sexual relations are regarded as depleting the strength of the parent-to-be the very ‘generation of life is a cause of death’ (1982: 8). Death does not change its negative value because, in their schema, it introduces the very condition that must be overcome in order for life to flourish. Accordingly, death can only be denigrated (in these ideologies), insofar as positive value lies in that which transcends it. In fact, there seems a sense in which it is everything that gets caught up in death that needs explaining; life appears as a self-evident index of the desirable and the benign.

The value placed on what is ‘life-affirming’ (above) comes from a world that regards its continuity in peril, on the verge of rupture. In a collection, Ruptures, subtitled Anthropologies of discontinuity, Holbraad, Kapferer and Sauma (2019) set out to empty the concept of rupture from any prior evaluation. Explicitly avoiding judgement, they wish to open it up to ethnographic investigation. This involves breaking with past theoretical moments. Thus they move on from the all too easy disposal of disruption as a matter of perpetual reconstitution through attributing (soft) ‘life-affirming’ analyses to anthropologists who invest in relational constructs. Rather, they wish to emphasise the multivalency of rupture as a concept by simultaneously stressing its (hard) negativity. This is part of a wider agenda for re-positioning anthropology in a critical mode that will recuperate a hard edge in dealing with present-day realities, the times of turmoil in the second part of the subtitle. Rupture is taken as ‘a radical, sometimes violent and even brutal form of discontinuity’ (2019: 2).

In their argument, life holds little interest; indeed, by contrast with rupture, it has low analytical value. Instead, death (not itself a focus) appears in the guise of destruction, and destruction takes on vital qualities. ‘If destruction is a vital dimension of rupture, such destruction has immanent within it a creative and regenerative potential that is never the reproduction of the same but always of difference’ (2019: 22, original emphasis). Rupture itself emerges, in the editors’ terms, as at once destructive and generative. Their volume thus gives rupture a positive analytical character in what it opens up to investigation, including anthropology's critical voice. Creativity, the capacity for renewal, a violently incisive power: it is as though life is born again in the vitality of destruction.

These brief excerpts from colleagues’ work must stand for the many ways in which, whether criticised or not, everything the concept of life touches appears to carry a positive charge. As a matter of self-evident language use, that seems simple common sense. Countless ethnographic situations – between these two volumes the range is huge – bear this out, even if the vitality of terrible dislocation and mortal conflict exists no more than as fresh narrative. But when evaluations can only be inferred through interpretative work, there are also questions for exposition. This is reason enough for these excerpts being at once illuminating and requiring further examination. While Bloch and Parry point to the pitfalls of antithesis (it keeps in existence what it devalues), ⁶ Holbraad, Kapferer and Sauma point to ruptures that need not be contained by perpetual opposites (they contain opposites within). Rather, ruptures may bypass existing states of affairs – and their impasses – by ‘cutting’ through them, and thus subverting anticipations. ⁷ Nonetheless, the resulting effects seem to endorse certain evaluations of life as it is generated out of incidents of breaking and destroying.

In short, in the attempt to re-balance a positive with a negative emphasis, references to the positive outcomes of apparently negative circumstances may fall back on life-related idioms. In the one life overcomes death; in the other destruction is a force for life. Both accounts are germane to what follows; I merely wish to give them a half turn. Occluded in such re-valorisations of life are other ways of assessing death and destruction.

Alternatives

Of countless manifestations of turmoil, climate change cuts through them all. ⁸ Surely we should more than ever be valuing life and the urgent issues of its sustainability, rather than, as here, fussing about the bias implied in academic analyses caught up in its valorisation. Yet perhaps there is something to be gained from considering in what kinds of narratives life acquires positive value with respect to its antithesis.

It is hardly necessary to underline the impetus given this particular bias by Christian notions of life everlasting and the compulsion to prevent death from extinguishing life. Life everlasting is very definitely not life on Earth – it is an idealised elsewhere. Some may hear echoes of such idealisations in secular evaluations of human power, where life manifests a transcendent impulse, as in capital's perpetual futures signalled by continuously expanding productivity, creativeness and innovation. Market exchange is one such index of life, especially of life as growth, whether in the eyes of advocates (a cosmos reanimated by financialisation) or critics (a tunnel vision that shrinks signs of vitality to itself). ⁹ One arena serves as proxy for another. Such a concept of life fans out in ever-changing permutations across numerous departments of people's affairs. In fact, multiplying proxies is itself demonstration of energy renewed. It also hardly needs saying that a focal issue here, debated since the mid-nineteenth century, has been capital's addiction to measurements of productivity, which register growth by indices of well-being that hide (at its crudest) the expenditure of energy, the work of labour and the pre-conditions of organic fertility. Climate change has indeed cut through all that. It has brought to the fore an aspect of life frequently overlooked: reproduction in the sense of the replenishment of growing things and the habitats they create. Suddenly regeneration appears as a condition of continuity, in individual lives or the world at large, for which there can be no proxies.

Something not unlike this apprehension was voiced by environmental activists who, more than a decade ago, were defending a forest from the incursions of an open-cast lignite (brown coal) mine in the German Ruhr (Krøijer 2019). Following years of protests at expansionist policies, directed at global financial institutions and UN climate negotiations, ¹⁰ they turned to civil disobedience aimed at the footprint of specific mining operations. This move anticipated their response to the emergent slogan of the broader climate justice movement, ‘System change not climate change’. Systemic change could be undertaken in any locale. This meant that it became possible to act out (some of) the change they hoped to accomplish. What came into focus was the need to develop arts of living for the future, the skill to go on inhabiting their tree houses, in order ‘to liberate human and non-human beings who have been “civilized” and “domesticated” by agricultural progress and industrial capitalism’ (2019: 161). Steering clear of religious vocabulary, they saw themselves in a relation of solidarity with beings of the wild.

Bringing into the present what is hoped for the future is reiterated in millennial-like movements that work to replace one world by another. Yet Krøijer's analysis of these long-entrenched activists is more subdued than this. Take their cultivation of the ‘art of sneaking’: how to sustain activism surreptitiously, avoiding confrontation and escalation. ‘Crucially, sneaking does not rest on the expectation that something better lies ahead’ (2019: 169, after Tsing 2015); maintaining daily life in the forest was enough. ¹¹ They broke, she suggests, with heroic tales of rupture. I append the obvious suggestion that they also broke with proxy idealisations of an alternative life just by keeping their occupation going when nothing else was an option. Their rewilding, so-called, was an ‘alternative’ that they could live out in the here and now. ¹² And the generative potential of their actions was also subdued. Their tree-sits were ultimately doomed because the trees were. They looked for signs of the latter's well-being and health, marvelling at how forests grow, ¹³ but mining had already lowered the water table. ‘The trees in this forest are in a sense already dead’, was said often (Krøijer 2019: 165). If the environmentalists were driven by the possibility of a continuing present other than where the present seemed to be hurtling, this was a form of alternative living that substituted an existing way of life for submission to a future already in the making.

Krøijer's is among the ethnographies explored in the collection Ruptures. The following two sections dwell on a prominent ethnographic example from Death and the Regeneration of Life, in order to return to certain of the conceptual intentions of both collections. We can state the reason in terms prompted by the activists. Valorising life makes death its ultimate alternative. The activists instead show us a form of affirmation in (how else to phrase it?) the positive value given to sheer perpetuation. It is one that values already dying trees. ¹⁴ With this in mind, I embark on a more extended discussion of just how the vernacular (Euro-American) pitting of life against its opposite can sometimes be problematic for the anthropologist's analytical ambitions. It cannot deal with circumstances where life and death appear not as alternatives (the one replacing the other) but as alternating states of being.

Agents of death and life

Ninety years ago, Fortune ([1932] 1963) lit upon the obsessions of the Dobu Islanders of Papua New Guinea. Ancient Dobu is re(re)introduced here not to suggest anything timeless about them but because Bloch and Parry reintroduce them. From what has been described as a post-cultural moment in contemporary consciousness (Schram 2018), ¹⁵ the reworking of earlier ethnographic accounts becomes interesting. This perpetual scholarly practice keeps former accounts in circulation while also changing them. A wholesale attempt to do this for the world's ‘cultures of immanence’, in his newfound phrase, drives Sahlins’s (2022) last book. ¹⁶

Bloch and Parry introduce the Islanders through their fears – fear of sorcerers, witches and death-dealing spirits accompany their particular fear of in-laws – to account for the manner in which a matrilineage endures by being stripped to its essence. ¹⁷ Ultimately Dobuan mortuary rituals repudiate continuity of relations through marriage and the exchange dependencies implied. ¹⁸ Rather, the argument goes, the lineage's idealised independence is a suppressed yearning for intra-group (incestuous) relations that would avoid marriage altogether: ‘the final triumph over death is also a triumph over the necessity for affines [in-laws] and over the world of sexual reproduction which they represent’ (1982: 21). Death thus releases a person from the threats of alternating residential arrangements, which mean that one spouse is always at the mercy of their in-laws’ often ill-concealed hostility. The marginality of conjugal houses in a settlement contrasts with the permanency of the central matrilineal burial mound. While at death the deceased is ritually returned to the haven of the village mound, free from extra-lineage relations and their dangers, their spouse (male or female) is subject to the formidable mortuary protocol of a year's confinement under foul conditions.

But there seems a puzzle here. Death is said to liberate people from fear of outsiders; if we take Bloch and Parry's argument about affinity, sexuality and exchange at face value, dying terminates these travails. So why, as a matter of ideology, does death have to be ‘overcome’? A vision of autonomous asexual reproduction, one that recurs across Melanesia, is not unrealisable. Rather, like the environmental activists’ rewilding, it is in part achieved: the Dobuan burial mound testifies to the enduring lineage. It endures not in an alternative world, one without death, but in a version of this one. Deceased and living members co-exist. ¹⁹ However, much the living guard against too much intrusion from the dead, I find it hard to see ‘ideological’ grounds on which Dobuans might yearn for a world without death. Rather, for all its negative value, death seems essential to the generation of the matrilineage and does not require turning into something else. That is not to ignore what an affliction it is. Indeed, precisely as an affliction it has positive as well as negative value. People work with it. Fortune describes the emphasis put on showing the superiority of one's magical powers, including using such powers to bring about the demise of others.

When Bloch and Parry configure victory over death in terms of the latter's conversion into rebirth, what is overcome is the notion that death brings about a terminus, the extinguishing of life. If an alternative life is possible, the new life overcomes the terminal character of human life, not the dying as such. To demonstrate victory, there must be some continuity of being, as in the idea that a mortal individual might enjoy an alternative life as an immortal. This is simply impossible as a serious description of Dobuan realities. The state or condition of being dead and of being alive offer not alternative worlds but alternating perspectives on the lineage and on the power of persons, just – as we shall see – life and death alternate, in that each entails the perpetuation of the other. ²⁰

Across Melanesia more generally, dead persons are invariably redistributed into diverse aspects of their being. ²¹ The part that survives as an individual ancestral spirit exists for a while (eventually fading away) as a dead person, although in Dobu not in very joyful circumstances. ²² Bodily substance may be returned to its source in particular kin or the land they occupy. While the person's identity in terms of lineage or clan or other kin-group affiliation augments that group's continuing presence, the stripping away of external ties also has an effect other than purification. It redistributes the generative powers of diverse relations built up over a lifetime in order that the power of regeneration may be carried by other conduits. (The dead themselves cannot be reproduced without living channels to carry them forth.) So what happens to the flow of generative power is of no little moment. While children may be said to ‘replace’ parents, such power is not tied to transfers between discrete persons in any direct sense when what is transmitted is the potential for, the generation of, (re)generation. Potential may be found in new marriages, new exchanges, and generally in the way the world of living is reanimated. Death is crucial here, and in the work people make it do it can have no proxy. Where Bloch and Parry (1982: 9, also 20) assert that reproduction is dramatised in mortuary rituals ‘more as representative of something to be overcome than as an affirmation of regeneration’, one might wish to reverse the terms of the evaluation.

If death is everywhere, it is personified in the sorcerers (men) and witches (women) of Dobu. It is not surprising that a missionary anthropologist once referred, in another Papua New Guinean context, to the prevalence of a ‘death force’ as well as a ‘life force’. ²³ The theme also infuses Sahlins’s (2022) talk of life-giving and death-dealing powers. However, diverging in this from Sahlins, I would emphasise the part that people award themselves as agents of death. But that is not to make their agency less cosmic.

Reports of hierarchies of religious powers come from societies of all kinds, not least those that anthropologists have frequently misdescribed as egalitarian. For Sahlins takes the cosmic polity as prior, not in the first instance reflecting human polity. ²⁴ Gods, spirits, ancestors and similar metapersons appear as forces working directly on human affairs, for good or ill, so people find themselves submitting to ‘masters’ of all kinds. His own interest is in demonstrating that, as a polity, ‘the state is prefigured in cosmology before it is known in society’ (2022: 127). For present purposes, we can note how Sahlins's vocabulary is suffused with a language of gendered power relations approximating to the ambitions of those religions and political systems that Bloch and Parry recognised as ideal orders. However, one of Sahlins's formulas gives us a rather simple question: ‘in immanentist regimes the cosmos of metahuman power’ has been ‘an all-around infrastructure, pre-posed to human relations and actions’ (2022: 107). So where, in such a language, would we see ‘superstructure’? Might it be found in that very world of human relations and actions? Of course, it would be (to keep with his terms) divinised through and through. Dobuan dealers of death might be re-described as divinised agents. ²⁵

If we use ‘agent’ as deployed in Strathern 1988 (ch.10) apropos old Melanesia, namely to refer strictly to the one who acts, then divine powers are frequently the removed source or origin (‘cause’) of people's acts. ²⁶ Persons seemingly dedicate much effort to enticing metapersons to be the cause of their actions. Powerful proxies (for human agents) indeed. Consider again what it means that life and death are all around. If life depends on the life-giving and death-dealing forces of such metapersons, so does death. In fact, I would suggest that many people uphold a cosmology in which death too needs sustaining. Whatever it is that metapersons are doing, and however, enrolled in living persons’ efforts, people have to bring about death as well. Here, there seems little difference between personifications of a death force in spirits and its reification (materialisation) in the kinds of spells or magic Dobuans so treasure. Those witches and sorcerers rival one another in demonstrating their superior powers, and every success by one agent is – as Bloch and Parry say (above) – decay or death for another. To suppose a ‘death force’ points simultaneously to suffering and to success.

It is a truism uttered by generations of Melanesianists that few deaths are uncaused; there is invariably a personal origin. In satisfying revenge, counter-attacking reprisals are often done in kind, at a distance, whether through sorcery or through enlisting ancestral help. To understand such preoccupations, as well as open episodes of war and homicide, it is important to appreciate that it is not just individual persons who are killed. What is frequently under attack is what persons personify, that is, the cause or origin of their health and well-being manifest in the fertility of the generations, the reputation of villages, the energy of clans and the power of metapersons enlisted on their behalf. Wealth, gardens, livestock – the destruction of people's perpetuity is bound up in the destruction of such items, not least in stopping the future possibility of regeneration through them. By the same token, those out to destroy will be augmenting their own sources of regeneration.

People who are part of an everyday world of dying and killing cannot escape being agents of death. ²⁷ Living men and women are variously endowed with powers that can destroy the attainments of others. Where men might seek out battle, seen or unseen, Bloch and Parry dwell on the contaminations often attributed to women and the failure to observe protective prescriptions; as for metapersons, their superiority is limited to the capacity of human vehicles to demonstrate it. In these regimes, a burning house, a murdered kinsman or a sick child all offer tangible evidence of incapacity. In short, people have to work on dying as well as living. This is true across numerous departments of everyday existence where fatal acts involve both causes and agents.

Sustenance and regeneration

Illness, failure, depletion or demise threaten many senses of well-being, seemingly assaulting the conditions of people's vitality and future flourishing. Yet those terms take us back to the antithesis with which we began: they (positively) valorise life. This was the comment I made on Holbraad, Kapferer and Sauma's collection. I propose to sidestep the expositional impasse by dismantling the implicit equation between ‘regeneration’ and ‘life’. Or, otherwise put, it is regeneration that brackets life together with death. Melanesian sociality is the prompt for this formulation. It is impossible to remain ethnographically true by focusing on discrete beings rather than on collectivities, relations and pairings. If one person's destruction is another's flourishing then these are alternating states of existence. The states are distributed between different persons or collectivities, yet form a conceptual (or social-logical) unit-pair, just as the living and dead are alternating manifestations of a body of kin. In this sense, regeneration – the transmission of generative power – applies to the lives and deaths of beings, and of all kinds.

People in regimes such as those of old Melanesia do indeed have to work on dying as well as living. Stasch (2009: 208) explicitly writes about dying as ‘a subject of seemingly constant attention in Korowai people's [West Papua] thought about their day-to-day activities’, not least through their concern about the all-consuming witches, often close (male) relatives, who are behind every human death. Like Dobuans, ‘Korowai live in steady fear of witch attacks’ (2009: 214). I suspect an underlying evaluation that doesn’t require spelling out. Killing or being killed would have a very different place if it were not the means of interrupting – and thus innovating on – the transmission of generative power by changing (diverting) the course of its flow. Such diversions do not just have specific productive effects (as when a killer is revitalised thereby), but appear generally necessary, even routine. ²⁸ What was startling about Frazer's description was the drama he made of routine acts of cultivation. If there is drama to Melanesian horticulture, it is one of everyday enactment. I bring it to my aid in order to show how there can be more to the concept of regeneration than the reproduction of life.

Holbraad, Kapferer and Sauma (2019: 1) make evident the generative potential of rupture, which in their terms gives this ‘inherently negative moment’ a ‘dual aspect’. Interestingly, though, none of the contributions to their collection dwells on ruptures of an inter-generational kind. As far as our Melanesia material is concerned, the double connotation of generation in English is both aid and confusion; let's reserve ‘generation’ for the sequencing of successive cohorts and keep ‘regeneration’ for the bringing or coming into being of life out of life. They overlap insofar inter-generational sequences imply not only whatever divides older from younger but a divide explicitly created between reproductive cohorts. Kinship generations we could call them, while not restricting the phrase to human subjects.

If the break between generations is a kind of routine rupture, it may well be imagined as both destructive and creative, as a radical, sometimes violent and even brutal form of discontinuity, to echo Ruptures, essential for the transfer of life between different conduits. As Robbins (2019: 219) puts it, ‘vitalist or immanentist anthropologies … render the question of rupture or change moot, since nothing ever stays the same in any case’. What is not moot is the necessity of rupture in the cut between generations. Death ‘completes’ persons, and as completed beings, the dead are individually non-generative. ²⁹ If they return, it is as new instantiations of former beings. Where in the adjacent generation child replaces parent, in the alternate generations of kin relations, grandparent is assimilated to grandchild. Crucially, it apparent that the second cannot happen without the first, the prior division of parent from child.

The life cycle of cultivars makes the point. Bloch and Parry comment on the lineal continuity of Dobuan yams: husbands and wives sustain separate gardens, each tending the distinct strains that belong to their own matrilineage. Yams are not just associated with the lineage but being metamorphosed people (Fortune's epithet) are part of it, planted in gardens just as persons are buried in the lineage mound. (‘The names of the first ancestors who changed themselves into yams or who begat children that were yams, not ordinary mortals, are names of power in the ritual to grow yams’ [Fortune [1932] 1963: 95].) Lineage yams, the authors add, reproduce asexually, contributing to the image of the auto-perpetuating groups of Dobuan ideology. It is in relation to many similar conjunctions that anthropologists have adopted the terminology of asexual cloning. Yet if we take Bloch and Parry for what they also convey about the lethal connotations of sexual activity (sex brings death), then we might speculate on its converse. Perhaps the cut between generations offers the outside observer something analogous to a sexual moment (devision between adjacent generations enabling the fusion of those of grandparent/grandchild). Garden rituals may offer a kind of local exegesis, insofar as they deploy overt sexual imagery at the point of planting. In any event, with respect to the staple foods of old Melanesia, yam and taro, it is the work of reproduction to separate tubers or corms into what is consumed and what will have a future. Division is the precondition for planting, creating thereby life-giving parents.

It would seem an exaggeration to call such apparently everyday cultivation practices ruptures, until one recalls that they determine the destinies of persons. Here is one Dobuan talking of rupture. A particular variety of Dobuan yam is sliced (into its component ‘eyes’) for planting; Fortune ([1932] 1963: 116–7) records, on one such occasion, the way in which the woman gardener spoke to the tuber. She was full of apologies and condolences, both for it and for the named (meta)person whose throat had been cut in order for its flesh, which yielded this yam, to be planted. Even though Dobuans treat only one variety in this manner, the slicing is apparently regarded with horror by certain neighbours, ³⁰ who instead plant whole yams set aside for the purpose. Elsewhere in Papua New Guinea, division into what does and does not have a future frequently entails the cutting of a single yam or taro into two. The planted portion is the source of progeny, dying as its generative power grows them and grows in them.

The piece of living being put in the earth will, then, in giving rise to the shoot(s) that it generates, itself fall back in decay. Dobuan gardeners pick out the decayed pieces of yam that have already produced offspring, hurling these ‘grandmothers’ into the sea (Fortune [1932] 1963: 122–3). In other contexts, such remnants rot unseen. What generated one entity is now channelled into its successor, the tuber or corm growing in its place. In this sense, regeneration is also replenishment, an idea that informs revitalising rituals organised in response to signs of bodily depletion. The generative power, of persons and plants alike, must constantly find new conduits as those already in existence grow ‘down’ towards terminal dispersal; they need new bodies to simultaneously grow ‘up’ (in English, intransitively) and to grow (transitively) the generative power itself by keeping it in circulation. Generative power is and must be sustained. ³¹ But as for life and death, in the valorisation of life lies the necessity of discarding it; if these are positives and negatives, they are of a particular kind.

Fortune ([1932] 1963: 177) was stumped by what he saw as the lack of moral judgement in Dobuans’ ready discrimination between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ persons (or places, times, actions). Positive evaluation seems to be made of those whose successful magic is demonstrated in a fine and healthy presence, while those made wretched through disease, disfigurement or misfortune reveal mortal deterioration. Such discrimination is rehearsed for everyone in the life cycle of individual persons, as generally imagined across old Melanesia, whose decline begins when they give birth and nourish their young (women) or deplete themselves by activity, especially in sexual relations (men). Good and bad. From this perspective, death is indeed an affliction – and as such can be used to drag down others, the winning combatant being enlarged by the enemy's diminution. Death and destruction is the moment when the life and fortunes of one being are channelled into another. ³²

Where life and death are so evidently co-present, it is not at all clear that analytical judgements about positive and negative values improve on people's descriptions of places, times and actions perceived as now ‘good’, now ‘bad’. Moreover, external judgements detract from the anthropologist's own object of interpretative work, the character of the perceptions in question. If apparently contrary evaluations work together, observers should not be adjusting one or other side of the equation at will, or, better put, should be aware of the bias of their own evaluations. This applies especially to cultivation practices where regeneration depends on the rotting away of earlier generations, and dead persons – benign or malignant – are present to, for and with the living.

Anthropologists may imagine life and death in antithesis, or the latter as a rupture cutting across the continuity of the former. Yet, in relation to the material presented here, neither formulation has quite the force that is conveyed by the alternation of life and death in the sequencing of cultivars. It is an alternation that sustains the flow of generative power. At its starkest, rotting matter is the basis of nourishment, growth the source of new decay. ³³ Decay culminating in death creates a generational sequencing of persons; in always being at a different moment, each generation requires a predecessor. Out of parents come children and out of children come parents, or whatever social configuration (such as moieties) enact inter-generational relations. Each is the other from its own and the other's point of view. Schram describes mourners exchanging food at an Auhelawa (Duau Island, PNG) mortuary feast. Everyone brings cooking pots, but they cook the food they have brought to give away in the recipients’ pots, receiving their donors’ food in their own pots: ‘people as a complementary pair perform one action to advance an ongoing cycle of reproduction’ (2018: 53). ³⁴ Giving and receiving, people's alternating perspectives on one another, make real an aspect of a cosmos in which – insofar as each contains the possibility of the other – beings or actions are paired together. I have given the ethnography a half turn, too, in suggesting ways in which living and dying are also paired.

In this synthetic reading of certain immanentist evaluations, generative power by contrast is not one of a pair; its absence is annihilation, extinction. ³⁵

Climate consequences

Latter-day climate activism takes many forms, but self-styled activists invariably rage (‘rebel’) at inaction, at the failures of endless protest and the futility of hoping that facts might speak for themselves. They face more than the obvious vested interests of late capitalism, insurmountable as they seem, for too much else also gets in the way. They are up against a cosmology that turns on, exactly, life itself.

The positive valorisation of life as a bias in anthropological knowledge (past selves not excluded) is but a symptom of a pervasive inclination to see life in everything that is positively valued. This is true not just of growth, creativity, and such, as they are pressed into the desirability of continuing expansion, but also of the hopefulness that the same inclination conveys in the way people seek justice in planning for sustainable futures. There seems nothing untoward about endorsing such an orientation towards life, but for a reservation about its runaway, limitless, character. ‘Life’ is like a currency that circulates by turning everything it touches into a computation of itself, which the world could live with (more or less) until climate change came along to stir apocalyptic warnings about the risks for regeneration. Old Melanesia yields an evaluation of life and death that make both integral to survival. Imagining simultaneous living and dying summons those forms of being – plant, animal, microbial, any existence that is also habitat – whose future is now exposed. It elicits a specifically finite object of thought: not just ‘living beings’ but ‘living and dying beings’.

In relation to such a view of life-and-death other views (such as ‘life everlasting’) come to seem proxies. In numerous, much-told, ways the neoliberal valorisation of life as perpetual growth strips out – just as a Dobuan lineage tomb was supposedly purified of affinal relations – crucial dependencies or externalities falling below the horizon of accountability. Of course, it matters what exactly is denied. Some deny processes that others see as intrinsic to existence, such as sustaining soil fertility or disposing waste materials, with the result that one may not always be aware of how living things die, or what dies in the course of sustaining other lives, or what killing is required for regrowth. As for old Melanesia, there was indeed more to the concept of regeneration than the reproduction of life. For all the constructs that the observer may take as denials of reality, idealised autonomies, and so forth, when it came to regeneration far from denying death people reproduced it. And, in the work people made it do, death could have no proxy, any more than laying out gardens or tending food plants could. That these activities equally engaged the solicitude of spirits and drove the living to banish the lingering dead were two sides of the same transformation that death brought. Nothing grew without personal intervention and nothing died without it either. ³⁶ Importantly, far from absolving themselves from such work people emphasised its arduous and unpleasant nature. In sum, they were used to excesses of agency; the ubiquity of human actions that is a revelation for Anthropocene-watchers was for them a premise. Annihilation would be the extinguishing of activity, to which Korowai seem to gesture when they call the abandoned land of clans that no longer exist, in Stasch's (2009: 146) translation, ‘extinction places’.

Scaling the imagination is something of an anthropological preoccupation – with what and how to weigh often incommensurable materials? How can one talk in the same breath of the unmanageably ‘large scale’ future of planetary existence and the management of life and death in particular ancient communities? Yet, in order to assess well-being, there are indeed scalar considerations here. Personal deaths in old Melanesia were not individual events, and the injury they caused were not confined to specific mourners. In diverse ethnographic contexts the very notion of ‘death’ summoned a whole range of vital absences or debilitating afflictions. Dying was not in this sense a ‘small scale’ matter. Rather, its cosmic import reached way beyond the fortunes of a particular soul. Collectivities might feel their future under attack; more routinely, the regeneration of the world was put at risk. As we have seen, the generative power for which someone had once been a conduit required re-channelling insofar as there was nothing automatic or inevitable about its flow and many reasons for it being blocked here or there. And if death, like life, was almost always the result of some agent's acts, these horticulturalists treated their basis of sustenance in like manner. Their proxies for themselves, their spirit co-worlds, did not let anyone off the hook: the metapersons on their backs gave cause for people to take action, not for them to shrink from it.