Axioms and Theorems of A Fictional Melanesian Ontology

Disclaimer: The following makes no attempt to be a definitive statement about the ontologies of Melanesian societies. It is but a philo-fiction produced from the collision of Western philosophical idioms with concepts and ideas drawn from the available ethnographic literature on Melanesia.

Axioms

1. There are no distinctions between flows and objects.

2. Everything is a container and contents and contains itself.

3. Since everything is a container, everything has holes. These holes are the entrance and exit points of flows/objects.

4. Everything is implicitly analogous to everything else (cf. Wagner 1977). This may be through inversion, scaling, subdivision and segmentation, or homeomorphism (continuous transformation).

5. Relations are given and multiple, discrete terms or units are produced (ibid.).

6. While relations “partialize” persons into an open multiplicity of object-flows, unit-definitions rely on dyadic distinctions (self/other, male/female). (Cf. Strathern 1988).

7. The whole replicates the structure of the part. General part-whole equivalence and substitutability. (cf. Wagner 1986).

8. Everything has growth-potential, but only if there can be differentiation.

9. Everything is implicitly androgynous (cf. Gell 1999).

Theorems

1. According to axioms (2), (5), (8), Melanesian ontology forms a fractal topology of self-containment in which everything is implicitly identical.

2. According to axioms (1), (3), (4), (7), persons are composites of flows and objects.

3. According to theorems (1) and (2), the structure of persons must be identical to the structure of the universe, even as social life consists of deliberate acts of differentiation.

4. By axiom (8) and theorem (3), social life consists in growing, but it is threatened by its own implicit presuppositions of fractal non-differentiation.

5. By axiom (9) and theorem (1), gender relations are formally symmetrical. Although they may be empirically asymmetrical.

6. By axiom (6) and theorem (1), dualistic distinctions degenerate back into identities, by the very fact of producing (analogical) relations.