Iau ToMartin, ina talil mulai

For most of the people I was closest to in PNG, the first dream was immediately leaped upon as proof that the tubuan was real. My friend, ToAtun, who was heavily involved in ritual tubuan practices, told me that the tubuan had “come to visit me” in my dream, a phrasing that suggested that the tubuan did indeed have an existence independent of and external to me and that its appearance was an intrusion into my brain not an emanation from it. As we talked, we switched between our three languages of communication: English, Tok Pisin (the form of Melanesian pidgin commonly used throughout PNG), and Kuanua, the vernacular Tolai language. “Go ra ririvon a ngala na magit” he informed me in Kuanua, “this dream; it's a big thing”, before switching to Tok Pisin, “nau yu save, dispela tubuan kam lukim yu tru tru”, “now you know the tubuan really came to see you”. He and others were in no doubt that I should take the dream as proof that the tubuan was “real” (an English word that he used several times in the course of the conversation). And this conviction was shared by those who were less enthusiastic about the visit. My host family at Matupit were devout Seventh-day Adventists who had expressed muted concern about my decision to go through initiation in the tubuan society. This concern became considerably less muted after I had shared my dream experience with them. After my second dream and waking encounter with the tubuan, ToAtun became even more satisfied. “Now you really know it's real,” he told me. Aware that my understanding of dreams might have led me to a different conclusion as to the tubuan's “reality” than his, he took my second experience as proof that the tubuan had decided to return in a manner that demonstrated its own external reality in a manner that I could not dismiss.

There were other factors in the dreams that ToAtun found significant. The fact that they happened in England, where I was from, also meant to ToAtun that the tubuan had come to visit me. Most Tolai, including tubuan devotees, were happy to admit that although the tubuan had power, its range was limited essentially to the Tolai and neighboring areas. The only way in which it might ever have power elsewhere would be if groups of Tolai in that new area were to consecrate sacred ground to raise tubuans on. At the time of my research, there were members of the emerging Tolai elite, now resident in the national capital Port Moresby, who were making plans to buy land to do just that. They hoped to consecrate that ground to make a tariau or tubuan site that would be guarded by poorly paid private security guards from less economically developed ethnic groups living in Port Moresby's teeming squatter camps. Such a process was unlikely to occur in England, meaning that it was hard to imagine that the tubuan would ever visit me there in my waking life, but the fact that it visited me there in my dreams suggested to ToAtun that it had “really” visited me. I took this then and I take it now to mean that I was supposed to understand that the visit of the tubuan was not a game or simply part of research but a real thing and that I had met and encountered it as a person and not just as a researcher.

The precise words that the tubuan used were also held to be significant. Although everyone at Matupit knew my name was “Keir”, they all referred to me as ToMartin. “To” is an honorific, similar to “Mr” in English often put before men's names. Keir was said to be difficult to pronounce, but more to the point, the most popular song in PNG at the time of my arrival was a song by the local artist Patti Potts Doi, titled “ToMartin.” It was enough of a coincidence that this song should be the most popular song in the region at precisely the time of my arrival. Even more striking then was the chorus: “Iau ToMartin ina talil mulai uro kaugu gunan” (“I am ToMartin and I shall return to my homeland”); a sentence that was felt to perfectly describe my situation. ToMartin I was then, for everyone except for the tubuan, who in my encounter repeated my real non-fieldwork name—Keir, Keir, Keir—both before and after I awoke. At the time, then, I had no doubt in my gut that ToAtun was right and that this was another indication of some kind of deeper power, whether that power was my unconscious or a “real” tubuan. The experience would have been disturbing enough if the tubuan had called out ToMartin to me—to call out with the name that meant that it was addressing me outside of the deep yet still separated out experience of fieldwork meant that it struck me at my core in a different manner.

I was not alone in struggling to make sense of the tubuan. Among Tolai themselves there is unending dispute over its nature and meaning. One could characterize these disputes as ontological clashes or ontological politics. They were arguments over what kind of entity the tubuan was and the extent to which it “really” existed independently of human belief or agency at all. Although a Western versus Tolai opposition could be drawn upon in such discussions, this was fundamentally a political clash of ontologies between Tolai themselves about the kind of humans that they wanted to be and the entities with which they co-existed.

This does not sit easily with the conventional narrative that unites many “ontological” approaches in anthropology these days, namely that clashes of ontologies are to be largely seen as a clash between a Western naturalism that is imposed upon others as part of a singular and historically consistent colonial project, rather than as perspectives that come in and out of being, as people shift conversational and relational positions.

In what follows, I shall briefly outline this situation before exploring the seemingly unusual resonances between the tubuan and the contemporary corporation. As a starting point here, I shall take the point that, as a number of radical critics have observed, at least since Marx, it's possible to present capitalist modernity as itself being built upon a celebration of non- or even anti-human agency. It is hard to imagine capitalist modernity as we have known it for the past century without the legal and social recognition of corporations as separate actors from the human actors who summon them into being through legal ritual and then have to interact with them, for example. Differences abound between tubuans and corporations, of course, and one could leap on these as the basis for once again rediscovering familiar kinds of “radical” difference between the West and the Rest. But does this have to be our default framing and contrast, or could we “take seriously” their similarities, their mutual entanglements, and their mutual constitution as a starting point, and then see if more genuinely surprising and unsettling contrasts and comparisons emerge?

Of clans and corporations

Elsewhere (Martin 2020) I have written on the political controversies surrounding the “reality” of the tubuan among Tolai people, and rather than repeat that material at length, I will only briefly touch on it here. During my fieldwork, there was some controversy over a proposal made by some prominent tubuan leaders to “protect” the tubuan legally through state legislation designed to make insulting it or denigrating it a crime. Although, the purported rationale was to protect the tubuan, it was suspected by many that the real purpose was for the so-called Big Shots (Martin 2013), men made wealthy by careers in politics and business, to silence growing criticism of their alleged corruption and the way that their “money-power” meant that they increasingly controlled the tubuan and allegedly increasingly used it for inappropriate political and commercial purposes. This criticism was not limited to those Tolai who openly rejected tubuan on religious and political grounds. It was perhaps most marked among grassroots villagers who were heavily involved in tubuan, such as ToAtun, who feared the consolidation of the emerging elite's power in the tubuan and across Tolai social life more generally. As I detail elsewhere (Martin 2020), proponents of the new law proposed it at least in part on the basis that the tubuan was a “real” thing that needed protecting, and ToAtun himself would not have challenged that underlying assumption as part of his opposition to the law. But many other opponents would, and elsewhere, I document some of the ways in which they did so. As one opponent bluntly told me, “Tubuan I man, I no masalai’. The tubuan is a man, not a spirit”, before going on to explain that it was now a means by which Big Shots hid behind masks in order to consolidate the wealth that new political opportunities enabled by independence and economic restructuring had made possible.

Tubuans are often associated with particular kinship groups, most commonly the groups bound together by ties of matrilineal descent known as vunatarai in Kuanua or as klan (clan) in Tok Pisin. There is a long tradition of contrasting these kinds of groupings with the social groups or organizations of modernity or capitalism. Chris Gregory (1980: 641), for example, draws a contrast between the traditional gift economy of Papua and New Guinea that is to be understood, “with reference to clan structure and the principles governing kinship organization” and the modern commodity economy which should be understood in relation to, “class structure and the principles governing factory organization”. To the factory, we could add the plantation or the mine (more common sites for wage–labor relations in PNG), and also the corporate forms that most commonly own and organize these kinds of workplaces.

While Gregory's distinction worked as a heuristic to explain the dynamics of social change in late colonial and early postcolonial PNG, in contemporary PNG, both poles of the familiar distinction between modern and indigenous distinction are blurred by actions such as the widespread legal registration of clan groupings into Incorporated Land Groups and other kinds of corporate forms, across PNG. The rapid expansion of this process in the past 15 years, noted by the likes of Colin Filer (2007, 2014), is part of a process in which land that cannot be legally alienated from customary control in PNG is leased to large multinational corporations for the purposes of logging or oil-palm plantations. This is a process that clans cannot always legally allow for, but that Incorporated Land Groups set up as separate entities that represent the clan (which itself now has to be constructed as a more unitary group-like entity than before in order to relate to its own representative) can do as their representative (see also Leaver and Martin 2016; Martin 2007).

Both tubuans and corporations are non- human actors brought into being as particular kinds of objects with a particular form of existence through human ritual.¹ Once evoked as particular kinds of objects, they become means by which humans’ relationships with each other, with non-humans and the satisfaction of their own needs become organized. We all, including most Tolai, live, eat, drink, sleep, defecate, copulate and speculate through the mediation of corporations. The tubuan also becomes established as an object by means of which wealth and food and relationships between clans are channeled in a way that, for its advocates, is an essential part of them continuing to be the type of Tolai humans that they wish to continue being. And these two forms of object through which human subjectivities are made, are now themselves intimately entwined as tubuan ritual is now unimaginable without the use of all sorts of corporate products from tinned meat, land cruisers, or kerosene. Meanwhile, tubuans themselves appear at tourism festivals or on Japanese TV shows or online advertising campaigns for the international fashion house ICICLE in which, “devoted career professionals can enjoy the pleasant harmony between human and nature in the process of personal growth.” ICICLE promotes the tubuan as number 19 in its promotional series of “earthmen” from around different, “cultures, calling upon the power of nature to protect mankind”, in an eerie mimesis of Marisol De la Cadena's (2010) depiction of the sacred mountains as examples of “earth- beings” whose power releases socio-natural forces for the benefit of humans who are willing to live in harmony with them.²

This collapsing of the nature/culture distinction by a transnational corporation looking to sell jeans to young career-minded professionals might unsettle the by-now familiar assumption that extractive and exploitative colonial-capitalist modernity is inherently built upon such distinctions. Even if we decry it as fake, insincere, inauthentic (in other words refuse to “take it seriously”), it might suggest that capitalist and colonial modernity and its associated inequalities and oppressions are not inherently based on such binaries and the “expulsion” of non-humans or the sin of “human exceptionalism”. Instead it might suggest that such binaries come in and out of view as they are useful or harmful framings to advance for particular agents in particular moments. Emphasizing such binaries or the unique capacities of humans might advance corporate interests in one context while their dissolution might be equally favorable in others.

When we read critiques of such modernist politics and the associated celebration of indigenous “ontological politics” as the privileged site of resistance to them, it is often non-human actors, such as states and corporations who are the main villains of the piece. At the same time we are told that the root of the problem of modernist politics lies with the West's expulsion of non-humans from the political settlement at the heart of modernity. De la Cadena's (2010) account of “indigenous cosmopoltics” provides a good example of this tendency. This article provides a powerful and welcome rebuttal to the marginalization of indigenous political claims and also provides an important starting point for a discussion of the ontological politics underpinning such marginalization. I return here to a piece that I have discussed before (Martin 2020) because of the power and clarity with which it sets out an important set of arguments that are underpinned by an admirable political advocacy of the rights of a marginalized group.

The lack of attention to corporations as non-human agents is striking in accounts such as De la Cadena's, where the main villains of the piece threatening the earth-beings are other powerful non-human agents. In De la Cadena's (2010: 355) own account, her key informant Nazario, sees a “consequential” difference between earlier forms of mining capitalism that, while often being destructive, still allowed, “for the continuation of relations with earth-beings”, and contemporary corporate driven mining, that, “destroys earth-beings themselves”. De la Cadena goes on to tell the reader that, “as lived from his world corporate mining ventures do not just encroach on peasant land and pollute the environment; they also destroy a socionatural world” (ibid., emphasis added).

It is not mining per se that kills the earth-beings. It is corporate mining that destroys them. And this is not the result of the relentless expulsion of non-human actors by humans from the political economy but in fact is the result of the precise opposite process: the creation and insertion of powerful non-human persons into the heart of political economic processes.

If, as De la Cadena (2010: 356) argues, the “ontology” of the sacred mountains is central to controversies over the destruction wrought by corporate mining projects, then surely the ontology of those very corporations is itself of equal importance to understanding and contesting these developments. Particularly if, as she goes on to argue (2010: 357), it is corporations whose spreading power has not only been a potential existential threat to the earth-beings’ survival but has simultaneously been the cause of the earth-beings’ increased “public presence . . . in politics”, by virtue of the ways in which they are increasingly made visible by the collective resistance to their destruction, in what we can perhaps see as an ontological instantiation of Karl Polanyi's (2001[1944]) famous “double movement”.

Capitalism—humanist and anti-humanist

Far from global capitalism being simply based upon the expulsion of non-human actors from the political economy, it is possible to critique it for being a profoundly anti-humanist state of affairs that takes human creativity and reifies it in non-human agents, such as corporations. This critique will be familiar to anyone who has skimmed the young Marx's writings on alienation, and often (though not always) tends to come from a leftist and humanist position. It is a position that is often in its turn rejected by conservative or business-minded opponents as backward-looking and unrealistic. It turns out that when viewed from one rather important perspective, that of the boardroom and trading floor, to be modern involves evoking and defending non-human agency from backward-looking humanists. In a best-selling book, praised by the The Economist and the The Financial Times, John Mickelthwhait and Adrian Woodridge (2003: 2–3) stated that the corporation is “the most important organisation in the world. . .the basis of the prosperity of the west and the best hope for the future of the rest of the world. The company is the key to productivity growth in the private sector. We are all richer as a result.”

Far from the expulsion of non-humans being the basis for a Western colonial-capitalist vision that seeks to impose itself as the future of the rest of the world, the problem with the natives, from the perspective of those who actually know a little about how capitalist enterprise operates, is that they accept the wrong kinds of non-human agents, such as the earth-beings and the sacred mountains, and reject the right ones, such as IBM and Rio Tinto.

Debates over the kind of legal recognition that should be given to non-human objects, such as tubuans or the earth-beings described in De la Cadena's work, often hinge upon the question as to whether or not the earth-beings “really” are separate entities of a particular type that deserve a particular type of recognition or whether or not this is a mistaken belief. We see something similar at work in the idea that the recognition of corporations as particular kinds of entities is also based upon mistaken beliefs that misrecognize human agency in both the left- and right-wing critiques of corporate personhood. From the left, the activist group Reclaim Democracy (2023) argue that, making corporations legal persons constructs corporations “as though they were human”, signaling the underlying assumption that this is a mistaken belief not based on reality. From the right, no lesser figures than Milton and Rose Friedman (1980: 307), advocated amending the US Constitution to disallow personhood to corporations partly on the basis of the claim made earlier in their book, that to talk of corporate income is “figurative” speech, and that in reality “only people have incomes” (ibid.: 20).

As with the differing and shifting perspectives on the reality of tubuans, it is perhaps important not to divorce perspectives regarding corporate persons from the relational and conversational contexts within which they are developed. Even if I agree with Reclaim Democracy and the Friedmans that “in the final analysis”, as they used to say, corporations are not “really” independent entities separate from the humans whose legal rituals give birth to them, I am forced to deal with them as such. I may disagree that the University of Oslo is ultimately an entity that exists as separate from me and the thousands of persons who come together in various relations to construct it as an entity, but by presenting itself to me as such when I sign contracts with it and accept money from it, it comes into being as such from my perspective whatever my underlying opinion on the desirability or ultimate source of its appearance.³ By appearing to me as an object, it becomes one to me in practice whatever my philosophical take on the issue, in the same way that Karl Marx was probably incapable of mystically deconstructing and perceiving the thousands of social relations that went into making the pint of beer he bought on Tottenham Court Road after a hard day in the British Library, despite having just developed a theory of commodity fetishism designed to do exactly that.

For Marx, it was the particular constellation of relationships which gave him or any other consumer a perspective that largely obscured those relations, and it is this that constructed it as an object of a particular type, that is a commodity, as such. Marx's argument on commodities is often taken to be one in which he uses the theory of “fetishism” to expose the illusions that others suffer from. Fetishism is what enables subsequent Marxists to denounce what Lukacs was later to term the “false consciousness” of the commodity consumer. Is this concept not simply a means by which Marx and subsequent theorists in the Marxist tradition tell other people how stupid they are, as one anthropology professor suggested during the discussion of an early presentation of this article? The point is not the “stupidity” of those whose perspective at the point of commodity transaction highlights particular potential relations and obligations at the expense of others. The point is that a particular position in a network of relations makes possible a particular perspective on those relations and the objects that emerge from those relations when viewed from that perspective. If we dropped the circular argument about whether or not that perspective is “false” and understood Marx as arguing that a particular position in a network of relations (in this case, engaging in commodity exchange) enables a particular perspective on those relations that highlights some and obscures others, then we have an eminently anthropological analysis that I suspect many anthropology professors would be able to recognize and endorse.

Marx's point is not that the commodity as a pre-existing entity leaps on top of the social relations that made it in order to obscure them. It is that the commodity comes into being as this specific kind of object itself through that very process. This means that while, on the one hand, it can force us to relate to it as that kind of object regardless of our philosophical interests, on the other hand, it is always vulnerable to other perspectives from which its particular form of objectivity can be viewed as leaky or deconstructed as an artifice that dissolves back into the web of relations from which it is perspectivally constructed. The same can be said of corporations, constructed as they are by legal ritual through the removal of particular forms of relationship from vision (that is the obscuring of debt through the limitation of liability) that then constitutes the very object (the corporation) that is intended to maintain the invisibility of a particular potential relation (the now erased obligation of shareholders to the corporation's creditors) (Leaver and Martin 2021). This too is the creation of an entity or object through the very construction of a perspective that brings it into being by obscuring potential leakages between inside and outside. And just as Lukacs observed for the reification of commodities that the creation of a perspective from which they appear as objects can be shattered by the construction of other perspectives, so is this true of corporate objects as well. Let us not forget that “reification” is not necessarily an insult as authors such as Bruno Latour imagine it to be, even if its use by authors such as Lukacs tends to carry a negative tone. If we are able to temporarily set aside the competing moral evaluations for the purposes of this conversation, then we can perhaps recover what is still useful in this earlier scholarship and take it primarily a descriptive term, literally meaning the creation of a thing or object.

Let me illustrate all of this with an example that is fundamental to the development of the global political economy in the past 125 years. One of the key moments in the development of the modern corporation was the legal hearing in the House of Lords in 1897, the culmination of the case of Salomon v. A Salomon & Co Ltd (1897). The outline of the case was the creation by a Whitechapel shoemaker, Aaron Salomon, of a limited company under the provisions of the Companies Act of 1862, which would henceforth be the owner of his business. Salomon incorporated the business using the minimum number of shareholders required under the Act. He owned 20,001 shares and the other six shareholders, his wife and five children, held a share each. When the company went bankrupt, the liquidator sued Salomon for the company's debt, a decision that was upheld in the Court of Appeal with Lord Justice Lindley referring to the company as a “mere scheme” and Lord Justices Lopes and Kay going further, referring to Salomon & Co. as a “myth” and a “fiction” (see Martin 2012). This decision was overturned in the House of Lords, with Lord Halsbury pointing to a perceived inconsistency in the earlier judgment in which Lindley acknowledged that the corporation had been properly constituted under the provisions of the 1862 Act. Halsbury concludes: “Either the limited company was a legal entity or it was not. If it was, the business belonged to it and not to Mr. . .Soloman. If it was not, there was no person and no thing to be an agent at all; and it is impossible to say at the same time that there is a company and there is not” (Halsbury in Salomon v. A Salomon & Co Ltd 1897: 31).

Halsbury, with the certainty of his claim that there is an entity or there is not and that it is impossible to say that there both is one and there is not, was perhaps unsurprisingly a well-known supporter of the traditionalist wing of the Conservative Party. Unlike Lukacs, he is clearly no fan of Hegelian dialectics. But what his statement points to is the same kind of phenomena that Marx pointed to with regard to the commodity; a thing that, “appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (1976 [1867]: 165).

Halsbury's claim that a corporate entity either is an entity or is not might on the surface appear to simply be a statement of good old-fashioned English conservative common sense. And to an extent it is. But its very need of statement is a tacit admission that it is possible to view things another way (as indeed his esteemed colleagues seemed to have done) and that, in this context at least, that perspective needed to be delegitimized and guarded against. If it is acknowledged that from some perspectives the entity both is and is not, then the perspective that seeks to stabilize it as an entity independent of its human progenitors is weakened and the real existence of the entity itself is at threat. And this is a perspective that helped in no small part to recreate the very entity that it sought to describe. The Salomon case is a landmark judgment for the existence of corporations in the United Kingdom and its former colonies. If the earlier judgment had been left intact, corporations might well have taken on a fundamentally different, and perhaps more fluid character than that which they have had until recent years in which the emergence of new forms of divisible and repackageable debt has arguably begun to lead to an increasingly fragility of the perspective that constructs them as more-or-less discrete unified objects (Leaver and Martin 2016, 2021).

The creation of a corporate person out of a limitation of debt obligations is the central dynamic in this case, as was intended by the authors of the Act of Parliament that made it possible. This particular entity itself built on earlier innovations, such as the joint stock company; described by William Dalrymple (2019: 42) as, “one of Tudor England's most brilliant and revolutionary innovations”. Dalrymple de- scribes how one particular example of this earlier corporate form, The East India Company (EIC), changed the course of both British and Indian history, being fundamental to the growth of British political and economic power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As with subsequent limited companies, the purpose of the incorporation was to establish, “one body, corporate and politick”, as the charter granted by Queen Elizabeth I that ritually summoned this new person into existence declared (Charter 43 Eliz 1:1600). As Philip Stern (2011: 7) observes, Tudor joint stock companies, like the EIC, themselves were innovations on earlier corporate forms that dated back to Roman law. Where the joint stock company differed from most of its antecedents is that it allowed for private financial investment in commercial enterprises by individuals who might be uninvolved in the running of the enterprise. Their role was simply to provide finance in the hope of a return on their investment. The joint stock company marked a radical transformation in the purpose and constitution of the corporation as a separate legal person, which had previously been a tool for ensuring the good governance of purportedly non-commercial enterprises (ibid.). This commercial transformation in its turn laid the foundation for the equally radical innovation of limited liability, three centuries later.

All of this might lead us to believe that the so-called perspectivism within anthropological theory that is described as being at the heart of a radically Other Non-Western ontology is at the heart of what we might describe as the most powerful social forms of so-called modern society. Indeed, we might take a look at the discussion of commodity fetishism in the opening pages of Capital and conclude that perspectivism has a longer theoretical history than we care to acknowledge and that Marx can be counted as one of its advocates. Indeed, we might go even further and observe that Marx's perspectivism compares favorably to many current anthropological instantiations in many regards, not least in its refusal to separate out the perspective from the ever-changing relational entanglements of its emergence, thus leading to the impression that an “ontology” is just conjured up out of and then hovers in some mysterious ideological ether systemically determining perspectives.⁴ By also suggesting, as a consequence, that some kind of perspectivism is an inherent feature of how we all live, it might encourage us to look more closely at its role in shaping an increasingly interconnected world in which new forms of difference and similarity come in and out of being, often in the most seemingly familiar places. This might be useful given the unfortunate ways in which a potentially radical questioning of the nature of the entities that we engage with has often become so associated with a parallel project that seemed designed to enable us to pretend that Said, Guha, Fabian, Clifford, Gupta, and Ferguson had never happened, so that anthropology could go back to what Arjun Appadurai (1996: 65) famously described 30 years ago as, “sightings of the savage”, as its default mode for finding difference that was good to think with.

Concluding remarks

What sense might we make of the existence of entities such as tubuans or corporations? Let me begin by returning to the example of the tubuan that visited me in my dream. Did I create that tubuan? Absolutely, I maintain I did. Without my brain and my ears and my nervous system, it would not have been called into existence as that particular object in that moment. If we accept that, then there are still other questions to ask; does “the tubuan” as an abstract entity exist outside of our evocation of it, for example?

We could ask the same of course, of any such abstract entity that molds our relations and our existence, such as Unilever, that shapes how we distribute responsibilities and obligations among ourselves, as tubuan rituals do. If corporations are to be accepted as agents of a particular kind, modeled to an extent on the rights of personhood extended to most human adult citizens, we are forced to ask, where, if at all, should we refuse to extend those rights, and consequently, what kind of subjectivity do we perceive them as having? Those familiar with US politics will know that this is far from an academic question. They are fundamentally questions of the kind of world that we wish to live in and the kinds of human subjects that we want to be.

One of the landmark political controversies of recent years was the Citizens’ United judgment passed down by the US Supreme Court in 2010, that removed the cap on corporate contributions to election campaigns. This judgment was justified on the basis that corporations, like any other person, had the right to “free speech”. Such judgments raise questions of the extent to which corporations have intentions, values, and morals of their own as part of determining exactly what kind of entities they are. Other legal controversies raise the issues even more clearly: to what extent do “corporations” have the right to deny contraception to their workers under government-mandated healthcare plans on religious grounds, for example? Such claims lead to arguments in court or the academic literature over whether or not corporations can have a “conscience” (Goodpaster and Matthews 1982); or to open questioning of the famous early English judgment that corporations “have no souls, neither can they appear in person, only by attorney” (Coke 2003 [1612]: 1081; Rutledge 2014). Whether corporations have souls is a question at least as interesting but far less interrogated in anthropological excursions into ontological politics than whether such usual suspects as rocks or glaciers can listen to us or not.

Humans without such perspectivally constructed objects are as unimaginable as such objects without humans. As the great German American psychoanalytic theorist Hans Loewald (1988: 77) argued, the human subject can be described as an agent “of spontaneous mental activity that is called into operation by and deals with a world of objects”. Those objects may or may not be perceived simultaneously as fellow subjects or agents with intentionality, consciences and souls by the subjects who emerge from interaction with them, as an infant may or may not perceive the mother as a subject-object or mere object. Or as the aboriginal Australian may perceive the listening rock as a subject-object not the “mere” object that Western observers, even critical political economists among them are wont to do; with the exception, of course, of a small coterie of anthropologists (Povinelli 1995).

Tolai, as many of them understand and construct themselves, are unimaginable without tubuans and without the idea of “the tubuan” as a particular type of object. The tubuan as an abstract object is as indispensable for the construction of a particular type of Tolai human as they are for it. It's perfectly possible to imagine the construction of human subjects without tubuans; the vast majority of humans have been constructed in interaction with other kinds of objects, but they would not be the particular kind of Tolai human subjects that many of my interlocuters wished to construct themselves as being. The raising of tubuans is a process only made possible through the circulation and exchange of Tolai customary shell-wealth known as tabu or tambu (see Martin 2018). Half a cen- tury ago, the Manchester anthropologist Bill Epstein (1969: 317) quoted a Tolai informant telling him, “If we didn't have tambu, we wouldn't be Tolai; we would be a different people.” Tabu is an object that only has value because humans create it and engage with it, and this object helps to make them particular kinds of human subjects in its turn. The same could be said of the tubuan as a related non-human entity (or “[subject]-object” in psychoanalytic terms) that only takes a particular form due to human intervention and without which those humans themselves would be differently constituted.

As long as an object exists, whether in the mind's eye or in the form of a ritual mask, that can be recognized as “tubuan” by Tolai, we can say that a perspective exists from which both tubuan and Tolai in their current form still exist in a process of mutual co-construction. If that ceases to be the case, then both tubuan and Tolai, in their current form at least, cease to exist, although it is always open to the people now known as Tolai to reconstruct themselves as humans in a different form in relation to other kinds of co-created objects. This is a process that a small but growing number of contemporary Tolai, such as evangelical Christians, seek to encourage. It is also a process that a larger number of Tolai fear is occurring by virtue of the tubuan's nature changing into something less “real” as the ability to raise tubuans and conduct tubuan ritual is increasingly monopolized by members of the emerging elite who have the money to buy ritual prestige or by government agencies that organize tubuans for events such as tourism festivals (see Martin 2010). These changes threaten to turn the tubuan into, as one grassroots villager put it to me, “another Mickey Mouse at Disneyland”—an object that, from his perspective, was an object of a very different kind.

This kind of mutual interdependence of Tolai and tubuan seems to me to be marked in the ways that their more “traditional” advocates discuss them. Whatever the ultimate origin of the forces that give rise to tubuan, they only manifest in the form that Tolai experience them, becoming “raised from the bush” as the saying goes, as a result of human activity, such as the circulation of tabu. The extent to which they have a similar form or any form at all prior to this process is entirely unclear to me and I suspect to most of the tubuan's devotees. Even if tubuan is a manifestation of something beyond the human, the extent to which it appears as the particular object known to humans as “tubuan” is absolutely reliant on human activity. They come into being as an object that humans can perceive at least in part as a result of human activity. From this perspective, humans and tubuans are part of an interdependent process of becoming; a perspective that is shared by both the tubuan's advocates and its evangelical opponents, who see the tubuan as an object that creates humans in a particular manner that entangles them with unnecessarily dark forces. This in turn is a perspective that is challenged by the perspective that the tubuan is simply a man with a mask. That perspective would appear to be a genuine clash of ontological politics of the kind proposed by writers such as De la Cadena. But this cannot easily be framed in terms of the indigenous resistance that encompasses non-human agency that is expelled by modernist, colonialist or capitalist forces. Instead, it expresses a largely subaltern perspective that sometimes sees claims to the semi-autonomous agency of tubuans as itself expressive of particular elite human forces that use the lie of tubuan's real semi-autonomous existence as a mask for their own particular very human interests. This is a position with some parallels at least to the criticisms of corporate personhood advanced by groups such as Reclaim Democracy in the United States. It suggests that battles over ontological politics are not always best framed as the struggle between an essential indigenous ontology and an equally essential Western modernity⁵.

As Marilyn Strathern (2020: 69) observes, talk of a clash of ontologies often problematically presents “ontologies” as if they were cultures in the old “strong” anthropological sense. Strathern approvingly refers to Kapferer's emphasis on “the multiplicity of different—meaning diverse—ontologies as they emerge under specific, situated social circumstances across numerous spaces of social activity”⁶ (ibid.).

This is a position that might provide the basis for genuinely radical anthropological ontological politics. All it takes is to finally move away from us–them dualisms and sightings of the savage. Freeing ourselves from the shackles of this position would open up the possibility of exploring how the shifting and contested perspectival construction of objects with which we are interdependent marks a fundamental aspect of the human condition.