NOTES AND QUOTES CONCERNING THE FURTHER COLLABORATION OF IAN SAEM MAJNEP AND RALPH BULMER:

SAEM BECOMES A WRITER

George E. Marcus Rice University, Houston

In 1982,1 published a late review of Birds of My Kalam Country (Majnep and Bulmer 1977), explicitly appreciating for the first time both it and the collaboration on which it was based as an ethnographic experiment in line with the self-conscious rupture in modes of ethnographic authority and representation that I, among other colleagues, have been documenting in contemporary anthropology (Marcus 1982:313-15; and see, for example, Clifford 1983; Clifford and Marcus 1986; and Marcus and Cushman 1982). Following Ralph Bulmer’s death, Andrew Pawley kindly sent me drafts of the several working papers in Kalam and English, which are eventually to constitute the second volume, Animals the Ancestors H un ted in the planned Majnep/Bulmer trilogy (the third being Kalam Plant Lore), along with notes from seminars Ralph gave in Paris in 1980-81 on the production of the Animals texts during the long gestation of this writing project.2

I intend this essay to be a further appreciation of the collaboration between Saem and Ralph, based on my reading of the working papers I have in hand. My comments will parallel perhaps the fragmentary form that the texts now take, and I am of course a reader who has probed the manuscripts, not so much for any knowledge of Kalam game and hunting practices, which are indeed their explicit object of representation, as for insights into the collaboration that has created them revealed on their margins, so to speak, in asides, and in decisions about their form and style of presentation. I have constructed my commentary around selected long quotations, especially from Ralph’s reflections on the project, and from Saem’s “finishing touches” to both the Birds volume and the Animals working papers.3 The risk I am taking is reading traces or signs of intention and purpose into the texts without benefit of conversation with the authors, especially Saem, whose emergence as a literal writer in the Animals project is of central interest to me.

With characteristic modesty, Ralph in one of his Paris lectures minimises the novel character of the way his long-term collaboration with Saem is manifested in the making of ethnographic texts:

I must say that I do not regard what Saem and I have been doing as particularly original, except perhaps in the narrow field of ethnobiology. Many of the classic texts of an earlier epoch in North American ethnography were of this genre. There is that entrancing book, Turi’s Book of Lapland, extracted and translated by the Danish ethnologist Elsie Demant Hatt, in the second decade of this century. There are also the works of Professor Griaule and his colleagues on the Dogon.

Of course this is true: the freshness of Ralph’s and Saem’s collaboration is very old indeed in the history of fieldwork. Ethnographers have always wanted texts from their informants’ speech acts and oral consultations, but the literal and collaborative textualising of essentially dialogic encounters has rarely been problematised in the production of the published ethnographic account itself. The decades-long relationship of Franz Boas to his collaborator, George Hunt, who often functioned, not unlike Saem, as an independent fieldworker (both as a source and as an investigator), is perhaps the key historical example. The fact of collaboration was repeatedly made clear in Boas’ published accounts, but it in no way changed the form his ethnography took for its professional readers.

In the very different ethical environment in which ethnographic fieldwork and analysis are conducted in the second half of the twentieth century, the Majnep-Bulmer relationship stands out from the history of sustained collaborations, particularly characteristic of early twentieth century “salvage” anthropology when the theoretically unadorned collection of “native texts” was in fashion, in the extent of Ralph’s willingness to compromise his own authority and authorship by introducing Saem into the professional presentation of their research. While Ralph downplayed any experimental claims or ends, the decision to bring Saem so far into his academic world of discursive practices and intentions, which for the latter must be as strange as any that Euroamerican anthropologists have encountered, was bound to have led to the production of texts that would radically depart from the conventions of ethnographic writing.

While the Birds book was produced over a very short period of time of daily collaboration, the Animals book has taken several years to produce, with breaks in collaborative activity and more uncertainty as to the form it should eventually take.4 Unlike the Birds project, there is to be a Kalam published version of the Animals book that is, at least in principle, to have equal status with the English version. Most importantly, the

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Animals book represents the work of textualisation over that of dialogue, from which the Birds book primarily derives. And further, in this regard, the Animals book seems to me to mark an evolution in the role of Saem in the collaboration. Although in the Birds book, Saem was a full partner in determining the arrangement of materials - was even deferred to by Ralph - and his voice/words were a prominent and typographically marked part of the text, it was still Ralph who held the pen, so to speak, and materially made the text from interviews and dialogues. Thus, even though the Birds book was a radical departure from the recent tradition of ethnoscientific ethnography, it was still shaped and crafted by professional authority and purposes. In the Animals book, it is Saem who primarily holds the pen, and Ralph moves into a secondary role in a much more substantive way. The making of the text is more in Saem’s control, and even though the project is still conducted under the rationale of scholarly classification and description (this remains resolutely the primary commitment of Ralph and his ethnozoological colleagues), there is now more of a potential for the articulation in the process of textualisation of an alternative, or at least a variant, intention or purpose on Saem’s part than in the Birds book. In short, I would argue that by Saem becoming the major and literal writer in this project, he has gained considerable substantive authority in their joint authorship to pursue his own purposes while also pursuing Ralph’s.

In his Paris seminars, Ralph provides a good description of the scribe-like nature of Saem’s role as writer in the Animals project, in which his own and other Kalam oral performances are the object of recording, copying, and transcription. Here we have a recapitulation in one instance of the more global and historic movement from orality to literacy in which writing most basically takes a scriptural form in the presence of a world of predominant oral communication (interestingly in this regard, the texts of the working papers even assume a “chapter and verse” format - twenty chapters or separate working papers, each on a particular variety of game mammal, and each of these composed of 50 to 100-plus numbered short paragraphs or single statements that range from simple declarations of fact, to complex observations, to reflections and speculation about the animals in question and Kalam beliefs about them).

A further specific problem, which is more exclusively one of style, rather than both style and semantics, relates to the fact that Kalam has no literary tradition. Note further that Saem talks first, then transcribes what he has said, rather than think through his hands and pen, straight onto the paper. Thus what he provides in his texts is a transcript of an oral statement And like any experienced public speaker (and virtually all adult male New Guineans are experienced public speakers) he tends to repeat each point three times, to make sure his audience gets the message. Some whole long passages are also repeated, almost verbatim, in two or three or four different chapters. Some abbreviation is thus quite necessary in the English version; as also some reordering of paragraphs, where, for example, five minutes of tape or three pages later, he remembers some point that should have been inserted earlier in the same chapter.But fortunately I do not regard these problems of abbreviation and editorial re-alignment as too serious, as I have Saem’s explicit and spontaneous request to edit out repetitions, and reorder paragraphs where this is obviously necessary.

Ralph himself thus performed the role of secondary scribe. As Andrew Pawley says in his editor’s notes to the working papers:

Saem spent several months in Auckland in the summer of 1977-78 and the book began to take clear shape. Saem recorded the first drafts of all of the Kalam chapters then and by 1979 or early 1980 he had completed transcriptions of all 20 or so chapters, and had made Pidgin translations of some of them on tape or paper. In 1980 RB spent three or four months in the Kaironk Valley and did first draft English translations of all the chapters, including an Introduction and an Epilogue that Saem had added.

Bulmer’s translation method was as follows. First, rewrite Saem’s Kalam text in a notebook, leaving two or three blank lines with a literal, word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase translation. Finally, write in a free translation on the third lines (or sometimes on separate leaves). In the process, there was a constant dialogue with Saem, clarifying meanings, making small changes to the text, etc.

Just how secondary Ralph permitted himself to become in the actual textualisation of the Animals book is captured in the following remarks from his Paris seminars. Here he notes his self-imposed loss of control over the shape of the text, compared to the Birds book, in which he manipulated, through his role as writer, Saem’s commentary:

But there are other points where I am hesitant to take the liberty I would like to. These result from Saem’s less spontaneous, and gripping, presentation in his dictated texts, than he often achieves in free conversation. For example, when he first told me that he was going to put the wallabies in the first chapter of the book, and explained why, he said this: “You Europeans believe you are descended from monkeys. We Kalam believe we are descended from wallabies. That is why I put the wallaby in the first

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chapter of this book.” Which seemed to me to be a marvellous opening. However, when he actually dictated, and wrote, the chapter, the same point is not made till after six pages of discussion of many other topics; and when it does appear, comes out in much more qualified and less vivid form. I’d love to reinsert his original statement of intention, but I don’t think I can. Contrast the bird book which was written almost entirely from conversations, not texts, and where I think I was able to catch something of the real flavour of his truly spontaneous form of expression.

It is the increased possibility for Saem to have more power over the purpose of their collaborative production of ethnography, derived from his distinctive assumption of the role of writer in the Animals project, that I will explore further in the remainder of this essay. To do so, I want to read their collaboration in the Animals project against a somewhat similar collaboration, recounted in a paper with the exotic title, “Words For Deeds and the Doctrine of the Secret World: Testimony to a Chance Encounter Somewhere in the Indian Jungle”, (1987) by Stephen A. Tyler, who, like Ralph, was a leading scholar in the ethnoscience/cognitive anthropology trend of the 1960s, and who, like Ralph, moved creatively (and certainly more provocatively) beyond it. In this paper, Tyler reports and reflects elegantly upon an incident of “data gathering” during his early 1960s fieldwork among the Koya, a tribal people of India. His key and paid informant (consultant?, collaborator?), Laksmayya, a Christian Koya, produces written texts for Tyler, among other tasks. Tyler scrutinises the production of one such text from his 1980s interest in the fertile arena of scholarship that focusses the understanding of major cultural differences in language and cognition on oral versus written modes of communication and their interaction in small settings like fieldwork as well as great historic movements such as the founding of world religions. Under the influence of Plato (especially, the Phaedrus), Walter Ong, and Eric Havelock, he moves beyond the naive assumptions about cultural description and classification of 1960s ethnoscience and structuralism, which sought formal structures of the mind from the formal structures of language, toward the fully contextualised conditions of discourse and its production in speech and writing.

In this paper, Tyler describes the production of Laksmayya’s written description of a Hindu ritual which he witnessed (1987:66-7).

This text was composed and written in Telegu character by my principal Koya informant Pūsem Laksmayya. It was dictated, tape recorded, transcribed, and translated on May 15-17, 1963. The text is obviously based on Laksmayya’s general knowledge, but more importantly, it is his account of what he saw in the village of Kasinagaram, on May 12-14, 1963, during a performance of the “Hill Festival”. . .The content and meaning of Laksmayya’s text was supplemented by direct questioning in the process of translating, by comments elicited from other informants, and by my own observation notes made during the festival. The text itself, however, is unaltered, merely transcribed here from the text as it was originally written by Laksmayya.

In his meditation on this text and its translation, Tyler focusses on the fit or operation of an oral sensibility within a mode of writing the purpose of which - ethnographic description and analysis - is also alien to it. Tyler raises not only provocative and critical issues about the discourse contexts of ethnographic production, but also about written discourse in the West generally. While Ralph was up to nothing so grand, and while he, unlike Tyler, remained firmly committed to the goals of ethnoscientific research, his collaboration with Saem exemplifies (and to some degree, challenges) the points that Tyler develops. I therefore want to use some selected quotations from Tyler’s reflections on Laksmayya’s writing, to serve both as another case for the reader to compare with the Majnep-Bulmer collaboration, especially the production of the Animals texts (even though the Laksmayya-Tyler collaboration was not nearly as deep and did not result in the mutual production of texts, except ironically in the very paper in question), and as a guide for probing in the rest of this essay the question of how Saem’s assumption of the role of writer might have changed his relationship to the collaboration and the production of, at least, the Animals texts. It is this sort of question that Tyler articulates best in his reflections on Laksmayya’s writing (1987:88,78,80, presented below in this order):

Though Laksmayya’s description fitted perfectly into my ethnographer's commonplaces, it was by that fact made mute about its own, and I came to see how objective description could be a means of alienation, a means of making strange the commonplace implied by its narrative. Without its own commonplace Laksmayya’s description was also made odd in that ethnographer’s commonplace it had seemed to fit so well, and there it remains, dangling somewhere between Laksmayya’s world and mine, but at home in neither (emphasis mine).

In the text, Laksmayya reveals nothing of his ethos, of his intentions or his reasons for writing this description. He appears to practise an image making art that attends only to the details of what the image represents, constructing an imitation that omits the perspective of the observer. His account is

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seemingly that of an objective reporter who communicates what he sees without judging it. It looks like the sort of thing an ethnographer might produce as primary data, but in fact there is a deception here analogous to the deception practised by the ethnographer, for just as the ethnographer is a scientist and a thrall of that ideology, Laksmayya was a Christian, and that is the unspoken part of his intention and character, that rhetorical ethos which helps to explain - apart from being in my pay - why he would be motivated to describe at all. Though his judgements are formally absent from his text, they are there in the act of constructing a text. . . .

This last observation serves as a reminder that Lakmayya’s text was composed with a specific audience in mind. For both its form and content flow from Laksmayya’s judgment of what I liked to hear. The rhetorical pathos of his text, its accommodation to the soul of its hearer, was based on his previous experience as my informant and translator. He knew the sort of thing that was likely to interest me, that nothing pleased me more than descriptive details, and when he was sulky over some real or imaginary slight would withhold them, retreating into mumbled “I don’t knows” in response to my queries, or in serious cases disappearing for a day or two on some pretext or other, only to reappear, bringing with him some ethnographic treasure he was sure would delight me as a way of patching things up between us - all the while expanding on it with a happy deluge of explanations and interpretations... (emphasis mine).

This same transformation is accomplished in the movement from description to explanation in our noncommonsense use of description, and it is just this movement that Laksmayya’s text lacks. By itself it neither contains nor implies exposition, dialectic, or explanation. It is merely itself, and we can infer a movement beyond the narrative only if we ground the text in a concrete dialogical context where it has purposes which express its author’s intentions, but this is contrary to the movement of dialectic which seeks the abstract and universal rather than the concrete and particular. It is not a return to the rhetorical context, but a movement away from it.

We can now understand what is bothersome about Laksmayya’s text as a description - it does not implicate an exposition that goes beyond the rhetorical circumstances of its performance. There is no movement from narration to exposition, from rhetoric to dialectic, or from description to explanation. At best it is a description in response to a commonplace problem like that of describing brown boots, except that we do not know what problematic circumstances evoked it (emphasis mine).

There are two major issues that are strongly developed in these quotations and that I want to address in the following sections concerning the Majnep-Bulmer collaboration on the Animals texts. First there is the ethical issue that concerns both partners to a collaboration. Tyler does not use the term collaboration with reference to his relationship to Laksmayya, and would probably be suspicious of any connotations of harmony or smoothness that might naturally attach to the term. The Laksmayya-Tyler relationship is bittersweet, is founded on structured inequality (in who defines the situation and the purpose of the relationship) as well as on mutual manipulations. Second, and relatedly, Laksmayya’s purpose, intention, or interest in his writing is deeply submerged in the result, if traceable at all. Without an essentially oral context of discourse, his writing becomes matter-of-fact, alienated description.

Turning now to the Majnep-Bulmer collaboration on the Animals texts, I want first to enter here Ralph’s own thoughts on the kind of ethical issues about collaboration that Tyler’s essay suggests, and then, in the following sections, I want to consider the extent to which Saem’s greater control of textualisation in this project has allowed him to personalise it, and thus demonstrates that “though his judgements are formally absent from his text, they are there in the act of constructing a text. . . ”. Faced not just with advising the creation of written texts as in the Birds project, but primarily responsible for the long, drawn out process of making the texts from recorded orality, does Saem in the Animals project, without violating the collaboration and still acting in the name of ethnoscience, have more of an opportunity to make his work distinctively his own, than, for instance, Laksmayya did as text-maker in the brief exposure we have to him in Tyler’s essay?

THE ETHICS OF THE MAJNEP-BULMER COLLABORATION IN RALPH’S REFLECTION

Here, from one of his Paris seminars, is Ralph’s consideration of the ethical problems of the collaboration with Saem:

These are the problems of all social anthropology, but perhaps particularly acute, or clearly perceptible, when work is focussed so much through a particular, single, individual. Problems of weighing up responsibilities to scholarship and science as against responsibilities to one’s collaborators. The question of honesty - how far one can express scepticism, indeed produce factually contradictory evidence which will affect one’s collaborator’s thinking, perhaps lead him to change his view and his story, perhaps disturb him. To the extent that I do this before Saem has finished his final draft, I do of course affect what he writes. He is even less portraying uncontaminated original Kalam thinking, he is in dialogue.

Saem Becomes a Writer 41

Is being non-commital, just not expressing one’s own opinions, fair? Is it not both patronising and exploitative?

How far is it possible NOT to exploit my partner, given the advantages that I command. Saem rationalises my access to external power and know-how in kinship terms (as my other Kalam friends do).He is my son, my eldest son.

How far is it possible for Saem not to be affected adversely in the quality of his life in his own society, by his partnership with me? Of course, I tell myself, when I start worrying, that

(i) We are doing a job together that neither of us could possibly do separately. We are totally dependant on each other. In that sense there is some symmetry in the relationship. But the difference is that I can go off and do alternative professional tasks, quite separately. Like coming to Paris and giving seminars to nice people. He can’t yet; but perhaps, if we persist, he may eventually be able to do something a bit like this. The first small step in this direction was when he was invited, in his own right, to two conferences in Port Moresby last month; conferences held in Pidgin as well as English.

He wants next to work on a monograph on salt - which is a very good idea. I want to start serious work on the ethnobotany. I have suggested to him that he should collaborate with someone else on the book on salt, for I have no special expertise to add to his, on that subject; and it could be very good for him to try working with someone else. But that we should work together, as part of a larger team, on the botany.

(ii) but perhaps the most important. We both manage very much to enjoy the work we do together. I have never taken more pleasure in my research activity. Surely it is better to go on doing something we both enjoy so much, than to be paralysed into inactivity by ethical anguish?

TRACES OF SAEM MAKING THE TEXT HIS OWN, I:KEY POINTS OF DIFFERENCE IN THE COLLABORATION

In the materials on the Animals collaboration that I have surveyed, I note two key points of decision about which Ralph and Saem differed, and in each matter, Saem prevailed. One concerns the direction of the collaboration after the Birds book, and the other concerns the precedence of the two language versions in which the Animals texts would appear.

RB’s thought had been that their next book should be about plants on the grounds that while he and various co-authors had written about Kalam knowledge of birds, mammals, frogs, reptiles, etc., no separate work had yet been written about the plants which are important in Kalam life. He had been collecting plant specimens and information about plant use assiduously over the years, so that some of the groundwork had been done. However, it was to be Saem’s choice and Saem plumped for a book about kmn, the larger wild marsupials and rodents, which the Kalam men hunt with great enthusiasm, and as, the smaller marsupials and rodents (excluding “unclean” rats), which are mainly hunted by women. RB told me, “My reservation about Saem’s proposal was that James Menzies and I had already written a 50 page article (’’Kalam Classification of Marsupials and Rodents”) on this subject in 1972 and I wasn’t sure how much new material Saem and I could come up with. But Saem was adamant that there was much more to be said about kmn and as. And of course he was right.

But “much more to be said” in whose context(s) of meaning and purposes? Obviously, for the interests of ethnoscientific classification, there was indeed much more to be said, as Ralph acknowledges (generously admitting the limitations of presumably totalistic modes and claims of scientific reporting as in his taxonomic paper with Menzies). However, the “adamancy” of Saem’s preference for the direction of the collaboration should take suggests that another more personal agenda of his own might be operating that goes beyond the ethnoscientific rationale for proceeding with animals rather than plants merely because there is much more to be said (i.e., described) about kmn and as.

Regarding the matter of which language version should appear first, Ralph states in his own preface to the Animals working papers:

Saem had, from the start, expressed the strongest wish that the book should appear in a Kalam version, for local readers, as well as in English. My response was to argue that we should get the English edition out first, then produce an edited Kalam text that would be consistent with the English. It is only very recently that I have realised that this was not a satisfactory ordering of priorities - and that the difficulties that were delaying my completion of the English text could be substantially reduced if we represented the Kalam version, with minimal abbreviation or other editing, first.

While it does not appear that Saem had his way in this matter by any adamant expression of preference - rather, the outcome was determined by what was convenient for Ralph as translator - he must have been pleased with the immediate production of an unedited Kalam version. Ralph’s initial response that the Kalam version should be secondary, and derivative of the English version, indicates, I think, a very basic skewing or

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privileging of Ralph’s side of the collaboration, of which he was, of course, aware, as discussed in the previous section. Saem’s expression of resistance to this is equally worthy of note. Perhaps, it was not as important to him that the Birds book should be accessible to his people, in part because he was not as materially responsible for it as he was in the role of scribe for the Animals texts. It might also be that there was something more personally compelling about game animals rather than birds for Saem, such that a primary Kalam version of this project, independent of a parallel English one, involving stylistic and rhetorical modifications of the oral Kalam texts that he freely left to Ralph, was very important to Saem. In any case, Saem has been clearly concerned that the contents of the Animals texts be available to his people (his kin in particular?). Certainly, in part, his interest is also to salvage and preserve indigenous knowledge, much as the anthropologist wants to do for his own purposes, but is this the only purpose for Saem of the Kalam version, at least, in which he has invested so much of his energy as a writer? Saem’s epilogues to both the Birds book and the Animals texts, to which we now turn, seem to offer the most explicit clues about the possible alternative, personal meanings of the Animals texts for him.

TRACES OF SAEM MAKING THE TEXT HIS OWN, II:THE PERSONAL NATURE OF SAEM’S EPILOGUES, OR ETHNOSCIENTIFIC CLASSIFICATION AS THE KALAM ART OF MEMORY

In the Preface to the Birds book, we are told this about the circumstances of the addition of Saem’s very personal epilogue to the volume (1977:15):

Then, on the day when he was due to depart, and an hour and a half before he had to leave for the airport, he requested the addition of the Epilogue, which he felt was necessary to complete the book properly, “How I walked about with my mother and she showed me these places”.

The following are excerpts from this brief seven-paragraph epilogue to the Birds book (1977:184):

Epilogue: How I walked about with my mother and she showed me these placesNow that I am finishing this book I want to explain about the parts of the forest that I know well, so

that those who read this will know where I have seen the things that I have described... [four paragraphs of place description!. . . These places I know about. When I was older I went to them by myself, or with my brothers. Since then I have travelled round in many other places too, but the places that I truly know well are those my mother first showed me. When I wander there, I remember what my mother told me, and the things that my father did there.

Sometimes when I am in town I get fed up and walk about by myself, and I think about these places that I knew when I was a child, and I know that I must go back there. That is all that I wanted to say, to finish this book.

This epilogue emphasises very strongly the connection between place and memory. Concrete and detailed accounts of birds - Saem’s major contribution to the volume - is a means, finally, of evoking powerful images of places, which in turn constitute the form and content of an autobiographical narrative. It is striking that birds do not figure at all in the epilogue, but rather landscapes, and in these the strongest image is Saem being taken around by his mother, who teaches him hunting practices, and at the same time, secures the game that feeds him. The “last word” that Saem so unexpectedly added to the Birds book at his moment of departure can be understood in light of the work that followed as a foreshadowing of the project on game mammals, which seem to resonate more strongly and personally with both the landscape and the maternal relationship traced within it than did the classification and description of birds.

Saem did indeed compose, in a less precipitous manner, both a dedication and a longer epilogue for the Animals book, which very passionately express the memory of his mother: Saem’s dedication to his mother appears at the beginning of the Animals book:

For my mother Kalam, who with such fortitudecarried me when I slept under the trees and in the rock-sheltersand under the leaking roofs of desolate houses,so that I survived and grew.I have not forgotten her.

Concluding excerpt from the epilogue to the Animals book:

In the difficult period I’m talking about I lived in two different places. The second was up at Gwlkm, by the ridge on which the government Rest House later stood. As at Walblep, my mother found an old pig-shelter there, but it was sound and dry for our family to sleep in. She collected dry trash from garden-

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clearing and blocked the holes in the outer walls with this, and we slept comfortably inside. But when heavy rain fell we still had to keep getting up, because if the rain really poured down, it would come through the roof into the interior where we slept. But when the weather was fine we were comfortable, for quite long periods. But I still remember, right deep down inside me, the things my mother did when there were storms. I haven’t told anybody about this before, not even my brothers or my cross-cousins.It’s only now, in writing this book, that I’ve decided to come out with this. Now I’ve finished that story, but finally I want to describe how my mother and my father used to go out in the forest, and my father hunt for kapuls in the trees, and they would eat the nuts from his alrjaw pandans and the kapuls that he killed in hollow trees and caught in his traps among the rocks. I’ve told how I lived as a child with my mother, and she cared for me so that I grew strong; and how she would take me out with her and tell me which were the tree lairs my father used to make his kills in . . . All these things I learned from her . . . When we were living at Alblep we’d go back and forth across to Gwlkm, and when there was heavy rain so that all the forest foliage was sodden, it was really hard travelling through the bush. We’d carry burning embers with us, and make a fire under the base of a tree to warm ourselves a little, before going on until eventually we reached Gwlkm. Then we’d turn back and after endless walking come down again to the open country on this side. I’d weep and plead for my mother to carry me on her back; and she would do so, though I was a great burden to carry in the rain. And when we were out hunting and sleeping in some shelter in the forest, and I was cold, she’d cover me up with her long widow’s skirt and her side-skirts, so that I could sleep comfortably.That’s all I have to say (emphasis mine).

I would like to suggest that the Animals texts double as autobiography for Saem (as did the Birds book much more indirectly), and that the assumption of the position of scribe in the former, most recent project has increased on the part of Saem both the motivation for and the articulation of this submerged agenda in the collaboration. For Saem (and perhaps for other Kalam), autobiographical narrative, which turns out to be at once both personal history and de facto Kalam ethnography, is a lot like, if not synonymous with, ethnozoological classification in which his anthropologist collaborator is primarily interested. At least, history is evoked by the resonance of memory in landscape, and the hunting of animals has a key significance in Saem’s life since it represents his own early experiences, peculiar for a Kalam (the absence of a father, and the presence of a nurturing mother who is a skilled hunter of all varieties of game) as well as the emotionally powerful feelings of gratitude toward his mother.

The use of landscape to key and narrate collective historical memory is very familiar in the ethnographic literature of Oceania and Southeast Asia. Renato Rosaldo’s poignant account (1980) of how he learned to listen to and hear as historical narrative what at first bored him - Ilongot recitation of place names and reference to seemingly inconsequential points on the landscape - is probably the best known, most influential example. However, what we have in the development of Saem’s collaboration with Ralph is less collective, than personal, memory tied to landscape through the classification first of birds, and then of game animals within it. Besides the overt organisation of the Animals working papers in terms of animal type, chapter by chapter, there is also, we learn from Saem’s perspective, a systematic movement through the landscape from niche to niche. From Saem’s angle, then, this project might be viewed as organised very much like a Renaissance memory palace (see Yates 1978) for which classification serves as the main trope structuring both a parallel narrative movement and imagined physical movement through a space of resonant meanings. Whereas a similar practice within Kalam lifeways might always be oral and collective, especially in the Animals project, in which Saem takes up the pen - a socially isolating function that writing generally brings - the point of the exercise in terms of memory becomes increasingly personal and autobiographical.

One can appreciate, then, why Saem was so adamant about pursuing the classification of animals further after the Birds book, and why he might desire strongly an immediate unedited version of the Kalam texts to be produced for local readers. Not only has taking up the pen in the Animals project motivated Saem to become more explicitly autobiographical in his collaboration with Ralph, but as expressed in the above excerpt from his epilogue, he is motivated to communicate, to reveal, as he indicates, aspects of his personal history to his people (perhaps to certain of his kin, perhaps more generally among the Kalam; I cannot tell from the materials in hand). Within his novel role of writer/scribe, Saem seems to have developed what would be for the Kalam an unaccustomed or idiosyncratic use of the oral narrative frameworks available for telling personal stories: the written epilogue to the Animals book is clearly more confessional and personal than the merely dictated epilogue to the Birds book. The written Animals texts capture a style of oral narrative that serves memory among the Kalam, but they memorialise a moment of discourse permanently in a way that the oral narrative cannot. Surely this power of inscription/transcription as the core activity of the Animals project was not lost on Saem.

Finally, to paraphrase Tyler, though Saem’s purposes are formally absent from his texts (but, given the epilogue, not as absent as, say, Laksmayya’s is from his text), they are there in the act of constructing them.

44 George E. Marcus

EPILOGUE: COPYING, OR THE POWER OF INS CRIB ING/TRANS CRIB ING/TRANSLATINGTHE RECORDED ORAL TEXT

The power of a country road is different when one is walking along it from when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out.The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands. .. Only the copied text commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of daydreaming, whereas the copier submits to its command (Walter Benjamin, from “One-Way Street”).

This is how I learned the things that we have written in this book, partly from what I’ve been told by my mother and uncles and elder brothers, and partly from my own direct observation.

Thus the first stage of this work of ours has not been difficult for me, because the knowledge of the trees and animals of the forest is there in my own head. But the work with Ralph, in translating what I have written, has been much harder. This is partly because so many Kalam words are not in the dictionary, and there are not pidgin words to translate them, and indeed there are no English words to translate some of them - in fact you could say that some Kalam words have no meaning at all, they are just part of what one says. So that when I’m asked what they mean, I have to stop and think, and sometimes I get really worried and begin to sweat with embarrassment and ask myself whatever possessed me that I took this work on! I’ve had to stay silent, wondering if I can or can’t explain what some words mean, and my friend Ralph has had to wait as much as five or six minutes, and I’ve felt very ashamed.But eventually, I’ve come up with something. However I have to say that the language I speak is an extremely difficult one, and it’s given us both a great deal of trouble (Ian Saem Majnep, from the planned Epilogue to Animals the Ancestors Hunted).

NOTES

1. I suspect that many readers will easily appreciate the heavily ironic nature of this essay in the enactment of its own construction of some of the observations about the Majnep-Bulmer texts that it develops. I could think of no finer tribute to Ralph or the innovative collaboration that he so modestly nurtured.

2. In the Preface to the Birds book, we are told of its rapid production (1977:15):

The completion of the first draft of the whole book, except appendices, in two months and one day, was a race against time. We left the first and third chapters until we had prepared the whole of Parts II and III. Saem dictated most of Chapter I, the statement about the history of his people and the main features of their culture, in two hours, on the morning of the day before he left New Zealand.

By contrast, in Ralph’s introduction to the Animals working papers, we learn of this second project’s long and somewhat troubled gestation:

In 1976-77 Saem tape-recorded some important statements from knowledgeable Kalam people, in the Kaironk Valley and at Port Moresby. Between 1977 and 1982 he recorded and transcribed what were intended as twenty chapters, of varying lengths, describing the kapuls and smaller rodents and marsupials of his home region, plus an introduction and an Epilogue. For most of these he also provided Pidgin translations, on tape and in transcript. These Pidgin versions are generally close to the original Kalam, but in some passages Saem gives an abbreviated statement and in a few he adds information or interpretations that he had not remembered to include in the original text.Between 1977 and 1985 I retranscribed Saem’s Kalam texts, attempting to bring the orthography into conformity with Andrew Pawley’s (1966) phonemic conventions, and with much help from Saem, translated them into English. And in 1984-85 Christopher Healey, who had illustrated Birds of My Kalam Country, provided us with drawings of the more important species Saem had described.That the book Animals the Ancestors Hunted has not yet appeared is my responsibility. Partly this is a consequence of midjudging, up to 1980, the time the work would take, and especially the time that Saem and I would have to spend together on the text; and partly it is a consequence of heavy competing demands on my attention in 1984-86. But I was also brought to a halt by agonising over editorial and translation problems - doubts as to whether I had correctly understood many passages, dismay at the gulf between my stilted English and the style of the Kalam original, and indecision as to how far it was legitimate to excise repetitions and re-order paragraphs - though Saem had assured me that I should feel quite free to take my own judgment in this regard.

Saem Becomes a Writer 45

REFERENCES

BENJAMIN, Walter, 1978. One-Way Street, in Reflections, edited by Peter Demetz and translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York, Harcourt Brace.

BULMER, Ralph, n.d. Notes on Seminars Delivered in Paris. Manuscripts [Department of Anthropology, University of Auckland].

CLIFFORD, James, 1983. On Ethnographic Authority. Representations, 2: 118-46.-----------, and George E. MARCUS, 1986. Writing Culture: the Politics and Poetics of Ethnography. Berkeley,

University of California Press.MAJNEP, Ian Saem, and Ralph BULMER, 1977. Birds of My Kalam Country. Auckland, Oxford University Press.-----------, and----------- , 1988. Kalam Hunting Traditions: Working Papers for Animals the Ancestors Hunted.

Manuscripts [Department of Anthropology, University of Auckland].MARCUS, George E., 1982. Review of Birds of My Kalam Country. Journal of the Polynesian Society, 91(2):313-15.-----------, and Dick CUSHMAN, 1982. Ethnographies As Texts. Annual Review of Anthropology, 11: 25-69.ROSALDO, Renato, 1980. Ilongot Headhunting, 1883-1974: a Study in Society and History. Stanford, Stanford

University Press.TYLER, Stephen A., 1987. Words for Deeds and the Doctrine of the Secret World: Testimony to a Chance Encounter

Somewhere in the Indian Jungle, in The Unspeakable: Discourse, Dialogue, and Rhetoric in the Postmodern World. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press.

YATES, Frances, 1978. The Art of Memory. New York, Penguin Books.

RALPH BULMER - A BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alice Bulmer Auckland

This bibliography has been organised in terms of discipline. Books, articles and other works, published and unpublished, have been classified according to their major focus of study. In the (many) cases where a work fits across one or more boundaries, I have placed it in the category which seemed to have the strongest claim. For example, “Kalam Colour Categories” could have been in the “Language” section, but Ralph Bulmer’s focus was on taxonomy, so I have included it in that section. But some decisions were harder, and another person compiling a bibliography would probably have done differently.

I have included a regional index at the end, where works are listed briefly by geographic and ethnological region.* denotes unpublished workNote: Both Kalam and its earlier spelling, Karam, are used, according to titles.

TABLE OF CONTENTS1. ETHNOBIOLOGY

(a) Folk Taxonomy(b) Ethno-omithology(c) Ethnozoology, Ethnobotany etc.(d) Reviews

2. SOCIAL ORGANISATION AND CULTURE(a) Original Work(b) Reviews

3. HUNTING, CROPS, CONSERVATION4. PREHISTORY AND MATERIAL CULTURE5. LANGUAGE6. ORNITHOLOGY AND OTHER BIOLOGICAL SUBJECTS 1. REPORTS ON GOVERNMENT POLICY, EDUCATION,

RESEARCH, TEACHING MATERIALS8. FICTION9. REGIONAL INDEX