ABSTRACT
The challenge by Sahlins to consider the advent of ‘develop-man’ in Pacific Island Nations is indicative of his continuing interest in the emergence of the possessive individual in Oceania. This focus on personhood rather than structure only appears to be a new departure point for Sahlins in addressing the question of how people experience the modern. Instead, it more closely reflects Sahlins’ continuing interested in the Hobbesian modern person, understood here as one whose individual expression of sentiment, as the possession or proprietorship of the self, distinguishes his or her agency. If this is to be taken further to the analysis of political development in Melanesia, it is important to understand how people become political actors with the capacity to express volition and intention, as well as experience others will and purpose. For Sahlins, as for Macpherson, the Hegelian theorist of Hobbes’s political treatises (1963; 1972), modernity entails becoming possessive individuals with the intent and will to act towards a political goal, recognizing that they experience the structures that shape humans within their own relationships as the Leviathan. This paper will examine the event in which a group of men in central New Ireland elaborated key issues in their concept of the possessive individual, a feature of modernity that Sahlins encapsulates in developman, and thereby laid the groundwork for advancing the common goal of creating a regional political identity.
