learning to see in melanesia

7/27/2019 Learning to See in Melanesia

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L ECTURER S INTRODUCTION :

L EARNING TO SEE IN M ELANESIA

Up to a point, the longer one lives or works, the more one knows, orperhaps it would be more accurate to say the more knowing onehas done, the more occasions there have been when one is aware that some piece of knowledge has become displaced by another. Thefacility for displacement is at the heart of the imaginative life. (Thereis a point, indeed, to learning it!) Yet there always remain compre-hensionsideas, understandings, concepts, interpretationsthat arehard to dislodge, or that one may not wish to, or that grow precisely as

other things move, and we can include here certainties as well asprejudices. The oscillation between what stays in place and what shiftsand travels applies to any order of phenomena, despite radically different ways of apprehending or sensing things. So it is as true for

what we see with the eyes as for anything else. There is, of course,nothing at all new in saying this. However, these lectures are anattempt to make that oscillation evident, playing offas different possi-bilities for knowingwhat we think we see against what we might beseeing, for one very interesting part of the world. I leave the we

open for whoever might wish to be included.

Introduction

Over the period when I was teaching undergraduates and mastersstudents in Cambridge, I gave, on several occasions, a short set of lectures that in their time contributed to diverse papers (courses).These included an area paper on the Pacific, an option paper on

Anthropology, Communication, and the Arts, and the MPhil option


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M ARILYN S TRATHERN 2

on the Work of the Museum. 1 Whereas other lectures were constant-ly changing, Learning to see in Melanesia more or less kept theform that is presented here. Given the multiple lives that Ialong withcolleagues and students of coursewas leading, they became for me a moment to catch breath, to pause at a specific ethnographic / theo-retical juncture, to draw again on a never-ceasing source of stimulus.That moment was also a return to and thus a continuing propelling forward of certain truisms about anthropological work.

P r e l im i n a r y c o m m e n t s t o t h e p r e s e n t l e c t u r e s

The questions that time fails to wash away arise from the particulars of

inquiry. However erroneously or awkwardly the particulars areframed, the prompt for every description is what it is that requiresdescribing. That relation is as fundamental to the didactic or peda-gogic enterprise as it is to the whole descriptive enterprise of academia. Description includes explanation, and sometimes explana-tions can vaporize what requires explainingan original puzzle

vanishes. But since what they are often trying to explain are aspects of peoples work and lives they know that they have only partially grasped, anthropologists will as often try not to erase the original

puzzle.2

On the contrary they (the anthropologists) may take pains toconvey what interested them in the first place and made them see a puzzle. Among the filaments that connected me to the issues capturedin these lectures was that they enabled a demonstration of the

1. Between 19932008, in the company of diverse colleagues: Amiria Henare, Anita Herle, James Leach, Gilbert Lewis, Andrew Moutu, Carole Pegg, Susanna Rostas. At the Cambridge Department of Social Anthropology, as it then was,lecture courses were organized and examined by the Department as whole,

there being either four or five examinations (also called papers) that anundergraduate or masters student would sit in any one year. It would be rare fora course (a paper) to be given by one person; courses were generally com-posed of several contributions from different members of staff. This four-part series was one such contribution. (The shortand intenseteaching term at Cambridge meant that eight was the most regular unit of hour-long lectures tobe offered as part of a course, and a half unit of four not uncommon. Fromthe students point of view, lectures were supplemented by seminars andsupervisions [tutorials], which demanded constant essay writing.)

2. One of Wagners favorite quotations refers to the anthropologist wanting to befigure and ground at the same time (see, for example, Wagner 2011).


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L ECTURER S INTRODUCTION 3

consequent entailment: even if one made a terrible hash of interpret-ation one could show that there were issues demanding exploration.The puzzles would outreach attempts to grasp them. In a way (theconversation takes place in retrospect) this matched what teachers

were trying to say to their students in general: Immerse yourself in your readingthere are things to be understood that go way beyond what we can tell you. But if you can see that, then you will also see why we pay so much attention to how we make our accounts, toframing, theory, explanation. Many of the photographs that accom-panied these lectures were proxy for textual immersionhoweverfleetingly, the image occupied the whole screen.

There was another match, that is, between these specific lecturesand what a teacher in anthropology might hope was a truism for theirstudents. Not everything need be seen though the prism of current interests; it is not only for their historic value or for a narrative of social change, so-called, that one attends to practices perceived to beof other times. Whereas problems and issues in the present have theself-evident character of current concerns, past puzzles are illumin-ating precisely because they cannot conceal their contingent or assem-bled character. Any temporal / cultural moment is ripe for suchattention, regardless of what happens(ed) subsequently, and anthro-pologists disparage their own capacities for response on the occasions

when they insist that interest in a phenomenon lies primarily in its re-levance to what is perceived as the present. There are very goodreasons why a specifically social anthropology, and its always re-

juvenated crop (as in seeds sown and grown) of current students,should be alert, astutely, to what is going on around it. Yet one of such an anthropologys gifts is to be able to make as part of that con-temporary going-on diverse epochs, venues, conjunctures, and assem-blages from all kinds of passages of social life. 3 The photographs were

not just illustrativethey were also up on the screen in the here andnow in your face.

There is a consequence to this. It is to do with how we problem-atize present-day concerns. There is no dearth of imaginings here,though, as often as not, present-day problems take the form of a crisisof some sort. We might be thinking of the forced relocation of populations; of the twin mirrors of cosmopolitanism and global- 3. With a nod to Paul Rabinow (2008).


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ization; of the pressing interests of an era of financialization that cutsacross everything in its computations of personal and material value;of the desperate ubiquity of violence, witting and unwitting; of un-precedented ecological shifts. Yet it would be an illusion to think that past concerns have no role to play in the present, and I do not necessarily mean concerns relating directly to such issues. The illusionderives from specific knowledge practices that focus on measuring therelevance of different materials to whatever concerns are at hand.This assumes that the concerns are shared (are ubiquitous), and that differentiations come in cultures and societies diverse ways of conceiving of them, including not conceiving them at allas inpractices that seem to have no bearing on them. However, con-

ceptualization is also itself an issue, that is, the very way in whichproblems are set up or concerns are analyzed or otherwise com-prehended depends crucially on the concepts they mobilize. As analternative open to it, anthropology might do well to reflect onanother face to this: on the idea that it is instead the faculty of con-ceptualization that everyone shares, and it is bound to be directedtowards quite different and diverse concerns. 4 In retrospect, thelectures might belong here. In any event, it is surely a truism that thereis huge diversity in the puzzles that people make for themselves.

Catching breath. In the midst of diversions elsewhere, theselectures brought me again and again to Melanesia, and particularly toPapua New Guinea, at a certain moment in time, yet to what I canonly describe as a depth of intellectual refreshment. The phrasegood to think with has become a familiar companion to many andin many circumstances. However, I would like to give to that goodsomething close to an ethical connotation. It made of me a goodperson to be thinking through the materials that have been so richly reported from that country. 5 It felt as though I was using my brain

appropriately.6

It also felt that I was properly acknowledging the life of

4. To paraphrase Viveiros de Castro (2003)

5. It should be said that many of them are materials that, following theestablishment in 1966 of Papua New Guineas first university and the practice of local research, Papua New Guinean academics also draw on.

6. I dont know how else to put it. (And, needless to say, this was no guarantee of a good analysis.) Engaging with these materials was in and of itself a rewarding exercise; at the same time the backdrop was the increasing instrumentalism of academic activity across the UK. The audit culture had bitten deep into ones


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relationships; certainly they reminded me that there was something still, and always, owed. The last occasion on which the lectures weregiven, as a free-standing set, they were dedicated to acquaintances inMt. Hagen. However, from another point of view, the inadequacy of such an acknowledgement is patent: I am afraid that the acknowledge-ment will have to stand in for the personal credits due to many of thepeople who feature in the photographs that follow.

And the puzzles to which I referred? Well, what is it that one sees?

N o t e s f o r t h e r e a d e r

A subject is of course as big as the time one takes to deal with it, but these four lectures always felt particularly constrained. Nonetheless, Ido not take the opportunity of potentially limitless space to expandthem now (in truth, that would only expand the constraint). Rather, Ihave kept more or less to what was spoken in an hour and, more orless, to their more-than-notes less-than-text form. I have added a few annotations in the text for current purposes.

The constraint was an interesting one for the lecturer on the spot (interesting as in challenging), and intensified the ever-present sense of dissolving and reproducing puzzles at the same time. In restricting theelucidation to materials from Melanesia, the lectures opened wide thequestion of how to convey enough of sufficient breadth for those whoknew little of the area, in order to develop arguments in at least somedetail. For at the outset I wanted the lectures to do double work as a commentary, bringing to the fore what was in the background quite

approach to research, findings becoming first rated as outputs and then re-quiring the self-authentication of impacts. I say self-authentication sincealthough impacts are supposedly all about the effects of research on definableothers, they give academic work a credibility that may have little to do with itsscholarship or contribution to a discipline and much more to do with practicesof verification and presentation peculiar to the audit world. The students wouldnot have had much sense of all that, but they would be able to seeby itsapparent evocation of somewhere far away and long agothat this set of lectures was non-instrumentalist in terms of contemporary cannons of relevance.Or rather, that its instrumentalism was precisely to do with how one sees thingshow one argues, how writers organize their material, how to address assump-tions, how indebted anthropologists are to their interlocutors, and so on, as a matter of nothing more, and nothing less, than the apparatus of intellectualtraining.


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as much as attending to what was ostensibly foregrounded. Yet thelectures, in a way, took overand I think, had I articulated it at theend, I might then have suggested that the puzzle is not (only) what weneed to know about the background, but how to see what to the Euro-

American observer would appear as the very foreground.

At the time I thought of this in simple terms as a matter of an on-going dialogue with colleagues and the manner in which Melanesianmaterials found their way into the anthropological record, and in lessobvious terms as a matter of dialogue with those who cannot seebeyond feathers and paint. The initial point was that there was a background to be understood in relation to that state of cannot-seetoo. (I paid some attention to this in the first lecture, drawing on a photographers magnificent pictorial record, which had its own ration-ale but is here deployed very much for my own purposes; in the light of the comments on phenomena that outrun our grasp of them, Ihope the pictorial images have lost none of their stature thereby.) Iam not referring here to a horizon that the anthropologist is in a privileged position to scan, but to what that personage shares with any

viewer or observer. This meant leaving the initial point behind. Wecould say that people not familiar with Melanesia do not know what they are seeing when they see a painted person decked out infeathers, leaves, and shells precisely because (and this is what they share with the anthropologist) people already do know what they see:they see feathers and paint. 7 The issue of showing anything to beseen then becomes that of displacement: substituting one impressionfor another. Perhaps something not dissimilar to this motivatesMelanesian display. So it seemed that maybe a way forward wouldbe to contrive something not unlike Melanesians inveterate play onconcealment and revelation. This would be in order to build someplaces and moments where a Euro-American student might be able to

see the extent to which he or she hasnt seen what is in front of theireyes.

An oral format, and being able to stage a sequence of illustrations,are aids that a lecturer can exploit in the way a writer cannot. Muchmore so than a listener, an anthropological reader is of course used toseeing a text relate(d) to other texts. However, I have tried to keep the

7. For 1970s reflections on the provocative use of feathers and paint in Amazonia see Conklin (1997).


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immediacy of the original lecture format, less in terms of the way they (the lectures) were spoken and more in terms of forcing a focus onthe material. This is not with any intent to hide anyones authorship,or the dispersed authorship of countless anthropological disquisitionsfor that matter, or the bias or controversy in the nature of theselections I made; it was a contrivance on my part to try to make theimages do (some of) the work (of exposition). One consequence isthat ordinary rules of exposition are truncated, in places drastically. 8 Of course, it is never possible to prepare the grounds for everything one wants to say, but the saying wasnt the all of it. One reader of thisintroduction commented that there was an implicit analogy betweentwo sets of relations: the relation between a more or less fixed format

here and the ever changing character of other lectures I was giving at the time, on the one hand, and, on the other, the relation between theconfined way these lectures were prepared for listeners and thepotentialities that texts normally have for readers.

At the same time, the visual presentation of the images had theirlimitation, or rather, one may say they perpetually recreated theproblem that I began with. I hoped for those following the orallectures that the sequence of images on occasion illuminated switchesin the way one might see things, but that of course depended on a temporal sequence that the reader of a text can ignore. However, theobservation to make here is that the images (photographs by andlarge, some drawings and diagrams, but all static) repeatedly bring the

viewer back to some kind of original standpoint. Whatever thesubject, whether with people in or not, whether familiar or not,

whether readable or not, an image is instantly absorbed. So you first see a man in bird feathers, and then you are told it is a mantransformed, or is a man in the form (say) of a tree, or that it is thecolors, not the feathers, that matter. It is as though an initial view,

already taken, has to be dislodged, always again, each time. And thedislodging comes through another idiom (the verbal interpretation), asa kind of supplement. As a consequence, epistemologically speaking,the image is grasped as something that forever remains interpreted.Here, perhaps, the verbal displacements and innovations that can be

8. One example of a concept left hanging is given in the original rubric of thelectures that refers to the construction of knowledgeknowledge was occupy-ing a space more like that of a signpost than an argument.


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built up through a sustained text, one that creates its own context, cansustain a complexity of a kind that is constantly obviated in the kind of presentation given here.

The title (Learning to see in Melanesia) had, in truth, a textualorigin. This was in Anthony Forges description of how boys and menfrom Abelam, Papua New Guinea, acquire expectations about what they will see in flat, two-dimensional paintings displayed on theelevated faades of ceremonial houses. One outcome was theirinability to interpret other two-dimensional images (as in photographs)outside the orbit of such paintings, for everything else would be three-dimensional. It would have been wonderful to match his insights forthe several materials presented here. They include many moments

when Papua New Guineans are put into a position of not knowing what they are seeing, or ineffectually looking without seeing. 9 How-ever, the learning in my own title referred more to the student of anthropology than to participants on the spot. My eye was always onhow the anthropologist built up a description. It was a matter of elucidating the categories of thought or apprehensionin Englishthat one would need to formulate in order to make such a description.This is less an issue of how to arrive at an appropriate interpretationof particular images than how to make oneself (as the observer,ethnographer, student) open to apprehending (some of) the effectssuch images might have. Anthony Forge (1970: 290) said as much inhis concluding sentence: One of the main functions of the initiationsystem with its repetitive exposure of initiates to quantities of art is, I

would suggest, to teach the young m[a]n to see the art, not so that hemay consciously interpret it but so he is directly affected by it.

Descriptive categories are not trivial. Old colonial (Australian)slang for mens rear covering used the Pidgin English term for grass,perhaps on an analogy with grass skirts. Across the Papua New Guinea Highlands people did indeed wear front and back coverings,some of which can be called skirts, the once invariable styles now reserved for special occasions. However, in certain areas (including Mt. Hagen in the Western Highlands) the colonial and humor-ous / nasty-matey shorthand for mens grass coverings was always a misnomer. They were not made of grass, and in any case what they

9. The lectures were not intended to deal with the physiology or psychology of sight.


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are made of is only part of their significance or interest. 10 Better look again.

* * *

Note: Square brackets indicate points of clarification added in this version of the lectures. Italics indicate the text, often in note form, of

parts of the lectures that might or might not have been delivered,depending on time.

* * *

10. Though it should be noted that the Pidgin gras had a wider range of referentsthan the English term. As across the Western Highlands, Hagen men worebustles made from cordyline leaves. [Ragnar Johnson (2001) shows Ommura men and women from the Eastern Highlands dancing at Independence Day celebrations in 1975 wearing grass skirts on the lower body, whose substancelook a little like the tall grass from which thatch is made for houses. MaureenMackenzie (1990) refers to grass skirts in Telefolmin, worn by girls and women(see Lecture Three). There are other examples, although it should also be saidthat string skirts woven from bark or other fiber might have the appearance of grass from a distance.]


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Original outl ine and reading l ist for the course

[Original rubric.] These lectures take up a number of artifacts forexamination and theorization; they are ones specifically made to beseen. Euro-Americans often point to the construction of knowledge

when they say they see things. But what about other visual inten-tions? Here the lectures have an identifiable set of coordinates inspace and time: material drawn from one ethnographic region(Melanesia), and from ethnographies produced at about the sametime together (1970s80s), 11 enable one to build up an appreciation of a visual theory that challenges certain enduring Euro-American pre-conceptions.

(1) F EATHERS AND SHELLS : Learning to see. How do we know what we see? Ceremonial exchange and the possibility of anindigenous visual theory.

Forge, Anthony. 1966. Art and environment in the Sepik. Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute for 1965 , 2331. London:Royal Anthropological Institute.

. 1970. Learning to see in New Guinea. In Socialization: The

approach from social anthropology , edited by Philip Mayer, 26990.London: Tavistock. [Abelam]

The New Guinea Highlands:

Biersack, Aletta. 1982. Ginger gardens for the ginger woman. Man 17:23958 [Paiela]

Gillison, Gillian. 1980. Images of nature in Gimi thought. In Nature,culture, and gender , edited by Carol MacCormack and MarilynStrathern, 14373. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

. 1993.Between culture and fantasy: A New Guinea Highlands mythology. Chicago: Chicago University Press. [Gimi]

Kirk, Malcom. 1981. Man as art . New York: Viking Press

OHanlon, Michael. 1983. Handsome is as handsome does. Oceania 53: 31733.

11. One or two later readings were added to indicate continuing debate.


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. 1989.Reading the skin: Adornment, display and society among the Wahgi . London: British Museum Press.

. 1995. Modernity and the graphicalization of meaning: New Guinea Highland shield design in historical perspective. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1: 46993. [Wahgi]

Strathern, Andrew and Marilyn Strathern. 1971. Self-decoration in Mt.Hagen . London: Duckworth. [Hagen]

Strathern, Marilyn. 1979. The self in self-decoration. Oceania 49: 24157.

. 1997. Pre-figured features. In Portraiture: Facing the subject ,edited by Joanna Woodall, 25968. Manchester: Manchester

University Press. [Reprinted in Strathern, Marilyn. 1999. Property,substance and effect: Anthropological essays on persons and things ,2944. London: Athlone.] [Hagen]

Compare:

Astuti, Rita. 1994. Invisible objects: Mortuary rituals among the Vezo of western Madagascar. RES: Anthropology & Aesthetics 25: 111-22.[Vezo, Madagascar]

Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and agency: An anthropological theory. Oxford:Oxford University Press.

(2) A XES AND CANOES : Travel ing objects . Ideas of mobility andfixity in human relationships. How specific artifacts carry relations.Rituals as a focus for dispersed life.

The Massim:

Battaglia, Debbora. 1983. Projecting personhood in Melanesia: The

dialectics of artefact symbolism on Sabarl Island. Man 18: 289304.. 1990.On the Bones of the serpent: Person, memory, and mortality

in Sabarl Island society . Chicago: Chicago University Press.

. 1992. The body in the gift: Memory and forgetting in Sabarlmortuary exchange. American Ethnologist 19: 318.] [Sabarl Island]

Leach, Edmund and Jerry W. Leach, eds. 1983. The Kula: New perspectives on Massim exchange . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [See esp., Chapters 8 and 9.]


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Munn, Nancy. 1986. The fame of Gawa: A symbolic study of value transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) society . Cambridge:Cambridge University Press. [See esp., pp. 10514; 13847.]

Young, Michael. 1987. The tusk, the flute and the serpent: Disguise andrevelation in Goodenough mythology. In Dealing with inequality:

Analysing gender relations in Melanesia and beyond , edited by Marilyn Strathern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.[Goodenough Island]

Compare:

Campbell, Shirley. 2001. The captivating agency of art: many ways of seeing. In Beyond aesthetics: Art and the technologies of enchantment , edited by Christopher Pinney and Nicholas Thomas,11735. Oxford: Berg.

. 2002.The art of kula . Oxford: Berg. [Massim]

Kchler, Susanne. 2002. Malanggan: Art, memory and sacrifice . Oxford:Berg. [New Ireland]

(3) N ETBAGS AND MASKS : Containers . Persons inside other per-sons. Borrowing power and stealing power. Concealment and

revelation as aesthetic and reproductive acts.

Sepik and Mt. Ok areas:

Barth, Frederik. 1987. Cosmologies in the making: A generative approach to cultural variation in Inner New Guinea . Cambridge:Cambridge University Press. [Mountain Ok]

Gell, Alred, 1975. Metamorphosis of the cassowaries: Umeda society,language and ritual . London: Athlone. [Umeda]

Mackenzie, Maureen. 1990. The Telefol string bag: A cultural object with androgynous forms. In Children of Afek: Tradition and change among the Mountain-Ok of central New Guinea , edited by Barry Craig and David Hyndman, 88108. Sydney: Oceania MonographsNo. 40.

. 1991. Androgynous objects: String bags and gender in central New Guinea . New York: Gordon & Breach. [Mountain Ok]

Strathern, Marilyn. 1991. Partial Connections . Lanham, MD: Rowman &Littlefield. [See esp., pp. 7990.]


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Werbner, Richard. 1989. Ritual passage, sacred journey: The process and organization of religious movement . Washington D.C.: Smithson-ian Institution Press. [See esp., Chapters 4 and 5.]

. 1992. On dialectical versions: The cosmic rebirth of West Sepik regionalism. In Shooting the Sun: Ritual and meaning in West Sepik, edited by Bernard Juillerat, 21450. Washington: SmithsonianInstitution Press. [Umeda]

Compare:

Hauser-Schublin, Brigitta. 1996. The thrill of the line, the string, andthe frond, or why the Abelam are a non-cloth culture. Oceania 67

(2): 81106. [Abelam]Kchler, Susanne. 2005. Materiality and cognition: The changing face of

things. In Materiality , edited by Daniel Miller. Durham: DukeUniversity Press. [New Ireland]

(4) W IG / SHELL / TREE : Hiding forms. Multiple forms, ambig-uous images: play with perception and the framing of images.Invention and innovation.

Highlands, coastal, and island PNG:

Clark, Jeffrey. 1991. Pearlshell symbolism in Highlands Papua New Guinea, with particular reference to the Wiru people of SouthernHighlands Province. Oceania 61 (4): 30939.

. 1995. Shit beautiful: Tambu and kina revisited. Oceania 65 (3):195211. [Wiru]

Feld, Steven. 1982. Sound and sentiment: Birds, weeping, poetics, and song in Kaluli expression . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

Press. [Third Edition, 2012. Durham: Duke University Press.][Kaluli]

Foster, Robert. 1990. Nurture and force feeding: Mortuary feasting andthe construction of collective individuals in a New Ireland society.

American Ethnologist 17 (3): 43148. [Tanga]

Goldman, Laurence. 1983. Talk never dies: The language of Huli disputes . London: Tavistock. [See esp., pp 23445.] [Huli]

Schieffelin, Edward. 1976. The sorrow of the lonely and the burning of the dancers . New York: St Martins Press. [Kaluli]


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Wagner, Roy. 1987. Figure-ground reversal among the Barok. In Assemblage of spirits: Idea and image in New Ireland , edited by Louise Lincoln, 5662. Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

[Reprinted in 2012. H AU : Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(1): 53542]

. 1986. Asiwinarong: Ethos, image and social power among the Usen Barok of New Ireland . Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Seeesp., Chapters 7 and 8.] [Barok]

Weiner, James. 1988. The heart of the pearlshell: The mythological dimension of Foi sociality . Berkeley: University of California Press.[See esp., pp. 6377.] [Foi]

Compare:

Dalton, Douglas. 1996. The aesthetic of the sublime: An interpretationof Rawa shell valuable symbolism. American Ethnologist 23 (2):393415. [Rawa]

Demian, Melissa. 2004. Seeing, knowing, owning: Property claims asrevelatory acts. In Transactions and creations: Property debates and the stimulus of Melanesia , edited by Eric Hirsch and MarilynStrathern, 6082. Oxford: Berghahn. [Suau, Massim]

Additional bibliography

Conklin, Beth. 1997. Body paint, feathers, and vcrs: Aesthetics andauthenticity in Amazonian activism. American Ethnologist 24 (4):71137

Rabinow, Paul, et al. 2008. Designs for an anthropology of the contemporary . Durham: Duke University Press.

Johnson, Ragnar. 2001. The anthropological study of body decoration asart: Collective representations and the somatization of affect. Fashion Theory 5 (4): 41734

Wagner, Roy. 2011. Vj de and the quintessentialists guild. Common Knowledge 17 (1): 159

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2003. And: After-dinner speech given at Anthropology and science, the fifth decennial conference of the

Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth .Manchester: Manchester Papers in Social Anthropology, Vol. 7.


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L ECTURER S A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

While I add my personal gratitude to all the publishers, and in somecases authors, who have so kindly allowed illustrations to be repro-duced here, I must reserve special thanks for Malcolm Kirk for hisgenerosity in sharing his images; he brings from the art world a quitedistinctive perspective, and to be able to see these images again is not at all of the same order as looking at any of the other illustrations, fineas many are. In thanking the H AU team for their splendid work, I amparticularly grateful to the contribution that Phil Swift and SeanDowdy have made to the presence and presentation of the repro-ductions and to the flow of the text.

The team at H AU who have given so generously of their time andexpertise include Davide Casciano (IT and website); Sean Dowdy (copyediting and layout); Stphane Gros (technical supervision);Teodora Hasegan (proofreading); Randolph Mamo (cover and image-related work) and Philip Swift (copyright and permission work, image-related work). My gratitude to them all, and to Giovanni da Col forthe invitation to publish these lectures in the H AU Masterclass series,and the unwavering encouragement on his part that accompanied it.

I have already indicated my debt to acquaintances in Papua New Guinea, and add too the many I did not know but who havecontributed to these lectures. Perhaps I can also acknowledge herethe generations of students without whose interest they would not have been given.


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A CKNOWLEDGMENTS TO PUBLISHERS

AND AUTHORS

Figures 111, 16, and 68. From Kirk, Malcom. 1981. Man as art ,New York: Viking Press. Photographs: Malcom Kirk. MalcolmKirk. Reproduced with permission of the author.

Figures 1215, 1739, 42, 43, 60, 67, and 81. Photographs: MarilynStrathern.

Figures 40 and 41. From Polhemus, Ted and Lynn Procter. 1978.

Fashion and anti-fashion: An anthropology of clothing and adornment . London: Thames and Hudson. Photograph:

Author / copyright holder unknown.

Figure 44. From Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific . London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd.Reproduced with publishers permission.

Figure 45. From Munn, Nancy. 1986. The fame of Gawa: A symbolic

study of value transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) society . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Photograph: Nancy D. Munn. Reproduced with permission of the author.

Editors note: Every effort has been made to obtain permission for the reproductionof copyrighted images. H AU would be very glad to hear from any copyright holders not acknowledged herein.


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Marilyn S TRATHERN 18

Figure 46. From Scoditti, Giancarlo G. 1980. Fragmenta ethno- graphica . Rome: Serafine Editore. Photograph: Giancarlo Scoditti.Reproduced with permission of the author.

Figures 47 and 48. From Campbell, Shirley. 2002. The art of Kula .Oxford: Berg. Reproduced with permission of the author.

Figures 49, 50, 52 and 53. From Battaglia, Debbora. 1990. On the bones of the serpent: Person, memory and mortality in Sabarl Island society . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reproduced withpublishers permission.

Figure 51. From Figure 5, Diagram of the measured view. Drawnby Carolyn Van Lang, in Starn, Randolph. 1989. Seeing Culture in a Room for a Renaissance Prince. In The new cultural history , editedby Lynn Hunt, 20534. Berkeley: University of California Press. by the Regents of the University of California. Reproduced withpublishers permission.

Figures 5459. From Mackenzie, Maureen. 1991. Androgynous objects: String bags and gender in central New Guinea. Gordon &

Breach. Reproduced with permission of the author.

Figure 61. From Schmitz, Carl. 1963. Wantoat: Art and religion of the northeast New Guinea Papuans. The Hague: Mouton & Co.Reproduced with publishers permission.

Figure 62. From Heintze, Diete. 1987. On trying to understandsome Malagans. In Assemblage of spirits: Idea and image in New Ireland , edited by Louise Lincoln, 4255. Minneapolis: MinneapolisInstitute of Arts / George Braziller, Inc. Photograph: Dieter Heintze.Reproduced with publishers permission.

Figure 63. From Clay, Brenda. 1987. A line of Tatanua. In Assemblage of spirits: Idea and image in New Ireland , edited by Louise Lincoln, 6373. Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of

Arts / George Braziller, Inc. Photograph: Brenda Clay. Reproduced with publishers permission.


19/19

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS TO PUBLISHERS AND AUTHORS 19

Figures 6466. From Gell, Alfred. 1975. Metamorphosis of the cassowaries: Umeda society, language, and ritual. London: AthlonePress. Drawn by Alfred Gell. Reproduced with permission of Simeran Gell.

Figure 69. Photograph: Author / copyright holder unknown.

Figures 70 and 71. From Goldman, Laurence. 1983. Talk never dies: The language of Huli disputes. London: Tavistock. Reproduced withpermission of the author.

Figures 72 and 73. From Clark, Jeffrey. 1991. Pearlshell symbolism

in highlands Papua New Guinea, with particular reference to the Wiru people of Southern Highlands Province. Oceania 61 (4): 30939. Reproduced with publishers permission.

Figures 74 and 75. From Roy Wagner, Roy. 1987. Figure-groundreversal among the Barok. In Assemblage of spirits: Idea and image in New Ireland , edited by Louise Lincoln, 5662. Minneapolis:Minneapolis Institute of Arts / George Braziller, Inc. Drawn by Roy

Wagner. Reproduced with publishers permission.

Figures 76 and 77. From Feld, Steven. (1982) 2012. Sound and sentiment: Birds, weeping, poetics, and song in Kaluli expression .Durham: Duke University Press. Photographs: Steven Feld. StevenFeld. Reproduced with permission of the author.

Figure 78. From Gillison, Gillian. 1980. Images of nature in Gimithought. In Nature, culture and gender , edited by CarolMacCormack and Marilyn Strathern, 14373. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press. Photograph: David Gillison. Reproduced withpublishers permission.

Figures 79 and 80. From Nilsson, Lennart. 1990. A child is born .New York and London: Doubleday. Reproduced with publisherspermission.

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