MA S T E R

CL AS S

S E R I E S 2

L E A R N I N GT OS E E I NME L A N E S I A
L e c t u r e s g i v e n i n t h e D e p a r t me n t o f S o c i a l A n t h r o p o l o g y , C a mb r i d g e U n i v e r s i t y , 1 9 9 3 2 0 0 8
Ma r i l y n S t r a t h e r n

U HA

LEARNING TO SEE IN MELANESIA

Lectures given in the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University, 19932008 Marilyn Strathern

H AU M ASTERCLASS S ERIES Volume 2

H AU M ASTERCLASS S ERIES Volume 2

Series Editors: Giovanni da Col and Sean Dowdy Associate Editor: Philip Swift The HAU Masterclass series is dedicated to the publication of seminal lecture series by key, influential anthropologists. The series is inspired by the lectures of anthropologists, intellectuals and writers such as Michel Foucault (Lectures at the Collge de France), Meyer Fortes (Kinship and social order), Nancy Munn (The fame of Gawa), and Hannah Arendt (Lectures on Kants political philosophy). The Masterclass series is designed for students wishing to understand complex thinkers in an approachable way; teachers interested in material that communicates effectively the core teachings of major anthropologists; busy academics interested in becoming conversant in the work of important scholars within a limited timeframe; and members of the general public who are simply curious to know more about anthropology.

2013 by Marilyn Strathern This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. Cover Design: Randolph Mamo and Sean Dowdy ISSN 2049-4769

HAU
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Editor-in-Chief M anaging Editor Deputy Managing Editor Associate Editors Editor-At-Large Editorial Assistants Giovanni da Col (Cambridge) Stphane Gros (CEH - CNRS) Sean Dowdy (Chicago) Holly High (Sydney) Philip Swift (UCL) David Graeber (LSE) Michelle Beckett (Chicago) Bree Blakeman (ANU) Davide Casciano (Rome) Teodora Hasegan (Binghamton-SUNY) Rodolfo Maggio (Manchester) Zachary Sheldon (Chicago) Marguerite DeLoney (Stanford) Juliette Hopkins (Sydney) Gina Krone (Sydney) Randolph Mamo (Malta)

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HAU-N.E.T.
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Supported by: EPICENTER: The Centre for Cultural Epidemics at Aarhus University (DK), University of Amsterdam (NL), University of Bergen (NO), University of Canterbury (NZ), Centre dtudes Himalayennes, CNRS (France), University of Chicago (US), Cornell University (US), University of Edinburgh (UK), Johns Hopkins University (US), University of Manchester (UK), University of Manchester Library (UK), Norwegian Museum of Cultural History (NO), University of Oslo (NO), University of Sydney (AU).

C O NTENTS
EDITORS INTRODUCTION Strathern bottle: On topology, ethnographic theory, and the method of wonder
Giovanni DA COL, Universities of Bergen and Cambridge

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THE MASTERCLASS Lecturers introduction: Learning to see in Melanesia Introduction Preliminary comments to the present lectures Notes for the reader Original outline and readings for the course Additional bibliography Lecturers acknowledgments Acknowledgments to publishers and authors 1. Feathers and shells: Learning to see Preamble The photographers gallery The anthropologists context Interpretation: Learning to see 2. Axes and canoes: Traveling objects Exchange and travel in Hagen Travel and exchange in the Massim Are there some elements of a visual theory here? 3. Netbags and masks: Containers Backtracking Male and female: Mt. Ok netbags Center and periphery: Sepik (and other) masks On visual theory again 1 1 2 5 10 14 15 17 21 22 26 40 44 55 58 81 93 95 98 101 110 121

4. Wig / shell / tree: Hiding forms A diversion on the interpretative exercise Two wigs from Huli Two shells form Wiru The Barok mortuary tree Why a visual theory? Learning to see in Melanesia: A summary Postscript to the lectures Appendix I: Artifacts of history: Events and the interpretation of images Appendix II: Social relations and the idea of externality Appendix III: Environments within: An ethnographic commentary on scale

125 126 128 134 140 145 152 155 157

179 207

Strathern bottle
On topology, ethnographic theory, and the method of wonder

Giovanni DA COL University of Cambridge, University of Bergen

In effect, Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it. . . . He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of general, platonic ideas. It was not only difficult for him to understand that the generic term DOG embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and different forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at threefifteen (seen from the front). Jorge Luis Borges, Funes the Memorious The Melanesian world is one where people constantly take themselves by surprise. Marilyn Strathern, Artifacts in history

Umberto Eco (1992: 50) once called excess of wonder that perceptual regime which overestimates the importance of coincidences and relentlessly traces relations between signs. The Hermetic tradition and the doctrine of signatures in the Renaissance were, perhaps, the most notorious examples of this way of seeing. That was an age where everything could be (and often was) connected to anything else by either resemblance or contiguity; occult parenthood and analogic kinship, for example, allowed a malleable system of equivalences and transitivity where connections, rather than being severed, were augmented and magnified. The exterior hailed the interior: clouds mirrored ponds and rivulets of rains encompassed a

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | Giovanni da Col Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. Strathern, Marilyn. 2013. Learning to see in Melanesia. Masterclass Series 2. Manchester: HAU Society for Ethnographic Theory.

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circulatory system. The form would contain the function: the plant orchis was named after its two spheroid bulbs, resembling testicles, and its properties could affect the reproductive apparatus. This was a putative universe where function, embedded in morphology, was ready to be revealed to the trained eye, a cosmos where Hermes ruled on a multiplicity of hidden Gestalten and signata as the god of knowledge, yet also of trickery. It is not by chance that the mnemotechniques of that age were drawn on imagined canvases or erected in arenas where scale-free relations of disproportional analogy were traceda metafisica fantasticata which Giulio Camillo, for example, employed to generate a Theater of Memory, an imagistic synecdoche which beautifully, albeit frenetically, contained and replicated on a human scale a larger cosmological model (here Ernst Cassirer or Frances Yates could speak with eloquence to our own cosmological and ontological turns and movements). Thus it is not surprising that Eco (1988) also mused wittingly that an ars oblivionalisa technology of forgettingcould not be developed semiotically through homology and connotation, but only by multiplication: one would forget not on account of defects of semiosis, but excesses of synonyms and relations. What, then, happens when an ant can stand for Providence by hieroglyphic resemblance, when analogy, contiguity, and homology may be potentially extended ad infinitum and distinctions of this flow of similarities are not drawn properly? Setting aside a timely reflection on the cropping up of academic humbugs and potentially new Sokal affairs (threatening to befall upon us at any moment) one could ask: what happens when knowledge is not produced or consumed properly? Perhaps the flow of vital resemblances would then turn into poison, knowledge into paranoia. After all, is not the paranoid the one who sees associations everywhere, or to put it betterthe one who does not know any opacity of mind, a master in discerning an occult relationship where others would only infer the work of so-called magic? Notably, in 1977, Roy Wagner commenced his seminal article on analogic kinship with a daring axiom recalling the Hermetic perceptual regime: let us begin with the proposition that all human relationships are analogous to one another (1977: 623). The domain glossed as kinship would then be nothing else but the crucial human capacity for differentiation, for creatively channelling or severing this

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flow of vital analogies. Indeed, kinship could be defined as the act of creatively joining or cutting the flows deemed to be innate in a society. What the lectures you are about to read show is Marilyn Stratherns masterful strategy of performing another creative trick: revealing the human flow of relationships by wonder. The trick, however, is that Strathern is being isomorphic to her own object of study, since what makes a theory ethnographic is the art of mimesis in methods for knowing the Other, where the observer imitates an agent of study and is recursively affected by the process. The outcome that such a negative strategyto use Stratherns (1990b) own expression---aims to produce by juxtaposing images and perspectives is dazzlingly analogic to the Melanesian perceptual regime itself: it unfolds through surprise. This is ethnographic theory as its best. Take the event, a category with a long and distinctive pedigree in anthropology. One could, for example, take an event as a chancy occurrence to be explained in a historical (or mythopractical context). Alternatively, one could consider an event as an image, an (ethnographic) effect, and reflect on what it conceals and contains. Each image-event could then appear as a succession of forms and displacements, a series of substitutions (and performances) where time is not chronological but organic, since an image is capable to presentify past and future at once. And since performance is dual, one needs another perspective and gaze to be capable to see what an image-event contains and cut the analogical flows of the happenings which could be imaginatively associated. A good witness, then, would be a master of cutting and extractingand seeing, a by-product of an extractive economy, since images are reified and produced in order to be consumed. Still, one can consume an event and all relationships embedded within it only by seeing things properly. The trick, though, is that a sender / producer can make an image to be seen properly only by eliciting in a recipient / consumer a particular level of attention. In other words, by wearing a mask or depicting oneself, one wants to elicit a specific response by an ideal observer, and one does this by catching the observer by surprise, by making him wonder. Gavagai! shouts the native to Quines (1960) puzzled imaginary ethnographer when a rabbit runs through the grass,
1

1. I here refer readers to Copeman and Street (in press) where the idiom of surprise in the work of Marilyn Strathern is expounded brilliantly.

Giovanni DA COL

pointing the ethnographers attention to an image that can be extracted as either a substance [Yet which? Rabbit? Grass?] or an event. See me properly! thinks the Hagener. What comes after is best described by Strathern in her own words. What the ethnographerand the Hagenerdraw upon is:
an emotional pause, a sense of amazement or surprise, a small shock, disappointment or even a sensation of self-dislike, but in any event an unexpected openness of sensibility. It is that openness of sensibility that often creates the conditions of cathexis, that is, of how the subject (the fieldworker) connects with or identifies withrecognisesan issue or concern of significance. So it suddenly seems that this [issue or concern] is a key to everything elseif this could be resolved or understood then others things would fall into place too! (Strathern 2010: 80)

Or elsewhere, in one of her seminal methodological pieces:

But the point is that the development of the idea cannot simply be attributed to the nature of the societies being studied. They cannot be the only source of the metaphoric power of the images, that is why certain associations appear essential, intrinsic, why it would be unthinkable not to consider the kula a species of gift exchange. That sense of having uncovered what is distinctive about a particular region lies also in the manner in which anthropological ideas are organized. I suggest that instances of cathexis are created at moments when the invention of concepts in local ethnographic contexts re-arranges conceived notions, thus bouncing back off the assumptions which inform metropolitan theory. Very often this takes the form of a negation or inversion of a relationship between familiar terms. As we know, Mauss original impetus was a critique of utilitarian morality. Such invention simultaneously makes re-arrangement possible by creating an externalizing referent: the new ideas are seen to have their source elsewhere, embedded in a context intrinsic to them. (Strathern 1990b: 205, emphasis added)

The candid lectures that follow illustrate (with the help of beautiful images, yet within the limitations of the written word) the Melanesian extractive economy of wonder. We should not be jolted that Strathern decided to employ wonder as method. Wonder is not another example of gobbledygook like affective entanglements or other uncanny or unformed objects spawned by the Postmodernism Generator; rather, it upholds quite a distinctive and vibrant intellectual tradition. (Indeed, Lorraine Daston and Katherine Parks Wonders

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and the order of nature, 11501750 would be a nice companion to this Masterclass.) On its own merit, the term could be a subject of investigation like mana or soul: wonder (Fr. ladmiration) was a passion eventually disposed of by Rene Descartes (1649), who, like Eco, was afraid of its excess (lestonnement). Yet famed is the Platonic observation that philosophy is grounded in wonder (thaumazein). Jacques Le Goffs (1985) brilliant analysis of the medieval imagination shows how mirabiliathe marvelousin time became an analytical category that the Christian orthodoxy employed to tame and contain the unpredictable and alien, along with another containing strategy named aestheticization. Or, consider Francis Bacon, who called for a substantial and severe collection of the heteroclites or irregulars of Nature, well examined and described (1605: II, 1.3), an intimation saluted by the Wunderkammer, the Stranger-cabinet which emerged in the mid-sixteenth century to contain and relate the most wondrous of all objects.
Thus where many have found difficulty in ascertaining the tenor or intent of Marilyn Stratherns writing in masterpieces like The gender of the gift (1988) or Partial connections (1991), most have also missed this strategy of the wondrous, which aims to re-produce that isomorphism that happens in dances or other aesthetic performances: that moment of enchantment, which holds the fieldworker captive. Alfred Gell (1992) has indeed named enchantment that halo-effect produced by anything that appears as being beyond the capacity of apprehension of an individual and requires recourse to a network of intentionalities, a collective. Recalling Georg Simmel, Gell notes that value is a function of resistance which one must overcome in order to gain access to an object. Thus, if one assumes that production could be achieved by either technical activity or work and magic, then the two means of production operate conterminously in a sort of figure-ground reversal, where magic is the negative contour of work, or technical competence; in other words, magic obliterates the difficulties and hazards entailed by technical activity (1992: 58). Thus, in Melanesian gardening, magic constitutes the ideal cum occult technology (concealed, disguised, veiled) which guarantees effortless production. Marilyn Strathern is the Mistress of Enchantment in such inception, yet what she does is not a theorysensu strictobut a series of mental tricks to make relations visible, to illustrate by

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juxtapositions how people (Melanesians, for example) make themselves explicitlyand dazzlinglyvisible. It is a cosmoeconomics which sees images as condensed meanings, as events which have to be consumed and produced properly. Ultimately, the medium of the message is involved in the production of the proper image-event. I always thought Strathern felt a sense of inadequacy with the written word and her reception, and one of the reasons she enjoyed these lectures was the opportunity to produce wonder by a succession of images. She seemed at home with her slides. In that dark seminar room in Free School Lane she could finally perform her magic of juxtaposition. Whereas some have mistaken Stratherns method of wonder for opacity (yet another characteristic of the Melanesian mind), others may have missed that her work also reveals a nifty exercise in topology: the conception that discrete and detached entities may remain nonetheless continuous and entangled, a geometry where shapes and forms maintain their essential properties and substance even if stretched and contorted. In Stratherns Wunderkammer, the environment is within, relations do not join but separate, ones own storage is external, the contained overhauls the container, a child grows the mother, one hides in order to show. But Stratherns fascination for conceptual and spatial topologies is not novel: it pays homage to a neglected tradition of ethnographic theory that untimely anticipated the more famous Lacanian and Deleuzian post-structuralist concerns for knots, planes, and lines of flight. Besides Gregory Batesons plateaus and Roy Wagners fractal person, memorable examples are Edmund Leachs (1961) Malinowski lecture where the linear logic of kinship is questioned not through the regularities of genealogical patterns but via a neighborhood system of controlled and uncontrolled mystical influences and forces. A society is not an assemblage of things but an assemblage of variables, Leach writes, analogical to topology. . . . If I have a rubber sheet and draw a series of lines on it to symbolize the functional interconnections of some set of social phenomena and I then start stretching the rubber about, I can change the manifest shape of my original geometrical figure out of all recognition and yet clearly there is a sense in which it is the same figure all the time (Leach 1961: 7). Topology returns in the spatial metamorphosis and inversions of Lvi-Strauss Petite mythologiques:

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from the reversal enacted by the construct of the house which puts two into one, replacing internal duality with external unity ([1975] 1982: 184), to the containers of The jealous potter ([1985] 1988), where the maker-cause of a craft is transformed into her product and the canonical formulas of myth leaves place to the image of the Klein bottlea container where one cannot determine whether a point is located inside or outside. Like the Klein bottle, the distorted nature / culture perplex, like the interfacing of the two genders, has neither an inside nor an outside, or rather, depending on ones point of view, it is all inside and outside and nothing else. Similarly, the Strathern Bottle tries to incorporate both the Ego and the Alter, to bifurcate identity and otherness contemporaneously, to show how and why holding two perspectives at once is all that matters: like the images of production and consumption, society and individuals happen at the same time, they entail each other simultaneously. These apparent wondrousparadoxes also ground Aristotles notion of education as entertainment, for what he meant by that much-abused term is that the teacher entertains her students by confronting them with propositions that they can neither accept or reject, and then inviting them to play with them. By entertaining her readers in this ludic dimension, Strathern teaches wonder. Hence the double-edged intrigue of the Strathern bottlewhat we could call the uncertainty principle of anthropology. How does one enter a Strathern bottle, an object for which one hardly knows where to find oneself on the inside or the outside of a native? How can an ethnographic topology contribute to debates in social theory? How can wonder become a methodology to account for alterity?
2

Proceed, oh reader, to enter with us into the Strathern Bottle.

II
Learning to see in Melanesia unfolds as a kaleidoscope, a linking of vision to sociality, image to the social imagination, symbol to object, and object to praxis. Lecture one, Feathers and shells: Learning to see, sets the tone for the Masterclass by moving between contexts (the photographer's gallery, ritual performances, the anthropological setting)and, indeed, questioning the very analytic value of
2. I should very much thank Roy Wagner for this insight.

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context itselfin order to think through the paradoxes of how Melanesian persons can be concealed and revealed, exposed and hidden, at once. The emphasis on Mt. Hagen in this lecture will remind attentive readers of the authors early work on self-decoration among Hagenersand, no doubt, will provoke new interpretations and questions. Lecture two, Axes and canoes: Traveling objects, follows the visual and social life of artifacts out into the broader Melanesian world, raising further questions about objectification, perspective, witness, appearance, stasis, flow, and spectatorship for a Strathernian visual theory. Lecture three, Netbags and masks: Containers, continues to explore the visual qualia of artifacts, but now turns to Mt. Ok and Sepik (among other places) in order to focus on a specific genre of objects: those that contain (or hold, leak, or limit) social relations. Lecture four, Wig / shell / tree: Hiding forms, circles back to the questions of concealment and revelation discussed in Lecture one. By the end, the reader not only has a dynamic visual theorya living illustration, both indigenous and anthropologicalbut also a vision of personhood, objectification, and even cosmology. We also include three appendices in this Masterclass. These are reprints of classic articles that represent some of the authors more public disseminations of ideas that developed in tandem with this lecture series. While remaining grounded in Melanesian ethnography, each essay takes up themes of general and comparative anthropological interest. Appendix one, Artifacts of history: Events and the interpretation of images, raises questions of temporality, materiality, the nature of events, and the historical imagination. Appendix two, Social relations and the idea of externality, showcases the authors topological engagement with archaeology and material culture, further developing concepts of symbolic storage, containership, and the social topologies of interiority and exteriority, built out of (and in relations between) objects and persons. The final appendix, Environments within: An ethnographic commentary on scale, is a compendium to the former essay and closes the Masterclass with an exquisite discussion of scale change, unpredictability, landscape, and the meaning of context and environment. In toto and in wonder, the volume teaches us not only how to see in Melanesia, but how to see anthropology anew.

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Acknowledgements
I wish to express the deepest gratitude to Marilyn Strathern for accepting HAUs invitation and the challenge to put into writing her imagistic lectures. This volume would not be possible without her unparalled diligence in meeting deadlines, her child-like enthusiasm and intellectual passion, her generosity and unceasing support for the development of the discipline and HAUs work. One might think that often eminence is accompanied by pride or evasiveness, yet Marilyn has been our most humble and dedicated author. I should also very much like to thank two persons, without whom this volume would not be possible: Sean Dowdy, who unfailingly coordinated and fine-tuned all stages of the production, and Philip Swift, who patiently set himself on a long quest for retrieving permissions and gathering all images. As ever, Stphane Gros and the rest of the Editorial Team were a trusted and reliable source of advice and support: thank you. An article with the same title as this preface, and co-authored by Roy Wagner, was originally meant to be included in Social theory after Strathern, a forthcoming special issue of Theory, Culture and Society, edited by Jacob Copeman and Alice Street, whom I thank deeply for their friendship and inspiration. We missed the deadline and the article never came to light, but I owe my gratitude to Roy for some dazzling reflections on the structure of jokes and the pedagogical role of entertainment.

References
Bacon, Francis. (1605) 1888. The advancement of learning. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Borges, Jorge Luis. (1942) 2000. Labyrinths. Translated by James E. Irbry. London: Penguin. Copeman, Jacob and Alice Street. (in press). Introduction: Social theory after Strathern. Special Issue of Theory, Culture & Society. Daston, Lorraine and Katherine Park. 2001. Wonders and the order of nature, 11501750. New York: Zone Books. Descartes, Rene. (1649) 1989. The passions of the soul. Translated by Stephen H. Voss. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.

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Eco, Umberto. 1988. An ars oblivionalis? Forget it! Translated by Marilyn Migiel. PMLA 103 (3): 25461. Eco, Umberto. 1992. Interpretation and overinterpretation. Edited by Stefan Collini. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gell, Alfred. 1992. The technology of enchantment and the enchantment of technology. In Anthropology, art and aesthetics, edited by Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton, 4066. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Leach, Edmund. 1961. Rethinking anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Le Goff, Jacques. (1985) 1988. The medieval imagination. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lvi-Strauss, Claude. (1975) 1982. The way of the masks. Translated by Sylvia Modelski. Seattle: University of Washington Press. . (1985) 1988. The jealous potter. Translated by Benedicte Chorier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Quine, W. V. O. 1960. Word and object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The gender of the gift: Problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. . 1990a. Artifacts in history: Events and the interpretation of images. In Culture and history in the Pacific, edited by Jukka Siikala, 2544. Helsinki: Transactions of the Finnish Anthropological Society. [See Appendix I, this volume.] . 1990b. Negative strategies. In Localizing traditions, edited by R. Fardon, 20416. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. . (1991) 2004. Partial connections. Updated edition. Walnut Creek: Altamira. . 1999. Property, substance and effect: Anthropological essays on persons and things. London: Athlone Press. Wagner, Roy. 1977. Analogic kinship: A Daribi example. American Ethnologist 4: 62342.

L ECTURER S L EARNING

INTRODUCTION :

TO SEE IN

M ELANESIA

Up to a point, the longer one lives or works, the more one knows, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the more knowing one has done, the more occasions there have been when one is aware that some piece of knowledge has become displaced by another. The facility for displacement is at the heart of the imaginative life. (There is a point, indeed, to learning it!) Yet there always remain comprehensionsideas, understandings, concepts, interpretationsthat are hard 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 as prejudices. The oscillation between what stays in place and what shifts and 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 an attempt to make that oscillation evident, playing offas different possibilities for knowingwhat we think we see against what we might be seeing, 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 masters students 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

MARILYN STRATHERN

on the Work of the Museum. Whereas other lectures were constantly changing, Learning to see in Melanesia more or less kept the form that is presented here. Given the multiple lives that Ialong with colleagues and students of coursewas leading, they became for me a moment to catch breath, to pause at a specific ethnographic / theoretical 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.

Preliminary comments to the present lectures

The questions that time fails to wash away arise from the particulars of inquiry. However erroneously or awkwardly the particulars are framed, the prompt for every description is what it is that requires describing. That relation is as fundamental to the didactic or pedagogic enterprise as it is to the whole descriptive enterprise of academia. Description includes explanation, and sometimes explanations 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. On the contrary they (the anthropologists) may take pains to convey what interested them in the first place and made them see a puzzle. Among the filaments that connected me to the issues captured in these lectures was that they enabled a demonstration of the
2

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 an undergraduate or masters student would sit in any one year. It would be rare for a course (a paper) to be given by one person; courses were generally composed 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 to be offered as part of a course, and a half unit of four not uncommon. From the students point of view, lectures were supplemented by seminars and supervisions [tutorials], which demanded constant essay writing.) 2. One of Wagners favorite quotations refers to the anthropologist wanting to be figure and ground at the same time (see, for example, Wagner 2011).

LECTURERS INTRODUCTION

consequent entailment: even if one made a terrible hash of interpretation one could show that there were issues demanding exploration. The puzzles would outreach attempts to grasp them. In a way (the conversation 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, to framing, theory, explanation. Many of the photographs that accompanied these lectures were proxy for textual immersionhowever fleetingly, the image occupied the whole screen. There was another match, that is, between these specific lectures and what a teacher in anthropology might hope was a truism for their students. 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 be of other times. Whereas problems and issues in the present have the self-evident character of current concerns, past puzzles are illuminating precisely because they cannot conceal their contingent or assembled character. Any temporal / cultural moment is ripe for such attention, regardless of what happens(ed) subsequently, and anthropologists disparage their own capacities for response on the occasions when they insist that interest in a phenomenon lies primarily in its relevance to what is perceived as the present. There are very good reasons why a specifically social anthropology, and its always rejuvenated 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 contemporary going-on diverse epochs, venues, conjunctures, and assemblages from all kinds of passages of social life. The photographs were not just illustrativethey were also up on the screen in the here and now in your face.
3

There is a consequence to this. It is to do with how we problematize present-day concerns. There is no dearth of imaginings here, though, as often as not, present-day problems take the form of a crisis of some sort. We might be thinking of the forced relocation of populations; of the twin mirrors of cosmopolitanism and global3. With a nod to Paul Rabinow (2008).

MARILYN STRATHERN

ization; of the pressing interests of an era of financialization that cuts across everything in its computations of personal and material value; of the desperate ubiquity of violence, witting and unwitting; of unprecedented 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 illusion derives from specific knowledge practices that focus on measuring the relevance 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 in practices that seem to have no bearing on them. However, conceptualization is also itself an issue, that is, the very way in which problems are set up or concerns are analyzed or otherwise comprehended depends crucially on the concepts they mobilize. As an alternative open to it, anthropology might do well to reflect on another face to this: on the idea that it is instead the faculty of conceptualization that everyone shares, and it is bound to be directed towards quite different and diverse concerns. In retrospect, the lectures might belong here. In any event, it is surely a truism that there is huge diversity in the puzzles that people make for themselves.
4

Catching breath. In the midst of diversions elsewhere, these lectures brought me again and again to Melanesia, and particularly to Papua New Guinea, at a certain moment in time, yet to what I can only describe as a depth of intellectual refreshment. The phrase good to think with has become a familiar companion to many and in many circumstances. However, I would like to give to that good something close to an ethical connotation. It made of me a good person to be thinking through the materials that have been so richly reported from that country. It felt as though I was using my brain appropriately. It also felt that I was properly acknowledging the life of
5 6

4. To paraphrase Viveiros de Castro (2003) 5. It should be said that many of them are materials that, following the establishment 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

LECTURERS INTRODUCTION

relationships; certainly they reminded me that there was something still, and always, owed. The last occasion on which the lectures were given, as a free-standing set, they were dedicated to acquaintances in Mt. Hagen. However, from another point of view, the inadequacy of such an acknowledgement is patent: I am afraid that the acknowledgement will have to stand in for the personal credits due to many of the people who feature in the photographs that follow. And the puzzles to which I referred? Well, what is it that one sees?

Notes for the reader

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, I do not take the opportunity of potentially limitless space to expand them now (in truth, that would only expand the constraint). Rather, I have kept more or less to what was spoken in an hour and, more or less, 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 the elucidation to materials from Melanesia, the lectures opened wide the question of how to convey enough of sufficient breadth for those who knew little of the area, in order to develop arguments in at least some detail. 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 requiring the self-authentication of impacts. I say self-authentication since although impacts are supposedly all about the effects of research on definable others, they give academic work a credibility that may have little to do with its scholarship or contribution to a discipline and much more to do with practices of verification and presentation peculiar to the audit world. The students would not have had much sense of all that, but they would be able to seeby its apparent 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 things how one argues, how writers organize their material, how to address assumptions, how indebted anthropologists are to their interlocutors, and so on, as a matter of nothing more, and nothing less, than the apparatus of intellectual training.

MARILYN STRATHERN

as much as attending to what was ostensibly foregrounded. Yet the lectures, in a way, took overand I think, had I articulated it at the end, I might then have suggested that the puzzle is not (only) what we need to know about the background, but how to see what to the EuroAmerican observer would appear as the very foreground. At the time I thought of this in simple terms as a matter of an ongoing dialogue with colleagues and the manner in which Melanesian materials found their way into the anthropological record, and in less obvious terms as a matter of dialogue with those who cannot see beyond feathers and paint. The initial point was that there was a background to be understood in relation to that state of cannot-see too. (I paid some attention to this in the first lecture, drawing on a photographers magnificent pictorial record, which had its own rationale but is here deployed very much for my own purposes; in the light of the comments on phenomena that outrun our grasp of them, I hope the pictorial images have lost none of their stature thereby.) I am 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. We could say that people not familiar with Melanesia do not know what they are seeing when they see a painted person decked out in feathers, 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. The issue of showing anything to be seen then becomes that of displacement: substituting one impression for another. Perhaps something not dissimilar to this motivates Melanesian display. So it seemed that maybe a way forward would be to contrive something not unlike Melanesians inveterate play on concealment and revelation. This would be in order to build some places 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 their eyes.
7

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. Much more so than a listener, an anthropological reader is of course used to seeing 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).

LECTURERS INTRODUCTION

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 on the material. This is not with any intent to hide anyones authorship, or the dispersed authorship of countless anthropological disquisitions for that matter, or the bias or controversy in the nature of the selections I made; it was a contrivance on my part to try to make the images do (some of) the work (of exposition). One consequence is that ordinary rules of exposition are truncated, in places drastically. 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 this introduction commented that there was an implicit analogy between two 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 the confined way these lectures were prepared for listeners and the potentialities that texts normally have for readers.
8

At the same time, the visual presentation of the images had their limitation, or rather, one may say they perpetually recreated the problem that I began with. I hoped for those following the oral lectures that the sequence of images on occasion illuminated switches in the way one might see things, but that of course depended on a temporal sequence that the reader of a text can ignore. However, the observation to make here is that the images (photographs by and large, some drawings and diagrams, but all static) repeatedly bring the viewer back to some kind of original standpoint. Whatever the subject, 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 man transformed, or is a man in the form (say) of a tree, or that it is the colors, not the feathers, that matter. It is as though an initial view, already taken, has to be dislodged, always again, each time. And the dislodging comes through another idiom (the verbal interpretation), as a 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 the lectures that refers to the construction of knowledgeknowledge was occupying a space more like that of a signpost than an argument.

MARILYN STRATHERN

built up through a sustained text, one that creates its own context, can sustain 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 textual origin. This was in Anthony Forges description of how boys and men from Abelam, Papua New Guinea, acquire expectations about what they will see in flat, two-dimensional paintings displayed on the elevated faades of ceremonial houses. One outcome was their inability to interpret other two-dimensional images (as in photographs) outside the orbit of such paintings, for everything else would be threedimensional. It would have been wonderful to match his insights for the 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. However, the learning in my own title referred more to the student of anthropology than to participants on the spot. My eye was always on how 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 interpretation of particular images than how to make oneself (as the observer, ethnographer, student) open to apprehending (some of) the effects such images might have. Anthony Forge (1970: 290) said as much in his concluding sentence: One of the main functions of the initiation system 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 he may consciously interpret it but so he is directly affected by it.
9

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 humorous / 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.

LECTURERS INTRODUCTION

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

10

* * *
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 referents than the English term. As across the Western Highlands, Hagen men wore bustles 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 substance look a little like the tall grass from which thatch is made for houses. Maureen Mackenzie (1990) refers to grass skirts in Telefolmin, worn by girls and women (see Lecture Three). There are other examples, although it should also be said that string skirts woven from bark or other fiber might have the appearance of grass from a distance.]

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Original outline and reading list for the course

[Original rubric.] These lectures take up a number of artifacts for examination and theorization; they are ones specifically made to be seen. Euro-Americans often point to the construction of knowledge when they say they see things. But what about other visual intentions? Here the lectures have an identifiable set of coordinates in space and time: material drawn from one ethnographic region (Melanesia), and from ethnographies produced at about the same time together (1970s80s), enable one to build up an appreciation of a visual theory that challenges certain enduring Euro-American preconceptions.
11

(1) FEATHERS AND SHELLS: Learning to see. How do we know what we see? Ceremonial exchange and the possibility of an indigenous 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 Marilyn Strathern, 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.

LECTURERS INTRODUCTION

11

. 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: 241 57. . 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) AXES AND CANOES: Traveling objects. Ideas of mobility and fixity 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 Sabarl mortuary 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 and revelation 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) NETBAGS AND MASKS: Containers. Persons inside other persons. 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 Monographs No. 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.]

LECTURERS INTRODUCTION

13

Werbner, Richard. 1989. Ritual passage, sacred journey: The process and organization of religious movement. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian 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: Smithsonian Institution Press. [Umeda]

Compare:
Hauser-Schublin, Brigitta. 1996. The thrill of the line, the string, and the 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: Duke University Press. [New Ireland]

(4) WIG / SHELL / TREE: Hiding forms. Multiple forms, ambiguous 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 Southern Highlands 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 and the 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. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(1): 535 42] . 1986. Asiwinarong: Ethos, image and social power among the Usen Barok of New Ireland. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [See esp., 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 interpretation of Rawa shell valuable symbolism. American Ethnologist 23 (2): 393415. [Rawa] Demian, Melissa. 2004. Seeing, knowing, owning: Property claims as revelatory acts. In Transactions and creations: Property debates and the stimulus of Melanesia, edited by Eric Hirsch and Marilyn Strathern, 6082. Oxford: Berghahn. [Suau, Massim]

Additional bibliography
Conklin, Beth. 1997. Body paint, feathers, and vcrs: Aesthetics and authenticity 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 as art: 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.

L ECTURER S A CKNOW LEDGMENTS

While I add my personal gratitude to all the publishers, and in some cases authors, who have so kindly allowed illustrations to be reproduced here, I must reserve special thanks for Malcolm Kirk for his generosity in sharing his images; he brings from the art world a quite distinctive 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, fine as many are. In thanking the HAU team for their splendid work, I am particularly grateful to the contribution that Phil Swift and Sean Dowdy have made to the presence and presentation of the reproductions and to the flow of the text. The team at HAU who have given so generously of their time and expertise include Davide Casciano (IT and website); Sean Dowdy (copyediting and layout); Stphane Gros (technical supervision); Teodora Hasegan (proofreading); Randolph Mamo (cover and imagerelated work) and Philip Swift (copyright and permission work, imagerelated work). My gratitude to them all, and to Giovanni da Col for the invitation to publish these lectures in the HAU 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 have contributed to these lectures. Perhaps I can also acknowledge here the generations of students without whose interest they would not have been given.

A CKNOW LEDGMENTS

TO PUBLISHERS

AND AUTHORS

Figures 111, 16, and 68. From Kirk, Malcom. 1981. Man as art, New York: Viking Press. Photographs: Malcom Kirk. Malcolm Kirk. Reproduced with permission of the author. Figures 1215, 1739, 42, 43, 60, 67, and 81. Photographs: Marilyn Strathern. 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 reproduction of copyrighted images. HAU would be very glad to hear from any copyright holders not acknowledged herein.

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Figure 46. From Scoditti, Giancarlo G. 1980. Fragmenta ethnographica. 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 with publishers permission. Figure 51. From Figure 5, Diagram of the measured view. Drawn by Carolyn Van Lang, in Starn, Randolph. 1989. Seeing Culture in a Room for a Renaissance Prince. In The new cultural history, edited by Lynn Hunt, 20534. Berkeley: University of California Press. by the Regents of the University of California. Reproduced with publishers 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 understand some Malagans. In Assemblage of spirits: Idea and image in New Ireland, edited by Louise Lincoln, 4255. Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute 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.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS TO PUBLISHERS AND AUTHORS

19

Figures 6466. From Gell, Alfred. 1975. Metamorphosis of the cassowaries: Umeda society, language, and ritual. London: Athlone Press. 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 with permission 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): 309 39. Reproduced with publishers permission. Figures 74 and 75. From Roy 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 / 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. Steven Feld. Reproduced with permission of the author. Figure 78. From Gillison, Gillian. 1980. Images of nature in Gimi thought. In Nature, culture and gender, edited by Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern, 14373. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Photograph: David Gillison. Reproduced with publishers permission. Figures 79 and 80. From Nilsson, Lennart. 1990. A child is born. New York and London: Doubleday. Reproduced with publishers permission.

1 Feathers and shells: Learning to see

There is no deep meaning to my choosing this topic [Learning to see]. On the contrary, far from being of central interest to my work, visual material has always been to the side. But peripheral vision can be very powerfulthe half-glimpsed, the half-grasped, continues to hold possibilities for exploration. I am sure you have all experienced what happens when you focus intently on something: it somehow dissipates, disintegrates through inspection. As when you want to define something in order to write an essaywhat you thought was such a solid idea dissolves the longer you pay attention to it. The power of the lateral thought, by contrast, is its constancy. The sidelong image remains as it was first glimpsed, before it comes into focus. So what I am presenting now hasnt been the subject of deep thought or great theoretical attention on my part. Rather, I present you an accumulation of glimpses. But they hold themselves in my peripheral vision because of the way they color, or make visibly present, aspects of social life in Melanesia. They are not alienthey just catch things from the side, and continue to make the Melanesian material fascinating. One of the most significant ways of paying ethnographic respect is for the anthropologist to create as interesting other peoples concerns, other peoples agendas, so that they hold our attention. I dont take lightly the task of making material fascinating: it is a form of engagement open to us as academics and scholars. There is something else. These lectures are heavily dependent on images. I just like looking at these pictures. Not so much for the personal memories summoned by some of them, which cant be shared, as for a reminder of the intimacy and intensity of peoples presence, howThis work is licensed under the Creative Commons | Marilyn Strathern Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. Strathern, Marilyn. 2013. Learning to see in Melanesia. Masterclass Series 2. Manchester: HAU Society for Ethnographic Theory.

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ever distortedor reperceivedthey are by time and by the medium. You may or may not be aware of the direction of the distortions, but perhaps they may touch intimate moments you have known also. Finally, if anthropologists really have been developing a relatively coherent account of Melanesian society, then any particular part should [be able to] generate the whole. This is why the materials are set in a certain time frame: it gives something of a coherence to anthropological approaches.

Preamble
The part of Melanesia addressed here is Papua New Guinea. The area is interesting because it has been anthropological convention that while some places in Papua New Guinea have a lot of art others have none at all! Or at least as is recognizable in art objectssculptures, painting, carving, figures, architecture, and so forth. And, as you will see, I am going to start with somewhere that apparently does not. In a way, this was addressed by Alfred Gell in Art and agency (1998). Insofar as he was inspired by Melanesia, we might ask what we need to know about Melanesia [in order] to understand his arguments? What were the problems to which his book was the answer? Two are relevant to present purposes. [Added note: These lectures were initially assembled before his book was published. I do not go into his brilliantly executed arguments about art objects as social agents, and art as a system of action, although the schema he develops would be more than applicable to the materials that follow. As the commentary on the two problems shows, immediately below, my own trajectory is a quite different one.] I. One problem: the way that the anthropology of art has been treated as different from the rest of anthropology. If social anthropology is the study of relationshipsis about persons and relationsthen it encompasses objects (things) to the extent that objects mediate social interactions, for example [my example] jewelry handed over in bridewealth in the context of marriage arrangements between kin groups. The anthropology of art, on the other hand, has always been about art objects, and about persons and relations insofar as persons are the transactors and producers of these objectsi.e.,

LEARNING TO SEE IN MELANESIA | LECTURE ONE

23

persons stand to them in relation of creator, artist, spectator, trader, and so forth. [Neither is satisfactory. Indeed, in respect of the first position] in mainstream anthropology generally what has happened is that the objects have seemed incidental to the social relations or the society, and much analysis proceeds simply by putting these art objects into their social context. A more sophisticated version of this is that in these objects we can see social roles, cultural values. . . . But that is part of the problem. When we put these items back into their social contextwhen the jewelry is thought of again as bridewealthas anthropologists what we see is the social value: we dont see the jewelry. What Gell wants to do is treat objects the way an anthropologist will treat anything else, and thus produce a specifically anthropological theory of art to account for the relations entailed in the effect that such items have on the world. And to do so in such a way that we do not lose sight of those objects, so that they retain their centrality. Often such objects are thought of as things or artifacts. I have taken this admonition very literally in these lectures. Each lecture is keyed into a particular set of artifactsfeathers, shells, canoes, houses, trees, netbags, axes, wigs. As we find, however, many of them point to other objects that do not take the form of things at all. The problem we thought we began with, art or art objects in relation to society, evaporates. If we are to retain the centrality of objects they have to appear as rather more than things or artifacts or art. At the same time, to retain some continuity with the starting problem (art objects) we might find ourselves more interested in some areas of social practice than others. My premise is that what we [ordinarily] separate off as artifacts are the outcomes of aesthetic and social practices that get to the core of [give us a glimpse of] Melanesian sociality, through devices of concealment and revelation that draw attention to items made to be seen. II. The second problem is an implicit one in Gells book. Sight and seeing are common Euro-American metaphors for knowledge. Gell says he is interested specifically in visual art: but what is involved in seeing something? We exhibit art objects because they are visible [or otherwise available to the senses], and indeed make artifacts visible by exhibiting them. Gell argues that it is museums and art galleries that make art

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objects visible insofar as these (museums, galleries, etc.) incorporate certain (Euro-American) traditions in ways of seeing. However, anthropologists may be with people who deliberately make things with detailed attention to their visual aspect and then hide them [from being seen]. Rita Astutis 1994 article is called Invisible objects; the context is a mortuary ritual carried out by the Vezo of Madagascar. Large wooden sculptures are put up on the edge of cemeteriesstriking to the observer [although when she was there in 198789 they were no longer being made]. But, in fact, these apparent monuments are not meant to be seen; the cemetery is hidden in the forest, and the sculptures are supposed to be hidden to the eye. People keep away from them. They separate the living from the dead. Astuti then asks how the anthropologist is supposed to look at these sculpturesand answers the question by saying that we should not look at the objects as items on display but look at the work that goes into making them, that is, all the ritual activity that makes their making necessary. In other words, look at the sculptures (so to speak) and draw out of them what went into their making: [they are part of] working for the dead as a way of giving them [the dead] pleasure, making them happy and keeping them away from the living. In that making, visual contact was essential. But the Vezo dont want to go on looking at the objects afterward; once they have made the ancestors happy by all their work, [visual contact is disrupted and] they can forget them. The results of that work are appropriately kept out of sight. So there are traditions in ways of seeing. Manipulating what is and is not visible [like the specific stipulation that people should keep away from these Vezo sculptures and not see themthe negative prohibition] is itself a productive and a social process. Seeing is regarded as an activity. [And this turns out to be true of Melanesia too.] Indeed, in some cases seeingby an audiencebecomes part of the work that goes into the production of artifacts. All this will become clearer as we go. For now, you should appreciate that what I want to do is convey for one part of the world (that is, Melanesia) what an indigenous visual theory might look like. [Added note: I use theory as a provocation for taking seriously what we might otherwise take for granted, an inflection more easily handled orally than in writing.] An indigenous visual theory? It turns out to be a theory of practice, programs or recipes for action. We shall find ourselves needing to

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confront notions of personhood, affect, power. We may even find ourselves looking at what we could call social technology, technologies of the self that are technologies of relationships. For Papua New Guinea I shall thus focus on what people do make to be seen, and ask: When people display objects, artifacts, and so forth precisely as things to be displayed, what invitation are they making, what is behind the invitation to the audience to see? If Vezo make in order to conceal, Melanesians often make in order to reveal. Yet, obviously, each act also contains the other: Vezo mortuary statues are seen before they are hidden away, while in the Papua New Guinea case I start with, there is constant play both on alternation between display and non-display and on what display conceals as well as reveals. Papua New Guinean societies allow enough continuities in basic local assumptions about social action, across diverse instances, for me to generalize about Melanesian premises in social relationsindeed, enough continuities in visual practices to be able to draw from four or five different regions and still be addressing a common phenomenon. As noted [see original outline in the Introduction], the materials come from a specific time frame, from works written primarily in the 1970s and 1980s and drawing in places on observations from the 1960s. There is a further coherence to this time frame in that these instances present the kinds of material that fed into Gells book; although that ranged far more widely than Melanesia, these would have been among those he had in mind. In each location, we have to rely on the anthropologists exegesis of specific circumstances. I offset that with reference to some of the visual assumptions that we find emanating from the culture that creates visible objects by putting them in galleries and museums [or displaying them in books]. So let me first expand on certain assumptions in the EuroAmerican tradition, as they were articulated by one proponent in the middle of this period (1981).

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The photographers gallery

The portrait photographer Malcolm Kirk is deliberate about the works he displays. One of his most famous productions uses a series of images from Papua New Guinea in order to illustrate a thesis about man as art. So we start off from the assumption that this is a paradox, that is, the provocation in the title is the idea that man is not ordinarily to be thought of as art, anymore than in this EuroAmerican way of thinking persons are things. As we shall see, the Melanesian ethnography raises some questions about the way people objectify themselves, turn themselves into objects to be seen by others; even in areas where people do not produce art in the conventional sense, they do produce aesthetic objects. Anyway, Kirks wonderful photographs are good for our purposes since they come from Papua New Guinea. And implicit in his imaging is an indigenous visual theory [my words], in this case a Euro-American one. It is not a theory about social action, though, but a theory about where one stands in relation to what is seen, a theory about perspective if you like. Kirk is interested in what these people do to their bodies, and the way they make the body into what he calls an art formin other words, an object of contemplation capable of evoking an aesthetic response. [T]he human form can become art, and may indeed have been mankinds original work of art, stirring emotions similar to those we experience when confronted by any other art form (Kirk 1981: 9, note omitted). He goes on:
If costume was originally designed to replace the natural fur that once protected us against the elements, people must have quickly understood it had a potential to be more than this. By shrouding the human body, clothing disguises our exposed, vulnerable selves, and elevates the way we feel (ibid.: 10).

Costume, he says, masks not only our bodies but also our inhibitions and raw natures (ibid.). In other words, costume is something that is added to the body in the sense of encasing, enclosing, concealing the naked form beneath. More than that, it can be transformativeit instills a sense of potency in the wearer, it can fashion gods out of mortals [his phrasing]. We can thus regard costume as work of art. But we also have here a Euro-American model of the person: costume is like the

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roles that people put on over their raw nature. Indeed, as we shall see, this model of the person dominates the photography and is integral to what I suggest is his theory of perspective. Now, when Kirk refers to art he means their art, that is, he is imputing to the subjects of his portraits the recognitionin their costumes and thus in the human formof aesthetic objects, which call forth emotions. He says that when people [non-Papua New Guineans implied] see the pictures, they often exclaim What fabulous photos, and he (Kirk) has to correct them and say, No, what fabulous images (ibid.: 9). In other words, he is trying to portray the artistry as theirs [his sitters]. My own contribution has been simply to record what exists (ibid.)he strives for a plain, realistic photography in order to let the images speak for themselves. So here we have an indigenous person, a Euro-American, talking about his own aesthetic practice: he is going to reveal the beauty and complexity of the costumes / body forms of these people from Papua New Guinea, plainly, denying his own artistry. Yet his verbal statements [they come from a brief Foreword] about what he is doing are on occasion at odds with my perceptions of what he has done. Or rather, what he has done is show Papua New Guinean peoples artistry as it might look if we were looking for Papua New Guinean artistry via Euro-American conventions. [Added note: It should be clear that I am making a didactic point, not a criticism of Kirk. Exactly what has just been said could be said of much anthropological writingincluding my ownas, for example, when the anthropologist lays out what Papua New Guinean concepts of social relations might be as though Papua New Guineans entertained such a concept. Introducing the photographic observer in this way is, it will become evident, a prelude to setting up another indigenous EuroAmerican, namely the anthropological observer, on whom, before the end of this first lecture, I spring a surprise.] Let us ask what simply exists. We are shown costumes, and costumes as clothing people, in other words, covering up their inner natures: clothing disguises. [There are several] Euro-American assumptions here: (a) that people have the kind of sense of a whole style that one might impute to a costume; (b) that the decorations these people put on are like clothing that covers; (c) that covering the body conceals the personto be naked is to be exposed; and (d) finally, that there is

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an implicit equation between the body and the person. [Added note: Kirks book includes some photographs of carvings too, as though the skin were like wood, a natural material that is or can be reworked, the grain of the wooden objects evoking the texture of the skin he portrays. They are collected together under the rubric of masks. Masks, he observes, heighten the metamorphosis that is brought about by wearing face and body decoration, turning the individual image into something less recognizably human (ibid.: 9).] As it happens some of Kirks photographs are from the vicinity of Mt. Hagen in the Papua New Guinea Highlands where I worked, originally with Andrew Strathern. As I go through I shall comment on the effect the photographs have on me [including deducing an ethical stance on the photographers part], showing Kirks images dating from the 1960s70s (taken between 196780) and then a short series from Hagen of about the same time. He has photographed men and women [in very many cases not all] as they would be decorated for ceremonial exchange: moka prestations in Hagen [for example] are accompanied by displays, both of the wealth [which is the subject of prestation] as such and of the donors who are giving the wealth to recipients. [Added note: The images are not cropped here: they are as Kirk has presented the portraits in Man as art. In some cases they include details taken from larger images or close-ups taken at the same time as a larger image, both referred to here as details. The ascriptions in the captions are taken largely from the identifications given on pages 437 of Kirks book; pages 3742 offer considerable additional information on the composition of the decorations. My selection is restricted to male portraits.]

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Figure 1. Portrait by Kirk of Sali from Mendi (Tente) in the Southern Highlands Province (between 196780). All the elements of male ceremonial decoration shown herefeathers, wig, shells, leaves, apron, weaponsare assembled on the occasion of display, for which the face is freshly painted, the skin oiled and the pearlshell on the chest newly colored. The portrait is taken against a neutral studio backdrop. Photograph: Malcolm Kirk. [Reproduced with authors permission.]

Recall that Kirk is trying to neutralize and naturalize his photography (work with realism) in order to bring out indigenous artistry [and that he is making portraits]. So he gets people to pose against a plain backcloth. People displayed singly. Because what he wants us to look at is the assemblage, the color. The reader of his book is the audience.

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Figure 2. Portrait by Kirk of Nigel, from Kauil (Tambul) in the Western Highlands Province (between 196780). The careful dark-light composition of the headdress and wig can be seen very clearly, as can the touches of color that offset the darkening effect of the oil. Nigel is wearing on his chest a tally of wealth items given away during the course of prestations to diverse partners. Photograph: Malcolm Kirk. [Reproduced with authors permission.]

Previous depiction was a bit stiff, so here is an attempt to portray the body more informally. He wants to treat these people with respect, so he also has them sitting. [We should also note that he gives the sitters of his portraits their personal names.]

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Figure 3. Portrait by Kirk of Napo, from Kauil (Tambul) in the Western Highlands Province (between 196780). We see both the similar range of items that Nigel (in figure 2) was wearing, and their different effect. Photograph: Malcolm Kirk. [Reproduced with authors permission.]

This man is sitting in a way that draws our attention to the fact that we are not being shown the whole bodyfocus is on the head and torso. In fact if you go through the collection, I think only one of the photographs [as they are reproduced in the volume] has a figure entire with feet in as well [plate on p. 102]. So we can deduce that some parts of the body are more significant (for the photographer) than others.

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Figure 4. Portrait by Kirk of Moga, from Melpa (Baiyer River) in the Western Highlands Province (between 196780). Moga has a special type of exposed wig, rather like Napos (figure 3), and is wearing second best feathers. A detail is given in figure 11. Photograph: Malcolm Kirk. [Reproduced with authors permission.]

Emphasis is put on the upper part of the body.

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Figure 5. Portrait by Kirk of Kingal, from Melpa (Baiyer River) in the Western Highlands Province (between 196780). He is wearing a bead necklace as well as a ceremonial tally, and has armbands made of small tradestore beads. Over Kingals wig is a striped netted [technically, looped] covering. Photograph: Malcolm Kirk. [Reproduced with authors permission.]

And Kirk zooms in on the head and face [of another sitter] in order to show us detail. We become aware, through his photographs, of the detail of each item of ornament. Each object can be picked out for itself. Like showing the detail of a painting.

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Figure 6. Detail of a portrait by Kirk of Huliya, from Huli (Ialuba) in the Southern Highlands Province (between 196780). The preceding image in Kirks sequence shows Huliya standing much as he depicted Moga (figure 4). Photograph: Malcolm Kirk. [Reproduced with authors permission.]

Striving for clarity, and a sense of texture. Hence the caked paint. Items very clearly differentiatedhere, the painting of the face and treatment of the beard.

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Figure 7. Detail of a portrait by Kirk of Mokai, from Huli (Piribu) in the Southern Highlands Province (between 196780). The preceding image in Kirks sequence shows Mokai standing much as he depicted Moga (figure 4), see figure 68. Photograph: Malcolm Kirk. [Reproduced with authors permission.]

But there seems to be something else going as well: the photographer is showing the mask and he is showing the person behind the mask at the same time.

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Figure 8. Detail of a portrait by Kirk of Sam Mai, from Kauil (Tambul) in the Western Highlands Province (between 196780). Photograph: Malcolm Kirk. [Reproduced with authors permission.]

He dwells on peoples faces, although he focuses sometimes on the nose, lips, sometimes on the eyesthe eyes are especially expressive: the person underneath! He says: Our faces themselves are constantly shifting masks that mirror varying moods . . . and our eyes become an outward reflection of the emotions within (Kirk 1981: 10). Note that here the outward body form hides inner feelings: so we have three layersthe outer clothing that conceals the body and the body with its facial expressions that in turn conceals the person and personal feelings: retreating perspectives.

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Figure 9. Detail of a portrait by Kirk of Ongol, from Mendi (Tente) in the Southern Highlands Province (between 196780). Even though one can only see a portion of his portrait in the reproduction, Ongols decorations recall those of Sali (figure 1). Photograph: Malcolm Kirk. [Reproduced with authors permission.]

We can say the same here, though the portrait sitter is from a different area.

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Figure 10. Detail of a portrait by Kirk of Maum, from Kauil (Tambul) in the Western Highlands Province (between 196780). Photograph: Malcolm Kirk. [Reproduced with authors permission.]

Once again, we are, I think, being invited to see through the paint and decorations to the [person as an] individual beneath.

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Figure 11. Detail of a portrait [see figure 4] by Kirk of Moga from Melpa (Baiyer River) in the Western Highlands Province (between 196780). Photograph: Malcolm Kirk. [Reproduced with authors permission.]

Seeing the individual person behind the decorations is to see the decorations, the feathers, shells, and face paint, as being added to the surface of the body. From the way he has photographed them, [I surmise that] Kirk also wants us to see the combinationthe resultant body formas an aesthetic object.

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Now it is I who has sequenced these photos to show what I think is Kirks artdisplaying objects where making them visible means making them as close to real life [that is, to the impression made at the time] as possible. In fact, in the way attention is drawn to texture, more than. [Added note: Kirk records his impression in his Foreword: the images convey an unearthly presence. . . . These are human faces, yet there is some other intangible presence reflected in them (Kirk 1981: 9)] And what is the mediumthe artfor presenting this reality? The detail, color, and assemblage of the objects, just as one might turn a light on items in a gallery.

The anthropologists context

The overall effect the photographers pictures has on me: isolated bodies removed from social context. Coming from Hagen, my first reaction is to put these into context. So is thislooking to context inevitably an anthropologists response?

Figure 12. Part of the large crowd watching a line of male moka [ceremonial exchange] dancers. Kuli, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1967. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

Not isolateddonors display themselves to an audience, here a crowd at an exchange festival (moka) . . . people dont dance singly.

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Figure 13. A space has been cleared in front of these moka donors: the whole body is visible, and pride is taken in the line of the ceremonial apron that sways in formation with the dance. Ndika, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1967. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

Never sitpeople do not display themselves sitting. In fact the sitting image breaks the line of the adornments. Visually, men present a row of upright dancers, in an aggressive posture, with the whole body on display.

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Figure 14. Shadows from the trees enhance the faces in shadow. A different kind of display formation (by comparison with figures 12 and 13), with men wearing specially short aprons, but as previously the aim is a massed effect that hides the individuality of the performer. Remndi, Mt Hagen, Western Highlands. 1967. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

Dont see the individualthe audience is supposed to see the massed effect of all the dancers together, eyes drawn towards the decorations as such, which are enhanced by being presented deliberately in movement (an effect aimed for by the dance movements).

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Figure 15. The dark, obscuring effect is desired; it was said that shadows at the neck lodged the soul / ones ancestral spirits. Ndika, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1967. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

Decoration disguisesyou dont look to see the person beneath. One should see the decorations, not the dancer.

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Interpretation: Learning to see

Isnt this where Kirk began?

Figure 16. Portrait by Kirk of Moga, from Melpa (Baiyer River) in the Western Highlands Province (between 196780). A detail is given in figure 11. Photograph: Malcolm Kirk. [Reproduced with authors permission.]

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Warning, re: realismif Kirk presents art, then my pictures present social life. And of course we cant stop there. The pictures I show are not more realistic than Kirks posed portraitsthey simply partake of the ethnographic rhetoric of social realism where Kirk partakes of a studio rhetoric of realism in relation to portraiture [under a spotlight, for example]. If the anthropologists first response is to put these [images] into, frame them by, context (social, cultural), then, it is the context of social realism. This is the conventional response, as I said earlier, it means that these images then become subsidiary to what emerges of real interest: the context. No difficulty about piling on the ethnographic realism.

Figure 17. A young man is helped by his wife to get ready for a practice. Ndika, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1967. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

This is someone being decorated. The realism of practicality: how the decorations are actually brought together (here for a rehearsal).

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However, as I have implied, that [finding the context] is not sufficient. Given the care and attention being paid here it might seem obvious that one has to understand indigenous aesthetics. What are less obvious are assumptions about visibility. For instance: the [EuroAmerican] assumption that to be naked is to be exposed. There is a profound sense in Hagen that to be decorated is to be exposed. How on earth might this be? What it means to see something comes back to the issue of what activity is going on here. How are we to understand this act? The context for the context? Through social identity? The man in figure 17 is being decorated by his wife. Let us leave the question of context to one side. [Kirk does not pretend to be offering more than his personal reactions (a few speculative thoughts) as a photographer. We might want to reserve rather more criticism for the automatic response of minereach for the contextas an anthropologist.] Context is not going to solve anything in a strong sense (it will continue to do some work in a weak sense). Instead, after Astuti, I want to question the activity. Because the image is the outcome of an activity, the gathering together of an exhibit. Why display feathers and shells, and why display them on the body? Why are they attached that way, and what are we being made to see? If it is the decorations that the spectator is meant to see first, then does this mean that the decorations are a kind of art object after all? But, if so, then why does the dancers individual person actually have to be concealed? And if something has to be concealed then what [in fact] is being displayed?

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Figure 18. When women dance, here the wife of a moka donor, their faces are not in shadow at all but brilliantly picked out. Kuli, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1967. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

A decorated woman: she is dancing as the wife married into the donor clan, and will probably have been decorated by her father or brother.

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[To take Kirks insights about transformation in a different direction.] Transformation turns on the relationship with the observers / spectators [who are present]. In sum, when we (spectators, audience) see the feathers and shells, we are invited to see the person, but the person in a transformed state. Not the person as an individual but the person as a nexus of relationships. Not a matter of clothing concealing the body, but of the transformation of a person composed by his or her domestic and private relations into an object for public gaze that then conceals those domestic and private relations.

* * *

At this point in the lecture, depending on time, I would refer in greater or lesser detail to Aletta Biersacks account of Paiela initiation [like Hagen, in the former Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea] in the 1970s, where boys are concealed not only by not being observable from peoples residences, but by themselves purging their vision of the sight of these (domestic) spaces. Seeing as an activity was evident in the discipline they underwentthrough washing the eyes, for example. The intention was an ultimate revelation of just how much the boys had grown in seclusion, entailing relations with a spirit woman, measured by the reaction of an audience as witness. An enhanced spiritual state was brought to the surface and shown on the outer skin, making visible on an outside what was on an inside. There was a similar move in Hagen in an equation between growth and concealment / display and the termination of growth in what is brought out. No initiation, but moka displays are mounted to similar effect.

* * *

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Figure 19. Ceremonial ground (moka pena) at Kelua, with a double set of commemorative trees (originally planted in tubs). Elti, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1965. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

Dances take place in the open, in daylight, to be seen so spectators can see. [Added note: The ornamental trees (initially planted in tubs) associated particular peoples life with the land / soil, to regenerative effect.] This is an empty ceremonial ground, cleared for the purpose. The issue is to convince people that growth has taken place since the last performance. Growth of what? Not just the skin (the body) but wealth (pigs and shells). . . .

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Figure 20. With their aprons tucked up, moka donors display the shells they are about to hand over. The pearlshell, mounted on a resin board and covered in red ochre, circulated as a valuable at the time. Ndika, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1967. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

Shells are brought out and lined up in display (for a moka prestation). Just before they hand the valuables over, the donors draw victorious attention to them.

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Figure 21. Not all exchanges are accompanied by dancing. At this showing the shells are flanked by a line of pigs, though at that moment everyones attention seems to have been caught by the camera. Displayed at the moka pena of Minembi Kambila, these are destined for Tipuka recipients. Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1964. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

Here shells and pigs together appear to stream out of the mens house at the end of the ceremonial ground.

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Figure 22. The same occasion (as in figure 21): pigs lined up waiting for a separate set of recipients. Minembi, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1964. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

Recipients may come from more than one clan. Accompanying the gift depicted in figure 21, a separate gift of pigs alone is also lined up in the ceremonial area.

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Figure 23. Assembling part of a headdress, and judging the sheen of the feathers. For a completed example, see figure 30. Ndika moka, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1967. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

In the same way as valuables are brought out of the mens house (so to speak), decorations themselves are brought out of concealment to be assembled for the occasion. Pigs are exchanged, feathers are worn: with shells you can do both. Made to be visible. In fact they are all [part of what is seen to be] on the skin. . . . So what do the spectators affirm? What is their role? They are witness to the activity of these men, both production: internal growth, and exchange: flow of wealth between donors and recipients, elicited as clans, big men, and so forth. In brief, you disguise the individual but reveal the person [as a nexus of relations]. Lets return to the point that when we [the audience and spectators] see the feathers and shells, we see the person, but see the person in a transformed state. That state turns on relationships both with the spectator and with others . . . many of those feathers will have come from others. Unpacking this will [maybe!] get us a bit nearer to understanding why these things are carried on the body. Some of this will be expanded in the next lecture.

2 Axes and canoes: Traveling objects

I have said that I would try to convey what an indigenous visual theory might look like for people who produce objects to be seen. Recall that what is seen is often in deliberate (not incidental) antithesis to what is not to be seenso [the issue is] not just what is seen but what is being revealed that before was hidden. What is hidden will have its own effect; what is revealed needs a witness. For this second session, I consider the role of the spectator. In the Mt. Hagen example of ceremonial display accompanying the handover of gifts, on the face of it, the role of the spectator doesnt seem so different from what we find in Euro-American [understandings of] aestheticsit is how we might consider any performance when interactions produce spectators and artists produce performances. However, there is a bit more to say than that. The Hagen material provides us with quite an extreme case where performers on one occasion are among the spectators on the next, and vice versa. This is an alternation constructed through the logic of ceremonial exchangeexchange because of the alternating relationship between donors and recipients, and ceremonial because it is in public and focused on a display. I shall stay initially with Hagen as my principal inspiration and then turn briefly to a rather different location for some similar ideas, Sabarl in the Massim, a region [of Papua New Guinea] made familiar through the Trobriands; the readings relate to that region. The material from Sabarl Island is from the 1970s. [It will become evident why this last part gives the title to the whole, i.e. whole lecture.]

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | Marilyn Strathern Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. Strathern, Marilyn. 2013. Learning to see in Melanesia. Masterclass Series 2. Manchester: HAU Society for Ethnographic Theory.

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We proceed with an analysis of the role of the spectator by appreciating the way things move between persons. Is there an analogy or parallel between the act of witnessing, where vision moves between performer and spectator, and the act of exchange, where gifts move between donor and recipient? The aims of this lecture are twofold. A. To ask what effects the switches in position: (1) One way gaze. Each [actor] apparently looks at the other, but in Hagen it is the recipient / spectator who is being invited or lured to lookthe donor / displayer is not looking back at them. That is reversed [that is, the reverse happens] when the roles reverse. (2) At any one time, there is a one-way direction to the flow of items between them. As valuables go back and forth, their roles [the positions of donor and recipient] change. In the Massim that movement is depicted by the valuables themselves. So [the question is] how is this achieved visually? B. A commentary on the place of artifacts in all this. Euro-American anthropologists are interested in making visible culture or society [including technology], that is, they are interested in the effects of cultural constructions or social institutions. But why should these peopleMelanesianssee social practice / culture? What they do seem to see are persons, and they see the objects persons produce or create. They dont theorize social process: that is what the anthropologist does. However, the anthropologist can also imagine those objects or productions or creations working as a kind of analogy to theoretical models [of such process]. Melanesian people manipulate objects as things or artifactsand I want to show you how models of social process, as the anthropologist would call them, are contained within the artifacts they produce. They use objects to make relationships visible. But they dont think of these relationships as aspects of society [or culture or technology]: they are aspects of persons. And from this premise we have to understand how people can turn themselves into objects. This is exactly what the Mt. Hagen dancers on

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display were doingthe person is made into an entity to be seen. We could thus say that the way in which persons draw others attention onto themselves makes themselves the object of other persons regard. It is deliberate. They want others to look at them (at certain times, not other times). The person is objectified: in the regard of others [he or she] is turned into an object. Now you see why I cant use [the term] objects interchangeably with things: persons can be objects. [Kirks accountLecture Onewas very sympathetic on this score.] In fact, they may reify themselvespresent themselves as thingsin doing so, but I come to that later. And what is implied when people make objects to be seen and those objects are themselves? I want to expand what was sketchily claimed last time, namely that persons decorated are persons transformed: the very act of being seen by a spectator contributes to the transformative effect of the decorations, and to the role of the body as carrier of them.

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Exchange and travel in Hagen

[This section was compressed in speaking, since it went over some of the ground covered in Lecture One.]
Lets start with the implications of decorating as such. Once again, the focus is largely [but not exclusively] on men and adopts a male viewpoint [a construction of group relations with which women largely, but not entirely, concur]. There are two ways of not decorating.

Figure 24. Turned inwards and not outwards, men pull their hair, deliberately unkempt, to greet new mourners (clansmen of the deceaseds sisters husband). The funeral of Minembi Rying, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1965. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

Funeral: deliberate anti-decoration, like anti-fashion. People are trying to convey an effect contrary to that emblazoned by splendid decorations, and uncovering the hair or smearing the body with dull clay is very opposite of attention to health and bulk. However, non-decoration [see next figure] is something else.

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Figure 25. Kawelka Pundukl and his wife Tipuka Kukile prepare a sweet potato garden at Mbukl. Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands (he is cutting the ditches, she is attending to the soil for planting). Seen in public, Kukile would always have something covering her head and back. 1964. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

Husband and wife gardening. Non-decoration. It was the case [at that time] in Hagen that people went around with little covering, although this [figure 25] is a particularly private moment. To European eyes it seems they often wore next to nothing. And gave nothing away! They concealed everything about themselves.

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Figure 26. Pundukl (see figure 25) is joined by his clansman Rop, making fences for a new garden near Mbukl out of one that has been in fallow for about seven years. Their attire does not give much away. Kawelka, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1964. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

The way the man in the garden is dressed tells you nothing about himself. Because [regardless of whether you are an outsider or a neighbor] you cant see the publicly significant things: his political standing, the size of the clan he belongs to, the relationships he has with others, and least of all his wealth. Unlike the Trobriands, and Massim generally, where food is also an item of wealth and where to see a man in his garden is to see his wealth, here one has to turn garden resources into wealth. This is done, first of all, via (1) food fed to pigs, since household pigs can be turned into exchange pigs, [and thus into] shells, money. A second way of turning garden resources into wealth is via (2) ones connections with othersespecially affines and maternal kin, whom a man assists in assisting his wife (sometimes). So, when they do decorate, what are people telling you about themselves? They tell you what they are made of [initially, this is what they contain within]. And it is when men decorate that they are said to feel vulnerable; this is the vulnerability of dancers before an audience. They bring to the outside of the body everything that they have within literally from their house / metaphorically from their insides on to

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their skin. When you look at a decorated dancer you see an everted person: what was formerly inside, hidden, is now on display. Hence the conundrum [to the Euro-American observer], that to have little covering is to be hidden, to be decorated is to be exposed.

Figure 27. One of the many groups of decorated men at the 1967 Kuli moka. On their chests, the omak tally records wealth given to others in the past. Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

Dancing at a large-scale moka to celebrate the handing over of wealth. And when you look at a decorated dancer, there are two elements to notice.

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(a) First element: the decorated dancer is there in person; it is the body that is presented. Yet why is the body decorated? Why the body idioms? One answer: it is the bodys capacities that are on displaythe work that goes into producing pigs / the strength with which a man persuades others to part with their wealth. The pigs or shells exchanged, the feathers worn: they are all seen to be on the skin [the body], and make visible a persons capacities. The first element then is to do with internal growth, [and it shows in] the strength and renown of clans, in big men. . . . Size of the clan, health of the man, fatness of the pigs, all speak to ancestral support for their well-being. Growth is a sign of ancestral favor. All the spectators will be potential recipients of the image or vision, that is, be witnesses to this accomplishment.

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Figure 28. Waiting impassively as the dancing proceeds, a spectator-recipient has come attired in second best decorations (darkened face, striped wig covering, cassowary plumage). Ndika, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1967. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

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(b) The second element: decorated persons are persons transformed, but this isnt a transformation that they do alone. The role of certain spectators is also to draw these things [signs of growth] out. Here the spectator [is present] as recipient: recipients in ceremonial exchange have to draw the wealth out of the place where it is hiddennot just hidden in peoples houses, but also in their minds, since recipients have to persuade donors to give to them. The dancers diverse relationships with the spectator-witnesses are being tested at the point of display; only certain spectators will be [put in the further relationship of being] recipients of the wealth. This second element, then, is to do with exchange: with [its elicitation of] the external flow of wealth between donors and recipients, and the importance of allies, partners. Donors [in turn] depend on their partners to receive the display. Understanding this will get us a bit nearer to understanding why these things [decorations, wealth] are carried on the body. It is as though people had turned their skins inside out. Hageners draw on body metaphors to convey this, coded to some extent in the decorations themselves. All the emphasis men put on shine, for instance, on the shells that gleam: it is as though one sees the shiny fat that lies beneath the skin (as with the white fat of pigs, quite startling when cooked) and the blood in the flesh. I shall focus on color as a coding device. We can go through these images quickly.

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Figure 29. A newly ornamented moka donor, a bit apprehensive perhaps. Ndika, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1967. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

Through the organization of the decorative items, claims are being made for clan growth and the size of its wealth. Deliberate play on contrasts of light and dark tones points to [the relation between] the inner and outer: outside black: protective / aggressive; inside red: source of fertility / danger.

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Figure 30. The top of a particular kind of headdress worn by donors at major events is called bird bilum [bag] (koi wal). Ndika, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1967. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

This particular element of a donors headdress is only worn on the occasion of prestations to clans of other major groups. Note the red center (incorporating other light colors) enclosed by a dark surround.

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Figure 31. Face and hair are carefully assembled as elements in themselves. The ornamental pearlshell crescent and armbands (from tradestore beads) set off the skin, which may be darkened with charcoal / oil. Ndika, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1967. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

The light / dark contrast is basic to the overall decorative effect: figure 31 shows a dancer on the day before a final showing. Exaggerating a dark / light contrast increases [the perception of] height, size. Blackness: charcoal, like the inside of a mens house blackened with smoke, signals inward protection, outward aggression. (Black is the color of warfare.) Also a double value for red: red simultaneously points to fertility and danger; see figure 29.

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Figure 32. This returns us to an earlier event (figure 21). We are now looking at the stream of shells from the position of the mens house. Minembi, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1964. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

Wealth streaming out of a houses interior (see figure 21)suddenly one can imagine the reverse image too: wealth streaming into the house of the recipients! (Though it never takes this overt formpigs, shells, money are always deposited furtively.)

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So the wealth that was in the donors house in the first place came from somewhere elsefrom other donors. Men take into themselves the wealth of other groups, in same way as in marriage a clan takes into itself women from other clans. What is at the very center of the clan, then, is also fertility and wealth that has come from other clans [and that, correspondingly, one gives away to them, see below]. Lets see how this works out visually.

Figure 33. Wives of donors at a Kuli moka, lavishly decorated, with ochre-streaked bailer shells in front, and individual variations on the bright facial designs. Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1967. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

Decorated and drumming, these women have synchronized their decorations. When women decorate for a major event the underlying color of face decoration is not black but red. Their faces form red centers to the whole attire, such a motif being specifically associated with womens contributions to clan prosperity and continuity.

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Figure 34. A little girl at the end of a line of female dancers. Kuli, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1967. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

Similarly with boys and girls (here a girl).

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Figure 35. The brilliant effect of female decoration in detail (a close-up of one of the woman dancers). Kuli, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1967. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

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Figure 36. Women pay attention to their decorations at the back as well as at the front. Kuli, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1967. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

Women only dance formally on major occasions, but when they do so are decorated more lavishly than men, indeed without restraint as men see it. In effect [from mens point of view], the women and children are being brought out as part of mens display: aspects of themselves, their energies. It is what [in this form] men have created or produced.

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Figure 37. At a neighbors home, Wora and Kukile with Nentepa and Kumbamong, near Mbukl. Tipuka, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1965. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

Woman and children. Persons come out of persons: the child from the mother. In presenting them in public, men transform women and children, re-produce them as though the body were the body of the clan. From the interior of their clan come girls who will marry elsewhere, just as women came as wives to them [the resident men] from elsewhere in the first place, and boys who will make sure the clan endures.

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Figure 38. The decorations women wear at their back may include the heavy mounted pearlshells themselves. Kuli, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1967. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

Less so than men, women are elaborately decorated on the back (see Figure 36): they have [Hagen people say] kin at their back when they move in marriage. Under patrilineal rubrics it is the women who travel. They face in two directions: towards their own kin and their husbands kin. Wearing shells [that travel in exchange] front and back indicates the exchange partnerships [between men] that follow marriage. Whenever you look at a husband and wife pair you are looking at two clans, and whether enemies or allies, the two clans are affines. Like men, women become objects. Where men objectify the clan and its inward / outward orientations, women objectify the relationships that exist between clans, between male partners, and objectify the wealth that travels between affines. They carry on their person on such occasions the very wealthsignified in the shellswhose flow they have also helped cause.

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Figure 39. Women pausing in their dancing. The bailer shells they have on their chests circulated in the Hagen area as minor valuables for a brief period. Kuli, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1967. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

Bailer shells pick out the length of the line of donors wives. So [if we imagine them wanting this] what do these Hagen [male and female] dancers want you to see? They want you to see that (1) they have inner resources, and that (2) what they are composed of is persons, that is, their relations with persons. What they also want you to see is the way things flow back and forth between persons and make the relations concrete and visible. Ultimately the capacity at issue is the capacity to make / mobilize relationships. The person is both composed of relationships and decomposed by them, since it is other persons who draw out the exposed wealth. Hagen people use the body surface (the outer body) as something to which they can attach the inside of the body and make it visible: the inside is everted. What comes to the surface of the body is evidence of the bodys capacityand they deploy bodily idioms of flesh and fat to refer to this inner capacity. More than that, they make the body both visible and invisible. The body is restructured, so to speak, insofar as the ordinary body becomes invisible: where it is not meant to be seen, it conveys nothing; the ob-

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served, visible body is observed in terms of a two-way flowobservation is elicited, an audience is asked to see. Now what the person has attached to the body has come from [partners / kin / acquaintances] elsewhere, because [relations with] these are the relations contained within. To put it briefly, one conceals the person (moral, domestic, non-public person) in order to reveal the person (political actor, source of wealth, exchange partner). Two types of persons, the one produced out of the other. In other words, persons are concealed inside persons. Does this sound nonsense? Think of a Euro-American counterpart. Think about the photographers gallery again. In effect the theory of the body informing it [see Lecture One] belongs to a Euro-American tradition of also thinking about persons as inside other entities. It considers persons as individuals who are thought to be inside society. They are members of society [and society produces them]. So you look at the person and you can see their social context (in this view).

Figure 40. Chorus girls from the Crazy Horse Saloon, Paris. What I have selected as examples of a team in uniform, the caption in Fashion and anti-fashion from which this is taken [see Acknowledgments to Publishers and Authors] reads otherwise: it focuses on personal expression through the display of an individuals name (Polhemus and Proctor 1978: 48). 1970s. Photograph: unknown.

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The socialized body: individual girls underneath or behind itor, as the original caption notes, in the names on their tops. So you can show the individual and the society at the same time. Remember the portraits. You get closer and closer looking into peoples faces to find the individual: that was a perspectivalist view implying receding distance from the observer. (The body is a surface for ornamentation, and the observer can look behind the surface to the real nature of the individual beneath.) But while the body surface is modified [in this theory], showing the impact of society on the person, as in uniforms [costumes], the individual can show through in different ways. Style also reflects individual taste, and personal names may be exhibited on the surface.

Figure 41. The original caption to this picture of Hells Angels from the USA refers to clothing and adornment to express membership of and identification with social groups (Polhemus and Proctor 1978: 49). Subcultures in effect enact collective individuality. 1970s. Photograph: unknown.

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The socialized individual, either as a member of a subculture, or else as an internal commentator on mainstream society turned outwards. Or [in this view] one can see the subculture [to use a term of the period] as an enactment of collective individuality against the mainstream, or the enactment of individual choice being given public expression. Figure 41 is an American example, same period. Sounds similar to Hagen? Bringing the inside out (aggression, taste), abstract qualities of personality that are then hung around the person, the body surface modified by decoration? But it is not. The difference is a visual one: that is, it lies in the way this [process] is effected between displayer and spectator. In the French or American case, there is a sense in which one looks at the body and then at the person: the (perspectivalist) viewer is located outsideand then sees the impact of society or culture on the individual. I am not supposed to be looking at a reflection of me. Unless I am part of the same subculture, I am supposed to be looking at a reflection of themtheir inner intentions, and so on. Only Hageners dont see a person inside society! (To repeat the point: they dont require any theory or model of society.) And, on the contrary, in the case of men, exactly what male Hagen spectators see are themselves: generally in the case of all the witnesses, specifically in the case of exchange partners or recipients who are also among the spectators. It is they who have produced the display, in the sense that a recipient has forced / created the donor to become a donor. Men are looking at reflections of themselves. Donor and recipient: dancer and spectator: the one to be seen, the other to see. Seeing has an impactthe audience is equally supposed to feel the stunning effect of the display. The eye of the Euro-American observer supposedly has no effect on what is being presented. By contrast [members of] the Hagen audience dont occupy a removed, distant position but rather are supposed to take into themselves the impact of what they see. A successful display will affect the spectators inner state of being. Judgment [on the display] they hold within themselves. It will only show later, become apparent later, whether or not the right effect has been achieved. What the spectators think [about the display] is concealed and will be revealed at some later time. Their opinion in turn will be an index of the displayers success. Display makes a bodily impact. Should the audience be moved there and then to express emotion, then the dancers must payopen admiration has been elicited and the dancers must compensate the

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spectator(s) for the expression of emotion they have caused him or her [to reveal]. We come back to the asymmetry of the fact that at any one time the gaze is one-way: the person displaying looks nowhere, for he (or she) is there to be seen, not to see. To the contrary, the recipient / spectator looks at the person on display and, in the case of the male exchange partner, he is looking at a transformed image of himself. Over time, however, and iconically, the recipient becomes the donor the spectator becomes the displayer: we may imagine this as an exchange of perspectives. What the dancers strive for is other persons perspective on themselves. Maybe we can say that perspectives are like a road ([to borrow a] local idiom): shells and feathers are put on persons, and thus create a body for persons who carry these things along the roads.

Figure 42. Hagen men carrying mounted pearlshell valuables on their person as they enter the ceremonial ground. Ndika, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1967. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

Now, so far I have talked of persons making themselves into objects. They draw attention to certain properties of their [carrying] bodies, their capacities, as we have seen. At the same time, since persons are relational entitiesas persons, always in relationships with othersthey also objectify specific relationships, the specificity of the ties giving each their individuality. I asserted that men objectify clanship, women links between clans.

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Figure 43. The body assembled from the attention and ambitions of others. A woman on her way to join a dancing line (a full length portrait of the dancer in figure 35). Kuli, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1967. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

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How do they do this visually? As we have seen, performers offer themselves for view in a particular form and I call this process reification. They take on the form of things by attaching things to themselves. Values, qualities, powers whose form is [aesthetically] definitive or recognizable [as in coded]. Objects appear as things. Hence we can talk of them as creating a body. However, there is a second technique of objectification that I call personification, where people make objects appear as persons. That is, as effective in relationships, evocative of them, summoning them. We are not talking of subjects (agency) but of two types of objectsobjects may appear as things or as persons. This latter appearance is very dramatic in the Massim.

Travel and exchange in the Massim

[Added note: At this pivotal pointfrom here to the end of the four lecturesI turn to consider other writings from Papua New Guinea. It must be emphasized, very strongly, that by and large the voice continues to be mine. I pursue issues to do with relations and persons in my own idiom, even where this ignores the analysis of the specific anthropologists on whose work I draw or cuts across their own interests (for example in personhood, as in some of the material that follows directly here). The lectures were never intended as an exposition of anthropological writing and arguments. This was a challenge to the students, although they did of course have access to the original sources. My apologies to the reader, nonetheless, who might have expected something different from a text-like format.] It was suggested that in Hagen display, observation is elicited, an audience is asked to see: what the person has attached to their body has simultaneously (1) been brought forth from inside and (2) come from elsewhere, because these are the relations the donor-dancer contains within. Relations are kept up, as a two-way flow between persons, as objects are detached and reattached in gifts. I move now to a situation that also makes very explicit the flow of objects between people. In the Massim area, the passage of valuables is visible across seas, in canoes, with people literally moving long distances. Does the idiom of travel [also along paths] also point to a flow of vision?

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Figure 44. One of Malinowskis photographs of a Trobriand canoeladen down and low in the waterfrom Argonauts of the Western Pacific (taken between 1915 18). The caption reads: Canoe under sail. This illustrates the rigging, the tilt of the canoethe raised outriggerand the carrying capacity of a canoe (Malinowski 1922: 97). There are eighteen men on board. Photograph: Bronislaw Malinowski. [Reproduced with publishers permission.]

Hagen people carry their valuables to and fro; this is true of Massim, but [in the Massim there may also be] another mediator: canoes carry the people who carry the valuables. Yet, then again, canoes are like another kind of person, as are valuables themselves. Thus, spelled out, we may say that persons carry persons who carry persons. . . . Anyway, in the manner in which people decorate the canoes, these artifacts are personified, endowed with the attributes of persons.

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Figure 45. The decorated prow of a canoe from Gawa Island in the 1970s. Nancy Munns caption comments on the visible strings of shells, which are likened to kula valuables ornamenting the human body. Part of the whitewashed hull appears at the right. The anthropomorphic aspect of the prow can be seen in the figure formed by the finial and vertical prowboard. The finial may be metaphorically described as the head or hair; it is lashed to the neck of the vertical prowboard. The prowboard is the chest (the outer curve) and the shoulders (the inner curve) (Munn 1986: 146) Photograph: Nancy Munn. [Reproduced with authors permission.]

Gawa islanders participate in the ring of exchange relations known as kula. I have signaled a reference to Nancy Munns (1986) book because you will find that Gawans decorate canoes [quite explicitly] as though they were persons, and use personal body imagery to do so. The decorated canoe is thought of equally as a beautiful young man [in his finery] or, with reference to the produce in its interior, as a mother with her children inside. Above all, the canoes adornments stimulate vision, drawing attention to itself in the same way as one person might come to visit another.

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Figure 46. Part of a kula canoe prowboard (tabuya), carved by the master-carver Kurina, from Lalela village, Kitava. Early 1970s. Photograph: Giancarlo Scoditti. [Reproduced with authors permission.]

A canoe prow from Kitava, near the Trobriands. [Added note: Figures 4648, reproduced here to show the coloring, do not come from Gawa but from elsewhere in the northern Massim; I project Gawan iconography onto them.] The canoe stimulates vision in three ways: (1) The canoes surface is what must be seen. It is made visible in being decorated, in same way as the Gawan fathers contribution to his child is made visibleideally he is seen in the childs external features. In this matrilineal context, the appearance of the child elicits the gaze of its paternal kin who care for it. (One Gawan woman said that the fathers kin go to visit his child after his death in order to gaze on the child and remember him in the

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childs face.) (2) Youthful men and boys decorate the canoe and, like the child, the canoes outward form appears as the result of male work. And (3) in its travels the canoe that sets forth destined for exchange partners is elicited by these potential recipients of the wealth it carries it is they who will make it appear before them.

Figure 47. Details of a decorated prowboard (tabuya and lagim) from Vakuta, southern Trobriand Islands. Roughly similar period, mid-1970s. The boards are not complete until paint has been applied. The coloring has life-cycle connotations, though none without ambiguity: the surface white points to a new born state, red to maturation and sexual activity, and black, the most deeply set, to ripeness, old age, and magic. Photograph: Shirley Campbell. [Reproduced with authors permission.]

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What are the visual techniques here? On Gawa, there is a specific connection between canoe and human body. A canoe is made from a red tree, and the red hull evokes matrilineal blood, which is the material from which a fetus comes. The canoe is owned by a matrilineal group, and fills up with the men of the matriline who sail in her. But the redness of the wood is concealed by a whitewash on its exterior, a protective surface. [Munn says she knew of no gender connotation for the whitewash, though one man explained the maleness of the canoe by pointing to its capacity to make a pathsail awayand find valuables.] The white outrigger wood is explicitly male. A visual impression is that the canoes external features evoke the individuating paternal appearance of people, for the decorations as a whole give the canoe a male gender marking, while its interior is female.

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Figure 48. The decorated prowboard shown in figure 47, seen in full from another angle. The different parts of the canoe prow are clearly visible in this larger version. From Vakuta, southern Trobriand Islands. Mid1970s. Photograph: Shirley Campbell. [Reproduced with authors permission.]

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If the bonds between clan members are those of blood and land, each person also has their own spectrum of relations with others (notably with paternal kin). When these are [male] exchange partners, their eyes draw the canoe towards them. In terms of the exchange logic of the kula, there is a one-way relationship between those who wish to be seen and those who do the seeingbut in reverse direction from Hagen moka [ceremonial exchange]. Hagen donors draw recipients to them (recipients travel to the ceremonial ground only partly decoratedin second bestif at all). In Massim overseas voyages, those who travel are still the recipientsthe donors draw them inbut it is the recipients who display themselves [decorate or make themselves attractive] to entice wealth from the donors. Very anxious, although they have to appear indifferent, [the issue is] how to get the donors to see them and give. It is the Trobriand or Gawan donors, then, who will be looking at them [the travelling recipients] and weighing them up. The donors remain quite impassiveresisting the allurement; they are not on display at all. On the contrary, it is the travelling recipients who are on display. So the donors are spectators in a rather special sense, having caused the recipients to decorate themselves (they elicit the canoes). This is a preamble to considering travel and exchange on Sabarl Island. Sabarl lies to the south of the kula ring [and ceremonial life has a somewhat different focus, namely in mortuary feasts and rituals], but I remain with the voyaging that people undertake to sustain exchange networks, at which vital [life cycle] pathways are renewed. The preceding account enables me to switch the focus of attention, and dwell on the valuables [wealth items] that circulate. We find that valuables can be visualized as persons in movement. Just to repeat, I say a person insofar as a person is a social category, defined by a nexus of relationships, and what is made visible about these persons are their relationships with others. And relationships are seemingly imagined as a journey between points [persons], with an outward and backward motion, like a canoe journey. As on Gawa, the Sabarl recognize complementary relations between paternal and maternal kin, with emphasis given to male nurture as coming from outside the matriclan (the clan draws reproductive energy towards itself). Women as well as men represent their clans and may sail in search of wealth. Off-island trading partners include paternal kin.

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Two Sabarl valuables [are considered here]: black greenstone axe blades and red shell necklaces.

Figure 49. Drawing of an anthropomorphic ceremonial axe (tobwatobwa) from Sabarl, an island in the southern Massim area outside the kula ring. The shiny axe blade (paternal relations / individual energy) and the handle carved from red wood (maternal relations / the person as clan member) complement each other in an image of movement. Late 1970s. Drawing: Debbora Battaglia. [Reproduced with publishers permission.]

[To put it at its simplest] axes given by a father to his children form part of his paternal nurture [towards them], and have to be acknowledged on the part of the children, whose clan is prompted by final prestations of blades to make returns (of diverse items including matching blades) to his clan at their death. That movement can be taken as movement between two sides of a person, between his or her maternal and paternal kin [typically acted out by designated cousins on each side]. Thus the axe blade (paternal relations / individual energy) and the handle or support (maternal relations / the person as clan member) sustain each other. When the maternal shaft forms a carved red wood support for the paternal blade, which is shiny or greasy, the image is of a clan and its individual members (a person with relations attached). At the same time, the leg of the axe is both support for the blade, Sabarl people say, and complementary to it, as husbands and wives

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complement each other. While the whole axe may be given ceremonially, it is above all the blade that circulates as a valuable, which is (so to speak) detachable and mobile in exchange relationships. The blade has reproductive power (sexual heat). Matrilineal strength is partible, and paternal potency is a male version of it. If the axe blade is a representation of a relationship, it is also the relationship itself in one of its moments. When the axe blade moves, it will reproduce relationships [between kin]. Thus the blade evokes the paternal nurture that the child has earlier had from its father and is [on the childs death] now due in return to paternal kin [fathers descendants]. The child [the childs clan] detaches the axe blade from him or herself and sends it back to its source. At the same time, the hafted axe as a whole, with a crucial turning point at its elbow, is an image of action and movement. The axe is a visualization of the paths along which persons and wealth move. What goes away comes back again.

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[The amount of preliminary detail given on the second valuable would depend a bit on time. I return to the two items briefly in Lecture Three.]

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Figure 50. Drawing of a ceremonial shell necklace (bak) from Sabarl, an island in the southern Massim area outside the kula ring. Late 1970s. This bridewealth necklace is likened to women's wealth; women use such wealth to reclaim matrilineage land or canoes and in mortuary payments to reciprocate paternal nurture. The necklace may be viewed as an out / back path, at whose extremity is a clasp, a turning point, one of whose forms is that of a canoe-shaped pearlshell. Drawing: Debbora Battaglia. [Reproduced with publishers permission.]

* * *
Necklaces (bak) used in bridewealth. As gifts between affines, they initiate counter flows to paternal kin. Given by husbands (fathers) kin to wifes (childs) kin / by the groom to the brides mother, they figure the joining of two sides of the future childs kin: maternal and paternal matrilines. Two flows of blood (red mothers blood) (flow of relations). (1) The male donor obtains the right to direct the marriages of his children; (2) female recipients use the wealth to reclaim matrilineage land or canoes, for example, and in mortuary payments to reciprocate paternal nurture. The bridewealth necklace is likened to womens wealth. Bak are thus obtained by senior women through their daughters, so it travels from daughter [via the son-in-law] to mother when the

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daughter marries, and the mother may also use it for a sons bridewealth.

* * *
According to Debbora Battaglia, the necklace itself encodes that joining of the two clans in the body of the child [imagined as the subject of mortuary ceremonies], which is also imagined as a journey. The strands are divided into an out and a back side that meet at a terminus connoting death that is also a turning point, a clasp that turns the direction of the small red shells from flowing out to flowing back. There has to be that [turning point]there is fear that otherwise what travels will wander away and never come back. The necklace is thereby viewed as a circular path, broken at the top by a clasp, one of whose forms is that of a canoe-shaped pearlshell. [The out and back movements in the necklace are in fact doubled, referring to different modalities of relationship, but I do not go into that here.] In short, the strands point to matrilines / clans bridged by the returns that death and the associated mortuary payments effect. Now imagine the figure the other way up [Euro-American iconography commonly requires a head to be positioned at the top of a standing body]. The necklace is animated with a head, the head also having voice (its chimes). The head is specifically said to make the object like a person, and is added when the shells are converted from a womens ornament into an item for exchange (valuable, wealth), that is, when it will mobilize relationships. The intertwined strands are like the out / back flow of things and persons, the clasp turning the rope to reverse the direction of the path. Indeed, trade pathways are likened to shells on a stringlike a necklace. [Necklaces can break of course and the sequence of valuables can be shattered.] The strands are red, the head white. The ethnographer conjectures that the head of a necklace is like the blade of an axe. But there is movement associated with the red legs too, if one imagines the shells as different points of a womans life-path traveled between [away from home at] marriage and [back towards home at] death. In summary. First, these valuables that travel in the Massim are simultaneously many persons and one person. They are both two matrilines or matriclans (maternal and paternal kin [from a childs perspective]), and one person (the child who is the outcome of these

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transactions [and at death the focus for more]), as well as the movement (relationship) between them. Second, these objects are designed to effect what they are: the axe blade will travel back and forth on the back of matrilineal support; like the necklace, valuables will supposedly return. There is anxiety about return: revelation / visibility is hazardous, for it invites the possibility of non-return. In short, when it is artifacts that move and create relationships, the question they seemingly raise is how to effect the return perspective from the other party, and thus to get them to come back again. [In the axe and necklace] the work of elicitation, to get valuables to travel in the opposite direction, is visually imagined as [already] accomplished.

Are there some elements of a visual theory here?

(1) An exchange of perspectives. A spectators viewpoint implies a relationship in which the positions of performer and spectator (donor and recipient) can always be reversed. At any one moment, like sending out valuables in gift exchange, one-way: but the demand for return [however it is worked out] guarantees that it becomes twoway, in terms for example of what each can extract from other. (2) The one-way gaze. Kula recipients elicit valuables from donors by decorating and travelling to them: they coerce the donors into being spectators and being moved to give. Hagen moka recipients elicit valuables from donors by appearing at the donors display; the donors claim to have attracted them, but it is equally they [the recipients] as spectators who have coerced the donors to decorate and move them to give. (3) Objectification. The person is objectified (decorated) and transformed as the object of peoples attention. One visual technique is reification [things appearing in appropriate form]. But there is another: objects can be personified, like the Sabarl axe, made like a person, whether through corporeal form or through animate qualities. Visual technique: personification. (4) Travel and flow. There is something further to learn from the Massim with its basic paradigm of matrilineal reproduction [it was not elaborated earlier]: a kind of split representation of what belonging means. On the one hand people belong to a place, land, where they grow food, where they attach themselves; on the

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other hand they belong to what they detach from themselves. Visually this becomes a relationship between what is hidden / grows / stays in one place (the matrilineal body) and what is brought into the open / travels / is to be seen (vitality, wealth, individual renown). (5) Appearance as an act. That objects are produced for people to see means that people wishing to see elicit these objects. When an item is with someone else it is hidden within that person / partner. How do you get to appear again? Kula Ring partners are constantly waiting to see the shells that will appear [on their way back to them] over the horizon. [Hence the kula decorations to make the voyager seductive.] (6) The witness. Getting objects to appear requires work from the spectator. Valuables that are the focus of exchange arent visible by themselves. We could say that the capacity to see is part of what makes things and persons appear.

3 Netbags and masks: Containers

We have heard something about the role that exchange plays in the way we might depict how various people in Papua New Guinea depict seeing. The focus was on transactions: the kind of seeing that is involved in displays, primarily [but by no means exclusively] mens. To recapitulate, what is at issue in the relationship between performer and spectator (donor and recipient) is what each can extract from the other and take within. People draw other peoples vision to themselves. At any one moment, like sending out valuables in gift exchange, the direction is one-way, but with the expectation for return, over time it becomes two-way and the positions are reversed. We might want to say that, like affinal [maternal and paternal] kin in bridewealth exchanges, donor and recipient in a gift exchange each has a perspective on the other, insofar as the transaction creates a distance between them. When the exchange is reciprocal we might then go on, as was suggested [in Lecture Two], to say that they exchange perspectives: the present donor is seen as a former recipient. Now that process of emanation and absorption creates a difference between what is inside / outside a person. You might have thought that this difference is a quite simple one, worked upon in the contrast between what is hidden and what is revealed, between what recipients / spectators take into themselves as something seen and their evaluation or appraisal, which may come months, even years, later, perhaps not until the return gift, with a similar temporal movement from one position to the other. . . . But what do we do with those situations that visually present images depicting the possibility of seeing both inside and outside at the same time? Surely one cant be hidden and revealed at one and the same moment!
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | Marilyn Strathern Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. Strathern, Marilyn. 2013. Learning to see in Melanesia. Masterclass Series 2. Manchester: HAU Society for Ethnographic Theory.

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It is obviously stretching the concept of perspective(s) to talk of them being exchanged. Indeed, perspective doesnt seem the right concept at all if what is at issue is not the position of the beholder in relation to the world but a relationship between performer (presented to be seen) and spectator (who does the seeing). And surely we have reached the limit of the concept now to talk of seeing both inside and outside at once. Nonetheless, keeping in mind the [general, ordinary] English language notion of perspective [the appearance of objects as determined by their distance from the observer; an aspect or point of view] may help us approach the visual maneuvers here. We have already encountered the figure of the [Euro-American] observer with a specific line of sight. Canonically, sight puts the observer at a distance from what is being viewed, or for that matter from what is experienced as surroundings, as in a room where the occupant creates perspectives that shift as he or she shifts. The observer is in the singular: you can do it by yourself.

Figure 51. Randolph Starn observes that the oculus in the Camera degli Sposi, from sixteenth century Italy, can be diagrammed as a diagram of a Renaissance analysis of pictorial space. In one-point perspective, a correct point of view is fixed, monocular, and focused from an arbitrary distance (Starn 1989: 219). Drawing: Carolyn Van Lang. [Reproduced with publishers permission.]

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This diagram (figure 51) of the measured view [as one of three modes of visual attention alongside the glance and the scan] elucidates an aspect of Renaissance perspective, illustrating the effect of what can be seen by gazing up at the oculus of a painted ceiling. It was a Renaissance discovery that the position from which one looks affects the proportions of the perceived object, pointing to how ones view changes as ones position changes. Transposed to a technique in painting, the viewer was put into a position in relation to what was on display. [A complex geometry of sight as lines of vision / light was involved, and a curiosity about the effect in turn of looking and being looked at, gazing and being gazed upon, not dwelt on here. However, such perceptions were presented as abstract principles that could be applied to any hypothetical beholder; even when they evoked relations, as between superior and inferior in rank, these were understood genericallythe visual principles were detached from particular relations between the actors.] By contrast, a Melanesian exchange of perspectives needs another person, hence the duality, as in a dance display. But, as will emerge, there are displays where the single (male) dancer seems in himself a double, to be in himself two persons, or rather to be in two places, center and periphery, at the same time. The observer does not just elicit the performance (Lecture One), or see himself reflected in the performer (Lecture Two). In the rituals described at the end of this lecture (Lecture Three), those who watch the dancing are no longer constructed in the same witnessing, elicitory mode [as in ceremonial exchange]. It is as though there was a movement [between positions] that did not involve travel. Of the four lectures, this is the one where I feel least secure [in the exegesis], partly because of the gross simplifications, partly because I do not think I have yet settled on the appropriate vocabulary, and partly because you have to take a lot on trust before we get to the last lecture. [And, I should have added, because considerable exegetical work has been done on some of these materials, generating controversies and debates over interpretations that are ignored here.] In the meanwhile, having knocked away the theoretical prop of context in Lecture One, I now in effect knock away the ethnographic prop provided by the material on exchange in Lecture Two, or at least indicate its limitation.

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Backtracking
Let me backtrack a moment, because we have already encountered artifacts where one is invited to see two sides at the same time.

Figure 52. [As in figure 50.] Drawing of a ceremonial shell necklace (bak) from Sabarl, an island in the Southern Massim. Late 1970s. Drawing: Debbora Bataglia. [Reproduced with publishers permission.]

You have seen this before [Lecture Two: figure 50]: the bridewealth necklace from Sabarl in the Massim. I was talking about the way we might think of vision travellingthe way that seafarers in the Massim compel others to turn their eyes onto them, by visiting and seeing their affines and exchange partners. This happens in the kula as well, where the aim of mens journeying is to be at the partners place and receive the wealth that is the effect of having come into the partners field of vision. The valuables embody the distance between persons; at the same time the valuables that recipients receive are already, so to speak, part of them insofar as the donor is compelled to yield them up. For the journey that brings the

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one person face-to-face with the other is anticipated, has already happened, so to speak, in the expectations that each have. (Countless transactions have in any case already taken place.) Items that travel back and forth contain within themselves a depiction of travel. We can say that it as though in depicting the movement between origin and destination, these items encapsulate both donor and recipient in the same image. It is as though the artifact were in two places at the same timeat the beginning and end of the journey at once. And look at this again [Lecture Two: figure 49]: the Sabarl axe.

Figure 53. [As in figure 49.] Drawing of a ceremonial axe blade (tobwatobwa) from Sabarl, an island in the Southern Massim. Late 1970s. Drawing: Debbora Battaglia. [Reproduced with publishers permission.]

Both the blades alone, and the blades and hafts together, may be treated as valuables. As we know, the difference between the arm (and the haft as a whole) and the hand (blade) points to the difference between matrilineal and paternal kin. Matrilineal kin provide bodily support for the person; paternal kin are like a hand that produces wealth that is an extension of the person. [The visual contrast is in the] wood of the handle and the detachable blade. The handle is the body of a person, and the hand its reproductive force: exchanges with paternal kin are essential for matrilineal regeneration. To depict both is

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not just to depict two parents (a Euro-Americanism) but to depict donors and recipients of marriage exchanges. From paternal to maternal kin [as we might describe the affines from the perspective of the child], and vice versa. So we have an image of the very relationship between persons who also act as donors and recipients to one another. Here the axe echoes the necklace, containing both parties or destinies at the same time in the one image of the personthe living person who is the outcome of those exchanges. So [to return to what, in Lecture Two, was mentioned in passing] these valuables simultaneously depict many persons, two matrilineages, maternal and paternal, and one person (the child that is the outcome of these transactions) and the movement (relationship) between them. Visually, it is as though one forever looks in two ways at the same time. If we go back to our exchange of perspectives here, we realize that the distance between displayer and spectator has collapsed, that is, you see both at once [as glimpsed in Lecture Two in the shells coming in / streaming out of the Hagen mens house]. Hence the suggestion that what these items encapsulate is relationship itself; it is visualized in the form of a back and forth movement. The necklace that records movement back and forth is also the very object that compels partners to send it [its substitute] back to the kin of its first donorand is the wealth that reproduces that relationship. Nonetheless, this imagery of travel or flowan exchange of perspectives, which makes seeing things crucial to communication between personsdepends on performances of a particular type. The examples have been of ceremonial exchange, and more briefly of mortuary and bridewealth exchanges; such exchanges [and their reversals] can only be effected over time as a sequencing of one-way transactions. [Added note: I left this formulation at this point, including the vocabulary of performer-spectator, for it came from and was thus extended from the exchange context. To have started with the artifacts presented in this lecture would have brought us to a different comparative juncture.] The parallel I want to develop [in this lecture] is also a visual one. It rests on a contrast between what is supposed to be inside and what outside a person. As I have indicated, coming to the phenomenon from exchange practices it is as though the journey or distance between spectator / observer or displayer / recipient can also be revealed in an entity with two aspects. But do we need to stay with ceremonial [and

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related] exchanges as the key? I dont think so. Something similar is going on in what I now want to present. We shall approach these similar suppositions from different kinds of artifacts, and from two parts of Papua New Guinea where ceremonial exchange is not going to help us understand the visual effects people strive forTelefolmin in the Mountain Ok region and Umeda to the north of there, in the West Sepik. We start with another artifact that is associated with movement, in this case carrying bags worn over the body that travel with the body. They enable the body to be a carrier: a body plus what it carries, that is, the relational (extended) personthe person plus relations. Those relations may also be folded into the person. Like the axe and necklace, two identities appear at the one time. Both parts of the person are visiblethe person as though it were composed of partsas in the dovetailing of maternal and paternal kin. Or as [having the character of being both] male and female.

Male and female: Mt. Ok netbags

Suppose the principal visual technique were not the transposition of exchange relations, in which gender plays a part, but gender relations as such. I turn to a situation where one of the ways in which you see inside and outside at the same timereversible identitiesis effected primarily through gender imagery. An observer can see a person as both male and female, that is, see the same person twiceor on other occasions see the person as one. If you read sexual innuendo [in the material that follows], you are meant to. More than that, sexual imagery is explicit, and is used overtly to refer to bodily capacity, including procreation, having sex, being born. [However,] the imagery occupies a different place [in peoples accounts] from what Euro-Americans often expect. When they [EuroAmericans] look for explanations they tend to stop if they come up with a sexual one, whereas these people are starting with sexual imagery, so to speak, and the question for the anthropologist is what that means.

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The womans bilum, associated with the task of gardening, from Telefolmin.

Figure 54. A womans open-weave looped bag or (in Pidgin English) bilum, revealing garden produce within. Telefolmin, Mountain Ok area. 1984. Photograph: Maureen Mackenzie. [Reproduced with authors permission.]

Both men and women in the Mt. Ok area [Telefol-speakers, Western and West Sepik Provinces] wear bilums [Pidgin or NeoMelanesian for netbags, strictly speaking looped string bags]. Telefol people make two kinds of bag, evident in contrasts between the undecorated / the decorated, between what women wear and what men wear. Making the bilum is womens worka valued skill rendering the woman creative and an initiator of life (same word that is used for initiation). Here (figure 54) is a womans bilum, with its open weave for all to see. Maureen Mackenzie, whose fieldwork dates from 198184, argues that it is in relation to this public female form that a mans bilum has significance.

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Mens bilum.

Figure 55. The reverse side of the elaborated, close-weave Telefol mens bilum, Mountain Ok area. Australian Museum, Sydney. Photograph: Ric Balzan. From Mackenzie, Maureen. 1991. Androgynous objects. [Reproduced with authors permission.]

A mans bilum is initially looped by a woman, but this work is hidden underneath the feathers. Adult men and ritual specialists add the mens feathers and decorations, and only they can do so (in private). The bilum is decorated as a face is decorated. In being carried, the part that women make touches the skin (it is worn on the back), while the feathers are visible on the outside.

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Mens bilum, feathers on top: being worn.

Figure 56. Mens bird feather bilum, decorated with the shiny black feathers of the hornbill. The hornbill is one in a sequence of feathers that men wear, principally from species whose males incubate and / or nurture their young. Telefolmin, Mountain Ok area. 1981. Photograph: Maureen Mackenzie. [Reproduced with authors permission.]

Decorated with hornbill feathers, this [such a bilum] is a source of male pride and an index of prowess. Only once youths have passed first stages of initiation can they elaborate their bags, there being a sequence of feathers (which may include wildfowl, hornbill, cassowary). In the way men add items to a basic bag, one might be tempted to translate the process as a matter of culture being added to nature. [That the temptation can be quite easily avoided is implied.] In this

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case, men acquire the female bilum as a gift from a female relative [e.g., boys from their mother, alongside feathers from their father]. The relationship remains active, and indeed [when women make the bilum for a specific male relative] is given visual cues: the bag is held to act as a reminder of the woman who made it, so the recipient will see her; while when she is looping the bag a woman sees the face of the person she has in mind. Now a mans work contributes to an analogy [see below] between male and female; it does not displace female input but enhances it. [Thinking of the Sabarl concepts of support and complementarity] there would be no frame on which men fastened the feathers if there were no women to loop for them; nothing for women to put in the bags if no men to fill them up. A reproductive image? Yet there is a crucial asymmetry: while invariably people see the womans bag with something inside it, the mens bilum hides one form by another. In the female bag, both genders are apparent at the same time; in the male bag, the genders alternate (the male covering is over the female bag underneath [when it is not being worn, now the wearer sees the back, now the front]). In other words, inside and outside appear though two different visual techniquesone simultaneous, one sequential. Can we see a visual analogy between male and female? In the same way as men cover the bag with feathers, so womens bags contain objects within. [The male bag created by a woman for a man is made in the context of relations between men and women, much as is whatever (food, babies) goes into the womans female bilum.] What you see is the effect of both womens and mens productivity or creativity. Insofar as the female bilum holds the outcome [as produce, creations] of mens as well as womens activities, can we say that it is male in female form? So what about the male bag? Is the feathered bag female in male form, then? A male mother? Telefol say: the bilum is the mother of us all. So what does motherhood imply? The short answer is that it is not just about bearing children but about nurture, and both men and women do that [are nurturers]. Indeed, we can say that both mothers and fathers may act as a kind of mother. The three principal sets of feathers with which the male bilum is decorated derive from birdsthe wildfowl or, as here (figure 56), the hornbill, and cassowarywhose males incubate

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and / or nurture the young. Men see themselves as male mothers incubating boy initiates.

Figure 57. Mackenzie comments on the visual similarity between a cassowary and a woman wearing her bilum and skirt. [See acknowledgments section for reference.] Telefolmin, Mountain Ok area. Early 1980s. Photograph: Robert Mitton (and the Mitton Memorial Trust). [Reproduced with authors permission.]

The woman as cassowary: Mackenzies perception of a visual similarity.

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Now the cassowary is also identified with Afek, a kind of primal female ancestress (Mother). This [figure 57] is the anthropologists visual analogy: a woman like a cassowary. [A cassowary is a large flightless bird related to the emu.] And with the cassowary feather bilum, another kind of visual sequencing affects mens perceptions. For the very feathers that younger men thought differentiated them from women are subsequently revealed to be versions of what women wear these plumes include long tail feathers, and the tail is referred to as a womans skirt. Indeed, Mackenzie says that when elders add plumes of the cassowary to their bilums, they are creating a portable embodiment of Afeks womb. So the same artifact can be seen as male, or as female, or as both. Cassowary plumage in general is likened to womens pubic hair; boys are carrying wombs on their backs. Fathers are indeed a kind of mother, but there is a contrast between the individual motherhood of women and the collective motherhood of men. The collective motherhood of men is enacted in the mens house.

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Telefol mens house.

Figure 58. Telefolmin. The mens house at Telefolip village, Mountain Ok area, its walls tightly woven and hiding what is inside. 1984. Photograph: Maureen Mackenzie. [Reproduced with authors permission.]

The mens house is where initiation occurs. [Telefol people offer many analogies to the elements of which it is composed.] The whole of the mens house is likened to the nest of a wild fowl, which incubates

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its eggs using heat from a mound made of vegetation. Initiates are said to be like nestlings. The house is called a hornbill house: at one point when the initiates are secluded they are passed food through the small aperturejust as a hornbill feeds its young from its long beak. (The beak of the hornbill is compared to a female breast: male nurture.) The small doorway to the mens house is also called the mouth of a bilum. In fact there is a string of references between the initiation house / womb / bilum. An analogy between the mens house and mens bilum.

Figure 59. An analogy between a mans feathered bilum and the Telefolip mens house [figure 58]. What kind of bag is a houseor what kind of house is a bag?

In summary [we could perhaps put it like this]. What men have or show on the outside, women have or show on the inside. Hence one may say that when men enclose something withinthe initiatesthey are female (mothers) in male form; the male form is made present in the imagery of the birds. Between the two forms of the bilum is a concomitant play on what is open and what is secret. Womens bilums, with their open weave, are worn in public; everyone can see what the woman has inside [it is in that sense shown]. Mens are made in secret, like the house, both enclosed and concealing, in the same way as

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feathers completely cover the bilum [the visible feathers show the hidden secret]. If we say that one person contains another person (as mother with her child, or as men protecting women enclosed within the settlement) then it has to be in the sense that containment may refer not only to something within but to somethingor that thing brought outside. (The language is counter-intuitive here.) So as well as inferring a sequence from containment to elicitation (concealment / revelation) [or its reverse] we could talk of differentiated forms of containment (or differentiated forms of elicitationthe same thing). If we are looking at peoples artifacts from this part of the world, then, we have to ask what kind of bag a house is, or what kind of house a bag is. [Added note: And one answer is another question: what is on its outside and what is within?] So what kind of person is a person? The Mt. Ok material shows one of the effects of gender imagery, that one can see a person as both male and female. And this [apperception] is mediated through visual orientation: the way outside and inside are made to appear in relation to one another.

Center and periphery: Sepik (and other) masks

With masks, the artifact in question is not at first sight a receptacle for carrying things, but a covering that people put over themselves. I said that the Mt. Ok bilum can [in gender terms] be analyzed as both male and female. It invites a view from the exterior, and the question of what is seen on the outside and what is being kept on the inside. Similarly the mask, but with masksas with houseswe can also start at a different visual point, a view from the interior. In the examples I adduce, men carry the masks, but as will become evident there is a sense in which the masks carry the men. I have deliberately approached the mask through first looking at the bilum; thinking of the bilum, which is as much an article of clothing or adornment as a bag to put things in or on, helps us sidestep much of what Euro-Americans imagine masks to be about. Now we could regard the mask as just a kind of enveloping or covering form of display of the kind we have seen before. (The wearers are all men.)

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Figure 60. Hagen exchange donor with a tall headdressthe feather plaque (bird bilum or koi wal, see figure 30). Ndika, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1967. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

Hagen mana feather plaque on top of the wig extends his decorations far above his head.

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Figure 61. A pair of ornamented spirit figures made from barkcloth being carried by performers at a ceremonial festival; the bamboo poles may be 18 or 20 meters tall. Wantoat, Huon Peninsula. Mid-1950s. Photograph: Carl Schmitz. [Reproduced with publishers permission.]

Wantoat (Huon Peninsula, northern coast of Papua New Guinea): dancers are magnified and extended by the spirit effigies they carry.

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Figure 62. A pair of malanggan (or malagan) from Madina, New Ireland, in the form of masks, danced after the cremation of an old lady. Made by Ahomarang of Madina. 1980. Photograph: Dieter Heintze. [Reproduced with publishers permission.]

Malanggan masks from New Ireland cover the head and shoulders.

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Figure 63. A malanggan-related mask called tatanua used in a performance by a Northern Mandak dancer in 1979, Pinikindu village, New Ireland. Brenda Clay (1987: 69) says that once a mask has been lowered over a mans head he must not utter a soundhe has gone inside a malagan. Photograph: Brenda Clay. [Reproduced with publishers permission.]

As with all these extensions, this one from New Ireland (Pinikindu) tests the strength of the man who carries it. The fact that the wearers face is covered with a mask [in Figure 63] seems a self-evident demonstration of the Euro-American truism that persons play roles in society [the roles are contained by / elicited from them]. However, we should look at this visual sequence [Figures 60 63] not just as a series of styles but as a series of phenomenal forms: the images [as I have selected them] here run from (60) what is attached a performer, to (61) what is carried by him, to (62) the performer enveloping himself in the ornament, to (63) making the dancer appear inside the artifact. We might ask if the last two actions enveloping or coveringare not effecting visual transformations of a particular kind.

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[We now turn to] Umeda, West Sepik and the ida festival [for sago fertility]. The anthropologists (Alfred Gells) question in the 1970s [fieldwork 196970] was how to interpret a particular array of male dancing figures and sequence of events. [They formed] not a single display in a line (as in Hagen) but an unfolding of a sequence over about two weeks of ritual activity, much of it at night. [Added note: more could have been made of this, since the spectators seemingly glimpse or sense the dancers rather than being exposed to them in full view.] Several different decorations suggest many ritual figures, but Gell concludes that basically there is only one, in process of transformation over the generations [resulting, in his view, in the emergence of a young man, a junior cassowary, as an older-man-to-be; mature men, the senior cassowaries, appear prior in the sequence]. Forms appear within forms, or one form emerges out of another. [Added note: The masks illustrated here come from those worn by dancers from the senior generation only; most of the masks are danced in pairs (two of a kind), indicating the two moieties (see next paragraph). Here, as elsewhere, I deal with no more than a minute portion of the material.] Umeda people live in small hamlets that make up villages, residential not kin groups, which come together for these festivals. A crucial axis is that between center and periphery: each hamlet is split into two moieties, one regarded as center / male, the other as periphery / female. [Each of course includes both men and women.] The female periphery encircles or contains the male. Some hamlets join together in order to intermarry. [From egos point of view, these are also regarded as on the periphery.] Others do not exchange women but exchange masks, each hamlet exchanging masks with two or three other hamlets outside its village. Masks thus circulateso men dancers will be wearing masks obtained from elsewhere; they can wear masks from other [peripheral] hamlets provided they do not marry from there. The mask is like the center of a hamletin effect a masked dancer is wearing someone elses center. [From Werbners meta-interpretation,] Men who are outsiders to each others territory exchange masks. In this way they turn themselves into insiders and gain access to one anothers inner space (Werbner 1989: 156). Like women, the masks are containers for men. The masked dancer seemingly takes the form of a tree. Across the Papua New Guinea Highlands, feathers worn at the head are likened to

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birds flocking to [flowering] trees. Lowlands people draw on coconut and the sago palms. On analogy with sago, a man has a core that can be extracted, and is himself sprung from an ancestral coconut.

Figure 64. The sago dancers at the ida fertility ritual wear the same kind of mask (ageli) as the cassowaries [see figure 65], but with bodypaint in strong contrast. Umeda, West Sepik. 196970. Drawing: Alfred Gell. [Reproduced with the permission of Simeran Gell.]

Dancer playing the sago role (aba), with distinctive body paint.

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Figure 64 shows the masked dancer as a tree [palm]at the core of the tree is the man. The dancer supplies the core and animates the tree, making the branches shake. So the man completes the mask so to speak: together they are a complete figure. But it is not a just a male figure, as we shall see. To make the point again, masks, or coconut masks as they are called (some of them incorporate coconut fiber), are exchanged between hamlets (coconut compatibility) and where hamlets exchange masks they cannot marry. Those who marry cannot wear one anothers coconut masks; maternal (previously married) kin are known by contrast as of the skirt, a reference to womens skirts that are made of sago fiber. Wearing the masks is reproductive in the context of a long fertility ritual cycle that plays on birth imagery; we might say the inter-mask hamlets behave as though they were inter-marrying hamlets, that is, [their relations] have similar reproductive effects. In any event, a man wears a mask that has come from another hamlet. As Werbner put it [above], this is entering another hamlets (another persons) inner space [he went on to suggest that the mask worn by the cassowary dancersee belowis worn as a male womb]. One person (hamlet) puts on another person (hamlet), so to speak.

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The cassowary (eli) role.

Figure 65. One of a pair of cassowary men who perform all night, joined by many other dancers, with a special penis-gourd in reference to the intention of the ida ritual to foster fertility. Spectators are on the periphery. Umeda, West Sepik. 196970. Drawing: Alfred Gell. [Reproduced with the permission of Simeran Gell.]

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The mask doesnt hide the man so much as puts the man in the position of being inside it, making him the center of it, a body within a body. An alternative to perspective? [There are three elements here.] (1) Center and periphery: what is inside [the mask] is not further away from the spectator than what is outside [rather, it is like the outsides inside, in the sense that the outside is given form and motion by the inside]. (2) The spectator is put in no single position, that is, there is no specific vantage point from which the figure is to be seen: the spectators are all around the masked dancerhe dances in their center. (3) What is made visible is outside and inside [the mask] at the same time. In gender terms, a male figure is composed of both male and female elements. Diagram of the mask (ageli) worn by both the sago and cassowary dancers.

Figure 66. Schematic diagram of the ageli mask seen in figures 64 and 65. Umeda, West Sepik. 196970. Drawing: Alfred Gell. [Reproduced with the permission of Simeran Gell.]

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[Although with different body paint, the aba and the eli dancers wear the same masks (called ageli)in fact, in sequence, the pair of eli dance first, all night, and then at dawn hand over their masks to the aba.] This mask includes an inner layer of bark (ehov sog), the same kind of bark that women use to make barkcloth and [the string for] bilums [netbags], covered by a fringe of pandanus leaves (the hubnab). And in this case the mask incorporates sago fronds, on the periphery. Can we say that mask (that has come from an ally village, a coconut village) contains reference to those other villages from which wives come? However, the sago isnt worn like a containerit is sago in the form of coconut. Let me try to explain that! Look at the sago fronds again: fibrous material from the sago palm is used in making womens skirts, although womens skirts hang down, [potentially] containing the child inside. Here, springing up on top of the mask, is that part of sago most like the sprouting branches of a coconut palm associated with men. So the man whose torso and legs appear underneath the mask, so to speak, also appears at the top, that is, as masculinized sago. You look at the sago fronds, but then you realize that the fronds remind you not just of coconut but of the cassowary plumes that men also wear (the term for sago fronds incorporates the term for cassowary). Sago appears masculinized in the way the fronds are worn. We may say that the whole mask plus its figure, an image of male interiority and a female periphery, is also shown on the outside of the man / mask in the male and female elements of the mask itself. Of course spectators are only aware of the mask in its animated stateit isnt seen when it is uninhabited. When the mask shakes and the fruits clack up and downthe band of fruit at top of the mask recall the daughters men give away in marriageit is because it is animated by male presence. As a consequence, as far as hamlet identity is concerned, places are assembled and reassembled: people can be in different kinds of places. Does a mask depict what a place looks like when it moves? Peripheral women move elsewhere or come from elsewhere and thus recenter the men of a hamlet, surrounding the men with different kinds of women. Daughters move away, mothers come in, the latter being from other hamlets where other men are the core. The masks are doing the same thing for those villages between whom there is no flow of women. You see at the same time one form in another: the womans

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skirt and her daughters are everted into the springing fronds, and it is the man who is within the mask. This is not an assemblage of materials (culture, roles, society) that the person has put on, but a person that a person has put on. Together they comprise those from whom and to whom fertility flows. Like kula wealth that in being given away magically compels its own return, here fertility is given away (in those daughters who marry out) and returns in the image of the hamlet contained by its mothers. For the role men assume in this, promoting their own fertility is also to derive it from others and bestow it on others. And the radical division between sago and coconut that divides hamlets (villages) turns out to offer the possibility [iconographically speaking] of hamlets occupying one anothers central places. This is consonant with the fact that [on the occasions of the ida festival] there is no single viewing point (no single orientation) from which to see the dancer.

On visual theory again

We can now pull some of the elements noted in Lecture Two in another direction. In general terms taking on board [the conclusion] that seeing activates relationships (where things are made explicitly to be seen, seeing is an act), we can add a couple of comments to the exchange of perspectives (where performers and spectators each see themselves in the other and thus from the others position [the perspective, like a relationship, is divided between them]). (7) Simultaneity and sequence. To see yourself from the view of the other may be to comprehend both views at the same time; at the same time, the simultaneous view may anticipate their differentiation (sequence). It is also possible to imagine oneself both in a place and occupying other places [at the same place]. [Added note: Knocking away the prop of exchange relations gives us another view of the temporality or spatiality inevitably implied in the two-way movement between revelation and concealment.] (8) Differentiation. It is possible, within the contours of an image, to see persons within persons, through differentiating visual attributes such as male and female, inside and outside, center and periphery.

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Let me bring this back to masks. The Euro-American assumption that a mask covering the head and face is primarily a re-presentation of the head or face is no doubt based on the fallacy that what we are primarily dealing with is transformations of personal identity, actors and social roles (Lecture One: the person as an individual is seen above all in the face). The Papua New Guinean mask pulled over the head is not so much representing the head as such; rather, the head is part of the body that can both carry this appendage and go inside it. Now when the mask is regarded [in the Euro-American view] as a covering for the face beneath / behind, a specific perspective is implied. That is, the observer is placed at a distance from the wearer. This view of the mask requires the observer to be looking from a position in front of / outside of the figure, so that he or she looks first at the mask and then thinks about the figures behind the mask. (A simple two-step view of receding distance.) However, the masks we have been looking at are less like the masks of Euro-American theatricals or masquerades and much more like netbags or axe blades, or even pearlshells. Hagen men bearing heavy mounted pearlshell valuables as part of their person.

Figure 67. The same occasion, and same dance formation, as in figure 42. Ndika, Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands. 1967. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern.

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* * *
[To be added if time]. While the wealth that a Hagen dancer displays refers to other wealth or implies a general statement about wealth, it is also part of that wealth, is the wealth. It summons the relationships that compel its travel and exchange. So, too, we may say of the netbags or masks as parts of personswhat people carry on their bodies is what carries them in / across relationships, or [avoiding that particular construction] is their relationships. If decoration is conceived for the body, the body itself exists only through decoration. We might say the same of persons and their relations. For the pearlshell / axe blade / bilum / mask is not so much an abstracted representation of the relationships between persons as their very presence, in the sense that when such a thing / person moves it reproduces relationships, and thus embodies its own effect. Both here and there at the same time [at the same place].

* * *
Finally, it will have escaped no-ones attention that diverse equivalences, identities and associations have been made largely in the absence of any justification through exegesis [anthropological or otherwise]. We shall turn to something like Papua New Guinean exegesis next time.

4 Wig / shell / tree: Hiding forms

It will be obvious that what I have presented [as a narrative and the assertions contained therein] has been a string of interpretations on my parttrying to turn images around for you, using the English language of course. This lecture concludes with a sequence that will turn certain images around through something like an indigenous commentary. That turning around is going to depend less on words than on how images are placed or located in relation to one another. So I introduce directionality. And it is a directionality that is bound up with the movement of objects, and of vision, between persons. Think of a map with its fixed directions. However you hold it, you are oriented northa point that fixes the viewer, too (a version of EuroAmerican perspectivalism). Yet, in these Melanesian instances, I have been talking about the way objects move between people and are carried by them. And even how people may be in two places at the same time: I am within the encompassing circle of my village / I am at the center of his village. Of course that is my formulausing spatial terms to produce a paradox. An English-speakers view of place is possible (in part) because places dont travel. They stay put, and one can only be in one place at a time. What I want to underline is precisely the possibility of imagining people occupying different places at the one time, as though they were at opposite ends of a compass, or conversely in themselves held two diametrically positioned places. And to suggest this is part of the image-makers visual theory. Sometimes we find this being made explicit, insofar as people play with form, as is very evident on the part of the Barok of New Ireland as described by Roy Wagner. At one point in their secondary mortuary
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | Marilyn Strathern Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. Strathern, Marilyn. 2013. Learning to see in Melanesia. Masterclass Series 2. Manchester: HAU Society for Ethnographic Theory.

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rituals, they uproot a forest tree, bring it into a central plaza, and replant itbut they replant it upside down, with the roots in the air. Clearly deliberately; clearly made to be seen; clearly a display. The tree that was originally pointing in one direction now points in another. And the tree is hung about with personsso it is the directions in which people are facing that are also twisted around. It is as though this display were enacting an exchange of perspectives. What people do with their artifacts includes putting themselves into the position of seeing things differently. Reversing expectations: here is a deliberate attempt to present what is visible as reversible.

A diversion on the interpretative exercise

[Added note: This set of lectures has clearly not been an exercise in the anthropological tradition of exegesis. For the labor of interpretation I have, as already noted, substituted a narrative. It suggests that those to whom I was speaking might see things in one way but could be shown another. (I comment briefly on that at the end of this last lecture.) The narrative is presented as though there were no problems with apprehending what is happening, and proceeds without pointing to the vast critical apparatus of symbolic interpretation to which the 1970s and 1980s were heir. However, for students in the 1990s and 2000s, for whom the art of explicit interpretation had more or less disappeared with the attenuation of symbolic anthropology, I could not resist one or two simple pointers. The narrative also rests on a visual device probably only suitable for face-to-face interaction, as in a spoken lecture. Face-to-face because the device consisted of no more than the passage of time involved, and thus a sequencing to what was being imparted, this relying in turn on holding peoples attention from one moment to the succeeding moment. To reproduce this as text, even part-text, is another matter. It should be added that in the descriptions that follow we find the ethnographers in question making visual interpretations of their own.] You cant ask people. They are not going to tell you. It would be like me asking you [heads down, sitting in the room writing notes]: What are you doing when you are writing? I am just writing! But why are you doing an A like that? That is the way you write an A. Why are As written like that? That is how it is. But this A doesnt look like that A. It doesn't matter! But surely it must matter? . . . And so forth. You can imagine the

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ethnographer asking: what does it mean to write by analyzing the number of times a person uses a pen or a pencil or prefers one letter to another. It is obvious that anthropologists have various procedures for interpretation and they once loomed large as part of the regular taught curriculum (all there, for example, in Radcliffe Browns 1922 Andaman Islanders), such as contextualization and cross-reference. Let me quickly note three. (1) Looking at a pattern, so as to understand one item by reference to various others, may mean finding a pattern in other items or actions either in the same milieu or else across them, as across [what we otherwise delineate as] contexts or cultures. (Example: how one understands the practice of mortuary ceremonies.) (2) To consider similar items in terms of the language of signs (semiotics) or decisions as to similarity and difference, which all have to remain within a single cultural milieu. (How people treat treesall the occasions on which they cut down trees. Are they a kind of immobile canoe? Full of people? Does it point to other usage of trees?) (3) What people do with objects as things: how can the properties that things present be deployed or acted upon (so a thing encodes its own context of use); what rules does an item itself contain? Within the one artifact? (What is the internal relationship between the roots and branches?) [Added note: Each of these presupposes what it seeks to explain, but deploys different strategies to do so.] Lets take these as guiding elements in what follows. (1) Approaching one item by reference to others may be across cultures so, as I have done before, I am going to take three artifacts from three quite different parts of Papua New Guinea. In each case I shall (2) look at similar itemsthat is, take a decision as to similarity and differencewithin each one of these milieux or contexts. We shall also consider (3) what people feel they can do with [objects as] things and thus how something creates its own context. The three artifacts taken up now entail a sense of directionality; each in fact requires that the object has to be seen (made visible) in relation to others, and each incidentally is to do with the succession of the generations, and thus with relations between youth and age. First one direction is evident and then multiple directions appear together. Thus the Huli wig displays only one direction [though it has two poles] at a time. A shell valuable from Wiru allows a viewer to see more than one direction simultaneously. The mortuary tree from Barok [mentioned above] combines both possibilities, moving from the one position to the other position; the power of the last image is that it is as though

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people were commenting on the effect of images as such, presenting an indigenous interpretation of what it means to be a witness.

Two wigs from Huli

Figure 68. A portrait by Kirk of Mokai, from Huli (Piribu) in the Southern Highlands Province (between 196780). See figure 7 for a detail. Non-display everyday apparel: a manda tene wig [see figure 70], though with the birds crest not upturned. Photograph: Malcolm Kirk. [Reproduced with authors permission.]

Start with the portrait gallery once again, and a photograph from Kirk. A man from Huli, in the Southern New Guinea Highlands.

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[Now] let us compare like with like.

Figure 69. A Huli (Southern Highlands) man wearing the ceremonial display-mode manda hare wig; see figure 71. Photograph: source unknown.

Another man, same cultural background (Huli), different occasion. [This is not one of Kirks photographs.]

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There are apparent similarities and differences between the two sets of decorations. Yellow face for black; differently shaped wig. In fact, we can say the wig encodes its own context: each [type of] wig refers to the other, not just by way of distinction or opposition but because each anticipates or contains the other. So let us look at the two wigs more closely. [As given in Laurence Goldmans account, based on work in 199798. In his orthography, the a in manda (see below) is marked as having a high-falling tone.] Both wigs are made to be seen. However, between them they refer to a movement between non-display and display. In the former case, the wig displays a moment of nondisplay. Only the second kind of wig is for display in a marked sense. Coded here is [for men] the passage from youth to adult [from the process of attaining power and knowledge to their achievement]. Time or growth is part of the difference between the two forms. The Huli manda tene wig.

Figure 70. The down-turned manda tene (first hair), with traditional upturned birds crest (yagama). Huli, Ialuba Valley, Southern Highlands. 197778. Diagram: Laurence Goldman. [Reproduced with authors permission.]

Graduation in cult status for Huli youths [young bachelors] was marked by the arrangement of hair. Initially novices wore manda tene (first hair) with charcoal as facial decor (as in figure 68). It became part of the mature mans everyday (non-display) apparel. Boy initiates formerly underwent ritual purification, cleansing the body and eyes of

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female pollution. This was the Huli version of the bachelor cult [as in Paiela, Lecture One], effecting the young mens transition from immature to mature. That the wig carries this message is significant since the forehead is associated with knowledge, and the transformation carries with it the capacity to make speeches in public. (The quality of speech should be consonant with the outward display, for to speak boys words from a mans head is to make a fool of oneself.) The Huli manda hare wig.

Figure 71. The upturned manda hare (red hair), with traditional down-turned birds crest (yagama). Huli, Ialuba valley, Southern Highlands. 197778. Diagram: Laurence Goldman. [Reproduced with authors permission.]

When fully fashioned the wig is called manda hare (red hair, colored with red ocher): it signifies the attainment of strength and power inherent in the life-blood of the cult [now put behind], and is imbued with the potency of the cults progenitor (a woman). (See figure 69.) (The Paiela boys in seclusion were grown by a female spirit.) The wig shows the heatbloodpotency that they have now absorbed and appropriated. [Technically speaking, the hair that was first cultivated and could be worked in either of the styles, was not cut and made into a wig until the man had finally emerged from the cult.]

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The transformation from immature to mature is frozen in the two wig types, either of which men may wear in the open, so they present themselves in one of two forms, young or old. [Added note: There may be other appearances in the way men dress, but I say form to indicate a deliberate presentation / alternation of properties.] The colors black / red offer a binary opposition between impotence and potency, the shape of the wigs between non-display and display or the everyday and ceremonial. To this I addyou will see why laterwhat is complete or incomplete. Now one wig is closed down, the other is opened up. The different directions (up / down) point to two different times. A man can only wear one wig at a time (depending on the kind of occasion), yet weve seen that each contains within it reference to the other. Look at the alternative placings of the blue Superb Bird of Paradise crest feathers (a child; children are eulogized as this bird) in the center of the wig, at the forehead. The up / down directions [of the crest feathers and the shape of the wig] were traditionally reversed. [Added note: The display mode of these blue feathers on the non-display manda tene shows what lies ahead in mens efforts to attain power; their non-display mode on the display manda hara signifies mens reticence in boasting of their accomplishmentsone is praised by others, not by oneself.] In sum, from the point of view of the wearer, a man only wears one [wig] at a time; yet the spectator sees two forms together. Each form is one of a pair . . . each also references the other, and thus makes the pair visible. In the past, the down-pointing wig had an up-pointing child, while the up-pointing wig had a down-pointing child. The boy becoming / to be produced as a man is procreatively the same as the man who will produce a boy. So any particular direction contains the other within it. That having been said, note thatthrough the relationship between the head and the body displayed as standing uprightthe relationship between up and down or top and bottom, pointing to the sky and pointing to the ground, is fixed. [The directional alternatives move between these two poles.]

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Diagram 1. Schematic depiction of one-way directionality in the Huli wig, where the relationship between up and down is fixed; although each type of wig contains its opposite, the direction (top / bottom) remains stable.

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Two shells from Wiru

Here [for the Southern Highlands Wiru] we encounter open and closed shells (my epithets). It seems that a contrast between open and closed operates as a similar kind of coordinate to up and down, namely, to what is displayed and what is normally hidden. The objects themselves are rendered either as incomplete, productive and creative, or as complete and the outcome of others productive or creative effort. [Added note: the ethnographer refers briefly to the first of two shells about to be described as open-ended and the other as complete, like an eggI have extended the references.] What I call the open shell, Wiru (maiyo).

Figure 72. The maiyo pearshell and its parts. The pouwe rim covered with a white tree sap that turns black on setting may be interpreted as referring to semen, while the opposite rim (tobe keli) is associated with femaleness and the womb, and with the color yellow; the line and dot marking are of a beetle that is yellow in its larval stage. The pouwe rim is also called the shells head, its horns legs. Wiru, Takuru village, Pangia, Southern Highlands Province. Early 1980s. Drawing: unnamed Wiru artist, drawn for the ethnographer. [Reproduced with publishers permission.]

This is the ordinary shell that travels, moving in life-cycle exchanges (for example, in this virilocal context, to mothers kin in payment for a

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childs body), separating persons and events in space and time. Wherein which directionis it going? It depends on how you hold it . . . where you are in its travels. Movement: because you can see a shell as either coming or going in its travels, coming or going between exchange partners. For the shell itself points in either, or any, direction: only whether you see it as a donor or recipient (or as a witness to a transaction) will it tell you its direction. [We might speak of this as] a visual effect; the direction in which people are looking is the discriminatory device. [Added note: While an alternation between away from oneself and towards oneself could be seen as the two poles of a single direction, the shell is (so to speak) not directed in itself, does not point to thatit could be either, or altogether other, and one only knows by other means.] The maiyo shell has an explicit iconography [as Jeffrey Clarke elucidates (fieldwork in 1980s)], with its yellow color and black-red rim (the latter comes from a white resin that turns black on exposure, and is painted red): a female inner body and male outer form, inside and outside together. The whole is washed over with red ocher, signifying male endeavor as well as blood ties between men (a mother creates flesh and bones; male semen binds both womb blood and [yellow] female substance to give the child a form). This open shell can turn inwards or outwards (toward one / away from one), or be going elsewhere, and thus encloses multiple directions of movement within it. In this sense, like the Huli wigs, each contains alternative viewpoints. In moving between persons, it is meant to be seen. For it is movement that makes the shell reproductive; one shell may be going in or coming out of another [my gloss]. However, in addition, Wiru elaborate a difference between movement and nonmovement in comparing the open exchange maiyo with another kind of shell. Hence [they also deploy] what I call a closed shell: when it is closed it is not elicited by anyone, is not travelling, and is in effect kept hidden and immobile: in short, it is ordinarily not meant to be seen. Any sequence (of acts, transactions) is finished. In terms of the Huli wig, it is the youth as the outcome of mens activities who is complete and thus [I would say] closed, like a fetus inside a mother. In terms of Wiru shell decoration, it is old age and death that is depicted as a completion.

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The special closed shell, Wiru (yobo maiyo).

Figure 73. The yobo maiyo shell, with references to procreation (the pearshell sliver is a child; the shells skirt, the painted barkcloth that completes it, is of the kind worn by unmarried girls seeking partners) and death (necklaces from the seeds woven into the skirt are worn in mourning). Wiru, Takuru village, Pangia, Southern Highlands Province. Early 1980s. Drawing: presumed as in figure 72. [Reproduced with publishers permission.]

The potent (maiyo) shell is the incomplete one that always moves to find a partner; it is open to another. But the closed yobo maiyo shell is in a sense already completed, is already partnered (two bodies have already been brought together). This special shell is kept in houses to help other shells grow (also occasionally used in war compensation but never for kin-based life cycle payments). The closed shell is associated with death, with once powerful men now deceased, or finished, for they have already produced children in their stead.

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Diagram 2. Schematic depiction of movement (multi-directionality) and nonmovement (directionality stopped) indicated in the two Wiru pearlshells.

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Iconographically, [the shell mount consists of] a barkcloth board that is both red and black, with references to death (incorporating bits of a deceaseds leg bands or mourning necklaces [coix lacrymae]). It is thought to resemble a womans skirt. The ethnographer points out its likeness to a child-carrying bilum (netbag): Wiru speak of the pearlshell sliver [on the shells rim] as a child of its pearlshell mother. [Added note: It appears in the drawing hanging down, but could equally be imagined as at the forehead or center of the shells head.] The secret of the closed pearlshell [reddened with ocher] is that inside the red and yellow inner body (blood and female substance) is a white child. [From what Clarke says, with reference to figure 73] we may imagine the yobo maiyo as two shells or two sets of legs meeting one another, and imagine them as doing so productively or creatively. Yet the production / creation has already happened: the shell is already completed by the skirt / bilum.

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Diagram 3. Comparison of certain Huli and Wiru forms.

[Added note: I did not draw attention to the similar / different clustering of values in the comparison.]

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* * *
This was the juncture at which I circulated in class a Wiru maiyo shell, which had been kept in a painted black and red bark pouch but was itself free-standing. Only when it was worn or given did the legs point in a specific direction, that is, and these are my extrapolations, when it was completed by the wearer (worn on the chest, with the legs upwards to frame the head) or by an exchange partner (to whom the legs would carry it).

* * * The Barok mortuary tree

In looking at similar items, the observer has to take a decision as to similarity and difference; so how do we ever know what is the same? The Usen Barok of New Ireland, from Roy Wagners fieldwork in 197980, propose some surprises. In this matrilineal context, a mens house enclosure ordinarily contains the feasts that people organize (inside the fence). The layout of the courtyard uses the relative positions of front / back and above / below to delineate coordinates of time and space. So it lays out all four points at once (front / back / above / below).

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Figure 74. In this drawing, a man is inside the mens house enclosure (taun), with a table piled up with food, as though he and it can also be seen as on top of the branches of the stile. Usen Barok, central New Ireland. About 1979. Drawing: Roy Wagner. [Reproduced with publishers permission.]

Here is the mens house enclosure or courtyard (taun) (Usen Barok), with its rectangular stone wall, the house itself in the center. The fore part is the feasting space, including a display table. The entrance is a stile carved from a treethe gate of the pig. The fore part the Barok

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say is like the upper part of a tree. At the rear is the burial ground. Barok say this is like the roots of a tree below groundthe roots of the clan, fixed in ground. Ancestors are buried there, indeed like the root of a tree, while its branches above ground indicate its capacity to give feasts. At a feast, the distribution of food takes place from the rear to the front, that is, from the enclosure within the courtyard to the outside. Pigs are laid out pointing to outside the enclosure, lined up facing outwards. In this ordinary courtyard, a man is inside the enclosure, with the trestle table piled up with food. It has been drawn by Wagner as though it can also be seen as on top of the branches of the stile. This is a visual cue, as well find out. Now at a funeral (the first mortuary ceremony) these positions are reversed. Here the moiety organization is important, and the moiety of the deceased is fed by [members of] the other moiety. The event is still taking place within the taun (mens house enclosure). However, all food for eating is brought into the enclosure from outside, and pigs (which have come from elsewhere) are turned towards the burial area pointing in that direction, they are facing inwards. During this period the corpse is being absorbed by the ground. The deceaseds moiety is turned inward and is fed by the outside moiety. Then when the deceased is finally decomposed and part of the land, the mens house opens itself up again and gives to others. Direction is reversed once more. The pigs are now placed facing outwards toward the gate, and distribution is from the rear toward the front again. Pigs come from the taun. Death is complete: the men turn to feeding others again. [Wagner refers to feasts succeeding each other in this way as closed and open.] Subsequently, however, when much later a great feast (a second mortuary ceremony) is held in memory of several who have died, something else happens. Now the actions go outside the taun. A tree is set up outside the enclosure, like a huge commentary on all these directional operations. The men deliberately manipulate the coordinates to which they had been adhering. [Still with figure 74.] First, they transform the grounding image, from courtyard into tree. But then the courtyard was already a tree! It is a tree with spreading branches and roots, canopy above and root system below, the branches of men who propagate other lineages through their marriages and the

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matrilineal roots of ancestry. So in the image of the courtyard you see the matriclan and its fruit: its deceased ancestress and its young mena central core and spreading extensionsand there is no problem about imagining these (courtyard, tree) simultaneously. The image keeps the coordinates steadyfront and back, up and down. But [as Wagner makes clear] an image has its own coordinatesthe image is of the whole thing: the clan and the possibilities of reproductionand any part signals the rest. That is, wherever you start, from the roots or from the branches, you are part of that totalizing image. (There is no one vantage point.) And they tell themselves that, it would seem! The Barok trick [they talk of tricks] is to show themselves that one could as well be in one place as in another. The upturned tree (Usen Barok).

Figure 75. Rootstock mortuary feast (una ya kaba) displaying a directional inversion of the image of branch and rootstock. The ultimate power, the source of all things in the world, is said to be that of image-transformation. Usen Barok, central New Ireland. About 1979. Drawing: Roy Wagner. [Reproduced with publishers permission.]

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So on this occasion men recapitulate the image of a tree supporting people, but turn it upside down. (The tree cut from the forest is planted with its roots [trimmed as the drawing shows] in the air.) Between these two different forms, the tree one way up and then another, people are transposed. One kind of person is [revealed as] also another kind of person. People are invited to switch their perception: to see that what is down can become up. Observers being invited to switch their perception enact a switch in their perception of other persons. The mens house enclosure (taun), ordinarily contains the feast (inside the fence). On this special occasion the feast is outside the mens house; everything is laid out around the tree on top of which a young man stands. For the occasion will entail celebrating the death of [one or more] former big men, pointing to the kind of young big men (boys) who will take their place. The effect is to have produced one person out of another. It is done through making the old and the new appear at the same time. [We come back to the realization that] persons are contained by other persons: when you see a young man you also see a female ancestress; when you see a nubile girl you also see an out-marrying man. You could as well be looking at old or young, at male or female, at married or unmarried. Persons are distinguished only by the places they occupy, and the places have moved. Or put otherwise, when you look at a person you see a person in a particular formyoung, male, initiate (say). But as a member of a clan group the capacity of that person to be effective in the world also shows that he (a clansman) is equally the female ancestress or nubile girl or middleaged man who also make up its members. We may recall the Gawan canoe that is simultaneously a mother and a decorated youth. One of Wagners early insights was that in a situation where people make presumptions about an innate similarity of identity, effort has to be directed to creating difference, keeping distinctions separate, such as between male and female, or there can be no productive / creative outcome [to life]. Hence all the rules and taboos that keep people apart, such as the interval in gift exchange. So the creation of temporal momentstwo times of socialityand the creation of distance between personsdividing them off from one anotherare deliberate efforts at demarcation. Then from time to time another truth is revealed: the fact that the differently demarcated reference points are all the same. It is as though people witness the coordinates changing places, that is,

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places in movement. Those who witness the image are perhaps made to realize that their present status (young / old, male / female) is simultaneously substitutable and determining: you could see yourself as of another age or gender, and indeed you are these other (clan) selves, but you are also what you are at that particular moment in space and time.

Why a visual theory?

My comments are stimulated by [what English-speakers would call] the kinds of artifacts that Melanesians produce to be seen. (In some cases these artifacts have fallen into disuse; in some cases they are still being made.) Yet does what I have been saying really point to an indigenous visual theory? What would the elements be? Of course, they dont need a theory [in this sense, there is not going to be an indigenous visual theorythat was always a question on a par with Kirks reflections on the power of his images]. Rather, the question is a way of formulating what the Euro-American anthropologist might need to construct as a theory in order to describe these artifacts, if only as a counterweight to what he or she otherwise takes for granted. The response has been in true Euro-American knowledge-making fashion that makes an assumption of difference here. What I am attributing to Papua New Guinean practices is part of an effort to get myself ourselvesto see differently. The reward might be a second glimpse, this time of some of the premises from which men [a reminder that I have been dealing with largely male spectacle] there operate. In other words, and it cannot be said too many times, it is not that the world being constructed in these lectures is the world Melanesians see (these artifacts are not concerned with describing a world). It is that without such a construction our world (with which we are concerned) will be all that we do see. [I do not go into the recursivity here.] Here is a glimpse.

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Figure 76. This is the kind of photograph that is frequent and conventional in ethnographies (Feld 2012: Plate 6, following p. 236) says Feld. Gaso of Bono clan, Kaluli, Southern Highlands Province. 197677. Photograph: Steven Feld. [Reproduced with authors permission.]

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This photograph of a Kaluli dancer traveling to a performance (Southern Highlands), the ethnographer says, is frequent and conventional in ethnographies. [He adds: it is an example of conventional Western portraiture in a medium shot. See comments on portraits and ethnographic realism in Lecture One.] But what relation does this have to the image the man presents?

Figure 77. Original caption: Frozen in motion while dancing up and down the dark longhouse corridor, a dancer is seen as a man in the form of a bird, kalu obe mise (Feld 2012: Plate 7, following p. 236). Kaluli, Southern Highlands Province. 197677. Photograph: Steven Feld. [Reproduced with authors permission.]

The photographer invents his own metaphor (image) to convey, he says, the metaphorical qualities or aesthetic intent of the danced display. This second photograph was deliberately taken by Steven Feld to respond to a Kaluli spectator who spoke of how in the middle of a night of dancing, drowsy with it all, you suddenly open your eyes and see a birda man in the form of a bird. Not just because of the movement of the dance and the quality of the light, but because spectators are supposed to be in an altered emotional state themselves. Kaluli take this to extremes in one of their ceremonies at which dancers are invited by the hosts of the occasion to evoke their [the

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hosts] feelings (for departed kin, for distant places). They are made to feelemotion is drawn from themwhile the dancers remain immobile and passive. Paying for being seen (Lecture Three): the Kaluli performer has to pay the spectator for his suffering, for being moved, altered, by the sad songs and the beautiful sight. [Added note: Conventionally the spectator-hosts weep and, as well as expecting compensation, take revenge for having their feelings elicited thus by branding the impassive dancers with torches.] The spectator plays back the power of the performer, a witness. However the spectator has to be in the right subject-state to do so. Here is another glimpse.

Figure 78. Men imitating womens secret ritual. Original caption: Belying the assertions of men and women that the details of each others secret ritual performances are unknown to the opposite sex, young men dressed as female initiates enact in the forest a scene from the womens secret rites. They are rehearsing a mime to be performed at night inside the mens house where male initiation rites (from which women are rigorously excluded) will be in progress (Gillison 1980: 166). Gimi, Eastern Highlands Province. 197375. Photograph: David Gillison. [Reproduced with publishers permission.]

Secrecy, hiding, precluding others from display, as when women are not allowed to see mens sacred rites, has less to do with people being

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kept ignorant than as to who qualifies as the right person to be a witness. In Gimi, men are excluded from womens secret ritesscenes that no man would ever be allowed to see as a man. [Added note: This is because to see would imply their receptivity to certain kinds of knowledge, and they are not the appropriate vehicles for womens knowledge. That does not mean they do not know about them in the way Euro-Americans might imagine knowledge as a matter of gaining information.] But here at the heart of an equally secret male initiation sequence men are mimicking what are not supposed to know about, namely a secret scene from womens ritual. Why are objects produced for display, or (for that matter) for nondisplay? Why is attention being paid to appearancewhy do Melanesian men, and more often than women, carve, paint, dress up, dance? Whatever they do in other parts of their lives, are they not at that moment conveying the import of events, through protocols and aesthetic conventions, of which time is a significant element (only at certain times are objects brought out to be seen)? The point to make is that this is often far from a concern with procedures of representation, that is, with how to make the world known to oneself, where all the problems are with how to describe, analyze, model it, as anthropological knowledge-seekers do.

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Figure 79. Looking inside oneself: imaging the effects of IVF. From Lennart Nilsson, A child is born (1990). The original description says: The nurse shows the hopeful parents an enlarged image of their own fertilised ovum immediately before insertion into the womans uterus. The ovum has been cultured for two days in a nutrient solution, and has now divided into four cells (Nilsson 1990: 200). [Reproduced with publishers permission.]

This slide is of a slide [I keep the reference to slides here, as the figures were originally shown], and one that is being interpreted, EuroAmerican style. [As the caption says] a nurse shows the hopeful couple an enlarged image of their own fertilized ovum before insertion into uterus. The egg has been cultivated for two days and is now divided into four cells.

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Figure 80. Making the unborn child visible: ultrasound. From Lennart Nilsson, A child is born (1990). The original description says: Until the 16th week the whole fetus is visible on the screen of the ultrasound device. The pictures are a visual translation of the ultrasound echo registered by the device (Nilsson 1990: 104). [Reproduced with publishers permission.]

Until the sixteenth week the whole fetus can be rendered visible, on a screen, through an ultrasound scan. The pictures are a visual translation of the ultrasound echo. Here sight is a means of access and supplier of raw material: there is something to be seen. [Added note: Interpreting an ultrasound image is notoriously difficult unless you already have some sense of what it is that you are going to see.] And when Euro-Americans interpret or depict what is seen, their comprehension becomes a means of organizing this piece of information about the world. [Which is what we have just been doing.] So that artifacts produced for display [as in these lectures] become a particular medium for conveying knowledge.

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Learning to see in Melanesia: A summary

(1) Seeing as a deliberate activity 1.1. To see is to be affectedto take the image within implies emotional exposure. 1.2. On many occasions (as when initiates are shown sacra), people have to be already in a certain state to see, and to be prepared to receive the sight (regardless of whether they know, or have any interest in, what it means), while others may be categorically excluded. (2) An invitation to witness 2.1. Persons may invite others to see them. They deliberately make objects for display, and persons may be objects in this sense, to be transformed by the way they are seen. 2.2. It may require a counterpart to identify oneself (exchange of perspectives). 2.3. Both reification and personification are techniques in creating objects of attention. (3) The viewer in more than one place 3.1. Viewer may see him or herself in the displayer. 3.2. The view may be equally of an outside or of an inside (an audience encircling a dancer within; the dancer bringing to the surface what is inside outside). (4) Directionality not a given, neither in space nor time. 4.1. One may see two forms at the same time through switching, as between: in : out / inside : outside / front : back / top : bottom / male : female / youth : age / mobile : immobile / incomplete : complete . . . et alia. (These do not add up; they are simply loci for switching perception, and may appear singly or in any combination.) 4.2. The human figure is not held together by fixed coordinates, that is, by an invariant relation between its parts. (To stand upright is matter of a posture taken, not anatomy.)

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4.3. Artifacts, persons and the properties of things can occupy different places at the same time (places move). (5) Sight evoking relationships 5.1. If what you see in an artifact (including persons as objects) is another person, and in seeing that other person you also see yourself in another form, a relationship is evoked (displayers and spectators) (donors and recipients) (maturity and immaturity) (roots and branches). 5.2. Artifacts carry (embody) relationships that persons also carry, such as between parent and child, old age and youth, man and woman, maternal and paternal kin. (6) Transformative effects 6.1. As a summation of the above: Intending / effecting alterations in perception. 6.2. (Pro)creative outcome: One form (one person) may be produced out of another (form, person).

P OSTSCRIPT

TO THE LECTURES

[Not in original text.] A glimpse and a provocation. Mt. Hagen, 1965 exchange festival (Kawelka and Tipuka). For all that male dancers are aware of other men in the crowd, their most attentive audience often and most largely consists of women.

Figure 81. While several women are looking at the performers, a crowd of young women and girls get ready to form their own dancing circle. As stimulated by the event they might be, their eyes are in fact anywhere but on the dancers. Mt. Hagen, Western Highlands, exchange festival (Kawelka and Tipuka). 1965. Photograph: Marilyn Strathern. [Note: A line a male dancers is just visible at the top of the photo.]

|Appendix I|

Artifacts of history
Events and the interpretation of images
Marilyn STRATHERN University of Cambridge

It has been something of a surprise for Europeans to realize that their advent in the Pacific was something less than a surprise. A number of accounts give the sense that their coming had been expected; that they were previously known beings returned or manifest in new form. Such ideas certainly fueled the millenarianism of cargo cults in Papua New Guinea. A further return was indicated in the future. So the one event encapsulated both past and future; indeed the two were conflated in so far as the second coming would bring not the generations unborn but generations already deceased, in the form of ancestors. Or if not the ancestors themselves, than their cargo. What triggered this recovery of the past in the future was the actual advent itself: the appearance of Europeans, and the stories that circulated about them. In this chapter, I argue that at least as far as much of Melanesia is concerned, and especially Papua New Guinea, Europeans initially presented a particular kind of image. Images that contain within them both past and future time do not have to be placed into a historical context, for they embody history themselves. It follows that people do not therefore have to explain such images by reference to events outside them: the images contain events. And here

Publishers note: We are very grateful to the Finnish Anthropological Society for giving us the permission to publish this reprint of Strathern, Marilyn. 1990. Artifacts of history: Events and the interpretation of images. In Culture and history in the Pacific, edited by Jukka Siikala, 2544. Helsinki: Transactions of the Finnish Anthropological Society. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | Marilyn Strathern Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. Strathern, Marilyn. 2013. Learning to see in Melanesia. Masterclass Series 2. Manchester: HAU Society for Ethnographic Theory.

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we have a clue to the mixed reactions which early Europeans reported greeted their arrival in New Guinea. They were met with surprise, but the surprise was also tempered by nonchalance. As Rena Lederman (1986) reported of her own arrival at Mendi in the New Guinea Highlands, people were eager to assure her that they had not been caught off guard. Their own accounts of themselves already contained these otherwise unexpected newcomers. Images are presented through artifacts, and in cultures where artifacts are highly personalized (cf. Battaglia 1983) also through persons in their bodily form (OHanlon n.d.), and where it is equally the case that persons are objects of the regard of others, through performances of all kinds (Schieffelin 1985). People objectify or present themselves to themselves in innumerable ways, but must always do so through assuming a specific form. I suggest that Melanesians may have seen the advent of Europeans in the form of an artifact or a performance. The interesting question then becomes who the Melanesians thought was the maker of the artifact, the producer of the performance. However, I do not present an ethnographically argued case. Rather, my intention is to raise some queries against anthropological perceptions of historical process. In evoking Melanesian images, I present a set of perceptions which poses problems for the still current division of labor between social / cultural anthropologists and those concerned with material culture of the kind that finds its way to museums. The result of the division has been that we have hidden from ourselves possible sources of insight into the processes by which people such as the Melanesians of Papua New Guinea deal with social change, and change themselves.

Events: Two views of time

There is a connection between the study of artifacts and the study of time, and between the idea of historical context and of cultural or social context. A certain perception of event is implied in the way that Western anthropologists have often understood the work of historians, which mirrors the way they have also understood museologists and those interested in material culture.

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Contrary to the aspirations of many practicing historians, anthropologists often take them to be interested in events. The idea of a concrete, incidental event holds much the same place in the anthropological worldview as does the idea of a concrete, incidental artifact. Events may be understood as the inevitable and thus natural outcomes of social arrangements, or even more poignant, the chance encounter that has not been anticipated by those arrangements. These are the two forms of event with which Marshall Sahlins (1985) is concerned in the Pacific. They are taken as items which must be brought to account in our system of knowledge, like so much raw material, like so many facts to be systematized. No account can recover the past, argues David Lowenthal (1985: 215), because the past was not an account; it was a set of events and situations. But the account may well create a relation internal to itself between events and the organizing process or systems which link / explain them. Indeed, Sahlins (1985) study of Cooks sojourn in Hawaii exemplifies the interest of social / cultural anthropology in locating events as the raw materials of their systematizing endeavors. For Sahlins approaches the interaction between the people of Hawaii and the adventurer Cook in terms of the alteration of meanings that occurs in the cultural interpretation of historical events and the impingements of history on culture. He dwells on the antimony between the contingency of events and the recurrence of structures (ibid.: xiii), expanding event into a relation between happening and structure. Structure and event are then mediated by a third term, the structure of the conjuncture. A structure must be seen to coordinate events: he dismisses the pernicious distinction between them in favor of the realization of structure in event and vice versa. There is no event without system, he proposes (ibid.: 154) and this, of course, has to be how anthropologists make knowledge for themselves. If Sahlins has displaced the pernicious distinction between event and structure with their irreducible relationship, this irreducible relationship can only be that between the knowing subject and the objects of knowledge. Sahlins suggests that an event as such should be seen as a relation between a certain happening and a symbolic system; it is the happening which takes the place of a natural fact in his scheme. A happening is domesticated through cultural interpretation. The event is a happening interpreted (ibid.: 153). This definition of event

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replicates for Europeans and anthropologists what is also imputed to the people of Hawaii. Sahlins analysis of events turns on the manner in which the Hawaiian people interpreted and contextualized, placing concepts in correspondence with external objects: Hence his remark that
Everything happens as if nothing happened: as if there could be no history, as if there could be no unexpected event, no happening not already culturally provided for. (ibid.: 30-31)

Social action is an actualization or realization of the relationship between the concepts of the actors and the objects of their existence (ibid.: 154). Hence Sahlins focus on the events as interpreted action, which utilizes (I suggest) the idea of event much as anthropologists habitually think of artifact. It is cultural construction which our systematizing interests force us to subsume under a further relation which also includes its social context, viz. structure. Structure is a frame metaphor, so to speak. Thus an event is seen as a culturally interpreted happening; in the same way an artifact is said to have meaning, this meaning requiring anthropological elucidation by reference to the system which produces meanings. Happenings stand in an intransigent rather than reflecting or expressive relation to structure, but are nonetheless not explicable to the observer (Hawaiian or European) without reference to a context. A cultural event is thus perpetually created out of a natural happening. In turn, the anthropologists elucidation of structure takes these interpretations (culture) as the proper facts, the raw material, of systematic anthropological knowledge. Anthropology out-contextualizes indigenous (Hawaiian or European) contextualizing efforts. Whether or not we can use Melanesian material to comment on Polynesian, this excursus suggests one caveat in the opening up of historical investigation into culture and history in the Pacific. What do we intend to recover as ethnohistory? Thus we can, as I think Sahlins does, regard peoples interpretations as their history, a kind of ethnohistory: their version of what we do lies in their referential codes and contextualizing practices. I do not know if this would work in Melanesia. To recover the knowledge which comes from perceiving structural relationships between events, we might have to seek the counterpart of our systematizing endeavors in peoples artifacts and performances, in the images they strive to convey, and thereby in how

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they present the effects of social action to themselves. And this would not look like our history at all. And it would not look like our history, because a quite different sense of time is at issue. These two views of time, European and Melanesian, can be apprehended as two ways of explaining or making manifest the nature of things. An event taken as incidental occurrence in nature, chancy and idiosyncratic, particular to the moment, is to be explained by being put into its historical (cultural) context. That is, its relations with other events is laid out, so that events are often seen in progression, one following another. An event taken as a performance is to be known by its effect: it is understood in terms of what it contains, the forms that conceal or reveal, registered in the actions of those who witness it. A succession of forms (cf. Wagner 1986b: 210) is a succession of displacements, each a substitution for what has gone previously and thus in a sense containing it, as it contains the effects it will have on the witness. Every image is in this sense a new image. Consequently, time is not a line between happenings; it lies in the capacity of an image to evoke past and future simultaneously. If this is the case, then in so far as they are concerned with their own uniqueness, the problem the makers of such images set themselves is how to overcome the recursiveness of time: how indeed to create an event that will be unique, particular, innovatory. What is true of time is also true of space. Analogously, we might say, space is not an area between points, it is the effectiveness of an image in making the observer think of both here and there, of oneself and others. The problem becomes how people can grasp the others perspective to make it reflect on themselves: artifacts are displayed and circulated in order to return that knowledge (Munn 1986).

The advent of Europeans

Despite the uniqueness of the event in the European record, Nikolai Miklouho-Maclays initial experiences on the Rai coast of New Guinea were to be repeated elsewhere. Whereas only certain Melanesians came to develop cargo cults, it seems that everywhere they expressed a pragmatic interest in transactions with the newcomers, and Lawrence notes the extent to which MiklouhoMaclay had to satisfy local demand for his goods. He established his

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position by gift-giving, among other things, and his gifts were always returned (1964: 60). At the same time, his biographer gives dramatic emphasis to Miklouho-Maclays surprise at being taken for some kind of supernatural being (Webster 1984: 72). The man who gave gifts was also a local deity (Lawrence 1964: 65; Webster 1984: 104). On the part of many Europeans, both those involved at the time and anthropologists afterwards, common assumptions have been that (1) the coming of Europeans was a unique event; (2) it therefore stretched peoples credulity, so that they had to find a place for the exotic strangers in their cognitive universe; so (3) it is no surprise that Melanesians regarded the first Europeans as spirits of deities; and (4) no surprise that in order to make sense of this untoward event, people reacted by trying to change their own lives and thus tap European power. Underlying these is the final assumption that (5) the Europeans really were the powerful ones, not least because it was they who were the occurrence, who arrived in the Melanesians midst. In short, within anthropological analysis, the advent of Europeans has the status of a historical fact. The people of Papua New Guinea were brought face-to-face with a unique moment in history. I am sure people were taken by surprise. But should we interpret their reactions by assimilating that event to an event in history? Suppose it were not a unique moment; that it was not the case that only the Europeans had power, and that it did not require that people create new contexts for coping with the untoward. Let me produce a set of counter-suppositions, synthetic in that it is drawn from what we know of many times and places, but nonetheless potentially helpful in considering specific times and placessuch as the exploration of the Highlands documented by Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson (1984). Suppose, then, we assimilate that event, the arrival of Europeans, to something that Melanesians were in fact already making. Uniqueness, power, and context can all be put into a rather different light. First, uniqueness. The Melanesian world is one where people constantly take themselves by surprise. And what takes them by surprise are the performances and artifacts they create. One thinks here of figures and carvings, and also of landmarks held to commemorate past events (Rubinstein 1981), tools taken as evidence of divine creation (Battaglia 1983), or shell valuables which carry a record of their exchange with them (Damon 1980). Accomplishment itself is celebrated. Melanesian politics are typified by the achieved

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nature of prestigebut the idea of achievement goes beyond politics, and inheres in the very constitution of collective activity such as ceremonial exchange, spirit cults, or whatever. People amaze themselves by their capacity for collective action, as the men of Mt. Hagen are amazed when they decorate on exchange occasions. Their presentation evinces the power they hope to have encompassed, at once a divination of past success and an omen for the future (Strathern and Strathern 1971). We may borrow Bruce Kapferers (1984: 193) observation from elsewhere, that rites are never mere repetition: acts and utterances constantly reassemble meanings. So however standard or traditional ways of doing things may be, the final configuration allows for the unexpected: a performance cannot be anticipated, for an image cannot be presented till the moment it is composed. Moreover, on many occasions, Melanesians present themselves as other than their appearance normally suggests. One may instance the disguise of self-decoration that hides the outer skin of the dancer by bringing his inner qualities to the surface (Strathern 1979); or the ambiguous displays of clans on the dancing ground that at once conceal their internal differences and reveal that no such conflicts exist (OHanlon 1983). Play may be made with man-spirit and other identities. Alfred Gell (1975: 243) observes of the Umeda that the identification of a masked dancer with the figure of a cassowary is only a disguise for the profounder identification of the cassowary with the man. The secret of the cassowary is that he is a man. Erik Schwimmer encapsulates this dualism in his comment on how often Melanesian dancers play in pairs, both parties representing spirits, masked or in mask-like attire: Each knows himself to be a man, but when he looks at his partner he can see a spirit (1984: 253). If they felt they were in the presence of an accomplishment of some kind, then Melanesians would not necessarily have to interpret the advent of Europeans as uniquely untoward. They were beings disguised: a surprise, but not a special surprise. And the identification of the men with spirits would be no more a special identification than the subsequent revelation that these were men. Second, power. Specific to Melanesians reactions is the way they sought out transactions with the Europeans. They appeared practical, even mercenary, despite the wonder and marvel with which Europeans frequently reported they were received. Indeed, some of

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the Europeans (though this could hardly be said of the sober Miklouho-Maclay) seem to have been taken by their own image as a cause of wonder. The extent to which they subsequently dwelt on the apparently irrational elements in the indigenous response (as evidenced in cargo thinking) was a prop to this. Yet what must be explained on the Melanesian side is peoples simultaneous construction of Europeans as spirits and their nonchalant acceptance (also reported by Lawrence 1964: 233) of what Europeans regarded as technological marvels. Their capacity to interact with these beings and get things out of them became evident very early on. It was that interaction which revealed these beings were (also) human. In the example which Jeffrey Clark (n.d.) gives, the two perceptions existed side by side. People thus appear to have assumed that the Europeans personal attributes, like other things they brought, were transferable, and the only problem was how to make the encounter work. Thus the Highlanders of Mt. Hagen sometimes think of themselves as turning European or else as remaining Hagen, as though these were choices between domains of personal efficacy. One might suppose it was the Melanesians who had a sense of power. If the advent were treated as performance, akin to that of the masked dancer, then who was the producer of it? It cannot be the dancing assemblage of the mask itself. Performances are the artifacts of persons (whether human or not), contrivances, displays of artifice, even tricks. Indeed, it is arguable that many kinds of events we regard as historical contingencies in Melanesians eyes have the character of improvisation (Wagner 1975). The makers of a performance are those who conceive it, fashion it in their diverse minds, and finally accomplish the display. A performance becomes an index of peoples capacities; an enactment of a feast is an accomplishment, a kind of coup (Wagner 1986b: 193). The inhabitants of the Rai Coast may well have been in terror when the Europeans first appeared, as Miklouho-Maclays (1975) diaries attest. But we cannot assume that it was simply terror of the powerful Europeans. My guess is that an
1

1. However, any reader who wishes to pursue the details of Miklouho-Maclays reaction is advised to consult the translation published in Moscow in 1982 (Progress Publishers). I am grateful to Daniil Tumarkin for his comments on the accuracy of the Madang version.

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initial component of peoples terror may well have been at their own powerat what they had done to bring about an enactment of a quite extraordinary kindor power they perhaps attributed to particular big men or neighboring peoples (J. Liep, personal communication). Someone must have produced them. There is a sense in which a witness is also an agent. A performance is completed by the audience (Schieffelin 1985), who may play an alternately passive and active role. In Melanesian cosmology, the agent or doer of an activity is often separated from the person (or happening) who compels the action. Thus under many patrilineal regimes, maternal kin are the cause of the prestations which flow to them as recipients by virtue of the health they bestow on their daughters / sisters child; the active agents, those credited with the prestige which comes from taking action, are the paternal donors of the gifts. Donors show their power in accomplishing a prestation. In the same vein, to the extent that Europeans presented themselves as a cause for the peoples response, the capacity to act lay on the side of those who responded. The Europeans would be an inert cause for all this activity. Third, context. It is this question above all which dominates anthropological analyses of cargo cults. The assumption is that cults show people trying to adjust the cognitive disorientation, or psychic disturbance in Jukka Siikalas (1982) critical phrase, created by the unexpected arrival of strangers in their midst. Yet their unexpectedness was, as it were, of an expected kind, merely a strange artifact. Initial difficulties in talking may have played a part in this. Europeans came hardly as enemies or allies would, with talk and ambiguous motivations, but confronted the beholders with, if not an unintelligible, an ineffable visual presence. Motivation had to be located in someone. I have suggested that the witnesses might know themselves as in some way the producers of the spectacle: if not themselves the makers of it, then themselves as the cause of their neighbors or enemies actions directed at them. But the point about a spectacle is that it is disconnected from everyday events, is the result of motivations hidden until the moment of revelation. It is in this sense also to be taken for itself. It only works if it is untoward. There is more here than simply the fact that there can be no happening that is not culturally provided for, that cannot be coded as a recognizable event of some sort (Sahlins 1985: 31). And more

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thus than simply the assimilation of the newcomers to an existing pantheon of supernatural beings. The point about the sequence I have described is its self-contained nature. We do not have to imagine the event as an interpreted happening. An artifact or performance grasped for itself is grasped as an image. An image definitively exists out of context; or, conversely, it contains its own prior context. The problems all lay in what was to be the future outcome of the performance, its consequences for the future, what would be revealed next, in short, its further effect. Consequently, the European advent did not have to be put into its social context. Melanesians did not have to make sense of it: they did not have to evoke the wider cultural and social milieu from which the Europeans came since they were under no compulsion to explain them. And ignorance of this context did not put the Europeans beyond reach, as the Europeans may well have thought it did. (No doubt they would have liked to have felt beyond reach, till education had taught people about Western society and the historical significance of the moment of contact.) On the contrary, the very act of presentation constituted the only context that was relevantif Melanesians were also inclined to open the image up to explanation, then the question would be concerned with motivation, to be elicited or tested by the kinds of relationships into which the strangers could be enticed to engage with the Melanesians themselves. In short, we do not have to suppose a cognitive disorientation because we do not have to suppose that Melanesians thought they were dealing with beings whose decontextualization presented a problem.

Image and context

Melanesian responses are unlikely to have been stable. Indeed, what I have sketched here probably occupied only a point in a longer process which would turn these constructions inside-out, locate power on the Europeans part and Melanesians as the inert causes of it, and eventually dismantle the constructions altogether. I imagine them merely in order to give pause to the kinds of constructions that Western anthropologists have in the past so easily imposed on historical events and the clash of cultures. It was suggested that such Western constructions often play on an analogy between putting

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artifacts into their social / cultural context and laying out events as sequences which appear as points in time to be connected up to one another. Let me advance the argument with reference to the Melanesian construction of artifacts perceived as images. I draw on Roy Wagners analysis of artifacts created by the Barok of New Ireland (1986b) as well as his theorizing on obviation (1986a and elsewhere). The artifacts include the spatial structure of their mens house, performances such as feasting, and in general the metaphors by which people construe ideas about power. In the minds of the Barok, such items evoke commonly held images. By image Wagner intends us to understand a particular type of trope. Perceptual image (or point metaphor) exists in relationship to referential coding (or frame metaphor) (Wagner 1986a: 31). Coding opens out a symbol with reference to its constituent parts and thus its relation to other symbols: it expands and obviates an image by interpreting it, by setting it within a context which thus becomes part of its meaning. An image on the other hand condenses or collapses context into itself in the sense that all points of reference are obviated or displaced by its single form. The constructions at issue may be illustrated through an example of an artifact that circulated all over Melanesia: the ceremonial stone axe. Battaglia (1983) presents an illuminating exegesis for axes used on Sabarl in the Massim. The triangular shape provided by the angle of the blade and haft may be perceived as image of action and directed movement (ibid.: 296). It at once evokes past actions and foreshadows future ones. Sabarl comment that it has the shape of mortuary feasts, that is, a lateral movement of wealth items from the fathers side (the left arm of a person) to the mothers side (the right arm), which commemorates the support that kin gave a person in life. The elbow thus represents the joint in the socially vital movement of reciprocal giving . . . [and] the ideal route of valuable objects away from person, clan or village and . . . back again (ibid.: 297). But that explanation also covers (obviates) others. On the joint itself is the figure of a bird with a snake in its mouth, an image of a mythical challenge presented as sexual opposition. Battaglia argues that the ideal support relations between kin are transformed at death into individualistic conflict between them (over inheritance and such). Yet the simultaneity of ideas about support and conflict contained within the axe cannot be matched by the explanations which people give, for

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these must always place one perception in relation to another. An image is distinct from an element in a comprehensive coding or exegesis. It is less the privileging of one interpretation over another that is pertinent than the relationship between interpretation (frame metaphor) and the apprehension of something that is only itself (point metaphor). An object at one juncture taken for granted, as an image standing for itself, at another may be coded through reference to further images (whose meanings must at that point be taken for granted). The bird-elbow intrinsic to the Sabarl axe has a shape that may also he explained as a map for kin relations; when these become points of reference for the axe, they take on assumed qualities of their own (are images of support, point metaphors). But the kin relations may then be opened to explanation, as happens in the give and take of the mortuary exchanges of which the axes are a part, in which case they cease to be taken for granted; and so on. The process of explanation by referencing or decoding deprives the image of its power to elicit taken-for-granted meanings. Conversely, by itself, the Sabarl axe is not a simple illustration of meanings describable in other terms: rather, it presents to perception a particular form that is its own. What the Sabarl Islander grasps in handling the axe that can be verbally explained as the same as kin relationships activated in exchange is not those kin relationships in fact. For when they become the focus of attention, kin are able to do things with their exchanges of valuablesincluding the axes themselveswhich reinterpret the ideal route that valuables should take. In effect, in explaining or acting out their relationships to one another, kinsfolk subvert the taken-forgranted status of paternal support in the bird-elbow image. One relationship substitutes or displaces another. An artifact, or a performance such as an exchange, perceived as an image, is not reducible to the coding explanations that accompany it, or vice versa. Steven Albert (1986: 241) makes the point apropos malanggan for which other New Irelanders are famous: their expressivity is to be found in the organisation of forms in the carvings, and not in some relation between particular forms and their referents. Referential coding is not only found in peoples verbal explanations: Wagners sequence between point metaphor and frame metaphor, between image and code, can be realized in the contract-

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ion and expansion of any kind of artifact. Images may substitute for one another in a succession of analogies. At the same time, images both contain and elicit interpretations. Any one image, he argues, may synthesize several meanings, and in provoking response elicits this synthesis in the perceiver; the synthesis is taken apart when those meanings become expanded (coded) in reference to other images. Thus the meanings of the Sabarl axe are desynthesized when they are acted out with respect to the maternal and paternal kin who exchange axes as valuables. The coding is accomplished through further performance or assemblage of artifacts, as well as through verbal exegesis. It is significant, however, that exegesis is accorded a special place by Barok. The effect of description may be taken as contrary to the effect produced by an image (including a verbal image such as a metaphor), so image in turn is understood by Barok as a distinctive means of construing power or effectiveness: An image can and must be witnessed or experienced, rather than merely described or summed up verbally (Wagner 1986b: xiv), and if it must be experienced in order to be understood, the experience of its effects is at once its meanings and its power (ibid.: 216). Barok remain suspicious of talk. Talk is always part of an effort to manipulate events and relationships, making motivation ambiguous, whereaslike the revelation of gift (Biersack 1982)in producing images, people produce the effects by which they know what they themselves really are. For producing an image means that an artifact has assumed a specific form (the image) in the mind of the viewer. Images are reflected self-knowledge. The way in which a person responds to a taboo or an injunction shows that person to be the kind of kinsman or kinswoman he / she is; similarly the visual figure of the mens house Barok build contains mens feasting activities and ancestral power in such a way as to make manifest their legitimated relationship with the dead. When the advent of Europeans created an affect similar to such images, it would also provoke self-knowledge. It would present a particular form to the observer, known by the response it thereby elicited. As the carrier of (bearer of) its effects, the observer (in whose mind the image forms) was also in this sense, like all audiences, a producer of them. I deliberately refer to the process of coding and referentiality in verbal explanation in order to draw a comparison with certain Western practices of knowledge. When Melanesians construct know-

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ledge about themselves and their relations with others, they may well draw on perceptions that have the status of image where a European scholar would deploy verbal concepts in a referential, coding manner. A European is likely to explicate any one relationship through reference to others, through his or her description creating systems by bringing different concepts into connection with one another. Above all, he or she will make sense of individual incidents by putting them into their social or cultural context: an encounter with strangers requires understanding in terms of the society from which the strangers come, as a happening must be interpreted as an event in history. One might imagine, however, that the Melanesian would understand encounters in terms of their effects. It is the effect which is created, and effects (images) are produced through the presentation of artifacts. A concept of society is not an explanatory context for peoples acts; rather sociality, as Wagner (1975) argues, consists in the implicit conventions against which people innovate and improvise. They construct further artifacts, such as cargo cults or wealth transactions, to see what the further effects will be. And the revelation will always come as a surprise.

A division of labor
The comparison throws light on certain assumptions held by social and cultural anthropologists over a recent period in anthropological history. Ever since the 1920s, much of Western anthropology has been concerned with approaching others through the elucidation of their worldviews. Part of our knowledge about material artifacts, for instance, must be our knowledge of their knowledge: it is taken for granted that we study the significance which such artifacts have for the people who make them, and thus their interpretations of them. Anthropologists, therefore, uncover meanings by putting peoples own meanings into their social and cultural context. One might call this the phase of modernism in English-speaking anthropology (Ardener 1985; Strathern 1987). It gave rise to a division of labor in which the study of material culture became divorced from social or cultural anthropology. On the one hand were experts who looked at artifacts (museologists), while on the other hand were specialists in the study of society or culture

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(social and cultural anthropologists). Over this period in anthropological history, the latter explicitly conceived themselves as experts in the elucidation of social / cultural contexts. Items of all kinds (not only artifacts but events and relationships) were to be understood by seeing how they related or referred to others. The compulsion applied equally to the artifacts of contemporary peoples and the remains or exemplars that found their way to museums. Indeed, I have suggested that there are strong parallels between anthropologists attitudes towards history and towards the study of material culture. Material culture came to designate a kind of technological substrate by contrast with the abstraction culture, which designated the values and modes of social life. There were always notable exceptions, and current interest in the culture of consumption (see, for instance, Miller 1987) suggests we can refer to this period as a past epoch. Nevertheless, for the time to which I refer, much anthropological analysis was almost exclusively concerned with the elucidation of systemsmaking sense of items by relating them in a coherent manner. The meanings of artifacts were elucidated by their context, whether the context was open to indigenous reflection, to be contextualized in turn, or was presented as a model on the ethnographers part. Making social (or cultural) context the frame of reference had one important result. It led to the position that one should really be studying the framework itself (the social context = society). The artifacts were merely illustration. For if one sets up social context as the frame of reference in relation to which meanings are to be elucidated, then explicating that frame of reference obviates or renders the illustrations superfluous: they become exemplars or reflections of meanings which are produced elsewhere. It was in this sense that social anthropology could proceed independently of the study of material culture. Material culture became perceived as background information. Even when art forms were foregrounded for study, it was usually because they were made visible by some social process such as ritual. In the many analyses of art or decoration undertaken in Melanesia, anthropologists often took as their task simply locating these objects within a frame already described in other terms (in terms of values and principles generated by the politico-religious system or embedded in kinship structure or gender relations or whatever).

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Frames of reference are intrinsic to the modernist anthropological exercise. These are the relationships within which we place our discoveries about peoples cultural lives. The reason that material objects appear so intransigent is precisely because they are not the framework itself. Rather, they occupy a dual position, both its raw material and illustrative of its principles and values (at once nature and culture in relation to system). This creates a problem for the understanding of Melanesian perceptions. In supplying social context, the inquiring ethnographer does not merely translate other peoples referencing into his or hers, but weights the perception of an object. An axe explained as the elbow of exchange partnerships is relocated within a framework which occludes both other frameworks and its significance as a synthetic image in itself. If decoding the meaning of an object makes certain presumptions about its referentiality, then putting them within their social context becomes a symbolic move analogous to the expansion of a frame metaphor from a point metaphor. Referentiality always introduces a further set of tropes. The whole perception is now the object plus its explanation, the interpreted happening indeed. Keesing (1987) has commented on Melanesians frequent reluctance to give exegesisto explain things by expanding frames verbally. Professed agnosticism is a kind of double resistancefirst to altering meaning by making out one image to be another and secondly to privileging one frame that would exclude others. For talk always creates its own versions and transformations of what is being discussed (e.g., Goldman 1983; Rumsey 1986). Translation from one medium to another (as giving literal explanation for a metaphor or describing an object in words) alters the significance of what is being presented. We might reflect again on the self-proclaimed distance of Western social and cultural anthropologists from their material-cultural counterparts. If anthropologists are specialists in social contexts, in constantly apprehending items through frame metaphors (society, culture) which provide points of reference for the meaning of artifacts or art productions, then what are museologists but conservers of images? The exploration of internal design, the attention to artifact qua artifact, the relating of one style to others, the preservation of exemplars, suggests a self-contained, self-referential universe. The move from classification to aesthetics in museum displays could be

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seen as one attempt to present a perception that consciously minimizes reference to wider social or cultural contexts. This is a controversial assertion; much museology is devoted to putting objects into their cultural context, producing functional and interpretative displays, objects as artifacts not art (Clifford 1985a; Williams 1985). At the same time, we may note George Stockings observation on the space in which museum pieces exist. Encompassing both object and viewer, it has a complex three-dimensionality that distinguishes the museum archive from essentially two-dimensional repositories of linear text (Stocking 1985: 4). Because they are removed from their original contexts in time and space (which can never be recovered), and recontextualized in others, the meanings of material forms preserved in museums are problematic. But, as a result, there must always be a perceived discontinuity between the image and its new context (cf. Clifford 1985b). We thus imagine that the material artifact cannot be domesticated in quite the same way as texts, verbal descriptions of events, are subordinated in anthropological accounts to an overall analysis of society or culture; it is after all the objects themselves that appear to be on display, not the analysis of society. Consequently, they command attention in themselves. In so far as we perceive this to be the case, they remain figures against the grounding social context. Thus Westerners apprehend the responses they evoke as inevitably having an element of the aesthetic to it. Whatever battery of meanings and uses are ascribed to the museum object, display draws attention to form, explicitly confronting the observer with his or her own perceptions, and thus his or her act of appropriation in looking at them. Perhaps the museum that looks like an art gallery presents us with a certain analogy to the Melanesian construction of image. It is, of course, only a partial analogy. The objects both elicit a reaction on the part of the observerin a manner analogous to the presentation of a Melanesian imageand as like as not will elicit an idiosyncratic reaction: that is, the self-knowledge so produced will necessarily be the self-knowledge of a Western kind, the aesthetics of personal appreciation. To recreate the elicitory power that Melanesian images had for the people who made them, one would have to be able to take for granted the cultural values and social relations of which they were composed. The paradox is that if it is taken for granted, such Melanesian knowledge of sociality is not referenced and coded. But

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we can only grasp that dimension through our referential and coding procedures.
This paradox is intractable, because for us there can be no resolution in favor of one kind of presentation over the otherour aesthetic and referential strategies bypass one another and all we can do is move between the two points and know that each is inadequate. But that movement is essential. The trick would be to make that movement itself at once an image and a code in the anthropologists mind. That might be approximated in the way we control our own metaphors in writing. I have argued that we should extend our concept of artifact to performance and to event. We might get a closer approximation to Melanesians idea if we deliberately use that extension to switch metaphors. If we are prepared to see artifacts as the enactment of events, as memorials of and celebrations to past and future contributions (cf. OHanlon n.d.)if the axe blade really is an icon of exchange relationshipthen we must be prepared to switch the metaphors the other way tooto empty our notion of history as the natural or occurrence of events that present a problem for structure to talk about people using an event the way they may use a knife, or creating an occasion the way they create a mask or demonstrate personal efficacy in laying out the phases of a feast according to strict social protocol. And that is why I chose the most event-full, chancefull occurrence in our own eyes as illustration, the arrival of Europeans. For we can extend the same metaphortalking about events as artifactsto visualize how people act as though they had power when confronted with the untoward. Perhaps the elucidation of possible Melanesian responses to such historical events will throw light on the changeability of these cultures. Melanesians readiness to accommodate novelty and the unexpected has long been commented upon. A significant feature, and one that might have been important in processes of cultural differentiation, is that the enactment of social life was always a little unexpected. It was not the ground rules of sociality that people were concerned to represent to themselves, but (following Wagner 1975) the ability of persons to act in relation to these. This ability to act was captured in a performance or an artifact, improvisations which created events as achievements. In this sense, all events were staged to be innovatory. Melanesians own strategies of contextualization necessarily included

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themselves as witnesses of such spectacles. If they sought explanation, it would be to account for motivation (who produced the spectacle and with what intent). That would then let them know who they themselves were, for in entering into relations with Europeans, they would interpret the European presence through the only meaningful reference possible, in terms of its effects upon themselves. Let me rewrite an ethnographic vignette. Andrew Strathern (1971: xii) reports the words of an old man from Hagen who told how his neighbors had reacted to the appearance of the first administrative patrol in the area. The white man was thought to be a pale-skinned cannibal ogre, but then he gave us shell valuables in return for pigs, and we decided he was a human. The unspoken side of this statement might read: Then we gave him pigs in return for shell valuables, and we realized we were human still.

Acknowledgements (from original)

I am grateful to Jukka Siikala for providing a context for discussion and to the Academy of Finland for their hospitality and the opportunity to see the exhibition of Pacific artifacts organized by the USSR Academy of Sciences. This chapter has profited from the comments of Debbora Battaglia, David Lowenthal, Francesca Merlan, Michael OHanlon, and Alan Rumsey. Finally I am very grateful to Jeffrey Clark for discussion and for letting me cite his unpublished paper, as I am to Rena Lederman and Michael OHanlon.

References
Albert, Steven M. 1986. Completely by accident I discovered its meaning: The iconography of New Ireland Malangan. The Journal of the Polynesian Society 95: 23952 Ardener, Edwin. 1985. Social anthropology and the decline of modernism. In Reason and morality, edited by Joanna Overing, 4770. London: Tavistock.

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Battaglia, Debbora. 1983. Projecting personhood in Melanesia: The dialectics of artefact symbolism on Sabarl Island. Man (N.S.) 18: 289 304. Biersack, Aletta. 1982. Ginger gardens for the ginger women: Rites and passages in a Melanesian society." Man (N.S.) 17: 23958. Clark, Jeffrey. n.d.. Sons of the female spirit, men of steel: Close encounters in Pangia, Southern Highlands Province. Adelaide. Unpublished Manuscript. Clifford, James. 1985a. Objects and selvesan afterward. In Objects and others: Essays on museums and material culture, edited by George Stocking Jr., 23646. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. . 1985b. Histories of the tribal and modern. Art in America (April): 16477. Connolly, Bob and Robin Anderson. 1984. First contact (film, 1983). Canberra. Damon, F. H. 1980. The kula and generalised exchange: Considering some unconsidered aspects of The elementary structures of kinship. Man (N.S.) 15: 26792. Gell, Alfred. 1975. Metamorphosis of the cassowaries: Umeda society, language and ritual. London: Athlone. Goldman, Laurence. 1983. Talk never dies: The language of Huli disputes. London: Tavistock. Kapferer, Bruce. 1984. "Postscript to The power of the ritual: Transition, transformation and transcendence in ritual practice. Social Analysis, Special Issue 1 (reprinted). Keesing, Roger M. 1987. Anthropology as an interpretive quest. Current Anthropology 28: 16176. Lawrence, Peter. 1964. Road belong cargo: A study of the cargo movement in the Southern Madang District, New Guinea. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lederman, Rena. 1986. The return of Red Woman: Fieldwork in Highland New Guinea. In Women in the field, edited by Peggy Golde, 35988. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lowenthal, David. 1985. The past is a foreign country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Miklouho-Maclay, Nikolai. 1975. New Guinea diaries 18711883, translated by C. L. Sentinella. Madang, Papua New Guinea: Kristen Press. Miller, David. 1987. Material culture and mass consumption. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Munn, Nancy D. 1986. The fame of Gawa: A symbolic study of value transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. OHanlon, Michael. 1983. Handsome is as handsome does: Display and betrayal in the Wahgi. Oceania 53: 31733. . n.d. History embodied: Authenticating the past in the New Guinea Highlands. Unpublished manuscript. Rubinstein, Robert L. 1981. Knowledge and political process in Malo. In Vanuatu: Politics, economics and ritual in Island Melanesia, edited by M. R. Allen, 13572. Sydney: Academic Press. Rumsey, Alan. 1986. Oratory and the politics of metaphor in the New Guinea Highlands. In Semiotics, ideology, language, edited by Terry Threadgold et al., 28396. Sydney: Sydney Association for Studies in Society and Culture. Sahlins, Marshall. 1985. Islands of history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schieffelin, E. L. 1985. Performance and the cultural construction of reality. American Ethnologist 12: 70724. Schwimmer, Erik. 1984. Male couples in New Guinea. In Ritualised homosexuality in Melanesia, edited by G. H. Herdt, 25968. Berkeley: University of California Press. Siikala, Jukka. 1982. Cult and conflict in tropical Polynesia: A study of traditional religion, Christianity and nativistic movements. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica. Stocking, George. 1985. Objects and others: Essays on museums and material culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Strathern, Andrew and Marilyn Strathern. 1971. Self-decoration in Mt. Hagen. London: Duckworth. Strathern, Andrew. 1971. The rope of moka: Big-men and ceremonial exchange in Mount Hagen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strathern, Marilyn, 1979. The self in self-decoration. Oceania 49: 24157.

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. 1987. Out of context: The persuasive fictions of anthropology. Current Anthropology 28: 25181. Wagner, Roy. 1975. The invention of culture. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. . 1986a. Symbols that stand for themselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1986b. Asiwinorong: Ethos, image, and social power among the Usen Barok of New Ireland. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Webster, E. M. 1984. The moon man: A biography of Nikolai MiklouhoMaclay. Berkeley: University of California Press. Williams, Elizabeth A. 1985. Art and artifact at the Trocadero: Ars Americana and the primitivist revolution. In Objects and others: Essays on museums and material culture, edited by George Stocking Jr., 146 66. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

|Appendix II|

Social relations and the idea of externality

Marilyn STRATHERN University of Cambridge
The concept of external storage system raises the question of what is or is not external to the person. This chapter offers an ethnographic commentary. Materials from Papua New Guinea lead one to consider the signicance of social relations in this respect. The chapter is not so much concerned with relations as storers of information but with specific practices in which people lodge (store) material items in (with) other people. It is argued that these practices create one of the conditions by which people compute what is interior and what is exterior (to themselves), namely through the very fact of their enrolling other persons in their projects. It is further argued that any single difference, as between internal and external, depends on other differences also being held in place. The chapter thus explores some of the supporting conceptual structures which enable these people to imagine that they are able to give out and take in resources of different kinds, thereby created as alternately internal and external to themselves.

More than one contributor to this volume has commented on the part that social relations have to play in any account of human experience. We might also consider them a rather special resource in the development of external symbolic storage systems. Social relations make artifacts out of persons; that is, persons carry the kind of symbolic load that Renfrew (this volume) nds in material culture. What makes them special is their recursive and elicitory character.

Publishers note: We are very grateful to the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research for giving us the permission to publish this reprint of Strathern, Marilyn. 1998. Social relations and the idea of externality. In Cognition and material culture: The archaeology of symbolic storage, edited by Colin Renfrew and Chris Scarre, 13547. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | Marilyn Strathern Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. Strathern, Marilyn. 2013. Learning to see in Melanesia. Masterclass Series 2. Manchester: HAU Society for Ethnographic Theory.

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Quite apart from the collective sense in which separate minds might be said to be embedded in any evolving culture (cf. Donald 1993: 12), ongoing relationships afford certain looping possibilities. That is, peoples working memory (Donald 1991: 329) loops through other people. Social relations do not just contain a record of past interactions or store information about future behavioral possibilities. They act also as a stimulus to reflection. This social reflexivity is crucial, for instance, to what Esther Goody (1995) has called the role of anticipatory interactive planning in human cognition. In addition to the fact that actions are linked to response, and that persons become aware of others thereby and of themselves through others, is the capacity to reflect on interdependence itself. We might say that the entire loop is given a dimension of time (enduring obligations, over the generations) and space (between persons separated by biography or residence from one another) when social relationships themselves become objects of reection and manipulation. We may add that the possibility of long-term relationships in which people anticipate the (dis)positions of others in relation to themselves also allows the same planning strategies to be mobilized at high speed in transient interactions. Long-term relationships are in turn sustained through the generic conditions or constraints (rules of behavior) expected of persons in particular locations (roles) in relation to one another. This seems self-evident enough. Here I bring to mind certain ethnographic data, some of it well known, in order to make one further point. If social relations are not external symbolic storage systems in the sense intended by Donald, the parallel I mean to draw is nonetheless precise in one respect. Relationships work through persons consciously acknowledging the presence, and / or the intentions, of others as persons capable of action like themselves. This means that all kinds of boundary possibilities arise in which people may put one another at varying degrees of otherness or externality from themselves. Social relationships thus provide an analogue model for the very exteriorizing process that Donald describes, in which memory is externally looped via devices which also stimulate it. Donald (1991: 309) argues that external memory is not simply coextensive with culture; he wishes to use the term for those mechanisms (artifacts such as literacy) that act as specic analogues to

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internal memory. He himself deploys an analogue model in his appeal to the difference between biological memory and other memory mechanisms: he represents diverse properties as the difference between what is internal and what is external to the organism. Now that concept of difference depends on other differences being held in place, such as that of body and environment. The perception of body boundary in turn requires its own conceptual supportas in the idea of houses having interiors and exteriors, or in images of containment and extension, or in the altered state of whatever is held to cross a line. None of these conceptual supports can be taken for granted. Together they make up the kind of analogical system by which social anthropologists identify specic cultures. It might be of some interest in the present context, therefore, to explore ways in which the very concept of externality has been (analogically) modeled. I am interested in models that make loops, and that take in other persons in doing so. My examples come from cultures which pay an exaggerated attention to the recursive (e.g., Munn 1986) and elicitory (e.g., Wagner 1986) potential of social relations.

Figure 1. Plan of Mekeo village, Papua New Guinea. (From Mosko 1985: 26, gure 2.1., with kind permission.)

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The eight villages belonging to the Mekeo, who live along the reaches of the Biaru River in the Central province of Papua New Guinea, follow a regular pattern (figure 1). Clubhouses of the resident clan chiefs are prominent at each end, while domestic dwellings and other structures are erected in parallel rows facing each other. In the center is an area cleared of permanent features. Coconut and areca palms, planted behind the faade of the houses, do not intrude on this central space.
1

The village is the focus of human activitypeople eat, reproduce, and are buried there. However, as the ethnographer (Mosko 1985: 22) adds, the village is not limited to human beings. Domesticated animals, various plants and a whole range of humanly-fashioned artifacts belong there. These village-things are radically separated from those of the bush beyond. Indeed village and bush are conceptualized as distinct domains of activities and powers, and a well-dened croton hedge bounds the periphery of the village. The bush is inhabited by many bush-things, animal, plant, and spirit; it is also the source of what Mosko refers to an as astonishing array of natural resources, including garden food and hunting products. What is beyond the village is thus brought into the village for consumption, and wastes are thrown back into the bush. Mekeo draw on a conceptual opposition between outside and inside to encompass both a spatial partitioning of the village and bush and a temporal regulation of the daily cycle of life which takes people between the two (ibid.: 23). The terms are not organized quite as Euro-Americans might imagine, however: it is both bush that is categorically inside and the village that is categorically outside.
2 3

Figure 1 is not of course the plan of any specific village; Mosko has abstracted sets of relations that signify differences of various orders, here rendered in terms of position and space. Now we may ask of the village, rst, what kind of information is being stored in the placing of

1. The so-called Bush Mekeo; I draw principally on Mark Moskos (1985) original ethnography referring to the 1970s. 2. Double quotation marks indicate vernacular phrases. 3. A term for a discourse derived largely from twentieth-century North American and Northern European cultures to which the language of analysis (such as the one in which this chapter is written) belongs.

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its houses and fences, and, second, what kind of spatio-temporal functions does it allow people to operate upon it. The demarcation between inside and outside, made visible through the croton fence that runs round the village, allows what we might call (after Harris, this volume) displaced communication: the ability to imagine oneself either side of it. This can be rendered in terms of seeing different sets of social relations. If the bush beyond the fence is inside, this is also the view that people have from the perspective of their overall territory; they are contained within the larger circumference of the land their tribe occupies, and the bush lies within this. A person going from village to bush goes inside. The tribe and its territory does not, however, form an undifferentiated unit. It is composed of villages, each of which contains members of one or more clans, and people interact regularly with other villages of their tribe with whom they are intermarried. From any one persons point of view, then, a tribe contains not only blood kin, but also the afnes from whom spouses come, and mothers kin from whom no spouse can be taken. These latter are so to speak outside people (my term) and it is in villages, the places of human habitation, that one encounters such people. To go outside in going into ones own village is thus to include in ones view those with whom ones clan is intermarried, and across more than one generation. In mimetic mode, distinctions are thus sustained, held in place, by other distinctions.
4 5

These Mekeo formulations prompt me to consider other material from Melanesian societies showing similar intellectual preoccupations with the relationship between inside and outside. As Thomas (this volume) notes, the very conceptualization of the person is at issue.

4. Mekeo were composed of two mutually hostile political units (tribes), at war with one another; each of the tribes was endogamous. Population figures were tiny (583 and 1258 respectively in 1970) (Mosko 1985: 15). While I follow Moskos account closely in many places, the observations on perspective are mine. 5. I simplify an interlocking set of analogies. The relationship of ones own clan to ones spouses clan, or of blood kin to non-blood kin, is analogous to that of inside to outside, while the relationship between the clans of ones mother and spouses mother is analogous to that between inverted outside and everted inside (see below) (e.g., Mosko 1985: 144). The range over which these analogues are repeated forms the subject of Moskos book.

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One has to understand the person in an expanded sense: there are necessarily many people involved.

Inside and outside

The idea that it is social relations which separate out aspects of persons and present them with worlds beyond themselves has many antecedents in anthropological accounts. This was Fortes interest in the West African Ashanti stool, and the concept of ofce it created. Regalia that embodied the virtues and powers of a particular ofce, in this case politico-religious positions of authority, came in turn to bestow virtue and powers on the person of the ofce-holder. The artifact thus both absorbed the person, and outlived any one incumbent in its own durability. What was being displayed to the rest of the world was the transformed status of the incumbent, a visible reminder in material form of the immaterial counterpart in the rules that the ofce-holder also observed in his person. In such circumstances, the artifact was created as external to the person precisely insofar as it embodied extra-personal power. That social separation of the incumbent from the ofce provided the conceptual basis for imagining a source of authority beyond the individual person. The same principle may hold elsewhere, as in the more diffuse system of the Tallensi of Northern Ghana (to keep with Fortes material), where the power of senior men was seen to emanate from their status within a domain of social life held separate from domestic affairs. From the perspective of the domestic domain, in turn, activities were understood as both belonging to it and lying beyond.
6

While in many contexts Melanesian people conceptualize a removed realm of power (a spirit or ancestral world), a preoccupation with what is internal and what is external seems to govern the perception of all kinds of relations. Distinctions between two features may be held in place by other distinctions between other features; they may also be held in place by movement across the boundary between features, or by shifts in perspective which substitute the view from one side by the view from the other. Such movement and shifts

6. Kinship and the social order (1969) brings this and the next example together.

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may well be anticipated in both terminology and imagery. Let me start with the example of a clan group. Think of the rule of exogamy, the stipulation that one should marry outside a particular group, such as a clan. Exogamy simultaneously denes sets of people as insiders (those who cannot marry one another) and as outsiders (those from whom spouses come). Taking up the vantage point of ones clan group makes this clear. But note the consequence of this particular example, and it is not fortuitous; the positions fold back on themselves. If members of other clans are outsiders from the point of view of marrying spouses from them, then these spouses are also brought within the clan through those marriages. That movement of persons between clans and thus across clan boundaries helps sustain (make durable) the initial distinction. I take a cue from the recent history of the area I know best, Mt. Hagen in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. A woman would be separated from her own clan through the exchange of bridewealth gifts between the intermarrying patrilineal clans, components of which were equated with mortuary payments. Thus a woman was referred to as being severed from her clan of origin in order to go inside (as they said) the husbands clan. Meanwhile her brother would be taking a wife from an outside clan and through her outside powers be producing further members for his own. If pressed to the point, Hagen people would probably have said that it was only by bringing in external sources of fertility that a clan could reproduce at all. That external source was kept external. Although a woman went inside her husbands clan, she did not lose her connections with her own kin; far from it, she became a road between them, her outside origins being conserved in her natal clan name which she kept. Rather than being fully absorbed by the new clan body, it enclosed or encased her, like a foreign body. Hagen men sometimes referred to their wives as being inside a fence, as though one could imagine a small enclosure within the clan territory contained within the wider circumference of the clan land, an image also summoned by gardens which were individually fenced within a clan territory.
7

7. The material will be familiar to many readers. Relevant to the present account are A. Strathern 1971; A. and M. Strathern 1971; M. Strathern 1979, 1987, 1988. I refer to events as they were rst recorded in the 1960s and 1970s, when the combined population of two related dialect areas was some 80,000.

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There are other images for this enclosing movement. Across Melanesia, one can generalize, the alimentary and procreative functions of the human body chart the process of substances seen now as inside and now as outside. These comprise a reproductive model of life, one which draws readily on metaphors of feeding and evacuation, of sexual union and childbirth. There is thus an interplay between notions of externality and internality imagined as body processes within a single organism, as one might have an idea of a fetus within the mothers enclosing body, and the conjunction of distinct bodies in cross-sex intercourse. Union, however, would be a bad translation, at least in the Hagen case, for (by contrast with EuroAmerican idiom) conjugal partners are not joined together as one personrather each conserves their distinct social identity. Indeed, each party elicits from the other behavior appropriate both to their sex and to their social origin. Thus it is because the husband is socially distinct from his wife that the child she carries is socially distinct from her (in this patrilineal system, women carry children for the husbands clan). If this were Mekeo one might say that the husband plants an inside seed within her outside body. The ow of body substance between persons is also a process of extraction or elicitation. What the woman takes within her she later brings forth as the newborn child. Now while one might raise ones eyebrows at this platitude, one might lower them again on thinking about the way in which Hagen people incorporate this into their thinking. We should understand these different body states as having their counterpart in social divisions marked by marriage rules and food taboos. Transfers of body substance through such rules and conventions in turn have a counterpart in various artifacts (such as bridewealth valuables) that also flow between people (cf. Wagner 1977). Bodily ows are both made visible in the transfer of material items between people and across boundaries, and the transmission of energy and life an analogy for those transfers themselves. This counterpart movement of artifacts is locked into body process in a second mode. The items to which I refer have value because they are regarded as being extracted from persons, just
8

8. One may think of artifacts as material items such as valuables owing against the ow of persons, as in compensation payments for bodily injury or loss. But we may compress the analogy (between ows of persons / artifacts) and also think of the one in terms of the other, e.g., persons as artifacts.

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as persons (like the bride) are regarded as extracted from other persons. In fact the two modes interpenetrate precisely at the point of marriage. In arrangements of the Hagen kind, it was these material artifacts that elicited persons. One clan yields its daughters (in marriage) to another because that other clan had offered artifacts (bridewealth) in the form of valuables for her. Each elicitation was in fact an instance of the elicitory potential of relationships.
9

The same elicitory potential was played out in the long-term reciprocal exchanges of wealth between political units (such as clans) for which men in the central Highland of Papua New Guinea were once renowned in the ethnographic literature. And what was this ceremonial exchange but the extraction of items of value from one grouppigs, formerly shell valuables, more recently moneyby another who in turn took them in order to give them out again? Peoples constant recourse to body imagery supposed wealth as always within someones body: it was only taken from one to be lodged in another. In Hagen, the recipient clan literally took the valuables inside its mens house and pigs inside its territory. This passage from outside to inside was further sustained by the distinction between the visible and invisible. What momentarily appeared also disappeared again. Items thus oscillated between the condition of being internal and being external to the body of ones own clan.

Concealment and revelation

This oscillation is interesting if only because of the explicitness of the accompanying social practices. Persons could be oriented outwards or inwards, even as parties to the exchanges alternated in their positions vis--vis one another. The men of two clans engaged in exchange alternated from being the recipients to being the donors of wealth; indeed we may say that they were exchanging perspectives on each other (Strathern 1988: 230). And the possibility was anticipated in the relationship between them. A donor was a future recipient, and vice versa. An exchange relationship thereby objectied that conceptual
9. Not universal in Papua New Guinea by any means. Some of the controversy is adumbrated in Godelier and Strathern (1991). Readers will have inferred that I am describing arrangements in which men have more stake than women.

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move, that recursive ability to see oneself from the view of another, through moving items (artifacts) between persons. These artifacts thereby moved the places persons occupied. This was not a logic that the anthropologist had to excavate. People acted openly by it. On an occasion of a public gift, the ceremonial ground would be thronged with those who had come to see what the recipient was getting, among them those who would be in turn potential recipients of such wealth as he passed on. At the same time the present donors, imagining themselves as future recipients, and challenging the present recipient to give back at least an equivalent amount, did not just draw attention to the size of their present giftit anticipated their own future ability to raise as much again later. The whole matter might be about the politics of clan composition and the economics of wealth creation; it was also about reproduction, ensuring the capacity to be productive and revealing that capacity through its effects. Now such claims could not be made in isolation; one could not so to speak reproduce by oneself. Donors depended crucially on recipients receiving their gifts, and for taking them inside, for how else was the donors creativity to be revealed? This was a prestige system where those who claim prestige depended on others to recognize it. Similarly, the producers of wealth would only be able to produce again, in the future, if those to whom they were giving the wealth were prepared to accept the immediate gift. In other words, donors required willing containers in which to pour the results of their prowess. We may think of these as an audience, or a body of consumers for products, with the proviso that the transactions were locked into a social alternation so that those who were producers at one point became consumers of equivalent items at another. The social alternation was explicit: the categorical division into donors and recipients created the possibility of future creativity. It was imagined in terms of different bodily orientations. First, I noted that a clan receiving wealth took the wealth into itself when it took the wealth into its mens houses. (The analogy between houses and persons, mediated through the concept of a body, is elaborated
10

10. For a recent general statement, see Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995.

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throughout Papua New Guinea. ) Like their ornaments that Hageners wrapped up in dark packagesdark because of the soot that caked the interior of housesshells were secreted away by the recipients of an exchange gift, and money even more easily. Pigs were dispersed to different households. Men removed their dancing attire, redistributing it among those from whom it was borrowed. Walk into a place a few days after a display and you would see nothinga shabby man in ragged clothes which only tell you, if you did not know by other means, that you have no idea of the wealth he received. All visible evidence would have vanished, the artifacts given away to others or wrapped up and stored inside the house, a process which in the case of shells was thought to make them grow, until the next occasion on which people brought them outside. Everything was then turned inside out.

11

Figure 2. Shells laid out down a ceremonial stand, streaming away from a house (where the viewer is standing). Mt. Hagen, 1964. (Photograph by author.)

11. Most notably the Sepik river region where much play is made (for instance) of boy initiates entering houses that are simultaneously male and female in structure, and emerging forth in altered state. Gender distinctions comprise another set of conceptual supports.

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So, second, in standard Hagen iconography, wealth would stream from the now open mens house (figure 2). Dancers turned themselves inside out tooon the exterior of their bodies they wore all the ornaments that signied their inner state of well-beingand took omens to reassure themselves that the interior would yield its fruits. Men anxiously poured glistening oil from dull, smoky asks, waiting for the liquid to flow, as evidence of their ability to bring internal capacities forth. Wives whom the male donors kept enclosed, the fertile centers of their clans, they turned inside out too. When women danced, they were decorated by their kinsmen, and covered in the red paint that indicated among other things the inferiority of wealth, now everted, turned outside for all to see. The important point to retain here is what these people retained. That inner state was not brought outside, revealed once and for all, so that people could forever see inside, as one might imagine EuroAmerican knowledge systems where what is brought outside remains (more or less) permanently in view. Rather, what you saw on the outside was an everted inside: an interior state turned momentarily outside, subsequently to be folded back and concealed from view. So it remained an inside being brought out, the externalizing effect a momentary one.
12

All this was apparent in the form of the pearlshell, a valuable which became for a time the most potent symbol of economic exchange, political power and generative reproduction Hagen men possessed. The shell, enclosed in its resin surround, painted with ocher, was occasionally likened to a fetus within a womb. Connolly and Anderson (1987: 251) reproduce a photograph from the 1930s, in the days when pearlshells rst entered the Highlands in number, in which men shoulder dozens of shells in special netbags, not unlike the carrying bags of women (the same term is used of womb). These were bags in which women put the products of their creativityfood for pigs and food for their familiescontaining thereby what would shortly come outside for others to consume (figure 3).

12. I anticipate / borrow Moskos terminology here, although the Hagen configuration is by no means directly mappable onto that of Mekeo.

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Figure 3. Carrying bags. A girl returns from the gardens with sweet potatoes in one net bag and vines and leaves in the other. Mt. Hagen, 1964. (Photograph by author.)

Incorporation and inscription

Whether we address the person or the body, we might want to ask just what is inside and what is outside. Or perhaps one should be asking what the personification of artifacts (the house as a body, the shell as a fetus) does to the idea of things being external at all. In what sense are items external if they are also caught up in the network of relations which bind people to one another? If the shell you have is mine because you owe it to me, in whose body does it reside, and in what sense is it external to either of us? Such Hagen questions, and the analogies they presuppose, recall Thomas (this volume) reference to Connertons (1989) arguments on memory. On the face of it, Connertons contrast between inscribing and incorporating practices resonates with that between the external storage of information as opposed to an internal one. Inscribing practice he sees as exemplied in devices for storing and retrieving communicationshe mentions encyclopedias, tapes, computersthat all have the characteristic of literacy itself; it traps and holds information, long after the human

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organism has stopped performing (1989: 73). Incorporating practices, on the other hand, are gestures that require the presence of bodies to perform them. Protocols of posture or habits of eating may convey information, but cannot be done outside the context of the performance. This does not mean to say that they have no lasting effect. On the contrary, his thesis is that even in societies whose practices are dominated by inscribing techniques we nd a continuity of bodily habit, information transmitted from one person to another over time. The social dynamic with which he is concerned, then, is transmission and the duration of memory, so that ancient practices are projected into the future not just through the records that people leave behind but through their bodily routines. Thus memory may be passed on in non-textual and (he adds) non-cognitive ways (ibid.: 102 3). Now this is the point at which Connerton both praises anthropology for attending to performance and castigates anthropology for being interested in the momentary communications of the present rather than seeing the performative potential for the storage of memory of past practices, and thus of information about them. In attending to the present, the anthropologist is of course attending to the pasts and futures that people encapsulate (in the present) for themselves. We might say that the performance of ceremonial exchange, or bridewealth, is at once an incorporating practice, replete with gestures carried out by human bodies / persons, including communication through the artifacts they transfer from one to another, and an inscribing practice, insofar as persons bodies hold information about previous states of affairs that they can indicate without re-enacting. Previous roles that people occupied, as we might say a recipient was once a donor, or the anticipation of an outcome, as one might say that a clan in handing over a young girl is also handing over a mother with potential to have a child, comprise information held over from other times and places. It comes from previous performances when the actors occupied different positions, or from the projection of absent peoples performances onto those present. So what the present body enacts is less an incorporating

13

13. For example, By substituting a visual record for an acoustic one, the alphabet frees a society from the constraints of a rhythmic mnemonics (Connerton 1989: 76).

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repetition of a former state of affairs than a transformation of them, a mimesis that works through inverting or everting a previous position. Instead of imagining persons / bodies (minds) as embedded in a culture, Melanesians (not just Hageners) imagine them as embedded in other persons / bodies. As artifacts for one another, they are processing entities of a sort. The social dynamic is not that of personal memory holding everything one needs to know, to be used when the occasion arises in order to repeat past experiences or summon former knowledge. Rather, the social dynamic is that of persons in relationships where one body elicits things from another, and where one body can only bring forth in the presence of the other. A mutual history is contained between them. It allows, at least in the exaggerated form presupposed by exchange relationships, that each person can anticipate being in the position of the other. As we have seen, this is an interdependence which requires that persons do not merge but remain (socially) external to one another. Here the idea of externality sustains the possibility of relationship as such. Let me produce my own mimesis. What do we substitute for culture? Rather than saying that already existing things are incised with cultural value (inscription), or that the body takes culture within itself in its habits and postures (incorporation), we may say that persons create effects as at once external and internal to themselves. That becomes evident when it is their relationships which they wish to reproduce. People do not have to re-enact specific events when past events are subsumed under (objectied in) relationships. But they do, so to speak, have to re-enact the relationships themselves.

Reiteration
In his exploration of Technologies of choice, Pierre Lemonnier (1993a; 1993b: 22) remarks on the puzzle of technical invention. The issue he has in mind is how is it that people perceive a sufcient gap in what they have to hand to want to plug it. If a system works, how can that conceptual gap arise? How can one conceive of something one does not have? His interest then becomes why some technical practices get chosen over others. One answer is already contained in Latours contribution to Lemonniers volume: this is a false model of the relationship of language to other cognitive processes, even as questions about cultural elaboration are a false model of the relation-

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ship of (useful) artifact to (ornamental) object (Latour 1993: 378). If Euro-Americans tend to see the pig rst as an animal (one of his examples) and then as an item of cultural value, they arrive at inscription as the archetypal cultural activity. Latour develops his counter-model of quasi-objects as technique and sociality enfolded inseparably together. The anthropologist should be no less adept than his or her informants at taking on other perspectives. If we were to start with the Hagen view, we might well wish to ask about quasipersons: persons have relationships enfolded within their bodies, simultaneously external and internal to themselves. Now if Lemonniers question were also about information (if people are already in communication, why should they wish to add anything?), would this also contribute to an answer?
14 15

It is no new observation to say that information may be produced as a by-product of other activities (see the discussion on language in Goody 1995). This may be true even when inducing states of knowledge seems part of the actors intentions. Observers of initiation rituals from Richards (1956) onwards have noted that boys and girls are taught what they already appear to know; there seems no fresh information as such to be gained. Take the Wahpeton Dakota village (Spector 1993) and the archaeologists reconstruction of a girls rst menses: a girl who already knew how to quill was submitted to four intensive days of nothing but quilling in order to make her good with the awl (1993: 38). Spector interprets this celebration of the girls future domain of accomplishment (the future woman would have her achievements at robe or tent making inscribed on the aps of the Council tipi (1993: 37) in terms of the significance accorded to the artifact, the awl. We may add that it is also the instilling of a bodily routine. Far from information being imparted into her, it seems that the four days instead demonstrated the capacities that could be drawn from her. But why did it have to be reiterated?

14. He has a wonderful passage (1993: 380) about the insouciance with which we identify more [a higher level of] society with more technology. (EuroAmerican definition of human society becomes the more certain the more we can identity the enlistment of non-humanstools, artifacts, plantsin peoples interactions.) 15. On quasi-persons, see Wagner 1991.

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DErrico (this volume) refers to the significance of the accumulation of notches on bone and other artifacts. He argues that carving a new notch on a tally stick without altering the previous record deploys a temporal but not necessarily a spatial or morphological code, though these are found in combination in other contexts. If we attend to the social activity of Dakota notching, we may learn something further again. Someone who has spent hours boring holes in hide then makes a single, though unpierced, hollow in the bone handle of the tool with which she is making those holes. Perhaps the one notch stands for the completed artifact; but perhaps the action of making the notch also stands for the countless hand movements and uses of the tool with which she brought other artifacts to completion. (Note that the tool has so to speak changed position: it has become the recipient of the boring process rather than the instrument of it.) Of course the Dakota used quite different tallies as well (e.g., sticks), just as Hagen men in the past used tallies for the number of hands of shells they had given to others. Indeed, as Spector surmises, we might wonder if the tool was not also an ornament, an extension of the body also receiving an impression upon it. [She uses the term inscribe to describe the impression that nding the awl made on her own mind (1993: 34) and she no doubt wishes to bring to mind the inscribed impressions on the awl handle itself.]
16

The Hagen tally, demonstrating the prowess in disseminating the wealth the (male) wearer had attracted, was made to be worn on the chest (figure 4). When it came to a ceremonial occasion, a man might either wear his own tally or else give it to a brother or son to wear, or even divide it up: there was no confusion over information created by such actions, for no-one would reckon the status of a man by his tally alone. People were openly agnostic in Hagen, as elsewhere in Melanesia, about what could be inferred from external markers; one never knew what revelations also concealed.

16. As in the case of a Dakota notch for each set of 10 hides, or tent, which a woman worked, so each small Hagen slat of bamboo recorded a set of 8 (or 10, a superior 8) shells given.

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Figure 4. Tally made of bamboo slats, recording exchange transactions, worn here by someone decorated for an accompanying dance. Mt. Hagen, 1967. (Photograph by author.)

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But apart from that, reputation depended on the congurations of the present, and past exploits were only a partial pointer to it; in any case, to distribute his signs of achievement among close kin was apt for a man who depended on support for success. Exploits could not, then, simply be added to exploits. Rather, each giving away of shells indicated the tremendous effort acquired afresh on each occasion to assemble and distribute, as each pushing of the awl through the hide required new effort. The exchange tally was a sign of the repeatedly summoned energy by which the wearer brought off yet again a grand gift. In other words, the number of occasions made a long tally awesome precisely as evidence of someone able again and again to draw out of himself the capacity to dispense wealth, a kind of insistent rehearsal of activity or energy, as though iterative endeavor had a virtue of its own. In this mimetic re-presentation of past actions, people represent the very ability to act, and that in turn may have informational content of a kind. What has to be learned afresh is that it is only by (fresh) social action that the conceptual universe is kept in place. In the oral and politically uncentralized regimes of the kind I have been describing in this chapter, where persons deploy others as signs for their own states of being, orienting themselves to artifacts like themselves, constant repositioning becomes both condition and outcome. It takes effort to keep social distinctions in motion. In communicating information about the results of those efforts, people stimulate themselves to further effort. As a consequence, positions are made anew. We might say that social mimesis thus creates the possibility of information as new knowledge. Certainly, it is overt cultural dogma in a place such as Hagen that relationships will wither away unless they are kept in a state of activation.
17

Movement
I have been drawing on the exaggerated attention that certain modern peoples pay to the recursive and elicitory character of social relation-

17. Melanesianists will recognize an allusion here to analogic kinship (Wagner 1977; Gillison 1993). The most salient distinctions have to be the most actively sustained.

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ships. Their models are suggestive about what both mimesis and analogy can entail in human interactions. Whereas a fence can keep the distinction between inside and outside precisely because it is built in one place, for that is all it does, when persons become signs for what is internal and external to themselves, movement may be required to keep the very distinction in place. Persons present themselves to others in terms of what they have closed off or, on the contrary, what they can draw out of themselves. This is communicated by movement through time and space, so that the body appears in varying states of openness and closure (to itself and to others). But if different times (such as times of the day or points in an exchange cycle) and space (such as the center or periphery of a village or ceremonial ground) provide measures for different social states, then it means that persons are also perceived as constantly liable to differentiationwhen they act and where they move takes on a signication to which they have to respond. As if to emphasize that there is no escape from having to respond, the Melanesians I have been describing here nd a further analogue in the bodys mode of processing materials, the unavoidable relationship between ingesting and egesting. This iteration is not mere repetition. The body is held in a state of animation through what it takes in and gives out. The ability to repeat actions in other registers, to conceptualize concepts in this sense, in turn enacts the replenishment of energy. I repeat the point that renewal of energy or capacity is not conned to the repetition of the same tasks (replication) but can be equally well effected in the ability to transform one task, or relationship, into another (reproduction). Mekeo underline that point for us.
18 19 20

Let us look at the plan again (figure 1). The conceptual alignments and separations impose a bodily regimen on the occupants; indeed
18. Mekeo have developed this to a ne art (see Mosko 1983; 1991). 19. But then nor is repetition (Deleuze 1994); cf. Donalds (1993: 13) comment that human beings in effect start from a new base line with each generation. 20. The Melanesian material describes a world where people do not just reflect on their activities but are reflexive about them, able to switch perspective, to anticipate outcomes and see the past as versions or transpositions of the present. The recall cues (cf. Mithen, this volume) include the changing social positions that people take on one another.

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the village is itself a kind of body. I said that there were constant transfers of produce from the bush into the village, and return of refuse to the bush. This is not an undirected coming and going but a ow of substance conceptualized as though it were coursing through the human frame. Observe the empty space in the center, used for feasting and occasions when guests are taken into the village. Mekeo do not conceive of this as the center of a center or as the inmost part of the inside. On the contrary, they cannot do so because we know that the village as such is already an outside place in relation to the surrounding bush. But the same relationship between bush and village is repeated in the relationship of the periphery of the village where the houses are and the empty plaza in the center: the center is an inside of a kind. Given that the village as a whole is an outside place, it is the outsides inside, and Mosko uses the phrase inverted outside. Similarly in relation to the inside bush: the bush immediately adjacent to the village is distinguished from the more remote bush as a kind of evened region, an everted inside. The English language phrasing is awkward; the conceptual space as it is lived by the Mekeo can be simply re-rendered as movement. Every day follows a similar course. Food is brought from the remote bush to the village, not to the center but to the peripheral dwelling houses where in the evening it is cooked and eaten. This bringing of food into the village is complemented by a scrupulously observed regimen of waste disposal. A rule species the place of excretion. Early morning each villager makes his or her way to the bush, not the remote bush but the peripheral bush just over the fence, to empty their abdomens. When they return they clean up the village, sweeping all the refuse and leavings into the central plaza. The rubbish is piled up in the centre, before being carried to the edge of the village and dumped where human beings have also evacuated. The abdomen of the village is thus cleaned out too. Indeed the central plaza is called just this: village abdomen. Now the village center or body cavity is not in any simple sense an internal place. If, in the English senses of inside and outside, you think of the alimentary tract through the body as taking in food from the outside and returning it to the outside, one could think of those inner chambers as exposed to the outside world, as though it were the

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persons outside within. In Mekeo terms, the waste that collects in the abdominal cavity is already outside the person, as though it had been already swept there, and must be taken from this outside to inside the bush: the abdomen of a human being is homologously conceived as inside the body only insofar as it is an inversion of space outside the body (Mosko 1985: 27). The abdomen is thus simultaneously an inside and an outside place, as the village abdomen makes evident. As we have seen, Mekeo always sweep refuse here before removing the stuff to dump over the fence. So rubbish is swept into an area thereby demarcated off from the rest of the village, while as part of the village it otherwise remains an outside place. Waste is separated from produce within the village, even as the source of produce in the (remote) bush is separated from the place (adjacent bush) where waste is deposited. By virtue of the daily transfers of objects between village and bush, writes Mosko (1985: 25), outside and inside domains are bisected by a reversal or inversion of each, such that the outside village has its own inside place (i.e., an inverted outside) and the inside bush has its own outside (i.e., an everted inside). In sum, the village abdomen is an inversion of an outside (village) space, while the area over the fence is correspondingly an eversion of an inside (bush) space. Food and materials collected from the bush and gardens and processed within the village thus travel in human eyes from inside to outside and then, in nally being evacuated, from an inverted outside to an everted inside. Needless to say, this daily routine is only the beginning of the conceptual operations Mekeo perform on their own thoughts. For instance, the whole system is bisected by what appears above ground and what appears below ground, and there are various rules about what holes can be dug in the ground where, including rules about the burial of bodies. The plan is also in effect a multidimensional grid that directs not just the daily activity of food and waste production but the conduct of ceremony (in feasts and mortuary rites and so forth), the manipulation of supernatural powers, and the relationship of persons to one another. Indeed, one may argue it is a presentation of a basic conceptual schema that relies crucially on the recursive operation of relations on relations. The iterated behavioral routine of persons moving between bush and village, in the collection of resources and disposal of waste, recalls whole sets of analogies.

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A regular recapitulation, then, of the movement of items between village and bush is given long-term spatial presence in the permanent layout of Mekeo houses and plaza. Hagen people enact similar movement in a quite different temporal trajectory. In dwelling on a particularly public set of practices (ceremonial exchange), I have suggested that behind the change of perspectives entailed by the simple alternation of donors and recipients in relation to each other lies a social dynamic of elicitation: a world in which capacity is predicated on the ability of persons to draw that very capacity out of one another. What lies within is potentially external precisely because it can be taken inside by someone socially external to oneself. In mens reciprocal exchange, the external other actually takes ones externalized inside into his own inside. The artifacts that ow between them carry this movement: whether they ow toward one or away from one will indicate the current social axis of the relationship. In Hagen the movement itself takes place over a span of years. However, the long-term temporal sequencing between the occasions on which donors and recipients switch places is re-enacted spatially in the brief display on the ceremonial ground. The re-enactment is to great visual effect, for the handing over is ordinarily staged in front of the house that has both taken in and gives forth valuables.
21

There is a nal observation to extract from the way in which certain Melanesian peoples combine various analogies to communicate the actors effects or inuence on one another. And that is that they furnish themselves with a calculus for those effects; this is how one could describe the tally of shell gifts worn in the past by Hagen men. There is a corollary to this observation. An analogic calculus will require constant social work to keep its measuring capacity in place. Each distinction requires more distinctions to sustain it. Men from the Trobriand Islands at present living in the capital, Port Moresby, make displays of their urban harvest in imitation of the harvest competitions people hold at home; Debbora Battaglia (1995)
21. Though the Hagen movement is in turn foreshortened, speeded up one might say, by contrast with cycles that unfold over generations, as is true for instance of Etoro (cf. Kelly 1993).

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describes one such event that took place in 1985. They built, as people do at home, mounds of yams in the shape of a cone. The cone has to be composed in one go, a maneuver which requires a ne judgment of dimensions and in particular of the size of the base to start with. The builder must project the correct dimensions for the base from the number, sizes, and shapes of yams, to make a stable and well-shaped stack from them. The whole display would be a test of the gardeners capacity to turn his effort to effect in its impact on others. This effect requires a temporal division into past and present, the past being brought into the present as something formerly hidden and now revealed. By virtue of having happened already, the completed activity being celebrated is thus categorized as off-stage (hidden), and what happens off-stage is growth (cf. Biersack 1982). But once the growing is complete and the yams ready for collecting, the transformed labor and soil become a visible aesthetic object of peoples relations with one another. The two states (concealment and revelation) are thus kept distinct from one another through accompanying distinctions of past / present, growth / cessation of growth, and so forth. On this occasion, however, Battaglia was made aware of a problem for the city dwellers. Unable to make these cones of yams next to their gardens, and having to transport the yams in pickup trucks across the cityinstead of being immediately amassed as they emerged from the ground, they were individually wrapped to prevent damage in transitgardeners fell under suspicion for surreptitiously adding tubers from other sources. They were thought to be secretly combining their own with other peoples. As a result, displays were growing at a time when growth ought to have ceased (Battaglia 1995: 85). The distinction between growth and display could not be held stable by all the other temporal and spatial markersand, accordingly, raised questions about how to measure the accomplishments being claimed.
22 23

22. It is the size of the base which is measured (by a piece of string) in the competition between gardeners. Being able to complete the building in one go is a mark of aesthetic power also demonstrated in the carving of canoe prows. 23. Size and quantity are significant dimensions. Yams . . . as much grow their subjects [the gardener] as the other way round. Gardeners trade on their ability to embody supplementation, incorporating others in exchanges that expand their own political parameters (Battaglia 1995: 80).

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References
Battaglia, Debbora. 1995. On practical nostalgia: Self-prospecting among urban Trobrianders. In Rhetorics of self-making, edited by Debbora Battaglia, 7796. Berkeley: University of California Press. Biersack, Aletta. 1982. Ginger gardens for the ginger women: Rites and passages in a Melanesian society." Man (N.S.) 17: 23958. Carsten, Janet and Stephen Hugh-Jones (eds.). 1995. About the house: LeviStrauss and beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Connerton, Paul. 1989. How societies remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Connolly, Bob and Robin Anderson. 1987. First contact: New Guineas highlanders encounter the outside world. Harmondsworth: Viking Penguin. Deleuze, Gilles. (1968) 1994. Difference and repetition, translated by P. Patton. London: The Athlone Press. Donald, Merlin. 1991. Origins of the modern mind: Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. . 1993. Hominid enculturation and cognitive evolution. Archaeological Review from Cambridge 12: 524. Fortes, Meyer. 1969. Kinship and the social order: The legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gillison, Gillian. 1993. Between culture and fantasy: A New Guinea Highlands mythology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Godelier, Maurice and Marilyn Strathern (eds.). 1991. Big men and great men: Personications of power in Melanesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goody, Esther N. (ed.). 1995. Social intelligence and interaction: Expressions and implications of the social bias in human intelligence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kelly, Raymond. 1993. Constructing inequality: The fabrication of a hierarchy of virtue among the Etoro. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. The ethnography of a high-tech case. In Technological choices: Transformation in material cultures since the Neolithic, edited by Pierre Lemonnier, 37298. London: Routledge.

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Lemonnier, Pierre. 1993a. Pigs as ordinary wealth: Technical logic, exchange and leadership in New Guinea. In Technological choices: Transformation in material cultures since the Neolithic, edited by Pierre Lemonnier, 12656. London: Routledge. . (ed.), 1993b. Technological choices: Transformation in material cultures since the Neolithic. London: Routledge. Mosko, Mark. 1983. Conception, deconception and social structure in Bush Mekeo culture. In Concepts of Conception, edited Dan Jorgensen, Mankind special issue 14: 2432. . 1985. Quadripartite structures: Categories, relations and homologies in Bush Mekeo culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . 1991. Great men and total systems: North Mekeo hereditary authority and social reproduction. In Big men and great men: Personications of power in Melanesia, edited by Maurice Godelier and Marilyn Strathern, 97114. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Munn, Nancy D. 1986. The fame of Gawa: A symbolic study of value transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Richards, Audrey. 1956. Chisungu: A girls puberty ceremony. London: Faber. Spector, Janet. 1993. What this awl means: Feminist archeology at a Wahpeton Dakota village. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press. Strathern, Andrew and Marilyn Strathern. 1971. Self-decoration in Mt. Hagen. London: Duckworth. Strathern, Andrew. 1971. The rope of moka: Big-men and ceremonial exchange in Mount Hagen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strathern, Marilyn, 1979. The self in self-decoration. Oceania 49: 24157. . 1987. Producing difference: Connections and disconnections in two New Guinea Highland kinship systems. In Gender and kinship: Essays towards a unied analysis, edited by J. F. Collier and Sylvia Yanagisako, 271300. Stanford: Stanford University Press. . 1988. The gender of the gift: Problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wagner, Roy. 1977. Analogic kinship: A Daribi example. American Ethnologist 4: 62342. . 1986. Among the Wen Barok of New Ireland. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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. 1991. The fractal person. In Big men and great men: Personications of power in Melanesia, edited by Maurice Godelier and Marilyn Strathern, 15973. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

|Appendix III|

Environments within
An ethnographic commentary on scale
Marilyn STRATHERN University of Cambridge

Social anthropology bases its practice on what we might call the unpredictability of initial conditions, unpredictable, that is, from the viewpoint of the observer. Ethnography, the kind of comprehensive account which gathers everything in, encourages the thought that one cannot predict at the outset of an inquiry where it will lead or what will turn out to be relevant to exposition. It also encourages the observer not to specify completely in advance where to look for the correlates and conditions of the outcomes he or she observes, and thus to confront unpredictabilities in social life. In the past, social anthropologists have produced all kinds of justifications for ethnographic comprehensiveness, such as the idea of holistic societies which had to be described in the round. But while the justifications nowadays appear theoretically flimsy, the practice is as important as it ever was. And it is particularly important in the study of environmental issues. The unfolding of complex interchanges between culture and environment makes the observer repeatedly aware of the unpredictability of initial conditions: factors that may have momentous impact can, until the impact is known, seem small

Publishers note: We are very grateful to Oxford University Press for giving us the permission to publish this reprint of Strathern, Marilyn. 2000. Environments within: An ethnographic commentary on scale. In Culture, landscape, and the environment: The Linacre Lectures 1997, edited by Kate Flint and Howard Morphy, 4471. Oxford: Oxford University Press. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | Marilyn Strathern Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. Strathern, Marilyn. 2013. Learning to see in Melanesia. Masterclass Series 2. Manchester: HAU Society for Ethnographic Theory.

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or obscure. Recent developments in Papua New Guinea afford an interesting illustration. In the spirit of the exercise, I begin at a point that might seem at the outset to have little bearing on environmental issues as such.

The importance of scale

The man in figure 1, who is from Mount Hagen in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, was photographed more than thirty years ago. He is gazing at inflation. Inflation has been the anthropologists term for what was brought about by a massive influx of shells into the local economy following Australian pacification of the region. Pearlshells stream down the ceremonial ground from the mens house at its head.
1

Gold prospectors, administrative officers, and then missionaries of diverse persuasion flew in planeloads of shells of all kinds, with which they were able to obtain food in the form of root crops and pigs. The goldlip pearlshell that had formerly circulated in often broken but highly prized pieces now became available as whole specimens and in great number. They were absorbed into peoples transactions with one another. The effects were political as well as economic, there being a corresponding increase of occasions such as that illustrated in figure 1, clan displays of wealth in the context of a war compensation payment, given as recompense for help to allies and to both allies and enemies as recompense for loss. Such payments acquired a momentum of their own, developing into reciprocal exchanges between groups who vied to outdo one another. Donors challenged recipients to make as good a return of wealth. If this served the pacific2 3

1. The same photograph is described from a rather different perspective in M. Strathern (1993); both this (figur 1) and figure 3 appear in chapter ten in M. Strathern (1999). This essay overlaps with, and is a companion paper to, chapters nine and ten in that book. 2. The goldlip pearlshell, particularly prized in Hagen, figured into bridewealth and mortuary payments, as well as homicide compensation, contexts in which pigs were also transacted; initially it was the only valuable which the expatriates could use to purchase meat (live pigs). Cowrie and other types of shell were acceptable for vegetable food and labor. 3. The authority on such compensation payments, which he has documented over a thirty-year period, is Andrew Strathern (e.g., 1971; and recently 1993, 1994).

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Figure 1: Spectators at a death compensation payment; Mount Hagen, Western Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea, 1964 (Photograph by the author.)

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ation policy of the Australian administration in the 1950s and 1960s, it also served continuing clan assertiveness, expressed through the commemoration of losses suffered and injuries inflicted during battles now of course in the past. The increase of such occasions is well documented. I doubt, however, if inflation is in this mans mind. He might, though, be reflecting on group strength, here evinced in the capacity to draw shells together and disperse them again, which mobilizes numerous connections among people. If he were a recipient, he might be counting them; but anyone may inspect their visible quality, their skin. Such shells are also worn on the donors skin, and he himself has on his chest a bamboo tally that records his own prowess in transactionsevery slat indicating an occasion on which a set of eight (or ten) shells were given. Pigs would come in return for shells, and later return gifts of shells. In the 1960s, people took a keen interest in what we might call the exchange rates, and looked back to the days when one shell was equivalent to one pig. But rather than bemoaning the drop in value of individual items, they tended to regard themselves as more fortunate that their ancestors. Their sense of importance was in no way diminished. Instead, men became more demanding over the quality and quantity of the specimens, their critical judgement keeping pace with the new opportunities. The shells retained their signification of wealth and strength. This was so until the late 1960s, when their value was overtaken by a second influx of wealth tokens, money.
4

Note the double process. The scale of wealth that poured into the New Guinea Highlands in those early yearsat one point Highlanders were extracting from the tiny expatriat population shells of all kinds at the rate of half a million a month had repercussions on many aspects of the political and economic life, and no historical account of the region can ignore the scale of the changes. At the same time, shells had an impact precisely because of what was kept constantl the value put on wealth as a sign of strength and the capacity that wealth revealed. For ambitious men in Hagen, this was above all the capacity
5

4. Kchler (1993: 94) explores a New Ireland conceptualization of skin (in the context of landscape) not as surface but as something which has surfaced and is constructed in terms of a hidden, interiorised pattern. 5. Described in Hughes (1978: 315).

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to dispense or distribute wealth resources through ceremonial exchange, for that in turn was a sign of commensurate ability to elicit or extract resources from others. Individual care and attention continued to be paid to each item; it was just that more shells circulated faster among more people. Without this constancy, then, we cannot complete the description of the effects of increase. From any one persons perspective their power seemed expanded, for they brought more people into their orbit; yet the prominence which that power had in the past given to one or two persons who took the lead in such exchanges was now gained at costlier price. Keeping in place the ratios between wealth and prominence or wealth and strength took more resources. That meant both finding the extra wealth to do so, thereby increasing the scale of diverse enterprises, and keeping unchanged the value placed on wealth extraction as a sign of influence, and thus conserving the equation between the two.
6 7

This no doubt sounds familiar enough. It introduces a query however. When does scale matter in our accounts of social life and when does it not? Or rather, is there any mileage to be gained from thinking about the relationship between the systemic effects of scale change on the one hand and on the other the capacity of systems to retain their features across different orders of scale? There is a reason for asking this question. My little vignette from the 1960s presents a state of affairs long superseded by other events. Inflation has had its final effect; there are no shells in circulation these days. Yet that period ought to remain
6. Inflation in a commodity economy based on productive consumption, implies a readjustment in the ratio of good and money to one another. What would inflation in a gift economy (cf. Gregory 1982: 31), based on consumptive production, look like? Presumably, it would entail changes in the rates by which relationships are reproduced. Inflation in a gift economy might be defined as an increase in the quantity of items, goods or money, against the capacity of relations to absorb them (i.e., reproduce themselves by them). In short, relationships expand to meet the increased circulation of items. The result is not necessarily more relationshipsbut the underlying premise of reciprocity or obligation in relationships evoked more frequently and at higher level of internal demand. So what is subject to increase are the occasions on which relations are activated. 7. Big men initially accomplished this by attempting to control the flow of wealth, drawing it to themselves and then making sure it went out of circulation (in truck purchases and the like).

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interesting as one of the pasts from which the present has come. The conditions for the present are there; the question is how to identify them. Can one actually seek and identify conjunctures which might make for unpredictability? We may have a case in point here. When parts of a system have been drawn into one vortex (scale changes introduced through the influx of shells have their own repercussions), while an essential part of the same overall system is behaving quite differently, drawing other elements towards it in its own vortex (sustaining a constancy of values that disregards scale), do we not start describing a particular kind of bifurcation? If so, then how the system develops will depend neither on the autonomy of the two separate trajectories, nor on a dialectical relation between them, but on a dimension somewhere betweenon the conditions which make each the starting point for the form which the other takes. This is how I have been describing inflation. If inflation points to processes that are both scale-sensitive and scale-insensitive, it is entirely unpredictable how this combination will develop. Let me treat that period of inflation in the Highlands of the 1960s as a set of initial conditions for a present-day outcome. We shall see what that outcome is in due course. Meanwhile, my question is: when does scale matter and when does it not? Some of the variation between Papua New Guinean societies is germane to my argument, although this is not the place for detailed comparisons and I make no more than a gesture to the ethnographic record. In general, these are societies typically referred to as smallscale, without centralized polities, whose technologies are based on root crop horticulture, with greater or lesser emphasis on fishing, hunting, and sago-processing. Peoples perspectives are often heavily gendered; when I pointed out that it was a man who was gazing at the shells, I meant that to carry a gender inflection.
8

8. In this example, the question is addressed to the influx of shells and the constancy of their signification; it may of course be addressed to models of analysis. Consider, for example, Arizpes plea that anthropologists focus on the dynamics of interculturality at different levels of magnitude: local, national, regional and global: (1996: 97), an appeal to scale. When she considers connotations of the global, however, she proffers a scale-effacing suggestion: the new globality is, in fact, a new locality (1996: 8990). She would find many anthropologists agreeing with both these observations.

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Cultural landscapes
Let me put some landscapes in your minds eye. Leaving aside the coastline and island Papua New Guinea, there is great diversity on the mainland itself. Indeed, in some places the pictorial concept of landscape itself seems inappropriate. Forest and bush may press in on human settlement to the extent that it is impossible to get an overview at allthere is simply no overall vantage point. Elsewhere, by contrast, cleared land gives vistas over miles of empty man-made grassland or shows up dense settlement and cultivation. Local variations also mean that a place like Mount Hagen in the central Highlands may contain within itself some of the differences encountered on larger scale, as is to be expected from a technological regime of intensive cultivation that continuously cuts gardens from wooded areas also encouraged to regenerate.
10 9

Not all Papua New Guinean societies have that internal difference available to them. Alfred Gell comments on the unrelenting effect of living in a place where one could never get a view; one was always surrounded by the tactile, scented gloom of the forest. The difference between cleared and uncleared areas was restricted to village and garden, rarely affording a visual landscape more than a few meters. He remarks on similar conditions elsewhere in Papua New Guinea for the effect they have on iconicity in language; where auditory stimulation takes over from the visual, the sounds people make echo a landscape full of sound. There are other consequences.
11 12

9. There has been a recent burgeoning of anthropological interest in the subject of landscapes (e.g., Bender 1993; Tilley 1994; Hirsch & OHanlon 1995; Feld and Basso 1996). The phrase, cultural landscape, comes from the American geographer Sauer, quoted by Hirsch and OHanlon (1995: 9). 10. Hirsch (1995c: 910) draws a contrast between two strikingly different attitudes towards the visibility of the landscape. Zafimanary in Madagascar (Bloch 1995) yearn for the panoramic view of the village set out clearly before them; when shamans from the Amazonian Piro (Gow 1995) gain a view of the landscape through dreams or other altered states they conceptualize trees and rivers as houses full of people. 11. Gell (1995; and see 1975), writing of the Umeda of Sandaun Province, Papua New Guinea. 12. Notably Kaluli {Schieffelin 1976; Feld 1982); Foi (Weiner 1991). These all happen to be low production regimes (see later) in which sago-processing has

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Dances are often at night, or inside a house, and display is canopied as though it were taking place in a sounding chamber. The dancers themselves may be half concealed or you may only half-see them in firelight or torchlight. The audience in turn is drawn into the light shed by the fire or must crowd into the house where the performance is put on. There could not be a more dramatic contrast to the staged visual displays of those Highlanders who expose themselves to the midday sun on open air ceremonial grounds cleared for the purpose. The congregation is limited only by the size of the dance ground. There may be pockets of darkness, as in the decorations that conceal the dancers identity and the forest leaves that make him dark, but the overall effect is of a vista, and dancers often form a straight line precisely so that their number and extent is visible.
13

In these details we see how landscapes comprise environments of human activity. Their features are drawn into the orbit of peoples practices, and not least by regimes of economic exploitation. Social anthropologists working in Papua New Guinea have long been interested in the relative development of some landscapes by contrast with others. This was particularly stimulated by the opening up of the Highlands in the 1930s, and the discovery of its high density populations, and indeed in the 1960s and 1970s led to a Highlandscentric ethnographic view of the island about which colleagues have been complaining ever since. As we shall see, however, that centrism is not restricted to anthropologists. We are dealing with obvious differences between regions in the scale of human activity when it is measured in terms of land use, impact on vegetation regimes, and so forth. Within regions we find micro gradients of those same differences in the mix between hunting / gathering and sago-processing and the cultivation of root crops, often registered in the size of settlements. One such scale is
14

an important economic role, but I do not want to make too much of such dimensions. 13. See Gells drawing of the Umeda dancer (1975: 181), and Felds photograph of the half-seen Kaluli dancer (1982: pl. 7) 14. These distinctions can be repeated at other scales; thus among the groups on the Bosavi-Strickland area, there are observable micro differences between regimes based on greater or lesser dependence on sago, hunting, and so forth.

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population density. Many sago-processing regimes support in the order of five to six personssometimes down to one or fewerper km . Elsewhere, mixed taro and sweet potato regimes may support populations ranging from eight to sixteen persons per km . In the central Highlands, intensive sweet potato cultivation leads to densities in places well beyond one hundred persons per km . Roughly along this scale, domestic pigs increase in number and importance. One can construct gradients here in degrees of resource exploitation and transformation.
2 2 2 16

15

This is one anthropological understanding of the concept of culture: the workings of human activity as such. Whether one talks of economic effort or ritual relations or horticultural techniques, culture is a register of human enterprise. The effects of that enterprise vary. If we say the consequences are measurable on the environment, we mean that what we call environment becomes the measure provides a scale of sortsfor the extent of activity. In these Papua New Guinea examples, scale is evident to the observer in the contrasts between high and low production regimes and in changes in the area of land brought under cultivation or the population it can support, features that become observable from an overview of the whole country. In addition to that: in extended as opposed to restricted landscapes, scale may become locally or culturally visible. In this sense, land exists as a culturally salient environment for Hagen people, that is, as one in terms of which they construct scales themselves. As we shall see, through its products land gives a measure of its own extent and fertility. These in turn measure the scale of an individuals enterprise, as when people line up the pigs they have reared (figure 1 shows pig stakes in readiness). But this has introduced a second sense which anthropologists give to the concept of culture. Here culture lies in the value which people give to things and the concepts through which they express it. It involves the facility for imagining ones own conditions of life. Scales, whoever constructs them, are thus cultural artifacts. At the same time, the observer would not give any scale to the facility itself: culture lies in the repetition or
15. For examples of comparative work on population densities, see Modjeska (1982: 53), Hyndman and Morren (1990: 17), Kelly (1993: 33). 16. The causal relationships are not, however, straightforward, see Lemonnier (1993).

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replication of ideas, and what gives a culture its internal richness are the different junctures at which specific values are repeated and thus recognized or encountered over and over again. This is the sense in which cultures behave as self-referential systems. Across Papua New Guinea, for example, ideas about energy and vitality are frequently linked to alternations in body states over time or in the pattern of events. The body indicates the relative expansion and contraction of activity. This expansion and contraction itself occurs in all kinds of contexts, themselves neither large nor small. There may, for example, be periodic renewal of the vitality or fertility of plants and animal life through rituals which gather together people otherwise scattered over the landscape. Or people display their ability to concentrate energy within themselves and then disperse it again, as a clan may celebrate the nubility of its daughters before sending them off in marriage. In order to effect the display, the preceding period of growth and accumulation will be marked by behind-the-scenes activity; the shut house or encircling garden fence are much repeated images of enclosure. Only what is kept hidden will grow. The initiation process which in many societies (not Hagen) marks the passage to maturity invariably involves seclusion and secrecy of a kind. This leads to a (culturally) salient inference: what you see in public or on the surface of the skin is the effect of growth that has occurred elsewhere. Display is the revelatory moment at which that is communicated or imparted to others.
17 18

In Hagen this moment is captured in womens routine act of digging tubers out of the ground in order to feed peoplethey are around her in her mind so to speakor the unpacking of an earth oven. The success of those occasions where people gather depends both on a local apprehension of a scale effect, in that the more people the more vitality is displayed by the hosts, and on a sustained analogy, between concealment and revelation and between growth and flow,
17. See especially Hirsch (1995b) on the Fuyuge of the Papuan highlands. His argument about the alternative modes of description which Fuyuge draw upon in recounting ritual activity (at once specific and event-filled and generalized and timeless) gives a temporal cast to the contrast between scale-sensitivity and scaleinsensitivity. 18. Biersacks original formulation (1982) has been substantiated in many other contexts since (e.g., OHanlon 1989).

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that does not depend on scale at all. And that analogy can be replicated over and again. Thus, the mens house which draws people to the ceremonial ground is also the conceptual source of the wealth that will stream from it, in the same way as the mans own head is regarded as the fount of his inner, secret prowess. The head may become the focus of enlargement, an object of adornment centered by the plumage above as well as the aprons below, a position which is sometimes repeated within the adornments themselves which have their own centerpiece. The relationship between revelation and display was also in the past repeated between the sexes, it being men who displayed and women who, bar special occasions, were excluded. When a woman in an enclosed garden is engaged in domestic production, this is a private and secluded domain of affairs kept from the public eye, in the same way as shells are hidden in the mens house for private deployment after a display.
19

In a series of associations of this kind, we might say that the analogies have a self-similar quality to them. While across Papua New Guinea the relationship between growth and flow, concealment and display, concentration and dispersal, center and periphery, is played out in different transformations, there are also striking continuities (cf. Hirsch 1995a: 65). Many Papua New Guineans would recognize the image of vitality and growth in the Hagen simile of people thronging a ceremonial ground being likened to birds flocking to a fruit tree or, for that matter, to feathers fringing a headdress. The analogies on which such imagery is based flow across contexts. But where has the environment gone? I have suggested two ways in which social anthropologists consider the concept of culture. One refers to human activity, to the organization of life and livelihood, whose consequences have a scale effect. It is scale-sensitive. Here we may imagine the environment just as landscapes have been imagined, as showing the impact of or limits to human enterprise, and as offering enablement to and constraints on it in turn. The environment in this sense is definitively outside or in interaction with human activity; or rather, it is everything that
20

19. See the photograph of the feathered plaque being inspected (Strathern 1997). 20. A view which Tilly (1994) and the contributors to Bender (1993) and Hirsch and OHanlon (1995) take to task in diverse ways.

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registers the effect, and thus the extent or degree of that activity. From a second understanding of culture, which anthropologists have in the past glossed with terms such as world view, ethos, or webs of significance, I take the extensibility of the imagination, and have focused on one characteristic, the fact that peoples imaginings observe no scales. They are scale-insensitive. Analogies and values retain their relationshipsequations or ratios between diverse elementsand thus their significance, across different domains of life regardless of the dimensions of an event; here the sense of an outside environment may disappear altogether. I have hinted that Hagen people would share both understandings, at least to a degree. But in order to give full cultural weight to these Hagen understandings, and thus deal with them in their own terms, we need to approach them through other materials, and I choose materials from elsewhere in Papua New Guinea.

21

Environments inside and out

It is almost tautologous to say that culture in the first sense, as the workings of human activity, requires exchange with the environment, a cycling of resources through the human community and back again. This is a condition of survival.
22

The Mekeo, who live along the reaches of the Biaru River in lowlands Papua New Guinea, have a wonderful diagram of this process in their village layout (see figure 2). Clubhouses of the resident clan chiefs are built at each end, while domestic dwellings and other structures have been erected in parallel rows. In the center is an area cleared of permanent features. The village is separated from the bush beyond. Indeed village and bush are conceptualized as distinct domains of activities and powers, and a well-defined croton hedge bounds the periphery of the village. The bush yields an array of resources, including garden food and hunting products.
23

21. Including the registration of no effect, as in the view of unchangeable natural constrains. 22. For an excellent review, see Ellen (1982) 23. The so-called Bush Mekeo of Central Province; I draw principally on Mark Moskos (1985) original ethnography referring to the 1970s.

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Figure 2. Schematic plan of the layout of a Bush Mekeo village (from Mark Mosko Quadripartite structures, 1985: 26, fig. 2.1). (Reproduced by kind permission of the author and Cambridge University Press.)

What is beyond the village is thus brought into the village for consumption, and wastes are thrown back into the bush. But Mekeo do not just draw a difference between village and bush: each is further divided, creating a series of zones that determine everyday activities. Food is brought from the remote bush to the village, not to the center but to the peripheral dwelling houses where it is eaten in the evening, while the rules of waste disposal mean that in the early morning each villager makes his or her way to the bush, not the remote bush but the peripheral bush just over the fence, to empty their abdomens. When they return, they clean up the village, sweeping refuse into the center plaza. The rubbish is piled up in the center, before being carried to the edge of the village and dumped where human beings have also evacuated. It is as though the abdomen of the village were cleaned out too. Indeed, the central plaza is called just this: village abdomen. What we might call the activity of extracting materials from the environment and then consuming them is thus visualized by Mekeo as a perpetual passage between bush and village, in which the village both consumes food and gets rid of waste, just as the human body does. The bush in turn yields produce and receives waste. The village

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models, we might say (Mekeo have already said it in other terms), culture as the workings of human activity, and divides the world beyond the fence in the same way as the human habitation is divided. But what might Mekeo imagine as the environment here? There is no measure of human activity beyond the activity itself. That is because these people have, as it were, focused on the exchange rather than the products. It would seem to be the flow of resources that interests them, imagined by them as a perpetual traveling back and forth. The result is that whatever the observer might want to call the environment folds back on itself. And that in turn releases countless possibilities for imaginative extrapolation. The further result is a flow of analogies.
24

Consider the village plan again. We saw that waste is separated from produce within the village, even as the source of produce in the remote bush is separated from the adjacent bush where waste is deposited: the relationship between immediate and surrounding bush is repeated in the relationship between village periphery and village plaza. On the surface, it looks as though these indicate scale, degrees of distance from a center that calibrates human activities. Certainly, the central plaza is used for feasting and other occasions when guests are brought into the village. However, Mekeo do not conceive of this as the center of a center or as the inmost part of the inside. On the contrary these zones fold in on themselves in interesting ways. The relationship between bush and village is not quite as EuroAmerican observers might imagine: it is the bush that is categorically inside and the village that is categorically outside. It is as though the environment were within. To make this image intelligible, we have to think in terms of persons and their social identities.
25

Imagine the bush as the closed territory of the tribe, an endogamous unit composed of people who are all related to one another; internal divisions within the tribe (into clans) means that people are also by virtue of clan affiliation rendered different from one another.
24. An observation Hirsch (1995a: 65) emphasizes apropos their distant neighbours, the Fuyuge, and see the discussion in Feld and Basso (1996). 25. My term for a discourse derived largely from twentieth-century North American and Northern European cultures to which the language of analysis (such as the one in which this essay is written) belongs.

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Members of at least two clans live in each village, which is in this sense socially heterogeneous. Moreover, each village full of people is open to people from elsewhere with whom they have dealings and traffic of various kinds. As a place where people meet with, entertain, and visit others, then, the village is in social terms a microcosm of a heterogeneous outside world. Think now of the alimentary tract through the body as taking in food from the outside, as EuroAmericans would say, and returning it there, as though those inner chambers were exposed to the outside. Turn this imagery inside out, and think instead of food coming from the tribal territory as coming from a socially homogeneous, inside, place, and being brought outside into the socially heterogeneous village before being returned as waste to the inside bush. When Mekeo refer to the central plaza as the villages abdomen, they are envisaging this plaza as an inside place homologous to the territory beyond the village. A qualification is that since the village as a whole is an outside place, the center (the abdomen) has to be the outsides inside (Mosko uses the phrase inverted outside, 1985: 27). And if the village abdomen is an inversion of (village) outside space, the area over the fence is correspondingly an eversion of (bush) inside space. So the bush immediately adjacent to the village is distinguished from the more remote as a kind of everted region (everted inside). The relationship between inside and outside presents each as a version of the other.
26 27

This Mekeo attention to the flow of resources across different zones does not indicate an ecological model of human-environment exchange. The interchange is between places endowed with distinct
26. Mekeo also imagine degrees of openness, which they monitor through changes in body shape: both men and women undergo regimens of body fattening and fasting, going from less open to more open states. According to Mosko (1983) the way in which they perceive the body as open or closed to the outside world replicates the way in persons are open or closed to influence from others. Bodies thus become registers of their interactions with persons from other clans and villages. 27. By virtue of the daily transfers of objects between village and bush, writes Mosko (1985: 25), outside and inside domains are bisected by a reversal or inversion of each, such that the outside village has its own inside place (i.e. an inverted outside) and the inside bush has its own outside (i.e. an everted inside). I draw on this example in a further discussion of inside and outside places (M. Strathern 1998).

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social identities. Rather than imagining an environment which registers human activity, Mekeo invite us to imagine a landscape of different zones (places) which elicit different actions from people. Indeed, the bisected dualities are the spatial beginnings of a complex series of conceptual operations by which Mekeo visualize the interfolding nature of social relations. The zones do not in themselves point to a scale based on distance, as a Euro-American might extrapolate from the notions of inside and outside. On the contrary, they are the basis of a series of analogies that disregard scale. It will come as no surprise to learn that the Mekeo body is bisected twice, divided into four regions, so that its own ingestion and egestion follows a pattern similar to that of the village, as does the whole Mekeo tribe. The clans to which I have referred compose four specific segments of the tribe between whom there are specific rules for flows of crossgenerational transfers and intra-generational marriages.
29

28

Calibrations
In commenting on the bifurcation in the anthropologists two senses of culture, the one scale-sensitive and the other scale-insensitive, I have imagined analogy as a kind of counterpart to scale itself. Both constructs offer possibilities of measurement: scale offers dimension and analogy offers comparison. One might be forgiven for imagining them as belonging to separate traditions of knowledge. A EuroAmerican perspective includes interest in recording the extent of human achievementwhat seems quintessentially an outsiders view whereas Mekeo and other peoples construct what to outsiders seems like a symbolic universe replete with insides and outsides and flows of persons and things. Yet in the same way as Euro-Americans use many analogic devices in their quantifications, such as the dial or thermo30

28. I use place here with the connotations Casey (1996) bestows on the term. 29. They concern kinship and relationships, reproduction and marriage, supernatural powers, chiefship, and so forth. The fourfold spatial layout of bisected dualities is replicated over and over again in the involutions of social relationships. 30. See, e.g. Donald (1991: 335f) on analog models of time and space; analogies measure one dimension of reality in terms of another, as temperature may be recorded (measured) by a column of mercury. One may also think of relationships between values held stable in the form of an equation or ratio.

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meter, so does dimension enter into the way Melanesians draw comparisons. There are peoples who make most discriminating calculations of the number and size of items at their disposal, measurements evident in the exchange of things against one another and based on finely attuned notions of equivalence. There is also the reckoning of compensatory values, the idea for instance that one item (person) grows at the expense of another.
31 32

In some areas of Papua New Guinea, demonstrations of vitality may appear as a male ideology of virtue which rates mens activities in production and exchange a sacrifice, a matter of spending their energy on others, so a man can expect a gradual depletion of a life-force as it is imparted to the next generation, one body growing large as the other shrinks. There is a measurement of a kind here. As men grow old their life-force flows into others, so that the diminishing vitality of seniors is measured in the increasing vitality of juniors. The more vigorous the younger men, the more the older men have given evidence of their virtue in passing their vitality on. This is an analogic calculation between states imagined as the inverse of each other. A one-way flow across generations means that seniors are becoming empty, so to speak, as juniors are filled up. We can see a similar analogic calibration in the reciprocal exchanges of Mount Hagen, although instead of the process taking place over a lifetime, it takes place at much shorter intervals, in which men alternately put themselves into the position of being now donor and now recipient. While from one point of view each is an alternative version of the other but at different temporal moments, at the same time each is also the measure of the other. The more the recipient receives the more he is challenged to give next time, and that occasion then becomes the
34

33

31. I use Melanesian rather than (in this case) Papua New Guinean as the counterpart to Euro-American discourse. 32. Argued with elegance by Biersack (1995). 33. I base the following description largely on Etoro (Kelly 1993) 34. What Kelly (1993: 146, my italics) says of life cycle processes in Etoro could also be said of Hagen exchange: The life-cycle processes of conception, growth, maturation, senescence, and death are attributed to the acquisition, augmentation, depletion, and loss of life force in these transactions [such as sexual intercourse]. In each instance, a recipients growth entails a donors depletion, such that one individual flourishes while another declines.

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retrospective measure of his first success. The obverse is the ability to deplete through injury. Now whereas one body may afford a visible measure of another body, in the Hagen case measurement also lies in the visible wealth that passes between persons. Here the receiving body, so to speak, is rendered as large as the size of the gift. It is under these latter conditions that local conceptions of scale become significant. In social terms, the prominence of a man is measurable by the extent of his network, and networks extend with the gifts. People start making more of their calculations of size and number. For they are not just measuring the growth of persons through quantity of resources; they also measure certain resources by other resourceshow many pearlshells for how many pigs. If land contains so many pigs and so much garden, the two quantities reflect each other. The size of the garden is planned in relation to the future demands on the pig herd. This is one of the ways in which scale becomes visible: land gives a measure of its own extent and fertility in its products (see figure 3). However, these scaler measurements depend on analogic ones similar to those I have just described. Let me elaborate. Ethnographers of the central areas of the Papua New Guinea Highlands tend not to talk of lifeforce; they do talk of fertility embedded in persons and pigs, and inland. It is as though it were not just through the rotted bodies and body fluids of their buried ancestors (Harrison 1988 quoted by Tilley 1994: 58) that land is made fertile, but as though life-force were now in the soil. In any event, land becomes conceived as a source of fertility. Evidence lies in turn in what the land grows, and it is regarded as growing people as well as pigs and plants. They all become carriers of land, portable manifestations of it, so that when you see a pig you see the food that the land has grown. These are analogic measurements. And there are others. One can assess soil quality by the growth of trees, tall trees also being analogues of male potency and ancestral support, while high crop yields and fat pigs are themselves indicative of ancestral favour. Fertility is thus given a measure of sorts. It leads to action; people estimating what gardens they must plant, given the expectations of a changing pig population, become conscious of what the land can support. That feeds back in turn into measurement of people. The amount of wealth a man attracts becomes an element in his very capacity to exchange, and thus his assessment by others; clans measure themselves, competitively, by

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the size of the war reparations they can muster and the amount of resources these indicate. We are back to scalar measurements. In the 1990s, Hagen residents talked of (recent) population increase. They experienced their landscapewhat they look out over as overcrowded; complained that there were too many houses too visible all at once. Conversely, I heard it said that the wild spirits that once inhabited desolate places are now frustrated at having nowhere to hide. But land is also short because it is a measure of resources; through cash-cropping and vegetable marketing, land has become a source of money. One place, near Hagen town, is illustrative. Here, the fertility of the soil is made visible by the abundance of the fresh vegetables it yields, and thus income it earns; this in turn has had a direct impact on population, since clansmen and diverse relatives from other parts have flocked to build their houses and gardens there, a pressure the inhabitants relate directly to fertility of the soil. They are pleased that they should have attracted so many to them. While an analogic relationship between human and non-human fertility is thus held constant, resources are also being compared with other resources and a direct relationship perceived between scale of the influx of people and scarcity of land. So people attempt to make the land yield more. There were some old gardens being redug for potatoes to sell to the fish-and-chip shop in Hagen town. As the fine, black peat soil was turned over, the owner poured out several bags of white chemical fertilizer to ensure a really lucrative crop. The more money spent on land, the more it should yield.
35

Compensation
What should we make of the fact that Papua New Guinea has apparently become a nation of landowners? The term landowner (pidgin landona) is used by nationals in negotiating royalties on minerals or timber extracted from the land. But some go much further, generously applying their claims to loss of access to all sorts of resources such as enjoyment of future development. We might think that this reflects some primordial or spiritual value attached to land itself; or might see, in their confrontation with mining companies and
35. Visited in 1995; I am grateful to the British Academy for the research grant which made the visit possible. These observations are expanded in some of the essays in M. Strathern (1999).

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other outside interests, the shrewd grasp that Papua New Guinea politicians have of the wider environment of competitive world markets. While nationals frequently evoke tradition (custom) in appealing to the depths of their association with land, they are also calling themselves owners in an international language that gives them negotiating power. It would seem that the term landowner is only about ten years old, and has emerged hand-in-hand with a new concept of resource compensation. In 1994, the Law Reform Commission of Papua New Guinea embarked on a study of compensation and resources in relation to land, and I draw on one of the contributions. It also happens to be one of the most incisive pieces of writing about contemporary development in the area I have seen. In it, Colin Filer describes the brief life of the concept of landowner.
36

The background is simple. Witnessing the inroads of foreign commercial ventures, of which the most visible are land-based mining and logging, the thought of company profit prompts people to construe the counter-idea of recompense. By staking a claim to land through the idiom of ownership, local politicians and businessmen are sometimes able to persuade companies that they should be entering into some kind of reciprocal transaction with them. They may argue that what is at stake is nothing less than social welfare. While an economist might call this the opportunity cost of lost subsistence production, nationals voice their claims as compensation that will ensure their future development and security. People imply that the loss of future benefit is like the loss recognized in Highlands compensation payments, whether these were for bodily injury arising from warfare or personal body payments for nurture. A fitting cultural appropriation, an anthropologist might say, landona is a hybrid term, appropriate to the end of the twentieth century, produced both by the newer demands of post-colonial economics and by attempts to con37 38

36. From Filer (1997); there was an older circumlocution (papa bilong graun) which did not carry quite the same resonances. 37. I deliberately put it this way round: evidence of what others have attracted to themselves (profit) seems to trigger the counterclaim. Filer notes how the idea of customary landowners has also generated the idea that the salient social grouping must everywhere be the clan. 38. Filer is quoting here from the Lihir Mining Area Landowners Association.

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serve local communities through appeal among other things to reciprocities in relationships. Traditional values meet world capitalism. Colin Filer would have little of that. He flatly states that what is locally promoted as a division between indigenous economic principles and those that govern modern capitalist enterprise obscures a crucial link. Current use of compensation as a concept in the politics of national resistance to the world economy goes hand-inhand with the growing dependence of the national economy on that specific form of compensation which economists call resource rent. He comments that the lack of realism in demands for compensation
should not lead us to suppose that they are founded on an incorrect assessment of the [current] forces driving the economy. For the popular [Papua New Guinean] perception of development as the collection of a resource rent reflects the real historical tendency for an ever-increasing proportion of the national income to be obtained in this form [from outside companies]. (Filer 1997: 172)
39

Colin Filer refuses, then, to agree with the actors current equation of compensation and traditionand not only the local actors. Expatriate developers may be doing their best to package their relationships with landowners in forms of caring reciprocity, including traditional compensation agreements intended to function as signposts to their mutual obligations, while, Filer adds, indigenous landowners are seeking their own private ways and means to remove elements of balance from the relationships and either ask for favors or resort to coercive hostilities! That aside, and agreeing that payments were always made for damage done to bodies in the context of reproductive payments, he argues that there was no real precursor in custom to treating land in this way. Despite its appeal to bodily compensation, resource com39. He points to peoples (developers and landowners alike) failure to address the issue of power: Papua New Guineans may place a very high value on the possession and circulation of money but still deny that money and power may properly be used in pursuit of each other. And this denial, I would argue, is due to the fact that power is not (yet) conceived in the Western manner, as something which, like money, can be a legitimate form of personal property, but in the customary way, as something which is properly avoided, dissipated, multiplied or neutralised by the efficacy of moral agents (1997: 181).

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pensation is new. Moreover, when one looks into the demands, claims to social embeddedness seem to evaporate. The demands, negotiations, and payments are contained within a matrix of landowner-developer relationships that are hard to pin down:
[For] when we try to investigate or conceptualise the substance of their mutual conduct, we may find that we are no longer dealing with any actual pattern of relationships between real individuals in concrete social settings, but only with snatches of rhetoric which, like the abstract opposition of landowners to developers, are applied to development discourse in a certain type of public forum. (Filer 1997: 174)

We are left with the rhetoric. So where is its power? Now Filers critique depends on acknowledging scale. He looks, for example, to actual social relationships to substantiate Papua New Guineans claims about social relations, an exercise that requires discrimination between different orders of fact. Indeed, that is the power of his account, a scale-sensitive attack on the way people insensitively run things together. They ignore the difference between interpersonal and interinstitutional arrangements and observe no scale at all in translating, as they do, sacred landscapes into lucrative ones. Nonetheless, it is also here that we see why the idea of compensation has such runaway effect. The demands draw on both dimension and comparison. On the one hand, the sums seem exorbitant to developers, and indeed may be constrained only by what nationals imagine the developers can pay; on the other hand, both sides are caught up in a spiralling set of constructs or images as the nationals draw in all kinds of comparisons to make their point. The very concept of compensation has undergone a kind of inflation. Not only must the same satisfaction be obtained at increased cost, but there are new arenas for satisfaction and more reasons for demanding it. One could thereby talk of an inflation in the range of activities to which the concept of compensation applies. It is not just in dealings with outsiders that Papua New Guineans try to extend notions of recompense from body payment to resource rent. The same is happening internally. To return to Hagen again: the Pidgin (NeoMelanesian) term kompemsesen covers a wider range of payments

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than any indigenous category did. Hageners linked recompense for bodily harm with recognition of the energy and work that went into nurture; not only is an implicit category now made explicit but it has expanded to include interactions of all kinds. Where before separate terms discriminated between different payments and different ways of discharging obligations, the new mode shows a generic tendency. It has the potential to cover almost any negotiation of relational responsibility simply because the fundamental idea of recompense for bodily exertion can be so widely applied. All that has to be kept constant is reference to the body and expenditure of resources. This expansion (of these ideas) is facilitated by money, and in Hagen nowadays numerous relational transactions can be conducted through the idiom of money payments. In relation to resources, and in situations where quantity becomes a dimension of value, this leads to one very simple outcome. Whatever commands a price also triggers an analogic calculation. There is a new interest in land as the object of investment that commands a price, for the wealth (company profits) extracted from it can be taken as evidence of the wealth (ancestral fertility) that has gone into it. There is inflation, too, in the way in which the concept of compensation has spread across Papua New Guinea. The reader will recall the restricted landscapes I evoked at the beginning, societies in which there was nothing equivalent to the scope of Highlands (as in Hagen) political transaction and where land is not objectified in the same way in terms of its products. Yet there, as elsewhere across the country, the human body is held to reveal in its activities inner resources of some kind or other. This notion keeps constant pace with notions of expenditure. In short, the Hagen-type idea that extracting wealth from others matches what has been extracted from one echoes those other growth / depletion regimes focused on the body. The significance of recompense (i.e., taking in and giving out) remains in place. Conversely, what applies to the vitality of persons also applies to the fertility of land. By the very token that fertility, like vitality, is a hidden quantity until it is revealed, it follows that anything
41

40

40. See A. Strathern (1993) on differences here in Hagen and Duna (to whom I refer briefly below) usage, and see Modjeska (1982: 55). 41. Vigorously argued by Gell (1992).

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that the land yieldsoil, timber, goldcan be taken as evidence of inner resources. Colin Filer refers to an area where local people blend received notions regarding powerful spirits with rumours regarding the finding of oil resources, in such a way as to move from a picture of a sacred landscape, whose fertility must be preserved for the future, to a picture of an exploitable landscape available for manipulation by a company (1997: 172). Here, we see the power of analogy-making that observes no scales. For those leaps and extrapolations are not just vague rhetoric; it is the capacity to jump scale which makes people willing to take on new things in the first place. So what might have been initial conditions for this ubiquitous state of affairs? The kind of inflation that characterized 1960s Hagen was both scale-sensitive and scale-insensitive. Here we are thirty years on. What we see today is possibly one outcome: the bifurcation that Filer describes in Papua New Guineans attitudes towards resourcecompensation. On the one hand, it is scale-insensitive: landowners attempt to extract recompense from outside interests through appeal to general community welfare, keeping constant the ratio between wealth and strength. On the other hand, very scale-sensitive indeed, they compete with their peers in the quantity of resources they handle, on the basis of a thoroughly economistic rationing of their own time, money, and patronage. As Filer puts it, landowners seek deliverance from the same web of social obligations which serve to justify and mobilize support for compensation claims (1997: 156).
43 42

You might think I have been singularly careless about letting my own field area, Hagen, occupy center stage in this account. The Highlandslet alone Hagenis not Papua New Guinea. Indeed, Filer states that there is little evidence that compensation was a traditional form of material transaction in other parts of Papua New Guinea. To the contrary, and this is the point, nationals may nowadays point to

42. The Duna; the quotation is from Strzenhofecker (1994: 27). Duna are a border Highlands society with labor-intensive gardening practices but a relatively low production economic regime in Modjeskas (1982) terms. 43. I have underplayed the role of feelings and emotions as a factor in compensation satisfaction.

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the Highlands as the origin of the present pan-island category. If Highlands-style compensation was a particular version of a more general phenomenon, a reproductive model of body expenditure, it is a version that has become something of a norm. At the same time, the basic image of body process as a ceaseless giving out and taking in of resources was itself widespread. These were not just traditional ideas waiting for modernity. They comprised the creative set of conditions for peoples capacity to move along two different trajectories at the same time, now making scale relevant to the size of things and now making it not. For that reproductive model, embracing all manner of bodily activity, was able to cross scales, that is, it could be replicated in all kinds of contexts. Perhaps, indeed, this insensitivity to scale was in certain systems the doorway to letting in its oppositesensitivity to scale expressed in Highlands-style reckonings of gain and profit. In certain systems: I have just been focusing on one. Hagen interest in size took a particular transactional form. People measured what they put in by what was taken out, and their own power to extract wealth was measured by the power of those who had extracted it from them in the first place. Such measurements of human activity were external to one or other party by virtue of the distinct social identities of each: as we have seen, recognition of one persons body expenditure came from another. The accompanying concept of compensation entailed the further calibration of resources by resources. And that particular idea of recompense could translate the perception of new and unprecedented possibilities into the widespread body idiom of vitality, growth, and depletion. No wonder the nation of landowners do not pitch their price according to some preconceived value of the land but scale up their demands according to the developers ability to pay.

44

Conclusion
This is not the juncture at which to reflect on the inflationary components of the anthropologists double construct, culture. Its
44. Filer himself points to two historical pushes from the colonial state; one was the payment of war damages compensation after the Second World War in many coastal areas, while the second was the administration backing given to Highlands war compensation payments to encourage peacemaking between previously warring groups that I have been describing here.

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current ubiquity needs no further comment. All that remains to be added is that if its double senses suggest a dualism, let me repeat that this pair (the two senses of the concept of culture) is not binary, dichotomous, or dialectical. Rather, each element has its own complex trajectory. For the sake of the present topic, I have characterized the two trajectories as sensitivity and insensitivity to scale change. And that is because I want to say two things at once. Both of them are rather obvious, but worth reiterating. On the one hand, scale matters: to perceive the effects of human activity on a world imagined as an outside or encompassing environment is to take responsibility for such activities. It is equally the case, on the other hand, that scale does not matter: imagining the dimensions of that responsibility draws, as it were, the environment within ourselves. It is also a precondition for drawing within our compass societies such as those of Papua New Guinea, not small-scale at all in terms of the analogical insights they afford. Let me condense this argument in a final pair of images, and return to the question of unpredictability. Why should Hagen-type (Highlands) compensation have become as it has in recent years, a kind of Papua New Guinean norm? If one can trace compensation back to inflation, then what were the initial conditions for that? Part of the longstanding technology of production (and still in use) was the string bag or net bag, used for transporting crops from the gardens that feed both human beings and pigs. Similar working bags to that depicted from Hagen (see figure 3) are found in many areas, including the Telefomin described by Maureen Mackenzie. The two areas present different landscapes and different regimes of horticulture, these being based on taro in Telefolmin and sweet potato in Hagen. Taro generally supports a lower population than sweet potato and a whole language group might be no more than the size of one of Hagens dozens of internal political units.
45 46

45. The Telefomin material is taken from Mackenzies (1991) study of peoples from the Mountain Ok region of Papua New Guinea mediated through the particular attention she pays to the string bags that women make. 46. In the Mountain Ok region the entire population amounts to only 30,000. There are internal variations in reliance on taro and sweet potato, in the part that hunting and the collecting of wild foods plays, in soil quality and fallow cycle, and in the densities of populations so sustained. Indeed, the Mountain Ok area can be divided into internal regions according to differing horticultural

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Figure 3. A young girl, soon to be married, carries back from the gardens two string bags of sweet potatoes, to feed both pigs and family; Mount Hagen, 1967. (Photograph by the author.) regimes on a local basisit even has its own Highlands, as it is known in the literature (Hyndman and Morren 1990). Variation between regions internal to the Mountain Ok thus repeat on a small scale the kind of variation one finds between the area as a whole and other parts of Papua New Guinea.

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At the same time, these string bags contain a very similar spectrum of values. In Telefolmin, women carry everything from babies to taro; taro plants are likened to children who have to be coaxed to grow, just as the sweet potato vines picked for further planting in Hagen are a reminder that people are planted in clan territories. Bags taken empty to the gardens each day return full. Hagen women thus carry on their backs both the yield of the land and the instrument by which that yield contributes to the rounding of the bodys contours.
47

There is a second set of initial conditions here. In neither area do men wear bags in the manner of women, any more than men carry out the range of womens tasks. However, one could not predict from these pieces of information how men actually separate themselves off from women or for that matter the form that their distinctiveness takes. Rather, in the way in which men both separate themselves from women and constantly make comparisons of their respective powers, we see another interesting conjuncutre of trajectories. The two conjunctures behave differently in the two areas; they have, we might surmise, taken different directions. Telefolmin men do sport bags but wear them on the nape of the neck or shoulders, Men use them primarily for carrying hunted meat and personal possessions, and whereas women take pains in manufacturing these bags (they make both mens and womens), men attend to ways of decorating what then becomes special male attire. Grades in the Telefolmin male initiation cult are marked by the type of feather men attach to the outside. Hagen men do not wear string bags at all. If one were looking for an analogue, it might be the feathers that Hagen men attach to their wigs, which they ordinarily cover with a string covering referred to by the same name as the womens string bag. Here we encounter a significant divergence. The Telefolmin feather-covered initiation bag signals promise of what it holds within. Like the Hagen headdress, it is both a display and points to the containment of secrets. But what in addition Hagen men have within themselves they also objectify as the external wealth of their houses and the size of their pig herd. They have no need to wear
48

47. On the swollen form of belly / bag, see Mackenzie (1991: 143). 48. Apart from little pockets or tobacco pouches for personal items, or bags carried on special occasions in the context of all-male rituals.

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containers on their persons. And there is no metaphorical limit to what they may thus contain. Of these two modes of male distinctiveness, only the latter seems to have become the basis for present-day ideas about recompense and compensation. The modes are not equivalent. Telefolmin men conserve an analogy between the reproductivity of women (the string bags) and the vitality of men (the feathers); Hagen men both keep a similar analogy and turn it into one in which quantity also plays a key part. The Hagen man in figure 1 does not offer a complete picture in himself: he is completed by the amount of shells or pigs or money he can command, in short, by the scale of his resources. That external measure is realized through a concept of compensation which, over the last sixty years, seems to have unfolded with great creative potential.
49

Acknowledgements (from original)

This paper is for Afred Gell, who has illuminated many landscapes. My particular thanks to Kupi Kundil (Mrs. Oiee) for letting me use a photograph of her as a young girl (figure 3). I am grateful for the comments of the Cambridge Department of History and Philosophy of Science on an earlier version, and in particular Simon Schaffers observations with regard to measurement. Mark Moskos elucidation of Bush Mekeo remains a source of inspiration. My thanks to Eric Hirsch for his comments. I should also add that this account presents several arguments made familiar, and in places controversial, by a substantial Melanesian anthropology that is not separately acknowledged here.

49. Epitomized in the regional contrast between vitality and fertility, or between initation cults and ceremonial exchange, not developed here; for a sketch, see M. Strathern (1988).

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