The Predicaments of Theory conference held in Santa Cruz, California, proved to be an inspiration for this brief meditation on "Native Informants." The spirits infused here, and the spirits expunged—for the conference was also a source of perspiration—were embodied in all of the papers and their discussions. Nevertheless, I draw directly from the presentations by Mary John, Vicente Rafael and, indirectly, from David Scott's paper and Cornel West's oral presentation, "Demystifying Theory." I also wish to thank Marita Sturken, John Hartigan, Ron Eglash, Judi Martinez, Donna Haraway and Jim Clifford for their comments.

Names and Places

Reflecting on a "scientific research project on high blood pressure" in the Micronesian island of Pohnpei, anthropologist Martha C. Ward ponders the significance of local names and places and their apparent indifference to her presence. In her reflexive ethnography, Nest in the Wind, Ward (1989) writes: "All places, however bereft of identifying characteristics to me, have a name." Names and more, Ward elaborates:

...every place has a name, an owner, and traditional stories about its special spirits or genealogical history. Pohnpeian eyes see gardens, boundaries, and a complex system of land tenure where I see only jungle. (p. 30)

Within this contending field of visions, entangled in the predicament of the anthropologist's line of sight, lurks a particular native—the "informant." This native is already framed by a special historical interest—a desire to see what natives like Pohnpeians see in the naming of their landscapes and the possible values such local visions would have in a global collection of different "cultures."(Clifford, 1988)

Interested in the "stories" surrounding a specific Pohnpeian topography, Ward records an exchange with one native informant, a person she describes as her "instructor." In the transaction the anthropologist is taken aback:

The native: "What was the first job that God instructed Adam to do? Name everything!"

Ward protests: "...God had obviously meant for Adam to name (only) animate objects, such as plants and animals..."

Native (according to Ward): "(go) reread the Genesis account and report back when (you) acquire greater wisdom. " (p. 30)

The native informant who emerges from the bush also happens to be, ironically and appropriately enough, a lay minister, a folk leader who, with a host of other Pohnpeians, will insist rather piously that "of course, we are Christians now." (p.36)

Global Narratives

For the anthropologist, the value of the exchange with the native informant lies in its role as local anecdote in the service of a global anthropo-logical knowledge and commentary. "Native informants" are taken as guides into the proper meanings of local stories so that (and over which) a wider commentary on Man—here, cultural relativism—can be certified. In Ward's narrative the native informant is christened "instructor" of trained scholars. And, however localized the lesson, the idea of the native-as-teacher serves as an allegory for the value that a cultural relativism (and a female scholarship, in Ward's story) might hold for and against the rigid social sciences.

The value of native informant/teacher underwrites Ward's embattled relationship with her colleague Floyd, resident psychologist on the interdisciplinary project of which Ward is a member. A "good husband, good father, good Christian, good citizen of the United States," Floyd combines a staunch belief in the universality of "western pyschological sciences" with his "first law that women naturally waited on men." Floyd and Ward spend "many happy hours debating cultural relativity and matrilineal clans." But if getting him to appreciate cultural relativity is difficult enough, it is the concept of "matrilineal descent" that is most "horrifying and appalling to Floyd." Matrilineal descent—the reckoning of one's clan membership (hence, one's source of authority) through the mother's lineage—is a perfectly reasonable way to organize kinship, according to Ward, especially since "people can always be certain who their mother is but never certain who their father is." But the problem, she tells us, is that Floyd hears "matriarchy" everytime she says "matrilineality." The thought "struck at the center of his moral code."

In the parlay set up by the female anthropologist with the male social scientist, invocations of native informants—local guides in an exotic jungle of cultural differences—provide necessary material ("canon fodder") for challenging established codes of knowlege and morality. For Ward, the native can teach the white teacher that Western systems of self-knowledge are inadequate for an understanding of humanity. But with invocation comes elision. A concrete native sensibility—one grounded in the complexity of Christian conversion as much as in matrilineality—is lost in the specific entanglement of Ward's reflective and critical desire to unravel western codes. Today, when Ward remembers Floyd "every time I teach these concepts in an introductory anthropology class" (p. 18), an historical native position gets subsumed by the larger project of christening freshmen into the teachings of cultural anthropology.

Like the anthropologist interested in challenging established moral codes, I, too, am interested by the ways natives see gardens, stories, and boundaries where outsiders see only jungles. But as namesake to, and inheritor of family stories about, my maternal grandfather—a native Pohnpeian and early "convert" who, as a child, acted as a translator between his mother's clan and the Spanish Capuchins in the 1880's—I am inclined to reread the verbal exchange between anthropologist and native. The encounter between Ward and her native informant/instructor yields more than the story of natives-as-informants (guides to the local) for a global commentary. Beyond simply serving as a local anecdote in the service of anthropological knowledge, the brief encounter points to other cultural and historical positions in what Donna Haraway (1988) calls the "textual bush of (native informant's) experiences." At issue is the alterity of a native's own re-positioning of external and global ideas, an alterity produced, we might say, in a simulation of sameness. The "other" is a good Christian! In an ironic twist, anthropology's affixation and localization of Pohnpeian stories is subverted in a Pohnpeian affixation and localization of a powerful global story of Christianity.

Rereading the exchange between the anthropologist and her native instructor, I hope to glean a few words of wisdom from a self-proclaimed Native Christian.

Native Convers(at)ions

The exchange between the anthropologist and the native informant can be read to blur not only the distinction between wisdom and ignorance, but also that between global theories and local stories. The Pohnpeian insistence on his "conversion" is less the effect of a tragic penetration (or, in an earlier history, a heroic rescue of "savages") by Christian missions in Oceania than an articulation of an identity —a native "convers(at)ion" with Christianity. To see conversion simply as the effect of a tragic or heroic global spread of Christianity, the assimilation of different peoples around the world into a Judeo-Christian heritage, would be to privilege the Euro-American actor as cause and effect, beginning and end, of History. It would be a "totalizing claim," as Mary John notes in her paper in this volume, one that would "leave too much out of the picture." What tends to get left out of historical and anthropological global stories are indigenous stakes and positions, "cultural and political transactions," as James Clifford (1988) notes, "[that are] not all or nothing conversions or resistances" to "western" encroachment.. Just as the native informant isn't simply a local function of a global anthropological discourse, the Christian native informant cannot be seen as the "converted" effect of an exclusively active Judeo-Christian mission history.

Since I have earlier invoked the spirit of my mother's father, renamed Miguel Dela Concepcion by the Spanish Capuchins in 1883, I'll relate the appropriate circumstances of his story as I have learned it from family narratives and other sources. One of the first Pohnpeians converted to Catholicism, "Lolo" Miguel and his mother traveled north from their home in Kiti to the village of Kolonia (in the chiefdom Net) where the newly arrived Capuchins had been welcomed. The story of Miguel's role as a guide and a translator for the Capuchins and a specific faction of Pohnpeians, and his subsequent departure from Pohnpei to pursue an education in the Philippines, is rooted in an interplay among village, family, and personal power struggles in Kiti in the mid-to-late 19th century.

An old Pohnpeian proverb has it that "Pohnpeians are not one people."(Fisher & Riesenberg, 1955) Indeed, since time immemorial, the five chiefdoms of the island have been in constant battle amongst themselves. It is precisely in the contexts of these squabbles, that first the Protestant, then the Catholic missions were "welcomed" by various competing chiefdoms. Each understood the benefits of having one or another Christian sect located within its boundary. But the strategic value of embracing the Christian missions was also exploited within the chiefdoms themselves.

In a power check within Kiti alone, for instance, Nahnmwarki (chief) Mensila sought to insure his newly acquired power over his predecessors' (Nahnmwarki Ejikaia's) upstart clan by inviting the Catholics to establish a mission in Kiti. The elder Ejikaia had, years before, wooed the Protestants and had made it mandatory for all Kiti dwellers to convert. Mensila knew that such a "conversion" had not only consolidated Ejikaia's own power, but that it furnished the necessary materials for his descendants to reassert their political claims. Mensila, as with other "second-generation leaders," according to historian David Hanlon (1988), was "unable to accept the political submission which (his) baptism (to Protestantism) would entail." For Mensila and his cohorts the value of the Catholic mission lay beyond the cargo of goods that arrived with each new ship. Catholicism's value for this particular group of Kitians was as a strategic counter to Ejikaia's and his progeny's stake in the Protestant mission.

Key agents in this narrative, my great grandmother, baptized Teresita, and her son Miguel, were probably sent by Mensila up to Kolonia to monitor the Spaniards.

In the written and spoken annals of Pohnpeian history there is a revealing incident involving a young native translator who escorts a group of Spaniards back to Kolonia from a visit to Kiti. Enroute to Kolonia by canoe, the boy and his Spanish Catholic entourage were ambushed by warriors from the neighboring chiefdom of Madolehnimw. Madolenihmw, long an enemy of Net (in which was located the village of Kolonia), had recently "gone Protestant" in response to Kolonia's acceptance of the Catholic mission. Whereas the warriors of Madolenihmw killed the Spaniards, they not only spared the young translator's life, but in fact offered a feast in his honor and out of respect for the Nahnmwarki Mensila of Kiti (the boy's kinship ties) with whom Madolenihmw had no immediate conflict. The treatment of the boy, according to Hanlon, was a "politically astute gesture," that among other things, "appeased the war parties from Kiti sent to search for the boy."

While the boy (Is he my grandfather?) had personal stakes for acting as interlocuter between a certain faction in Kiti and the proselytizing Spaniards, it turns out that he himself was used as a safety measure by Madolenihmw warriors to maintain peace between chiefdoms. Such is the feel of only one set of historical convers(at)ions in only one part of the island of Pohnpei.

The Politics of Co-constructed Identities

Mary John suggests that we consider certain "processes of subjectification," or, "co-constructions," as she calls them, that take place in between "produced knowledges and sanctioned ignorances." In her example of the intellectual formation of middle-class Indian women in the U.S., she notes that "gaining an education is not merely an abstract process of attaining competence within a universalist discourse and assenting to its indifferent rules. It is a process by which we learn to avow and remember some knowledges and disavow and forget others. Learning is as much to learn the English language, for example, as to forget one's native tongue."

In the exchange between Ward and her native informant/instructor/ lay minister, there is such a "co-constructive" device in the native reminder of a conversion ("of course we are Christians") and its temporality ("now"). As I've suggested, the reminder tells less a History of indigenous Pohnpeian assimilation and/or deicide than of a series of historical intercourses, transactions between local and Judeo-Christian identities that act to blur their distinctions and to create powerful positions from which to speak. In reminding the "expert" of his own religion, the native not only foregrounds the processes of subjectification but also reconsolidates a native agency now invested with all the powers that accompany a "convers(at)ion" with Christianity. This transaction, I suggest, is galvanized by its pious style. The piety displayed in the native's reminder is reminiscent of what Michael Goodich (1982) sees as "behavior drawn from the lives of the saints" which, by the 13th Century, along with the refinement of "the sermon," had become "the stock-in-trade of the successful preacher." With holiness and sermon in pocket, doubling as native informant, the "converted" native lay minister simulates what Stephan of Bourbon (1982) describes as "the successful preacher (who) relies on...stirring examples of piety in order to impress the minds of his uneducated listeners." Today, Christian preachers are natives who assume authority and responsibility for enlightening the ignorant. But if the native gathers this authoritative space, one already "in place" by the 13th-Century, the imitation reflects different political stakes when repositioned in Oceania in the context of late 20th Century American colonial control.

Native-Christian "convers(at)ions" are co-constructions which have the effect of submitting to, and simultaneously countering, an encroaching discourse. . In the case of the exchange between Ward and the Pohnpeian lay minister, the convers(at)ion appears to displace an anthropological and historical authority through the form of a rhetorical question, an interrogation, that anticipates its own answer ("What was the first job God instructed Adam to do? Name everything"), and through a command and dismissal ("...reread Genesis and return when you have wisdom"). Apparently dismissed, too, is a "western" claim to biblical (Christian) authority through its very espousal by others. In what local tale is the native expert now? Who is knower? What does he know? And from where does that knowledge originate?

The co-constructed identity that floats on a powerful and displaced Judeo-Christian tradition interrogates traditional locations of wisdom and ignorance, local and global narratives, as well as essential definitions of indigenous culture and identity. As political practice, the notion of coconstructed identity from one end of the Pacific plate is affiliated with claims from the other: Contemporary struggles of "Chicano identities,"
Lorna Dee Cervantes explains, constitute less the search for essentially lost selves than a reclamation, a renaming of the terms of "Chicano experiences" from Anglo control. (San Jose Mercury News, 1989)

Restless Na(rra)tives

Exchanges like that between Ward and her native informant are not indigenous to the late 20th Century record. Local and global claims to wisdom (and foolishness) also appear entangled in another historical and political context on which I end my (alter)native meditation on informants.

In what can probably count as the first ethnography in the Marianas, the 16th-century discalced Friar Juan Pobre holds a dialogue with "the Good Sancho," a Spaniard who was shipwrecked and who had lived among the Chamorro inhabitants for a number of years:

Fray Juan: "Until it is mealtime, please tell me about the nature of these indios..."

Sancho: "Although to us, these indios seem to be such savages, they consider themselves to be very wise. The questions they ask and the answers they give indicate that they believe there is no one else in the world wiser than they."

Fray Juan: "I do not understand the fact that the most savage people in the world presume themselves to be the wisest."

Sancho: "Listen to the presumptuousness of these indios... Listen to the ignorant answers they give to some of the questions I have asked them. When I asked who made the heavens, they answered that, inasmuch as they can see it, they made it. And when I asked who made the earth, they said: 'How stupid you are. If it is I who plant my rice and set out my tubers, who is to have made it if not myself.' They say the same thing concerning the ocean; that inasmuch as they sail and fish on it they have made it. Such is the foolishness with which they answer our questions, but they often say that we are foolish to ask." (Driver, 1984)

References

Clifford, James. (1988). The Predicament of Culture:Twentieth-Century Ethnography,Literature and Art. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Marcus, G. (1986). Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Driver, Marjorie G. (1984). Fray Juan Probre de Zamora and His Account of the Marianas Islands. Mangilao, Guam: University of Guam -----Micronesian Aera Research Center.
Goodich, Michael. (1982). Vita Perfecta: The Ideal of Sainthood in the 13th Century. Anton Heirsemann Stuttgart, p. 7.
Fisher, J., Riesenberg, Saul H. (1955). Some Ponapean Proverbs. Journal of American Folklore, 98:9.
Fisher, M., Marcus, G. (1986). Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
Haraway, Donna. (1988). Reading Buchi Emecheta: Contests for Women's Experience. Inscriptions, nos. 3/4, p. 109.
San Jose Mercury News. (March 12, 1989).
West, Martha C. (1989). Nest in the wind. Illinois: Waveland Press.