Dividuals, Individuals, or Possessive Individuals?: Recent Transformations of North Mekeo Commoditization, Personhood, and Sociality

Purpose – To provide an update on recent intensifications of commoditization among the North (Amoamo) Mekeo (Central Province, PNG) and to assess the extent to which in this context contemporary villagers qualify as “dividuals,” “individuals,” or “possessive individuals.”Methodology/approach – The empirical data presented in this chapter were collected by means of participant observation techniques conducted over a 40-year period. Here those materials are analyzed through a juxtaposition of the “partible” or “dividual” type of personhood foregrounded in the “New Melanesian Ethnography” (Strathern, 1988; Wagner, 1991) and models of the “individual” and “possessive individual” in Macpherson’s (1962) formulation of “possessive market societies.”Findings – Contrary to the canonical assumptions of “individualism” and “possessive individualism” which underpin most social-scientific theories of modernization, globalization, development, etc. in the non-Western world, North Mekeo villagers’ most recent intensive post-contact engagements with capitalism have tended to reproduce indigenous “dividual” patterns of partible personhood and sociality which incorporate seemingly “individualist” practices as momentary parts of overall, total “dividual” persons and processes.Research implications – Explanations of the globalizing spread of capitalism among non-Western peoples must pay heed to indigenous notions of personhood agency if they are to avoid ethnocentric distortions arising from presuppositions of the ubiquity of Western notions of individualism.Originality/value of chapter – This chapter demonstrates the analytical benefits of the New Melanesian Ethnography – particularly its key notion of partible personhood – and the advantage of focused long-term ethnographic fieldwork in accounting for processes of social change.