Focal Images, Transformed Memories: The Poetics of Life and Death in Siar, New Ireland, Papua New Guinea

FOCAL IMAGES, transformed memories: the poetics of life and death in Siar, New Ireland, Papua New Guinea

by

SEAN PAUL KINGSTON

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON

submitted in candidacy for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

September 1998

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ABSTRACT In the Siar area of New Ireland, imagery and memory are particularly important to socio-cultural reproduction. Memories are elevated to a central role in the ongoing and mutually forming interrelationship of persons and their social and material milieu. Visual images are the prime instrument for manipulating memory and reformulating relationally conceived personhood in life-cycle rites. The thesis has three divisions: 1) examines why imagery and memory are important in Siar, and how these complex concepts might be fitted into social theory. 2) describes the local ecology of forms which memorial imagery contribute to. This is done first in the social realm, and then in terms of material and spatial structures. The interlinkage of cognitive, social and material aspects of these phenomena are highlighted and the Melanesian relational conception of them likened to wave theory. 3) is an ethnography of the transformational life-cycle rites. First, it examines birth and female initiation, particularly the nature of the gendered contributions to children and menstruation. Linkages between these processes of imagining persons and of those involved in the two part process of 'forgetting' them in mortuary ritual are highlighted. Then the funerary series itself is analysed. Primary rites are shown to involve the identification of mourning taboos with debt and painful remembrance. Exchanges and exchange good effigies are used in consolidating that debt\remembrance and transforming it into a positive relationship with the ritual host. Secondary rites entail the use of both masking and feasting to transforming the host into an all powerful, dead spirit, who finally incorporates the identity of the deceased into clan masks by removing the last material reminders of their lives to the spiritual realm. The thesis concludes by considering the life-cycle as a formal and memorial cycle which oscillates between humans remembered as spirits and spirits remembered as humans.

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table of contents titlepage .....................................1 abstract......................................2 tableof contents ................................3 list of maps, figures and plates ......................6 acknowledgments...............................9 PART1 - introduction ........................... 13 CHAPTER1 - approaches ............................ 14

Approaching Siar ............................... 17 Issuesin the field .............................. 19 Planof the thesis .............................. 23 MEMORY......................................... 27 Ataxonomy of memory .......................... 28 Culturaltransmission ............................ 31 The political economy of memory ................... 38 IMAGE.......................................... 45 Whatis an Image' .............................. 45 Imagesin action ............................... 48 Images and relationality in Melanesia ................ 49 Ontologyand imagery ........................... 53 CHAPTER 2 - ethnographic orientation ................. 59

GEOGRAPHICORIENTATION ........................... 60 Province, electorate, ward ........................ 60 Environment.................................. 64 Loggingand logistics ............................ 65 UNGUISTICORIENTATION ............................ 68 Languagesand communities ...................... 68 Language use and transmission .................... 72 CULTURALORIENTATION ............................. 76 Traditionin the region ........................... 80 Localcontexts of kastom ......................... 82 Whenis wol? ................................. 86 Traditionand its other ........................... 87 Shortcuts ................................... 91 PART2-anecologyofforms

................

93

CHAPTER3- social foci .............................94

Centreand scale ...............................98 GROUPFORMATION ................................101 Moieties and dual organization ....................101 Kamtiken oon and segmentation ...................103 Kampapal and kam go! .......................... 108 RESONANCESOF KINSHIP ............................110 'Mother' ....................................110 3

Mother's kin . 115 Artanat relations ..............................117

Relations through marriage ......................121 Age.......................................123 AVOIDANCE AND FOREGROUNDING .....................124 CHAPTER 4 -spatial and material foci ................. 130

Theanalogy of waves .......................... 134 The creation of form in relational fields .............. 138 FORMIN THE LAK WORLD ............................ 142 Therealm of spirits ............................ 142 Thevillage .................................. 149 UVINGSPACES ................................... 155 Ancestors' hidden houses ........................ 156 Contemporaryhouses .......................... 157 Men's-houses ................................ 159 Houseposts ................................. 163 PERSONALSPACES ................................. 168 Everydayperson coverings ....................... 170 Personalcontainers ............................ 172 Decorations................................. 175 Changesin adornment .......................... 176 Contemporary singsing decorations ................. 179 Thepoetic tubuan ............................. 187 Pidiks and supplementary space ................... 196

PART 3A - reformations: additions

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203

CHAPTER 5 - the supplement of a child ................ 204

Mythicform s of procreation ...................... 207 Present procreation: sex, violence, secrets and seduction 212 Conception: the blood of the father ................. 215 Maternal nourishment: food and water .............. 217 Spiritand life ................................ 221 Birth...................................... 223 Childrenbeget parents .......................... 225 CHAPTER6 - female initiation ....................... 228 Dal....................................... 233

Preparations................................. 234 236 240 243 246 Dawn...................................... 249 Paradeof the malerra .......................... 252 Distributionof pails ............................ 254 The dal and the poetics of the life-cycle .............. 256

Arso...................................... The dal in the goh ............................. Thewomen kumbak ........................... Menas pidiks ................................

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PART 3B - reformations: subtractions

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264

CHAPTER 7 - death, debt and a memorial economy ...... 265 Deathin life ................................. 268 Thedead and their death ........................ 270 Por minat: 'covering the corpse' ................... 273 Sulai minat: 'accompanying the corpse' .............. 277 Thework of the women ......................... 280 Anngan .................................... 283 Pongor br: breaking off the head .................. 287 Thedistributions .............................. 289 Sar !akman and a torn yah: broom the village and smell the fire ....... 291 TONDONG....................................... 292 Bananapackets and ashes ....................... 292 The construction of the first lalamar ................ 294 Singing daut and erecting the ton ger ................ 296 Distributing, disassembling and dancing .............. 298 Theimpact of the images ........................ 300 Pu/pu!, gar and preparations for tondong ............. 303 Mangis ngis: the time of dancing ................... 305 Theexchanges ............................... 311 Finishing the tondong .......................... 314 CHAPTER 8 - secondary rites: spectacle and spirits ...... 316 Thehost ................................... 320 Thedead and the ba/ba! ........................ 323 Gar and the readying of tubuan ................... 325 Tangurputus, cutting the weeds ................... 327 Singsings, !alamar and ngasa ..................... 330 Thetubuan enter the village ...................... 331 Killing the men, becoming spirits ................... 335 Only seeing the dead dance: surveillance and display . 336 The tubuan visit the men's wives ................... 339 The spirits dance to death, the men killed to live ........ 340 Endings.................................... 347 PART

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conclusion

...........................350

CHAPTER 9 - thoughts on the life-cycle ...............351 Memory and form in the life-cycle ..................352 The reciprocal presence of humans and spirits .........357 APPENDIX - marriage .............................366 glossary....................................375 bibliography.................................378

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list of maps 1. New Ireland and nearby islands .......................61 2. The Lak Electorate ................................63 3. Language groups .................................70

list of figures 1. Diagram of Siar .................................150 2. The circle 'wants' to return to the centre ...............192 3. Set diagram ...................................198 4&5. Movements of exchange goods and memorial debt .......313 6. Human and tubuan life-cycles .......................358 7. The carrier wave ................................360

list of plates 1. Compelling Image ................................21 2. Tolais of Ulam displaying some marisol ................ 107 3. Typical tanruan near Bakum, an isolated rock ............148 4. Typical tanruan near Bakum, a cave ..................148 5. A newly constructed house .........................158 6. 'Old Style' houses in Lamassa .......................161 7. 'Old Style' houses in Siar ..........................161 8. The singah in Kamilal .............................163 9. Tables VII & VIII from Stephan & Grabner 1907 ..........165 10. Patrick demonstrates a pandanus cape ................170 11. Towai, with a modest new basket ....................172 12. A line from a libung sum wearing dukduk tobotobo ........181 13. Dancers with semi-tubuan Ia! ....................... 181 14. Damian dances tabaran ........................... 183 15. A night tangara singsing ..........................183 16. Men dress as women to dance bobo .................. 183 17. Women in a bobo ............................... 185 18. Two nantoidance ...............................190 19. A blind dukduk ................................. 190 20.Agroupofkoropodance ..........................190 21a. Pauline suckles polonon from a coconut breast ..........220 21b. Tosui is dried over an earth-oven ...................220 22. Carolin Matwin with her white new born son Ryan ........225 23. Photograph taken by Rickard (1892) .................230 24a. The dal in enclosure ............................237 24b. The arso .................................... 237 25. The women struggle over the portal to the dais enclosure . 240 26. Pidiks appearing at a dal ......................... 247 27. Pidiksappearingatadal .........................247 28. Pidiks appearing at a dal ......................... 247 29. Ma/en-a parading around a decorated pok food bed .......253 6

273 30. Upon hearing news of the death, women mourners gather 31. A decorated coffin ready for burial ................... 276 32. The young men lead the funeral cortege ............... 276 276 33. The coffin buried under flowers ..................... 277 34a. Two orphans prepare to pay sulal minat for their father. 34b. The daughter of the deceased breaks belongings ........ 280 35. A widow cries over the banana and water .............. 282 36. The orphans lead the women in their contributions ....... 289 37. A lalamar at Morkon ............................. 295 38. Before...................................... 297 39. After....................................... 297 40. Thelocal member of parliament .................... 309 41. Pigs ready for exchange attached to the ton gers ......... 312 42. A ba/ba! ..................................... 323 43. The yal-Inpidik and their tubuan get ready to wo ......... 331 44. The matamatam in Rei ........................... 332 45. Asenior woman weeps ........................... 332 46. Revealinga grave .............................. 334 341 47. A koropo sits in the grass to be whipped with shell-money 48. A dying nantoi with smudged eyes ................... 344 49. Toanaroi weeps as the tubuan leave for the last time ...... 344 50. The pu! ...................................... 345 51. A gorgor ..................................... 345 52. Menin ator ................................... 345 53. A munum .................................... 345

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Acknowledgments I have gathered many debts in the course of conducting my research and writing this thesis. I cannot hope to repay them, but merely acknowledge those without whose help this work would have been very difficult to complete. My first debt is to my parents who have always encouraged me to follow my somewhat winding course of interests and fatefully offered me the funds which enabled me to change tack, once more, in the direction of anthropology. Many anthropologists have influenced me in person and in writing, but always the most supportive has been Dr. Susanne Küchler, who has been a friend as much as a mentor. Financial support for my studies and fieldwork was provided by the ESRC. Valuable encouragement and orientation were kindly provided by Dr. Steve Albert and his wife Robin Karlin, prior to our departure for Papua New Guinea. Within Papua New Guinea I am grateful for the affiliation provided by the National Research Institute and the Research Permission granted by the Provincial Government of New Ireland. Mr. Noah Lurang was particularly helpful in arranging the necessary paperwork. The ICAD project and its staff helped us get into the field, and provided occasional logistical help. The Provincial Government Representative, Mr. Ezekiel Waisale, also helped with transport into the field-site. Within Lak, and in particular within the Siar ward, the people who deserve mention are legion, I only mention some of the most helpful. Patrick Toarbusai and his wife Sophie Tinamungman were the first to welcome us to his village, he also built our house and aided us in many small ways. His clan, who adopted Selina as one of them, were always particularly helpful to us. Joseph Tobilsai who had me initiated in the tamianpoipol, Christian Dokon, and Lenny Toarbusai who was my tipang partner deserve special mention. Cecelia Rodi was a particular friend of Selina's and together with her husband Gregory Topitman gave me much help with translations. Thadeus Humi and Theresa Tinaimi and their children were our closest family in Siar, and provided us with much food and took a special interest in our welfare. Their conversation and storytelling, and Thadeus's heroic help in getting our possessions to Rabaul will always be remembered. Daniel Toanaroi, 'lapun rubba', was one of my most knowledgeable and helpful informants. The evenings when he would come to drink tea and story about taimbipo were some of our most enjoyable. He gave me valuable access to his tubuan custom that was key to my understanding. Also invaluable was Alois Topot who initiated me into the tubuan society, and gave and constructed my dukduk. Tony Pisrai was an always cheerful and helpful friend and informant who aided me in investigating many obscure corners of Lak language and traditions. Outside of Siar, Goro of Lambom was especially knowledgeable, kind 10

and hospitable. His stories are a valuable storehouse of tradition for his people. In Morkon, Peter Toru and Joe Bongian were most helpful in providing hospitality after more than one soaking cycle-ride and explaining the intricacies of Konomala funerary variations. In Rei, Paulus liii and Alois Bongian helped me at their tubuan custom, and gave access to information not available in Siar. In Pukonmal, I'd like to mention Tom Toabuki, Michael Toetman, Camillus Toanunai, Clement Tolilisman and families. In our few forays out of Lak, Paul and Therese Douglas, Andrew Bullough and Brian Dicker all provided help and hospitality at no notice in Namatanai. In Rabaul Jurgen and Kessia showed us another side to volcano town. In Port Moresby Matilda Rakopo and Peter Mildner gave us a wonderful send off and a reintroduction to western lifestyles. On the home front Michael and Delia Ayers put up with us, a thousand cardboard boxes and malaria without complaint. Stel Michael loaned me his slide scanner, making illustrations much more possible. But most important has been the love and support I've received from my wife Selina - who gallantly came on board an adventure which was not of her choosing, and came through many hard times with grace and spirit. Without her I could not and would not have done it. To her I dedicate this work.

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Note on orthography: This text uses my transliteration of Siar language into approximately English sound values. The main exception to this is the velar ng. For clarity of sense I sometimes pluralize local words with an -s, a practice common when mixing Siar words with pidgin.

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PART 1 introduction

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CHAPTER 1

approaches

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'That out of sight is out of mind Is true of most we leave behind.' Arthur Hugh dough (1819-61), Songs in Absence

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s we made our good-byes from Siar our teenage friend Tina said, very seriously, 'Don't think too much of us'. She was concerned . )) / that recollecting our friends when we were so far away from them would surely make us sad. When we gave our septuagenarian friend Toanaroi a handsome sarong as a parting gift, we felt inevitable irony when he told us that he would not wear it for a long time, but would hide it away in his strong-box. He explained that if he took it out while his thoughts were still 'strong' on us he would see our faces and be very sorrowful. I had to remind my friends that thinking about the village and unearthing reminders of them would be my daily task while I was working on my thesis... With their emphasis on the emotional tenor of memory and the evocative power of objects that both re-presence the missing persons in one's mind and yet heighten awareness of their absence, they made me see anthropology as an inevitably melancholy profession. Toanaroi's straightforward account of the manipulation of physical objects as a means of affecting cognition, reminded me of one of the main lessons I had learnt in Siar: the inadequacy of the western models of the internalized mind (Cf. Bateson 1972). Anthropology's traditional concern with the distant and the 'other' has made it a discipline more self-consciously reliant than most on authors as mediators of presence and absence. The institutionalized practice of anthropologists writing from afar highlights their dependance on memories - intentional recollections, physical 'stores' and reminders such as notes and slides, commemoration with partners, involuntary remembrances born of habit and familiarity, body memories, reverie and other forms of remembering. Anthropologists' creative praxis is thus inextricably intertwined with, and reciprocally shaped by, their memorial praxis. Yet writing anthropology is as much an exercise in loss, exclusion and forgetting, as a remembering which can only foreground these less welcome elisions. The genre of academic (or any) writing demands many deletions and excisions of experience in the creation of coherent, let alone cogent, form. 16

These unobjectionable, perhaps platitudinous, insights on the process of producing 'anthropology' contain the seeds of a more interesting perspective when applied to the production of form more generally. They confirm the ineluctable nature of figure-ground in the constitution of experience (cf. Merleau-Ponty 1962). The ongoing projection of 'persons' as figures on a social ground similarly involves processes of highlighting and eliding, remembering and forgetting, that form the relationships that connect and yet distinguish the subject from their milieu. The manipulation of both the spotlight of attention that picks out the figures, and the shadows of oblivion that create penumbral 'gaps' between and beyond them, is apparent both in my experience of writing and my Siar friends concerns with the direction of thoughts.

There is a further aspect to this dynamic that they were well aware of in Siar, but which I only felt as I began producing my thesis. A corollary to creation producing a wash of 'absence' around it, is that the best way to overcome the diminishment (or 'sorrow') of a removal from the world of an entity one is implicated in is to incorporate its newly felt absence into the framing of a fresh addition. This happened for me in the positive transformation of my absence from Siar into the presence of this manuscript; it happens in Siar on death when negative relations with the deceased are transformed into new relations with feast holders and the production of beautiful spirits. Reformations associated with such additions and deletions are central to the concerns of this thesis.

Approaching Siar

I arrived in the field with interests apparently at a great distance to those of life in rural Papua New Guinea. A product of a poststructuralist and post-modernist inflected education, I had been influenced by the crises surrounding the concepts of presence and representation. When contemplating from afar anthropological fieldwork, this developed into an interest in non-western uses of imagery and memory as avenues whereby alternative processes of 17

(re)presenting or (re)figuring cultural worlds could be investigated; particularly in how the manipulation of appropriate image-forms might be implicated in the various forms of social memory work whereby people remind, remember, or forget to each other. Memory is a creation of the flow of experience we find ourselves in, and yet at the same time memory work is that which enables us to intersect, interrupt and otherwise manipulate these flows within others as much as ourselves. It is therefore an intrinsically social faculty. 'Images' with their virtual relationship to 'quotidian reality' interpolate other times and places in a complementary fashion. Like memory they have a potential for an 'education' of attention in which aesthetics and power are implicated in attracting, or forcing the senses from their drift downstream.

Life in Melanesia, and indeed Southern New Ireland would, according to recent theorists such as Strathern, appears to be a sea of flows of exchange items, ritual forms, kinship and general 'relationality'. Action and agency in any of these realms is, it seems, only possible through the imposition of form, the construction of boundaries which deny their own fluidity; whether it be as a discrete place, social relation or perceptual event. These 'holding' forms are images in a deep sense, and it is in the contestation, persuasiveness and ownership of such imagery that much of the cut and thrust of political action takes place.

It was from such abstractions that I had to relocate myself to within the limits of studies possible through anthropological methodology in my particular field situation. Most crucially I had to orient myself to accepting the perspectives Siar people themselves highlighted as important. After alt, much of the rationale of my field project, and indeed of anthropology itself, is the precedence that alternate logics discovered in the lived reality of the field must have over theoretical models. So I went to Siar hoping to learn if imaging and memory work were culturally important and, by learning and discussing practices in which observed 'images' and 'memories' were implicated, to try to understand the local constructions of such universal operations. 18

Issues in the field

So how did my proposed topics of investigation, which came from a conjunction of western academic preoccupations with a reading of recent Melanesianist literature, gel with the reality of Siar life? Before proceeding, I would like to sketch, briefly and in outline only, the factors which confirmed the direction of my researches.

Siar life has an easily discernable rhythm, noted also by other ethnographers in other parts of New Ireland, in which the dispersed and quotidian routine of gardening and other chores is interspersed with centrifugal ritual feasting events. These latter, termed wol in Siar and kastom in pidgin 1 , are extra-ordinary in their social ramifications and in their role in accessing a transcendent world of the spirits. My informants privileged wol as the site in which I might really understand Siar society. It is certainly the arena in which the strongest sense of 'society' precipitates. How and why wol may be of continuing importance to life in Siar, and the nature of its relationship to the quotidian are central questions addressed in this work.

In Siar there are two complexes, each with two major subdivisions, which make up the ritual corpus. In order of their discussion in this thesis, and in ascending political importance, these are, very briefly:

1) women's rites of fecundity a) the production of children, via interaction with men and spirits. b) the dal female initiation in which women are made fertile, again by spirits.

1

See Ch.2 for a discussion of these words and the role of their referents in Siar. 19

2) men's rites of death a) primary funerary rites to clear sum (negative relations of loss and debt with the deceased) and its restrictions from places and people. b) secondary funerary rites, many years later, in which men's initiatory spirit masks take away nambu - material evocative of the deceased, including a shell-money effigy.

These ceremonies are a linked series in which life-cycle transformations are managed through intercourse with an 'other', absent, spirit world. Imagery is used extensively in these transitions, both of spiritual entities and\or relational social identities of persons. These include displays largely composed of exchange goods (shellcurrency or food) which are the media of various types of social relationships. Their construction, destruction, display and manipulation are central to processes of redefining the status of the person and their interlinkage with the social world. Resonant imagery is particularly key in forming the relationships of men to the dead and to women.

Each of the ritual complexes involve the presentation of men in a range of decorations and disguises which are of a hierarchy of iconographically linked images, at the apex of which are the tubuan masks. 2 The tubuan images are both the iconic form of dead spirits and of sexual attractiveness to women. They are part of a general initiatory system of ancestrally legitimized secret knowledge and powers known as pidiks3 , in which men 4 achieve access (in the form of some revelation) to the production and ownership of a range of socially compelling decorations and imagery. Much of the social identity of a powerful man is constructed in his ability to display his

2

The Siar name for these spirits\masks is nataka, but as tubuan is the term used in popular and anthropological literature, and frequently in New Ireland, for these masks it is the expression (unitalicized) I shall use here. Pidik is most simply defined as a secret, it will be more fully discussed below. Women also have a pidik in childbirth. 20

Plate 1: compelling Image: This mask is a nanto!, a mother tubuan, the apical image of the men's Initiatory cults and the most fearsome yet seductive sight in Slar. Its appearance radically changes the village space. All women and uninitiated men are compelled to watch its dances and must obey strict codes of behaviour while It Is abroad, for fear of their lives. While it Is said to have strong love magic, and be sexually attractIve to women, it is also very dangerous to them.

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ownership of powerful images and it is through them that he hopes to establish himself in the minds of others, such as when women seeing the tubuan weep for the memories of the leaders that have summoned them in previous years.

Discourses of memory are important in the context of transformations of relationally defined personhood in the life-cycle rituals. This is particularly overt in the two series of funerary rituals, the purposes of which are manifestly memorial work. The primary rites revolve around removing sum, the mourning remembrances and debts of the deceased, what might be termed social absences or 'negative' memories, which affect people, places and possessions. The main mechanism of eliminating sum is the feeding of and gifting to mourners, in order that they 'forget' the deceased and the exchange relationships that bring them to mind. One of the main foci of the secondary death rites is the destruction of nambu, personal objects related to the deceased, such as their basket, photographs of them, their house, or a tree they planted or sat under. In burning these items, or having them taken away by the spirits, the sponsor is removing the last reminders of the dead and must distribute shell money to the men and portions of pig to the women of the village, so that they will think no more of the dead. It was the extensive memorial ramifications and manipulations of the ritual cycle which led me to its importance in Siar kinship. The discourse of remembering is important in the activation of kinship and relatedness, and is complementary to perhaps more familiar notions of nurture, substance and exchange. As elsewhere in Melanesia 5 there is an economy of remembrance in which nurturing and exchange goods are used to create appropriate memories of relationship in the minds of others. This is active both in an expansive competitive sense in the political realm (cf. Munn's (1986) 'fame'), and in a more emotive but less quantified manner in the creation, maintenance and finally dissolution of the bonds of familial kinship.

See, as primary examples, Munn 1986 and Battaglia 1990, who are discussed below. 22

These then are some of the 'obvious' aspects of memory and imagery that impressed themselves upon me after some time in Siar. From this initial outline it should be clear that this focus developed as much from practices in the field as the university library. Already it is apparent that there are some rich avenues of inquiry, with issues of the personal, political and cosmological nature of imaging/memorial action and their implications for ways of thinking about material culture, representation, social relations and ontology.

Plan of the thesis

It may help the reader to have the overall shape of the thesis and the arguments contained within in mind as s\he proceeds. The work contains both highly theoretical and ethnographic segments which, it is hoped, are mutually elucidating. The precis of some of the major themes which follow here, while serving a useful preparatory function, can only be caricatures of the fuller material and should not be used to prejudge them.

The remainder of this chapter is a critical exploration of the literature relating to the concepts of memory and images and their social ramifications. Amongst the results of a wide ranging discussion on memory, apart from the 'external' determination of remembering already mentioned, is a relatively novel distillation which correlates the experience of powerful remembrance with two polar modes of attention to the memorial object: that of diffusely focused subconscious habituation and that of tightly focused super-conscious encompassment. Both these relationships reduce the distinction between subject and object. Images are both implicated as a most powerful mode of reception and presentation of memories, and a natural implement for the manipulation of attention that effects remembering. In particular I highlight their qualities as virtual forms, themselves created by a particular focus of attention that ontologically differentiates them from their surroundings. Poetic qualities, described by Bachelard and Strathern, derive from this differential; reverberating - foregrounding and 'backgrounding' qualities and 23

relationships - throughout the horizons of the perceivers' purview and changing the nature of the entities therein. Just as we suppose powerful images of western art to refashion our perceptions of the external world and internal self, so do powerful images, such as

pidiks, in New Ireland. The reader is taxed less in chapter two which provides an orientation as to the geographic, linguistic and cultural contexts of Siar, including in the latter two sections introductory analyses of political aspects of differentiation and transmission.

Part two is entitled 'an ecology of forms' and is concerned with the inter-relationship of cultural entities and their processes of definition. Thus its two chapters both address their subjects in terms of foci. The first discusses 'social foci', group and kinship designations, and examines how their usages implicate not only the persons to whom they are directly applied, but have poetic reverberations upon a wider array of persons, places, objects and their qualities. It ends with an analysis of avoidance relationships as paradoxical 'negative relationships' that highlight the denial of one set of relationships in order to frame and foreground another.

The next chapter is both the longest and most theoretically adventurous. It relates the 'fluid' perspective developed in relation to the constitution of memory, images and social formations to the 'harder' realm of 'spatial and material foci'. It initially highlights the inseparability of spatial and material qualities and, in their perceptual definition, their relational articulation with social interests and cognitive processes. It suggests the interaction and manipulation of these factors and the poetic creation of 'forms' that result might best be modeled on the properties of waves rather than particles. This provides a background for the ethnographic bulk of the chapter which examines both the familiar background 'swell' of the spatial\material environment that is normally only subconsciously attended to, and its 'interference' with more immediate 'poetic pulses' associated with focusing of attention to 'objects' of socially determined importance, 24

power or beauty. This is a project commensurate with the methods of the previous chapter and the reverberations of material forms are traced in a similar way to those of social forms. The results of an examination of boundary forms are similar too: compelling and powerful imagery is produced by the framing effect of absence and obscurity, through corn bi ned spatial\material\cog nitive\socia I means of covering, dissimulation and secrecy. These hidden spaces, provide a gap, a formless realm of the spirits, which may be localized and controlled, from which poetic form emerges and into which it may be dissolved again.

The processes of addition to and subtraction from the quotidian world of the quintessential poetic form, the person, are the subject matter of part three, 'reformations', and form its two subdivisions. Although largely ethnographic, these expand and exemplify the theoretical perspectives developed in parts one and two.

'Additions' examines the rites and evocations of birth and female initiation. Chapter five, 'the supplement of a child', discusses procreation beliefs and practices, including the nature of the spiritual, paternal and maternal contributions to the child. It also examines the child's status as a remembered deceased and a pidik which is revealed from the framing enclosure of the house in order to 'create' married parents and other implicational changes in kin status. Chapter six, 'female initiation', analyzes the mechanisms by which girls are made to menstruate by enclosure within a house and exposure to male spirits, and the correlation the rite makes between the women's domain of the inside of houses with the inside of men's masks and the secret realm of spirits. The two stages of female initiation-parturition are seen to illuminate the two stage mortuary rituals and the two stages of (dis)aggregation of the body.

'Subtractions' examines in a similar way the more politically complex ramifications of the primary and secondary mortuary rites. Chapter seven, 'death, debt and a memorial economy', examines the primary series, paying particular attention to the linkage of mourning taboos 25

with debt, painful remembrances and an effacement of presence. These are consolidated upon the ritual host by means of a series of exchanges and manipulation of images in which the deceased is realized as a 'potential difference' in the flow of exchange relations. The mourners' release from restrictions is realized by their previous debt\b lacknes s framing a demonstration of decorative and spiritual brilliance in dances.

In chapter eight, 'spectacle and spirits', the secondary rites are analyzed. These involve the social forgetting of deceaseds by the physical removal of mnemonic reminders associated with their 'bones' to the hidden realm of the spirits. This is conjoined with payments to the community which both disaggregate the gendered contributions to the person of the deceased, and create an activated memory of debt towards the host. The forgetting of the deceaseds is promoted by its positioning as a frame to foreground the host and his memorial relationship to the community. By giving everything unilaterally the host becomes a powerful mother-spirit, a nantol tubuan, who commands all the 'men' as spirits. These beautiful tubuan spirits dance before the women compelling them to watch, while in turn effecting a violent and transformative surveillance upon the village. The spirits then die and must be mourned and forgotten in turn, in order to effect the rebirth of the men and the village.

I conclude the thesis with a short overview of the life-cycle as a whole, tracing the linked transformations of the memorial and formal constitution of the humans and spirits that are the rituals' subjects. I suggest that the cycle could instead be usefully regarded as a 'carrier wave', correlating degrees of implication in the social milieu with an oscillation between human and spiritual form and presence. This gives the final insight into the use of images and memory in the ongoing manipulation of presence and absence necessary to social reproduction in Siar. V V V

26

MEMORY The problematic of memory is not only a topic deemed central to the Western experience of modernity (e.g. De Man 1970, Terdiman 1993), but also to Medieval art and education (e.g. Yates 1960, Carruthers 1990, Clanchy 1979, Kemp 1991), museums and the heritage industry (e.g. Lowenthal 1985), oral history and oral traditions (e.g. Lord 1966, Vansina 1985, Tonkin 1991), and in innumerable other corners of the soclo-historical field. There seems to have been an exponential increase of academic concern with the construction of memories and their social effects, following a growth in popular concern, whether it be the construction of private memories in the form of genealogies or souvenirs, or public debates about 'false memory syndrome' or national curricula (e.g. Nora 1989, Gillis 1994). Yet until recently memory was seen as the preserve of the long established 'mentalist' disciplines - neurology, psychology, and the philosophy of mind which have traditionally had individual recall as central to their field. Newly allied with the computer sciences under the rubric of cognitive sciences, these all have a large discourse of technical work on the topic. The anthropologist thus comes to the topic of memory relatively late.6 Wishing to take a holistic approach, the s\he can neither afford to ignore the philosophical, psychological and historical debates on memory nor can s\he allow the illusion of an exhaustive study. A topic like memory, let alone one involving imagery which has its own impressive genealogy, must perforce be covered piece-meal, intuitively even, and demands an approach that lets ethnographic imperatives determine the way taken through a large and muddy field. My aim is to investigate some of the social practices concerned with memory and imagery, while attempting to articulate with the cognitive and philosophical constructions which too often deny their soclo-historical origins.

6

Bar Halbwachs, if you wish to classify him as an anthropologist. 27

A taxonomy of memory

Memory is an amorphous faculty with a depth of presence in our everyday existence and a variety of modes of articulation difficult to over-estimate. Many grand claims have been made for its importance. It has been described as fundamental to our experience of consciousness (Rosenfield 1992, Baddely 1986), highly inter-related with our attention, perception and arousal processes (Gear 1989), intrinsic to the faculties of imagination and perception (Casey 1991) and central to our ongoing cognitive evolution (Donald 1993). Philosophically, the historically dominant metaphors for memory have been variants of the model whereby our experiences leave their impression upon the Aristotelian wax tablet of the individual mind to be accessed by remembering (forgetting is the failure of that access). Perhaps because of its folk, commonsensical status, this view has had great tenacity. Belatedly, a variety of attacks on this model have been developed out of the early work by Bartlett (1932) and Halbwachs (1980/50, 1992/25/41). Current discussions of memory focus on four aspects contrary to the Aristotelian model which will be central to my discussion. Firstly, that remembering is active as well as passive, that is memories are evoked and shaped by present concerns as much as the past events they are 'of'. Secondly, and following from this, that remembering is an eminently social activity, involving the social construction of historically variant frameworks of meaning through and for which we remember. Thirdly, that memory has an external component; we do not merely represent the world within in memorial experience, we also order and shape the world as memory. Finally, that remembering and forgetting are always intertwined: without the presence of forgetting one cannot remember, indeed forgetting must be the background against which memories define themselves.

In considering memory, it is first necessary to take a step back and review what kind of activities or cognitive experiences we mean when we talk of remembering. So far my discussion has been based on the over-wide designation of recollection. There are perhaps two main divisions within the psychological literature. Tulving (1972) proposed 28

a very influential distinction between episodic and semantic memory, in which semantic memory governs knowledge gained independently of our experience of ourselves, and episodic memory is our autobiographical recall of subjective experiences. There are difficulties, however, with Tulving's epistemological split between rationally organized concepts and non-rational sequentially ordered experiences as Fentress & Wickham (1992:21) point out. This is both counter-intuitive and problematic cross-culturally where one cannot assume a reification of a separate realm of semantically ordered knowledge similar to our own. A much older division is between primary and secondary memory, first distinguished by James (1890). Primary memory allows the experience of temporality as flow or duration; it is the brief persistence of a previous moment of experience, the 'holding in mind' of a receding moment. Secondary memory is the retrieval of that which has passed from consciousness: it is the model one usually has in mind when speaking of recollection.

Casey (1987) provides the best philosophical analysis of the experience of remembering. He stresses the multiplicity of possible modes of remembering, and unlike many cognitive psychology texts, attempts to describe them in their full variety. He progresses from mentalistic description to an ever deepening discussion of remembering's articulation and rootedness in the world. Thus remembering does not just have the form of remembering-that, remembering-how, remembering-to, etc; it also articulates between ourselves and the world in such forms as reminding, recognizing or reminiscing; it also can be more firmly extra-mental as in body memory, place memory and commemoration. Anthropological work must focus on those aspects which are open to external inquiry, that is those which, through their entanglement with the external material world, are open to social manipulation through that world.

All societies must have an architectonic, a framework, of memory. Minimally this must provide for ongoing cultural reproduction. However there seems to be a tendency in the literature to dichotomize between societies in a condition of modernity (e.g. Nora 1989), or 29

alternatively literacy (e.g. Donald 1993), and 'traditional', non-literate societies, as to their memorial nature. This breaks down into two related conceptions. Firstly, that with modernity, sources of 'living memory' (e.g. grandparents) have been replaced as providers of knowledge by state and media sources (e.g. Marc Bloch 1954 cited Connerton 1989:39). Secondly, that literacy has, by externalizing memory, extended the quantity of what can be remembered astonishingly. Both conceptions are true but the situation is more complex than the posited dichotomy suggests.

Connerton (1989) points to the heart of the matter by drawing attention to two alternative modes in which memory can be tra nsm itted: inscription and incorporation. These are, respectively, the inscription of memory into extra-human stores (by writing, photography, tape) and the incorporation of memories into persons as embodied knowledge (especially through habit and performative ritual). Considering these modes of transmission he raises a number of important points. Firstly, the impossibility of distinguishing between memory and its mode of communication. Memories do not exist outside their evocation (see Rosenfield 1992 for a neurological basis for this). Remembering is a communicative act, even within the person: the grandparent both contains and transmits the remembered values; the book is both the memory and its communication. Hence, Halbwachs' contention of the inseparability of even apparently private memories from the social (see below). This is not, of course, to negate the role of presentist interpretation; each remembering shapes its content to the interpretive structures of the rememberer. Secondly, by showing the efficacy of embodiment in cultural transmission Connerton challenges the view that oral cultures merely 'settle' for incorporated practices (as in Bourdieu 1977: 186-7, see Battaglia 1992 for this point also); inscriptive and incorporative memorial transmission are important in all societies. This last follows not merely from the empirical fact of habit and performative ritual within modern societies and the inscriptive, signifying, manipulation of material culture in traditional societies. It derives from my third point that, as Battaglia (1992) has recently argued, the opposition 30

between per-formative and inscriptive memorial acts is itself a false dichotomy. Conner-ton suggests, even as he makes the distinction, that it is in fact possible that no act of inscription is committed without an irreducible component of incorporation (1989:76-78), giving examples of the bodily habits necessary to handwriting, typing or viewing a film.

This brings us to a final coalescing of memorial taxa, including the possibility of remembering as forgetting, and vice versa. Battaglia (1992) argues that in the Melanesian context where there is so much emphasis on the construction of social persons through manipulation of gendered objects, that gift exchange is an inscriptive performance of embodied relations. In other words informational content is inscribed in peoples bodies which in the Massim mortuary rites of her example are overtly revealed to be constructed via flows of exchange goods. Furthermore she highlights 'counter-inscription', the overlaying of memorial inscriptional acts, as particularly salient to 'forgetting as willed transformation of memory' (1992:14). A mode of forgetting particularly overt in Massim and New Ireland funerary rituals where the replacement of deceaseds as nodes of connectivity or bundles of relations gives rise not merely to new relations but, Battaglia (1993) argues, to a commemoration of 'society'. Thus a collective forgetting of individuals may be key to the imaginary formation of the group in ideology.

Cultural transmission

Already it is clear that social influences must affect the mechanisms of memory and the mechanics of memory must shape the cultural material reproduced through it. Within western discourse the emphasis often seems to be on memorial efficacy, but to model memorial practices as if always shaped by a desire for maximization would be naive, as Maurice Bloch (1992) demonstrates. While cultures necessarily have a memorial inertia, which has in fact been overlooked in the recent theoretical concern with reinventing traditions (see Connerton 1989 & Norton 1993 for critiques of this), 31

what this literature does make clear is that forgetting is always key in the memorial reproduction of culture if only to allow the impression of true recollection.

Despite the depth and breadth of memory's influence within human life, its study has largely been the province of psychology, a discipline which has been slow to investigate the importance of the social and cultural on memory (or vice versa). To this day (see e.g. Middleton & Edwards 1990a), the most influential models derive from the formulations of Bartlett (1932). Bartlett's most famous studies demonstrated that given an unfamiliar narrative, subjects' recall of it was shaped by the perception and construction of meaning, and hence individual and cultural modes of interpretation. Bartlett talked of schemata of the world, based on experience, which shape how memories are recollected. Many of Bartlett's insights into naturalistic recollection were neglected by a laboratory bound cognitive science until a recent revival of interest in 'ecological validity' in cognition and memory studies prompted by Neisser (e.g. Neisser 1976, 1982; Neisser & Winograd 1988; G. Cohen 1990). Ecological validity is important because as Bartlett and others show (e.g. Middleton & Edwards 1990b, Radley 1990) it is in the social construction of attitudes and interests, meaning and significance - the very factors which since Ebbinghaus' (1885) pioneering studies many cognitive psychologists have attempted to exclude from their laboratories that remembering takes place in everyday contexts.

Within the social sciences a similar, if not stronger, description of the inescapably social nature of memory was produced by Halbwachs who was writing in the same period as Bartlett. (Halbwachs 1925, 1939, 1951/80). Like Bartlett, Halbwachs' work has only received further investigation relatively recently. 7 He rejected the separation of individual from collective memories, showing how we conserve our recollections by relating them to the mental and material spaces of the group. Every recollection exists through a relationship with

See introduction to Halbwachs 1990 for a representative sample. 32

notions common to a social group (ie. words, persons, places). It is the material/social spaces of these groups which provide the location for our memories and to which we turn our attention in recall. For him, the only time we are truly alone is when we sleep, hence the unstructured disordered memories within dreams. Both he and Bartlett had an emphasis on the 'spatialization' of memory through relation to the material and social environment that my work intends to pursue (cf. Johnson 1987). Most recent work on the social aspects of memory have been of a linguistic nature. There has been a large body of work deriving from oral sources. These come from the related fields of oral history, oral tradition and oral narratives. 8 For disciplinary reasons oral historians have largely been interested in comparison with written sources, especially a concern with establishing the truth value of oral histories compared to written sources (e.g. Thompson 1988). In oral traditions where there is no corresponding written record there has also been a concern (perhaps misguided) with truth value 9, as well as an exploration of genre and authoritative accounts (e.g. Tonkin 1991, Barber 1991). The most important work for my purposes includes examples of both of the above fields but is primarily from accounts of oral folk-lore and poetry, in which the concern for comparison with 'an event' does not blur the matter. These give a useful discussion of mnemonic form and the way in which a piece evolves to its most culturally memorable form, or 'olkotype' (home type), in three common ways. Through rhythm, that is temporal schematization; through visual imagery; and through a density of causal and semantic linkages, that is internal context dependence. These modes of conceptualization provide mnemo-techniques whereby reliance on external context is lessened and narrative culture is successfully reproduced. (See e.g. Lord 1960, Parry 1971, Propp 1968 and good

8

See Vansina 1985 on distinction between oral history and tradition. See lentress & Wickham 1992:Ch. 2 for a good discussion of all three. See De Heusch 1982 for a critique of an ethnohistorian's account of an oral tradition on this basis. 33

survey in Fentress & Wickham 1992). There is no apparent reason why these mnemo-techniques may not be equally applicable to nondiscursive forms of culture.

The other main approach to social aspects of memory has been largely conceptually linguistic in orientation also. This is the social constructionist school of social psychology (e.g. Billig 1987, Coulter 1979, Gergen 1982, 1985). There has been one major collection on 'Collective Remembering' (Middleton & Edwards 1990) in which the majority of contributors concentrate on the dialogic, rhetorical nature of remembering and the accounting practices (ie. meaning centred) we go through in recall. Most attention is again given to people talking about the past (Radley 1990 is the exception).

This logocentric notion of memory is one that is caused by the long historical dominance of the text as a way of recording memories. Yates (1966) was the first of a number of studies to underline the importance in the classical and medieval periods of carefully constructed mental imagery in the preservation of memory (see also Carruthers 1990, Clanchy 1979). By showing the different memorial practices and conceptions of memory of the past, she highlighted the historically specific nature of our own memories. Classical sources advised the orator wishing to remember a speech to walk through a familiar landscape or building within which he had placed mnemonic images of the points he wished to recall. The ages of memory-men and the arts of memory are now past, as Yates and Casey (1987) make clear, but the spatial nature of ancient mnemo-techniques bear close relation to the famous account of Luria (1968) who studied a modern mnenomist who involuntarily remembered everything via a 'landscape' of exceptionally concrete imagery.'°

In an important work, Schutz (1964a) shows how a past stream of consciousness, music originated by a composer, is at each rendition lived through in quasi-simultaneity by both the performers and

10

See also my discussion of Schutz and polythetic memories, below. 34

beholders. This 'tuning in' of temporally and spatially separated individuals - composer, musicians and audience - is achieved through the alignment of duree, inner time (cf. Bergson 1988/1896), amongst the co-experiencers. This process is subject to many variations of intensity and togetherness but its crux is the success of communicating a polythetic11 experience. The power of music in bringing the past to us lies in the irreducible and multi-dimensional nature of its temporal structure. Communication between an author and the reader of a book maintains far less of a common temporal structure, indeed arguments within may be abbreviated and conceptualized in the same way that we might grasp a theorem without performing its derivation - monothetically. Discourse is usually monothetic and therefore not powerful in re-presenting the past. Music exists in inner time and in each production the same inner time is experienced. Equally the co-performers in a single production must 'tune in' to the same inner time in order to produce a good performance.

I would argue that music is not the only experience which retains its temporal structure. Nor is something merely polythetic or not. There are degrees of tuning in, of success in the reproduction of inner time. Schutz's argument actually elucidates the properties of mnemotechniques for narrative culture - rhythm, visual imagery and internal context dependance - which are all mechanisms for making the 'text' temporally irreducible, multi-dimensional and polythetic. Attention and absorption are also surely key in aligning 'inner time' to some external duration. The material world, in the form of place, or material objects that Bourdieu sees as important for the inertia of habitus, generally retains its temporal structure. But it does so as 'outer time'. There are at least two modes by which the person's inner rhythms (spatial as much as temporal) may be aligned with such objects of consciousness and via them achieve intersubjective tuning-in with others. Firstly, attention may be compelled towards them so that they become relatively encompassing of our experience. Alternatively, as Bourdieu

Schutz takes the terms polythetic and monothetic from Husserl. 35

would argue, they become incorporated through to the level of nonattentiveness by the repetitive nature of praxis. The investigation of this first mechanism is central to the approach taken in this thesis. Due to its overt and conscious nature it is likely to provide a more satisfactory explanatory model than practice theory's reliance on preconscious transmission which, ironically, give Bourdieu et al difficulties in accounting for individual agency (cf. Turner 1994). The route of foci of attention is also more 'social', both in the sense of relying on aesthetic and moral conceptions of compulsion and in being a selfconsciously manipulable aspect of social praxis.

At one point in the same paper (1964a) it seems as if Schutz wishes to distance experience from the structuring of society, giving it priority. He criticizes Halbwachs' (1939) description of the collective memory of musicians, both on the grounds of his equation of musical communication with musical language/notation and of his identification of musical language with the social background of the musical process. I have already summarized why Schutz believed the experience of music is irreducible to its notation. Yet in another paper on the social distribution of knowledge Schutz (1964b) is not so far from Halbwachs, and indeed my own position, when he shows how our knowledge depends on the socially constructed relevance of that knowledge. In fact our acts of remembering, our presencing of knowledge, are inevitably shaped by the web of relevancies we find ourselves in, which is indeed influenced by social differentiation and positioning. Thus for Schutz, as much as Halbwachs, our memories are never isolated from the social.

Barth (1975, 1987, 1990) and Whitehouse (1992, n.d.) have produced a series of comparisons between alternative modes of knowledge transmission which, although they do not use the terms, could be termed polythetic and monothetic. 12 Among the Baktaman, as in many other New Guinea societies, religious knowledge is

12

They are also concerned with the political structuring of, and from, such modes of transmitting knowledge. I discuss these later. Here I am only concerned with the mechanics of such memorial reproduction. 36

transmitted through the multi-sensory (polythetic) initiatory revelations of secret practices and paraphernalia - there is little or no verbal exegesis of symbolic or referential meanings (monothetic). Barth has outlined the 'cultural genetics' of this highly restricted and analogic, rather than textual, corpus of knowledge, theorizing a generative model for the production of religious variations within a small area of New Guinea (1987) through the accretive metaphorical evolution inevitable in the infrequent recollection of imagery. Whitehouse (1992) shows that certain traditions are transmitted in image form, both so as to be memorable and so as not to need the constant repetition or literate codification of more systematically coherent traditions. He (1992, n.d.) contrasts the frequent communal verbal rehearsal of the Pomio Kivung movement in New Britain with the highly cognitively and emotionally stressful, infrequent iconic initiations of many initiatory cults such as those discussed by Barth. This he relates to the different requirements and utilization of semantic memory and episodic 'flashbulb' autobiographic memory.'3

Flashbulb memory (Brown & Kulick 1977) has been an influential model of a special mechanism of memory which, when a surprising or consequential event occurs (the archetypal example is Kennedy's assassination), permanently imprints all the surroundings in memory so later recollections have a 'live quality that is almost perceptual'. The existence of a special mechanism for this type of memory has been disputed (e.g. McCloskey et al 1988). However, a phenomena of vivid memories is generally accepted which tend to include a large amount of apparently indiscriminate details, high resistance to change, an association with high levels of emotional reaction and rehearsal, a sense of importance, and a belief in their accuracy (despite their frequent inaccuracy) (Wright & Gaskell 1992). Wright and Gaskell provide a convincing account which explains the detail of vivid memories by their uniqueness and importance, using Schank's (1982) theory of dynamic memory. According to this model, everyday phenomena are stored in memory via indices of structures already

13

See above for episodic/semantic distinction and critique. 37

adapted for similar memory events, with extraordinary phenomena the brain can find no, or insufficient, suitable structure within which to store the memory. The importance of the event determines how many indices the brain searches. What is stored if the process fails is the contents of all the indices searched and possibly the visual field, creating a structure for a new event. This also fits into an explanation of infantile amnesia, in which new more efficient structures replace the once unique detailed structure. This model has several implications. Firstly, it suggests a continuum between multi-sensory, polythetic, lifelike memories and highly conceptualized semantic memory. Secondly, although vivid and lasting, the vivid memories require special prompts to be 'fished out' (Wright & Gaskell 1992:282) - more conventional memories are more easily accessed but lose individual detail and power as they shade into each other. Lastly it does seem to add credence to Barth and Whitehous&s distinctions and to my polythetic/monothetic distinction.

Gaskell and Wright do note that many factors of vivid recall can only be explained by recourse to sociological explanations, such as the variant of 'importance'. However, they still use the accepted, reified, cognitive terminology which suggests a fundamental separation of cognitive faculties from the world. By focusing on what is essentially a social phenomenology of memorial practices, I hope to elaborate on the memorial mechanisms outlined here with an emphasis not just on their socially contextual nature, but on their use in manipulating and defining 'context'. By starting from the outside, while bearing cognitive theory in mind, I hope perhaps to bring remembering to the fore as a mode of adjusting alignment of self, others and world; 'tuning in and out' as Schutz might put it.

The political economy of memory

I will now examine some of the literature relevant to an examination of cultural memory practices, that is those practices with which people manipulate their own, or others', remembering or forgetting. It seems clear that memory techniques cannot be examined without an 38

investigation of memory practices (or vice versa). Some of the literature reviewed above shows a concern with the efficiency of memory in 'the real world', but the notion of memory practices must encompass, as Bloch (1992) suggests, cultural notions of the person in the flux of events, the local evaluations of how such 'history' should affect the self (or not) or be used to affect others.

I shall particularly

examine those practices of remembering, forgetting, and reminding (having others remember) which take us beyond a concern solely with narrative of past events. The range of potential practices is still large and in order to underline the role of memory in political activity I shall centre my discussion on the production and dissolution of imagery and the dissemination of cultural knowledge in the form of gift objects, traditional skills and knowledge.

The ongoing production and manipulation of cultural knowledge implied by the elicitation of its remembering and forgetting in self and others that I am positing, implies mechanisms of power. As Davis & Stern (1989:12) following Foucault (1977) show, 'whenever memory is invoked we should be asking ourselves: by whom, where, in which context, against what?' The idea of the distribution of knowledge, and what counts as authentic knowledge, being functions of power is an old one. It has recently been invoked within a Melanesian context by Keesing (1987) who criticizes much recent symbolic anthropology for reifying 'culture' as a coherent system which can be read as a text thus neglecting the uses and distribution of knowledge. Barth (1990), while equally moving away from the representation of culture as a 'whole', has argued for the methodological efficacy of proceeding in the opposite direction. Instead of reading from knowledge and its distribution to structures of power, he advocates generating features of knowledge from the practices that arise from particular forms of empowerment. His example compares the shaping of knowledge entailed in differing Melanesian and South East Asian conceptions of politico-economic process.

39

'[Rjecognition and rank in Melanesia are characteristically derived from supremely valued objects. You give these out only in delayed reciprocity for other, equally or more valued objects, which will come back to you and stick to your skin and give you enhanced rank. But by these directives, you engage yourself in an informational economy where the transmission and reproduction of knowledge are painfully at cross-purposes with your basic value premises. Rank should be something you obtain from ho/ding and hoarding secrets, not from giving them downwards by teaching. Yet you are trapped in a double bind, since the alternative of not transacting produces no relations.' (Barth 1990:649, orig.emph.) Thus, the ideal type initiator, whom Barth delineates, protects his knowledge by secrecy and mystery; he puts it to use in producing a performance which does not so much transmit knowledge as transform the initiates. The initiator does not teach, he makes the mysteries immanent rather than understandable.

Barth's methodology is attractive because of the difficulties of unveiling an 'epidemiology' of representations existing within an environment of brains, as Sperber (1975) recommended. Of course Sperber's point that such cognitive mechanisms such as memory must be taken into account is a central premiss of this thesis. But reliance on articulation of 'what is within' is both notoriously difficult and predisposes the posited content to verbal form. In Melanesia where the emphasis is generally on the actualization of knowledge in performative, object form, it makes more sense to work from external objectifications. In fact I intend to emphasize the processual nature of knowledge or representations which are not 'stored' in a static 'internal' memory, but which are evoked as more or less relevant or objects of attention in remembering, reminding and forgetting within a social world.

Rowlands (1993) proceeds in a similar manner to Barth, utilizing a wide range of material in a consideration of themes developed by Küchler and Whitehouse. He contrasts dispositions towards the monumental and durable with the mobile and transient in regard to

40

the forms of legitimation and political activity their memorial forms are associated with. In the western tradition where duration and unilinear capitalist production is emphasized, memory gained the status of 'a sequence of events that can be literally retraced' and we produce monuments which endure into the future, forever pointing to the past. In Melanesia where a gift system emphasizes reproduction of people and personification, we find systems such as Malangan, ephemeral monuments which in their destruction create a memory for the future when they, along with the life-force that they embody, will be recreated. While western monuments refer to an outside referent which sinks further and further in the past, Malangan is a memory of nothing outside itself, cyclically reproducing itself and the empowerment it embodies afresh.

Malangan imagery imbues rights to land and indeed for Küchler (1993:97) 'the social landscape is indeed the subject matter of social memory'. A point stressed even more forcefully by Feeley-Harnik:

'It is more than ironic that so much recent scholarship on history, tradition, or even memory in anthropology has focused on questions of time, when the most salient feature of relations between Europeans or North Americans and the "non- Western" category of foreigners has been the appropriation of land, the places in and through which people create their times and beings, where memory and history are inextricable from political presence and political economy.' (Feeley-Harnik 1994: 18) That this is so seems to me indisputable and for reasons outlined earlier'4 I believe landscape to be a natural memorial vehicle. The beauty of the Malangan system is that it, in effect, mobilizes the land in aesthetically powerful ritual imagery which compels ones attention to them with their 'brilliance' Thus the mnemo-techniques are combined, the pre-conscious incorporation of landscape becomes extra-conscious inscription of imagery. These are in turn linked reciprocally to memories of persons: deceased person<->

14

See previous discussion of Schutz and Bourdieu. 41

landscape<->imagery via object'z->successors. Rowlands (1993) implies such an expansion is more possible within a gift economy and I'll now address, briefly, how the manipulation and extension of memories is fundamental to the gift.

There are two related concepts which underlie much of the following discussion - (in)alienability and fame - in particular as discussed by Weiner (1992) and Munn (1986). The concept of alienation has been at the centre of anthropological discussions of exchange since Marx. The notion that the produced object embodies an aspect of the self (labour) which can be denied in exchange, is the classical description of the process of alienation and the production of a commodity. A 'gift economy' is distinguished by the fact that the social relations of the exchangers are recognized within the inalienable gift (Mauss 1990). Thomas (1991) points out the inflexibility and inconsistency within much of the literature about the 'personification' of social relations within objects (which social relations? - of the producer, exchanger or owner?) and more openly equates alienation with decontextualization. This creates an analytic avenue in which the importance of memory can be seen in the creation of the inalienable, conceived as that which evokes its pre-exchange context. The 'gift' is, in a sense, a cultural mnemonic, an objectification of past activities.

It is the role of the inalienable in cultural reproduction that Weiner investigates. Her innovative study shows how subjectively unique objects (the inalienable) become bearers of identity both in their differentiating function and as a locus of cosmological authentication. For her, inalienable possessions through their permanence become the bearers of inter-generational identity and authority. Much exchange, in her analysis, is shaped by struggles to determine access to the possessions which are bearers of the past and cosmological power legitimated via identification with previous institutions, individuals or sacred realms.

Individual value is not created by merely keeping the subjectively unique object to oneself, as Munn (1986) demonstrates. In Weiner's 42

terms it is 'Keeping-while-Giving' that is the ideal; that is, giving while still having the gift identified with oneself. Munn shows how in Gawa this is metaphorized as fame. There personal value and power are created by the extent to which one's name is in the mind of others. It is this spatio-temporal extension of name, an aspect of self, that Munn calls fame. Generated through success in kula exchanges, by the circulation of inalienable objects to which one's name is attached, fame is the extent to which one is remembered. Here objects serve as mnemonics of their previous owners. They serve to re-present oneself to others, being made to act as reminders to others of their obligations to the sender. In Munn's terms the objective gift must be converted into subjective remembering, so that the gift does not disappear, but generates spatio-temporal connections and is retained as a potentiality for reciprocation (cf Munn 1986:60-67).

There are 'economies of memory' in what may superficially appear to be economies of objects. These economies are based on what Strathern (1988) terms an aesthetic, in that there is a restricted variety of cultural images which will evoke the appropriate memorial response (e.g. recalling of debt). Thus the investigation of that aesthetic, and the political economy of its representations, may well have great implications for the delineation of a cognitive style, or memorial aesthetic, and the ways in which knowledge might be appropriately circulated and subsequently evoked.

Objects are not the only non-linguistic forms in which there is a memorial economy. Certain forms of knowledge, or particular practices can be seen as inalienable in a similar way. Kastom has been analyzed as that knowledge which a community reflexively delineates as its own. Toren (1988) has pointed out that it can be appropriate to talk of kastom in Fiji as 'appropriate action', rather than seeing it embodied in material form. Toren, with a similar concern to Bloch (1992), shows how culture specific notions of tradition, social memory, affect responses to historical change. Keesing (1982) was amongst the first to argue that the comparatively recent development of the concept of kastom is a reflexive reification 43

of the notion of culture which has come about due to colonial contact. This externalized notion has a potentially different articulation with social flux than the apparently internalized body of knowledge of the Fij ia ns.

The circulation and transmission of traditional knowledge and practices within Melanesia has several characteristic forms. In many societies great emphasis is placed on secrecy and the control of ritual knowledge (cf. The 'Great Men' societies discussed in Godelier & Strathern 1991) and knowledge is passed on by revelatory initiations (e.g. Barth 1975). In others (e.g. Keesing 1991) traditional knowledge is open to all (notwithstanding structural advantages) with the requisite abilities and ambition. Such knowledge can be acquired in a variety of contexts, including purchase, and as Harrison (1993a) has shown was, even in pre-contact times, more commonly transacted across cultural boundaries than is often realized. In modern contexts MacKenzie (1991) and O'Hanlon (1993) have shown how various string-bag designs have been very successful in crossing cultural boundaries (so much so, that according to MacKenzie they are becoming a mark of Papua New Guinea identity). In essence, however, Harrison (1993a) argues that possession of prestigious knowledge was no different to the possession of prestige goods both belong to the category of wealth and both provide the basis of political power. Significantly, he points out that many Melanesian societies not only imported kastom such as dances, but also that they often retained their associations with their original owners (cf. O'Hanlon 1993). Thus they can have similar mnemonic qualities as inalienable gifts (see above). As such, there is a political-economy of traditional knowledge and skills, just as much as more recognized exchange items. Practices are taught in particular ways for particular reasons to particular people. These established patterns show the cultural basis of committing cultural knowledge to memory.

V V V

44

IMAGE

'[IJmagining without remembering is empty; remembering without imagination is blind.' (Casey 1991 :xviii) 'Imagination and Memory are but one thing, which for divers considerations hath divers names.' (Hobbes 1968:89) We need no go so far as Hobbes in positing their identity, but it is clear that imagination and memory are at the very least complimentary and sometimes, as in the case of dreams, screen memories, historical reconstructions and time-consciousness (see Casey 1991), practically indistinguishable. Imagination tends to be oriented to the future and not-yet-explored, and involve an extension and dispersal of self. Remembering tends to be oriented to the past and already-constituted, and be of coalescing and consolidating character. Both connect and separate us to\from 'other worlds' space-times with at least minimally distinct ontological conditions. Both are realized, arguably most fully and effectually, in the form of sensuous images.

What is an image?

In a virtuoso analysis, Mitchell (1986) attempts to account for the many different kinds of phenomena for which the term image has been used, and to give indications as to the genealogical and ideological dimensions of theories of image and its distinction from the word. He notes that the very word 'idea' comes from the Greek verb 'to see' and is linked to the notion of eidolon, the 'visible image'. It is perhaps hard to contemplate any notion of theory (which comes from the Greek for contemplation and sight) without imagery being at some point implicated. Western discourse has talked of graphic, optical, perceptual, mental and verbal images; all under the loose framework of image as likeness, or similitude, and all central to the discourses of such varied intellectual disciplines as art history, physics, psychology, epistemology and literary criticism. It is tempting 45

to see a continuum of literalness, or authenticity leading from the 'objective' images 'proper' of the graphical and optical through to the metaphorical and subjective mental and verbal images. But Mitchell's work demonstrates that many of the hard distinctions one might posit between these polar types are invalid. I will not recapitulate his argument here, merely indicate some of its, perhaps familiar, conclusions. He claims there is nothing natural or automatic about the formation of images, whether mental or material: both require the conventionality of language to be perceived, neither are naive resemblances to the world they portray. Nor are graphic images perceived in any unitary way any more than written or mental images. Nor, furthermore, are any images exclusively visual, they all rely to some degree on multi-sensory apprehension and interpretation. Hence, for instance, the dialectical reliance of verbal and visual media (see below).

Mitchell's aim in subverting these distinctions is to point up the historically contingent and value loaded uses of categorization of word and the image, and there oft implicit correlates of culture and nature. In attempting to characterize a commonality within notions of images, in contradistinction to their dialectical counterparts words, he fastens upon their virtuality.

'[AJn image cannot be seen as such without a paradoxical trick of consciousness, an ability to see something as "there" and "not there" at the same time.' (Mitchell 1986:17) '[It] is the sign that pretends not to be a sign, masquerading as (or for the believer, actually achieving) natural immediacy and presence.' (Mitchell 1986:43) It is this virtual quality which I would like to take as the key characteristic in identifying and detailing the social modulations of imagery. Agency and power are implicit in producing the contingent presence of images, and it is their manipulable ontological nature which in turn provides much of imagery's power in accessing\creating transcendent and sacred realms. Thus Gadamer's statements that:

46

'..the meaning of the religious picture is an exemplary one. In it we can see without doubt that a picture is not a copy of a copied being, but is ontological communion with what is copied.'(1975:126) & that 'picture magic... depends on the identity and nondifferent/a tion of picture and what is pictured. . . . nondifferentiation remains an essential feature of a/l experience of pictures. '(1975:123) Which is why the stakes have been high in the recurrent battles between iconoclasm and idolatry: how we regard images and imagemaking bears directly on our relationship with the transcendent.

We can elucidate this by looking briefly at image-making phenomenologically as an intentional activity. Thus firstly one can see that imaging is an essentially productive activity. It is additive, creating, even if only by means of sympathetic perception, an entity, albeit a virtual one. Secondly, that the imagined content must have its own world frame, as Casey (1976) terms it in his study of imagining. Thus the content of even the most ephemeral of mental imaginings are situated in a specific and delimited imaginary spacetime with its own distinctive character in respect to the a priori world of perception. If this were not so then the image would not be perceivable as such - in the example of a picture one would either see paint smeared on wood. Yet it must be delimited or one would be attempting to eat the grapes of a still life.

The image's reality as an 'supplementary' entity resultant from a conventionalized way of perceiving, which may be reliant on speech as in the announcement of a title but is recognized as having a form of existence distinct from words, is essentially sensuous. Although since Kant a complete divorce between sensation and meaning or conception has been untenable, the image aspect of forms is in the creation of sensory effects - the most essential of which is the direction of attention such that consciousness of the grounding and connections of the image to the quotidian world is in abeyance.

47

Linguistic structures of signification are distinguishable. The conditions of perception of an image may be dependant on words, and then indeed the image will necessarily be incorporated into discourses of denotations and connotations etc - but in so far as it is a modulation of sensation, the image will not be reducible to language. What is more, the degree to which an image is successful in obtaining an aura of 'naturalness' and presence may be correlatable to the degree with which it resists semiotic definition by its viewers. (cf Sontag 1994, Wagner 1986)

Images in action

Images are intentional objects in a wider sense than the phenomenological. They are intrinsically social objects, the results of agency and the instruments of power. They are made with intent, implicating, categorizing and creating the quotidian and the transcendent. They act in at least four related ways:

Firstly, in control of the access of the image: what and how they depict, and the shaping of viewers by that depiction. Mitchell (1994), inspired by Foucault and DeBord, identifies these two directions as that of the spectacle over the viewer and that of surveillance over what is imaged. Spectacle acts by deceiving, entertaining or otherwise manipulating the observer, it is primarily an ideological form of power. Surveillance exerts disciplinarian controls, often in the guise of 'realism', over the object of its gaze, transforming the subject so transfixed to the rubric of the object, defined by others and seen 'as it is'.

Secondly, there is control over access to the image. Whether and how an image is presenced is not necessarily a shared or public phenomena. So there may be a hierarchy: you see Wittgenstein's duck/rabbit, he sees only a duck, she sees only a rabbit and they only see some uninterpretable mark on a page. The frames of reference needed to see, or perhaps not to see, an image are often likely to be valued and restricted cultural capital. 48

Thirdly, images may be controlled as an object. Thus as an object it may be hidden, displayed, destroyed or exchanged in some economy. However, an object which gains its specificity by virtue of its ability to present something 'other' will generally gain value by reference to its image rather than its object foundation, and therefore its economy will relate to control of access to or of that image via the object, rather than of the object for itself. Lastly, images may be controlled in their production and reproduction. Production of an image implies successful manipulation of the attention, perception or attitudes of the intended audience. It is a performative act constrained by the imaginative, social and material situation and skills of the executor(s). Imaging is intentional and it is tautologous to speak of an image as the object of imaging. An image is an image of something by virtue of the fact that it is not its material base (i.e. it is not a straight line in the sand but a tree, the track of an ancestor, or a moral approach). Thus imaging has some notion of reproduction, often of an ideal form, built into it. This reproducible quality may be delimited by attempts to personalize or render unique the image, or be controlled through copyright or other systems of ownership. Or it may be exploited through repetition and expansion of the distribution of imaged material. In these two sections I have sketched both the formal properties of the image and the ways in which these implicate it in social process. Image has been delimited in its 'objecthood' as a) virtual, b) of distinctive (if perhaps ephemeral) world frame c) sensuous. Its social action is by virtue of a) construction of viewer and viewed, b) variation of interpretation and visibility C) manipulation as an object d) (re)producibility. Images and relationality in Melanesia As Mitchell argued, images are not merely socio-historically implicated, but the conception of 'image' itself is a variable product of interests and practices. I will now look at some notions of imagery 49



BIBL LONDON UNIV

derived from Melanesian practices. Melanesian anthropology has a surprisingly large, but conceptually disparate and entirely unarticulated body of work on imagery and imagination. The criteria for this discussion is an emphasis on local conceptions of visual imagery, which means that works such as Weiner 1991 and Maschio 1994 which deal largely with verbal discourse, I do not address.

The first usage I wish to consider is that of Wagner's (1986a & 198Gb) mutually informed ethnographic and theoretical writings, which examine the process by which specific cultural images attain their 'natural immediacy and presence'. Wagner describes the central New Ireland Barok culture as particularly image orientated: hence their distrust of the truth content of words, their infinitely polysemic exegeses of cultural concepts, and Wagner's analysis of the obviation of form in funerary/successorship rites. Wagner's describes the obviation process as producing a 'symbol that stands for itself', one that refers only to its own enactment, in essence the production of an image in a strong sense. This process of obviation seems very similar to the semiotic and aesthetic processes theorized by Grauer (1993) who might help us integrate Wagner's more idiosyncratic approach with a wider discourse because he articulates to a wider degree with structuralist and post-structuralist theory.15

Within the kaba feast which Wagner analyzes, a structural inversion or 'figure-ground reversal' (not opposition upon the same structural categories) of everyday relations and feasting structures is enacted. He portrays this as the constitution of the succeeding big man as having the over-arching power of the very negation of the social itself. This obviation is what Grauer would analyze as the construction of a negative field. A negative field is that revealed by a systematized disruption of the perceptual structures (present in what he calls the syntactic field) of everyday image production. This disruption is by means of 'antax', structural inversion, or in Wagner's terminology,

' See Foster 1988 for a sympathetic critique of some of the problems with Wagner 1986a & b and with some of the peculiarities of his writing. 50

obviation. For example, the use of negative space (the space between forms) that Cubism used to deconstruct perspective, or the use of dissonant chords by the serialists to disrupt musical, tonal space. In both cases the apparent effect is to disrupt signification in favour of the 'things themselves'. That is either 'spaces' or 'sounds' in our two examples. Thus we have here the manipulation of the perception of 'reality itself'; images in the strong sense indeed, they hide their own artifice, exuding 'naturalness'. For, in a process Grauer does not fully emphasize, these forms as inevitably ideological artifacts cannot be meaningless. The halt to the chain of signification is of a purely temporary nature. Wagner, in his tripartite dialectical scheme, shows how each such synthesis becomes itself the subject of a further obviation. The image's autonomy from the word and its arbitrary nature, can only be a phase in the social life of an image. Convention and invention, in Wagner's terms, are always in action.

The second usage I wish to highlight is that of Harrison in relation to Sepik material.

'[A]esthetic experience seems implicitly to be conceived by Melanesians in this way, that is to say, as like being woken UP with a start, or the experience of an emotional shock.' (Harrison 1993b) Harrison extends the insight, first delineated by Forge (1967), that the aesthetic effects of the images in Sepik visual arts appear to be experienced by the Abelam as power. Harrison further refines the understanding of this linkage by locating it in the experience of violence. The cultural power of Sepik visual art and violence derives from the masking effect of an extreme subjective impact on others. In forcing attention with urgency to a particular aspect of self-hood, they withdraw attention from the generality of experience. Thus, in Melanesian cultures where personhood is conceived as relational, importance is attached to the production of compelling images which through their focus and delimitation of relationality highlight different aspects of personhood. Thus the use of imagery in selftransformation. 51

'Avatip metaphors for homicidal aggression are clearly not of an explosive inner force but draw implicitly on imagery of masking, self-disguise and body-decoration, that is to say, on modes of aesthetic transformation of the se/f' (Harrison 1993b:125) Harrison (1993b) has recently shown how the mask of war is put on amongst the Avatip in order to foreground a particular sort of relationship - namely warfare. In contradiction to a Hobbesian tradition of analysis, he argues that war is used to delimit, or obscure, the entropic generalized sociality which threatens to dissolve Avatip groups. The Avatip speak of this as a 'covering up' of their 'Understanding', which is the capability of apprehending social obligations associated with hearing, and the source of sociability, compassion and amity. (1993b:96-1O1). What this Understanding is masked with in warfare is 'Spirit', the ideal of imposing oneself on the world, sharpness. Associated with speech, kaiyik, Spirit, literally means an 'image' of something (or important painted designs of the men's-house, or, nowadays, a photograph). In an initiated man this Spirit becomes detachable, an item of adornment with a sentient existence separate from its owner. In war Avatip regalia involved the wearing of a mask which covered their face and which embodied this Spirit. Harrison argues that this masking of generalized sociality with anonymizing decoration is common within Melanesia, and quotes a range of ethnographic evidence. The production of particular amity within the group can only be produced through use of masking. The violence of the masked man is not seen as due to a breakdown in political structure, or from any inner desires, but from aesthetic transformation via the embodiment of image.

In 'What You See Is Sometimes What You Get.' (n.d.) O'Hanlon points out the problematic and political nature of such attempts at selftransformation. In a series of works (1989, 1992, n.d.) he investigates the ideological nature of Wahgi body decoration. Just as the claims of a clan's autogenesis conceal the reliance on affinely and matrilaterally related groups, so in their body decoration clan unity is highlighted. But just as the self-contained clan is an ideological image

52

into which the big men attempt to force a group with a variety of extra-clan ties, so the correspondent body-decorations have within them covert matrilateral sources. What is more, in a mirroring of Gombrich's (1985) statements on the importance of titling in the interpretation of western visual art (cf. Mitchell 1986), O'Hanlon shows how verbal assessments persuade the audience of the selfevidentiality of the image with which they are presented. Seeing the decorated clan as a male autogenic unity, which is at the same time constructed from individual entities with diverse extra-clan sources, requires the same paradoxical trick of consciousness Mitchell described as necessary for the perception of any image. Thus just as there is a man of understanding underneath the mask-image of spirit and there is a husband and son beneath the patrilineal-image of a Wahgi pig festival, so there is a lot of yellow-paint beneath the image of Van Gogh's sunflowers. In Melanesia the conception that people are the sum of their relations inevitably leads to a stress on the framing of image construction whenever it is important that a person or group be one thing in particular.

This viewpoint is, of course, closely related to the conclusions which Strathern (1988) draws in her magisterial analysis of the manipulations of relationality in Melanesia, which determine a particular aesthetic of conventionalized cultural forms. '[R]elations are only recognized if they assume a particular form' (Strathern 1988:180) Persons are objectifications of, and thus revelations of,

relationships (e.g. 1988: 273-4). They are known by the aesthetic effect, the image, they present.

Ontology and imagery

Following through some of Strathern's insights, a recent paper by Miller(n.d.) criticizes the universalization of western 'depth' models of ontology in which authentic being is seen as deriving from metaphors of the inner self, rootedness and solidity, and as incompatible with that characterized as shallow, ephemeral or mutable. An ontological 53

model attached to such evaluations has political implications. Concern with surface visage has been used to stigmatize and characterize dominated groups such as women, the young, and ethnic minorities within our own culture, with the implication that their presentation of self is less 'real' than that of more 'established' classes. At the same time, such marginal groups use these 'superficial' forms as a capital in creating their own distinct presence and authenticity. Other cultures may not construct being according to western ideology. Melanesians, in particular, are known to locate the self on the skin, gaining authenticity through the gaze of others. 'Surface' there is not superficial. Ontology is not found within, in inaccessible memorial depths, rather it is upon externalized, publicly adjudged, imagery that it is found.

This kind of approach together with an emphasis on what makes an image compelling, is espoused by Bachelard:

'[T]he relation of a new poetic image to... the depths of the unconscious. - - is not, properly speaking a causal one. The poetic image is not subject to an inner thrust. The poetic image is not an echo of the past. On the contrary: through the brilliance of an image, the distant past resounds with echoes, and it is hard to know at what depth these echoes will reverberate and die away... it is in the opposite of causality, that is, in reverberation,.., that I think we find the real measure of the being of a poetic image. In this reverberation, the poetic image will have a sonority of being... Therefore, in order to determine the being of an image, we shall have to experience its reverberation in the manner of Minkowski's phenomenology.' (Bachelard 1994:xvi) Thus for Bachelard a poetic image is a brilliant surface form, whose authenticity does not come from the past, but rather which illuminates the past with its reverberations. Such would also seem to be the natural Melanesian way to interpret new forms (cf. Strathern 1990, 1992). The resonance of poetic images that gives them their power brings to the fore previously unformed potentialities in the world around them. Their echoes form (give form to) the past and are in that sense its future causes. Truly poetic images create resonance

54

throughout the horizons of their world - present, past and future through their shaping of remembering and imagination. In Strathern's terms, 'past and future become present; any one form anticipates its transformation, and is itself retrospectively the transformation of a prior form.' (1992:249). Again, the successful production of an imposing image compels a newly shaped world into existence. The revelation of aesthetically compelling, powerful imagery upon one's skin implicates, or rather give social existence to, relationships (social being) with past, current and future orientation. Politics, the competitive production of such imagery, means that Melanesian leaders are vying not so much over their position in the world as their determination of that world (although of course it amounts to the same thing). Such, at least, would seem to be the implication of not merely Strathern's analysis, but those such as Munn (1986) and Clay (1992) who take the manipulation of 'space-time' as key in their analysis of agency. A 'big man' is someone who has presence in many people minds, enters into the consideration of their own actions; a 'rubbish man' is someone without such presence. A 'big man' makes a big splash, which create waves with effects upon far shores. Minkowski uses an example of resonating waves in a sealed vase, filling the microcosm with its sonority. Take away the physicality of the waves and their reflections and:

'... this is precisely where we should see the world come alive and, independent of any instrument, of any physical properties, fill up with penetrating deep waves which, although not sonorous in the sensory meaning of the word, are not, for this reason, less harmonious, resonant, melodic and capable of determining the whole tonality of life. And this life will reverberate to the most profound depths of its being, through contact with these waves, which are at once sonorous and silent. '(Minkowski, quoted Bachelard 1994:xvi) The tubuan masks and other Lak aesthetic productions are clearly poetic in nature. They are compelling for their audience and they transform the tonality of the Lak world. They cast ontological reverberations throughout Lak life. It would not be productive to analyze them in terms of any 'deep' ontology. Going 'beyond' the 55

forms for a psychological or symbolic content would not be true to the local conceptions of imagery. Sontag, in a seminal article 'Against Interpretation' (1994) argues against the violence of 'interpreting' content, where interpretation is an act of pushing aside or translating 'manifest' content in favour of unearthing a more 'valuable', 'truer' meaning for the analysts own purposes. The form of much of modern art ( cf. Grauer 1993) can be understood as motivated by an attempt to avoid such interpretation through parody, abstraction or close identification with its material structure. One could perhaps regard the disguise and censure of speculation upon the production of Lak pidik (secret) imagery as a parallel move to restrict interpretation, and concentrate attention upon the sensory experience of the presentation. Rather than argue in terms of representational qualities of symbols, as an excessive stress on interpretation of content tends to, I will stress the formal as suggested by both the relativizing analysts of western imagery such as Sontag and Bachelard, and by indications of a surface, present orientated aesthetic by Strathernian analysis of Melanesian personhood. These suggest that one proceed in terms of the examination of formal resonance, dissonance or motivation amongst cultural objectifications. Sensational, phenomenal correspondences or disjunctures between forms provide a more convincing relationship between areas of culture than reificational procedures of either local or imported schemes of interpretation. This makes for many difficulties in description and analysis in the monothetic media of text. How does one describe the character of the aesthetic relationship between the dal female initiate and the tubuan mask without referring at all to interpretational abstractions such as gender and ritual? One cannot, and indeed for the purpose of generalization one would not. However references to 'gender' make little sense without a description of 'its' undoubtedly polythetic qualities and the differences or associations they make with the qualities of other phenomena.

Not all forms will have the same weight. To extend Minkowski's analogy: some will create a large splash with bigger and further reaching ripples than others, which may perhaps have the benefit of 56

regularity or cohesion in their effects. This is a restatement of a distinction I made earlier between cultural reproduction through all encompassing experiences and subconscious repetitive praxis. if we are trying to gain an understanding of the poetic power of imagery we must take into consideration the destructive or constructive interference16 of other, perhaps humbler, forms. Thus a landscape of forms with different frequencies, amplitudes and location of impact of objectifications could in theory be determined, in which the mode of existence (ontology) was not in the depths but in the ripples of cultural form.

In the 'west' surface vs depth is only one of the ways by which we categorize the ontological status of our objectifications (including our selves). Scarry (1985:311-315) has put most succinctly the distinction Europeans make in the reality of cultural artefacts (including own personhood) in terms of the visibility of their processes of externalization. (The parallels are with Marx's notions of reification and fetishism.) She distinguishes the 'super-real', the 'real' and the 'unreal':

'the 'madeness' of objects in the first category is both unrecognized and unrecoverable, and the 'madeness' of the objects in the second category is unrecognized but, on reflection, recoverable, the 'madeness' of objects in the third category is not simply recoverable and recognized but self-announcing.' (Scarry 1985:314) So artifacts which function by seeming to have a greater authority'7 and reality than persons, such as gods, or perhaps divine monarchy, are 'super-real'. Art objects, poems, films, sonatas are framed by their status as fictional and therefore 'unreal'. The vast majority of everyday artefacts are 'real', in as much they appear as independent entities most of the time, but their status as products of human labour is re-traceable. Ontological status is graded through fetishism:

16

The analogy is, of course, with interference patterns familiar from wave mechanics. 17

Note, author-ity, is the mode of construction of this ontology. 57

the locus of creative agency grants the subjectified entity ontological priority over the objects of its externalization. The author, whether deity or mortal scribbler, is granted both greater reality and greater truth than his/her productions.

This connection of truth and ontology is a 'Western' ideology and should not be inappropriately applied to Melanesian contexts, where as Lattas (1989) has convincingly demonstrated, the creative power of 'lies' is a valorized source of power and central to social reproduction in rituals where men trick women into 'believing' in their illusions. The viewpoint of Nietzsche (1968), who famously highlighted and elevated the necessity of lies for life and their necessity in the artistic power of transforming the world and one's self, is more appropriate. The point is the power and inevitability of the cultural construction of ontological categories, however varied the social validation and recognition of the 'fictional' or, more neutrally, 'poetic' means of doing so. One cannot be, or act, in an ontologically undifferentiated world. The forming of things into images is perhaps the prime mechanism for this differentiation and grading of 'reality'. The manipulation of attention and aesthetics involved in this is a central concern of this thesis.

58

CHAPTER 2 ethnographic orientation

59

fly ethnography is a product of a quantitive and qualitative

intersection and interaction of the ethnographer and particular places, people and events in the specific frame of fieldwork. It is from within this envelope of co-presence and experience that my data was collected and what authority I may have in writing about the lives of others gained. Here I present an initial sketch of some of the environment which formed the background for the lives of myself and the people with whom I was working and living during the period of October 1994 to June 1996 in which, bar a 1 month break in July 1995, I was resident in Siar village.

V V V

GEOGRAPHIC ORIENTATION Province, electorate, ward New Ireland is a long narrow mountainous island of some 220 miles in length, and between 7 and 35 miles width, which lies on a NW-SE axis to the east of the mainland of Papua New Guinea, of which It is a province. It is geographically part of the Bismark Archipelago and lies between the largest island of the archipelago, New Britain, which is about 20 miles to the west of its southern tip, and the smaller island of Manus which is about 200 miles to the west of the northern tip. New Ireland Province includes the line of small volcanic satellite islands to its east, Anir, Tanga, Lihir, and Tabar. Also within New Ireland, to the north, is the island of New Hanover. Politically within New Britain, in the narrow St George's Channel which separates it from New Ireland, are the small but heavily populated Duke of York Islands. The Lak Electorate lies between the Mimias and Lakut rivers in the Namatanai district. It is one of New Ireland's largest (1035 km 2) and least populated (2130 - 1990 census) Electorates. It comprises much 60



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of the eastern half of the 'bulge' at the southern extreme of New Ireland, where it is at its greatest width, and the mountain ranges at their greatest height. These are the Hans Meyer and Verron ranges which rise dramatically either side of the Weittin, the largest river in southern New Ireland, to heights of 2340m and 2028m respectively. The Weittin valley, which lies approximately 5 km to the southwest of Siar, is a major rift valley (following a fault line which divides the Pacific and Indian Ocean tectonic plates), which rises from a wide delta to a saddle point separating it by only a short distance from the west coast Kamdaru valley.

Siar is one of 15 wards composed for census and administrative purposes within the Lak Electorate. It consists of a stretch of coastline of about 5 km length with 2 large villages, and 5 hamlets of only a few households each, within it. Siar was my home and the larger of the two villages with c.108 inhabitants in 18 households and 2 men's houses. The second village Pukonmal had a population of c.72 inhabitants in 14 households and 1 men's house.' 8 They lie at the edge of the somewhat flatter and, bar the island of Lambom, most densely populated central coastal area of Lak. But even here the coastal strip is very narrow, rising quickly into the steep mountains of the interior. To the north and most dramatically to the south, the mountains descend steeply to the sea. In the words of one of the Australian officers who patrolled this area by foot (also cited in Albert 1987a: 19): 'These villages have precarious footholds on a most inhospitable coast with almost sheer cliffs arising from the sea.' (FA

18

For Siar the figures break down as follows:

Elderly (50+) Adult (25+) Young Adult (16-25) Chi(dren TOTAL 61 32 9 12 Male 8 23 47 5 Female 16 3 108 55 14 28 TOTAL 11 In Pukonmal the split is 38 male, 34 female. These figures are for the settlement of Siar and Pukonmal villages themselves in December 1995 and April 1996 respectively, excluding the nearby hamlets. The population is more or less variable depending on visiting patterns, school attendance etc. 62

Kaad, Patrol Report 2/1949-50)

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MAP 2: The Lak Etectorate. Adapted from 1980 Census report.

63

Environment

Lak is a riverine area, with a moist tropical climate and a mean annual rainfall ranging from 2,000-4,000 mm. It has a marked rainy season during the southeastern monsoon of July-October when 200-300 mm per month is likely, and a less defined hotter and drier period from November-March when it is protected from the northwest monsoon by the interior mountains. Drought is rarely more than a minor problem. Although minor streams may dry up, there are generally larger rivers or more constant springs within feasible, if difficult and time-consuming, access of villages. Gardens do suffer from excess sun, but the damage is lessened by the construction of shades and by the carrying of water to the garden. A more severe problem is excess rain. Most people try and store food prior to the start of the really wet period, however few people can escape without hardship if flooding damages their gardens. Clean water is also a problem when it rains too much. Although some villages have concrete water tanks built at the time of the Australian colonial government, none of these work now and for most villages' 9 when the rivers flood, complete removal of sediment from drinking water is difficult. Mobility can be severely restricted by bad weather in the rainy season. Many of the larger rivers flood into raging torrents which are impossible to cross either on foot or in transport. Paths become slippy and water-logged. The sea becomes extremely rough and dangerous for canoe transport. When the rains come, the sky is as dark as dusk all day and the village becomes a muddy playing field in which squealing naked infants slide and skid while their elders sleep, chat and grumble around the fire in the gloom of the men's-house or home. Life and work come to a standstill until the rains lift, and although people do their best to schedule work, especially ritual work, to those times of year in which rain is less likely, such is the unreliability of the weather, and the difficulty of success in any project should it turn against you, that weather magicians can charge (or blackmail) a high price for

19

The exception is Matkamlagir, which recently, with the backing and support of the Provincial Finance Minister who comes from that village, persuaded the government to construct a piped water supply to the centre of the village. 64

their services at any time of year. The vast majority of vegetation in Lak is primary rainforest, of which there are four distinct types present relating to the relief in different areas (see DEC,CRC 1995). There are also mangroves and areas of secondary growth and gardens. The rainforest is inhabited by a variety of fauna of which relatively few are large - wallabies, cuscus, and many bat species, and wild pigs are the most important. There is also much avifauna, including many large birds of prey and colourful parrots, but not the cassowaries which are important in neighbouring New Britain. On some parts of the coast there are saltwater crocodiles and beaches where giant turtles come ashore. Although much of the Lak coastline is rocky, there are some coral reefs (especially fine around Lambom), and many beaches of volcanic sand. Some of the reef is dying however: around Siar it has been covered by pebbles, and at Makamlagir it is covered with silt as a by product of logging. Logging and logistics In recent years, after a long period of quite minimal physical effects on the landscape, state and, in particular, capitalist forces have made some dramatic changes in conditions in Lak. In 1986 the authorities extended the east coast road as far as the government outpost at Silur (see map), making access to and from the small administrative centre of Namatanai (& ultimately the distant provincial capital Kavieng) somewhat easier for officials with access to 4 wheel-drive vehicles and given the forbearance of the weather. Previously the area had only been accessible from the north on foot, or by infrequent government or commercial copra boats (which now no longer operate) across sometimes dangerous seas to the major town of Rabaul in New Britain. The onset of logging operations in Lak in 1991 by Niugini Lumber Merchants, a Malaysian owned contractor, brought many further changes. They constructed logging camps at Metlik and Pukton, and 65

started the ongoing process of harvesting timber from the one third (approx 26,000 hectares 20 ) of the Lak Timber Rights Purchase (covering most of the Lak electorate) which is suitable for commercial logging. The remaining areas have been excluded mainly on the criteria of difficult terrain, or proximity to restricted areas (e.g. land in use, or water sources etc). Between 1991 and 1994 at least 163,000 m 3 of timber was harvested (= approx. 80,000 trees), from around 8,600 hectares of forest. The logging is not proceeding within Papua New Guinean environmental guidelines 2 ' and has caused environmental degradation, the most immediately noticeable effects of which include erosion, pollution and siltation of water sources and reefs and choking, invasive growth of vines in clear-cut forest. Longer term effects on flora and fauna are not yet readily apparent from the village.

The logging company have extended the rough road all the way to Metlik, close to point St George, and over the large precipitous mountains of southern Lak, and brought back into use the long defunct airstrip at Silur. This road is frequently impassable after bad weather and only a few of the bridges promised by the company were built. It is clear that when the irregular maintenance of the logging company stops after the completion of their contract the road will soon become impossible to navigate. The flights to the airstrip will also stop. For the time being, there is a small amount of company and government traffic on the road on which locals can sometimes gain lifts between villages or to town. There was also for a short period (1 year) a large community truck, donated by the government, available for hire. A very few small pick-ups are now owned by local individuals, either as a result of logging money, or through government employment. Many of these are in a poor state of repair, some are

20

This and subsequent figures relating to the logging process in Lak are taken from DEC,CRC 1995. 21 See DEC, CRC 1995, esp p30. The loggers have been contravening the PNG Environmental Planning Act, and had up to 9O% non-compliance with the dictates of the plan submitted. An experienced forestry expert (Dr Frans Arenz) is quoted as saying 'it is the worst example of rape and pillage style operations I have observed'. 66

intermittently available for hire. Although transport is unreliable, and difficult to access for the vast majority of Lak, it is for the moment feasible to transport goods to and from Namatanai and several small and irregular stores have sprung up to try and take advantage of this. Lak had previously been almost entirely within Rabaul's economic hinterland, but the combination of the new road and a disastrous volcanic eruption in Rabaul in 1994 had shifted the balance somewhat to Namatanai during my stay.

I and my wife shared many of the problems of local people as regards difficulties with transport and the terrain. However, unlike them we were reliant on intermittent trips to either Namatanai or Rabaul for supplies as our attempts to grow our own garden foods were rather unsuccessful, though we did receive some food in gifts and purchases from local people. Initially this was achieved by attempting to arrange a lift/hire a car all the way to Namatanai. This would often prove an onerous task both in terms of the obtaining cars, the reliability of the vehicle and difficulties of the journey/terrain/weather, and then often the same problems on arranging a return. In the second half of our stay, when the Silur flights were more frequent and our cash flow less difficult, we would instead fly to Rabaul which 'only' involved arranging transport for our cargo to and from the airstrip, but was also rather reliant on the weather. At the end of our stay I had the difficult task of obtaining a boat to transfer our trunk to Rabaul, and can confirm the frightening reputation of the conditions of some boats, and the rough seas around Cape St George. At least one boat sank making the same trip during our stay. Within Lak I initially would walk to villages as far north of Siar as Morkon (10 miles or so), sometimes being lucky enough to meet transport on which I could hitch. The mountains between Matkamlagir and the villages further to the south, I found more of an obstacle, which limited my visits to the few times I arranged a ride on a truck going that way. By the second half of my fieldwork, I had obtained a mountain bike which enabled me to be more independent and expand the range of villages I visited

67

as far as Rei to the north, although I never felt quite determined enough to cross the southern mountains on two wheels.

V V V

LINGUISTIC ORIENTATION

Languages and communities

Language is often used as a convenient, if not necessarily strictly accurate, tag by which to group peoples and cultures within New Guinea and elsewhere. 'Lak' as in the Lak Electorate is not congruent with the area that shares the dominant language or cultural practices of that region, which extends some way beyond both it's northern and western boundaries. It seems to be a relatively new term, deriving from the indigenous word used to nominate another, in a friendly fashion, without using their name. 22 It probably gained the sense of referring to the people who now live in the Lak Electorate during the colonial period. Siar is in fact an older term for the language and the group of people who speak it, in addition to being the name of my host village. Unfortunately there are people who speak 'Siar' whose traditions (kastom - see below) would not be identified as Lak/Siar. I will in fact use both terms largely synonymously, as do local people, without, I hope, causing unwarranted confusion. Lak is primarily an areal term and has become the most widely used expression in local, administrative and anthropological discourse. 'Siar' pre-dates and therefore is not limited by the bureaucratic boundaries. It also designates the village which was the locus from which my understanding of local culture was gained.

The language situation in the area is quite complex. According to the bibliography of Huskes (1932) Siar was formally studied by Neuhaus, a Catholic priest based in Namatanai, but the manuscripts he

22

Although it lak is often used in name avoidance situations (see section on kinship below) its use is not limited to them. Lak is also the root in Iakman - village, and kamlak - spouses MB or ZS 66

produced seem no longer to be extant. 23 The only mission language materials on Siar are manuscript catechisms in the language in the Vunapope Mission archive24 . In 1986 the SIL linguist and his wife Larry and Joann Erdman came to Lak, basing themselves in Lambom, with the ultimate aim of producing a New Testament in the language. Unfortunately they had to cut short their work due to ill health, and only a technical analysis of word order (Erdman 1991) has been accessible to either myself or the subsequent SIL workers who have recently restarted their work. I have few pretensions as a linguist, and although by the end of my stay I cou'd understand the gist of most that was said, I could never converse in Siar to more than a young child's ability. All of my interviews were carried out in the lingua franca of Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinean Pidgin), albeit often with a fair proportion of Siar mixed in. I was more able, and indeed my informants were more helpful to me, as a collector of words, assembling a fair dictionary, especially as relates to the sometimes obscure vocabulary relating to ritual matters. I found the patterning of word forms particularly useful in my analyses.25

Siar is an Austronesian language of the Patpatar-Tolai subgroup (Lithgow & Claasen 1969) and is the language of choice for the vast majority of inhabitants of Lak. Tok Pisin is spoken fluently by all in Lak, with the exception of a very few elderly women and the very young. Now that more outsiders are finding their way into the area (because of the logging company and general increased access to towns), and some marrying in, pidgin is increasing in use. It is also the language of services in the Catholic church (which holds sway from Siar northwards). The United Methodist Church (Matkamlagir south) holds its services in Kuanua (Tolai). Many people understand 23

Neither I nor a previous ethnographer, Steven Albert, had any luck in locating a copy and Beaumont (1972) also comments that many of the manuscripts listed in this bibliography seem no longer to exist. 24

There is no author credited on the typescripts, however one had 'Maurer' penciled on it, which presumably refers to Heinrich Maurer, another Catholic Priest who worked in the Namatanai area from the late 1920's onwards. process was much inspired by Gell's classic language work in Metamorphosis of the Cassowaries (1975). 69

a certain amount of the neighbouring languages, especially those living in 'overlap' areas.

163'

/ / --% '

T.tauf

I

TABAR%

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a

/L*mWGIIl.

.,LIHIR

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/

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—.,

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3'

/

-

/'

BAROK

-

PATPATAI?

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0,

/ / / /

Num.tan.t

TANGLAMET

/

Hilalon

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I

/

SURSURUNc

d'

O

TOLAI

b.uI

Ma*.* I \._$ursIiI

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- — çin.n

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Rel ,lorkon (Konomalu enclave) Kamporam (Guramalum enclave)

i

PENINSULA



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)Guramalum enclave)

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153'

Map 3 :Language groups. Adapted from Beaumont 1972.

70

20 nullS

40

The use of Siar seems to be expanding. It is the primary language in all villages between Rei and Lamassa and is certainly well known some distance beyond these villages. Albert quotes a typescript produced by a SIL survey team (Copland & Woodland n.d.) 26 which reports that 'during the last generation Lak/Siar has completely swallowed one language (Guramalum) and made significant inroads on another (Konomala)' (Albert 1987a:24). Guramalum was the language spoken by one of the last groups to come down from the mountains and is only spoken now by a very small number of people in the widely separated villages of Kalapopo and Kamparam. Although I am unsure of the exact situation in Kamparam, in Kalapopo it was only spoken at all fluently by the senior generation of one small clan (2 people), and will not survive as a 'living' language. Konomala has an enclave of speakers in the village of Morkon, and then a more established presence north of Rei. Around Muliama is a small enclave of Tanglamet dialect speakers, which is also spoken on the islands of Tanga and Anir. From there northwards for some way, Susurunga is the dominant language. But all of those in Morkon, and it was my impression, many of those for some distance north of Rei also speak Siar. At the southern extreme of Lak in the United Church sphere of allegiance, many people understand Kuanua, the language of the Tolai and Rabaul, the major service town, as well as the church. To the north of Lamassa on the west coast the Kandas language is spoken. Within that area is a further small language enclave at the village of Nasko where Lambel is spoken. Lambel is another language associated with the groups that previously lived in the mountainous interior, and which seems to have descendants on both coasts. Although they do not speak Lambel there are some Lak clans (e.g. one eponymously calling itself Lambel, and another Konobuah) which seem to be derived from this group and recognize as kin Nasko inhabitants.

The available lexicostatistical correlations between Siar and the neighbouring languages (from Lithgow & Claasen 1969, Albert 1987)

26

Unfortunately unavailable to me. 71

are 70% for Kandas, 41 or 48% for Konomala, 31 or 51% for Tanglamet, 7O% or 'much lower' for Guramalum. Any account of the historical connections and migrations of the language groups is rather a matter of conjecture, based upon the marginalia of a very few documented colonial encounters. I will not rewrite that story which Albert (1987) has already discussed but merely summarize the conclusion at which he arrives, and with which I concur, viz, that Lak\S ia r seems to be a recent product of the influence of both coastal and inland groups, and the successive migration of further mountain groups to the coast accounts for further variation and linkage with other languages in the Patpatar family.

Language use and transmission

It became clear to me in the field that knowledge of languages, as well as the language or dialect form itself, has not only a geographical and a temporal, but to some extent social, variance. These are by no means independent variables. Thus Siar\Lak has quite noticeable variations in pronunciation and word form between its northern, central and southern speakers. 27 Also a northern inhabitant would be far more likely to understand Konomala than a southerner who might well speak Kuanua. Albert (1987:26) says that, in his time in the field, elderly informants could remember a time when even neighbouring villages (e.g. Siar and Bakum) spoke languages only mutually understandable with difficulty. During my own fieldwork many younger and even middle aged people would complain that they did not always understand the vocabulary used by their elders. Particularly in the realm of public ritual, many would not know the meaning of names for events they had taken part in many times, or of words of songs they had sung many times because, they said, the lyrics were too old or were in the languages used by the bush people. Some of the elderly, particularly those men 'specializing' in public

27 Although perhaps not linguistically competent to make the distinctions, I doubt these variations could be classified as separate dialects. The difference to me seemed more in the nature of regional accent. Indeed my informants would parallel the difference in the way someone from Morton and Lambom would speak as similar to the difference between my own northern English and my wife's southern English accents. 72

ceremony, understood some of these 'fossilized' meanings. But, for instance, much of the daut songs that are sung in many villages from dusk until dawn during the mourning phase of the death rites are not really understood by anybody anymore. I only found a very few, very old men who could translate small segments. It is now mostly elderly or middle-aged men who are able to sing these songs, and although all villages agree that they are part of the required practice at the appropriate stage in the rites, many no longer sing daut, because they do not have enough men who know them. Much of the meanings of quite contemporary language use in the ritual sphere are also esoteric to many. Many of the canon of modern song and dance performances presented during the funerary rites originate from neighbouring areas and their words are incomprehensible to most of the performers and audience. The powerful words of magic also often involves 'foreign' or old languages whose meaning is recondite to most. Further in the artifice of obscurantism is the secret vocabulary surrounding pidiks, most notably the tubuan.

The problems of interpreting foreign, archaic, or invented language is in these cases related to the their role in the production of power. This is so in an at least three ways: firstly, in an evocation of otherness and mystery which associate the language users with a transcendent; secondly, in the (often initiatory) hierarchization of the knowledge sometimes needed to interpret or produce such numinous discourse; thirdly, following the lines of argument of Bloch's (1974) classic paper, the reduction of propositional meaning within the unfamiliar formalized utterances is part and parcel of an increase in illocutionary authority. An implication of this as regards language transmission and use in southern New Ireland is that it may not merely be a matter of minority languages being 'forgotten' in response to dilution of the language group. When what is passed on are words which have 'added' value through their exotic and poorly understood nature (cf. the arguments in Barth 1987 & 1990), the distortion of conventionalized (ie. true, living language) meaning is accelerated. If there is not a certain degree of familiarity with the source language in the community as a guard against excessive distortion, the 73

discourse may become so little recognizable as to become too nonsensical to create the aesthetic effect which attracts the effort at interpretation that its mystery, value and power may depend on.

The (re)production of languages, as much as other bodies of knowledge, depends largely on the practical strategies its communication serves. I collected two stories in Lak which relate the origin of different languages to the competitive fracturing and dispersal of an originary social group.

1)

[This story was told to me by Daniel Goro of Lambon. Its first section details how primordially there were only 2 sets of siblings who exchanged sisters (or brothers) for marriage to start the fragmentation of society into moieties and eventually all the clan groupings of today. The second section, which I reproduce here, further details this fragmentation, as shown in the production of men's houses (pal) which are icons of co-operative kinship units (kampapa!) under the auspices of a single leader (kamgoi). Pal/kampapa! are in competitive feasting and exchange relationships with each other.] '.... Ok this was the start of us. But at the start there was only one language. This is the language of the bush. But when they built the men's houses , now all the languages broke and came up. If they called out for some wood to go up [to the men working on the roof], they gave rope. Ok, the group down below, those above called for wood and they gave rope. Ok this line now had another language. Ok, if they called out for rope and they gave wood it was another language now. They went on like this. The languages they were breaking now. This goes on and on. OK, all the languages are there now, and only one group now work there house on top. They hold this language and they gave it out. They call for rattan to come up and they give wood up. Or they give another thing to go up. OK, all our languages are broken now. Thus we now hold this language, and you go to Susurunga and there is another language, Kandas another, Duke of Yorks another. OK, you go to Rabaul that's another language.'

2)

[This account was told to me by Camillus Toanunal of Pukonmal, he was told it by the now dead Kortai of Sian 'A man and a woman married in Siar and made a house from stone at a place called Puardeli. They had 6 male and 6 female children. All the boys married the sister next in age. The last born married and got the house, the others left and worked houses in other places. In order to 'hide talk' from their brothers and sisters, who were jealous, new languages came about'

The stories suggests an original unitary body and speech and then subsequent group competition and distinction as productive of different languages. What evidence we have from the literature and the present situation in southern New Ireland actually suggests the 74

reverse of this process and the production of a more homogenous form of Siar amongst previously heterogenous language groups. However, the change in social conditions assodated with resettlement on the coast and increased colonial and mission influence - a reduction in warfare, enmity and territorial distinctness between the groups - would by the logic implicit in my informants stories indeed promote the sharing rather than distinguishing of languages. It is notable that logically similar processes have been proposed by anthropologists studying the evolution of language (Nettle & Dunbar 1997), who provide evidence to suggest that linguistic diversity may be a result of language's use as a social marker. Access to social cooperation may depend on the use of the right linguistic markers. Evolving a distinct dialect serves to mark membership of a social group and aid the stability of reciprocal support. Increasing the range of the group within which reciprocality was the rule would tend to increase the currency of the dialect.

The lessening of such 'external' language differentiation between groups, does not necessarily imply anything about degrees of 'internal' language differentiation within groups. Within Lak, informants report an apparent increase in linguistic incomprehension in the community, together with greater proliferation of dance, decoration and song forms and an increase in the degree of both cultural importation and native innovation. The high demand for such cultural valuables is associated with the high variance of language use within the group, which is one method of adding value to such possessions. This is probably linked to the decrease in linguistic differentiation between groups. The reduction of the enmity and warfare between groups, which was associated with their linguistic differentiation, appears to have been succeeded by a refocusing of competition within the group and therefore further language differentiation there. This is certainly reflected in the common observation by old informants th eviousy that leaders have reduced in individual stature and multiplied in number. This suggests that kastom with its tendency to linguistic differentiation has substituted for warfare as the mechanism of empowerment and 75

social control for leaders, a substitution which Foster (1995), without any comment on the linguistic aspect, also finds in Tanga. Thus the extensive use of allo-lingual forms within Lak 'culture', and by all accounts (e.g. Foster 1995, Clay 1986) elsewhere within New Ireland, need not be interpreted as evidence for the weak correlation between linguistic and cultural form in Papua New Guinea suggested by Welsch et al. (1992)28, nor as suggesting the disjuncture between certain cultural forms and the social, as proposed by Wagner (1991a), but rather as a form of politically motivated cultural inflation.

V V V

CULTURAL ORIENTATION

There are common 'roots', or generational elements, within the cultures of the Austronesian language speaking peoples of coastal and island New Guinea. Correlating with the linguistic differences with Papuan speakers are broad social and technological themes, the significances of which have recently begun to be considered by anthropologists working on the mainland. Thus, for example, panPapuan modes of gender relations and aesthetics have recently been postulated from examination of the distinctive material forms of Papuan culture (see Hauser-Schaublin 1996, Mackenzie 1991). Unfortunately little of this has occurred from the Austronesian perspective - the delineation of, say, 'basket-cultures' being merely the negative background from which such authors highlight the commonalities of the 'bilum-cultures' with which they are concerned.

In more detailed and structured consideration and comparison of a (sub)region, the mainland also leads the way (e.g. Knauft 1993) although there have been themed, but multi-perspective, collections on the Austronesian islands of the Kula ring (Leach 1983, Damon & Wagner 1989). Although they have yet to be studied as such, the

28 See, however, a critique of their analysis and results by Moore and Romney 1994, and a response by Welsch and Terrell 1994. 76

Bismark archipelago, and more narrowly the cultures the length of New Ireland and including the Tolal of northern New Britain, seem to form a distinct cultural region. These societies are matrilineal with a dual division into exogamous moieties which are identified with 'big' and 'little' birds, the sea-eagle and the fish-hawk, now recognized by the Kuanua terms manigu/al and tarangau. 29 Within the literature on these groups there seems to be common concerns with the reproduction of matrilineal groups in distinction to their partnered affinal unit (generally opposite moiety) of whose reproductive potential they are both origin and output (e.g. 'F' & 'S' relationship simultaneously). This is associated with a general emphasis on elaborate funerary and successorship rites in which the relationships of the deceased are made visible in public exchanges and displayed exchange goods, then 'forgotten', only to be refashioned into the ongoing political relations of the matrikin orchestrating the ceremony (e.g. Küchler 1986, Errington 1974, Wagner 1986, Clay 1986, Foster 1995). The area is largely homogenous in its emphasis on links between initiation and life-cycle rituals (particularly male initiation and death, but also female initiation and birth e.g. Fergie 1995). One can divide the island into overlapping and mutable regions characterized by their distinct instantiations of spiritual power in material form to which initiates have special access. There are the malangan cultures of the north, famous for their intricate wooden carvings which embody 'life-force' (see Küchler 1986); there were u/i, androgynous wooden figures from the central plateau, which are no longer extant (see Gifford 1974); and there are tubuan and tamianpoipoi (also known as talung, sokapana or tambaran), masking and buliroarer cults

respectively, which characterize the south of New Ireland (Albert 1987, Bell 1935), and for tubuan also northern New Britain and the Duke of Yorks (Errington 1974). Of course, questions remain as to the status of a 'region' based on possession of apparently similar cultural

29 Mutti-clan systems are present from Fatmilak northwards (Chinnery 1929). Nor do Tangans divide themselves into exogamous moieties. Foster 1995:71 does, however, discern similar structures of dual organization to those used on the mainland as present within the marriage preferences and 'brotherly' support relationships between pairs of clans. 77

complexes amongst neighbouring groups. 3° The tubuan in Siar, although widely held to be 'the same thing' as the tubuan in the Duke of Yorks or amongst the Tolai, and indeed their originary source, is actually quite different in many of its details.

The common themes within the region seem to have been widespread for some time. Early records, compiled by Albert (1987:27-35) show that the tubuan society extended over a large section of the southern coasts. There are reports of it in Kalil in the Patpatar language group (Stephan & Gräbner 1907:120)31, at King and Lamassa in Kandas (Stephan & Gräbner 1907:120, Baudouin 1883:136) and at Likiliki/Metlik (Duperrey quoted in Stephan & Grabner 1907:8) and Mimias (HahI 1907:315) in Lak. There are also numerous early reports of its presence in the Duke of Yorks and the Tolai area of New Britain, some of which date its presence there to only a short period before the arrival of the missionary George Brown in 1875. Local histories there, say that the Tubuan arrived from Siar (Simet 1977:2-3), whence also the Tolai trace their own origins (see Sack 1987 on the complexities of this). The dal female seclusion and initiation seems to have been present in a roughly comparable area within New Ireland. Bell tells of its presence as dafal on Tanga (1936). George Brown reports of coming across it on his 1876 transit of New Ireland (1910). Rickard (1892) witnessed a similar ritual, this time called kihal on the west coast of New Ireland. Brown also quotes Rev. Rooney (no reference given) observing the rite, and from the reference to 'Maramara and Pikalaba clans' this would appear to have taken place in the Duke of York Islands.

There is evidence that certain cultural performances, not just song and dance, but such practices as the seclusion and initiation of young girls, magic, or secret societies such as the tubuan or bullroarer

cf. Werbner 1992 and others on the problems of identity between the similar '(afar and Ida cults of the Western Sepik region. 31

Though they were told it was at that time extinct, possibly because of the influence of the Methodist mission. 78

societies have travelled extensively between a large number of groups within and beyond southern New Ireland for some considerable period of time, and continue to do so to this day. Bell (1935) describes the acquisition of sokapana (buliroarers) from central New Ireland by specific Tangan leaders during the years of the 1st world war. In the last few years tubuan have been transacted over the larger distance from the Duke of York Islands to the Lelet plateau. Tubuan from Lak have performed in Kavieng for the opening of a hotel, and while I was in the field preparations were being made for the acquisition of masks from Lambom by Sir Julius Chan the then prime minister of Papua New Guinea.

Such practices, despite their emphasis on access to obscure and/or restricted sources of power, seem more mobile than one might imagine. This seems to counter the model of New Guinea knowledge transmission put forward by Barth (1990), in which the 'conjurer' is concerned to make the 'power' of religious knowledge apparent, while limiting its transmission. One explanation of the apparent promiscuity of such secrets may derive from their use in creating value and hierarchy (see e.g. Foster 1995:47): the sale of rights to such items provides income from new initiates and leverage over those denied access. As copyrights, these practices are suited to the ideal of 'keeping while giving' (see Weiner 1992) that one would wish for one's valuables. They are liable to be successful insomuch as the social dynamic of maintaining (or creating) hierarchical levels and 'power effects', such as compelling aesthetics and mystery, prevents the currency of the practice becoming devalued by either overexposure or the possibility of being disregarded. As valuables these practices have a quite different pattern and motivation of transmission, or adoption, than other less exotic, but more mundane cultural elements such as gardening practices, house manufacture or birth procedures.

It is similar aesthetic effects of 'power' in such performances that are both part of their status as valuables in 'local' contexts, and which also renders them suitable for display and use in the more globalized discourse of objectified cultural traditions that might be more relevant 79

to the Malagan Lodge or the Prime Minister. The secretly prepared, transformational and dramatic singsings and mask performances are the most travelled aspect of southern New Ireland culture. 32 A factor in the mobility of these 'entangled objects' (cf. Thomas 1991) is that the mixture of the sensational and mysterious which they present seems to be culturally salient in widely different contexts. These are indeed two qualities which can be linked to two adumbrated crosscultural aesthetic effects: namely the revelation of shining, brightness, 'brilliance' (cf Simmel 1950, and Morphy 1989, 1994, who fortuitously use the same term for related concepts) and the 'difficulty [one has] in mentally encompassing their coming-into-being as objects in the world accessible to me by a technical process..' that Gell (1992:49) calls the 'enchantment of technology'. I will discuss in detail the relation of both of these posited processes to Lak aesthetics below. Here I merely suggest their role in the cross-cultural valuation and transmission of certain cultural forms.

Tradition in the region

The blurred edges and flows to and from and within cultural and linguistic areas creates difficulties in defining these areas in the first place. This is not merely a problem of description for the objectivising eye of the anthropologist wishing to create a stable object of study. It is an issue in local discourses of culture and identity, and processes of classifying people, bodies of practice and their relationships. Aspects of this have arisen in the anthropological discussion of the increasing prominence of the notion of 'kastom' within Island Melanesia. There are two major recent works within the region which analyse kastom in the context of broader historical and social processes, which I shall now discuss.

Foster (1992, 1995) delineates two major strands of exegesis that the term generally attracts: that emphasizing the role of state policy and 'nation-building' (e.g. Babadzan 1988, LiPuma & Meltzoff 1990); and

32

would hazard that the same is true for many other areas. 80

that emphasizing the oppositional stimulus of colonial encounters (e.g. Keesing & Tonkinson 1982). However, he argues that neither of these are appropriate for Tanga where he finds that kastom evolved as a means of articulating the conflicts surrounding the progressive 'commodification' of social relations. The latest phase of this was marked by the cessation of control of the commodity (primarily copra) economy by the big men. Foster sees this as the point at which kastom and bisnis were precipitated into existence as contrasted realms of practice. Individual households became the focal unit of the commodity economy (bisnis) while the reproductive gift exchanges and mortuary feasts for which the matrilineage is the focal unit became reified as kastom, an indigenous and distinct sphere of activity. So apparently in Tanga, kastoms primary effect is in delineating certain realms of practice and valuation associated with particular social formations and hierarchies within the culture, and only to a lesser degree in being an objectification and token of that culture in contradistinction to colonial and local 'others'.

Errington and Gewertz (1995) present a more complex picture of the multiple ways in which tradition is articulated in Karavar, one of the Duke of York islands. Their ethnography is telling: In one chapter, the importance of the locally specific nature of traditional cultural valuables in promoting Karavar and Papua New Guinean worth and differentiation in the face of the ex-colonial other, is shown in a confrontation between a local elite and expatriates apprehended attempting to export shell-money and masks. Yet in the next, an entirely local audience stage a re-creation of missionaries first contact, in which their fore-fathers are presented as hilarious, savage, pre-cultural, others to the Papua New Guinean citizens whose common national and Christian identity is based on their distance from the customs of their pagan ancestors. Contemporary evangelicals position themselves in opposition to their kastom practising neighbours, who they portray as anachronistic and illegitimate in their religious devotion. Yet the then prime-minister attends tubuan performances at mortuary celebrations and strongly identifies himself as embodying continuity with locally specific 81

ancestors and practices. The positioning of kastom is shown to be highly contested and context dependent at all levels within Papua New Guinea - local, national and international.

In the Lak area, there are similarities with both Karavar and Tanga in the subject matter referred to as 'kastom', and indeed with the 'cultural logic' which highlights it as seemingly incompatible with and distinct from bisnis (business) or lotu (church) practices. However, these distinctions are not so rigid, nor is the realm of practice as recent as presented by Foster. Within Lak there is substantial evidence for pre-colonial existence of a terminology and a distinct realm of activity roughly equivalent to what is today often referred to by the tok pisin term kastom. Although there are tensions between the commodity exchange form of business and that of traditional exchange, it is not, in the Tangan sense, contrasted with kastom because the same matrilineal social units are involved and the proceeds of commodity exchange often invested in kastom events. There are also various and differing tensions between kastom and the three churches in the region - for the majority though 33, the church was neither foundational for kastom nor in contradictory opposition. The colonially introduced, but not controlled, influences of commodification and mission morality are important within Lak, but do not effect the conception of kastom or culture in the uniform and hegemonic manner that seems to be the case for the former in Tanga and the latter in Karavar (where the mission introduced 'culture', and 'order'). In the following orientation I am largely in tune with Errington and Gewertz's insistence that we should not underestimate the complexity of such matters.

Local contexts of kastom

In Siar, there is a local word, wol, which has a meaning similar to that of kastom, and indeed the older people sometimes complain about the substitution of the Tok Pisin term in the speech of the younger

33 5ee below for more detail about the exceptions. 82

generation. Wol mainly refers to the set piece productions of the funerary and other rituals. Unlike kastom or tradition it carries a future orientation. It has been translated for me as referring to 'plans' or 'meetings' involved in bringing off a ritual performance. It is perhaps not coincidental that a pregnant pig, or one of a size to be able to carry litters, is also called wol. The analogy of gathering, planning and production is suggestive. Wol unlike 'tradition' or kastom is an intentional activity aimed at some transformation or result in the world.

Wol does however translate more happily into some terms familiar to us as tradition: it refers to a code of behaviour that carries a feeling of authenticity and power in its relationship to the past. Part of its relationship with the past is its close identification with, and empowerment by, the dead and their associated spirits. Wol relates to the 'laws' or standards of proper behaviour relating to ritual performances - kutuss ep wol means to break such strictures. The tubuan and then the bullroarer-spirit are the most powerful and 'strongest' forms of wol; these pre-eminent ritual performances, concern all male societies and male transformation into spirits. Their regulatory meetings, laws and enactments (these three aspects are classified together under the one expression, kilung for the tubuan, and odo for the bullroarer-spirit) are of the strictest and most absolute kind. The contrast with the maintenance of 'secular' order in warkurai public meetings is stark. 34 In K/lung and odo offenders face the judgement and punishment of the spirits themselves. They cannot evade such judgement, nor may they plea their case. They may be bodily brought into the sacred area of the spirits, and if recompense for an infringement is not swiftly forthcoming the tubuan or bullroarer-spirit will destroy the house and possessions of the

It is very similar to that presented between kilung and vurkurai, tubuan and 'secular' courts in Karavar, Duke of Yorks, by F. Errington (1974) & S. Errington (1977). 83

transgressor, and then kill him. Warkurai35, however, do not meddle in the affairs of such spirits. They mainly proceed on domestic and village affairs. Accusations of poison, theft or adultery are the standard fare. They have become absorbed into the colonial and now state framework of justice, in as much elected local government appointees 36 generally preside. However these courts are all too 'human': offenders may not turn up and cases may be discussed for many meetings without being resolved. The main implements of enforcement are shaming procedures and the mobilizing of community wide censure (e.g. refusal of assembled community to disband a meeting until a fine is paid).

Lesser matters of wol than those to do with the tubuan or bullroarerspirit are often spoken of after ritual feasts, when clan-leaders (kamgoi) give comment or 'schooling'. All the men who have gathered will sit separately to the women and after witnessing any distributions or exchanges eat betelnut and listen to the speeches of the kamgoi. They will comment on the success or otherwise of the proceedings and the appropriateness of the host clan's actions. I never heard of or witnessed any penalties meted out at these meetings, but rather was told stories of the misfortunes that befell those who did not follow wol. The implication of these stories was that spirits, generally of the dead, acting on their own behalf or controlled by living persons, could punish the wrong doer.

There is a subcategory of wol, termed sulmin, which refers to kastom events related to sum. Sum is a difficult concept, which relates to the presence of absences, in the sense of mourning taboos and debts. Sulmin are involved in overcoming these absences in funerary and

A likely derivation of the word warkurai comes from war- meaning talk or speech, and -kurai meaning I) prow of a canoe or ii) Iuluai (tok pisin), the colonial governments village representative. 36

Who, exactly this might be is quite variable and depends on the perceived seriousness of the case and who is available. Each ward of the electorate has a Komitee who is supposed to be specially concerned with enforcement of policies. Village elders and the ward member often play an active role also. There are also several Ministret and a Peace Officer in the Electorate who are the official representatives of the government in village courts. 84

successorship rites. Thus one has sulmin ep minat (death rites) and sulmin ep pal (production of a new mens house), but most definitely not sulmin related to marriage or dal festivities. Sulmin (and/or wol) also seems to imply revelation and newness/novelty. This is related to the notion of pidik. For instance, I was told more than one story of the acquiring, covering/secluding and then revelation at a feasting event of European effects or imagery (cf Strathern 1992), when the Lak were still unfamiliar with Europeans. This was not just the case with artifacts, but in the following intriguing case of myth-history, of a trader: A Chinese trader, Captain Cook (!) came to Likkilikki (Mietlik) when it did not yet have anyone living there. He slept in a picus tree there, and had his cargo cumulatively delivered there by ship. He also wore his shoes backwards, as a trick, so when he walked to the sea it looked as if he had come from there and vice versa. A man of Kaptux clan went to Mietlik to fish and discovered the China man and reported his presence to the men at Pukton. They came and captured the chinaman, but instead of killing him, built a large pal (men's house) at Pukton and hid Captain Cook inside the pal secretly, so none of the women saw him. Cook was kept in the pal for many (4/5) years. While in the pal he was not allowed to shave or to cut his hair. When he had to go out to toilet, they painted his feet and legs black and took him out under a pandanus rain cape. After the several years were up they hosted a custom to bring Cook out of the pal and reveal him to the women. They had to pay a fee (dok) on seeing the pidik and were supplied with a pig distribution. This was described as 'Sulmin ep kongkong' ('custom of the chinaman') A tonger was stood up, to remove sum, but there were no pig exchanges, because it was not a custom for a death. The chinaman had sum, in that his skin was covered up, long hair, paint on legs etc.. On coming out hair was cut, and placed in a bark cloth shell-money container (kamporoi) Cook was now free, and when a ship subsequently passed by they lit a large fire to signal to it. They said good-by to him and put him on board. (Edited account by Daniel Toanaroi of Siar).

All customary events involve disguise and revelation. This is the case both in terms of ritual imagery and in the motives and resources of the hosts. This account also associates sum and its removal with a similar covering up (both in the sense of the unshorn hair and black mourning paint and in the sense of seclusion) and revelatory process. Those uncovered from mourning sum are made new and valuable in a similar way to a pidik. Cook and the European artifacts, inexplicable effects of unusual qualities, were appropriated similarly as pidik emanations of spiritual power. As such they were incorporated into

85

the male realm, separated off from women and turned into valuables for display.

When is wol?

It is a point well taken in some recent discussions of traditions in island Melanesia (e.g. special issue Oceania 62, Keesing & Tonkinson 1982) that terms such as kastom or other indigenous categorizations such as vakavanua, the Fijian 'way of the land', always have within their usage particular implications for social and temporal positioning. Thus assertion of a special relationship between a group and a particular delineated praxis, structures the relations with others via that praxis. This may imply commonality with others that share that praxis and differentiation from those that do not, but not necessarily (cf. Thomas 1991). Notions of 'traditions' also bear within them assumptions of temporality. These may be, as is most commonly presumed in English usage, of continuity with particular communities of practice (e.g. Toren 1988), but can equally represent conditions of rupture or re-appropriation of a discarded past (e.g. Tonkinson 198 What is less highlighted within the literature is that, as with all aspects of identity, tradition\kastom\wol has implications for all the horizons of the entity. Kastom, like our own 'tradition' or heritage, is a particularly politically salient form of social memory. Its invocation has a great deal to do with the construction and delineation of a past with regard to present day and future oriented concerns.

In Siar my informants had a discourse about how kastom was more dominant in the time of their forefathers. 'All they did was work in the gardens, grow pigs and work kastom.' I was told demands on people's time from church, government and most recently business concerns (primarily logging) meant that less time and effort was expended on kastom. 'Before' big men were 'bigger' and more aggressive. There would be only one dominant kamgoi of each moiety

See also Jolly 1992 for comparison between Vanuatu and Fiji in terms of relationship to the past. 86

in each village and he would hold (or at least 'front') the funerary rituals for all the dead of his moiety. Clan/sub-clan leaders would then 'wash the hands' of the paramount kamgoi by recompensing him for the wealth expended on behalf of their dead. Now, there are 'too many little big men' and clans and sub-clans have a greater degree of independence, generally performing their own mortuary feasts. The men of before were also said to have had more pigs. Now, particularly in the densely populated Lambom area, inability to feed the larger numbers of people who would now attend, is given as a reason for dropping much of the kastom of before, and for instituting 'shortcuts'38 , new abbreviated forms of ritual.

These differentials, presented to me as significant in understanding changes between 'now' and 'before', suggest that there has been a flattening and a broadening of the hierarchies in Lak. Individual

kamgoi no longer dominate the means of production of symbolic capital to the same degree. They are lessened in their hold on the economy of valuables (primarily pigs and shell-money but also ritual possessions such as tubuan), which in turn lessens their ability through feasting to gain status and place in debt the kin of the deceased, gaining further access to land and valuables. How exactly the hold has been broken is difficult to recover, except in as much as church, government and business are all presented as competing concerns and sources of social and pecuniary capital. 39 However unlike Tanga, the increased competition faced by the 'big-men' has not been kept to a realm outside kastom. Rather it has lead to smaller units taking responsibility for their own dead and holding their own smaller feasts. It may well be the case, as suggested, that the pig population has not kept pace with the increasing human population. Kastoms will indeed seem smaller because the smaller feasting unit does not have the same opportunity to 'double-up' feasts as might a larger one which would include a number of dead under the umbrella of a single

38

This English phrase was used. I will examine these 'short cuts' in more detail

below. 39it may well be that the demise of the Iuluai system contributed to this. 87

large feast (hence gaining a greater 'utility' per pig).

There is a further ideological axis to the given decline of kastom and kamgoi in comparison with those of before. Lak ritual and ritual possessions gain much of their power and efficacy through the invocation of the dead and ancestral spirits. Pidik possessions are indeed sometimes referred to as tatasim turai - literally meaning old (tural) cleverness (tatasim) - and there is a feeling that much of such ancestral power and knowledge has been lost. Many times men excused their partial knowledge and non-possession of clan regalia (e.g. bullroarers), by saying that their elders had failed to pass on the stories and location of the magical underground store in which they hid their valuables before dying. This is often blamed on the possessive greed of their powerful predecessors. 4° This fragility in the transmission of power from its source with the dead and spirits, necessarily portrays the past as a locus of powerful kastom.

Tradition and its other

In Lak the attitude to wol is complex and fragmented and must be viewed on several scales. Within New Ireland the Lak electorate has a reputation as strongly traditional. Depending on the context this traditionality may be associated with 'backwardness', positively valued traditional sociality, ignorant belief in sorcery, or awesome ritual powers, amongst many other categorizations. Within Lak itself different areas and different villages have widely differing attitudes. At the one extreme are followers of the 4-Square Church 41 who have withdrawn from residence in United Church villages to form a new community in the newly formed village of Udam, and also on the mainland across from Lambom. They define themselves in sharp and sometimes antagonistic contradistinction to the other people of Lak

° cf. Errington & Gewertz 1987:Ch 1, on the Chambri conception of the entropy of power. 41

Also sometimes referred to by its members as the New Church - very possibly the same New church present in Karavar and discussed by Errington and Gewertz 1995:Ch. 4. 88

along a church/kastom axis. At the other end of the kastom continuum are situated villages like Siar, which is particularly known for the strength of its wol, but who define their relationship in different terms - certainly not in the opposition of church and tradition.

The Udam community believe that kastom and many other aspects of local life (ol samting bilong graun, 'things of the land') such as chewing betelnut are things bilong pies daun ( of hell/damnation). They have no mens house, refuse to attend feasting events, and have little shell-money or pigs. Their evangelism and withdrawal from customary responsibilities has been a source of much tension and some occasions of violence. They say they are persecuted. It seems clear to me that they are attempting to instigate a rupture between themselves and tudak, the time of darkness and sin before the arrival of the missions, which they see as perpetuated in the continuation of local 'customary' practices.

An illustration of the gulf between Udam and Siar occurred at the 1995 school closing ceremony for the Weittin primary school, which many children from both villages attend. One of the presentations from Udam involved khaki clad, mock gun toting forces of darkness moving to the staccato beat of a drum, rounding up white clad believers and, in an extended sequence, beating them to death in a vain attempt to make them recant their faith in the Lord. The reverberations of this performance are not difficult to discern, given the tension between Udam and other villages and their moral positioning of kastom. Amongst the performances presented from Siar was a small boys' (c7-l4yrs old) version of the primary male singsing

libung, complete with all its accoutrements of prior seclusion on the beach, the singing of magical songs to attract the desire of women, the preparation and wearing of copyright head-decorations, the covering of the boys in ochre mixed with dried sweet smelling plant materials, and the carrying of pampam - spirit possession devices by the lead two dancers. As they came out of the bush, singing their approach song, members of the 4-Square Church backed away with 89

cries of 'Satan, Satan'. Both the libung dance and the boys' decorations are formally (and conceptually) iconic of the tubuan and have a degree of its power. The pampam involves the use of bone relics and the invocation of place-spirits to possess the dancer. For both Siar and Udam groups the degree to which the dancers give themselves the characteristics of spirits (tubuan and place-spirits) is the degree to which the performance is powerful, and for the Siar group successful. For neither group are women's performances, in which no such transformation takes place, powerful in the same sense - nor, in fact, do the Udam community appear to have any objection to the women's style of singsing which they have adapted easily to religious contexts of performance.

Both communities believe that power is accessed through spirits. The Udam community do not portray kastom performances as being without power, rather they say that they are given power by the devil. In their religious context power, such as the power of testament or speaking in tongues, is gained through the holy spirit. Illnesses are cured by invoking the holy spirit to cast out the devil from the invalid. Communities like Siar (which is Catholic), on the contrary, stress the continuity of power accessed in kastom and through the holy spirit. 'The ancestors of the pre-Christian era did not have the church but instead went to stones and place-spirits before going hunting or fishing. They got their powers from all things in the bush because they had belief, but this was really the power of the holy spirit.' (translated from sermon heard in Pukonmal). Indeed they stress the greater powers of those ancestors, which they explain by their superior belief (faith).

In this sort of context wol is specifically related to power, particularly male access to spiritual/ancestral power. Although there are many specifically females roles within kastom, it is men who front all kastom events (even female initiation) on behalf of the matriclan. In fact the hosting of one's own kastoms is related to the definition of a clan as an independent entity and the leader 'whose name goes first' in the kastom, whatever the level of support or organization actually 90

performed by other clan members, 42 is defacto leader of that clan. If a clan cannot 'finish' its own dead, or reciprocate the work of another clan in doing so, it can only repay that debt by forfeiting land, ritual possessions (e.g. tubuan) or clan members (le. children). Thus, in its consequences for leadership and resources, kastom is very much interwoven with worldly politics and power in addition to the spiritual realm.

Short cuts

Although all clans are concerned with maintaining their own reproduction through kastom, the basis on which this is done and the elaboration of the concern with sum varies a lot. Some of this variation is regional. Siar has a particular reputation for working 'full' kastoms, closely following the ideal forms acknowledged even by those that do not follow them so faithfully. It is also known for its tubuan activity. There are only 7 other villages with taraiu (sacred place of the tubuan) in the language area, some of which are almost dormant. The tubuan makes, and enforces, great demands on the entire population during the weeks of its appearance; secluding the men in the bush and limiting the women to the village, and bringing almost all work (gardening, mat making, house building etc) to a halt. The following and enforcing of the full extent of restrictions, exchanges and presentations gives Siar leaders a degree of cultural capital43 which is recognized and positively valued by most44 , although some regard them as 'hard work' or as an inappropriate balancing of priorities.

Other leaders, and other areas (e.g. Lambom) are, on the contrary

42

The clan kamgoi may even 'allow' younger or more junior members to host events to which his name will still be attached. I fund Bourdieu's ideas and terminology of 'capital' relating to different fields particularly relevant in discussing the inter-relationship of 'traditional' forms of power and post-colonial sources of empowerment (e.g. church, business, governmental authority) Not, of course, by the 4-Square members. 91

known for taking 'short-cuts' in kastom. These are compressed versions of the customary ritual sequences. I will not go into the implications of particular missed segments here.

Instead I will let two contrasting rationales hosts gave for committing the work and resources they did to their kastoms characterize the distinction between the 'traditionalist' and the 'short-cutter'. The first, hosting a traditionalist tondong (primary mortuary exchange) said it was so the widow could dance again. The second, the host of a composite primary and secondary mortuary affair, likened holding kastoms to a business proposition, by investing pigs in holding the funerary ceremony he gained access to land and coconut plantations. The emphasis of the first was on mourning procedures/sum, that of the second was on legitimation of succession and inheritance. These perspectives need not be exclusive, and in a full ritual sequence are indeed successive themes in the primary and then secondary mortuary rites. However 'normally' it is the primary rite that is obligatory and the secondary optional. In combining the segments in the way they do, southern Lak shift the allocation of ritual labour. Although their kastoms have just as much, if not more, emphasis on dramatic singsing/pid/k presentations and their aura of spiritual power, it seems to me that their lessening of concern with sum is a lessening in the poetic relationality of personhood. The mutuality of (the deceased) person and their possessions, places and associates are paid little attention, so there are only diminished experiences of the transformation negative taboo sum relationships into ones of spiritual beauty and well being. These new short-cut forms are commonest in southern United Church area, which is more commoditized than the north. This commodification is apparent in their more pecuniary emphasis in ritual.

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PART 2

an ecology of forms

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CHAPTER 3

social foci

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'Seiving as samples of, and thereby focussing attention up on, certain - often upon unnoticed or neglected shared or shareab/e forms, colors, feelings, such works induce reorganization of our accustomed world in accordance with these features, thus dividing and combining erstwhile relevant kinds, adding and subtracting, effecting new discriminations and 'tegrations, reordering priorities.' (Nelson Goodman, Ways of Woridmaking, p. 105)

'focus: 1. a point of convergence of light or sound waves, etc., or a point from which they appear to diverge.' (Collins Concise Dictionary, 1982)

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inship in Siar is truly produced through the intermeshing of relational worlds. It is hard for Lak people to envision a world in '. ' which kinship is not only produced through the manner in which people relate to each other, but also through each other. A friend of mine once commented, 'even if I went a long way away, to somewhere where nobody knew me, if (say) I went back with you, I would be your brother, and then I would know my kinship (patar) with people there.' As my friends statement indicates, while in EuroAmerican culture our kinship circle is very delimited, in Siar everyone is related, potential 'kin' of some sort. We have little room for negotiation, we know who our kin are, and their status as such as 'natural' and inviolable. For the Lak no relation is completely given, kinship is an artifact of human production. Except in unusual circumstances, or those of cultural incompetence (such as with young children or the senile), kinship is not a question for us, we seldom ask 'how are we related'. In Lak, on meeting new people, this is an eminently sensible inquiry, 'ep patar sah?', 'what kin term\relationship?'. The answer, as my friend indicates, derives from the way in which kinship is produced through implication. This is not just a hypothetical point, but an everyday fact, and one of great political and personal import. Siar people do not have a great deal of choice in the relationship term, and correlating behavioural ideal, which is applied to 'close' family. It is difficult, if not impossible, to refer to the parents that reared you, or the siblings that accompanied you through child-hood, in any but the conventional way. For many more 'distant' folk, however, without such an intense and over-determined historical relationship, the justification for the choice of kin terminology tends to run along the lines of, 'I call them X, because my mother\father\mother 's brother\wife... calls them Y'. For the naive ethnographer this sometimes gives rise to what appears to be contradiction, in as much as the relationship between the terms used by one informant to designate two people (A-B, A-C) may not gel with the admitted kinship between them (B-C). The endemic example of this is when there is a generation (or more) between spouses - so, as one woman explained, before her marriage her 96

husband called her father, grandfather, (tete), so her relationship to him had been as a classificatory mother (nana). With their children now, most people are faced with a choice or negotiation as to what generational relationship they enact with them, dependent on whether they use their mother, or father or another relation as the orienting point in the relational field.

Such possibilities and flexibility are always implicated in Lak processes of kinship. This is a concomitant of its essentially performative nature - which is not to say it's free from constraints. It is a matter of weighting, history and imposition. The assertion, denial or reformulation of kinship links are key in the political as well as the domestic realm. As Bloch (1971) suggests, all uses of kinship are part of a tactical process of shaping and morally characterizing the soc•a situation. In acting, say, as a mother to someone, Tinsanlik45 , one is attempting to impose on them the situation of a child, with the benefits and duties that that entails. Also implicated are many others, such as one's grandchildren, who are located as children to Tinsanlik. They, or any of the others, may well attempt to render things differently. The stakes in such manoeuvring are moral, economic and emotional capital - I use the word capital advisedly here (cf. Bourdieu 1986), for such actions are investments of time, energy and self. The investments and their dividends must not be economized. as it is clear that we are dealing with what Mauss would term a total phenomena. The receipt of 'mothering' is a polythetic and emotive affair, in which material goods, emotional tone, and moral authority are all intertwined. As indeed they are, in a rather different fash'on, th

rehtionships exemplified in the competitive prestations that

pass between men's-houses, or in the 'tears' (pakan un), shell r!or!ey-p!g exchanges between same moiety members and the host of a funeral feast.

Furthermore, as these examples might be taken to indicate, the implicatory entailments of 'kinship' go far beyond the analytically

' The equivalent of 'Jane Doe'. 97

reified domain of the 'social'. This is so in two, complementary, ways. Just as the performance or projection of a role implicates other people, it also imbues many other objects, places and behaviours with significance, both categorical and specific. This is particularly important in the context of death where places and objects associated with the deceased - a place they used to go with a survivor, a food they used to give, a tree under which they would be seen sleeping assume a significance which must be addressed in funerary ritual. Furthermore this is not a unidirectional process; the use and qualities of objects or places also have constitutive reverberations for persons and social groups. Examples might include the differing qualities of exchange goods and the relationships their use exemplify, or the differing qualities of places and the categories of people or spirits which are associated with them. I should, perhaps, emphasize that these are not relations of 'meaning' or simple semiosis; the place cannot in any sense be substituted for the spirit, or the exchange goods for the relationship, or the tree for the person or a house for a mother. Rather these are acts of extension and foregrounding of particular qualities. The unit in question becomes plural, enchained, perhaps more accurately written of as mother\house\ g i ve r of food\tree under which she dozes\.... (cf. Sperber 1975) Each foregrounded item bringing a different chain of resonances into play from which it gains its specificity. Thus if we started with another term, say the tree, houses would not be of such relevance.

Centre and scale

Many sources of implication in others' worlds in Lak would traditionally be analyzed under the rubric of kinship. For example, those which can be characterized as 'centring' on the mother, the father, and the spouse. However, to talk of centres or of singular sources for relational fields is somewhat misleading, even though that is often how it is presented by local informants. There are two related aspects as to how this is so. Firstly, there is no clear, context free, priority to relations. It can, in the appropriate circumstances, be as correct to 98

speak of the child producing mothers and fathers, or a married couple, as vice versa (cf. Strathern 1988). It is a matter of focus. Secondly, each 'centre' is itself multiply constituted from the fields deriving from other centres of implication. To talk of structurating points or centres is dangerous for the very reasons that Derrida describes so well:

'[SJtructure - or rather the structurality of structure although it has always been at work, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or of referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin. The function of this center was not only to orient, balance and organize the structure... but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure... it has always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which while governing the structure, escapes structurality. This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. the center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality.., the totality has its center elsewhere. . . The concept of centered structure... is contradictorily coherent. And as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire. The concept of a centered structure is in fact the concept of play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which itself is beyond the reach of play. And on the basis of this certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is in variably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were at stake in the game from the outset.' (Derrida 1978:278-9, orig.emph.) Yet, as Wagner (1977) emphasizes, in analogically, relationally composed (or considered) kinship delimitation is crucial. Otherwise (as Simmel might put it) one becomes spread too thin. Melanesians are anxious, as Derrida suggests, at being implicated in the game, in the play of structures beyond their control. Which is why the imposition of 'centres', and of the scale of relating 'units', 'points', 'centred groups' and the inflection, weighting and asymmetry of the relations between them are all important. My friend may be

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potentially related to everyone, even strangers in England had he accompanied me, and he may potentially defined through these relationships - but not equally so. There are BROTHERS, brothers and 'brothers'. There are better and worse, and more and less compelling, convincing and cumulative performances and elicitations of the brother relationship. There is a fair degree of selective interpretation and choice in accepting such performances. All brothers are in the same man gis ('moiety'), many less in the same kamtiken oon ('clan'), and still less in the same kampapal ('lineage'). Which is the required level, and who is within each, is a matter of context and negotiation

46

The dramatic moments of most illocutionary force and persuasive performance, in which the mettle of presumed relationships are shown and judged, are those of public exchange and the corporate use of resources. That is, the principal presentation of kinship is through the assumption of specific obligations in kastom, particularly in the rites assuming responsibility for 'finishing' a person after death. This cannot come completely ex nihilo. There is a critical and informed audience at such affairs, some of whom may be competitors with interests in a contradictory social positioning of the deceased. The right to give can be challenged, intended recipients may not come to the kastom, and even if successfully given the framing of the gift and its positioning of the doner vis a vis the feast-holder, or the 'subject' of the kastom (e.g. the deceased), or the wider kinship groups either of these two may be deemed members of, may be debated and interpreted in ways not entirely in accordance with the wishes of the parties directly involved. Equally, such projected links could be used to put pressure on people to give at appropriate moments. Historical precedence and continuity is an important factor in the rhetoric of performing kinship. If one has a record of, say, giving naoul pigs as a sin gah ('ZHu') to a person ('WiB') who may be presenting himself as an individual, or a group of brothers, or a village lineage, or a

46

cf. Jackson 1995: 163-179, for a discussion of a similar flexibility in the scale of social unit in question in the nearby Susurunga language group. 100

moiety, then depending on the manifestation of the unit you are giving to, one has a compelling case for a return naoul from the appropriate body. The corporateness of groups, both lineally derived and otherwise, is largely formed in responses to such scenarios. The ambiguity in scale and definition is where politics and the leverage of power comes into play.

This rest of this chapter will be devoted to the discussion and portrayal of the associations of these two aspects then: the implication of relationships from differential positioning vis the fields' foci; and the different contexts and modes of scaling the size of these fields up or down.

V V V

GROUP FORMATION

The focal activities around which groups coalesce into more than notional presence are largely those of ritual occasions concerned with death, successorship, birth and marriage. The dominant motifs of belonging or same group membership evoked in these are of nurture, most particularly feeding. As this is primarily associated with mothers and mothering, and as there is a generational and descent implication in that association, it is perhaps no great distortion to categorize Lak as matrilineal. However, although 'maternal' nurture is the main descent criteria, nurture is neither limited to the maternal line nor are the cross-cutting ties of other kin unimportant.

Moieties and dual organization

Mythological accounts of moieties and dual-organization in New Ireland commonly involve brothers. 47 Here is an 'authoritative' one from Lak:

See, for example, that of Suilik and Kampatarai recounted by Albert 1987. 101

The origin of moieties 'For us, in this part, there were only two women and two men who came first. So the start of us in Lak were these two women. One woman was Tinainkoroe with [her brother] Tankoroe. They were the start of the moiety now, the name of the moiety. The other woman was Tinainbongian with Tanbongian. There were two lines only, and this was the start of them. On top in the big bush. Tankoroe he got this woman from Bongian, Tinainbongian, and Tanbongian he took this Tinainkoroe. This was the start of us. Later the two women carried children, and now we come up thus as Koroe or Bongian. There were only two lines at the start. But later, now, there are plenty. They have followed this marriage of the two at the beginning. It stays now. When they see their children now, they have come up plenty. Now they are living in this place up in the mountains, up at lat. They break up about some things and now there are plenty branches of the moieties. If these lines they break, they call them another line now. They are broken up now and I think they are divided because it was no good with just two lines only. So now there are really lots. Us, us Koroe we are broken up. These little Koroes, these are us, and the name of all of us is Koroe. Its the same with Bongian.' [Account by Daniel Goro of Lambomj48

This short statement reveals much about Lak moieties and their role in social structure. It is clear that moieties are conceptualized as totalizing descent groups which relate to each other as wife g ivers\takers (affines) and, by implication, fathers and sons (agnates)49 . As one man described the relationship with the opposite moiety, 'We make them and then marry them'. Everyone is descended from the original quartet of ancestors and their exchange of women (sisters) for marriage. Moiety membership is said to be visible in physical characteristics, such as the number of lines on one's hand. In origin the moieties are in fact conceptualized as two 'clans'

(kamtiken oon), and the relationship between them as that between two intermarrying clans. In fact, further north than Siar, in Morkon for instance, some claim that the two moieties are in fact Kamrai (not Koroe) and Bongian. This derives from a direct extension from clans to moieties, because members of the present day Kamrai clan claim that Koroe clans are 'inside them' (rather than vice versa). This has

48 This is the first half of the story also recounting the production of languages reproduced earlier. This formulation is, of course, reliant on a somewhat Levi-Straussian male gendering of moieties. Regardless of western gender politics this is actually how most groups in Lak are conceived, see later discussion of the fathers identity 'covering' that of his family. 102

no little to do with clans identifying themselves as Kamrai having far greater numbers in the north, and hence being better able to present their identity as 'covering' the others. This process is one that is repeated in many spheres of Lak life, depending on the context: the mothers identity covers that of her children, the father that of the family, the leader (kamgoi) that of his clan.

The flexibility as to what scale of unit is in question goes as far as group terminology. Fakereng is fairly unambiguous. It refers to moiety opposition in the context of the respect relations due to them as affines, during mourning for instance. Man gis refers more specifically to the moiety unit per Se, in its entirety, on such occasions as the dal ritual or the tubuan, in which the society in its totality is represented and split into opposing moieties - artimlal ep mangis - lit, divide into moieties. It is indeed on these occasions that moiety is most salient. However man gis is sometimes also glossed as 'line' and on some occasions the meaning shades into that of smaller scale units (see below). A further notable use is mangis ngis - lit, moiety g ood\decorated - meaning a ritual singing group. These, contrary to one's supposition, are not made up from members of a particular clan or moiety. They are generally formed from a loose network of kin, afflnes and friends. However they will perform under the auspices of a particular person and will very possibly have their presentation appropriated by a clan leader during the dance. Despite their heterogenous make up, they are indeed generally representing a lineal group.

Membership of a moiety only brings rights and responsibilities in terms of appropriate behaviour towards (from) the opposite moiety: respect during mourning for instance. It brings no specific property, land or even support with it. These lie in the realm of clans and more kin orientated lineages.

Kamtiken oon and segmentation

Kamtiken oon means root of the banana. Its use in referring to groups 103

of people presumed to be descended from common matrilineal ancestors is based on an explicit analogy with the banana tree. A mature banana tree will sprout subsidiary plants in a circle around it, all connected by a common root. Thus just as the trees are related, so are people in the same kamtiken oon related: they have come up from the same ancestral root. Kamtiken oon can be large and their members spread over wide areas, while the actual genealogical connections are often obscure (as roots tend to be); criteria which place kamtiken oon squarely in the conventional anthropological usage of the clan.

When asked which kamtiken oon people are in, the reply may be a distinct named subdivision of a moiety (e.g. Koroe-Kabiawai), or very commonly identification with a moiety name (Koroe\Bongian), no more or less. This may indicate that the grouping (certainly smaller than the moiety) has no further name. It is sometimes claimed that the eponymous clan(s) are so called because they are the 'original' Koroe or Bongian (cf. above on identification between clans and moieties). Regardless of the number of distinct groups making such claims (for Bongian there at least 2) these are political avowals of authenticity. Others profess to belonging to no further subdivision than Bongian\Koroe for reasons of ambiguity, notably an unwillingness to enter into disputes surrounding clan identity (distinctness) and possessions.

Further investigation 50 reveals that everyone belongs to clans of lesser scale than moieties. These subdivisions have a somewhat segmentary character about them. It is said to be women that break up clans. The stereotypical case is that two brothers (often stylized 'big' & 'small') are 'cross' about a woman and go their separate ways. Clans are often named after some motif deriving from the story of their segmentation. 5' However the ideology and general practice is that the

50

Others will categorize an individual even if they are unwilling to do so themselves. ' Albert (1987) prints some of these. 104

descendants of such clans are 'close' to each other and act with a greater degree of mutuality and cooperation than other more 'distant' clans of the same moiety. Although divided groups may come together for political purposes, there is none of the binary oppositional logic of the classic 'fission and fusion' model of segmentary theory (ie. that inspired by Evans-Pritchard 1940): segmented clans do not fuse into a higher level group for the purpose of opposing a body of an equivalent level. In Lak, fusion can take place either through cooperation or appropriation. In the first of these the level of cooperation between two segmentary groups becomes such that distinctions between them become irrelevant. For example, while I was in Siar a powerful man without close relatives was actively pursuing closer association with a lineage descended from a Manus woman, and therefore without a firm kamtiken oon affiliation. In the second, more predatory mode of fusion, one group 'finishes', that is holds funerary rituals for, the dead of another and thereby claims control of the clan's possessions (land and copyright ritual forms). The two methods are not necessarily distinct. If there are two leaders of much standing, the cooperative mode is greatly eased if their groups are spatially distinguished and therefore not in direct competition as to which leader is 'going first' in any particular event. In recent times there has been an extra impetus to the process of segmentation. This has been a result of the much increased salience of one particular clan possession - land. The onset of logging meant great financial rewards could derive from swathes of bush. While the coastal stretch of land suitable for gardens has always been of value, particularly if planted with coconut or cocoa, the inland 'big bush' had been little valued or inhabited for generations. Some previously anonymous clans gave themselves names to improve the distinctness of their identity, and therefore members and possessions. For all clans the importance of having a 'history' which detailed locations on their migration, and claimed precedence over other migrating groups, became paramount. While some such accounts are agreed by all to be accurate, there are many disputes and claims of fraud, both on the

105

grounds of the points of migration and the composition, or degree of segmentation, of the group attached to the history.

The identity of a kamtiken oon derives both from a spatialized history of a series of places and, more importantly 52 , from a series of named leaders (often in a chain of succession coming down to the present incumbent) and their\the clans inalienable possessions, marisoi. Marisol, are 'things of the men of before'. The word derives from the root mans which is translated as 'sorrow'. When people see marisoi, they say they think of and they are 'sorry' for the clan-leaders of before who owned them. Chief amongst these items are named and copyright tubuan and bullroarers, but they can also include carved men's-house posts, carved axes associated with the tubuan, carved drums and other items. Possession of marisoi is seen as tantamount to control over a kamtiken oon and its land. A fair amount of controversy surrounds the use and recreation of the most important of these (tubuan, buliroarer-spirits) by purportedly distinct kamtiken oon.

Because virilocal residence is combined with matrilineal descent, locality and kin based sub-groups of kamtiken oon are commonly spread over a wide area. This creates ethnographically observable tensions which tend towards segmentation. Reciprocal aid in mortuary feasting and more general cumulative construction of association through visiting practices are important in maintaining clan integrity. One lineage head explained, on the death of an apparent member of his clan who lived some distance away, that when alive the deceased had never stayed with or eaten with him while visiting the area, so he did not feel obligated to fulfil his co-clan mortuary requirements. In other words, the deceased had chosen to enact relationships with others, so as far as the lineage head was concerned they were not in fact 'related', and their two branches of kamtiken oon had split.

52

At least outside the recent context of logging royalties. 106

Plate 2: Tolais of Ulam displaying some marisol - two firam tubuan axes, and a maquette of a carved house post. He Is standing In his men'shouse: note the rack of pig jaws behind him, these relate to the number of feasts he has held. 107

Kampapal and kamgoi

Kampapal is not a term I heard used a great deal in Siar, and it does

not hold the ideological weight of kamtiken oon. However, its literal meaning: the group of men associated with a men's-house (pal) is one which describes well the most active level of corporate group. It refers particularly to the those descended from a single woman married out to another village - in other words a lineage. In terms of a singsing a kampapal is, appropriately enough, a subdivision of a mangis (moiety\troupe): a line of dancers.

In 1995 there were approximately 41 men's-house in the Lak Electorate, one in most independent hamlets and two or three in the largest villages. 53 The number of men's-houses can be roughly correlated with the number of kamgoi, a linea g e\cla n leader who would be glossed in pidgin as a 'bigman'. He is someone who leads and 'covers' a kin-group (of whatever scale) through virtue of being a notable performer of kastom events. Maintaining a men's-house is a necessary entailment of that role, as all mortuary rituals must be held at one. A lineage head without a men's-house of his own can only hold minor rituals under the auspices of a leader that does possess one. The men's-house enables a kamgoi to incorporate under his kastom leadership groups that need to hold the feasts to 'finish' their

dead. However, constructing a men's-house needs a certain amount of support and resources as each stage in its building is supposed to have a pig feast, and its inauguration must involve the feasting of all the men of the area. Furthermore, like other thatch and bamboo houses they only survive around five years and must be reconstructed with a new pig feast if the kamgoi wishes to go on holding mortuary rituals.

Lambom had 4, but Lambom has a much larger population than any other village, and a rather different attitude to kastom. 108

Men's-houses are lived in by the young and elderly men of the village, married men sleep with their wives. Those living in a kamgoi's men'shouse are not necessarily of his lineage, but are literally 'covered' by him and must support him. it is also where his spirtual marisoi possessions, which validate his succession to leadership and the distinctness of his lineage. The contents and spatial structure of men's-houses will be examined in detail in Ch.4, for the moment I just wish to highlight their role as icons of feasting activity, spiritual continuity and containment of living supporters. It is all these that make the kampapal the most activated political grouping. In fact it is between men's-houses, rather than abstract descent groups the competitive exchanges of ritual politics take place. The larger the feasts a kamgoi holds at his men's-house, the larger and more widely spread must be the activation of lineage cooperation, and the larger the ensuing reputation of the host. Successful kamgoi, it is commonly held, must travel widely and cultivate exchange relationships in distant villages. Kamtiken oon ideology gives an ideal base from which to stimulate more active cooperation. One man elaborated the icon of the banana tree. Its central trunk which towers over the others was the kam go!. When it dies it leaves space for one of the surrounding shoots (bition) to take its place. When a child is doing something dangerous, there is a saying, 'you aren't a bit/on, we can't plant you again'. The banana fruits were likened to the young women of the kamtiken oon, they can be detached from the tree\clan and enjoyed elsewhere. As the image of tree as a central point in a nexus of underground connections suggests, the person of the kam go! is more vitally dispersed or intertwined amongst his lineage followers than any other member. So, for instance, should a kamgoi be the victim of sorcery, all his clan would be liable to suffer it and must be treated with a cure which will 'change their skin'. ,

V V

109

KIN TERMINOLOGY PARALLEL

CROSS MALE +2 TETE

FEMALE wowo

MALE TETE

+1 KOKO

NANA/NANG

TA TA/MAM NANA/NANG

I0



MAL f.s

RUATO f.s TASIK

RUATO m.s.





TASIKAIN I

MAL m.s

-1 KOKO/KOWAK KOKO/KO WAK TOl -2 TUBUK

FEMALE WOWO

TUB UK





TUB UK



GEU TUB UK

Table 1

V V V

RESONANCES OF KINSHIP

In chapter 5, I will examine in detail how mothers and fathers are implicated, largely as providers of 'nurture' and 'substance' respectively, in producing their children as living physical beings. This section provides a complement and introduction to that topic by considering the resonances of kin relationships and their terminology with each other and the wider world.

'Mother'

A mother is called by her children nana or nang. These terms are never used in reference, only address. The usual reference is tan54, heard most often in the teknonymic phrase tan ep... Tinsanlik,

Many relational terms, and other nouns such as body parts, are conjugated according to person and number. I will follow the convention of using the third person. Note however that for the word tan, I have never heard the first person form used (tak), more appropriate would be nana or nang. 110

meaning mother of Tinsanlik, where Tinsanlik would be her first-born child. Indeed teknonyms for mothers and fathers (taman ep..) are a very common form of reference and address in Lak. They are the commonest term used in referring to somebody one is in a 'taboo' avoidance relationship, that is opposite sex siblings, a spouse of a sibling, or an opposite sex cross-cousin. Frequently the term of preference for those in the opposite moiety, they are also often used regardless of relationship. Occasionally the descent orientated identification is extended to the first-born grandchild, hence bun ep.. (grandfather of..) and wan ep.. (grandmother of.. e.g. wansuilik). The tone of teknonym use is positive and respectful.

The 'mothering' nature of tan is also clear in the term taninsus, used as a term for women who have given birth - lit, tan - mother, in - to fruit, sus - milk\breast. Tan, 'mother' can also be conjugated as a collective noun as the relevant quality by which to designate adult women. Thus diatan, 'lain mama' (TP), refers to a group (3 or more) of adult women and, if present, their children (male and female). Children of whatever gender or age are covered by the tan identity while with their mothers, and indeed are within not just a 'mother' designation but an explicitly female one, as is shown by the use of the noun gurar, meaning group of women separate from (and in opposition to) men, which can equally be applied to a group of women and children. Should a father be present with the family group however, then his male identity as taman (F) takes precedence (see below).

The uses of the word tan are especially complex. Often 'it' was translated to me as 'man'. Yet if just referring to gender, or to an adult male, the term is barsan, and a woman is fai-in. The translations of tan\man were in the context of such phrases as:

tan ep pakan - lit. 'man' a leaf = rain magician, tan ep siaro - lit. 'man' a hot clear weather = sun magician, tan ep pipial - lit. 'man' a pidik revealer = divulger of secrets, tan Ion boibol - lit. 'man' inside bush = tubuan initiate, 111

tan Iakman - lit. 'man' village = uninitiated man tan ep lele - lit. 'man' a promise - an advanced initiate, man good at

holding secrets tan/al - lit. 'man' root ginger = magician tan ep kakan - lit. 'man' a pain (p1) = healer tan madar - lit. 'man' ?town? = whiteman, person from town

In many of these tan is related to the production or revelation of some form out of obscurity. Thus the preponderance of terms relating to 'magic', in which the common sense with 'mother' seems to be of causative or productive agent. Out of seclusion the mother delivers a baby as the rain-magician delivers a downpour. But what then of tan Ion boibol, tan Iakman, tan ep /ele or tan madar: tan here seems

more to bear the common implication of belonging, being of a place, or identity. When one says tan ep Tinsanlik, it is stronger than a claim of classificatory motherhood, Tinsanlik must be their first-born, must, in a strong sense, be of that mother and gain her clan identity from her. There is a further, very important, series of usages of the term tan for a man, in which, however, it tends to be translated as 'mother'. These are: tan ep tarai - ' mother' of men, tan ep tondong or tan ep ngasa - 'mother' of tondong or ngasa sections of the series of funerary

feasts. The explanation given to me of the first phrase will suffice: 'The mother of all men is the man working a custom. He has sung out for the men (to come) and they can now he/p themselves to whatever is in his basket.' [Toanaroi

of Siar] The primary performative act of a mother is the unreciprocated giving of food and other nurture. She will let her children take what they will from her. 55 This however is the source of her ultimate moral authority over her children, and is a debt that can never be fully repaid. In the excerpt above my informant was referring specifically to a large

As we discovered attempting to give presents to female friends, only to find to our frustration that they were inevitably quickly claimed by their children. 112

tubuan ritual that he was soon to host. A basket, especially a ritual leaders basket, is his most personal possession, and giving unlimited access to it (and making sure there is a steady supply of betelnut within) is a continuation of the act of unstinting giving of food exemplified by the unreciprocated distribution of pig meat and feeding of large numbers of people for the duration of the tubuan ritual. In this context, the ritual host is identified with the lead nantoi tubuan which is itself explicitly a mother. 'Nantoi' is a compression of nana\nang (mother) with to! (son). It is as this violent domineering mother, who has claims over all the men (and women) that have been fed and given the food and possessions inside 'her' basket, that the host has the power of life and death during the ritual period.

The nantol is perhaps the only spirit to be overtly described to me as a mother. However, a further series of words having tan as a component deserve our attention. These are:

tanruan - a place spirit; tan -man/mother, ruan - second, no 2 tan gara - spirit of sleeping men used by siniet magician or in komkom (a method of sorcery divination and revenge); tan man/mother; gara - smell of food, esp meat, which is slightly old, not yet stinking. tamianpoipoi. - bullroarer spirit. tam - second person form of tan man/mother, ian - to eat, poipoi - rotting wood, leaves etc, 'the man who eats rotten wood'. tangalau-up - bullroarer. tan - man/mother, ga/au -??, up - to go quickly from place to place.

Each of these etymologies is individually suggestive in their own right. But together they associate the use of tan with the spirits and the dead, and indeed with secondary (r..Iruan), 'off' smelling ("gara), or decomposing ("poipol) things. Things which are at temporally later, transforming, points in their existence. Chapter 5 will note the links between babies and spirits and the equation of spirit (tal ''ung, "-'ngan) with life as well as the dead. In this context it is appropriate that in his excessive unreciprocated giving, the host of the tubuan rite 113

not only becomes a mother, but also a spirit, a dead person. He is no longer 'heavy' (ubah) with food and shell money, but light (a!) like a spirit (talung).

At first he is heavy (ubah) with food and sar. There is much respect - he cannot hear the talk of [be influenced by] others, he cannot ask for anything. His eyes clear when finished. After the death of the tubuan he is no longer heavy, but is light —a! a!. Thinking goes "nothing', no things hold him. nuknuk I al (thoughts are light). When a! ,when given everything away, is like a spirit (talung)' [Fieldnotes on account by Daniel Toanaroi of Siar on hosting a tubuan rite.]

The end point of giving of oneself, giving all, is to become not just a mother, and a moral power, but a spirit. This aspect interlinks with yet another usage: tan piu - ' mama ground, heavy, holds water, grows well'; of which the antonym is p/u a/al - 'light ground, not heavy, cannot hold food, dry'. The Lak draw an explicit analogy (see Ch. 5) between women as producers of children and ground as the producer of food. In these phrases this parallel is extended, with heaviness and wetness being allied with fertility and growth; and dryness and lightness with infertility. But does this conflict with the usage within the tubuan ritual, where lightness and dryness are associated with spiritual power? In an important sense no, because what Toanaroi was describing was a transformation: from heaviness, when he was loaded with food and valuables which he distributed and allowed to be taken from him as a mother; to lightness, after his tubuan have died, and after he no longer has any possessions to give as a spirit. Similarly piu a/al, exhausted, light ground, follows upon the fecundity and food provision of tan p/u. The ritual host moves from nurturing, responsible, support for others' existence to an exhausted, but radically free and powerful spirit transcending the intermeshing debts and mutualities of everyday sociality. I will return to these important transformations processes in Ch. 8 which describes these rites in detail. Their portrayal of an individual as beyond the living and their mutual reliance is in some ways their political endpoint, and a parallel to the mourning process of detaching the living from their mutual implication with the deceased at the primary rites.

114

Mother's kin

One's mother is the primary basis on which a child is thrown into a circle of kin. Her pre-existing positioning provides much of the initial context within which the various styles of kinship relation may be performed. Let me set out the entailments of these matrilineal relationship categories, with the caveat that the further the 'genealogical distance' the greater the optionality of the relationship:

nang/nana: In addition to one's birth-mother, this would also normally be applied to her sisters (& 'Z'), and such kin as MMZD. It can also be applied cross-moiety to an adopted mother or to such kin as FZ, MMBD or MBWi. Central to nana/nang performance is the provision of food and care. The relatively common cross-moiety nature of mothering is important as an indication that the designation of Lak society as 'matrilineal' actually elides important cross-cutting factors.

koko/kowak: These are applied to MB and reciprocally to ZS or ZD. While not all 'mothers', nang, are of the same moiety, it is only same lineage (or maximally moiety) mothers' brothers who are called koko. This relation is far more indicative of 'lineality' than 'motherhood', especially in the political and feasting realm. The term for a group of MB\ZS is matokwan56 and is employed primarily on feasting occasions in which lineage corporateness is being demonstrated. In fact matokwan is the closest I got to a description of what 'made' matrilineally based groupings, from moiety down to lineage. The relationships between the members of 'clans' and 'lineages' and their kamgoi ('bigmen') are supposed to exemplify, especially in terms of succession and inheritance, that of senior koko and junior kowak.57 This is because koko relationships are deemed to be of mutual

56 This is the 3rd person form, it is also acceptable to say datokawan (Our line of MB\Z S ) or diatokawan (your line of MB\ZS). Implicitly it has as a subset 'group of brothers', for which it is sometimes used. See also brother relations. 115

support and display singular intent (e.g. in feasting). The senior koko has precedence over the father concerning decisions regarding his nephew. For instance, in Siar a father wanted to have his son initiated into the tubuan but he was gainsaid by the boys koko on the grounds that he was too young. In their idiom, 'the name of the kamgoi [senior koko] goes first', that is he is identified with the corporate group and his decisions take it's authority. tata/mam: These refer to 'fathers', classificatory and otherwise.

One's mother's husband and/or legitimate genitor and their 'brothers' (ie. same sex, generation, and moiety) are all potential tata. Unlike nana (M), tata is always the opposite moiety to his children. Tata,

although now the most common nomination, is however probably a relatively recent import to the language. Mam I was told is the older term. It is interesting for its reference to a mode of behaviour: mam (plural mamam) means 'play', sometimes as a euphemism for sexual intercourse. Mamam is the characteristic and formalized mode of interaction of arbung: occasions upon which opposite moiety (le. 'F' relationship) 'haze' a person on a first visit, dance etc. So, for example, on a girls return from her first visit to the town of Namatanai, members of the opposite moiety barricaded the entrance to her house and attacked her with water. Although a source of authority, in many ways in competition with the koko, fathers are characterized as doting upon their children: indeed it is not uncommon to see senior men trailed by a group of small boys. They are supposed to be less 'cross' with their children than mothers, coming back in the afternoon to play with them; it is the mothers who are the quotidian sources of authority that must chide the children into helping with the chores during the day. taman: After the birth of his first child a father will, in a similar way

to the mother, be known by those in artanat avoidance relationships, and more generally, by the teknonym taman ep... Tinsan/ik. Taman does not have quite the same richness of resonance as tan. The only taman ep.. phrase I know of is taman ep piu, meaning landowner,

which is a literal translation of the pidgin papa graun (lit. 'father of 116

ground') that has become an item of popular discourse since the arrival of logging. Most other uses of taman relate to the father as 'going first' in the family. Thus diataman, glossed in pidgin as 'lain papa', refers to a father and any children and wife he may have with him. Without the father the same group becomes identifiable as diatan - a group instead identified with the mother. Taman kak is a married man. The father is particularly identified with the household unit as an entity distinct from, and cross-cutting of, lineal forms. Tarai taman (lit. 'men father') is the term for 'family' or 'household', the father, wife and children who share residence in a house, emphasizing the male image and control of that form (cf. tarai mokson - lit. 'men spouse', a married couple).

Artanat relations

These are relationships which are shaped by avoidance.

tasik/tasikain: "ain is a feminine ending, cf. fain - woman. The

closest English gloss for this word would be sibling. All children of 'M/F' (nana/tata) couples are generally tasik("ain), which is a slightly less obvious way of saying that all those of the same generation and the same moiety (ie. parallel relationships) are potentially tasik. Note that the children of opposite moiety nana, such as one married to koko or who is FZ (ie. cross relationships) are not. It is thus possible for same moiety same generational persons to employ alternative relationships through marriage (see below for singah-birar, e.g. MBSWi; and ruk WiZHu).

Tasik is often used with the implication of mutuality, and indeed in importuning, but does not carry the same implication of hierarchy as koko (although the eldest B may in effect have similar authority if there is no surviving koko) . It, alongside koko/kowak, is the formative relation of lineality.

One of the most important aspects of the tasik relationship is its

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opposite sex restrictions. These come under the rubric of artanat

58

From an early age brothers and sisters must avoid each other, and may not mention each others names. Normally a boy would go and sleep in the men's house from around 12 (depending on the accommodation available), and if a girl was reaching puberty the father would sleep in the men's house (or alternatively the daughter would sleep with other female relatives). Although direct contact is limited and taboo, indirectly the role is still very much one of nurture, often with the children as intermediaries (especially ZChi). Thus I remember a woman explaining to me the care she took not keep her tobacco in her basket, so that her brother, who did not smoke, would not be pained by the smell when he came looking in her basket for betelnut.

Singah: This term is mostly applied to the spouse of one's tasik( '-'a/n), that is to same generational, opposite moiety persons. The exceptions are referred to as sin gah-bfrar, birar being a suffix meaning same moiety, who are the spouses of cross-cousins, particularly of MB's children. However I do not recall anyone using this exceptional appellation outside discussions on kinship. Sin gah, particularly opposite sex sin gah, are again artanat, and should be kept at a distance and their name avoided. Sin gah are relationships associated with singan - shame (note the common root). This link was expressed to me particularly in relation to provisioning . A man would be ashamed to ask his sin gah for food, or be at their house at any time that could be construed as close to a meal time. If he was hungry, informants would continue to say, he would sit a long way off, but in their view, and food would be sent by an intermediary to him. This resonates with Lak expressions of sexual interest in which the giving of food is a central motif.

Sin gah is also the word for post, as in a house support. This imagery

58

See discussion below.

The age seems to be debatable and increasingly of lessening severity, but certainly by puberty. 118

was explicitly used in referring to the 'lieutenants' or main supporters of a kamgoi, particularly those of his clan helping provide the resources necessary for a large feast (e.g. a tubuan production). 6° In such a feast the kamgoi 's name 'goes first' and 'covers over' the hidden supports of his sin gah, his house posts. In days gone by (see Ch. 4) sin gah carved into likenesses of dead kamgoi and clan spirits (tubuan and bullroarer), hidden in the darkness from external view, supported physically and 'magically' the current kamgoi's men'shouse and the feasting enterprises that it hosted.

These notions of shame (sin gan) and hidden support (sin gah as post) have further resonances with singah as kin. Although it would be considered shameful to ask directly, singah are supposed to provide support for their affines. A clear illustration of this was presented at one Monday community meeting when a long standing quarrel between two men of the same moiety flared up, with one denouncing the other as showing disrespect for his singah and the other fake reng (opposite moiety) by not providing a pig (naoul) for his affines on the occasion of their mother's death. 'What must his own wife and her brothers think of him?'

In reality a successful feasting clan relies heavily on naoul pigs from their affines, which must be scrupulously reciprocated and take precedence over any intra-moiety debts. However there is an indirectness about the whole process. Naoul are not given directly but through a sin gah, and the 'name' of the donor is not attached to the success or otherwise of the feast, but only to his exemplifying the supportive role of an affine. Overly direct gifting or importuning would be as shameful in itself as the neglect of consideration for the needs of one's singah with which the accused was embarrassed.

ma! ruato: These are one's direct cross-cousins. Especially when opposite sex, these relations are the exemplar of artanat restrictions. Ruato is said to be a recently introduced term, which in fact may well

60

The term wos - canoe paddle, is used in a very similar way. 119

originate from the Duke of York Islands where, according to Errington (1974:36), rvata is the term for opposite sex cross cousin. I was initially taken aback when I realized the implications of the artanat nature of the MBD\FZS relationship: for this is also the preferred pairing for marriage. One man told me that he had made a good marriage, because he was truly new to his previously ma! wife, he hadn't 'held' her before. 6' Marriage with one's 'true' ma! is said to be discouraged now by the church, because cousins are of 'one blood' (ie, paternally related) and therefore 'too close'. However, there are some recent examples of this kind of marriage, and many genealogies are liberally sprinkled with them. Previously 'sister exchange', known to the Lak as sokampen, was ideally practised with the simultaneous marriage of pairs of cross-cousins. Siar fathers recognise the advantage of marrying their sons to a woman within their clan and gift, as it creates an opportunity to attempt to effect patrilineal inheritance (taman rasi - ' pull from father'), by passing goods and privileges to one's son in the name of one's grandchildren. This practice is recognised, and said to be legitimate, so long as the inheritance only leaves the originating clan for one generation. The word ma! has a wide range of applications, many of which derive from its other primary meaning as barkcloth. Thus it has connotations of tying and covering. Ma! is now the length of material (formerly barkcloth) tied around a mother to hold a baby to her in its pandanus cradle. Barkcloth was also used to cover female genitalia. A ma! formerly played a very important role in death rites: it was a piece of barkcloth within which remnants (hair, nails, a bone) of the deceased were contained and tied around the neck of the widow. Sometimes still made from a piece of cloth, it is said to 'be' the deceased and a feast is held for its removal. Tying and covering are perhaps suitable associations to take to the ma! relationship in which the participants are 'obscured' or 'covered' from each other in their avoidance, yet potentially to be 'tied' closely together in marriage.

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It is possible, but unlikely, that part of the association of avoidance with marriage comes from Catholic doctrines on sex before marriage. 120

Relations through marriage moksok: This is the term used for a spouse of either sex. Like tan ep.. or taman ep.., but unlike most other kin terms, it has a unique reference and does not function as a more general classifier of relations. In the married couple (tarai taman - lit, men, father) the man is supposed to 'boss' his wife and family and 'go first' amongst them. This means that he linguistically, as well as practically, takes precedence. Violence in marriage (and other relationships) is common, and at least two women were killed by their husbands during our stay. It is not, however, socially acceptable, in the sense that in both of these cases it was found that the husband was not actually responsible for his wife's death but that others had sorcerized her. Lak wives are certainly not generally the subdued or overtly dominated figures that one might suppose from this. Instances of them physically attacking their husband are not uncommon, and more commonly still they verbally and physically dominate their children.

A couple's main work together, apart from their children, is their garden. This is perhaps reflected in 'moksok' - mok is the name for taro garden. mokos - is also the term for a widow.

lanmuk: This is the term used reciprocally between a woman's parents and the 'wife-taker', her husband. It has quite resonant associations, ian - meaning eat, muk - meaning a greedy person, someone who does not give food. This must, in effect, underline the debt relationship of nurture that the husband has to his wife's parents. He eats from his wife, but gives nothing back.

tau-uk: This is the reverse term. It is used between a wife and her husband's parents, particularly his nanas. Lak men say that they pay bride-price so that their wives will come and look after and work for their mother, to pay her back for looking after them as children. So, after marriage Lak couples generally live close to the husband's parents, and the wife must pay great respect to, and care for, his mother. After the husband's parents die, if the wife's are still alive it 121

is not uncommon for them to relocate and 'look after' her parents now. Tau - is linguistically linked with planting holes, and with parturition (see Ch.5). It is a suitable response to 'ianmuk' to refer to a woman as tau-uk, highlighting her role as a planted hole from which children for her moiety will be delivered; born from the husband's breaking of ground with a digging stick, and his blood and substance.

kamlak: This is a reciprocal term referring specifically to someone in koko or kowak relationship with one's spouse. Thus for a female ego, while your husband's mother and mother's sisters are tau-uk, his mother's brother is kamlak (but his wife in turn, as a 'mother' to Hu would be tau-uk). In junior generations kamlak can be of either sex (e.g. EZD or EZS). Kam - is a common root associated with grouping or coming together, -lak, as already noted is a friendly appellation similar to 'hey, you' or 'man' in the colloquial English\American sense, and also the root of Iakman - village.

Where there is a degree of discretion kamlak is often the relationship of choice between those of opposite moieties. This may be because of its friendly overtones and, contrasted with alternative such as sin gah, lack of restrictions. Kamlak are, in everyday life as well as mythology, supposed to be of aid to each other, and even to be more trustworthy than those of one's own moiety from whom one should expect succour. This notion is explicitly linked to the fact that it is those of one's own moiety that may 'poison' you because of jealousy (arsaikiap) - thus, for instance, during tubuan ritual, a time particularly linked with sorcery attacks, I was told to leave my basket with my kamlaks rather than those of my own moiety for fear that I might be attacked. One reason for this is that the opposite moiety is outside the sphere of direct competition, both in the political sense of competition for the leadership of social groupings, and in the sexual sense of competing in magical allure for women.

ruk: This is a relatively little used term used between men who have married sisters.

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natuk/toi/geu: natuk is the term for a child. Important cognate terms include: fanat - baby; natsui - lit. 'child go' a bereaved child with particular mourning commitments in funerary ritual; and nataka - the Lak name for the tubuan. To/is son, cf. nantoi, 'mother-son' tubuan, and geu is daughter; these terms are the reciprocals of nana/nang and tata/mam. There are considerable differences, even at an early age, between the roles of male and female children. Both children are primarily the responsibility of the mother, but the son will stop helping her at the water while still young and instead roam with other boys in an independent fashion. The daughter will remain an aid in the female tasks of washing and minding younger children.

Age

Siar has a largely gerontocratic hierarchy. This is both in the sense of social organization, in as much as the eldest brother normally takes precedence in controlling and representing the lineal unit, and in the sense of personal (and magical) power. The elderly are 'drier', and closer to the ancestors than younger people. A typical statement to this effect is that the preparations required for effective magical action and spiritual aid are easier for old men who do not have to Ia! so much as their younger counterparts. Ia/is the fasting and abstinence from water and liquids which is central to the drying process deemed necessary to make men a! - dry, and arat - sharp, that is efficacious in their singsings ('impersonation' of spirits) and magical activities (which are 'powered' by ancestors and spirits). Older men are also said to be better known by the ancestors upon whose aid they are calling.

Amongst women age is also linked with status. In particular women with many children accrue authority over them and their spouses and children, especially junior female kin and affines.

The following terms are used when a generational gap of +/-2 is of relevance.

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tubuk: Refers to a grandchild of either sex, or rather to any kin of two generations junior. Thus children of tol, geu or kowak\Iaiik are all potential tubuk. Its use implies hierarchy as well as a degree of mutual aid and responsibility. Pupu (TP) can also be used, reciprocally, between +/-2 generations kin.

tete/bun: Tete primarily refers to male kin of +2 generations, although it can also be used reciprocally. Bun was translated as meaning 'old man', but it can also be used in a semi-teknonymic fashion referring to a person in relation to their first grandchild. Thus bun ep... Tinsanlik. Bun is a term of respect, and indeed bunbun is a word meaning 'respect' or to treat someone (implicitly an old and powerful someone) with circumspection and deference.

wowo/wan: These terms are the female equivalents or tete/bun. Wowo is the term for female kin of +2 generations and wan means 'old woman', but can also be used teknonymically for 'grandmother of..'.

V V V

AVOIDANCE AND FOREGROUNDING

There are interlinked issues in the above material that require further discussion. Principally artanat avoidance behaviour which, I will argue, derives from the same logic as the wide spread use of teknonyms, and respect relations with spouse's parents. This 'logic' suggests key insights into the cultural processes of Lak world-making far beyond the domain of kinship.

Clay (1977) finds that amongst the Mandak B/Z and FZS/MBD avoidance is associated with opposite sex relationships within maternal nurture bonds. Marriage is prohibited when the moral force of the avoidance is strong (in 'closer' relationships) and acceptable when it is weak. Both parties in a FZS/MBD or B/Z avoidance relationship receive maternal nurture from the same 'mothers', and 124

affinal\sexual relations are somehow incompatible with being within the same nurturing group. Hence shared nurture and marriageability are seen as having an inverse correlation with each other. A similar logic is seen to be functioning in the avoidance of opposite sex siblings' spouses, in that the two men (or women) are interacting with the same person (Hu\B or Wi\Z) in incommensurable ways (sexual intimacy and exchange vs nurturance and sharing).

These modalities of relating seem similar to those in Lak. The avoidance of inappropriate mothering nurture is an important part of artanat. Thus one may not eat any pig named after an artanat relation, nor may one eat something that has been on their head, nor, in particular, may you eat from their mortuary feast, that is 'on top of the deceased'. (These last two involve susun - the carrying of food on the head associated with breast-feeding and nurture). I have mentioned already possible sexual overtones of the cross-sex crossmoiety giving of food. Despite these apparent similarities in concern with 'nurture' there is an important difference between Siar and the Mandak: in Lak those to be given the highest degree of avoidance (opposite sex cross-cousins) were also the most suitable for marriage, whereas according to Clay in Mandak 'marriageability' has an inverse relationship with the degree of avoidance (ie. those most avoided are those least suitable for marriage.).

Wagner (1986) also notes avoidances amongst kin of the same genealogical intercepts in Barok. However, in some Barok villages the practice of marrying cross-cousins is seen as the traditional form of marriage (as in Lak). Even in those where it is not so recognized, classificatory cross-cousin intermarriage is a common tool for clan alliance. Wagner, inspired by Bateson's classic article on play (1972), depicts avoidance behaviour with important kin as a similar 'metamessage' to that of 'this is play' in a mock fight, in that it 'is paradoxical, for it sets out to violate a relationship, and succeeds in affirming or even establishing the relationship through the negation, or failure of that negation.' (Wagner 1986:53). The establishment of a relationship through its violation depends upon, and indeed is, a 125

'framing' of the interaction. Avoidance offers the same opportunity as joking for rejecting, or by cooperating, creating, an inverse relationship to the 'fiction' of lack of relationship (avoidance) or aggressive relationship (play). Thus:

'What is the appropriateness of avoidance, per se, to marriage and affinal relationships? A link can be seen in the privilege of option or preferment, the right (often bargained for) to marry a certain person. In this case the bride, for instance, is given over as against the possibility of not being given. Avoidance, eliciting a relationship through not "relating" - relating by demurral - is the opposite of preferment, and its appropriateness as a means of eliciting the affinal relationship (as against joking) is that of "marking" or encoding the favor of preferment within the relationship itself.' (Wagner 1986:56) Wagner goes on to construct a similar argument for avoidance between cross-siblings and spouses as marking the actual preferment of their offspring. He not only places joking and avoidance in the same meta-communicative elicitory category, but also respect and, by implication, many other reified relation specific modes of behaviour.

This seems a plausible way of presenting matters, and one which I would go a long way in affirming. However, by going back to Bateson's article, I would like to connect this sort of analysis with some of the broader (and deeper) problems we have been dealing with. Bateson explicitly links the double paradox of play, vis 'Not only does the playful nip not denote what would be denoted by the bite for which it stands, but, in addition, the bite itself is fictional' (1972:155), to the processes of art, magic and religion. He gives us examples of trompe d'oeil and Hollywood films to make the point clearer Bateson is analysing play as a process of representation, as, in the terms it has been discussed in this thesis, image-making. He moves on to a discussion of how the paradoxical qualities of play and imagery are a used in their function as 'framing' particular arenas of experience (e.g. a dream, a filmic experience, or play). He posits this framing quality by tying together set theory and gestalt notions of 126

perception. Thus imagery and play are restatements of the paradox, All statements within this frame are untrue

,taken as a premise for evaluating its own truth or untruth, which is in its turn an example of Russell's set theory derived paradigm paradox 'class of classes which are not members of themselves' (Bateson 1972: 158\Whitehead and Russell 1910-13). Bateson describes Russel's logic: when defining a logical class or set of items 'A' (e.g. 'class of matchboxes'), it is necessary to delimit the set of items that are to be excluded 'Not A' (e.g. 'class of non matchboxes'), a background set of the same degree of abstraction (or 'logical type'). If paradox is to be avoided the discriminating criteria themselves, 'A' or 'Not A' ('matchboxes' or 'non-matchboxes'), even though themselves clearly not A (they are not matchboxes) must not be regarded as members of the class 'Not A' (class of nonmatchboxes). Thus, according to Russell, no class can be a member of itself. A picture frame is like a dividing line in a set diagram delimiting one logical type from another, or the discriminating criteria for inclusion or exclusion from a class ('A' or 'Not A'), it is an instruction to the viewer not to extend the premises which obtain b'etween the figures in the picture to the wallpaper behind it. But as Bateson notes, 'Russell's rule cannot be stated without breaking the rule. Russell insists that all items of inappropriate logical type be excluded (i.e., by an imaginary line) from the background of any class, i.e., he insists upon the drawing of an imaginary line of precisely the sort which he prohibits' (1972:162). He goes on to conclude, 'The message "This is play" thus sets a frame of the sort which is likely to precipitate paradox: it is an attempt to discriminate between, or draw a line between, categories of different logical types.' (1972:162)

Through close attention to Wagner's use of Bateson, we find kinship matters leading us into discussions of framing and paradoxical metaqualities of borders closely related to the discussion of imagery and 127

ontological differentiation which concluded my introduction. The creation of 'supplementary spaces' through the imposition of such boundaries is perhaps more fundamental to 'kinship' than any other realm, for it is in that forge of human relationships that new (id)entities are created, distinguished and extinguished the most often. New, foregrounded, distinct spaces for new identities have to be created by the foregrounding and framing of absence.

How do we move back from Bateson to avoidance behaviour and more general social practices? I think the first step is to draw attention to the similarities between artanat and the secrecy involved in pidiks. We have yet to dip the word itself in my lexicon to see if any associations stick: ar" is an adverbial prefix marking its reciprocal nature (Erdman 1991), tanat, seems to contain allusions to both mother tan and child nat. 62 The other word we have come across which does the same thing are the premier pidiks, nantol - the mother-son tubuan. Those outside a pidik such as the tubuan have similar restrictions upon them to those outside the potential or actual marriage - avoidance and refraining from showing knowledge. Thus, to paraphrase Bateson, not only does the secrecy or avoidance not denote what would be denoted by the ignorance or incompatibility for which they stand, but, in addition, the ignorance and incompatibility is fictional (which is not to say it has no 'reality'). In birth ritual, as we will see (Ch.5), secrecy frames the production of a child, separating out the emergence of a supplementary entity from the relational world which it will transform. Similarly, avoidance frames the production of the cross-moiety marital unit which in turn produces the child, and in itself supplements and reorders the surrounding world. Wagner is quite right to suggest that the avoidance of one's sister is in favour of her children, or cross-cousins and affines in favour of the marriage. Just as Levi-Strauss (1972:195) is surely correct to suggest that the assumption of a teknonym indicates 'not.. the addition of a new being to those that exist already but.. the substitution of one for the others': substitution in the sense of the modulation of social focus such that

62

Note these are syllabic inversions! 128

parents become a ground for a new figure. The nature of the phenomena - fictional-real, mother-child, secrecy-public display, avoidance-association - all point to their meta-communicative status as frame-making images that draw Russell's paradoxical line between the figure-ground of two logically exclusionary sets. These manipulations of incommensurability feed into wider and more traditionally phrased anthropological concerns such as Mary Douglas' (1966) idea of taboo being at the meeting point of distinct categories, or even the Van Gennepian\Turnerian notion of rite de passage.

But rather than become too enmeshed with overweening universals of categorization, I would rather depict a frame of 'absence' as a particularly Lak (and perhaps Melanesian) style of foregrounding images. These positive absences include not just avoidance and secrecy, but 'taboo' in a much wider sphere, particularly mourning taboos. These are far more overtly about foregrounding, and then by removing of the frame, dissolving particular relationships. This reiterates my processual emphasis of compelling imagery emerging from absence at times of supplementation to, deletion from, or reformulation of, the world. This can be linked not only to the demands of endemic relationality but also to the aesthetic quality of brilliance that Simmel (1950) depicted items emerging from secrecy as possessing. It is a poetic property, in the sense of Bachelard that we discussed earlier. A figure is more compelling against a blank background, a light more blinding in the dark.

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CHAPTER. 4 spatial and material foci

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'When power is disguised and value is concealed dissimulation becomes a way of life. That one does not know another's mind is a Melanesian axiom; that Papuans have white skins beneath their brown ones is common belief. The inside of a fruit, a tuber, a person, a house, a basket, a tree, a mountain or a stone is where the true value of these things is to be found. Humanity itself came from inside the earth, emerging from a hole at the top of a mountain. Sorcerers and magicians contain their secret powers in bundles kept in baskets hung in dark recesses of their roofs. Everyone keeps their valuables in boxes or baskets likewise hidden away in their houses. To be 'showy' is a prerogative of rank - a transient attribute at best, temporarily accorded to feast-givers - or the privilege of marriageable youth. Display (of self, of wealth, of beauty) has its place, but the normal state of affairs is concealment, a studied modesty, and a cultivated shabbiness. There is a disregard for appearances, an in difference to aesthetics. But this belies the inward state. The diffidence is cultural affectation, a display of non-display. That it is motivated is evident from the occasions when display is enjoined: at feasts, distributions, marriages, mortuary ceremonies, canoelaunchings and other inaugural occasions. The men and women paint their faces, rub their skins with coconut oil, decorate their hair with the brightest flowers and feathers, adorn their limbs with scented leaves and she/I-valuables. To an outsider, the effect is dry land blooming after rain; the visual shock of the sudden flowering is all the greater for the unpromising aridity of the usual condition. People are revealed as aesthetes after all, beautiful beneath the skin.' (Michael Young, 1987:249-250)

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'' his chapter concerns a single subject which is often treated as two I..6esep arate realms. Spatiality and materiality are in fact 'i.? coextensive, indivisible aspects of each other. An entity which has spatial properties must exhibit material qualities 'in' and 'of' that space. An object's material qualities must similarly be evident as a spatial presence. But perhaps because of a still popular conception of spaces and places as containers for the objects that lie within them, 'things' and 'spaces' are usually disjoined in thought and analysis. More often than not, within anthropological as much as other academic studies, the former has suffered from being over 'materialized' and the latter from over abstraction. Often they are contrasted upon these criteria. Take, for example, this statement In an otherwise astute analysis of space which neglects to give the same attention to mere 'things': 'Social spaces interpenetrate one another and/or superimpose themselves upon one another. They are not things, which have mutually limiting boundaries and which collide because of their contours or as a result of inertia.' (Lefebvre 1991:86, orig.emph.)

The clue to his bias is only loading one side of the contrast with the qualifier 'social'. The 'socialness of things' 1 in a general sense needs little defence or elaboration here, given that the point has been made repeatedly in recent literature (e.g. Appadural 1986, Miller 1987, Thomas 1991). However, the assumption that things, objects, are discrete, distinct and have easily identifiable boundaries - although in my view remarkably naive - needs addressing here both for its seductive apparent common-sense nature and for the use I intend to make of the counter position. Even within a 'physicalist' paradigm which has no qualms in amputating a material object from its mental representations, the matter of separating things from their contexts is far from straightforward.2

1

Riggins' (1994) title.

2

See Battaglia 1994 for a recent undermining of such 'materialist realism' in a Melanesian context.

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This aspect of classification has been a concern of Mary Douglas (e.g. 1991, 1994). She recounts an anecdote in which the wheels are stolen from a car and the insurance company refuses to pay because they classify them as 'accessories', construed as items moveable from the vehicle. This definition of the identity and context of the car seemed rather unfair to the owner who wondered what the response would have been if 'the car' had been removed and the wheels left behind. Whether the question at issue is 'what constitutes "the" car' in a claim against an insurance company, or 'what animals are birds' amongst the Kalam (cf. Bulmer 1967) Douglas concludes that neither similarity nor contiguity nor any recourse to 'natural kinds' can help us explain the system of classifications in operation, rather that we need to look to the usages and intentions embedded within classificatory systems.3 Furthermore these classifications of 'things' as, for instance, cars and accessories, or half empty and half full glasses of water, can overlap, interpenetrate and superimpose themselves upon one another just as much as 'spaces'. This is partly because human intentions often so overlap.

In fact, contrary to the implications sometimes present in both Douglas's and Thomas's work, I believe that materiality is important and can prompt almost universal dispositions to place boundaries of either objects or spaces at particular points. There is a degree of 'intuitive ontology'4 operating in these matters: the sea is rarely conflated with the land either as a spatial or material entity. This is not to deny the fundamental intermeshing of objects and spaces as social and cultural phenomena with each other and with social subjects (persons), due to the nature of intersubjectivity (ie. on a basic level, the presence a space\object may have in two or more subjectivities) and the differing intentionalities that are brought to bear on them. Rather it is to point Out that foregrounded or pressing material disjunctures are inseparable from and coeval with intentional

Cf. A similar approach to differential construals of objects across cultures in Thomas 1991. ' Boyer's (1996) useful phrase.

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and categorical distinctions. This is so with the artefactual world which presents us with embedded intentionalities (cf. Scarry 1985, Gell 1998): so, for instance, a wall presents us with an intention to divide and therefore categorize, a chair with intention to shape the body and relieve weight - implicitly promoting the production of a kind of entity that needs such relief. Goodman has long argued that the production of kinds amounts to the production of worlds, Hacking (1992) demonstrates this most effectively in relation to the impact of the production of the human kind of 'child abuse'. Chairs, walls and other entities promote the production of certain kinds and certain worlds in much the same way, if not necessarily so dramatically. The 'natural' world, insofar as its features compel our attention and find their way into our memory, presents us with 'natural' kinds and vice versa: the distinction of sea and land is material, spatial and conceptual. The difference is categorical, no matter how fuzzy and contested the 'content' of those categories may be.

The analogy of waves

My approach to material\spatial culture is consonant with that I bring to the more overtly 'cognitive' realms of memory and images and the more overtly 'social' realm of kinship and group affiliation. We have already seen how a phenomenological approach to these was enlightened by fluid metaphors of focus and resonance. Lefebvre suggests a complementary model for thinking about space (in all its richness): he describes it as a 'hydrodynamic analogy',

'...where the principle of superimposition of small movements teaches us the importance of the roles played by scale, dimension and rhythm. Great movements, vast rhythms, immense waves - these a/I collide and 'interfere' with one another; lesser movements, on the other hand interpenetrate. If we were to follow this model, we would say that any social locus could only properly be understood by taking two kinds of determinations into account: on the one hand, that locus would be mobilized, carried forward and sometimes smashed apart by major tendencies, those tendencies which 'interfere' with one another; on the other hand, it would be penetrated by, and shot through 134

with, the weaker tendencies characteristic of networks and pathways. This does not, of course, explain what it is that produces these various movements, rhythms and frequencies; nor how they are sustained; nor, again, how precarious hierarchical relationships are preserved between major and minor tendencies, between the strategic and the tactical levels, or between networks and locations.' (Lefebvre 1991:86-87) I too find a 'wave' rather than 'particle' perspective on social interaction to be useful. A wave, as my dictionary has it, is: 'an energy-carrying disturbance propagated through a medium or space by a progressive local displacement of the medium or a change in its physical properties, but without any overall movement of matter' (Collins 1982). Thus, in addition to the superimpositional advantages outlined by Lefebvre, it has the two further special benefits for social disciplines. Firstly, it counteracts our folk atomistic models of individualism with an intrinsically relational standpoint, and not just in terms of an intersubjectivity that highlights the interplay of subjects in opposition to objects. Our selves are not just implicated and negotiated in relation to each other, but in relation to the 'object world' also. As Jackson, discussing intersubjectivity, puts it in analogy apposite to this discussion: 'To echo quantum theory, the subjectobject partition is an artifact of our interventional acts of measuring reality; in fact, selves are no more single existences than are atoms and molecules' (1998:6, orig. emph.). Secondly, in as much as this model regards 'particles' or 'atoms' and other essential entities as effects of relational waves, it obviates our preconceptions of disjuncture between form and substance. There is no need for a 'depth ontology' where substantial essences are somehow prior or interior to 'surface' sensational form. The way European thought spatializes and prioritizes personal identity and regions of consciousness as within subjects is mirrored in a tradition of emphases on substantial identity within objects despite changes in attributes or relationships, whether the formless substance be Aristotle's 'prime matter' or Locke's 'something-I-know-not-what'. We must take care not to import such particular notions to cultures, such as those of New Ireland, which place much more emphasis on the role

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of 'exterior' inter-relations in assessing change, causality and identity. This is why, Melanesians place such much emphasis on control of form through covering, revealing, decorating and other means - identity and 'substance' are based on what can be known through perception, particularly sight. Lefebvre expresses doubt as to what such waves could actually be said to comprise of in a social setting. Without wishing to overconcretize what is still only an analogy, I would like to propose that such waves may be given impetus by 'local displacements' between 'internal' models and expectations of the world and 'external' perceptions of that world. Without entering into the exact cognitive mechanisms of such internal\external relations, it is possible to see that there is a tendency for them to 'equalize' and how agency, sociality and materiality are all implicated. Such 'waves' are an aspect of the long recognized and much written about dialectic between self and world. They are the 'disturbances' or 'displacements' experienced when the revelation of 'poetic' images create resonances in their milieu (cf. Bachelard), and in the 'Melanesian aesthetic' shape perception of the past and future in terms of its cause (cf. Strathern). Or, in a perhaps more tangible example, the implicational changes in status caused by a change - such as a birth, death or marriage - in people's relational fields. A birth changes the status of its immediate kin, and in turn the change of who they are transforms, to a diminished degree, the identity of those 'related' to them. This, in my estimation, constitutes a decent approximation to the physical notion of a wave, albeit that the 'energy' or information transmitted is of a socio-cuttural kind. Needless to say the effects of such waves are just as 'real' as any more 'physical' variety, in fact in a sense more so, because they directly engender change in perceptual reality rather than, as the positivists would have it, perception of reality (which changes). For the best use of the wave analogy as a tool for the analysis of material and spatial phenomena, I need to introduce two further factors. Firstly Lefebvre's (and others') weak construal of 136

objectifications - spaces, objects, other persons - as 'social Joci', mere convenient locations or scenes of social interaction, needs modifying. This repeats the fallacy of the disjuncture of space and thing; regarding locations as 'containers' of unrelated activity. It also elides the crucial role of agency. Instead I would like to add a more phenomenological, processual and relational perspective by substituting foci for loci, a term I have already used with regard to the multiple centres of implicational kinship. Spaces and objects are also social foci. Their formal definition (both in the optical and semiotic sense), and superimposition (or not) upon each other is a matter of social focus. A focus is a point at which waves (of light, water etc.) converge or diverge. The convergence of light at the focal point of a lens, or the divergence of ripples from the point a stone was dropped into water, might be physical examples of the two processes. Both are the result of activity, of directed change.

As it stands, one might attempt to visualize a social milieu in this model as a rock-pool: a repetitive cycle of raindrops on the surface resembling the reproduction of those foci of agency and intentionality we call persons. The drops create multiple atomic foci from which ripples interpenetrate, reinforce and interfere with each other; if we imagine them as persons we must allow that they have some ability to effect their direction and intensity of their projection. The pool has areas of different depths and viscosity. Some may be of high resistance (such as, perhaps, more perduring aspects of the material and social environment), less pliable to the disturbance of surface ripples, but rather moving to the rhythm of the Ion gue duree. There will be objects and barriers (the pool rim, an interface of high resistance) impervious to the immediate impression of the waves, but gradually shaped by their persistent abrasion and erosion, which they will reflect and become, in turn, the focal origins of. Thus does the 'inanimate', despite the grammarians objections, have 'secondary agency' (see Gell 1998 for an extended analysis of this). 'Viscosity' and 'barriers' may have many causes: important for this study are those which modify the internal model\external percept relationship upon which our 'waves' are based - ie. obstacles to and control of 137

perception or ideation.

The creation of form in relational fields

The problem in such a fluid model is how to conceptualize the persistence of forms or stabilities in the dynamic flow: consistencies of perception such as persons, objects or spaces. The existence of any particular object or space as itself (rather than subsumed within some other entity) is a matter of the regard of social agents (or patients cf. Gell 1998). In as much as it is a product of attention, this regard is a matter of intention and agency; in as much as it is an attended to percept, it is a matter of relationship and mutuality. In a social sense, each and every person and salient cultural object may be seen as foci of varying degrees of coherence and power, both in terms of their definition as a 'patient' of such waves and as an 'emitting' agent shaping the world and its perception. The first case is perhaps easier to describe: if we, or any other cultural entity including inanimate and immaterial objects, are to exist as such (cultural entities) we do so because we are the objects of others' regard and intentions. They (and we ourselves, given that we too have regard and intentions for ourselves) define us as a focus of attention. The degree of focus or definition depends on the homogeneity of the superimposition of perspectives and intentions. Like Douglas' car, the definition may be weak or contradictory if there are interfering intentionalities construing it.

The emission of defining 'waves' from persons is perhaps also easily agreed upon: the combinatory shaping action of attention and intention being part of our everyday experience. The formative, or poetic, powers of entities not usually regarded as agents capable of attention or intention, such as 'objects' may need rather more explanation. There are two connected approaches to this. The first, which has already been alluded to, may be regarded as ecological or implicational. This has been the subject of much elaboration in recent social and philosophical critiques and refinements of evolutionary theory (e.g. Hornborg 1998, Ingold 1991, Shotter 1991) which take 138

seriously the embeddedness of organisms within their environment. The relationship between them is often described as ecological: which implies not only that particular sorts of environments promote the evolution of particular sorts of organisms but also, what is less often highlighted, the reverse; particular types of organism promote the evolution of particular types of environment. Indeed viewed as a network of interlinking ecological relations, it becomes difficult to conceive of the development of 'form' itself. Two aspects which impinge upon the production of this form in relational fields are of relevance here: firstly the problem of time. When the 'environment' has changed, the 'organism', regarded as a locus (focus) in the network of ecological relationships, has, despite appearance of continuity, itself changed. The way we conceptualize the stasis which leads us to identify an object as 'the same' is, when considered relationally, problematic. The change in mise en scene that foregrounds the 'identity' of the object, is a change in the totality considered as a nexus of relations. Given this, the questions of form and relative separation of 'organisms' from 'environment' become lacunae which conventional theory has neglected. This is highlighted in Prigogine's (1980; Prigogine & Stengers 1984) emphasis on boundaries of different kinds of temporal flow. 'Organisms' or other 'dynamic stabilities' tend to be distinguished by us from their 'environments' by the sensation of different rates of change (cf. Shotter 1991) and correlating with this, difference of causal interdependency upon change (cf. Homborg 1998). Translating to my analogy, the differing kinds of temporal flow that Shotter and Prigogine talk about could be seen as different degrees of viscosity, or resistance to waves of change. Such resistance (or not) can easily be seen to link with the phenomenal qualities of materials and forms over time, such as their malleability, consistency, durability or ephemerality. The second aspect to the creation of form I would like to address follows Shatter (1991). He suggests that we need a 'poetics of relationships' in which we recognize our own self-construction and that 139

self-construction's implication in the formation of our surroundings: our conceptual models and cognitive schema are implicated in creating the world, but furthermore our agency is implicated in creating those self same models and schema too. This means that, as Shatter warns, following Vico's New Science, we cannot take it for granted that how mind (and hence also its 'environment') seems to be now, represents how it has always been. In particular it means, as Vico says, 'we must reckon as if there were no books in the world' (para. 33O) especially when we are dealing with a still oral culture. We must thus engage with the sensuous nature and effects of language and images. The problem, following Vico and others such as Mead (1934), is in the flux and flow of experience and sensation how do people create a 'place' where,

'there comes to be formed a recognizably distinct, but socially shared feeling about one's circumstances, to which all those involved can later return. ... Without the metaphor of written texts, and of meanings as static images (representations) to help us, how might we imagine the nature of people's first mental activity?' (Shotter 1991:385, orig.emph.) The question is one concerning the separation from, and intersection of, the temporal flows that tie the identity of the 'organism' to its environment - a phrasing which shows the close link with the problematics of memory and image. The creation of persons and minds thus becomes a problem of the creation of form. The answer proposed is that such forms originate in emotionally laden, compelling, shared 'sensory topics'. Vico's example is of thunder from which everyone runs in fear, and realizing that it is the same thing that they all fear, it becomes the unspoken explanation of their action and itself being apparently causeless they lend it their own form and nature as an 'imaginative universal' e.g. Jove. As Shatter puts it,

'Jove, the imaginary universal, "lent" form to, and was rooted in, the prior establishment of a sensory topic, a sensuous totality linking thunder with the shared fears at the limits of one's being, and with recognition of the existence of similar feelings in others because of shared bodily activities. ... The sensory topic.. .15 [thus] a 140

"place" in which it is possible to 're-feel' everything which is present at those times when 'Jove' is active.., as such feelings are slowly transformed into more external symbolic forms, the inarticulate feelings remain as the "standards" against which the more explicit forms may be judged as to whether they are adequate characterizations or not. Sensor,' topics are the primordial places, the loci, constituting the background basis of the mentality of a people. They make up its common sense, its sensus communis. Without a common sense, there is no basis in which to "root" the formation of any imaginative universals.' (Shotter 1991 386-7, orig.emph.) In our hydrodynamic analogy, we might put it that the production of persons as emitting foci depended initially upon themselves being defined through the reverberations and turbulence of some exterior wave of sensation. A primordial movement of form in the pond, which is still the basis upon which chaotic flow is propagating variations and diminutions.

This is, of course, more along the lines of a thought experiment designed to provoke understanding than an explanation of the processes involved in the production of any specific forms. Such productions necessarily mean the erasure of, or at least superimposition upon, other previous connections and forms. The primary forms we are concerned with here are persons. This theorizing indicates the possible mechanisms of their creation\ima gi nati o n , modification\redefinition or erasure\forgetting. The mechanisms discussed are all inter-linked and inter-reliant, but they can be enumerated separately:

i) Interests: Intentions of all kinds, strategies, politics and dominance combine in determining how our competing agencies divide up the world for our various ends. ii) Spatio-materiality: Whether artefactual in the sense of being the outcome of human intention or not, the spatio-material characteristics of the environment dispose mental categorizations to certain forms, and vice versa. This implies that boundary markers, 141

containers, surfaces and other divisors or 'form-givers' should be examined carefully (cf. MacKenzie 1991). This is especially so given regional emphases on 'skins' as containers for 'life-force' (e.g. Kuchler 1992, Gell 1993) and their creation, empowerment and dissolution. iii) Compelling sensation: These may produce a focus of attention, and as a corollary a commonality amongst the sensors and an increased awareness of their boundedness and separation. The question of what may be so compelling, involves many factors including those of I), ii) & iv). It may be that 'aesthetics' as we conceive of them may be less important than, say, the interest in an exchange good. Consideration also needs to be made of the factors which delimit which groups will be exposed to a salient sensation and their manipulation. (cf. argument in Introduction). iv) Environment of forms: The 'common sense' and 'imaginary universals' that Shotter talks about are part of this. The habitual associations correlated with certain sensations, and the habitual structuring of those sensations toward various archetypal forms. Think of Gibson's (1979) influential idea, extended by Ingold recently, of perception proceeding via an 'education of attention'. One aspect of that education is via our, often sub-conscious, familiarity with other forms around us. Others, clearly, are dependant on interest, materiality and super-conscious 'compelling' experiences.

V V V

FORM IN THE LAK WORLD

The realm of spirits

There are no lines or markable borders which delimit the geographical bounds of the Lak social milieu. We most usually refer to the zones deemed beyond 'society', as the unsocialized realm of 'nature'. Of course, as has previously been remarked by many authors (e.g. MacCormack & Strathern 1980), such categorization is firstly steeped in western traditions, and secondly, in as much as any intellectual or perceptual entity is present in the regard of any people, it cannot be 142

culturally or socially pristine. There are no realms which are unsocialized in as much as all come into being as realms through such socially inflected activities as discourse. Having made that caveat, it is true to say that many (all?) societies do construct spaces which are beyond or other than humanity in some way: those geographical areas in which people seldom venture, especially when they present very different characteristics to those which they do inhabit, are predisposed for use in such symbolism. In Lak, as in much of New Guinea, the forest and the sea are ideal candidates. The primary forest is a treacherous place, often dark, with a limited and disorientating visual prospect. The natural paths within it are watercourses and stream beds. Other orienting landmarks are valleys and the sound of the sea. Without help from these, men are quite liable to get lost in the dense forest even quite close to home. It is a place of towering trees and enormous clumps of bamboo, but is also often tangled with spiky and stinging undergrowth and vines. There are masses of decomposing and rotten debris on the ground level, while up above and around are the cries and calls of birds whose brightly coloured forms are far less often seen than heard. Flowering trees and vines also bring shots of colour to otherwise muted surroundings, as do wandering, and sometimes very large, butterflies. Patches of forest buzz rhythmically with the sound of insects, while elsewhere one might hear the crashing sound of a wild pig rushing by. The further reaches of the forest are only ventured into for the hunting of these wild pigs which were traditionally caught in nets, but this landscape extend far beyond the range of any hunting party.5 The men who once lived in the mountains are termed tan marit, which is sometimes used as a synonym for the 'ignorant' and 'violent' men from before colonial contact. Marit is described as the big bush, where one cannot hear the sea, and where there are no people or signs of human life, such as the cuts from a machete, the inevitable trace of

Although there are a few men who have accompanied Australian government officers on the grueling trip over the Weitin-Kamdaru pass to the other coast.

'43

human progress through the forest. The deep forest is also occasionally known as bual - as in bubual (plural formation), the sweet smelling plants associated with spirits. Once in a while, especially at night, I would catch those perfumed smells wafting on the breeze from the bush. The sea is used for fishing, like pig hunting a men's activity, traditionally with secret pidik fish traps laid and collected from canoes. It too is resistant to closure - eventually taking . one to Rabaul or Anir, should one have access to one of the few motorboats. It does not have the spatial density of features that the forest has in which one may be lost. Instead it has temporally distinguished moods: from storms to stillness, freak waves (even tidal waves on occasion), and currents. It too is a place of potential danger in which children are not to venture far unsupervised. Roaming beneath are shark, in some ways the sea's equivalent of the wild boar. Both are large dangerous animals which may gore and even kill a man, both are sought after as prestigious food although unsuitable for kastom exchange or distribution, and both may be used as a vehicle by the spirits of siniet magicians in order to kill. Both forest and sea are realms rife with tales of spirits and the uncanny. A strong form of this is the presentation of each as the home of spirits who mirror the human world. Thus: Before there were spirits on the mountain in the centre of Lambom. They would sometimes trap a man in vines (cf the net used in pig hunting) if he wandered around on the mountain too much, and take him away on a yal-kip (stick used for carrying pigs). One would sometimes hear a bullroarer or see a tubuan, but it was only the spirits working a custom. (Fieldnotes)

or Three women, Tinbain, Matlela & Tinru (M of Tokai) were at Wanan on the mainland looking after the pigs of Misiaring. They heard the sound of a triton shell, the flying fox spirits (taingan iru), singing on their mon (large ocean going canoe) announcing the arrival of a pig. There was no fire at the place where the women were and they were scared, so they lit a torch & the taingan iru flew away leaving the mon and the pigs, these then came up on the beach as driftwood. (Fleidnotes)

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There are also many accounts of villages being sighted under the waves of the sea. The ocean is also often associated with place-spirits (see below): the sea-cow, for instance, is thought to be a woman who was jumping from stone to stone on the reef, missed one, and was turned into a dugong by a place-spirit as she fell. The way in which the realm of spirits is a mirror image of the realm of the living ('the other side' we might say) and exists in its strongest form in a world 'beyond' the boundaries of Lak territory, is telling and typical. The metaphor 'mirror image' is appropriate as one's reflections and shadows are actually called ta/n gan - one's spirit. Perhaps the most trivial, but least ambiguous sign of spirits' trickery as well as inversion is the point repeated in many stories (e.g. Captain Cook Ch.2), that the footprints of various sorts of spirits will always mislead because they will seem to be going in the opposite direction to that in which the phantom is really travelling (ie. heel leading).

The spirits are seen as holding kastoms as men do but the pigs upon which they feast are men, or, once they are banished by fire, revealed to be pieces of wood - a substance linked with (dead) human bodies. The linkage of pig feasts with cannibal feasts is not as arbitrary as might initially be imagined. Previous generations 6 did feast upon the victims of warfare. The tubuan spirits were also infamous for feasting upon a victim from the village (human realm) in the tarafu (spirit realm) when they were invoked. In the case of tubuan cannibalism, the rough nature of the boundary\relationship between the victims and those that ate them is clear, it is the boundary between spirit and human - indeed symbolically, to this day, all men upon their initiation are killed and consumed by the tubuan\initiates, in the form of a pig feast and shell money distribution. In the case of human-human cannibalism, it seems to have been in the context of warfare which, according to oral accounts, was mostly between groups of the interior and coastal dwellers. The warring groups were identified with particular kamgoi and with the territory that they controlled. Even if

6

I did meet one old man, who was brought up in one of the last inland groups, who had witnessed cannibalism as a boy.

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open warfare was not extant, men had to take great care and seek the protection of allies should they trespass on foreign ground. Although there were certainly mass attacks, it also seems that there were times when single combat was undertaken between warriors. One was only supposed to kill members of one's own moiety (as in poison), in other words the negative exchange of death is moiety endogamous while the positive exchange of marriage is moiety exogamous. When a man was killed and consumed by the members of a men's-house, portions of him would be sent in baskets to other men's-houses of the same moiety as a boast and boost to the killers' reputation. The practice of sending baskets with portions of pig, tubers and shell money after kastom distributions to same moiety men's-houses today is an acknowledged continuation of this. Although there are female spirits, such as the torotoropa succubus, the realm beyond the populated milieu is identified with the masculine prowesses, such as warfare and magic. Male village pigs are castrated by their owners so that they don't taste 'sour'. It is the wild pigs which roam the forest that are the male source of fecundity for the domestic sows, when they punctuate the human realm. They are often used as a metaphor for men acting in a spiritual fashion, that is in a 'wild', roaming, violent and sexually aggressive manner.7 The places of men as spirits, in the guise of pidiks, are also overtly male in character and take on many of the qualities associated with the bush. The quintessential are the taralu, literally meaning the place of the men, which are the home of the tubuan. Lesser spaces of the same kind include rakrak, places associated with bullroarer spirits, and kamar, places for the preparation of men's singsing decorations. Alt are forbidden to women, and the taraiu and rakrak also to noninitiates. While within them, men are dead spirits and are under restrictions that promote the unsocial activities of spirits. Discretion permits only brief examples, but the wearing of clothes is limited (sarongs only, and previously nakedness), kinship links and

See discussion of spirits in the next chapter.

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hierarchies of the village are largely obliterated, the usage of knives is restricted, and hiding in the undergrowth encouraged. Visual prospects, and with them the prospects of knowledge, are obscured and controlled. The atmosphere is one of conviviality, which can turn speedily into uncertainty, violence, and danger from spiritual forces. As in the forest, there are instances of colour and song, beauty appearing and then disappearing out of the obscurity of the undergrowth, provided by the masks and decorations of the taraiu. In this context the association they have with the birds of the bush is entirely understandable.

The other kind of location especially attached to spirits are those in which tanruan ('place-spirits') reside. They may be found in two specific types of plant. One, rarely mentioned, is a vine called suan painget (axe vine). Unfortunately I was unable to identify it or discover why it is picked out in this way. The more common residence is the ficus (tropical fig), which presents a fabulous if quite common sight in the bush. These huge trees are propagated by the deposition of seeds by birds upon the limbs of a host tree. They grow an uncanny net-like lattice of roots and limbs, full of dark holes and crevices, which cover and eventually strangle and kill the tree underneath. The special and numinous nature of these trees is easily apparent and widely recognised, 8 but their hollow, niche covered, containing form along with their quality of growing upon the remains of a dead tree are particularly significant in the Lak context. As we shall see, having a hidden interior and growing life from death are both central symbols of spiritual power. Other typical locations of tanruan are caves, pools and springs. These share the ficuses quality of obscure, hidden contents. Sometimes tanruan live in peculiar stones in the forest, in rivers or on the reef. Some may be though to live in fabled or auspicious places under or over the sea - such as inside the volcanoes at Rabaul.

8

They are the same genus as the Banyan tree and Buddha received his enlightenment under one.

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Plates

3 & 4: Two typical tanruan near Bakum, an

Isolated rock and a cave.

Tanruan may be held responsible for many peculiar phenomena,

good, bad or indifferent. The two most common contexts are causing illness or indisposition, or In magic which harnesses them to add power to the effect of a singsing performance. The usual forms they take when abroad are snakes, or people.. These may be unusual in some way: typically the former huge and the latter white. Or, most espedally when in the form of a person, they may take on such 'realism' that a spouse Is tricked by a tanruan In a husband\wife's guise.

148

The village

All Lak villages and hamlets are within a very short distance of the coast, if not actually situated on the beach. The distance between them and the resident's gardens can range from a few hundred yards to a few miles. Some villages are quite old, certainly a hundred years or so, while others are very recently constructed and inhabited. Indeed there has been quite a spate of new settlements arising in the last five years. This has been enabled by. logging which has made equipment for clearing the bush accessible, and also provided a source of building materials. Few of the new communities have separated from their old villages because of any 'geographical' motivation, although that has certainly affected where they have chosen to settle. Rather all the recent encampments that I know of followed upon political schism which was usually along clan lines. A notable partial exception to this is the recent creation of Udam, which fractured away from Matkamlagir because of religious differences: however these largely followed pre-existing political fault lines.

The relationship between lineal group and residential group is apparent not just in new encampments but also in longer established habitations. Hamlets are generally dominated by, and indeed are on the land of, a particular clan. Many villages take the form of a ribbon of clan dominated hamlets along the road or the beach, and even those that do not, such as Siar, show a firm relationship between social and geographical propinquity. Reference to the illustration below, in which lineal connections are projected onto a diagram of Siar village (not to scale) suggests that proximity of residence gives a good indication of co-operative ties and reflect their expression of more than lineality alone. The village space is one of political as well as domestic relations, with affinity, power, and lineality all acting as attractors to various foci affecting the decision of where to reside. Looking at the north-western corner of the village one can see by the mass of red characters and lines that it is clearly dominated by a single clan (B-Konobua: red). However, Konobua, as a clan that came to the coast late, has no (or very little) land. Its claims to residence 149

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and gardening land is based on its affines. It is currently moving into a stronger position in Siar because its most active (but not actually eldest) male representative Tomalisman (1) is a long term supporter of an elderly, powerful kamgoi and yai-inpidik (tubuan leader\owner) Tonika (2) who is of another Bongian clan (B-Mongnon: blue) which has (disputed) claims on ownership of Siar. 9 This is a very strong position because Tonika has no direct lineal kin (only two classificatory ZS) and Mongnon has no female clan members left at all. So when Mongnon dies out, as it eventually will, Tomalisman and Konobua will have a strong claim to inheritance of their clan possessions, including land. This position has already been marked by giving Tomalisman joint responsibility for Tonika's men's-house and land.

The south-western corner of the village cannot, however, be similarly identified as dominated by B-Lambell (pink) by virtue of the clan identity of its inhabitants. Rather this cluster is here because of another kamgoi and yai-inpidik Topot (3), who did not actually, at the time represented by the diagram, even sleep there 1° but instead at his pafanpidik (initiate's men's-house) located on the edge of the taraiu. His house was instead occupied by a daughter who was a single mother, and neighboured by a house containing another daughter and her husband (from Bakum) who, once his parents had died, had moved to Siar to be with Topot. Topot's ZS who lives in Morkon (dO miles away) says he, and his mother will come and be by him when his own father dies.

The last and commonly deemed most powerful of the three yaiinpidik\kamgois in the village is Toanaroi (4). His reputation is largely based on his record of holding funerary kastoms. He too claims ownership of the village, and shared the rent from a nearby conservation base with Topot. Although his clan K-Marmar is big, there are only two adult (married\house h o lder ) men of his clan in the

Since I returned from Papua New Guinea he has in fact died. 10

He generally ate there with his daughter, and eventually built himself another house next to hers.

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village. Not all of his clan support him as they might. There being disputes about various things, including accusations of him predatorily holding mortuary feasts for those whose own closer relations would prefer 'finishing' them themselves. This is a sign that some clan members, residing in different locales, would like to secede from his leadership. However Toanaroi has built up a wide ranging network of alliances and debtors upon whom he called for a recent large tubuan mortuary celebration, confirming and maintaining his kastom based pre-eminence in the area. At that ritual he made several pointed speeches about how he had achieved a successful display on his own, without any aid from his own clan, but with help only from his Sons and other non-clan supporters. One of his sons lives adjacent to his men's-house and is married, in order to maintain patrilineal inheritance in a matrilineal system, to a woman from Toanaroi's own clan. The final grouping I'd like to examine is that dominated by the KKabiawai dan (yellow) in the north-east of the village. They too have attracted the spouse of an out-marrying clan woman to bring his family to Siar once his own parents had died, this time so the daughter could be with her sick mother, Maria. Their stay was supposedly only for the duration of her illness, but one year after her eventual death they were still in Siar. Kabiawai have their own land, with gardens and recently planted cocoa plantations about a mile away. Maria's children have used resources, royalties, and wages from the timber company to construct their own new settlement (Kapokpok) on their land. Two brothers and two sisters already lived there at the time this map was drawn. By the time I left (c.20 months later) another sister and brother and their families had joined them. Only three adult members of the clan remained in Siar: the senior member, Maria's brother, partly because he was in dispute over the degree of leadership taken over the clan by her children (especially the eldest brother); the sister who was in marriage already separated from the rest of her clan and living on the other side of the village; and the elder son himself, who despite many threats and much time spent at Kapokpok had stayed in Siar partly because he was the 152

village catechist, and perhaps partly because of his wife's wish to be in the proximity of her own mother.

It can be seen from this last account that the village is an ever changing entity. In the 30 buildings represented there were 16 'households', or rather what in Susurunga were called wanpela sospan, 'one saucepan' (see Bolyanatz 1994 and S. Jackson 1995) units which generally ate from one source of cooked food, and 2 men's houses. By the time I left 11 new buildings had been built, 8 had been knocked or fallen down, 3 households had moved out, 1 household had moved in, and an additional men's-house inaugurated, leaving a total of 33 buildings with 14 'households' and 3 men'shouses. Buildings and dwellings are ephemeral things, with almost a third of the housing stock being replaced in a 20 month period, we might very roughly estimate that the average house is changed, for one reason or another, once every 5 years - which in fact agrees with local estimations." Of course, this is now changing with the advent of timber houses. None of the houses knocked\fallen down were timber, and 5 of the 11 that were built were at least partly made from planks. This amounts to a slow change of character of the village space. Semipermanent housing actually presents quite a radical change in the traditional poetic qualities of the house. The ephemeral, sun-bleached, rotting, relatively mobile nature of the traditional house was, and still to a large extent is, an important component of the Lak canon of imagery. It is part and parcel of the environmental experience of decay, transformation and dissolution that is reflected in the death rituals. A timber house with a corrugated iron roof, in addition to its physical permanence, represents a substantial investment and one that is not readily left upon disagreement with one's neighbours. The heavier investment in materials translates into a heavier investment in a location and a deeper implication in specific localized social relations.

My reasoning being that if 1 in 3 houses were changed in 20 months, then all of the houses might be changed in 3x20=60 months = 5 years.

153

Villages are a dense embroidery of traces of human life and activity. This tracery is neither fully mental nor physical. Physical phenomena, often invisible or unnoticed by those without the requisite knowledge - a scar upon a tree used to cut a house-post, a stone used as a seat or as part of an earth oven, a tree used as shade, or a food favoured and shared - evoke the long gone people with whom they are associated for those remaining. Places, objects and activities are often richly evocative for Lak and are sometimes treasured, avoided, or feared for their associations. This is key to the qualities of sum and nambu which are a central rationale for the entire edifice of mortuary rites and apply to successive stages of manipulation of the association between a deceased and the evocative traces that s\he left behind. A desired effect from these manipulations is that the 'memory', the evocative potential of the traces of the deceased, should be 'finished'. This 'finishing' is partly achieved by the physical destruction of evocative items but is also largely achieved through the poetic use of images of ephemerality and decay - which foreground a balancing imagery of permanence in ancestral possessions such as tubuan (Cf. Weiner 1992). The village and its houses, although constructed by men, are primarily the women's realm. Women are especially connected with the ephemeral, as indeed they are with life. It is they who every few days sweep their zone of the village with a coconut-spine broom called a sar, erasing all footprints, clearing away betel-skins etc. When a

village has sum during the mortuary rites for the removal of evocative memorabilia, it is forbidden for women to so broom - all traces must remain. The true end point of such kastoms and the removal of sum is the brooming of the village. Sar also means shell-money, almost the only traditional material culture which is so long lasting as to be, to all intents and purposes, permanent. It is especially associated with the dead and the male realm. It is 'with' this shell-money that men remove or destroy the houses, trees and other evocative remains of the village. The women are concerned with the everyday reproduction and making new of the village as a scene for social-interaction. The men remove a person's traces only once and permanently. Emergence 154

of new long-lasting materials, especially in the domestic domain, has potential to disturb the inter-relations of such imagery.

V V V

LIVING SPACES Some of the most conspicuous and poetic imagery in Lak, as in many other parts of the world, are those of living spaces. Dwellings, through the action of everyday familiarity and habituation, and characteristics of their delimitation of internal and external spaces, are important in the foundational imagery of being-in-the-world. They are emanations of who and where we are, locating us in social, geographical and imaginal space. It is no coincidence that thinkers concerned with the roots and processes of our ontological positioning, such as Bachelard, Bourdieu and Heidegger, have the analysis of the house or dwelling as key to their work. Since he deals most directly with imagery, let us take Bachelard as our starting point: '[TJhe house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts memories and dreams of mankind. The binding principle in this integration is the daydream. Past, present and future give the house different dynamisms, which often interfere, at times opposing, at others, stimulating one another. In the life of a man, the house thrusts aside contingencies, its counsels of conty are unceasing. Without it, man would ta dispersed being. It maintains him through the storms of the heavens and those of life. It is body and soul. It is the human being's first world. Before he is 'cast into the world' as claimed by certain hasty metaphysics, man is laid in the cradle of the house... Life begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house.' (Bachelard 1994:6-7)

Bachelard based his analysis of imagery on the western experience of home and it is clear that this needs modification in the face of the different physical structure and use of housing in Lak. Thatch buildings certainly do not present quite the same counsels of continuity as bricks and mortar.

155

Ancestors' hidden houses

Bachelard's advice that past, present and future oriented notions of the house may give differing stimuli is apt in Lak. The 'ancestors' were often described to me as not living in houses such as people live in now, but in lum, dry holes in the ground or rock, similar to caves, with a fire inside. Furthermore, these lum were still the location of many of the missing clan possessions I asked after, which previous kamgoi were said to have deposited. Through neglect or greed, many have not passed on their location or the requisite magic to gain safe entry. One friend confided, in an account similar to many others except for the vividness of his first-hand description, that he had the limepowder magic which opened and closed the entrance to his clan lum, inside which was an eternal fire and a snake which guarded the items within. These were clan skulls, shell-money and the clan buliroarer. Once items are deposited in a lum, they may only be taken out temporarily. If not returned, one will suffer sorcery or be killed by the snake. Hence the reputation of greediness of kamgoi who deposit their valuables in a lum rather than passing them on to their kin.

Lum present an important complex of imagery quite distinct from contemporary thatch houses, although structurally related. They associate certain sorts of temporality - both continuity and the past, the realm of the dead - with particular spatio-material qualities and contents. The presence of snakes in underground caves or holes has highly specific resonances with tanruan, powerful place spirits which are associated with caves, pools and enveloping parasitic ficus trees. This past-underground, is the location for clan valuables and through them for chthonic group continuity. The presence of the valuables must be continuous, and everlasting, even at the expense of present day exigencies. The emphasis on the eternal fire is also linked to the permanence of the lum and its contents. The conserving effect of drying and storing items in the roof above the fire is well known and much utilized in Lak. Perhaps the aspect of lum which is most resonant with numinousness is the idea of a hidden realm of spirits and valuables. 156

Such imagery is in fact endemic. Tales of gold, following local fascination with the gold mine on the nearby island of Lihir, reinforce the imaginary location of valuables. There is a story in Lak that, when there was a local priest, he would sit by the graves of the dead, and on the fourth day after burial the deceased's spirit would come up with gold. Or, alternatively, that a snake deposits gold in the ground.

Contemporary houses

Rumal is the word for a normal house. As already mentioned, some have been able to take advantage of the recent availability of rough cut timber from the logging company and they have constructed plank houses on piles with corrugated iron sheeting as roofing. These are high status houses possible only for those with an income. Many older kamgoi, even though they may have income from logging royalties, prefer to live in the vernacular style. This is part of a general feeling that it is dangerous to display wealth for fear of arousing jealousy. In Siar one eminent kamgoi had refused to live in a timber house that was built for him for fear of sorcery, and (initially at least) only some of the younger middle ranking men were brave (their word) enough to build them. These 'modern' houses are still very much in the minority, for mainly financial reasons, and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

The primary advantage of timber houses is that they are relatively permanent and impermeable structures. The normal house in Lak is a small rectangular structure of split-bamboo walls (normally two layers) nailed onto sunken wooden corner and wall posts with bands of split bamboo batons. The roof is A-frame and made of bundles of rattan leaf folded over split bamboo cross pieces, and the floor is dust. The newly completed roof is the same fluttering glistening green as a tubuan, but it soon dries to a golden yellow colour, complimenting the pate dried bamboo walls.

157

Plate 5:

A newly constructed house. Note the green rattan, as also used In the

tubuan.

It is a considerable work to find, cut, carry, and erect all the materials Into a house. It is primarily the husband's job to build the house although he may call upon family and close lineage members to help in some sections. He will probably pay the village women to collect the large amount of rattan leaf needed. Constructing the thatch from this also needs a group effort, this time from the men. The thatch will last no longer than 3 years and the whole house will need replacing in 5 or so. The whole structure slowly rots, is eaten away by insects, shaken to the foundations by large pigs, periodically hammered by the violent seasonal winds and soaked and flooded by the monsoon. There are many buildings which are mixtures of these two styles: bamboo walled with corrugated iron roofing, or a thatch house on top of piles. The 'standard' type of house would almost always be used as a cook house alongside a residential house that was on piles, as the main mode of cooking is the earth oven. Other houses also separated the functions of cooking and sleeping. They would either have a cook house alongside, or would divide the interior of the house with a blsectin wall. On one side would be a more private sleeping area with raised bamboo or plank beds and pandanus or coconut leaf mats. On the other side would be a place for an earth oven and head level shelf 158

for storing firewood, food, saucepans and other possessions in the drier smokier roof space. Each side will probably have a window opened by a prop, the door will ingress into the cooking section.

The interior of the house would generally contain more than these minimal furnishings. There is almost always a lockable metal patrol box for valuables and clothing, wooden shelving, and a scattering of items - knives, an axe, drying tobacco, baskets etc - stuck in the thatch, or hanging from the walls. Outside there may be a place for a fire, a bench under the eaves, and a giant clam shell for feeding the pigs. Much of the time, the pigs, dogs and sometimes chickens are under the house if it is on piles, or otherwise in its shade.

Most of the time that is spent at the house is spent in the space around it, on mats by the fire, or under the shade of an associated tree. As I soon learnt, spending too much time' 2 inside the invisible interior is associated with sickness. Although built by men, the house is primarily the domain of women and children, who when not working in the garden or at the river will spend most of their time in the village. Men usually leave the house in the morning and return in the evening. Any leisure time may be spent in the men's-house or in the

taraiu. Men who spend too much time at the house with their wives and children are traditionally scorned and said to 'stink of women'. Around the house men must be careful to avoid such sources of feminine pollution as walking under a line of women's clothing or sitting under the food\firewood shelf.

Men's-houses

Many men's-houses are built time and again upon the same site, stressing the continuity of the line of kamgoi that build them. Unlike the construction of a family house the building of a men's-house is a

kastom occasion - and involves a pig feast and a distribution of food to the women. The custom for renewing a men's-house, (or perhaps

12

Such as more than half-an-hour after dawn1

159

more accurately the act of succession signalled by its construction) is said to be 'the same' as the rituals for death. That is it involves removal of sum (loosely translatable as 'mourning taboo' but see later extensive discussion) and was previously said to involve the erection of a rangrang and a single large ton ger, both constructions associated with the tondong mortuary rite. The erection of a men's-house is inevitably linked with death ritual because it is in order to host mortuary rites, with all the political connotations that implies, that men's-house are constructed. One cannot claim leadership of a clan or clan section without 'finishing' their dead, and one cannot host mortuary feasts without a men's-house - a new men's-house is an index of the intention of a kamgoi's intention to do just that.

Houses have not always been built to the same designs as today. Stephan and Grabner (1907) document oval houses completely covered in rattan leaf to the ground and all the houses in a picture of Siar published in Hüskes (1932) are of this type. No further record of such houses, as domestic residences, are known to me. However this form survived much longer in men's-houses with which it became identified. One of the last was seen and photographed by Albert in Siar in 1985, and my sources say that there was one extant in Rei even more recently than this.

In this 'traditional' form there would be no windows, the only openings being two doors symmetrically placed on each side of the front, which are known as the 'eyes' of the men's-house. These doors would also be covered in rattan and held up by a stick when open, but when closed would be almost invisible like nun s/ks/k, the nest of a small parrakeet which closes the entrance to its nest after itself. Sometimes there would also be a small hidden 'emergency exit' at the back of the men's-house for escape if it was attacked and set alight.

160

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Plates 6 & 7 'Old style' houses In Lamassa (top) (Stephan & Grãbner 1907) and Slar (Hüskes 1932).

My Informants inevitably commented on how very dark and smoky the inside of the men's-house would be - upon entering one cannot make out the inhabitants. Now, as before, narrow bamboo beds\benches line the walls, and there are fire(s) in the middle. There is a spot (often now a box) at the central post (if there is one, or otherwise by the door), where everyone's betelnut skins and detritus are thrown, 1.61

so that the refuse is communal and no sorcerer can identify the leavings of his chosen victim. Hung from and stuck in the rattan leaf roof or on small high shelves close to it are small personal belongings of those who sleep there and old smoky baskets of ritual and secret paraphernalia. All the pig jaws of the feasts associated with this men's-house are strung on a strip of bamboo across the back wall as a visible index of the stature of the owning kamgoi. Various ritual insignia and copyright possessions of the kamgoi are also kept his men's-house. These may include ceremonial axes with conical haft ends incised with tubuan markings, and spears with a human bone haft that are the insignia of a tubuan-leader (yai-inpidik). Long slender poles of obscure function to the uninitiated (actually used in buliroarers) may also be stretched across the roof space and under the eaves outside may be a very old slit drum. Men's-houses are enclaves of male secrecy and exclusiveness within the female realm of the village. They are generally at the margins of the village13 alongside the bush and\or the reserved areas of the taraiu, rakrak or kamar (places of tubuan, bullroarer and singsing preparation respectively). Many have a window facing the bush so that men may enter and leave without being visible from the village. They manifest two degrees of discrimination: no women are allowed to approach or enter a standard men's-house; no men (or women) who have not been initiated into the tubuan may approach or enter a pa/anpidik, 'men's-house of secrets\initiates'. The men's-house is the

place for matters of kastom to be discussed, a place for conviviality and sharing of food and stories. It is not always a place for young boys: although I have seen men there with a small son at their side, there is also a saying that should one be in the men's-house during feasting, the men will 'eat the eye of the child'. It is essentially an adult place, and a boy's leaving of the domestic hearth to take up residence in a men's-house is a sign of his entering the adult world. 13This is certainly the case in the villages near to Siar but further away (Morkon and Rel for instance), in villages that have developed in ribbons along the road, this principle is often compromised by the need to have the men's-house on the clan's own land. So when a clan's block of ground is bordered on each side by other inhabited blocks, the men's-house too will necessarily be in the midst of housing. 162

Indeed, traditionally the moment for a boy to leave his mother for the men's-house would be on being deposited back Into the village after his incorporation into the bullroarer spirit. In other words, the boy began living in the men's-house, a somewhat spiritual as well as male place, after his first exposure to, and indeed transformation into, a spirit. House posts The men's-house as the location of a kamgoi's ritual possessions and valuables is a place of power. However, one type of pidik was not merely stored and hidden there in readiness for future revelation, but was intrinsic to the structure and empowered character of the men'shouse. These were carved, painted and 'animated' house-posts (generically called singah), which might walk around when no-one was inside, or be propitiated for success with women or in warfare. When a men's-house was finally abandoned the singah would be buried on the site under a stone and the place marked with tangets.

Plate 8: The singah KamlIal.

163

Sin gah are rare now: but many men can remember them and many contemporary kamgoi are clear about the copyright designs which they possess. Until recently there were no longer any men's-houses in Lak with these posts, but during my stay one was erected in Kamilal. 14 That post was carved in secrecy in the bush, and brought to the men's-house and planted in it's centre by the bullroarer-spirit of the owning clan. Once it had left, the women emerged from hiding and those related to the previous kamgoi came to the 'eye' of the men's-house to see the sin gah within and wept and wailed, leaving a small payment (dok). In this case the post had a snake carved upon each side, painted with back and white stripes, representing a maumau, a poisonous reef snake. This snake, I was told was MB of the sponsoring kamgoi, Leopold. The snake and Leopold's human MB Toarurung were twins, born from the same mother, the snake first and then him. Toarurung became famous for a kind of magic in which he would use the snake for the divination and punishment of sorcery. Toarurung and the snake died, as they had been born, at the same time. The snake was seen crawling around the men's-house on the night of the post's inauguration.

In representing a snake this post was slightly heterodox, but still within the range of material normally depicted. The posts are generically said to be of previous kamgoi, as indeed was the Kamilal example. On investigation into contemporary descriptions of designs however, and consultation of the historical collection of sin gah and related dance staffs published by Stephan and Grãbner (1907, hereafter S&G)' 5, it can be seen that not all the posts are entirely anthropomorphic. Some, (e.g. S&G Vu/Vu! 8), are complete human figures, depicting an identified ancestor or even an historical (living memory) kamgoi (e.g. 'Tolipari' belonging to B-Silbat in Rei). Others depicted tubuan or bullroarer-spirit, or might incorporate both human

14

I also saw a detailed maquette of a sin gah prepared to show a young kamgoi a design in his possession. 15

Exactly the same illustrative material was also published in Stephan (1907), but the table numbering is different. Unless stated otherwise I am using the numbering of the jointly authored volume.

164

Plate 9: Tables VII & VII from Stephan & Grãbner 1907, demonstratIng

-

sin gah.

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165

and spirit motifs in a single figure and\or be identified as both person and spirit. The tubuan might be depicted quite naturalistically with the iconical triangular mask above legs, or be more discreetly referred to in triangular designs with incised eyes (e.g. S&G Vil/VIlI 12, 13, 14). Those of bullroarer-spirits either showed buliroarers or a 'human' figure. Other anthropomorphic motifs, such as a 'neck' and an 'arm\ha n d' were also identified by my or Stephan and Grabner's informants. Other 'more abstract' motifs were often present, in combination with each other or with the overtly figurative designs (e.g. S&G VH \VIII 1-7). The most common of these, a flat segment\divider motif which is used decoratively, and from which human figures and tubuan almost always arise,' 6 is the ba/ba!. Ba/ba! is a word of powerful and multiple imagery. Perhaps it's primary meaning is that of an inedible mushroom that grows from rotting wood (e.g. S&G VII\VIII 22), some of which are luminous. It is also the name for a kind of sponge that grows on the reef. Another meaning is the tree which, from a cut down stick, regrows very quickly and is planted as a boundary marker or is planted in front of the men's-house to mark the deceased in the secondary mortuary rites. Ba/ba! are exemplars of regrowth and the reclamation of a secondary life from the apparently dead or rotting. As such they are very much associated with spirits. The angular motif clearest on S&G VII\VI II 4 and 6, is known to my informants as Karnkungen gar, a branch of coral. This is what is collected and burned to make lime powder, which is the most common medium for the invocation of spirits and their power in spells. A similar pattern (e.g. S&G VII\VIH 3, 5) was often known to my informants as bern - butterfly. Certain butterflies are thought to be spirits particularly dangerous for children.

Another character (e.g. bottom motif of S&G VII\ VIII 5) is the fruit from barringtonia racernosa, which has a green skin with a white edible nut inside. There is also pas, taro, or (S&G)ndupa, the middle of broken taro. Taro too has a white interior: ndupa which I found no record of, would in Siar now be called patun pas, literally meaning

16The full human figure of S&G VII! VIII 8 is an unusual exception. 166

'seed taro', which refers to taro broken into pieces before being cooked. Patun pas are given to all women on the revelation of a newly born baby, and is also the term for a tubuan initiation payment. The use of food motifs as part of the carved figures is in itself significant, given the role of food in the general creation of relationships; particularly in the creation of fealty to those who give unreciprocated food: kamgoi and mothers. They are perhaps also resonant with the ton ger 'food effigies' which are dismantled as part of the process of transforming the dead from social persons to spirits. The linkage of white with hidden interiors obtains a significance by cropping up in a number of culturally relevant places; such as bones in bodies, lime in pouches, shell-money in baskets, and indeed sin gah in men's-houses. These objects and the colour are linked with spirits, whom are very often white'7 , and often hidden in interiors.

At least some (possibly all) sin gah were carved from a wood with a white interior, and were said to have white skin. Portrait posts often have their 'skin' decorated as if at a singsing, ie. as if an emissary from the spirit world. The wood, from which they are carved, is a common metaphor for the body, especially dead bodies.' 8 Hence the symbolic power of the ba/ba! as something which grows from rotting wood. As is abundantly clear from the variety and density of associations and evocations, sin gah are instantiations of spirits and poetically form the men's-house into a spiritual space.

With their darkness, containment of valuables, spirits and fires, men's-houses bear some similarity to lum. Houses also have a visual and material similarity with tubuan. This link is explicit and tubuan were referred to 'as houses for men'. The men's-house is such a house, with 'eyes', and an animating hidden spirit within the container of rattan leaves, as the tubuan has. Furthermore the men's-house has an ethos of commonality under hierarchy: all are to eat and joke

See, for example, the myth of Suilik Ch.5. 18

This will be discussed in further detail in Ch.5. 167

together within it, while all are under control and obligation from the owning kamgoi. This too is the case in the taraiu. Men's-houses are separated by a physical, conceptual and onto-logical boundary of thatch, 'Not' and secrecy from women and the village in a similar way, if to a lesser degree, as the taraiu, and effect an enclave of the spirit world in the village. We will return to this.

V V V

PERSONAL SPACES

We turn from consideration of simulacra figures to that of living persons. The difference is one of degree rather than kind. We must remember that just as a kamgoi may cause wooden carvings of his ancestors and associated spirits to be created inside his men's-house, so, on ritual occasions, he may cause real people to incarnate those spirits in masks or decorations in front of his men's-house. One correlate of power is such an ability to transform the identities of those around you.

Social identities, transformed or otherwise, are assessed and manifested largely through visual media. Many of these indications are codified and enforced quite rigidly. Because of this the wearing of certain decorations or the display of certain articles are in effect performatives - 'image acts' (Bakewell 1998). So, for example, the display of a sur, a spear with a bone in its haft which is an insignia of a yai-inpidik (tubuan leader), effects the placement of the owner in that category. It is almost inconceivable, and certainly impossibly daring, that the correlation could be mistaken. Which insignia are assigned to which people is not, as a semiotic tradition would have it, arbitrary. There are quite cogent reasons - to do with relative exposure or ability to hide personal items, for example - why certain accessories or decorations are more suitable for designating some statuses than others.

Insignia are not just signs which are emitted by their carriers - they 168

are worn. They are in spatial and material as well as conceptual relationships. The formation and transformation of persons in Lak is bound up with the interplay of the same material, conceptual and social possibilities of covering and exposure, attention and obscurity as the negotiation of other entities. Costume, as the artefactual component that comprises a 'compelling' boundary to the person, is key in that process.

I will argue that Lak restrictions on clothing, accessories, decorations, and masks can all be viewed as part of the same sumptuary complex. There is a continuum between clothing and baskets and pidiks: the covered, obscured and restricted, whether it be the interior of a taraiu, men's-house or basket, are analogous spaces from which revelations may issue. To those outside them, they are framed off as ineffable and inaccessible. It is this combination of the owned inchoate, which has the potential for directed poetic and powerful incursions into the public sphere, that characterizes them all, to greater or lesser extents, as abodes of the spirits.

These characteristics also provide the grounds for a seeming paradox: the simultaneity of attracting attention and obscuring perception in clothes, decorations and masks. Often revealed pidiks, they demand attention and poetically effect their surroundings, but they themselves are containers and covers. They reveal and conceal, intimating that there is more to know, a realm to which the viewer does not have access. They create forms which obviate and superimpose upon others beneath or before them. Initiates clothe themselves in pidiks, covering themselves with disguises and decorations and overwriting their quotidian identities. These copyright and restricted garbs are the form taken by the dead once transformed by the mortuary rituals; their living identities having been superceded in the course of the rites, their subsequent identities now take the form of the mode of overwriting itself - ie. poetic decorations which may be used by others as means for temporarily transformation.

169

Everyday person coverings 'Traditionally' men wore no clothing in Lak. Many of the older men who were accustomed to this style of (un)dress died within the living memory of middle-aged informants. Older informants would tell me that all the preceding generations of men had worn were small armbands. The only other coverings they donned normally were pandanus leaf capes or 'umbrellas' which were worn as protection from the rain. Capes are sometimes used to conceal pidiks19 and they are larger versions of the pandanus leaf cradles used to carry babies. They also have associations with tubuan, 'the umbrella of men'. There is an important distinction between capes and other men's coverings which are replacement exteriors, such as tubuan masks, decorations for singsings, or other costumes for various pidik performances. Capes are used to obscure the hidden, but not highlight another form in its place.

'a

Plate 10:

Patrick demonstrates a

pandanus cape.

19

Especially In brief movements outside seclusion, such as when a girls exits the house for her toilet during her initiatory sedusion, or in the movement of pidik objects, such as the first 'white-man' encountered and captured, to the seclusion and secrecy of the men's-house.

170

Prior to universal adoption of sarongs, women wore a genital covering made from bark-cloth and leaves referred to as a ma! (bark-cloth)20. Why women wore a genital covering and not men is a debatable point. My preferred explanation links it to women's 'natural' role as containers, from within which pidiks are produced (children) 2 ' and the male appropriation of 'cultural' coverings as their own pidiks.

The dress associated with mission influence is sarongs for both sexes and 'men blouses', which fit tightly around the neck and arms, for women from sexual maturity to childbirth. Older women still often go without tops, but men-blouses and T-shirts are worn beyond the nursing of their children by the younger generation. Younger men now often wear shorts instead of, or underneath, their sarongs. The trend is towards both sexes, especially the young, and especially those that have been to high school in the towns, wearing more and more elaborate clothing - trainers, watches, ripped jeans. As one might expect, now men wear clothes the distinctions of gender hierarchy are followed rather than contradicted, and women lag some way behind in the possession and display of desired items such as watches or shoes.

Most of the time most clothing, bar occasional defence against the chill of the small hours of the night or the rain, is of 'ideological' rather than 'practical' use. Some items, such as the woolly hats sometimes put on young children despite the blazing sun, seem to have negative 'practical' utility. Part of their current appeal is their association with 'modernity'. However, clothes may have a more ancient and entrenched significance within 'tradition' because of their status as coverings. The adoption of clothing is associated with control over disclosure of one's person and one's possessions. While the person can be invested in the unadorned naked body, the inbuilt mutability of clothing and decoration creates greater possibilities of self-

20

See Stephan & Gräbner 1907, p34-35, figs. 13 & 14.

21

See discussion of the body in Ch.5.

171



modification and transformation. It is probable that the increased take up of clothing, baskets and other coverings and markers of status is not unconnected with a general flattening of hierarchies and an inflationary increase in certain pidik forms (especially tubuan) and the numbers of Initiates controlling them. Personal containers

Like capes, baskets are used to transport and cover pidiks which should stay hidden; the archetypal case is shell-money which should always be hidden inside a basket until its moment of revelation. They are constructed from coconut leaves made pliable by singeing over a fire before being plaited into shape. Like a house they are green until they dry and fade to a straw white. Also like a house, they contain and cover a man's secrets and have explicit connections with tubuan. Even the uninitiated see that after the seclusion of men in the bush, they emerge with new baskets under their arms and that these are sometimes referred to as their tubuan. Furthermore, the asocial, spiritual nature of the insides of baskets Is made clear by the Lak explanation for why they don't carry their babies inside them, as mainland New Guinean's carry their children in net-bags. If a baby is placed In a basket they grow up to become a nong, a person who

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Plate 11: Towai, with a modest new basket. Note the herbs attached. 172

pays no heed to their parents and goes to earth-oven after earth-oven (for food) regardless of whom they belong to. The implication is that they become 'wild', unattached and unencumbered with social relationships, and voracious, like spirits of the bush.

Given these spiritual associations it is perhaps not surprising that important sumptuary restrictions, which have now become considerably watered down, once applied to personal containers and baskets. 'Before', ordinary men did not carry baskets around with them at all, that was the reserve of kamgoi. Nor were they allowed to carry lime pouches made from a type of pandanus leaf: to this day these remain markers of yai-inpidiks. 'Nothing men' had to carry their little lime and betel tied in a banana or ginger leaf, or they might carry their pipe or tobacco leaf in their plaited arm band, their only clothing.

Baskets are now the ubiquitous companions of all men. Different types are still associated with different social positions. The 'native' style is the robong, which may come in various sizes, but a small hand-held version is favoured by older men, especially kamgoi. Younger men carry baskets of various 'foreign' styles which are subject to whims of fashion and artful elaboration and decorations reflective of their personality. 22 Their larger baskets tend to be carried over the shoutder. Those active in pfdiks, especially Fn the period leading up to a custom, often sport outlandishly large baskets and boast of how they could hide an entire pig inside. In addition to hiding items within, in certain singsings such as tipang these huge baskets are used as shields to hide the performer\spirit before their moment of revelation.

A basket is deeply personal to its owner, and reflects his personality and social position in more than form. It may contain his betelnut, tobacco, mirror, bush-knife, shell-money and other belongings. Normally only close relatives would ever look in it without permission. Its contents can be munificent: a family man should never come back 22

The role of baskets in symbolizing masculinity and individual personality seems rather similar to the use of penis gourds 'trained' to various shapes and sizes in parts of mainland New Guinea.

173

from the bush without food-stuff's in his basket; it is from within his basket that a man produces betel and tobacco for his friends. They can, however, also be dangerous: the basket of a powerful man may contain poisons, a sick man's may have had poison put within it. Baskets are objects of personal adornment and may have fragrant herbs fastened outside and in, these may attract women. Or, along with other singsing paraphernalia they may have been carrying, if taken to the garden, they may attract damaging pests and spirits. It is only quite recently that some women have begun carrying personal baskets, although they are generally cast offs from their male relatives. They have always carried food baskets of course, which are a completely different style to the enclosing men's basket. Food baskets are plaited loosely with gaps, they have large openings and are carried open upon the head. They hide little, instead demonstrating their contents and the food giving capacity of the bearer. The contrast between open women's food baskets and men's concealing personal baskets is comparable to the difference between women's open provisioning netbags and men's covered secret netbags discussed by MacKenzie (1991). There are important differences, which, given that MacKenzie generalizes for the entirety of Papuan New Guinea, may have some bearing on pervasive Austronesian/Papuan distinctions. A fundamental contrast is that while in central New Guinea women make netbags which are overlaid by male feathers23, in Lak both types of basket are made by men, indeed a new husband's first task is supposed to be to make food baskets for his wife. Related to this variance in the objectification of gender differences is the divergence in characters of containers' interiors: Papuan netbags are wombs within which children are grown and socialized; in Lak even deposition in a woman's basket would make a child asocial. Men do not overlay female forms in quite the same way 23 Another common New Guinea method of 'converting' a female made bilum to male usage is to make it rigid or stiff, rather like a basket in fact (Hauser-Schäublin 1996). This kind of conversion is plainly not open to baskets which are already stiff. 174

in Austronesian Lak as in Papuan New Guinea, male spirits do not cover and disguise female interiors. Rather, hidden interiors are male and spiritual, often inside female envelopes: the men's-house is the 'wife' of the men it hides within, the nantoi tubuan is a mother who hides a man, human mothers, as we shall see when I discuss the body and procreation, hide male spiritual infants within them.

Decorations

This characterization of male spiritual interiors hidden within female envelopes seems immediately contradicted when we turn to decorations. Adornments worn on the exterior are closely associated with the male dead and used to transform men into spirits. 'Interiority' does not suffice to describe the conceptual space of spirits or men. Our earlier mapping of the landscape in terms of gender and spirits gives a indication of a more precise correlation. Masculine spirits are resident in both the inaccessible 'outside' and 'inside' of the human sphere. Spiritual decorations come from those remote and restricted spheres, and it is this provenance which enables them to attract attention and transform their wearers.

In terms of attention drawn to themselves, decorations and capes are at either extreme of a continuum of obscuring and framing 'containers'. Capes merely obscure the enclosed between hiding places without offering a replacement or transformed form. Men's baskets not only obscure during transportation but are a locus from which powerful valuables are revealed. It is in reflection of the 'aura' of the contained valuables and in anticipation of their exposure and possible distribution that baskets acquire the status of a 'secondary' focus of attention. Men's-houses, as locations for the revelation of pidiks, have a similar standing. Decorations, however, are intended to be 'primary' foci of attention, and furthermore transform the identity of the wearer to one degree or another. These functions are, of course, connected. As argued in the introduction to this chapter, compelling sensations, foci of attention, are implicated in the changing of forms. The insignia that perform a metamorphosis upon their wearer must at least be 175

noticed, and are likely to be noticeable to the degree that they indicate change.

As part of the focusing effect, decorations and transformed identities are generally revealed: the most elaborate tubuan and the most perfunctory singsing decorations both enter from an obscured 'backstage' area of the bush. They also overlay or cover a 'previous' undecorated identity. 24 Conceptually and materially the person that is under the tubuan mask is almost entirely effaced. They are radically other to their human identity, which is very difficult to perceive under the all enveloping covering of the mask, and which should 25 not be recognizable. Other decorations materially cover to varying degrees. The degree to which they do so can be roughly correlated with the degree to which the person 'underneath' is effaced or transformed. Singsing decorations which cover the face are powerful pidiks, whose wearers should not be approached or recognized. The yai-inpidik who dons his ceremonial regalia, on the other hand, is in an activated, powerful state, but is still visibly the same person. His spiritual powers remain attached to his identity when undecorated.

'Coverage' and concealment are not the only indexes of spiritual otherness. There are many other factors, such as qualities of the body like 'dryness' or 'lightness'. Here we will limit our discussion to the Lak iconography of decoration.

Changes in adornment

The decorative insignia of a kamgoi used to be a single feather of a black bird of paradise or chicken, stuck in the front of the hair. This is known as a Iai, and the chicken feather version would be worn by male dancers in singsings. The thin spine like head decorations of

24 The reader may note a slip between spatial and temporal terms here. This is however deliberate. As I hope I have already demonstrated, the non-here of the hidden is associated with the non-now of the dead. 25

In the moral sense as well as the sense of being practicable. 176

dancers are still known by the term, although they are no longer feathers. The term has an interesting linguistic resonance: Iai also means to physically or verbally assault someone. 26 Men's singsings often have martial overtones and the dancer's intention is indeed to assault the viewers (cf Harrison 1993). Their impact must not be blunt, bul, but sharp, arat, like a knife. The Iai is said to relate directly to the feather on the peak of most nantol, the violent mother tubuan. Nowadays kamgoi no longer wear the feather, but at singsings they tie a bunch of tanget leaves around their neck so that they hang down their back. These too are an obvious reference to nantol, whose backs are constructed from various types of tanget. They have long put lime on their faces, and I often saw kamgoi using ochre, and wearing decorative armbands or pendants as well.

'Before', singsing decorations were much less elaborate than in contemporary performances. Male dancers wore either a wreath-like circle of leaves or chicken feathers known as a bangbang or a single lal feather upon their heads. They wore none of the elaborate headdresses and other copyright decorations of today's singsings, which are said to be Tolai influenced innovations. There is some indication that particular patterns of body-painting may have been copyright, as they are today. In their hands the dancers of yester-year carried u/al, roots and sprays of leaves or grasses. Today's u/al are now ornaments often consisting of coloured feathers. The wearing of purpur, a circle of larger leaves or grasses, around the shoulders is a 'traditional' decoration of long standing which continues. My informants linked this too with tubuan, many of which have a similar 'collar' around them. Dancers were and are perfumed with dried herbs and chewed ginger, and painted with ochre and lime.

Within the living memory of the middle-aged, women could not wear the bangbang which are today their standard dance decorations. My informants volunteered the rationale, by now familiar, that this was

26

La! is also used, in the sense of 'feather' in relation to taro which su kal Ia!, 'put on a feather' when they sprout their leaves. 177

because they were 'something of the tubuan'. In fact, there is no direct counterpart to bangbang in the iconography of any of the recognized varieties of tubuan. Instead there are more general and more interesting plausible linkages between them. The first is simply the association that any eye-catching, attention drawing decoration has as a male medium of power, deriving from the spiritual realm of which the tubuan is the archetypal representative. At a second level are the connotations of wearing such decorations upon the head, which, as also noted elsewhere in this thesis, carries a heavily symbolic load in Lak. 27 The carrying of baskets of food upon the head is the exemplary act of female, maternal nurture. However, men's singsing head-dresses are generically known as kabut, which is also the term for the basket in which women carry food upon their heads. Men, as well as women, susun their very different kabut. Susun being the term for the provision of maternal nurture, exemplified by breastfeeding (also susun) as well as carrying food upon one's head. The word is also closely related to asus, the term for the feeding of a child inside a woman's body and giving birth to it. 28 Here we come to the nub of the problem. The child's link to the mother is through her asus and susun, a process of nurture which produces the maternal and matrilineal relationship. Men bear on their heads not food but decorations, they produce not children but spirits, and the relationships they form through this are primarily towards their dead ancestors not their living descendants. For women to susun spiritual decor would be to enter into a masculine relationship with spirits.29

27 See Ch.5 for more on the linkage between carrying items on the head and maternal sustenance, see Ch.7 for more on the treatment of heads upon death and the linkage between mortuary feasts and eating from on top of the head of the deceased.

28 Asus is distinct from the actual work of delivery and parturition which is known as taur. See Ch.5.

29 Very occasionally this is done. Childless old women have reputedly been initiated into the tubuan, and some senior women have performed with spirit possession devices. 178

Contemporary singsing decorations

The most important part of men's current day adornment is the singsing head-dress. There are different types for different singsings, as indeed there is for the rest of the outfit. It is head-dresses which, within certain templates, vary most in design. It is also headdresses which are the focus of memorial work. Many head-dresses are personal possessions, named designs dreamt by individuals as coming from ancestral or place-spirits. They are pidiks which are usually passed on within the clan unit. When made after the originator's or customary user's death, viewing a head-dress provokes memories of the deceased and emotional reactions of tears and sorrow amongst the subsequent owners and others who saw the deceased dance with his head-dress. Such copyright spiritual decorations become a powerful locus for the memory of the deceased, particularly in comparison with other possessions and associations in the quotidian realm that have their relationships with the dead 'overwritten' in the process of the mortuary rites.

While viewing a head-dress may provoke memories, and should provoke envy and admiration within men and sexual longing within women, I was also sometimes urged not to look too hard at some lest they sicken me. For many head-dresses are lesser versions of tubuan, and all are pidiks which are prepared in seclusion from women. Like tubuan and other pidiks they are meant for display, but the support for the presentation, the interior of the masks and head-dresses and in particular the method of attachment to the dancer, is a closely guarded secret. As far as the audience is concerned these are not men wearing decorations, these are men transformed.

The modelling of tubuan is most overt and literal in some of the headdresses treated with most respect and restriction called tobotobo. The

tobotobo style of decoration is said to have been imported from the Tolai. They consist of miniatures of the three types of tubuan -

nantoi, koropo or dukduk - complete with all the correct markings of the 'head', a simulacra of the leafy 'body', and even the legs of the 179

mask bearer perched upon the head of the dancer. 3° Only dancers initiated into the tubuan can bear tobotobo and they wear either one of their own tubuan designs or a tubuan of the sponsor of the singsing group. Tobotobo only appear at tondong, the culmination of the primary mortuary rites, and their presence is a good indication that the sponsor intends to bring out the tubuan at the secondary rites.

I saw tobotobo performed twice in libung singsings, which are the singsings deemed most 'traditional' and most often performed. A

libung must begin the series of men's day dances at all mortuary ceremonies. A key factor in its importance is that it's dance style closely resembles that of the tubuan. It tends to be in libung that the most tubuan-like decorations are worn. There are also, however, a number of, probably derivative, types of men's daytime singsings, such as utun, pokpok and pinpidik which use broadly similar costumes with somewhat different songs and dances.

Many head-dresses in libung and related singsings depict tubuan in a less specific manner than tobotobo. So like those illustrated, many show the legs and leaf 'body' of tubuan with tops of the general 'cone' shape of a koropo or dukduk, but of an 'abstract' or geometrical design. Unlike tobotobo which are individual and identifiable, all these dancers carry the same design. Most of the head-dress in libung type singsings are at one further remove from the tubuan, and to the innocent eye appear unrelated. However, they will have at least a small green base which can be related to a tubuan body, out of which a vertical spine protrudes, still called the Iai. Some, on the other hand, if less accurate representations than that of tobotobo or the headdress illustrated, present huge leafy bodies which exaggerate that most obviously tubuan related feature.

30

Unless part of a libung sum, the first male singsing of any tondong which is performed by those closest to the deceased, which cannot carry (susun) any decorations upon their heads, in which case the tobotobo are born upon their shoulders.

180

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Plate 12: A line from a libung sum wearing dukduk tobotobo.

Plate 13: Dancers with semi-tubuan Iai. 181

,

Despite libung head-dress's and Iai's universal status as lesser versions of tubuan, many have little or no 'iconic' relation to them. Indeed younger or uninitiated dancers may be unaware of the status of their head-dresses. Some may have no referent apparent to either the owner-makers, dancers or audience. The makers may 'mekim nating', that is casually improvise them. Or head-dresses may have referents only apparent to those who have the requisite knowledge of their names and meanings, which may have been forgotten or lost in transmission. The referents of the head-dresses need not be tubuan per Se, some, such as butaiges, which has a base covered with spikes made from chilli peppers and a s p ineVai resembling a yellow pennant, are named after place-spirit (tanruan) and may be said to contain or represent them: in this case it is said to be 'in' the 'pennant'. Others, such as a similar head-dress called Iamrau, this time covered with spikes made from matches, are named after and relate to elements of the natural world which are suitably beyond the domestic realm, in particular birds, plants and creatures from the big bush, and sea creatures, in this case a sea anemone.3'

Other daytime singsings refer to other kinds of spirits. Tambaran is a singsing whose name, and often its decorations, refers to the tam ianpoipoi bullroarer cult. In the illustration, we can see a headdress displaying a version of the bullroarer associated with Kabaramram, a named tamianpoipoi spirit. The pattern of red and white on the dancers and the head-dress belongs to Kabaramram, which is in turn owned by the sponsor of the dance. Women and uninitiated men are not supposed to realize the significance of the head-dress design and would not necessarily know the name of the singsing they were viewing or that it was connected to tamianpoipoi.

31

That was its identification as far as I could tell from an aural description, it was certainly a spiny creature something very like a sea anemone.

182

Plate 15: A night tangara slngsing.

Plate 14: Damian dances tabaran with kabaramram bullroarer-spirit copyright decoration.

Plate 16: Men dress as women to dance bobo. 183

Daytime singsings are most important, and more care and effort is generally spent in their preparation. The most popular night singsing for men is probably tan gara. Again named after a type of spirit, this singsing is often performed by younger dancers. Its decoration involves white body paints and long spiny Iai and u/al. The dance usually involves the staccato blowing of whistles.

Some styles of performance can come in the day or night. They include tipang, which 'originally' presaged the arrival of tubuan, and which now are bizarre, almost human creatures from the bush which enact humourous and mistaken adaptions of Lak dances. Their arrival from the bush is generally disguised by lots of broken greenery and youths with large baskets in a way similar to that of some more important pidiks.

Less spiritual is bobo which can be performed by either men or women, both in women's dress. Women's costumes for their singsings are remarkably unelaborate by comparison with the men's. Nor do they hide their preparations, such as they are, in the bush or elsewhere. They remain untransformed humans wearing human clothing. Their singsings - b//i/o and bobo are the most popular require only their best men-blouses and sarongs (often coordinated),

bangbang, u/al and sometimes lime or talcum powder on their faces. Bobo also require small baskets, which contain betel or tobacco. These, along with their other decorations, are taken by members of the audience at a pre-ordained point in the singing. Often the removers of u/al and bangbang are other women who then proceed to use the same adornments in subsequent dances in the same event. While bobo presents the opportunity for men to dance as women, another less often performed kind of singsing, robong, gives women the occasion to mimic men. For this they carry huge baskets, again with tithits within, which are again taken from them during the dance.

184

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Plate 17 Women In a bobo. Note the small basket which has small gifts within.

The contrast between the removal of women's decorations and the attitude towards men's singsing accoutrements is great. Any fragment of a man's libung costume, for instance, is potentially dangerous to the audience, especially women. 32 Small pieces of debris may be carefully gathered after the dance and\or their power nullified by the magical use of lime. Any obvious breakage during a dance, especially to a head-dress, must lead to the entire dance row of the afflicted performer immediately retiring back into the bush while the singsing continues. Given the role of spirits in male-female relations and their Incarnations In decorations, the care taken towards male adornments 32

This danger is certainly much less extreme for some, less powerful and less Impressive, men's slngsings than others. But the categorical contrast between women's acquirable and men's dangerous decorations still holds.

185

is easily understood. Less simply explained is the removal of women's. There is no exchange taking place, bar the replacement of patiently constructed u/al with whatever twig comes to hand. Nor, despite both my and Albert's (1987) suspicions, would it appear that intimations of a sexual nature are being made. Although this may well happen, it is not the rule, and the suggestion was scorned by informants who insisted it was merely the decorations that were desired. Behaviour need not be strategic or oriented to any desired end, nor can I offer any explanation on those terms. The only tentative explanation I can give is one of form; people's behaviours are as subject to style as any artistic product, and they take appropriate form from the milieu in which they exist. The most relevant iconography is one of gender. Men's kabut, head-dresses, are impenetrable, owned and restricted; women's kabut, food baskets, are open and used to give and provision others. Much of women's status and identity is formed around their feeding and birthing others (which, as we shall see, is also regarded as a kind of feeding). Just as men exhibit their spiritual capacity in their dances, so it would seem that in providing decorations for others to take, women may be exhibiting their provisioning capacity.

It may seem strange to examine some of the visual iconography of singsing decorations without analysis of the songs and dances themselves. They too are sources and recipients of form. However most of the wider relations and associations they produce are also evident, and perhaps more clearly so, in visual form. In particular, the relation between male singsing dancers and spirits, especially the tubuan, is overt. Indeed this is largely what their songs refer to. The contrast with the more quotidian presentations of the women is also clear. Women's songs and dances more often contain narrative sections that relate to the often poignant, often humourous, goings on of humans rather than spirits. Many times a bulb will enact the death of the deceased in whose honour it is danced. Other bobo and b//i/o have almost the status of gossip, referring to scandals and illicit couplings.

186

The poetic tubuan

We shall need real courage if we are to found projective poetry before there is ever metrical poetry, just as sheer genius was needed to discover, very late in the day, that beneath metrical geometry there lay projective geometry, which is in fact essential and primitive. Poetry and geometry are completely parallel here. The basic theorem of projective geometry is as follows: what element of a geometric form can, with impunity, be deformed in a projection in such a way that geometric coherence remains? The basic theorem of projective poetry is as follows: what elements of a poetic form can, with impunity, be deformed by a metaphor in such a way that poetic coherence remains' In other words, what are the limits of formal causality?' (Bachelard 1951:55 orig.emph., extracted in Jones 1991) Only a certain amount of direct information on the tubuan can be imparted without compromising my position with some of my hosts. However, the figure of the tubuan is of such poetic power that it has been projected onto a plenitude of other lesser 'tubuan', such as the singsing decorations, houses and baskets etc, which have already been discussed. Thus much that is important about the masks can be approached indirectly as knowledge that we, and most certainly the Lak, already know from their refractions.

The cumulative constructive interference of these projections allow us, and them, to perceive tubuan as a focal image in Lak society and culture without going into the finer, and restricted, details of their make-up. It is unclear whether the central image of the tubuan is defined through reception, that is the cumulative interference of multiple causal 'waves' from external sources: the separation of men and women, the separation of living and dead, houses, baskets, the power of revealed valuables etc. Or whether, as the Lak might have it, the tubuan is the emitting origin, the template from which the lesser entities derive their form and positioning in the world. Which it is hardly matters for, as dialectical as well as Strathernian approaches have shown us, the directionality of reception and emission are hard to discern and tell us little on their own. All such claims to the priority 187

of origins and centres are suspect, as was learnt early in the poststructuralist revolution (e.g. Derrida 1978).

If centrality is not the appropriate adjective, the tubuan can, however, certainly be described as a 'key symbol' in Ortner's (1973) sense. It has 'elaborating' power, providing a 'root metaphor' by which many important categories (male: female, living :dead, hidden :visible) are conceptually understood and affectively 'felt'. Yet it is also a 'summarizing symbol', ramifying through the whole of the Lak organization of space, society and knowledge so that acceptance or rejection of the 'law of the tubuan' amounts to a positioning of the person vis a vis the entire edifice of traditional culture. Such negotiations have already taken place. The tubuan was banned for a time by the Catholic Church. Present day 4-Square Pentecostals regard it and its lesser emanations (e.g. singsing) as the work of Satan. Logging companies and government projects have demanded that their employees not be kept away from work for extended periods. Yet none of these have revealed, at least not publically, any of the secrets of the tubuan or obstructed its actions. Lak men are proud of the terrible vengeance that has been wreaked upon those, including government employees33, who dare such impudence. But the tubuan too has modified and adapted its practices, taking into account the new pressures on villagers and making the onerous ritual conditions less drawn out and constraining than previously.

Nataka, a word which, as mentioned earlier, contains a root (nat") linking it to the parent-child relationship, is the term for tubuan of all varieties. All nataka have a 'body' (nu, nest) of the same green rattan leaves as new house roofs. These can vary quite considerably in size, profile and the quality of leaves used, but although there is quite a specific arrangement for each nataka, one would not normally be able to identify a nataka purely from its nu. The primary locus of differentiation and identity is the 'head' which bears copyright designs

In particular a teacher on Lambom was said to have fled the island and had his house and belongings destroyed.

188

that are unique to each named nataka. This 'head'\mask is called dok, the term for the shell-money payment to see 'inside' a pidik. Anyone seeing a pidik in construction, whether to acquire the knowledge necessary to reproduce that pidik or not, must dok a certain amount of shell-money. In the case of the tubuan, the movement from an exterior to an interior state of knowledge and membership of the pidik is concretized in the mask, inside which the initiate must see.

People must pay dok for any new revelation, for the crossing of the boundary between the unknown\unseen\unformed and the known\seen\formed in either direction. Thus the dok payment for the revelation of the captured trader COok.M Thus also, the shell-money payment known as dokmani (mani = birds) for seeing the new masks after a tubuan ritual, which is compulsory for all the viewing women and men. 'Traditionally' there were only two types of nataka in Lak, nantoi and dukduk. Nantoi35 are the mother tubuan, their ownership defines a yai-inpidik tubuan leader. They are tall figures with a characteristic

forward leaning profile. It is said to lean over its children, the dukduk, as a hen bears over it's chicks. As with yai-inpidiks, their backs consist of tanget or cordyline leaves. The front of the mask is generally of a fairly simple design, consisting of a bisecting vertical line descending from a red feature, and flanked symmetrically by two eyes. These eyes are a key defining feature of nantoi. They are the most powerful and dangerous aspect of the spirit. Although women and non-initiates are compelled to watch all the nataka dance, to catch the glance of the nantof is most perilous, especially to women.

N

See Ch.2. Literally 'mother-son', see section exploring the resonances of 'mother' in Ch.3.

189

Plate 18:Twonaneoidance.

Plate 20:

Plate 19:

Ablinddukduk.

A group of koi-opo dance. Note those similar to nantol do not have tanget

backs.

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The menace of the nantoi's gaze is that it damages fecundity, rendering women liable to miscarry or give birth to a rattan leaf or some other facet of the tubuan, such as a covering caul. It may also make one a target for its murderous and voracious intent - a death is said to be the inevitable consequence of every tubuan ritual. 'Before', the tubuan would drag some victim into the bush where they would be consumed before returning to perform in the village with a limb of the unfortunate held aloft in the dancer's hand. Eyes, matan, in Siar are not only the locus of the gaze, but portals between inside and out. An example is matan pal, the eyes of the men's-house, through which men and spirits seated invisibly in the darkness regard the sunlit village outside. The gaze of the tubuan similarly travels from the inchoate, covered and secret to define, form, its receiving 'patient' in its own likeness. As we will see in the next part of this thesis, women, especially mothers are closely associated with the nantoi, and their initially white babies with dead spirits. The nantol spirit-mothers and their dukduk children would sometimes 'mimic'36 the behaviour of human mothers with their babies: for example the nantoi would go to the shore to dispose of the baby's soiled leaves, the dukduk would initially emerge with an infant's unsteady gait. A reason, I suggest, that it is expectant mothers who are most at risk from the gaze of the nantoi and that the consequence of that gaze may be the birth of a malformed or a dukduk shaped child is the formal similarity between mother and mask, an isomorphism prefigured in the relationship between men's spiritual decoration\transformation, head-dress kabut, and women's vehicle of nurturance and reproduction, food basket kabut. That some conjunctions of forms can produce a certain cognitive 'impetus' towards an alternative state of affairs has been well known for some time. One only has to think of a number of the famous gestalt diagrams, such as the off-centre circle that 'wants' to return to the centre of the square. We are cognitively habituated to symmetry, and slight asymmetries are all too easily assimilated as 36

Mimic is perhaps the wrong word, because it makes human women the prototype upon which nantol behaviour is modelled. This precedence would probably not be granted them by the Lak. 191

'mistaken' members of the set of symmetrical forms. The ease of projection between pregnant women and nantoi is such that their conjunction produces an analogous cultural and cognitive pressure towards another world in which women are nantoi and their children spirits. The direction of the dangerous transformative gaze, and the direction of change figured in the potential

__________________

world, are an index of the power dynamics of the situation: the tubuan are the focal point, the centre of implication, not the women. It's gaze exerts discipline on the women's world, Figure 2: and with that surveillance wields

The circle 'wants' to

return to the centre. (After Arnheim 1974)

formative powers. The reciprocal of this, the women's compulsory viewing of the dances, reflects the tubuan's complementary powers of display. Looking on the pidik, into and through the portal of the mask's eye, is the gaze of initiatory knowledge: a gaze in which the viewing subject is changed rather than the object of contemplation. Adepts would make clear that the danger of women looking too closely at the dok of a nantoi was that they might see through the mesh to the face of the

dancer within. 'Accidental' exposure to interior secrets of the tubuan was a common method of forcing the issue of initiation. Induction into the tubuan entails the 'death' and 'consumption' of the initiate before the eventual dancing in the village of a dukduk 'alter ego'. In the context of initiation, the dancing dukduk's triumphant display of the death and consumption of the initiatory viewer, seems a projection of remarkable poetic coherence: a projection metamorphosing the virtual transformation of the male initiate into a literal and fatal transformation of the illegitimate viewer. Either or both directions of gaze, of waves, demonstrate what Bachelard might term 'formal causality', the causal impetus of forms. Dukduk are tall vertical cones, whose designs generally consist of

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simple bands of colour surmounted by a tall pole with a tanget of some kind on top. The most significant iconographic differentiation from nantoi is, in fact, that they have no eyes. Because of this, they are sometimes referred to as rumai kut, blind houses. Significantly, dukduk are not particularly dangerous or feared: they make very few 'waves' in the world. These thin, hopping forms are depicted as entirely dependent on their fat, vigorous, aggressive mothers, and affect the world around them very little in their own right. Given the Lak emphasis on visual revelation and control as a means of effecting and directing change in the world, it is logical to connect the dukduk's lack of sight with their, and their owners, dependant and subservient position vis a vis the staring nantoi and their owning yai-inpidiks.

The final type of tubuan used, and one placed between the nantoi and dukduk in terms of status, is the koropo. These are regarded as relative newcomers to the Lak scene, an innovation taken from the Tolai which closely resembles what they would call tubuan, their mother masks. The shortest form of mask, they may either lean forward like nantoi or stand straight like dukduk. Their designs are far more elaborate and varied than either of the indigenous styles. Because of this perceived stylishness and their lightness they are the most popular masks to dance in. All have eyes, though smaller than those of nantoi, and often other apparently anthropomorphic features such as 'noses' and 'mouths'. The backs of these masks have further, often apparently 'abstract' and quite intricate, designs upon them. These frequently relate to the koropo's origin story. Most owners of koropo, unlike most possessors of nantoi and dukduk, can give accounts of the genesis of their mask - indeed many of them are first or second 'generation' owners having either 'originated' the new mask or been given the mask by the originator. These tally with stories relating to the provenance of other mask types, and are part of a fairly strict genre also covering lesser decorations. They are of two main types. The mask is seen in a dream, often while sleeping in a place associated with a place-spirit and often given to the dreamer, or the dreamer is instructed to give it to a third party, by a deceased yai-inpidik. Or, a person might simply see a mask while alone in an 193

auspicious place such as the deep bush, (or other places associated with place-spirits such as on the reef or in ficus trees).

It is significant that spirits, the dead and their manifestations as singsing decorations and tubuan, are the stock of dreams and the main recognized factor of the dream-world that cross over and enter into the waking world of the living. Furthermore, those spiritual designs which are not the result of sleep-dreams are, conventionally at least, the product of solitary meditation or vision in a spiritual environment. Respecting its perceived link with dreaming, this process of imaging is perhaps best considered as reverie. These are the culturally recognized conditions for creative imagination; for the addition of compelling and poetic images to the world. Bachelard, perhaps the most persistent and introspective investigator of the process by which poetic images are produced in (French) creative imagination, thought that they derived from 'the zone of material reveries that precede contemplation' (1942:6). He distinguishes reveries and the simple dreaming of rêve by the degree of consciousness guiding their progress (1969:esp Ch 4). Both are creative because they are not 'thinking', that is they allow the almost free play of association that is characteristic of a relaxed mind. Both are informed by the cumulative inspirations of the past. However, reverie is not mere daydreaming but a free play of the mind around objects in which there is always a glimmer of guiding consciousness and the presence of the 'dreamer'. In contrast, Ie rêve, the sleepdream, is unconscious of the world and unguided by the dreamer, whose subject-hood is diminished and absent to such a degree that it seems that 'another subject has come to dream in us' (1969:11) and as if (quoting Valery) dreams are formed 'by some other sleeper, as if in the night, they mistook the absent person' (1969:146) This is strikingly similar to the way in which the Lak describe both the departure and travel of the sleeper's spirit and the sometimes dangerous, sometimes creative, impact of other spirits upon the

Bachelard's footnote credits the quote to: Paul Valery, n.d. L'áme et Ia danse. Dialogue de l'arbre. Paris, Gallimard.

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slumberer. While Bachelard admits the continuum from rêve to reverie, he emphasizes the creative potential and value of the latter over the former. Although his reverie may be shaped by fortuitous admixture with exterior objects, it is important to him, as in much of the western tradition, to locate creativity with the individual, the genius creator. Amongst the Lak the reverse is the case, while rêve\reverie are still the favoured modes of creative imagining, their cultural values place the emphasis on the agency of the non-self, the spirits, accessed through the subconscious. Ideally, the inspired Lak artist should have no further claim to the shaping of the mask he has envisioned than the ability and techniques for attracting spirits to himself.

Siar people place the burden of inspiration upon the non-self of dreams, and upon the non-now of ancestors and spirits, from the non-here of their distinctly non-human spirit world (e.g. taraiu). This ideology has two further aspects: firstly that the production of categorical difference or transformation in this world requires communication with another; secondly, that that communication be controlled and given positive value by mechanisms of secrecy and revelation. Much in this chapter has provided evidence as to the ramifying character of these two worlds: the tangled, obscured, asocial, formless other and the cleared, social, arena of revealed form. This characterization and spatialization of imagination is not so unusual. As M. Jackson (1996:14) puts it:

'Whatever is brought forth, embodied, and made visible bears with it a sense of other things which are copresent but backgrounded, peripheral and ephemeral Experiences we tend to gloss as belonging to the unconscious - an abyssal region of the mind - are conventionally construed in many preliterate societies as belonging to the unknown - a penumbral, inscrutable space.' (orig.emph.) The last section in this chapter, considers the logic of the relationship between these two worlds of the abyss and the clearing, and the position of the entities that mediate between them.

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Pidiks and supplementary space

In Lak, the dominant set of compelling, powerful and poetic objects which on their appearance impart a particular form to their surroundings, are in some senses 'immaterial' and 'fictional'. These, such as the tubuan and other pfdiks, are associated with spaces of a different order to the quotidian. They are not coherent autonomous entities in the 'intuitive ontology' of everyday space. 'Intuitive ontology' is a concept invoked by Boyer (1996) to describe the pancultural ontological categories - such as animate and inanimate which are developed in infant-hood. The contravention of such categories, by such processes as anthropomorphism whereby inanimate objects show animate behaviour, is a 'paradox' which draws attention to, and therefore renders potentially more powerful and\or reproducible, religious phenomena. Ontological criteria cannot be contravened willy-filly in Boyer's model, the religious objects must still follow enough 'intuitive' characteristics to give them enough inferential potential to promote their cultural reproduction.

The implication of multiple, if delimited, ontologies in Boyer's work has a respectable philosophical lineage (e.g. Quine 1969, Goodman 1978). The 'paradox' of religious secrecy and the irreality of the beings that emerge from it is, in my view, closely related to Boyer's paradox of counter-intuitive ontology. Their ontological dissonance does indeed attract attention as Boyer suggests, but their irrationality is controlled by being spatialized and regionalized. Pidiks are counter-intuitive objects which exist in a space of different ontological properties than that of the quotidian from which they are distinguished by a frame of secrecy and exclusion. I follow Herdt's (1990) forceful argument that it is not adequate to follow the Durkheimian view of secret collectives as merely concerned with the concealing of information and the (ab)use of 'knowledge' in opposition to and subversion of the rules and cultural reality of a society. I-lerdt instead proposes an 'ontologicaf theory of secrecy' that pays attention to the intentionality of Melanesian traditions of secrecy, and suggests that secrecy is used to protect (and I would add create) the secret collectives' social, moral 196

and psychological 'world'. It is a separate and differentiated nature that secrecy shelters from violation: these are not secrets of society, rather the secrets are productive of an additional cultural reality. In Melanesia, these differential ontologies are generally gender based. However much women may know about men's secrets they cannot understand or partake of them; they do not enter into the reality deriving from them, nor undergo the transformative experiences associated with them, not the least of which is the psychological and cultural separation of their mental and physical selves from the woman's realm. The space of pidiks such as the tubuan manifest wholly different ontology from the village: everything, bar the yaiinpidik adepts who stride between and indeed command both realms, is transformed and 'other'.

A technical sense of punctuation (cf. Wilden 1972:Ch V) is the structuring of one communicational system with another (e.g. gestures punctuate spoken discourse). It is now widely recognized both within scientist and humanist paradigms that the (real and apparent) behaviour of systems are affected by the way in which the obse rver\ partici p ator punctuates them. The punctuation and articulation of the radically differentiated realms of the tubuan and the village is a source of power for yai-inpIdiks, as are similar powers for those with privileged access to complementary and subsidiary 'other'

pidik realms of the dead and spirits, from adepts of bullroarer-spirits, to the humblest practitioner of ancestral hunting magic.

It is not merely within a mono-dimensional determination of spaces and their boundaries that powers of determination and articulation are exercised. Spaces are also created with the additional dimension of logical levels within which they are hierarchized. This conception has sociological roots in Bateson (1972) and Witden's (1972) writings on meta-communication and philosophical roots in Russel and Tarski's work on the necessity of hierarchies of logical types or levels for an adequate model of set theory or truth (Sainsbury 1995). The need for meta levels becomes apparent when faced with self-reference, especially in terms of negation. I have already referred to Bateson's 197

'this is not a bite' and Russel's 'set of sets which are not members of themselves' and how these equations of different logical levels have the same characteristics as picture frames. Kinship is not the only realm in which such 'metacommunicative' devices are deployed. As Wilden (1972:122) puts it for 'NOT', '"Not" itself is a metacommunicative boundary essential to the 'rule about identity' which is the sole sufficient and necessary condition of any digital logic. In other words, boundaries are the condition of distinguishing the 'elements'of a continuum from the continuum itself. "Not" is such a boundary.'

Many spaces are defined by 'NOT', but of course, as Goodman (1968) has famously highlighted in his critique of the resemblance theory of representation, there are an infinity of ways in which comparisons may be made and all two things share many aspects of difference, opposition and identity. However, some oppositions, as Boyer rightly notes, attract more attention than others - such as his contradictions of 'intuitive ontology'. Images, including Bateson's framed pictures, are variants upon this theme. They present a space of contradictory ontology to that of the 'viewer' from whom they are separated by the meta 'Not' of some frame. Iegtmete iie

Let me take as an exampJe the taraiu as a region separated by such a frame from the village. It is a space founded upon many criteria, many of them oppositional, but the most notable and foundational is the exclusion of non-initiates, Figure 3 'women' for short. Let us simplify and imagine

the Lak world, so conceived, as a spatial diagram, A being the realm of the taraiu and B that of women. Despite apparently having divided the whole of reality into the A the B (or non-A), the act of negation and exclusion has created a third meta-realm of which the dividing line, the logical self-reference 'NOT', is a member. 38 This realm

38

Note that in placing the diagram on the page and separating it from the text yet another 'meta' frame (labelled here as illegitimate) is created.

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partakes of both A and B(non-A) yet is reducible to neither, it is both impossible in terms of A & B and yet necessary to produce A & B. As might be expected it has commonalities with Mitchell's (1986) analysis of the image as virtual, both present and absent (see previous discussion) and perhaps even more pertinently Derrida (1987) and others (e.g. Duro 1996) work on frames as parergon which,

'stand out both from the ergon (the work) and from the milieu, it stands out first of al/like a figure on a ground. But it does not stand out like the work. The latter also stands out against a ground. The parergona/ frame stands out against two grounds, but with respect to each of these two grounds it merges into the other. With respect to the work which can serve it as a ground, It merges into the wall, and then, gradually, into the general text. With respect to the ground which is the general text, it merges into the work which stands out against the general ground. There is always a form on the ground, but the parergon is a form which has as its traditional determination not that it stands out but that it disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts away at the moment it deploys its greatest energy.' (Derrida 1987 in a modified translation quoted in Duro 1996:2) As Derrida's reference to 'the text' make clear his post-structuralist viewpoint does not regard the parergon\frame as limited to artworks. I see the 'secrecy' which divides the taraiu from the non-initiate as such a parergon which in its 'education of attention' (not a poststructuralist but a phenomenological phrasing) toward figures and grounds exerts both the disciplinarian powers of surveillance and the ideological powers of spectacle (see Mitchell 1994, Foucault 1979, Debord 1977). From the 'outside' it stands out against the ground of women, a 'discipline' which restricts their movements and scopic activity. Even as 'that which they must not know' the 'secrets' are a highlighted figure which women have to bear carefully in their minds' (eye), and are an ideological spectacle to which they are constantly exposed. From the 'inside' however 'secrecy' stands out against the ground of initiates, fencing them 'in' as much as the women out throughout their enforced seclusions during tubuan activity and, even at non-ritual times, imposing the 'discipline' of never allowing themselves to be seen by women when entering or leaving the sacred 199

area. The figure which they watch is that of the women, both in the defensive sense of avoiding being seen, but also as sexually interested voyeurs from their hiding places.39

Furthermore, the border between the taralu and village is not merely constituted through the absences of men who may not be seen and women who must not see. It is also the space of the tubuan, the realm in which these entities, images of otherwise paradoxical nature because of their status as masked men who are spirits, exist. They appear at the edges of the bush and dance between the village and the taraiu. They do not belong to the village, although they do make forays there; mainly to claim nambu objects identified with the dead, or to sit in the refuse area (itself at the edge of the bush) by their owners house to collect shell money from his wife. 4° Nor do they, in an important sense, belong to the taraiu, as men are free from observation and hence the need for their masks there. The domain where they are a logical necessity is at the interfaces between the initiates and outsiders, such as initiation ceremonies themselves.

Not only are tubuan the presence at the boundary, 4 ' as befits its 'meta' status they also incorporate the very oppositions they divide. Consider again the categories that precipitate from this partition

male:female: :dead:living

Those at the furthest conceptual distance from the male, dead taralu are pregnant mothers, women in the process of producing life. They are indeed those deemed most at danger from the taraiu and keep the furthest physical distance between themselves and any of its emanations. Yet the tubuan, while being dead spirits and playing a key role in removing the 'life' and the remaining aspects of the

See Ch.5 for further details of the sexual interest of women, for men in the guise of spirits, and Ch.8 for vice versa. 40 See ch.8 for more details of the tubuan activities. 41

Although, of course, at yet another level they 'presence' the absence of the men whom they hide.

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deceased's personhood from the attention and attachment of villagers, are also themselves mothers (nantoi) producing children

(dukduk) who when they dance are compulsory foci of attention for the viewing villagers (women and uninitiated).

To imply that a parergon incorporates both the inside and out in its own 'meta', logically distinct level of existence, does not mean that it does so equally. Frames may be more firmly attached to either text or context. While our picture frames are, as their name suggests, usually more attached to their contents than the walls on which we place them; cinema screens are rather more dependent on the wider context of the building they are within than the ever changing images which are projected upon them. When this differential is transferred to more explicitly social boundaries, such as we are examining in Lak, it produces hierarchical relationships. Although both men and women, initiates and non-initiates, are subjugated (in both senses - imposed upon and given distinct subjectivities) by this division, the boundary phenomena themselves - tubuan, secrecy - are clearly conceived as being aspects of the taraiu rather than the village.

This has two further entailments in the Lak context. Firstly, that the village domain is conceptually prior to, and potentially independent of, the taraiu. It is the quotidian, the everyday into which the affairs and effects of the taraiu protrude. There are villages without taralu, albeit they are changed in character by that lack. A taraiu without a village, by contrast, is an impossibility. The village provides the ground, the 'background ontology' (Quine 1969), onto which the figural differential ontology of the taraiu is projected. It is in the terms of, and in relation (often oppositional) to, the village quotidian that the punctual pidiks are formed. The second entailment is one of power relations. The activities of the taraiu are experienced as a violent imposition upon the villagers. It is a 'window' onto the taraiu that the tubuan present when they enter the village. No correspondingly poetic presence of the village is ever expressed within the taraiu. Despite the disciplines that the initiated men must undergo, which are in many ways harsher than the non-initiates' lot, it is not hard to see which is the structurally 201

dominated realm - it is the village. The apex of the hierarchy is in the 'meta' realm of the border dwellers, the tubuan masks and their coexistent yaf-inpidiks who impose authority on both sides of the divide.

The last aspect that I wish to touch upon in this discussion of such boundaries is their materiality. Frames can have varying material qualities. Rather than 'effacing' themselves, they may sometimes draw attention to themselves, even competing with 'work' they are meant to be highlighting. It is after all not so long ago that it was de rigueur for our own imagery to be surrounded by swathes of gilt curlicues, while more recently our (post)modern art has sought to minimize and even exceed the physical boundary of a frame, whether that be construed as a wood surround or a museum (cf. Napier 1992). Such changes can tell us much about the structuring of socio-cultural divisions. Equally revealing may be the nature of the disjuncture a frame is intended to bridge.

The 'Not' of the tubuan and other pidiks is realized in the physicalities of concealment and obscurity, particularly in the cloaking qualities of the bush, the men's-house and the basket. It is from within all of these that pidiks emerge, and they are a material manifestation of the socio-cultural disjunctures involved. So are the characteristics of the realms so created as separate entities in which the alignments and oppositions of categories and qualities are formed. Thus, for instance, the contrast of the tangled undergrowth of the bush\taraiu with the maintained openness of the village is implicated in and associated with oppositions between the living and the dead.

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PART 3A reformations: additions

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CHAPTER 5 the supplement of a child

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[T]he making of one world out of another usually involves some extensive weedmg out and filling - actual excision of some old and supply of some new material. (Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, p.14)

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tudying the (re)production of persons is particularly revealing for the analyst seeking to divine more general processes of the V' production of cultural form. Here we have the originary magic, the transformation of nothing, or very little, or very disparate forms and materials, into an important and relatively coherent something additional to the world in all senses. It is a model of the projection over, or of, the gap between differently constituted worlds, to which nothing has been added, yet a 'new' form or meaning has emerged. It is an ontological act, and it is a representational act. The projection of the person implicates and reproduces a whole range of entities and associations. If we can discern the causes given to this effect of a person, and trace the perceived continuities and modulations of 'being' implicated in this production, it will shine light on the ongoing activity of generating the Lak cultural topology. As Wagner (1983) has shown, conception ideology and the regard with which knowledge of it is held and transmitted can be an important entailment of the broadest social processes. The reverberations of these processes reproduce the form of 'conception' just as 'conception' reproduces them. Despite the depth and range of these 'ripples' they can as Wagner also notes, require sophisticated and prolonged seduction by the ethnographer to acquire. One would perhaps expect conception beliefs to be particularly explicit or elaborated in Austronesian areas with elaborate death rituals - 'deconception' at death being its balandng inverse in the developmental cycle (see Mosko 1983, 1989). Rebirth, if not 'reconception', is also a primary metaphor in many male secret initiatory societies (e.g. Allen 1981). However, as is by now well known (e.g. Knauft 1989), New Guinea has the most varied 'conceptualizations', minimal as well as elaborate, which reflect and shape many aspects of personhood, and sodal reality. I was recounted information by senior men and women (separately) on processes of conception, but many other informants confessed a degree of confusion (and shyness) in their knowledge of such things.'

1 Albert too found conception ideologies difficult to trace, and was instead referred to a manual on midwifery (1987:385) 206

However direct exegesis is not the only, or necessarily the most reliable route to gaining an understanding of the instigation of other lives and bodies. There are other narratives implicating their constitution (e.g. myths). It may also be somewhat misguided to focus too much on the physical act of procreation. Although people in Siar do believe in its crucial role, it may be both analytically and ethnographically presumptuous to separate it out rrom its surrounding, and to some degree causal, contexts - such as exchanges related to intercourse, marriage, or social recognition of fatherhood, or the revelatory procedures of birth ritual. For that matter, the procedures of forgetting people may shine light on the inverse of imagining them in the first place. Much of this is for later parts of the thesis. In this section I concentrate on the production of physically constituted persons. I am not yet concerned with the child as a subject, or upon the social milieu into which s\he will emerge on birth. I follow roughly the sequence of production of a child, from mythic precursors to birthing procedures, and in each stage I examine the language, material and procedural forms that go on to make a child. In doing so I hope not to suggest equations as to what a person or these forms are, but to effect an introduction into their mutual ongoing constitution via the cumulative effects of Lak practices of representation and association.

Mythic forms of procreation

Let us be a little coy and start with the bodies of myth. How were they created, and of what do they consist? Suilik is the main culture-hero of Siar mythology and there are many stories about him often with his brother Kampatarai, and often indistinguishable from stories that relate to a generic orphan figure natsuilik ( natsui-orphan, Ilkdiminutive ending). Many of the stories relating Suilik are foundational in character and are regarded as a 'history' or explanation of how the world came to its present state.

Both Albert (1987) and Neuhaus (1934), a German missionary, have 207

printed versions of the Suilik myth which are clear about his genesis. Wansuilik ('old woman\grandmother Suilik'), whom it is emphasized is not Suilik's mother, cut her finger while working in the garden, then wrapped the blood in taro leaves (hung it in a tree, according to Albert) and then later returned to find the blood had become Suilik (& Kampataral in Neuhaus). In Albert's version, SuUik goes through the same process to produce Kampatarai. Forearmed, I asked my informants about this, but only received pleas of ignorance or outright denial that such could be the case. The important factor as far as they were concerned was that Wansuilik was an old woman, not responsible for Suilik's birth or creation, and that she gave him and his brother food. The closest I got, while asking about the primordial, 'historical' Suilik was an account in which the red sap (blood) of an edible, water inhabiting, taro stem went inside a taro leaf and came up as Suilik. This knowledgable informant even tentatively identified the name Suilik as the old Lambel word for blood - the current Siar word is the near homophone silk. I did, however, come across an avowedly ancient myth relating the creation and recreation of a (nat)Suilik, sections of which are known to many and which were independently narrated to me ('in full') by elderly men in widely separated villages. The prime character in this tale is a man called Manila, and there is no mention of Wansuilik or implication that this was in pre-human or primordial time. The regeneration of Suilik recounted here is similar to that related by Albert (1987:88) for Kampatarai in a variant of the Suilik myth that does not mention Wansuilik's procreative role. Kampatarai is often identified with Lak people and their 'hard work', in opposition to Suilik who in a cargoistic vein is said to have abandoned Lak for 'America' and is identified with white people. I find the Manila myth to be particularly revealing, so I reproduce a version here: SUILIK & MANILA Manila goes to the garden with his basket and his axe. He finishes work and sits down to eat sugarcane, but when he tries to cut the sugarcane he cuts his finger. It bleeds profusely. He gets two taro leaves and lets the blood run into them. The blood dries and he fastens the leaves around it and hangs up the packet in a cuila tree. He 208

washes and goes back to the village in the afternoon. Time passes. Three days later he goes and looks in the leaves. The blood has a head, eyes and hair. He waits another day and goes back and looks again, it now has arms and legs and fingers, but its navel isn't yet closed. After almost a week when he goes to look, the leaf packet is broken and Suilik [his skin is 'red', like a whiteman's] is sitting on a branch of a flcus tree in the sun. Manila speaks: 'Ah you are strong now, but you must stay here, in the afternoons I'll bring you food.'. This he did, after his wife had cooked in the earth-oven, he would carry some food up. [A major difference with the other version is that there Manilla's unnamed wife helps him wrap his blood in the leaves and that the leaves are then taken back to hang the leaves in the roof of their house where they are dried by the smoke of the household fire. There is less emphasis on Suilik's status as a pidik.] His wife asked him, 'Why are you always carrying food away'. He replied, 'It's for a little kandere [ZS) of mine.'. 'Where is he, where has he come from', she asks. 'He is up there, I cut my hand and I put the blood in a taro leaf, wrapped it up and put it to hang up in a cuila tree - now it has come up as a man.' 'Can us women see?' 'No, you must stay, later I'll bring him to the house and work a kastom on him.' Manila goes fishing for tuna. He is a long way out . Meanwhile two women went to wash. Suilik was in a ficus tree next to the water. His reflection was in the water. The two women look at it - 'Where is this man'. They look around in the bush, they try to have sex with the reflection in the water. They find him above them and call for him to come down. But he will not. They have no way of climbing the ficus, so they throw stones, and call for him to come down - but he will not, he is a long way up. They go and come back with their houses, they break them, put them at the base of the picus and set them alight. The fire starts burning, it burns the man's leg and he starts singing: 'Manilla, manilla, Suilik kel ian kel Ian aaii' x 2 ['Manilla, Manilla, Suilik will be eaten' - this may refer to the women's sexual advances in addition to the consuming fire] It is Suilik in the tree, and Manila hears the call and hurries back to find out what has happened to him. But he is too late, the fire has already consumed Suilik. As Manila came ashore on the beach, his head felt down. Manila killed the fire and collected all the bones, and put them together. [and lay them on a pandanus raincover\cradle]. He got a broom (sar) and started hitting all the bones, and the skin started coming back, and as he hit and hit they started to make a noise, he kept hitting them and they started crying with the pain. He hits him some more and Suilik arises a man again. Manila takes him and puts him in his house. He tells everyone to ready the food and pigs, to ready the place of the earth-oven, and firewood. They asked his wife what he wanted to do, but she said that she didn't know but that there was a room in the house he had forbidden her to enter. When everything was ready he worked a feast, the women were given portions of pig and the men ate. He came outside now: 'This is little 'ZS' Suilik, he came up from blood. I was cutting sugarcane when I cut my hand. I put the blood in taro leaves and hung it up in a tree. Then two women lit a fire under the tree.' [Account given to me by Augustus Tobau of Marmar, insertions from the similar account of Joe Bongian of Morkon]

209

Dried blood is again the key factor in the constitution of the body. In my sources the blood is definitely from a male source (the importance of this will come out below), which may well be linked with the sexual attraction, and then on refusal, attack of the women. Taro leaves are again used as a container (Cf. primordial Suilik myth). Giant taro leaves are also said to be used by sorcerers as originary containers in the magical production of simulacra persons for nefarious ends. It is a woman, ultimately, who provisions and 'grows' Suilik. It is also women who kill him by 'cooking' or rather drying him once more. Suilik moves from fresh blood through a process of drying/clotting to become a person, to a corpse of bones produced by 'over' cooking/drying. The hitting with a broom, called sar in Siar, to resurrect Suilik is particularly interesting. Brooming of the hamlet\v i l lag e is the marked ending of all major segments of death ritual. It is also key in the almost daily maintenance\definition of the village in the face of the bush, and in gardening. Sar is not only the word for a coconut-leaf spine broom, but also for shell-money, and flowers. The shell-money link is most pertinent here, as tubuan are hit with lengths of sar by the yai-inpidik (ritual leader) on going to the house of their owner in the secondary mortuary rites. 2 Men, in their turn, are hit by the tubuan with a stick, both to 'kill' them so that they become spirits, and again, as the first mark of their reintegration into the world of the living. This nexus of resonances is suggestive, but leads us on to further questions. There is additional mythic lore which gives an alternative account of the production of bodies, emphasizing not blood, but their tree-like (or wooden) constitution. Here is a well known segment from the primordial Suilik myth:

2

According to Errington (1974) in Karavar this was seen as the ritual leaders imposition of the control and ordering of shell money over the wild disordering forces of the tubuan spirits. When I proposed a similar rationale to Lak yal-inpidiks they denied that such was the case, but could provide no alterrnative exegesis. Aijmer (1997:Ch 37) suggests that the shell money is a vehicle for the dead, and that in striking the tubuan and penetrating its leafy nether parts it transfers the dead from the living to become internalized into the ancestral representation of the tubuan. Although speculative, this is highly suggestive in terms of Lak imagery and possible sar-semen associations. 210

Suilik gets his axe. He goes up a guan tree and cuts off all its branches, staying on top of it still. He starts at the top, at the head of the tree and he cuts and Cuts. He goes down to look and a young woman is at the bottom of the tree. Kampatarai comes now and asks him, 'Hey brother, tell me about this.' Suilik says, 'If you go and you climb up this langir tree and you start cutting up above, and cut and cut and if you cut its last branch, throw the axe down.' Tarai works as told. He cuts and cuts. He cuts off the very last branch and throws the axe down. He looks and there is an old woman standing there. The two brothers build two houses, where they stay for a while. Suilik gets up and he gets part of the banana tree, cuts it and puts it behind the house fence. He gets a cane and he hits and hits this thing. Tarai asks, 'What is Suilik doing.' His grandmother replies, 'I think he is killing this woman.' 'Why? Oh, I too will go and kill the other.' Kampatarai really hits the old woman and she dies, and Wansuilik says,' Oh Suilik are you not a little sorry for Kampatarai' [From account by Daniel Goro of Lambom]

Other accounts have Suilik carving a tree3 which he took on board his ship overseas and which became white people. Black Melanesian people were not carved, Suilik merely painted a mouth and eyes on the dark bark of the tree and left them behind. White people, like the carved posts of deceased kamgoi ('bigmen') formerly present in men's houses4 , have the white colour of the inner wood. Caucasian's skins are often described as 'red'; natsuilik's red skin is also explicitly likened to a white person's. Wood and trees (the same word yai covers both) are associated with human bodies in a variety of figures of speech and ritual contexts. For example a corpse may be referred to as yaikut ('blind tree\wood'), or yai (bo)bolos ('tree\wood remaining'), expressions emphasizing the inert lifeless/spiritless state of the body. A parent, particularly a mother, may be buried with a number of sticks to make the spirit of the deceased think they are still with their children. The use of a banana tree as a substitute for a person in the Suilik myth is

Thought to be a common and much used tree called marn gas in Siar. This tree is also used for the production of carved posts in the men's house. See Ch.4. 211

significant given the identification of the clan unit as kamtiken oon, the base of the banana (see Ch.3). Present procreation: sex, violence, secrets and seduction

The current sexual behaviour and creation of human beings is necessarily more prosaic than that of myth. As in most cultures sexual matters are a mixture of the secret, the humorous and the dangerous. Take for instance expletives, the scene of linguistic violence and transgression. The most common Lak expletive is peuli, meaning foreskin. This word is used both as a term of abuse and an expression of general exasperation. Its use is supposedly restricted to men who claim that it was in reality so in years gone by. It is now used by adults and children (with great relish and bravado by young girls) with such frequency as to make it almost ubiquitous. The female equivalent term, which I on the contrary did not hear used in my tabooed male hearing, is not an external covering, but an opening and revelation of the inside, piriki, to part the legs and the labia (for intercourse). Genitals are pidiks. It is somewhat shaming for them to be seen by the opposite sex, and forbidden for them to mention any accidental revelation. For men this is a lesser and more recent stricture deriving from colonial influence; elderly men having gone naked within living memory. Within same sex groups for both men and women there is very little coyness, but opposite sex revelation that say, a child saw their father or mother naked during washing, is regarded as pial, a Iowgrade betrayal of secrets. A concomitant of sex is the private giving of shell-money to the woman by the man, in a similar fashion to the giving of shells to view a pIdik. There are many tales of women being seduced to sleep with spirits, especially place-spirits which can take the form of a person, by gifts of shell-money. The shells are so the woman will 'hear the talk' of the man, that is do as requested. Public exchange, especially the acceptance of food by the man, is a sign of more serious relations and impending marriage. My impression was that girls became sexually active from around the 212

age of 14 or 15 and boys from a little older. By all accounts, a fair amount of pre-marital sex goes on, and a moderate amount of discrete extra-marital liaisons. Intercourse takes place in private and is associated with obscured and unpeopled places. Its primary location is not the house, despite the fact that one can easily be hidden in the darkness inside - houses suffer from the close proximity of children and others, and a highly visible entrance\exit. Rather it is the secondary bush, and the areas in and around gardens, that are highly sexualized. Wee ep fain sah I da. Oh, what woman is there? Ep fain sikel I da A singlewoman is there I katim wanem kain kona long bus She's cutting corners (taking short Cuts) in the bush lukaut tar ma on ep rokoi Watchout for the wild pig (man) 01 tasik 01 U sikrap tumas tar ma olsem wanem. Brother, you are too hot/aroused, what now 01 artai tar susun on ep runmon 'Eating' breasts in the dark [A gar song of Ben Toasal of Siar village in mixed Siar and Tok Pisin]

Men are cast in the roles of sexual aggressors, and women in the most active modality as temptresses, and more passively as prey. As the above song relates a young woman caught alone in a secluded spot (especially the bush), might well be regarded as a legitimate sexual target. Sexual violence is implicated in the disturbing ambivalence of the use of the local pidgin word 'rape-im' - which seems to connote the widest range of degrees of compliance. Thus women (especially the young or unmarried) usually only go beyond populated areas and routes in groups. There is a large discourse of women being spied upon by predatory males hiding in the bush. The male practice of lurking in the forest cover, surveying but unseen by a female object, is characteristic of spirits, and indeed talung (spirit) is also used as a verb, denoting this kind of activity. It is the behaviour not just of men wishing to waylay women, but more ominously, of sorcerers attacking their victims. Attracting lovers through the combined, and not totally distinct, 213

means of decoration and love magic is a (young) mate preoccupation. 5 Singsing events are propitious times for sexual liaisons, but the use of love magic (known as malerra) is by no means limited to these periods. Such enchantments come in a wide variety of guises. The iconic exemplar is the tubuan mask, which is said to be highly sexually attractive to women. The decorated and transformed men in the lesser singsings are also, as they present themselves as spirits, augmented in their sexual allure. One, or many, nights before the performance they spend in seclusion in the bush singing songs in which they bespell the women so that they will be overcome by desire for them. Urn ep fain (hit\kill a woman) is the phrase indicating successful bespelling of a woman, and overcoming of her will - urn can also mean to be drunk, or befuddled. Many women put down their marriages, to the irresistible use of malerra, placing the act outside of their own volition. 6 Most young men, however, are rather wary of this outcome, fearing that if their magical concoctions were discovered and burnt, or if the girls family deemed it to their advantage, they might be forced to marry. Malerra use verges on the aggressive and anti-social. 7 It can be 'turned' into sorcery, especially by spurned suitors, who may bespell their erstwhile object of affection to make them ill or fornicate indiscriminately and incestuously. Intra-molety sex is deemed incestuous, gomob, but many are supposed, surreptitiously, to practice it. One can tell however because their skin 'stinks'. Sorcerers are especially associated with propositioning women for incestuous couplings - if refused they will threaten the woman with a sorcery

Older women were sometimes said to know love magic (malerra), and to pass it on to young men, primarily their sons. However I was told (by both sexes) that women did not themselves practice love magic. Although I am inclined to believe this, it does raise questions of how the old women came to know the love magic in the first place, and what means young women use in their seductions. Unfortunately my (gendered) data gives few clues on these matters. 6

least one woman of my acquaintance, who married a much older man (under familial pressure), would sometime scold him by saying that she would never have married him had it not been for his use of malerra. Cf. Harrison's (1993:122) account of how the use of love magic can be seen as an assault in Avatip a Sepik community. 214

attack; hiding in the bush in a similar manner to that used to proposition her in the first place. 'Poison' always has its source in one's own moiety8 . Although many illnesses and misfortunes are attributed to sorcery, the classic symptom of 'poison' that is almost always related in informants narratives is that of uncontrolled bleeding, or the vomiting of blood. The comparison of this anti-social, life-shortening, sexually provoked flow of blood to the 'fastening' or drying of blood in the production of a child resulting from socially appropriate sexual relations described below, is telling. Conception: the blood of the father

Child-birth is the female pidik par excellence. The processes of conception are to a degree part of this pidik for, as was pointed out to me, knowledge of them is inaccessible to men for they are hidden within women's bodies. None the less, I was informed as to Lak thoughts on the process by both mature men and women. Although I came across some talk of the blood of both parents mixing in conception from younger people, older people were adamant and clear: the child is the blood of the father alone. 9 It is through this connection of blood that the child may make claims of inheritance from his father. The father's semen (mek) is transformed into blood (sulk) inside the body of the mother, which she then gives birth to as the child. Pregnancy is spoken of as ep kalang kut ani - the moon closed off (lit, blind) - referring to the cessation of menstruation. Menstruation, variously known as rei kaben (seeing the moon), or samsiik (sick blood), is also seen as caused by intercourse, the blood

being discarded (or inadequately congealed?) semen. First menses are

8

This is supposed to be the case, but I did come across a small proportion of cross-moiety accusations. The two discourses co-exist quite happily. That the child is the 'blood of the father' is certainly an important saying and conceptualization and is reflected in the many other realms (myth, ritual etc). It highlights the substance relationship between the father and child. One would never say someone is the blood 'of the mother' or 'of the mother and father'. I think it is very likely that the two bloods theory of conception is derived from western conception beliefs picked up from school and mission sources. 215

in fact meant to take place during the girls seclusion in the dal ritual (see Ch.6), during which spirits and suitors are attracted to her before she is married off. The moon (in whom Siar people, like us, see a man) is also seen as 'cutting' the girl, or being causative in some rather vague way.1°

Menstrual blood is seen as dangerous to men. A menstruating woman is not supposed to cook or have contact with food that is to be eaten by a man. 1 ' To do so would make the man sick, the blood would cook his skin\body (I tun ep falinon), changing his blood (I keles ep sulk on ep barsan), making him thin and lethargic. Giving such contaminated fare is known as tawani, reheating old food - cooking something that has already been cooked some time before. I read this as being an entailment of men's already being menstrual blood delivered by their mothers some time ago. A 'second delivery' (recooking) is undesirable. Men are in fact the source for their partner's menstrual blood in the first place. Being given back the same thing one has given is said to be weakening, to make one bald (prematurely aged) in fact - hence the importance of women not returning menstrual blood to men. Returning the blood to men as food by women, is an inversion and negation of the giving of semen\blood by men to women

10

It is interesting to compare this account with the Usen Barok beliefs as presented by Wagner: 'A couple must have sex perhaps six or seven times, in the opinion of my informants, before the 'bad' menstrual blood comes Out and the 'good' blood appears. The man's semen, in fact, causes the clean blood to arise in the woman; it is 'the strength of the man' that brings it about. What is meant here is actually a notion of transubstantiation: a woman herself cannot create a child, for her blood runs; to make a child, the blood must be contained within the uterus. This is accomplished by the action of the male semen upon the female vaginal secretion, pe ge a une (literally 'female semen'), which is turned into 'clean blood,' which in turn seals the uterus. ... This usage of the word 'blood' in a special, marked sense to refer to a father's substantial or nurturant relation to his offspring is shared with the northern Barok and the Mandak' ( Wagner 1986:62-3) The major contrast appears to be whether the semen changes into blood or the semen changes vaginal secretions into blood. One of the entailments of this difference is the relationship of men to menstruation - but perhaps it is not so far from semen causing a 'clean' blood to replace 'dirty' menstrual blood, to intercourse causing menstrual blood. In fact I collected no information about vaginal secretions, but it seems that the notions of transubstantiation within the woman and the substantial relation to the father through 'blood' are shared. Though adherence to this was not overt in Siar. 216

to feed. As such it is deconceiving and life-diminishing act.

Maternal nourishment: food and water.

The mother's role in conception is rather more than that of a vessel for male substance. She feeds the child unreciprocally, growing it in addition to delivering it. Although the imagery of motherhood is a major part of the everyday presentation of female gender, its use is not limited to the female sex. 12 As we have already seen, there are many important situations in which men also act as 'mothers'. In an important sense Lak is actually a matriarchal society, in as much as powerful men and spirits (tubuan) utilize 'mothering' and the gifting of food in the production of child-like dependency in large groups. We will return to mothers, but here I discuss the roles and substances involved in the production of children.

The process of conceiving and giving birth is known as asus(i) - the same word as is used for breast-feeding. The word refers to a single concept, the growing of the child by the provision of food from the mother. Breasts, the carriers of maternal sustenance, are susun. Susun is also to carry a load upon one's head, an iconically female action, the archetypal burden being baskets of food. Adult men could never carry food on their head in this way. As we have seen, the only context in which men place things upon their head is singsings, when they are lesser incarnations of the tubuan, itself a mother.

For the infant still in the womb, and for some time beyond, a mother is the sole source of sustenance. She should consume watery substances, especially coconut 'water' (polonon ep go/oh) and boiled greens and their juices (polonon ep piam), so that the foetus eats well and becomes fat while lying in the vegetal liquid within the mother's womb. Her afterbirth is atso named for its association with greens; it is called kampiam (kam -mixed\grouped, piam - edible greens), or

12

am making use here of the analytically useful, distinction between sex and

gender. 217

pakrinan (pak - leaf, rinan - unknown). The regimen of coconut water

and boiled greens is to be continued after birth, when such substances reach the child through breast milk (polonon ep sus). Polonon, the common term for these child succouring liquids, does not strictly correlate with water (which is either ma/urn for fresh water or bun for sea or salty water), rather it relates to organic or bodily juices or fluids. Thus young coconuts, or betelnuts have po/onon at their centre, ripe bananas or sweated or boiled greens also have polonon, as does pig meat and decomposing human bodies. It is quite distinct from excreta (sweat, urine etc), blood or fat. The link between decomposition fluids and those vital for the beginnings of life are suggested in the following story: TINKOS & PUAK A woman in my clan, her name was Tinkos. She died while she was pregnant. The custom of our ancestors before was not to bury people in the ground, but to put them up in a tree. Afterwards they speared underneath their two feet and their stink, their juices, go. So they no longer stink. Now this child, Puak, his mother was stinking, her stomach broken [le. decomposing], and the child came up. This child would eat the decomposition juices of his mother. This went on for a long time, until finally the men discovered them. They got a net, the kind they used for catching pigs, and they surround this place they had put the deceased in. They captured the child in the net and carried him to the men's house. They took him in and put him up in the roof, and they used to work their fires underneath him. Much time passed, four days and four nights. They waited to see if he would sneeze. If he sneezed it meant that the smoke had gone up his nose. They got him down, they removed the net and they cooked some banana. They thought up a kawawar [a variety of magic involving ginger] and chewed it with the banana, and opened the child's mouth and made him swallow it. After this he vomited all the bad things. He stayed some more time, around four more days. After this they tested him on food. He ate now and he came up as a true man now. He was no longer like a wildman. [Edited version of account by Toakali of Morkon]

As in the Manila and Suilik story, drying over the fire is seen as crucial in 'firming up' the child. Here we also see a theme of the final drying up of a corpse at the end of a lifespan. Water was associated with (and substitutable for) living people - its drying out with death. Small babies are particularly vulnerable to being attacked by spirits. In recent times when a mother and child spent time away from their house they would leave two bamboo containers of water on the bed, as substitutes to fool manrugh, spirits which prey on the very young. 218

A similar practice was the use of bamboo water containers as substitutes for men going on long trips in large ocean going canoes (mon). Should the water disappear from the containers, it is a sign that the men have died at sea and that their spirits have come back and drunk the water.

Foods thought difficult to digest and incompatible with 'wet' babies are hard substances (e.g. nuts) , strong smelling (gass) foods (e.g. pig meat, fish or shrimps) and in particular fatty greasy (kakauin) foods such as ku, coconut oil. Kakauin, fat\grease, is a male gendered food substance and ku is important in the preparations of male singsing groups. Special 'greasy' foods are consumed both in public and in secrecy by men during ritual occasions. Kakauin is said to be dangerous to the unborn and very young, 'cooking' their skins. Yet pregnant women are seen as attractive, or even as bait to the migrating paloloworm, an animal and food deemed as especially ..4- greasy and fatty. On the one day a year-in which the paloloworm flood onto the reef, Siar folk protect their yam houses by fastening leaves of a small fernlike plant called gamgam to them. Gamgam is also used to burst and dry pussy boils. The fat of the paloloworms would otherwise, it is said, 'cook' the stored yams, ruining them, just as bringing strong smelling (gass) pig meat or fish would also damage them. The greasy worms are attracted to the yam storage house, just as they are to the pregnant woman. The yams are cooked by greasy or smelly foods, just as the young child is. Women have a strong association with houses anyway; here we see confirmation in the correlation of the images of a pregnant woman and a house full of food.

219

Plate 21a: Pauline suckles polonon from a coconut breast carved by her lather.

Plate 21b: Tosul is dried over an earth-oven.

-:'

-.'-

'L ::.

,.r

220

Spirit and life The physical body is inert, 'wooden' (yai bobolos - wood remaining), without spirit. The moment of death is when one's spirit finally departs. When life begins is harder to discern, but it is marked by the arrival of spirit in the child. This life-spirit is known as taingan. -Ngan is a possessive, see for example aan-ngan (your food) or wai-ngan the fruit of a tree. Ta!- is the root term. Taingan is somebody's spirit, taking is the generic word for all types of spirits . Ta! or talta! mean

to wander, or to roam without any specific purpose, which is just how spirits are supposed to act. The life-spirit of a person has been incarnated as another person previously. The importance of the previous life's identity for the current incarnation of the spirit can vary hugely. Some people are called by the name of their ta/n gan, and may be given food or even on rare occasions claim inheritance from their taingan kin. Other's taingan identity may be undeveloped or forgotten. Taingan may come

from either the mother's or the father's side of the family, or from some completely unrelated source. There seems to be no pattern to their transmission, except perhaps that people see who they want to see in the face of a child. Thus it was fairly common for a grieving relative or friend to see the likeness of a deceased in a young child and start calling that child by the ta/n gan name and paying special attention to it. It is also notable that important or powerful dead seem particularly popular - hence the rather embarrassing recent case of three separate babies being put forward as the same dead leader. The identity of taingan are not however properly divisible in this fashion. Taingan are particularly associated with the visage or countenance. It

was likened to the image one saw in the mirror. But when walking in the forest, any sign that reminds one of a dead person - a Sound of whistling, or a bird, or a light - may, if one feels it to have the 'mark' of the deceased, be taken to be their taingan. In a child it is in their looks and character and actions that their taingan will be discerned. In the many cases children themselves are said to relate whose 221

ta/n gan they have and begin using the kin terms appropriate for that

identity. Chris Dokon 's elder sister, Theresa, tells me that he has the taingan of Dokon a kamgoi and sorcerer of before. During Chris's birth Dokon's tubuan was seen dancing on the beach, and he was born with a caul over his head like a tubuan. They wondered initially if the baby was a place-spirit. (Fleldnotes)

Young children, babies and the unborn are particularly closely connected to, and vulnerable from, the spirit world. Spirits of dead women, manrugh, or place-spirits are known to be dangerous to them. Tales of place-spirits taking the form of a man and fathering children, are also very common - two albino children were held to be the result of this during my stay. As already noted, men's pidik productions are especially dangerous to pregnant women and children. Affecting their reproductive potential is the main and really the only expression of the incompatibility of these pidiks and women, bar 'death'. A woman who comes too close, or walks on some remnant of lime or leaf from the tubuan will almost certainly miscarry, or give birth to a deformed child. Such children are sometimes refused milk. People are not the only entities with life. The land also is alive. 'It has eyes, ears and nose', I was told, 'your land is like your pig, it knows who its owner is.' This tends to be brought up in the context of land disputes, and\or discussions about illness and sorcery. The land is 'hot' (lapang) and has power\strength, (rakai); on one occasion, after the accidental transgression of the rules of the taraiu, I was told that I was lucky to be wearing sandals, for otherwise the land would surely have made me sick. It is Suilik or the Christian god who has put his spirit in the ground, giving it life and power. It is, in turn, the belief (nurnur) of people that gives not only these spirits their life and

power, but also men's pidiks such as the tubuan. If women were to see inside the tubuan they would no longer believe. Previously it was Suilik who gave life to the tubuan, but when he went he left the tubuan life-less on a wooden post. Men now replace Suilik and give life 222

to the tubuan.

It is notable in this context that women are sometimes likened to the land. In one speech the analogy was particularly explicit:

'The land is like a woman. It supports men. It can be clear in the morning, and by the next day it will have growth on it. The land provides food, just as women provide children'. (Tomalisman of Siar, encouraging the 'supportive' behaviour of women) Birth

Labour and the act of parturition are conceptually distinguished from the overall process of pregnancy and birth as a process of feeding (asusi). The dangerous work of delivery is taur, one of a series of gender and reproduction related words using the root word tau (the primary referent of which is a spot, or hole of broken ground for planting of root crops).'3 Others in the series include tau-uk, a kin term used between a woman and her HuM or HuF, and taulaf, meaning marriage. The link between breaking the surface of the ground in order to produce food from within and breaking the integrity of a woman's body in order to produce a child from within should be evident.

Unless, as is often the case today, the woman goes to an aid-post, the birth will take place in a house, within the presence of women only. This is a women's pidik, men should not see it, nor should women who are not 'initiated' (i.e. have not yet given birth). The mother gives birth on leaves of banana or pau (an edible member of the Barringtonia family), the afterbirth is kept in these leaves and will be thrown away on their emergence from the house. When a baby is newly born it has white, dry skin on it known as nusin fanat, 'old' skin,

13

Subsidiary referents are: I) fish are jumping out of the water; ii) a tree ready for harvesting, le. its fruit is ripe. We can perhaps see a link with the primary case for I) in as much as it is the breaking of a surface, and a prior moment to the collection of food, the fishing that will go on if a man spots that the fish are tau. For ii) the connection is perhaps limited to the pre-harvesting moment. 223

likened to that which a snake sheds, nusin soi. This is rubbed off with leaves. The colouring stays for some time,' 4 a fact which was used to draw attention to the kinship between babies and spirits which are also white. A little time later further drying and shaping of the child will take place. Ginger leaves are twisted into conical shape normally used to cork containers, heated and placed in each of the babies nostrils, another two heated leaves are pulled up and over the side of the brow. This is so that the babies nose is not flat and that his\her hairline goes back over the brows. It may also be related to the drying and hardening of the fontanel and nose cartilage. The birth, and the gender of the child, may be signalled by a deposition at the entrance to the village. One bundle of firewood for a girl and two for a boy. The numbers relate to the gendered modes of carrying: women susun single burdens on their heads, while men carry a pokos, a stick over their shoulder, with balanced loads at either end.

Both mother and child must stay secluded within the house for 4 days (an important period of time in several stages of death ritual), after which time the umbilical of the child is said to have dried sufficiently. During this time any short trips outside for the toilet etc. must be under the cover of a pandanus cape. From this point on, until it is able to crawl, the baby will spend much of its time inside a pandanus leaf cradle. On their coming out, the first feast of the child's life is held: basi pakan, meaning throw away leaves, in which the afterbirth of the child is disposed of and the mother's family give portions of pig to the women who helped her through labour. If it is a first born, this may be combined with a kawass taman ka (father goes on top), in which a pig is cooked for the father, to express gratitude for his 'growing' the mother's clan. A live pig should later be reciprocated. As the exchanges on the baby's behalf start, the child begins to become enmeshed in their entailments. Another subject now emerges in the ebb and flow of the moral obligations of sociality.

14

As it does for all black children until the melanin spreads. 224

S

H

E

Plate 22:

Carolin Matwin with her white new born

son, Ryan.

Children beget parents The consequence of a birth is not merely the eruption of a new subjectivity on the scene, but also a transformation of the persons relationally implicated in the child. The most obvious and radical of these take place on the birth of a first born, which is why Siar mark it more than any other. Fathers and mothers are the most immediate creations of a birth, but these new identities are not merely formed vis a vis the infant, but also in relation to each other. In fact, the most commented upon result of a first child, was that it completed, and strengthened, what for a young child-less couple might be a more tentative and partial relationship. Children, I was told, are the 'glue' of a marriage. They hold a couple together, and are in fact evidence of the marriage. Prior to the arrival of children it is not uncommon for the couple to lead largely separate lives, the young man sleeping in the men's-house as often as he likes, the new wife sometimes 225

sleeping with female affines. In old age, after the children have reached maturity and left their care, the couple may again revert to living separately. However, once the husband has constructed a house, and the wife given birth to a child, they are expected to stay together - a man may be scolded and told to give space to others if he sleeps in the men's-house too often from this stage. A wife, if she runs away, will generally be brought back by her matrikin, albeit in return for a considerable payment if the husband is deemed to have mistreated her.

Ideally marriage is the end point of the dal female initiation ritual, which in turn is a concomitant of first menstruation, the result of the insemination of male semen\blood and potential child substance. As Strathern might put it, children are not so much the end result of a marriage, as a marriage is an anticipation of the outcome of children. Or rather marriage is formed in the wake of children - it precedes, maintains, and perhaps endures beyond the presence of offspring but is always in relation to them. But marriage is not merely additive and future oriented as its association with children might suggest. It is also about the weakening of one set of relationships in favour of another: like death its rituals evoke an admixture of remembering and forgetting in order to facilitate a change in relational identity. Unfortunately its ritual enaction is quite rare, hence the relegation of a discussion of what data I do have to an appendix.

Nor is 'marriage' is the only corollary of offspring. Also implicated are the past and future relationships between the two lineages involved, and the status and obligations of those that will feed, support, initiate, sponsor, avoid, marry, depend upon, compete with, bury and inherit from the child. The world is reformulated in potentiality and in practice around the new social entity. In describing it so, I do not mean to take away choice and agency. The relationships surrounding the child are produced with varying degrees of compulsion and expectation. Thus if a father is not apparent, then responsibility for paternity may be projected onto the advances, in the form of a human simulacra, of a tanruan spirit. Or, conversely, if a married couple are not producing 226

children, they will almost certainly be given babies to adopt by relatives (from either side).

227

CHAPTER 6 female initiation

228

'I had heard from the teacher about some strange custom connected with some of the young girls here, and so I asked the chief to take me to the house where they were. The house, which was about 25 feet in length, stood in a reed and bamboo enclosure, across the entrance to which a bundle of dried grass was suspended to show that it was strictly tabu. Inside the house were three conical structures about 7 or 8 feet in height, and about 10 or 12 feet in circumference at the bottom and for about 4 feet from the ground at which height they tapered off to a point at the top. These cages were made of the broad leaves of the pandanus sewn quite dose together, so that no light, and little or no air, can enter. On one side of each was an openmg, which is dosed by a double door of plaited cocoa-nut leaves and pandanus leaves. About 3 feet from the ground there is a stage of bamboos which forms the floor. In each of these cages we were told that there was a girl or young woman confined, each of whom had to remain for at least four or five years without ever being allowed to go outside the house. I could scarcely credit the story when I heard it; the whole thing seemed too horrible to be true. I spoke to the chief, and told him that I wished to see the inside of the cages, and also to see the girls, that I might make them a present of a few beads. he told me that it was tabu (forbidden) for any man but their own relations to look at them; but I supposed the pmmised beads acted as an inducement, and he sent away for some old lady who had charge, and who alone is allowed to open the doors. Whilst we were waiting we could hear the girls talking to the chief in a querulous way, as if objecting to something or expressing their fears. The old woman came at length, and certainly she did not seem a very pleasant jaior or guardian, nor did she seem to favour the request of the chief to allow us to see the girls, as she regarded us with any but pleasant looks. However, she had to undo the doors when the chief told her to do so, and then the girls peeped out at us, and when told to do so they held out their hands for the beads. I, however, purposely sat some distance away, and merely held out the beads to them, as I wished to draw them quite outside that I might inspect the inside of the cages. This desire of mine gave rise to another difficulty, as these girls are not allowed to put their feet on the ground all the time they are confined in these places. However, they wished to get the beads, and so the old lady had to go outside and collect a lot of pieces of wood and bamboo, which she placed on the ground, and then going to one of the girls she helped her down, and held her hand as she stepped from one piece of wood to another, until she came near enough to get the beads I held out to her. I then went to inspect the inside of the cage out of which she had come, but could scarcely put my head inside of it, the atmosphere was so hot and stifling. It was quite dean, and contained nothing but a few short lengths of bamboo for holding water. There was only room for a girl to sit or lie down in a crouched position on the bamboo platform, and when the doors are shut it must be nearly or quite dark inside. They are never allowed to come out except once a day, to bathe in a dish or wooden bowl placed dose to each cage. They say that they perspire profusely. They are placed inside these stifling cages when quite young, and must remain their until they are young women, when they are taken out and have each a great marriage feast provided for them. One of them was about fourteen or fifteen years old, and the chief told us that she had been there for five years, but would very soon be taken out now. The other two were about eight and ten years old, and they have to stay there for several years longer. I asked if they never died, but they said no. If they are ill they must still remain. Some other girls we saw outside wore fringes crossed over the breast and back. As well as we could learn, they must wear this as soon as they attain a certain age or stage of growth, and continue doing so until marriageable. This latter custom seems to be followed by those whose parents cannot afford, or are unwilling to bear the expense of, the feats which the other barbarous custom entails. Our people tell me that the same custom in modified form prevails also on the western side of New Ireland. There, however, they only build temporary huts of cocoa-nut leaves in the bush, in which the girls remain.' (Brown 1910:105-7)

229

f.j,•

Plate 23: This photograph was taken by Rickard (1892) and Illustrates the westcoast form of the endosure

230

rown's stirring account of his encounter in 1876 is entirely consistent with details, given to me more than a century later, of the traditional practice of the dal in Siar. Although the entire southern New Ireland area seem to have practised similar female initiation\menarche rites (see Ch.2) no modern ethnographers have either noted them or questioned their relationship with other cultural traits of the region. I was fortunate to witness two short (one night and two nights duration), but relatively 'complete', dal female initiation ceremonies from beginning to end early in my fieldwork. This chapter describes these and shows that, even if rarely practised, these Initiations are a richly Illuminating source for common cultural imagery surrounding women and fecundity. Dal is particularly significant because it is a female pidik which articulates with the much more visible and hence widely discussed male mortuary rites and secret spiritual possessions (e.g. Albert 1987, Clay 1986, Foster 1995, Jackson 1995, Wagner 1986). Knowledge of the dal enables us to contextualize and examine the female ground which supports, and yet is obscured by, the publicly projected figure of male spiritual power. Most importantly of all it allows an exploration of the complexion of personhood itself in relation to a broader view of gender and the lifecycle. The general lack of ethnographic accounts or analyses of female initiation been has highlighted in a recent collection of essays (Lutkehaus & Roscoe 1995a). 1 They have been neglected partly because of male-centred bias within anthropology, and partly because they tend to be of smaller scale and less liable to involve groups or associations of initiands than male rites. 2 This is the case in Siar, where the female dal rites are insignificant when contrasted with mate

1

The preface incorrectly lists Wedgwood 1933 as the only publication devoted to female initiation in Melanesia. The subject of Bell 1936 Is the dafa! female initiation of Tanga. 2

This has caused female iites to be underestimated by the many anthropologists who conflated scale with importance, and also led to its under-reporting by those such as La Fontaine (1985) and Allen (1967) whose definItion of 'Initiation' excludes ceremonies which do not Involve groups or associations of initiands (See Lutkehaus & Roscoe 1995b on the former and Roscoe 1995 on the latter). 231

initiation in terms of political or economic importance. However, as almost all the articles in Lutkehaus & Roscoe demonstrate, even where this is the case, the importance of female rites in physical and cultural reproduction is hard to over-estimate. Female initiation is neither an inert nor an isolable entity. As a cultural institution, even if one seldom practised in full, it plays a key role in creating the poetic operators for, and propelling forward, the life-cycle as a whole. In this it articulates with the imagery of other sections such as death or male initiation which are temporally distant and\or resulting from different immediate interests. In Siar dal is the second part of the ritual corpus that specifically belongs to women, and it manifests the other main female pidik apart from child-birth - menstruation. In fact, the dal both prefigures the birth by producing the conditions of fertility it requires and recapitulates it in symbolizing the rebirth of the girl as woman. While the dal and birth are termed female 'secret' possessions related to the production of life, their gendering is far from simple, with male and spiritual input being important to both. This linkage is not foregrounded in birth ritual, but is implicit in the conception beliefs surrounding it. The dal rites dramatize the role of men and spirits and its imagery highlights, and maintains, the linkages between the women's pidiks and the men's. There are many links with the male pidiks associated with spirits and the end of life, in particular the tubuan which come to the village in the secondary funerary rites. Male initiations into the tubuan and the lesser pidiks recapitulate death in moving the initiate from the living to the dead in the mask of a spirit mother-child. Female initiation in the dal, I will argue, recapitulates birth in moving the male dead into the covering of a living motherchild. Furthermore, the double nature of primary and secondary funerary rites, and birth and dal rites is, I claim, by no means fortuitous, but rather a revealing and necessary element in the production and dissolution, imagining and forgetting of the composite imagery which form and reform personhood through the life-cycle. Before moving on to these complex poetics, I will describe the dal rite 232

in its entirety, paying special attention to the imagery invoked, and the connections such usages make. Dal

Dal, as a word, refers both to the girl or woman and the ritual they

undergo. It also means a young, sexually attractive woman and is the name given to several such characters in various stories in which Suilik (the main culture-hero) or a wallaby (an animal associated with male display and decoration) attempt to take her as a sexual partner. Sexual attraction is a major theme of the dal ritual and the production of a gendered and sexual woman from a non-sexual and androgynous child attracts male spirits in a way similar to that predicted by Strathern's 'Melanesian aesthetic' (1988). The dal ritual is attenuated from that which took place in years gone by, when it could last many months or even years. Then, girls who underwent dal were supposed to be secluded from before their first menstruation until their breasts had developed and they were ready for marriage. Now, once all the preparations have been made, it is generally over in a few days or perhaps a week. In former times the dal directly preceded marriage, but this is no longer so. In fact,

though marriage rituals are rare, and I did not see one, they still provide a valuable source of imagery inter-relating the dal and death which I investigate in an appendix. The three girls I saw undergoing this rite were aged between 4 and 12, and the criteria that they should have started menstruating by the time they emerge from the rite admittedly nominal. It is deemed preferable that women should have undergone the ritual at an early age, even if only the minimum 'short-cut' version which involves only the final distribution of food exchanges from a display stand. Those

This aesthetic entails that an androgynous child who is the product of cross-sex relations between her parents' groups must be rendered single sex to become an agent who can attract and combine with an opposite single-sex subject in order to produce a further androgynous product. 233

who have not been initiated are known as kurmakmak, a name of some stigma, but for which I could discover no literal meaning, only the implications of not being a 'true' woman and, more importantly, of not having repaid their debts to those dal from whom they have received distributions.

Preparations The ceremonies are sponsored by the girls' fathers. This is in accord with the events linkage with marriage, for it is also the father who has the responsibility for helping his child to find a partner. Although there is a sense in which a dal ceremony is held 'for' the girl, so that she is no longer kurmakmak, large scale dal ceremonies are also interpreted as demonstrations of the host's grandeur. As such they are competitive and aggressive acts and liable (and meant) to arouse jealousy in others. Foster's Tangan informant's explanation of the retrenchment of dafal, their variety of dal, as due to the jealousy and sorcery it arouses (1995:47) would be well understood by the Lak. However, neither of the dalI witnessed were of any grand scale, nor were the hosts prominent kamgoi. Indeed for most of the ceremony the hosts were not much in evidence, centre stage being largely, and unusually, taken by women.

In the run up to the event some structures are built in preparation. The house in which the dal is to be secluded is selected. In the dalI saw in Siar this was the dal's maternal grandmother's house. A large high screen made from dried coconut fronds is erected at the side of the house, between the area at the front, where the women will gather, and the bush. The house itself has many bunches of perfumed plants and herbs fastened to it, and should be decorated with as much red as possible. The former being to attract the spirits, the latter being 'the colour of the dal'.

In a 'full' ceremony an additional small enclosure called a goh would be constructed inside the house and it is within this that the dal would be secluded. The reason given for it's infrequent use these days is that 234

its erection requires a small pig feast. This goh would be made from sewn pandanus leaves, and came in two varieties: the more prestigious and complete is the larger goh tur (standing goh), which has a conical, dukduk-like, roof to it; the lesser 'short-cut' type is a goh pa/al (bald goh), which has a flat top. The shape and material of

the goh is quite significant: babies cradles are constructed from exactly the same type of pandanus leaves and in the same way. Similar, but larger, pandanus leaf capes are used by men and associated with tubuan. It is under such coverings and on top of pandanus mats - sheltered from the sun, the ground, and the sight of men - that the dal makes any brief excursions from her seclusion. The da/'s confinement overall, is, to initiated men, very resonant of a tubuan.4 Further into the village a food stand is built. This is a raised bamboo platform, of about two feet in width and long enough to hold all the distributions that will be made. The uprights are saplings or long thin branches, and have some of their upper leaves and limbs left on them. They reach above the platform to a height of about 10 feet where they are joined by cross-pieces. To these cross pieces are attached fluttering strips of coconut frond. When it is close to the time of the ritual, this frame is further decorated with food: sugar-cane, taro, bunches of betelnut, shelled drinking coconuts and pig intestines. These are hung on to the pok, in a distinctive way, that is upside down with their roots facing upwards. This is the same way that the ton ger exchange stands are decorated in the tondong primary

mortuary rite, a correlation I will expand upon later. The final preparation is the sending out of small baskets containing a portion of taro and a little cooked pig, to kurmakmak, asking them to come. Most of them from other villages (and their mothers etc.) arrive in the evening, soon after dark, to sit with the dal and sing kumbak songs until dawn.

For reasons of secrecy I cannot spell out how this is so. 235

Arso Before this, in the afternoon, the rite begins with the arso - ' play' or 'competition'. For this the women decorate their faces with baby powder (a substitute for lime), and tie various purpur (leaf decorations) around them. A senior woman of the dal's lineage, generally the child's maternal grandmother, wears a tanget around her neck, an insignia of a kamgoi, and in any other context completely inappropriate and forbidden apparel.

The colour of the dal is red and she has her hair dyed this colour, and is decorated with red shell-money ear rings. Her eyes are encircled by a distinctive, but as far as I could tell unnamed, white lime\baby powder design reminiscent of the nantoi (M) tubuan's eye designs. Over her neck, on her chest, is hung a packet of various strongly perfumed plant materials and she may be doused with cheap shop perfumes for good measure. So adorned, the women divide into moieties (artimlal ep man gis) and arm themselves with gorgor (a tall type of ginger) and pak (a round fruit sometimes used as a substitute for betelnut). With one of their number blowing intermittent blasts on a triton shell, they make their way from the village to opposite ends of the beach. By now their mood is excitable and festive. Few men are to be seen in the village and they keep their distance. On the beach, the female members of the two moieties approach each other as war parties, individual members prancing and whooping, before 'battle' is engaged. The opposite moiety to that of the dal charge, throwing their gorgor spears at the dal's moiety, and wrestling opposing women into the surf. They then retreat to a counter attack by the dal's moiety and finally return to attack and 'force' the dal to the house of her seclusion.

236

Plate 23: The dal in endosure. Not the spiritual eye markings and herbs, and the red hair.

Plate 24: The arso. Moiety opposed women do battle with ginger spears.

237

The arso produces resonances with two important sources of Lak imagery. The first is myth, the story of Kabakal-ir and how he introduced death to Lak life: kabakai-ir The men of before would fight using pak. They would break them and get rid of the fluid inside. They would put them in slings and they would shoot men with them. The fruit would stick to the skin of a man. They would light like this every day. Tomorrow again, they would come up, bring food, put it to one side and fight. But there was one man called Kabakai-ir. His mother had given birth to him between the roots of a balku tree. He comes now and he sees the men fight. There were spears they cut from gorgor which they would throw. When they finished in the afternoon they would Sit down together and eat. This was the good fight of the ancestors. When Kabakai-ir came and watched them, he thought this fight was no good. It was only play. Back in the bush he carved these spears now, he sharpened them and he got these stones. The men set another day when they would meet again. They cooked the food, got the pigs and other savouries and they met. Two lines of them started their fight again. If the pak gets them they got sores from it. When they finished they removed them. When Kabakai-ir watched he thought 'Ah this is no fight'. They finish fighting and go back. They set another day when they will come up again and fight. Every day they work only to fight. One time Kabakai-ir came and told them, 'We will fight like this, I don't want us to fight that way. That fight is no fight.' They said, 'How will we fight then, ours is a good fight." Kabakai-ir he got up with his spear and he speared a man. Oh, man, he fell down now, and everyone said, 'Oh you came and have ruined us now. This fight is no good now. This fight of ours was good.' Now this was the end of the fight they had at first, and the sitting down to meet and eat it was finished. They followed him now and started with the sling again and shot them. These stones would hit a man and the man would die. Now they said, 'Oh this is no good' and Kabakai-ir said, 'No this fight will stay now.' Now they follow this fight. It came to our ancestors and they stayed with this fight to kill now. Men they died now and the start of this fight of the ancestors was Kabakai-ir. [Edited version of story told to me by Daniel Goro]

The implication of Kabakai-ir's place of birth, and of his not knowing his mother, is that he may not be entirely human: there are many stories of bush people and spirits being born from between the roots of trees. In the dal women fight with the same implements that men used in the time of the ancestors before Kabakal-ir introduced weapons and the dreadful reciprocity of war. 238

The other linked imagery is of the tubuan, which are themselves ancestors (tubunadat - our ancestors) and spirits. Prior to entering the village in the secondary funerary rites they wo, that is the tubuan of each moiety 'attack' each other from opposite ends of the beach, led by ceremonial spear bearing yai-inpidik. The two groups threaten each other with the spears, let fly potentially deadly bespelled lime, retreat, and then enter the village. This is the same pattern as the dal: the moieties 'test' and mutually define each other on the beach

before entering the village. These mock battles in both the wo and the dal, in their differing degrees of closeness to true warfare, define the

moieties and affirm their mutual relationship at opposing ends of a continuum of tension and danger. 5 The duality of the moieties in the wo in modern times is no longer supposed to be that of negative

exchange of life, but deaths are sometimes still attributed to it. Despite its current status as 'play' it still gains its character by referring to death and evoking a relationship of dangerous competition between the moieties. The context evoked by the arso, however, is not simply, as one might assume, the Batesonian meta-message 'this is not death' for by using the pak and gorgor of pre-Kabakai-ir the women refer to death in a different fashion, not by refraining to kill, but by anteceding it. The dal play evokes a symbolic space in which the relationship between the moieties is productive and where on death spirits did not remove people to their 'Other' realm. The wo however brings that very spirit realm into the village in order to remove a life from it. While there are many other parallels between the tubuan and the dal which will be noted, the difference in tone between the dal women's pre Kabakai-ir combat and the tubuans deadly wo, on the other side of the 'fall from grace', holds throughout. The dal is not dangerous or 'totalizing' in the same way as the tubuan. Women's broaching the male domain of the taraiu or falling foul of a tubuan is punishable by death or miscarriage. Men caught within the female domain during the dal are liable to be thrown in the sea.

Other points on this continuum are taken by various other rituals. 239

Plate 25:

The women struggle over the portal to the dars endosure.

The dal in the goh

After the arso the women walk back from the beach to the house. I was told the women of the opposite moiety to the dal then try and place the dal Inside the goh, while those of her moiety try and block them. What happens appears more along the complementary lines of moiety 'play' already cited, as a pair of women from one, and then the other, moiety block the doorway by hanging onto its frame, and have, with great hilarity and effort, to be pulled and wrestled away from the door by four or five women from the opposing side. The women then line up along the side of the goh, or house, and beat the wall in time with the song below. When they are beating a goh made of pandanus it is said to boom like a drum:

240

Kam kausai ep dal bring inside dal 1) Dal karon Ilk 01 saral matana kik Small dalkaron find the eye of the kik bird 2) keaoi. .oh ngai, kamtur ruge ????..??, stand together break it 3) balam ruge kunar ep goh stomach break, shake the goh 4) oh malep kunar ep goh oh malep bird shake the goh (Repeat)

For the period the dal is inside the goh she is no longer known by her own name, but instead is referred to by a name such as dal karon. These names are moiety possessions, certain names are restricted to Bongian and certain to Koroe. They are thought to be the names of female ancestors. 6 This song contains the first of many references towards birds in the dal. Here we have the dat being encouraged to attract the gaze of the kik, a small black bird of the beach, which is said to sing out on seeing the dal. The stomach referred to (3) is, here as elsewhere in Melanesia, the seat of many emotions. This phrase refers to an arousing of emotions associated with the shaking of the goh. Malep (4) is a small red and yellow parakeet which, the song has

it, shakes the goh (rather than the women). As is clear both from the dal rite and other contexts, such as that of the tubuan, birds are

heavily associated with spirits and the numinous phenomena in which men make the power and presence of the spirits incarnate. In descriptions, but not actually in the dalI observed, the women then sang the following song: 1) ru pel peies ru pel peles na bing ruanoi two packets of peelings, two packets of peelings fasten the neck 2) ma! rupit singi! oil yes pick singil 3) ru pel peles ru pel peles (repeat)

Packets of peelings were often cooked in an earth oven to feed pigs. This is not current practice because it is thought to give pigs the taste

6

Dal karon is a name that belongs to Bongian, karon is a white leaf used in decorations. Other names include dal patam - kunai\sword grass, da! lelet - a white shell-money, dal pit - to pick, dal pitang - to make a large noise, explode, dal pal men's-house, dal sarunbia - a flower, dal labarontus - a fish? 241

for sweet potato and encourage them to damage gardens in search of food. These days they are generally fed on old coconuts (dries). Why the image of packets of peelings is employed here is obscure: there were none actually cooked, or mentioned as part of the ceremony. What it does by implication is introduce domestic pig imagery into the event - an association which will subsequently be reinforced. Sing/I is a small, scented, purple flower which is widely used in perfume-bundles and in decorating the dal and her goh. Its implication is of attracting spirits. Men in spiritual, women stalking mode are often referred to as wild pigs. 7 Domestic pigs come to peeflng packets by which they are nurtured and made fat, wild pigs are attracted by the domestic sows which they inseminate. The dal is now placed in the goh. By now women are in control of the village. Many water fights, and some wrestling take place, particularly between opposite moiety members. 8 Men are an especial target for dousings, and are not allowed to fight back, complain or punish the women. During the period of dal women have licence to throw even the most senior kamgoi in the sea and may indeed invade the men'shouse to do so. This is reflected in a song which individual women break into, along with a burlesquing bouncing free-form dance at high spirited moments in events, to hoots of encouragement and laughter from their audience: 1) Pollam, poilam sal a pus ten Baldy, baldy, hit on the other side 2) lamlamir ka sal an mas Wash you on the ground 3) lamlamir ka tim an bun Wash you in the sea 4) sa gegerlin, sa gegerlin No hair, no hair (Repeat)

I did not enter the goh as it is barred to men, so I have only secondary reports of what happens within. In modern occasions the cf. The gar song quoted in Ch.5 warning single women from short-cuts in the bush lest they meet a 'wild pig'. 8

Also more generally - thrown containers of water have a tendency not to discriminate by moiety! 242

seclusion inside is reduced from a period of many months or even years to a couple of days, and the requirement that she must remain unseen is no longer onerous. The quality of the time spent there now was described as akin to a children's party, with friends joining the young dal in singing songs and impromptu dancing similar to those outside. Even 'traditionally' no knowledge or instruction was imparted, except sometimes about the timing and care of her menstruation. The dal should be fed only on greasy foodstuffs such as taro baked in coconut milk which must be left a day (or over night) so that they are cold. This food should, in theory, be provided by the clan of her husband to be. She should be washed in, depending on my informant, either ku, coconut oil, or kartung, a scented plant oil\sap.9 In previous times she would also be given facial tattoos.'° It is a beautified and sexually attractive woman that is finally released from the goh; she should be pale skinned, plump, have developed breasts, and have menstruated.

The women kumbak

Soon after nightfall the invited women and children from other villages begin to arrive and join those already sitting in front of the dal's house. To one side is a space for cooking food and tea to supply the guests during the night. To the other is the screen between the women and the bush. They have lanterns and a fire, but the rest of the village is in complete darkness. This now is the scene for the kumbak, which refers both to the songs sung during the night and the 'seclusion' of the women at the house. For the women must stay with the dal until dawn, taking great care that they do not stumble across any of the pidik creations in the darkness. The word segment kummeans secret, hidden or unknown; as a word in itself it refers to seclusion in the bush as a ritual preparation. The meaning of bak is a

Ku and kartung are especially associated with, and used by, male singsing groups incarnating spirits. 10

Women (and men) still tattoo themselves, but not to the degree that was historically the case (See Parkinson 1892). Nor is the dal ceremony any longer an occasion for it. 243

fenced pig enclosure. This, if we add it to the otherwise obscure singing of packets of peelings, strengthens the implication that the women are in a bak and are to be associated with domestic pigs. The concatenation of imagery of village sows\women with spirits\wild pig s\men sets a sexual and fecundizing cast to the event. After a while chatting and chewing betelnut, a woman strikes up a song, and others will add and then remove their voices from the chorus as their enthusiasm, stamina, and mundane tasks such as child care, move them. So although there is a unison in song melody, text and timing, the voices which comprise it, who is leading it, and its volume and spatial patterning have an ebb and flow to them. Occasionally this unity is divided as someone starts up an alternative song to that already in progress, this is known as arsaikumbak kumbak competition.

Many kumbak are poorly understood today. The first kumbak is easier than most and was translated for me as follows: 1) ngek kolko! aIee cry so much 2) ma ul ngek sara natum now you cry for your child 3) ngek kolko! aiee cry so much 4) ma ul ngek sara natum now you cry for your child 5) nang 01 ta rikisi ep balam so rei taman dirai mother turn stomach at seeing fathers (dual) 6) ki 01 dal 01 ul ngek 01 dal you cry 7) ki 01 da! oi ul ngek kolkol aiee dal you cry so much

The reference to the turning stomach (5) relates to emotion on viewing the fathers. There is some ambiguity over the identity of the 'mother' who cries for her child, but the closing lines of the song seem to suggest it is the dal crying for her yet unformed child. What is viewed during kumbak are the pidiks - presumably the fathers of the song - thus confirming the sexual and reproductive implications of the conjunction of the visiting spirits and the dal.

244

Other kumbak relate to the theme of the pidiks that come before the women:

1) Anu matotubun oil da 01 pidiklik (x2) Belongs us and our ancestor\grandparent this little pidik here 2) Pinait on ep liullu I da 01 Love magic to clear way here 3) UI ngek ke ra busile You (Dal) cry after the perfume (Repeat)

In this song the dal is attracted by, and crying after, the scented herbs and ginger of the men. The association of pidiks with ancestors and ownership of them as a focus of identity is also brought out, as is their sexually attractive nature. The pidiks in the dal I witnessed were, however, owned and performed by men of several different clans, rather than, as might perhaps be imagined, bearing in mind incest prohibitions or marriage preferences, the pidik presentation as a whole bearing any particular kin or clan relationship, e.g. cross moiety, to the dal. The salient relationships are more of ancestors and spirits to the living and descendants, and masculine to feminine.

There are also kumbak which appear to refer obliquely to sexuality and menstruation:

1) Pilir bun el ian yau oil (x2) Sea snake eats\bites me 2) Mans na me limak kai Sorry for my hand 3) ma ul tur pirim na me kol bebeklai limak now you stand-up and go down to shake the blood from your hand 4) el sisilik ep limak nangol bleeding hand, mother 5) Mans na me limak kai Sorry for my hand (Repeated)

'Eating' is a common euphemism for sexual intercourse. Snakes are closely identifled with spirits and sea snakes particularly with tanruan, (place spirits). They are also creatures which change their skin in a way which is likened to rebirth, and to the skin of new born babies. Singing of being made to bleed by being bitten or eaten by a sea snake, in a rite where girls are transformed into sexually active women and menstruation is 'produced', is very thinly disguised reference to a, presumably spirit, phallus deflowering the girl and, 245

given the correlation the Lak make between the two, initiating menstruation.

Men as pidiks

During the run up to the dal, men will have been making secret preparations for the production of pidiks in various small encampments in the secondary forest and bush. These groups are composed from a mixture of clan members, relations and friends. They are in no special relationship with the dal. The pidiks they produce are of two types: sound effects which are heard but not seen in the bush; and visual creations which perform silently in front of the women. Some of these are agreed copyrights of long-standing; others are common or standard forms of equal or greater antiquity; other productions are improvised specially for the occasion, but if successful and repeated will come to be regarded as the possession of the inventor and his descendants. Generally these dal pidiks are regarded as quite minor in importance, less than either the malerra which appear later, or than pidiks associated with death ritual and the political sphere such as tubuan or buliroarer-spirits. They are an ideal training ground in the arts, secrecy and camaraderie of pidiks for younger boys. As is usual for all pidiks, great and small, viewing or partaking of their construction entails a small payment of shell-money (dok) to the person owning\manufacturing it.

246

Plates 26, 27 & 28: Pidiks appearing at a dal: a giant pig, snapping tamsaikio, and tipang with a (highlighted) woman dancing alongside.

247

The class of sound pidiks are known as birds or birdmen (manimanitarai). They are produced by an array of methods, both

ingenious and simple." At the beginning of the night of kumbak these start making their cries at a distance, gradually approaching from all around until they are very close to the goh, and then at the end of the night, they return slowly to the forest, sounding further and further away before dawn. Many of the sound effects are named. Some for the birds whose cry they imitate, such as the silawak with its characteristic wolf-whistle. Others, such as ta/n ganiru, are names of spirits. Some sounds are unnamed and are not bird cries but other loud, dramatic, surprising or humorous noises ranging from eerie braying, whirring and whining to clatters of apparent gunshots or flatulence. Sometimes loud pidiks such as the thump of kutang or a shower of pebbles on a corrugated iron roof are used to warn the women that a visual pidik is approaching and to urge them to sing louder. These are patently theatrical productions, with lighting adjusted to meet their requirements and aids to help with props. The emphasis varies from wonder to bravado to pathos to a frisson of danger. Some are well known characters that have appeared at other dal, others are new. All are mimed productions, but some produce narrative and interact with the audience. One common type comprises variants upon 'fire' (yah) in which 'men' wearing sometimes extremely tall (6ft or so) headdresses with fire or glowing coloured lights upon them approach and walk silently in front of the women or around the display-stand. Others are often individually named variants on tipang12 or Iorr13 masked figures. These generally have white wooden masks with red

I will not reveal these here for reasons of secrecy. 12

Tipang, strictly speaking refers to the masked 'bushman' that comes into the village as the first public sign that the tubuan are abroad. However it has come to cover other similar masked, 'not quite human', figures that appear at the da and singsings. 13

Apparently an old word (Lambel?) for skull. Stephan and Gräbner (1907) have it as the Kandass for head. 248

and black designs on them. 14 They often have white body paint and green leat\grass coverings, and sometimes carry a ceremonial axe associated with the tubuan. The tone of the tipang performance is generally otherworldly and often humorous, such as when an old lady arose from the body of women to do a lewd, hip gyrating dance before tipang. Tipang like figure are sometimes involved in the class of pidik involving feats of apparent fortitude against pain. The most common of these, labar, involves decorated men (usually youths) or a tipang being whipped ferociously with long cane-like ginger across their back, legs or arms. Another, turlaben, was a 'little bush boy' who wanted to come and play with village children, but instead had flaming torches thrust between his legs to the hoots and delights of the crowd. Other pidiks that come before the women, sometimes repeatedly, are further still from being human. Those I saw included a giant pig, cassowaries (of which there are none on New Ireland), a Bulmakau 'cow' (unrecognisable as such), a terrifying, snapping tamsaikio and a haunting, floating, ship' 5 . Animal creations might charge at the children, or nuzzle a bowl of rice in a manner not dissimilar to that of pantomime or children's theatre in the west. During the night, baskets are lowered on a line over the screen separating the men and the women. In these baskets are placed markers of what the men\spirits require - an empty rice bag if they want rice, a betelnut skin if they want betelnut, or a pig jaw if they desire pig. The women will put provisions in the basket and it will be hauled away, while all the time the men remain Out of sight. As in all pid/ks and all theatre it is important that the men, the actors, do not

puncture the reality they have created by appearing out of costume.

See Stephan & Gräbner 1907, Table IX for examples which are still close to those used today This was modelled on one which had run aground on a nearby reef many years ago. 249

Dawn

As the morning star (Venus) begins to rise the women sing a song to wake the dal:

1) silo a palas ep fanu nai (x2) black bird of paradise wakes the village 2) kok el ngeki kok kiral mai (x2) chicken cries chicken dawning\awaking

Then, if it is the last day of her seclusion, while it is still dark women of the opposite moiety remove her from the goh and hide her in another house.

Whether or not this has happened, come the dawn the women sing the kamgingin, the two songs that end the kumbak for that night. The first of these was not understood by my informants, except in as much as it calls out to all the birds:

1) ngok el larmane Ilk moh lang (x3) spoonbill.. ?? ?? 2) kamgurar uk moh lang (x2) all women.. ???? 3) siksik el larmane Ilk moh lang (x3) parakeet.. ???? 4) kamgurar Ilk moh lang (x2) all women.. ???? 5) balus... pigeon etc etc with other birds

It is with the dawn that the calls of all the 'bird men' slowly move from the immediate vicinity of the goh until they fade away in the distant bush. This song perhaps bids them farewell. The women then sing a second song calling the names of all those remaining kurmakmak (not yet dal) in the village:

1) Delma I kespek on a samle Delma [a kurmakmak} sit and pull strongly this water snake 2) mulmulai polpol !aiee (x3) leaf [used as a plate] ?rock pool? 3) Hilda... etc etc

This was their best effort at translating this song, but the women working with me were at a loss to explain its meaning, except perhaps

250

that mu/mu/al (2) were mentioned En relation to the food distributions the kurmakmak are soon to receive. These distributions are signs of their inferiority and indebtedness to the dal - of whom, in a similar way to distributing kamgoi in the men's rituals, the recipients are envious and desirous of making reparations. Kespek (1) is what one does on pulling a rope, that is sitting back against the strain and pulling. The phallic and spiritual implication of the sea-snakes the girls are instructed to pull has already been made clear in relation to another kumbak. In this song the uninitiated girls of the village are, it seems, encouraged to emulate the dal and to desire the phallus that will make them fecund and equalize their social standing with her's. After a short break, the women now sasarei ep dal - find the dal. It is common knowledge amongst them where she has been hidden, but they start a long 'search', taking care not to find her until they have examined most of the village houses. The search is lead by the grandmother of the dal with lime\talcum-powdered face and a tanget tied around her neck, and holding a stick over her shoulder. The women form a long line, most also holding similar sticks, and move around the village singing the repetitive refrain, again not clearly understood: Iau mai yauo !au mai !au mai Iau mal (repeat)

A Guramalum' 6 speaker suggested that Iau mai meant 'to find someone'17 . As the women come to a house they give a high pitched cry and hit the building with their sticks, forcing their way inside to look for the dal. If they find men they are very likely to attack them, or throw water over them. The sticks they carry over their shoulders are said to 'mark' or represent mumugur, long bamboo containers previously used to carry water, as well as being used to 'break' the houses. While water in such containers is in other situations seen as 16

A bush' language now only spoken by a very few people.

17

Another informant suggested that they were singing of a lum - a magical and hidden house or hole in the ground where clan possessions are kept, which is an apt and telling association, but not really close to the apparent content of the song. 251

a substitute for a living person,' 8 sticks are carried over the shoulder in the same way by the men bringing the spirit of a newly deceased victim of sorcery to the village in divination. These men are also, while they are punctuating the spirit world, restricted from using each others names, just as the women are restricted from using the dal's name while she is secluded in a spirit bound space. Having discovered the dal they break open the door to the house. Then, in the same manner as the dal was placed into the goh (except in this case it is supposed to be the opposite moiety who block), two women of the opposite moiety to the dal are pulled away from the doorway by women of the dal's moiety, and then, in their turn, two women from the dal's moiety block the door to be dragged away by the opposing 'team'. This is accompanied by a great deal of merriment, wrestling and water throwing, before, eventually, the daI is taken back to sit outside the house of her seclusion to await the distribution of food from the display-stand. The men then attempt to cook the pigs for the distribution, under a barrage of 'playful' attacks from the women. Parade of the malerra

Malerra strictly speaking refers to any love magic. The most important materra in the dal are also sometimes known as balllai, and are explicitly modelled on specific tubuan (although not always in practice nameable) and as such they are copyright possessions of some consequence which are constructed in the taraiu. I only saw balllai at the Siar dal, where only dukduk were represented. 19 The Siar bali/al ranged from a straightforward miniaturization of a dukduk, to a quite complicated elaboration on the 'theme' of a dukduk. There were also less tubuan motivated headdress forms used. These are still copyright

18

If a baby is to spend a night away from its home, for instance, a bamboo full of water maybe left in its sleeping place 'so that the spirits think it is still there'. 19

Unfortunately I was unable to ascertain whether bali/al by 'definition' could never be nantoi or koropo. 252

though, and examples range from, kamsiririk named after a spiny animal which it models, to elaborate 'fire' head-dresses similar to those used during the night time pidik visitations. Other decorations and pidiks, such as smoking baskets and labar whippings, may also visit the village as malerra.

Plate 29:

Ma!en parading around a decorated pok food bed. Note the upside-down

sugar-cane etc.

In the afternoon, once the stand has been loaded with the food for distribution (see below), and the finishing touches have been made to the decorations, the malerra emerge from the bush. Silently they walk anti-clockwise three times around the stand in front of the watching dal and women who are back In front of the goh house. Some malerra are individual and others come In groups of mixed kin and affines led by a lineage head or a kamgoi. As they return to the bush they are gIven a small basket of food to take with them. The bali/al and other pidiks may be burnt in the fires used to cook this food, but will at any rate be destroyed.

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The parade of the malerra in front of the gathered women is somewhat akin to a beauty contest. It is supposed to be a competition between the men in trying to attract the dal away from her husband to be. An elderly informant of mine in fact claimed to have 'pulled' his wife this way, and he had to compensate the proposed husband for his reputation and disappointment and also pay back all the food and shell-money expended upon her.

Distribution of pails

After the malerra have displayed themselves the food distributions

(ngasa, cf. ngas -road) can commence. The reciprocations for gifts already received are the only compulsory part of the rite - as such they were described as the as (base or root) of it. The shelf of the stand has the new 'roads', the prestations to kurmakmak, on it on breadfruit leaf plates. On the floor are baskets to repay debts to those

dais who gave to the present dal when she was kurmakmak. The individual prestations are known as pa/is and contain a portion of pig with other foods such as a packet of taro or sweet potato baked in cocon Ut milk, baked ta ro\sweet potato \yams, betein ut, suga rcane, drinking coconuts, and various other fruits and nuts. When received the length and breadth of the portion of pig should be measured by two sticks which are tied into a cross and stored, often in the roof of a house, so as to assure that reciprocation is exact - a procedure also employed in the competitive exchange of men's-house groups in mortuary feasts. The other contents of the pa/is must also be noted so that reciprocation can be exact in kind and quantity.

A senior man (not necessarily of either the dal or her father's clan) then takes a long stick and hits each return prestation with a loud 'HUH' and calls Out the name of the receiving girl. After the debts have been returned the same procedure is followed for the kurmakmak, hitting the stand and calling their name to mark which food packet is theirs. Portions of pig, tabar Ion gon (to give for cold) are also given to all of the women who sang throughout the cold of the night. As soon as all the distributions are complete, there is a surge towards the 254

stand and all the 'upside down' food which decorated it is ripped off to be eaten, drunk, or, in the case of the taro, planted. This marks the formal completion of the ceremony, just as the ripping down of the similar decorations on the tonger after the exchanges of pig in the tondong marks the finish of the first sequence of death rites. The display of the food prestations and the decoration of the stand give commensurable temporal imagery the same vertical alignment:

ROOTS OF ABOVE I

NEW GIFTS I

BELOW

COMPLETED DEBTS

DECORATIONS

BEFORE

I

I

TOPS\FRUITS

AFTER

OF DECORATIONS

This spatlo-temporal imagery is noticeable and foregrounded (to the ethnographer as well as others20 ) largely by its inversion of the general background directionality of the vertical dimension. Most things, most of the time, in this (and other) environment(s) - people, animals, trees and plants - go (grow) up over time, not down. The display-stand goes against the flow, and as such creates some ripples of poetic implication, which, along with ton gers, at the very least create a correlation between the closure of exchanges and this kind of imagery. Tongers are used both in the exchanges which 'forget' the deceased in the primary mortuary rites, and in marriage where they imply a forgetting of certain relationships in the wife's natal village and their replacement with duties to the husband's kin. These are in fact social deaths. The reversal of the directionality of life with the nurturing substances of life (food) in the dal display stand and ton gers is therefore perhaps apposite.

People mill about, eating food from the decorations and the distributions. Those that took the pig innards from the stand and the representatives (mothers or fathers) of the girls who received pa/is,

20

Those Lak to whom I talked about this noted and commented upon the relative positioning of both gifts and decorations without seeing them as linked (but see later discussion of pu/pu!) 255

file to the dal and her grandmother and give monetary payment for what they have received. Those that received gifts in return for ones they had given the dal previously, pay exactly the same amount, preferably in the identical units, that they had been paid themselves. The given explanation for the amount paid was that one gave as much as one could, so that one would receive a large payment when you returned it. My own data on the exchange gifts from only two dal is limited. In the Siar dal it seems suggestive that the pigs heads (the most prestigious portion) went to girls whose fathers were of the same, or closely related, clan section as the dal (e.g. dal's MBD). The exchanges in the other dal also seemed consistent with this. This might have many connotations, the most obvious being that the girls most honoured by the prestations are the daughters of those expected to help with the dal rite in the first place, and also those amongst whom are likely to number the sister\father of the dal's husband to be. Whichever is the dominant theme it seems clear that the exchanges (as well as other aspects of the rite) foreground the father-daughter relationship. The quantity of money given in return for the food does not apparently correspond either to the portion of food paid for, or any relation between the exchangers (although both are factors), but more to the financial situation and political standing of the donor.

The dal and the poetics of the life-cycle

The dal rite in song, theatre, myth, personal role and material culture reproduces an array of resonant images and associations. Men, women, spirits, bodily substances, food, pigs, snakes, and birds are only some of themes invoked, and their portrayal in the dal impacts on day to day attitudes, social interactions and conceptions of sexuality and reproduction amongst other realms. The concatenated imagery produced in the ritual interact and induce changes in each other, including as the centre of poetic action the dal herself. It is not that the girl's seclusion and the visitation of the spirits etc. materially effect bodily processes such as the onset of menstruation, nor given 256

abundant evidence to the contrary do the Lak believe it to be so. This is not a Lévi-Straussian (1963) use of symbols to articulate the body in order to manipulate its physical processes. Rather it is an ideological and associative cultural topography that is being created. The dal is an idealized cultural image: all young women have breasts and menstruate, but not all are dal, some are kurmakmak and some, having only completed the exchange part of the rite, only nominal dal. The dal is an icon of a sexually attractive, fecund, 'fat' young woman who has developed breasts and started menstruating. This production of 'womanhood' is shown to have multiple and distinct sources. It requires a separation of the male and female, creating single-sex realms which may then interact, propelling the girl from androgynity just as a Strathernian viewpoint might suggest. This also entails a separation of, and subsequent movements between, the worlds of the spirits and the living, so that the new revelatory attributes of the dal and all mature women may (as with other entities arising 'as if' from nowhere) be sourced in the obscurity of the ancestral realm. That this domain is enacted and controlled by men, and hence that men are the source of children and female fertility is, of course, one of the main ideological correlates of Siar gender relations. It is the poetic action and presentations which are used in the production of this particular bodily transformation that I now examine more closely.

The most direct statements we have of the cause of the menstruation are the references to phallic sea snakes. They cause bleeding by eating the dal and uninitiated girls are encouraged to pull them to them. Earlier we saw how other 'sea-snakes', paloloworm, were similarly attracted to pregnant women. But other entities are also attracted to the dal in an analogous manner. There are various birds who come to her, and, amongst other actions, 'shake the goh'. We also have a succession of spirits, pidiks and men coming to her: from the inchoate and thoroughly inhuman sounds and otherworldly visions of the night pidiks, to the still pidik and ancestral, but visibly human and male malerra, to, presumably and eventually, an all too human suitor or husband. All these, the snakes, the birds and the various

pidiks clearly belong to the same family of representations, most 257

easily classifiable as spiritual, ancestral and male. Two things are clear about the selection of these images. Firstly, the most phallic form is most directly connected with menstruation, clearly linking it with physical as well as spiritual penetration. Secondly, the least human and least bound to form presentations were during the night and during the dais seclusion; the half-human malerra were presented in daylight when the girl herself was no longer in enclosed obscurity, but was still in the role of dai; and fully human men are subsequently taken as lovers when she herself is fully restored to the world of women. This suggests a correlation between the state of the dai and the numinous state of her visitors. She is in a similar non-human transcendent realm, and is a similar 'spiritual' being while secluded within the goh. Having said that, there is obviously still a gendered and sexual opposition between the dal and her suitors which is expressed in the, wild pig:domestic pig: :male inseminator: female mother opposition referred to in the kumbak and 'ru pel peies'. Many things, in addition to her obscurity and exclusion from the human life of the village, signal that the dal is no longer a social 'human'. She loses her name, gains colouring and smells associated with spirits, and eye-designs and covering associated with tubuan. The eye-markings are particularly important, for they are the key motifs which designate a nantol rather than the dukduk foregrounding her qualities as a mother-to-be. The dal attracts from the bush a host of spirits and men to pay suit to her. It was notable that the bali/al which came to seduce her only took the forms of dukduk, children of nantol. This is not an isolated instance of a seductive child. In a different context I was told of the power of oldstyle love magic in which the men take a dry coconut, place it in a pandanus cradle (sometimes called ball!) and carry it as if it was a baby they were breastfeeding. The women lust after the child and as a consequence the men. The dal\nantoi also lusts after the men\ba/llai\dukduk, and indeed vice versa, for the nantoi has strong 258

love magic powers of its own.2' Beyond her identification as a 'spirit-mother', the dal ceremony has many links with birth rites. Most centrally, it is the other female pidik and is concerned with a related set of bodily transformations. It is instructive to compare them closely. Despite the fact that birth is dependent upon the grounds of fertility provided by the dal, they are in some ways opposed processes. The dal is concerned with producing a flow of blood from a previously 'inert' girl, the birth rites are concerned with the cessation of this flow and the controlled drying of the blood into the form of a child. It is striking that the dal is fed with cold, greasy foods and bathed in smelling oils, for these invert the rules surrounding pregnancy and babies when watery substances must be eaten and 'grease' and strong smelling foods avoided lest they cook the child. A similar contrast is apparent between the dal ceremony's concern with promoting sexual interaction, initially to create bleeding provoked by a phallus; and restrictions upon men having intercourse with their wives during and after pregnancy for the same rationale as the avoidance of greasy foods - so the child is not 'cooked'. Given these correlations, it is tempting to equate 'grease' with semen. Just as men's semen is the source of female blood, yet its return to them is damaging, like reheating old food or returning a gift; and just as semen is necessary to make blood and a child, but additional semen once a child is formed would cook it; so perhaps we can explain the necessity for greasy foods and smelling oils at the dal's inauguration of fertility and the reason for its proscription at its fruition in childbirth.

In the initial sketch of birth we saw how the 'watery' substances thought healthy for young children, were not to be identified with 21

It seems doubtful as to whether we can call this a strictly Oedipus\Jocasta passion, for the mother nantoi also hold a powerful allure for the women when the men perform them. 259

water at all, but rather organic and bodily juices or fluids - polonon. In myth pregnancy and birth are continued 'ex utero' and the child grows through eating his mothers decomposition juices - polonon before being dried in the mens house. Decomposition juices, of course, stink - goh, a word specific to the odour of rotting. Goh is also the name of the dal's pandanus enclosure. Menstruation is said to stink - goh - the dal and her residence are covered with perfumed herbs not merely to attract the spirits, but also to hide the smell of menstruation (konporroi tobonon - ' cover with perfume'). This rotting smell allows us to identify, and the Siar to experience, a resonance between menstruation and decomposition. This rotting of women is provoked by greasy, seminal fluids, and in fact is seen as a monthly expulsion of such fluids. When they 'take', when a child is conceived, the woman no longer rots but produces a child of white22, male, spiritual substance - a colour, gender and state associated with the permanence of shell-money and bones rather than ephemerality of pigs and blood.

The covering of the dal in red ochre and the women of the opposite moiety forcing her past the blocking barrier of women from her own moiety into her house\goh, only for her to be expelled from another house by her moiety-mates against the opposing barrier of her husband's female moiety members, has a strong resonance with the production, via penetration, of blood in her own body before its eventual expulsion. The doorway to the house is a threshold, and houses are associated in multiple ways with women and their bodies. The tussles over passage to and from an 'other' realm within the house, are poetic struggles over passage into and out of the dal's body. It is, of course, apt that it is the husband-to-be's moiety women who enact his role in thrusting her, the blood, inside the house\body, and that it is the dal's moiety women who enact the initial resistance of her body and then its eventual expulsion of the blood, dal. However, in another sense it seems strange that it is the dal's moiety,

22

The reader is reminded that before the melanin spreads new-born black children are indeed white. 260

which the future child will be a member of, that resists the bloods gestation and the opposing moiety, which has less stake in the childto-be, which promotes it.

This may be explained by triangulating the dal ceremony not just with birth, but also with death. While the women's pidiks appear to give them 'ownership' of the procreative side of the life-cycle and the men's over death, things are not so unambiguous. The nantoi is not an isolated assertion of fecundity and female gender symbolism within male pidiks. Nor are birth or dal achieved without male substance and spirits. While within the frame of secrecy and behind the barrier of the pandanus goh the dal is, as we have seen, in the realm of the dead spirits who come to pay her suit. She is, perhaps, dead herself. The space to which dal are secluded, and the space in which men are secluded during pidik rituals, that is the space within mothers and tubuan, are isomorphic. Passage to and from these containers and realms of spirits is a matter of mortality as well as nativity. A man dies upon entry into the tubuan, and is henceforth referred to as a spirit. The dal also dies, decomposes and becomes a dead spirit upon her seclusion in the goh. The dal is brought forth by women from the house as is a new born child - a child whose life-source is a ta/n gan spirit of a deceased and whose substance is male blood. The dead, moving in the other direction, are these days taken by men to be buried in the ground, from a house surrounded by women. Previously the corpse would have been taken to decompose, and then the skull, which is itself likened to a germinating coconut, would have been dried in a men's-house and then hidden in a rock crevice, only eventually to be taken by the dead to the taraiu. But the ground and its crevices are, like the house, containers and coverings linked with women and their fecundity. Thus another rationale for the husband's moiety, and therefore male-representative, role in provoking and controlling ingress to the obscured and contained male realm of the spirits - and for the da/'s representatives fighting this death. Women, and in this case the dal's moiety women as the female role within the rite, control egress and production of life from the male spirit realm, through and from within the obscuring containers of their bodies and 261

houses. The Lak cosmos is gendered, spatialized and embodied in a topology analogous to that described by Gillison (e.g. 1980) for the Gimi. The all-male spirit world in the forest, is symbolically within women, or at least mother-houses, into whom men convey the dead and place children, and from whence women actually deliver children. Lak practices seem to follow the conception and deconception cycle of birth and death suggested by Mosko (1983, 1989) to be common throughout Austronesia, or in Strathem's (1988) terms of composition and decomposition throughout Melanesia. However, in contrast with most documented cases, in Lak there is not only a classic Hertzian (1960) linkage of the two-stage transferal of the spirit of the deceased to the land of the spirits with the stages of decomposition of the body - but this is mirrored in bodily recomposition. As we will see, death rites are described as a process of drying. The first sequence is concerned with the rotting away of the flesh of the corpse, before the dry 'bones' can be taken to the spirit world of the tubuan in the secondary rites. This is also reflected in the two-stage transferal of the spirit back into the world of the living via the dal and the subsequent birth ritual, in which the woman's internal 'rotting' in menstruation is initially provoked, and then in the second stage her blood dried for the production of a child. The parallels are exhibited in, amongst other things, colour symbolism. The colour of the dal is emphatically red, and the production of btood is central to it. New born babies, however, are white. The colours of the two funerary sequences are also clear. Red is the colour of the primary funerary rite culminating in the tondong, exemplified by the dash of red ochre on their foreheads of

the pigs, on the tonger effigies and on the 'skull' of the deceased, as well as in the transforming decoration of the previously black mourners. White however is the colour of the secondary mortuary rite, in which all the pigs have white marks placed on their foreheads and the 'bones' of the celebrated dead are removed. That the spaces created by the dal and by male pidiks, particularly the tubuan, have many similarities is manifest - but there are important differences. Although the dal is an initiation, for it involves a seclusion, 262

a transformation and a subsequent change in social status, it has far fewer social ramifications than initiation into male pidiks. There is, for instance, little clan differentiation, little hierarchization, no ritual or incarnate possessions and no hazing of the girl. Some of the differences result from women's general position of subordination. There is little attempt at full secrecy from the men, for the ceremonies are in fact sponsored by men, and impossible without their blessing. Of fundamental importance though are the different occasions, and emphases of the affairs. The men's initiatory societies and rituals are about physical death and 'finishing' the newly dead from the world of the living, and men's own initiatory 'death' and subsequent access to that spirit world . It is from these dead that power, legitimacy and inheritances derive. The women's rites are about fertility and birth into the human world. The new born are not of any immediate political import or concern to men - hence, apart from providing an occasion to demonstrate ancestral power and inheritance in the incarnation of spiritual visitations, the secrets of their production are left to the women.

263

PART 3B reformations: subtractions

264

CHAPTER 7 death, debt and a memorial economy

265

'The chains incorporate various links which can equally well consist of objects, plants, animals, persons or elements of persons (living or dead). Specific actions planting, animal raising, fishing, weather-making, and so forth - bring about the passage from one link to the next in a chain which eventually leads to the most important transformations: eating, killing, love-making and birth. Although some seem to have beginning and a specified end, all are assumed to go on and on eternally as do time and society. Under these conditions, the exchanges which make up the chains are necessarily unbalanced, since it is the unequal and hierarchical nature of the exchanges which ensures the continuation of the chains. The principle underlying the chains and their construction is that any item appearing in one of them carries forward the item which precedes it, and has to be carried forward by another item. These successive pro/on gations ensure the continuation of the cycles of life-giving death.'(de Coppet 1981:201)

266

he role of ritual in incorporating death into a reproductive process has been recognized at least since Hertz (1960\1907). Hertz's ?I .C? work has been taken up in rather different ways by contemporary anthropologists in two influential texts. Huntington and Metcalf (1979) , )s)

develop the Hertz's 'grammar', regarding death as instituting a Van Gennepian rite de passage. They suggest that rites and beliefs associated with the corpse, its soul, and the mourners will be homologous with each other. Bloch and Parry (1982) are less concerned with the form and progress of mortuary rites themselves, than with how they legitimize the social order. They particularly address a conflict they identify between human contingent historical time associated with the biological individual, and reified, static persistence associated with hierarchical social orders. Although both these analyses have points of insight useful for Lak, where mortuary ceremonies certainly are transitional rites and where leaders do use those rites to establish their power and the integrity of their descent group, neither Huntington and Metcalf's imposition of universal grammars, nor Bloch and Parry's reification of 'society' and its opposition to the 'biological' are helpful perspectives to import to a Melanesian study (cf. Damon 1989). More sympathetic to the Siar materials is the approach proffered by de Coppet (1981) and colleagues (Barraud et al 1994). The quote heading this chapter spells much of this out. Mortuary rites have to be seen as one of an interlinked chain of transformations throughout the life-cycle. The result of one transformation, is necessarily implicated in the next transition. Thus any analysis of one rite outside the 'sociocosmic' morphology generated by this inevitably recursive process is partial. The transformative nature of life-cycle rites means that the exchanges associated with them, or by which they are enacted, are most unlikely to be equal or reciprocally balanced. The object of these rites is not to produce identity or stasis but differential and change, and the exchange goods used are likely to reflect this. Moreover, not only will the objects involved be qualitatively differentiated and hierarchized, but so will the persons. This leads Barraud et alto conclude 'Big men's greatness" in Melanesia ... [is] entirely at the 267

service of and in subjection to the superior ritual tasks which assure rebirth and perpetuation of these societies and reinvigorate their highest values.' (1994:102).

These are central themes to these two chapters. Firstly, the enchained nature of each segment, in which 'business', particularly sum is passed on. Secondly, the way in which the elevation of ritual leaders is inseparable from the mechanisms which remove sum from the community and the deceased from their active consideration. A further examination of the nature of the ritual chain's complete circuit will be delayed until the conclusion.

Death in life

Death, I would venture, is a more important concomitant of life in Siar than most places. Not just of life, but of lives as projects of the self. Every death creates centrifugal disturbances in the local area as the news travels outwards, often far beyond the family or the village of the deceased. There were seldom more than a few weeks between deaths impacting on Siar during my stay, and those which were local might involve villagers in an extended sequence of optional and secondary rites over a long time span. It is through involvement in these kastoms that a man gains political prominence and recognition. These factors combine so that the work of overcoming the punctuating 'interruptions' of death is, in fact, a large part of the stuff of everyday life.

The degree and location of impact of a death is directly related to the distribution of aspects of the deceased person in life. The demise of a famous and powerful kamgoi and yai-inpidik who has invested his self in many people and places, and in whom many others have invested aspects of their selves, may have repercussions from one end of the Lak area to the other. That of a child may only affect nearby hamlets. The deficit suffered by the living when an aspect of themselves dies with the dead is known as sum. Persons, places, objects and activities have sum when the deceased formed part of their relational identity. 268

Sum items should be avoided if possible. While it is present on oneself or one's village one may not work or indeed play normally, or make any loud noises for fear of sanction. A death gives people a sense of lassitude, discomfort and the desire to stay quietly at home, known as kes ubah - lit. sit\sta y uncomforta ble\heav y . This sentiment is also felt after friends of family have left one behind, perhaps after a visit, or after the end of a kastom when the performances have finished and the gathered people returned home. It amounts to a physical expression of the diminishing of the socially constituted self entailed by the departure of others.'

It is the responsibility of local representatives of the deceased's clan or moiety to release their villages from sum as soon as possible. This is the beginning of a centripetal movement which culminates at the tondong ceremony, where a single host brings all the local representatives and family members to himself, so that he may repay their debts and remove their sum. In a usage already discussed in Ch.3, he can be known as wan ep tondong, lit, old woman of tondong or tan ep tondong, man\mother of the tondong. He lobs ep minat, carries the corpse, and takes all the relatives' 'heavy' - Ialakrai upon himself. He may discharge this burden in the secondary rites.

Joe Bongian expressed the motivation behind the expense and work his holding a tondong entailed most eloquently. He was doing it so that his wife2 might singsing again. A more standard phrasing of the effect of tondong is to/on ngis, lit, to make good, beautiful and free of sum. This term is also used for the payment which the host may receive from the family members of the deceased in return for his sponsorship, in which case it is glossed as 'washing his hands'. The two motivations are, in fact, one. The moment of singsings and the

' Fajans (1997:120-2) describes a similar sensation evoked by death and other departures amongst the Baining of northern New Britain. It would not surprise me if the physical and affectual expression of relational diminishment was, although little documented, widely distributed in Melanesia. 2

The deceased was her father, hence of the same moiety as Joe.

269

groups performing are called mangis ngis lit. moiety \cl a n3 good, beautiful, free of sum. Their beauty is the desired transformation of its inverse, the dirtiness of sum. Where those with sum are heavy, those in successful, poetic and beautiful singsings are characterized as light, a!. Men who are the most ngis, wishing to have effectual decorations and dance performances, will make themselves light and like the spirits which they incarnate by fasting and the avoidance of water - a process also known as a!.

The dead and their death

When nearing death aged kin, especially if they are widowed, determine many peoples' residence:— mainly children and their spouses but also, if their own parents are deceased, maternal nephews and nieces. They come to accompany and care for them; if they become seriously ill the moral pressure for a broader span of kin to attend to them increases. On their actual death all family and many acquaintances are expected to come to be with the deceased for the last time. Sitting with the corpse is particularly the responsibility of women (see below). Although 'orthodox' medical aid may be sought many Lak both express a desire to die at home and doubt the ability of doctors4 and aid-post orderlies to deal with sicknesses 'of the village' (le. sorcery).

Death is not conceptualized as any particular bodily event, although the cessation of breath and the heart beat are of course consequent from it, but as the final departure of the spirit from the body. This permanent separation of spirit and flesh is often suspected to be the result of sorcery; either directly as a target or indirectly by virtue of relations with others who are either practitioners or targets. The spirit may venture from the body at other times, such as during dreams, and take part in magical activities such as the discovery of new pidiks

See Ch.3 for a more detailed investigation of the term mangis.

' The nearest qualified doctors are a long and difficult trip from Lak, either in Namatanai or Rabaul. 270

and sorcery. The last such journey before death is deemed particularly significant, and may give forth visions of one's sorcerous murderer. In the period directly after the death the spirit of the deceased stays close to its body and the places it used to frequent, in particular its house and gardens. During this period the spirit may be called from these places in divinations and questioned about it's demise. Indictment by either of these methods is a strong basis for an accusation and calls for compensation or retribution.

There is a short account about what happens to the deceased upon death that links the spirit, the body and social persona together:

'The spirit of a dead person goes to a cave on a point called Wasir on Lambom island. There it draws a charcoal line with a wooden ember for each of the 4 days people think of him\he r. On the last day s\he throws the ember into the cave. On the 5th day people no longer think of the deceased, the body stinks and its belly is broken.' [Recounted by Tony Pisral of Siar village]

This introduces some of the themes of the initial burial and mourning phase of the mortuary rites. They are four days long, a time period which is associated with the rupture of the body, and the onset of its decay. Both death and birth involve the seclusion of the person who has been most directly diminished (widow(er)) or supplemented (mother) in a house for that duration, before the integrity of their enclosure with the spiritual deceased\child is punctured. This correlation of the two rites is, in fact, explicit and I was told more than once in connection with them that 'the work of death is the same as the work of birth'. For central to both are two movements: the rupture of a body to release a spirit, either in the envelope of an infant or as a wandering spirit; and the subsequent propelling forth of the living, widow(er) or mother, from an enclosed association with the spirits and the dead. In the context of funerary practices this separation from the dead is achieved by 'forgetting' them, which is explicitly linked with the decomposition of the body, the decomposition of the re'ationships of the deceased, and the destruction of the evocative possessions of the deceased.

271

The body no longer undergoes the same period of exposure after death as in earlier times. However, earlier practices are well known about, and if the corpse no longer decomposes before their eyes it certainly still does so in their minds. Many informants told me how it would be placed on a platform in a ficus tree or on certain large rocks - places associated with place-spirits. Sometimes a kamgoi might be placed in his men's house. 5 The decomposition fluids (polonon) would flow (or even be drained off) into the ground; tree or rock. While on the platform the deceased would be brought food and water for four days, a sign of remembrance in the form of continued social linkage, before s\he was 'forgotten'. Then on the next day, pongor br (see below) the head would be broken off, have the flesh removed from it and be put in a basket and placed in the roof of the men's-house to be smoked. The other bones would be thrown onto the reef.

In Siar what is being 'decomposed' is in fact sum, and the process of removing it is often tellingly spoken of as cleaning (cf. the 'washing of hands' above). Sum is exemplified in the eponymous mourning condition of being covered by black paint - which the mourning rites must clean away. In attempting to explain to me the concept of sum my informants translated it as 'dirty'. Not, they explained, as in dirt from the ground or that one washes from a plate, but 'dirty from life'. This makes sense, in the context of its multiple links with rotting and various kinds of 'decomposition', as dirt in Douglas's (1966) sense of the interstitial condition of the unformed and the out of place. The various remains and loose ends of the intersubjective, interdependent, enmeshed life of the deceased and those around him\her are scrubbed away, yet 'leave a bright spot on the floorboards' (Battaglia 1990:Ch 9). The deceased is reformulated through the 'forgetting' mourning rites as an absent presence - a spirit and an image. 6 The creation of this absence through the disarticulation of the personal worlds of the living and the dead in mortuary rites, only frames the

This may have been restricted to villages further north. 6 Ultimately the dead are incorporated into pidik decorations. The absent presence

is a important aspect of the aesthetic and poetic impact of such pidiks. 272

ongoing formation and entanglement of the mutuality of the living necessary to the performance of those self-same rites. Death frames life and vice versa.

Por minat: 'covering the corpse'

The first sign of a death is usually piercing female wailing, domus. On hearing this, and the moaning laments contained within it, all the women of the village come to the house of the corpse. As they arrive in dribs and drabs at the house they go inside to view the corpse and then they too cover their heads with their arms and wail for a period of perhaps five minutes. Stopping abruptly, they take their place amongst the women gathered inside, around, and, if it is raised, underneath the house. As the news spreads women from surrounding villages and hamlets also make their way, with children and babies in tow, to the house. Women think back to shared aspects of the deceased's life when wailing, and what is intelligible of the laments may be references to it. The arrival of each new group sets off further cries from the chief female mourners (typically eldest daughters).

Plate 30: Upon hearing news of the death, women mourners gather under the house of the recently deceased.

273

Even years later, should some acquaintance of the deceased arrive in the village for the first time since the death they will weep over them. For each acquaintance presents another aspect of the deceased, and indeed have had, in the deceased, an aspect of them die.

The women sleep with the corpse overnight, to 'say goodbye' and be with the person for the last time. Until the body is buried the women are not to carry anything on their heads (ie. susun), nor are any loud noises or work supposed to take place. The village must kes ubah 'sit heavy\quiet'. In the morning men and women from the surrounding villages continue to arrive and preparations for the burial are made.

Under the instruction of senior clansmen of the deceased, pig(s) are placed in an earth oven ready for the distribution of food after the burial. The number of pigs is an indication of the investment and therefore status that the hosting clan wish the funeral to have. They must be enough to feed all that attend, the number of whom is another indication of the ramifications of the event. At least one of the pigs usually belongs to the deceased and has often been preselected for this very purpose. Others may come from close kin and debts. E.g. At the large funeral of Maria organized by K-Kabiawai at Kapokpok, a pig each came from her eldest two sons, a pig came 'from' her daughter's six year old son, and a pig came as 'return help', from the man who succeeded her dead husband to leadership of his clan.

The body is dressed in its finest decorations, possibly sprayed with perfume and wrapped in calico sarongs. Men cut down a canoe to provide a coffin and, once the deceased is within, cover it in turn with sarongs and decorate it with flowers and perhaps a cross. They dig a grave alongside other clan members in the cemetery at the edge of the village. Then, once all is ready, the coffin is taken away from the women by young men to the church, if there is one, or just to the 274

area in front of the house. Depending on the ability of those officiating, a short Christian service or a few words of prayer will be said by the assembled community. The coffin is then taken quickly by young men on the short walk to the graveyard. The youths are often keen to replace one another and every few yards the bearers change in a rapid manner. This milling and disordered way of acting is appropriate to spirits. On the occasion of the death of an important yai-inpidik (tubuan-leader) the coffin may be painted with the designs of his tubuan and his nantof (M) masks may actually appear after the service and carry the coffin to the grave. There he will be buried and two nantoi stand at his head and feet, whisking away the flies with tangets for four days until the end of the initial segment of the funerary rites at pongor br.

At a normal burial, everyone else follows the youths and the coffin at a more sedate pace to gather around the grave. A few more words of prayer are said at the grave side and then flowers and decorative leaves are thrown on top of the coffin before the young men cover it with earth. If it is a woman who is buried it is very likely that a small stick will be thrown in with her for each of her surviving children: an attempt to deceive the spirit into believing that they have accompanied her. As the grave is being covered the women break into wailing once more. Once finished a tanget is planted at the head and the feet of the grave, a small suggestion of the tangets of the nantoi that would be there for a yai-inpidik, and everyone walks back to the village to witness the exchanges.

275

___________

Plate 31:

.4..

A decorated coffin ready for burial. Note the holy

water.

-

Plate 32:

T.

:-

The young men lead the funeral cortege, acting

lIke spirits.

Plate 33:

The coffin buried under flowers.

276

Sulal minat 'accompanying the corpse'

Unlike most other exchanges and public rituals, the transactions accompanying burial take place close to the house in which the death took place, rather than at the men's-house. The sexes sit apart, and the exchanges and speechifying are directed at the men, though many women keep an informed eye on events from a distance. For this is a moment of some political importance when it will become clear who will take responsibility for the funerary rites of the deceased. This, and some matters of subsidiary support, may have been discussed privately in the hours leading up to the funeral but the requisite exchanges enact and reveal these commitments - and there is always room for surprise and political manoeuvring within them. The orphans of the deceased play an important role in the

I Plate 34:

Two orphans prepare to pay sulai minat for their

father. 277

The orphans of the deceased play an important role in the proceedings. The eldest male child stands and gives a yaikip, a pole cut at an angle with its 'head' painted red which denotes the sulai minat pig, to the leader of the deceased's clan segment. Sulai means

to accompany or bring, and minat is corpse. This pig goes along with control and disposal of the body of the deceased. The recipient may accept the sulai minat or he may pass it on to another member of his or a closely allied clan. It may be passed on in two ways: i) Onwards, in which responsibility is shifted, perhaps because of a lack of resources or inconvenience, as in the case of a death I witnessed at Pukonmal, where those most suited by virtue of kin link were residing far away. ii) In a loop returning to the original recipient, in which accepting and passing on the yaikip indicates solidarity and support for the lead recipient in fulfilling their obligations. Following the acceptance of the yaikip the eldest male orphan may give shell-money in addition to the pig as suIai minat to the now established funerary host. In addition, sometimes after a harangue from the host, shellmoney to pay for the 'work of the deceased' during their life may be given by the orphan. This money, unlike the su/ai minat will not be returned. Further payment of a pig (via the medium of yaikip) may be given to the host by the person in whose house the death took place, if they are cross-moiety to the deceased. This is to bring\reveal the body outside of the house. The host then begins to make his distributions. One by one he calls out the names of various men from his moiety. For each he pulls out 10 fathoms of shell-money and perhaps some cash from his basket and lays them at their feet. These are matal, also known as tears (pakan lirl). Their recipients are obliged to reciprocate with a pig to be

used in later stages of the rites. These may be returns for mataf that the host has received previously, in which case they must be of the exact same kind and size as must the pig which they elicit, or they may provide the ground for future reciprocal matal to be faced by the host. 7 matal were given at Maria's funeral. The pig and root crops that have been cooking during the burial are 278

distributed separately to the men and women of each village in large open coconut leaf baskets. This is in marked contrast to the communal fashion in which all men normally eat together at the men's-house. At the same large funeral mentioned above 26 baskets were disbursed. This and all subsequent meals in the deceased's funerary series are said to be eaten 'on top' of him\he r. In fact they are treated as if the deceased had susun, carried the food on his\her head, the archetype of the provision of nurturing. As such this food, as it would be in life, is prohibited to those in artanat avoidance relationships with the deceased.7

A shell-money distribution should also be held, but is sometimes foregone for reasons of finance or reluctance to form a political presence. It entails the breaking up of rolls of shell-money into small sections which are then distributed one by one to all present. The shell-money will include that of the deceased, but may be supplemented by the host and his clan helpers and also by the calling in of outstanding debts as well as new prestations. In our example funeral Tangrai, the host, laid out 2 10-fathom lengths of shell-money saying, in a rather mock humble tone, that that was all he had, and that he couldn't remember if perhaps there was some more available amongst the assembled men. He later admitted to me how proud he had been when 9 of his exchange partners and political supporters laid out 10 further 10-fathom lengths of shell-money, so that he was able to give a very big distribution of 6 x 10 fathoms to the men and 6 x 10 fathoms to the women.

As after most such revelatory events and exchanges the host, and perhaps those others that passed on the sulai minat pig and\or other attending kamgoi, then give some rather rhetorical explanations and comments: why they have done what they have done, what they intend for the forthcoming rites, and most of all, whether they and others have done what should be done. This last is phrased both in

This is particularly marked when men place things on their head, but less so for food items that may have been carried 'anonymously' on a woman's head. See Ch.3 on for further details of artanat relationships. 279

aesthetics of the performance of 'custom'. The work of the women Towards or after the end of the eating and exchanges focused on the men, a few women sasal, (lit. 'break'), the household possessions of the deceased, and the last things that the s\he saw ('dead seen'). This is the first occasion for sasal; later garden crops will be broken also. Here it is the responsibility of the daughters and ianmuk, (son's wives), of the deceased. Often a daughter begins to wail, barging in and around the house, sweeping cups and plates to the floor, kicking and throwing pots and pans, breaking and emptying storage containers such as nets of canarium almonds. These and other material possessions of the deceased (not land or clan possessions) are pukin, objects which no longer have an owner, and members of the opposite moiety, with the exception of those in avoidance relationships to the deceased, may take them as they wish. w*•

i.

I

S -

. .' , -

,-

.--..-

• - .,-.

Plate 34: The daughter of the deceased breaks house-hold belongings and weeps against the truck. 280

The exegesis given for sasai and pukin are of two kinds: that they are smashed and thrown away because they reminded one of the deceased; or because 'something of you cannot go back to you'. I read these as recounting the same phenomena of relational personhood in the contiguous idioms of remembrance and exchange ideology. On the one hand the keeping of objects associated with the dead provokes an experience of loss of other\se l f, a negative transformation, so they are destroyed or scattered. On the other, the transfer of ownership to one who is 'of' the deceased, and whose identity reciprocally partakes of theirs, is equivalent to the return of items that have already been used in linking the self to another. That is, it is the same problem as is produced by returning items once given in exchange; it is an inversion of the positively valued production of social relations that their original transmission entailed. This is the case whether the transaction is of the nurturance of food or of the substance of blood. 8 What is at stake is the viability of the relationally composed entity. While the transmission of an equivalent in return is a supplement to the relationship and therefore self, return of the same object is a rejection or attenuation which is expressed in physical weakening. Thus the possession of pukin by moiety-mates of the deceased would be deleterious in two ways: they would remind one of the loss of the deceased, and they would enact the diminishment of self. On the afternoon of the burial the widow(er) and the chosen orphan are taken by some of the older women to the reef where they wash them. On their return into the house they have their hair and skin rubbed with a black paint which the women manufacture from burnt coconut husks and coconut milk, and which is a realization of the condition of sum. The widow(er) may have markers of mourning abstinences, placed upon him\her: I saw a bracelet constructed from vine and beads of shell-money marking the avoidance of eating pig

The reader is reminded of Lak men's fear of adulteration of their food by menstrual blood outlined previously. 281

coconut being worn. Sometimes a widow(er) has a necklace from plaited black cloth placed around his\her neck. This marks the earlier practice of widow(er)s wearing a ma!, a small barkcloth bag necklace with some physical remnant of the deceased, such as hair, within it. This might also be known as pukiun rn/nat, the skull (or head) of the corpse. The deceased's spirit is said to inhabit this ma!, and to reveal if the wearer has broken any of their mourning commitments by breaking it. The ma! must be taken off when the widow(er) sleeps and placed under a pandanus cape - for when unconscious and\or dreaming one is at one's most vulnerable to spirits and wearing the necklace would be bound to make one ill.

Plate 35: A widow cries over the banana and water she has just been paid to eat. 282

The spouse and child's deprivations are by no means limited to those signified by their decorations. They must be confined within the house, emerging only when strictly necessary, and then as with the dal and other seclusions, under the obscurity of the pandanus cape. Initially they have no light or fire, no food or water, no cigarettes or betelnut, nor may they wash or wear 'clothes' (ie men blouses or tee-shirts). They are as the dead, and they must be 'forced' and paid to take on all the attributes of the living once more. On the afternoon of the funeral the senior women caring for them pay them with shell-money to eat from a leaf a little banana that has been cooked in a fire. This provokes further wailing and keening. They may also be paid to smoke and chew betel, so as to ease their confinement. Their release will be on the fourth day, after three intervening days of men's anngan feasts and the gradual reduction of their restrictions, at the pongor br feast which marks the end of the initial period of mortuary

rites. Anngan

Anngan is used as an imperative - 'eat!', literally meaning 'your

food'. 9 A further three mortuary feasts of this name are held at the men's-house of the village of the deceased which is associated with the person who accepted the sulai minat pig\corpse. In villages where the deceased had clan members or close associates and which therefore have sum, but which are at some distance from the central site of the funeral, single anngan feasts are held to 'clear' them. In effect these scattered singular anngan's telescope the action of the more extended sequence at the central village. The schema that is repeated threefold for the home village is as follows: A pig or more is provided by a moiety or, preferably, clan mate of the deceased, and cooked by the men in an earth-oven near

An example of its use in less loaded ritual context might be, baran anngan, 'something to eat'. 283

to the men's-house. Some root vegetables (sweet potato, yam etc) are donated by each household and cooked by the women in their family earth-ovens in their houses. The women bring the cooked vegetable to the men preparing the food. Depending on the number of men attending, they then make a number of leaf beds for the food inside and outside the men's-house. In the centre of these they cut and dice the pig into small pieces, which are encircled by the root crops. When the food is ready there is a certain amount of rounding up of the men and playfully cajoling them to eat. More important men are urged by their friends and competitors to take a seat inside, but often as not they may make pretensions of resistance or avoidance of the food. Once within the men's-house further delaying tactics may be contrived at the same time as there is an egalitarian procurement and giving of food to one's neighbours. Despite this ethos of commonality, hierarchy is by no means absent. Important kamgoi when hosting (or even when not) will inevitably enter the men's-house last by some degree, and eat at very slow rate. No-one may leave their place at the meal until he has finished. A kamgoi judges his feast a success if people are chewing the cud and pretending to eat while there is still plenty of food left. Although many anngan are small and only the men eat, if a single anngan for an outlying village is of any size the women will also be

fed. A line of leaves are laid out in front of the men's-house onto which are placed a row of portions of pig with a corm or two. These portions are taken individually to each woman of the village at their house. At the central village the women only receive a distribution of food at the last feast, pongor br, which is described below. Once the anngan are finished the outlying villages are free from sum and may function as before. Noise, building and gardening may all resume. The participants are said to think of the deceased no more once the meal(s) is\are consumed. That is why the men are, at least notionally, reluctant to take part and must be coerced into eating and forgetting. In feeding the village the host has in effect consolidated all the debts and remembrances of its population. He in turn will be 284

compensated for and made to forget his expenditure, by whoever has accepted the su/ai minat, at the tondong exchanges which conclude the ritual sequence that deals with sum. It is not merely an equation of the 'memory' of the deceased with debt that is the relevant theme here (although it is one we will be returning to), but the power implicated in the transfer of such debts. Men are often entreated to remember who feeds them not just by their mothers and their kin, but by the kamgoi who regularly feed them on occasions such as these. They become indebted to them, and this debt is a source of their power. So the foregoing of the memory\debt of the deceased has another aspect to it that the men may wish to resist, namely the transfer of a memorial capital by which authority is accumulated. It is not entirely correct to reduce the motivation for holding anngan to politics, although it is an intrinsic aspect of it, and hosting them is the first step for a man entering into 'public life'. Anngan qualify him to bring his own singsing group to the tondong, erect his own tonger and exchange a supplementary pig for a larger return. To do these things not only gains one 'name' and profit, but can also have an emotive aspect to it. While in the distant villages only one anngan wifi be held by a single host, in the central village the three days feasting may well have many contributors. These will include many men from within the (sub)clan and family of the deceased in addition to those of closely allied or identified clan units. For these the motivation is less to release the village from sum than to show solidarity with the deceased and their funeral holders. This is despite the fact that economically every anngan pig eaten represents a further loss for the funeral hosts later. Not only do they have to be reciprocated with a live pig, but the additional live pig which the anngan donor may present at tondong must also be replaced by a larger one. The reason that promoting this economic loss is actually a unifying gesture is because the performances of the anngan holders (not just the feasts themselves, but also the productions such as the singsings and ton gers that follow on from them), enact the 'forgetting' of the relationship with the deceased and its replacement with a relationship with the funeral hosts. The debt\sum incurred by the death is repaid 285

and then reversed. The loss of sum is turned into a gain: the eaten pig is replaced by a live one, the live pig with a larger one, the curtailed relationship with a new one. It 'should' only be the moiety of the deceased that are involved in hosting anngan. However, members of the opposite moiety may sometimes host anngan in an unsanctioned manner, particularly if they are a kamgoi of sufficient status that none may gainsay them. This is known as 'jumping over a garden divider'. The motivation for this is enactment of a close relationship with the deceased or successor. Thus, the only case I saw of an 'incorrect' moiety member hosting an anngan, erecting a tonger and partaking in the subsequent exchanges was of a kamgoi and yai-inpidik at a tondong hosted by his son. No-one was surprised at his acting in such a manner. Indeed even prestigious secondary mortuary rites are sometimes attributed to important men of the inappropriate moiety. Albert (1988) cites this as an index of great power - the power to bend the rules. Such may well be the case, but close questioning of the men involved as well as others present indicates that there were actually nominal hosts who were of the correct moiety. They are generally close relatives (such as son) of the kamgoi involved who, more or less blatantly, actually supports and organizes the affair. But rather than effectively implicating themselves as the focal cause of events, these lesser men are merely seen as aspects of and as caused by 'bigger' men. A more legitimate involvement of affines and others of the opposite moiety to the deceased is in the donation of naoul. These are gifts of pigs that are given to be used in anngan by those of the appropriate moiety. There is in fact a significant moral pressure on close male affines to give naoul on 'behalf' of their female family members, such as wives or daughters. Giving of such pigs is said to show respect for the opposite moiety, and exemplifies the support a good affine is supposed to give. It is quite a slander to impute that someone did not remember his affines in this way when they were mourning their dead.

286

Pongor br: breaking off the head.

Each day the men of the village are eating their anngan a small basket of cooked pig and taro (or other root crops) and a length of shellmoney is sent to the chief mourners secluded within the deceased's house. These gradually begin to release the widow(er) and the orphans from their negative existence. There is a spatial dynamic to the movement into positive sociality once more. Initially it is the functions of the body that are freed, they are allowed to eat and drink etc. Then the house is 'cleared' and a fire is now allowed inside. Then they may look outside the house, sit on its threshold and communicate with the outside world again. After the pongor for feast they are free to engage in almost the full range of activities once more. The pigs for the feast are first brought alive to the hosting men'shouse the evening before the pongor br. Still tied, they are arranged in a circle before being encircled by a trail of ashes or powdered lime. This is to 'keep the spirits out'. These pigs must be present while men from nearby villages and hamlets gather to daut: sitting around a fire in front of (or inside if the weather is inclement) the men's-house singing and beating hour-glass and slit drums until the dawn. These songs are at least partly directed at the pigs whom they are said to 'fence off'. The other 'audience' implicated by this performance are the spirits and the deceased himself. Half humourously a friend referred to the daut as the men's kumbak, and it is in the sense that both the women's kumbak at the dab and the men's daut at the pongor for are nights spent singing to attract spirits. However daut are even less well known and understood than kumbak. It is mainly old men who sing, few but the most knowledgeable can sing many of these songs with much facility and it is a common complaint that the success of daut performances relies on a small group of people. Some villages no longer practice them.

The singing ceases with the dawn, and preparations for the feast 287

progress. The next step in proceedings is known as a teleh, which is the term for the work of bringing food from the garden to the village. The widow(er) and the opposite sex orphan are released from their enclosure for the first time and taken by close family in a slow, sorrowful walk to the garden of the deceased. On their arrival they wail once more. Gardens are closely identified with the nuclear family unit - it is here that a couple together with their children produce the foodstuffs with which they nurture each other. When food is the prime currency of sociality, then viewing the still growing garden of a dead person is akin to meditating on their past and possible future relationships. It is an index of social embeddedness, a reaction to gifts and plans for giving, an icon of thoughts (memories) of others and others' thoughts of the deceased. It is a poignant and sombre time as the widow(er) and child and their helpers gather taro (or equivalent root crops), banana leaves, and firewood. A load for the spouse and child is all that is taken, all other trees and crops happened across are (or should be) subject to sasai, they are slashed with machetes or uprooted. The woman places the taro on top of the banana leaves on her head, the man attaches the taro and wood to the end(s) of a stick and carries it over his shoulder. 1° These are the first times that they have undertaken the gender specific and archetype modes of carrying and providing food - susun for the woman and Jo/os pokos for the man - and is an important moment in their reentering of socially productive life. Such work was under memorial mourning restrictions. They used to carry food back and give it to the deceased, now it is the responsibility of the tan ep tondong, host, to pay them the undertake that action once more, but this time to return the food to him and his feast. On their return, the mourners deposit their loads and are taken by senior women to be washed once more, demarcating the end of their seclusion in the same manner as the beginning, except that this time fresh, not salt, water is used. I gained no exegesis as to the significance of washing in sea water on the reef at the beginning of

10

The carrying stick may well serve as a token for the firewood. 288

is thrown into the sea, and the reef is the source for the lime that is the most prevalent medium of spiritual power used by ritual adepts. The river, contrastingly, is potable and associated with washing, women, children and, by extension, life. The distributions The prime purpose of the pongor br is the hosting of a food distribution to the women. The food carried by spouse and child to the village is used in the forthcoming feast at which they play a central, if subdued, rote. The widow and\or female orphan cook root crops wrapped in the banana leaves in her earth-oven. She is joined in this activity by all the other women of the village. The women who attended the burial from other villages also come, each carrying on their heads a basket of cooked root crops. Part of the purpose of the occasion is to pay all the women for crying over the corpse. The pis which were sung to during the night are taken and cooked by the men in their earth-oven much as for any other kastom. The widower and\or male orphan will contribute his firewood toward this earthoven and be expected to take part in its preparation. Once the food Is ready the men display the cooked pigs on a leaf bed

-

T.

-!;

/ -, /

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Plate 36: The orphans weep as they lead the women in their contributions of rootcrops for the pongor For. 289

Once the food is ready the men display the cooked pigs on a leaf bed in front of the men's-house. In the funerary sequence of Maria 7 pigs were laid out. All the women led by the widow and\or her children walk slowly in single file to the pigs with their baskets of root crops on their heads. As they tip their contents out the women cover their heads and wail once more. Men chop the pigs into pieces and organize the piles of food. A single portion of pig is placed with one or two root crops on breadfruit leaves for each of the attending women. These cuts vary from the head of a large pig to the smallest slabs of meat and fat of about 2Oxl5xlOcm. At the pongor br in question 126 of these were laid on a very long carpet of coconut leaves that traversed three sides of the plaza in front of the men's-house. They were arranged in rough order of standing and genealogical closeness of the women and were given to them to pay for their wailing at the funeral. At the end of these were placed 16 baskets of food given for each pig that men had contributed in anngan. Slightly to one side were laid various foods - pig, root-crops, betelnut, rice - corresponding to peoples' memorial mourning restrictions. The widow(er) and orphans have not been alone in the forbearance from foods and activities that connected the deceased to them. Various foods that the dead person would give, are common choices to taboo. The avoidance of a place (generally the home) associated with the deceased is also common. Those who wish to be relieved of their abstinence at this stage let it be known and the host has them paid to accept the memorialized object. The main emphasis at the pongor br is on giving to the women, some of whom hide and have to be discovered and made to accept the food. This is done by young men, who at Maria's funeral broke down the door of a hiding place and violently pushed the pig meat into the faces of the wailing woman, leaving a payment of 30 toea with the root crops. In all 24 of these portions were given, almost all to women, at the pongor br. Others held on to their restrictions for longer. Not all of them are public, nor will all necessarily be lifted - an instance being a magical specialist, who would still no longer perform taro magic many years 290

after his wife's death, because it was an activity which had formerly bound the two together.

During and after the distribution the men sit to eat their food together in the men's-house, just as in any of the anngan. When they have finished they assemble outside once more where, after a distribution of betel to all men present, the leading men will speak and give their views as to the status of the days work and what should happen next. After this all are free to return home once more, carrying their bundles of food through the dusk or darkness of the end of the day.

Sar Iakman and a torn yah: broom the village and smell the fire

Two more tasks truly finish this section of the rites. Firstly, as with all of the major stages of mortuary sequence, the day after the feast is set aside for sar Iakman, 'brooming the village'. Since the death, and through all the days of hosting many visitors and distributions, the village, as part of its sum restrictions, will not have been swept. The public areas look a mess, but more pertinent than the aesthetics is that the betel shards, the splashes of red staining spit, the debris from the meals and displays and the many tracks which cover the ground are traces of the people and events that have come and gone. Seeing such litter around is recognised as a sign of a place in mourning. The women's act of cleaning and erasing all the signs of what has passed is the material enactment of a process of forgetting the deceased by removing all reminders to those that gathered because of the deceased. A torn yah, 'smell the fire', is worked sometime subsequently to sar Iakman. It is a further stage in the refiguring of activities previously associated with the dead person by redirecting them towards the organiser of the mortuary rites. The widow(er) and orphan are given a knife and go to clear the garden (or more likely a token section of garden) of the custom's host and plant some of the taro corm-tops saved from the pongor br feast. They may now work again in their 291

own gardens. It is the lighting of the fire in the garden which is the particular indication of the return to normality, the smell (and sight) of the smoke being a signal to neighbours that the transforming activity of human life has restarted. It is notable that it is again the act of clearing debris, this time the refuse of the garden with fires rather that of the village with brooms, that is the physical expression of the removal of sum's covering 'dirt from life'.

V V V

TONDONG

Banana packets and ashes

A variable length of time without much further ritual activity then follows. The next visible sign that things are still in motion will be the appearance of large bunches of bananas hanging from the beams inside the hosting men's-house. These hang there until they are overripe and deliquescing. If the planned schedule is too short for the bananas to reach the required state, then they may be force ripened within a large bark container on the floor of the men's-house, a practice which, it was speculated, comes from the Susurunga lang uage\culture group further north. According to S. Jackson (1995, 1996) their final mortuary feast involves just such an encasement of bananas in bark, which is likened to the body of the deceased and buried within the men's-house before being unearthed and eaten. In Lak the link with bodies, and their decomposition, is also overtly made. Jackson claims that in Susurunga these bananas present one of many cases where a single clan member (the deceased) is confounded with the clan as a collective entity, revealing his\her personhood to be a fractal (Wagner 1991) or self-similar (S. Jackson 1996) to the larger scale. Although I would not wish to press that point from my Siar data, the bananas are certainly redolent of the clan (kamtiken oon, clan, also meaning the base of the banana), most especially when dispersed around the men's-house, an overt index of the co-operative group. Bananas are the transferrable and edible part 292

of the tree and hence normally identified with the women of the clan. However, their 'rotting' within the men's-house, the container of the spiritual materials of the matrilineal group, is also close to the constitution of the dal. She is caused to rot inside to enable the transition of the white child from the spiritual to the human realms. The rotting of the bananas in the men's-house is an early stage in the process of transition of the dead from the human to the spirit realm.

The cutting down of the bananas once (over) ripe is the recognised sign for the beginning of the next major sequence of events. They are given to the women who cook them in leaf-packets with coconut milk and sweet potato. The meal of bananas is brought to the assembled men of the village, and eaten by them. The eating of these banana\coconut milk packets is said to mark the removal of the soft brain from the skull of the deceased. Once everyone has finished eating a large container of lime-powder (also known as luah - ashes) is placed in the centre of the gathering, and conversation ceases. The ntual host will begin by taking a handful of lime and dropping it onto the hair of the orphan and then presenting him with a length of shell-money (probably 10 fathoms) and\or some money (generally K10-20). This is known as arkus, glossed as to clean, or clear someone from sum. Kus is the word for bleaching one's hair with lime. After the host has cleansed the orphans, direct family and prominent persons, others of at least the same moiety (generally same clan) may continue the process with others present. It is actually an advantageous investment because the recipient must reciprocate for the shell-money\money with a pig of 'equivalent' value at some later date. Razor blades are often given to the men with the lime and payment as a sign that they may begin to shave once more.

293

The construction of the first lalamar

During the same day a thin tall branching tree stand is erected in front of the men's-house without any ceremony. Immediately after the conclusion of the arkus men of both moieties (but primarily the deceased's moiety and affines) will open their baskets to reveal more shell-money hidden inside and hang them on the stand to create a lalamar effigy of the deceased. Along with the shell-money will go personal reminders of the deceased; typically a basket, a photograph, and poignantly in Maria's case, a son's sock used to wipe his mother's cancerous breast. This construction is said to be the body of the deceased. When physical manipulation of the corpse was still practised the skull (now emptied of brain) would be placed at the 'head' of the shell-money body. On viewing it the women of the village wail at the 'sight' of the deceased once more.

The bodily nature of the lalamar effigy and the close relationship between shell-money and spirits are illustrated by a curing ritual for young children also called (Ia)Iamar. Illnesses of small children are often attributed to the spirits of the dead. In order to provide a substitute body to house the spirit a parent may hang shell-money beside the infant overnight. In the morning they address the spirit now inhabiting the shell-money rather than the child, telling it that it is recognised and that it is to desist, and remove the shell-money. Shell-money's suitability to house spirits is bound up with its normal concealment and occasional powerful revelation. It is strongly gendered male, with resonances with body substances such as bone and semen (see Ch.5 & 6). In exchange it is often used as an intermediary between the men and spirits, such as in dok payments for pidiks, or it is exchanged for food items which contrast on symbolic axes of gender (male\female), moisture (dry\wet), and longevity (permanent\ephemeral). In these and other ways shellmoney is an eminently suitable 'body' for spirits.

The components which make up the lalamar, the shell-money and personal possessions, are known as nambu, a word related to that of 294

memory functions (namnai = remember, namuni = forget), which can be roughly translated as reminders or left-overs of an absent deceased. Lalamar is the first appearance of nambu in the mortuary rites. Their primary role Is in the secondary rites after tondong where everything relating to the deceased, particularly the lalamar which is made once more, is nambu. Indeed there were a few dissenters who . F

Plate 37:

--

A lalamar at Morkon. Note the photograph of the deceased at its centres.

295

felt that the lalamar (and therefore nambu) should not arise at all until the secondary rites - although the majority, including very knowledgeable elders, disagreed. This is perhaps because of the role of manipulating nambu in the process of removing the deceased from consciousness, ie. in forgetting. As intimated in Ch.4 where poetic imagination was linked with revelation from obscurity, particularly from the covered and inchoate spirit realm, the correlation between mental space and physical and social space is particularly explicit in Lak. The word for forgetting is namuni, nam- a memorial related prefix, and -uni to hide. Nambu of all kinds are taken away to obscurity by spirits in the secondary mortuary rites. The head (skull) would be displayed on the second lalamar, only to be hidden by the spirits in an underground clan ossuary. The skull in the first lalamar when removed would also be hidden in obscurity, but less so, this time within a basket in the roof of the men's-house. As less hidden, it is equally less forgotten, awaiting the final banishment to a deeper and less visited zone of the unconscious that the secondary rites enact.

Singing daut and erecting the tonger

On the same afternoon further preparations take place in a secluded part of the nearby bush. There the ritual host and the men who have hosted anngan feasts previously, each prepare their ton ger posts (although not necessarily in person). They select and cut a suitable straight length (c.6-8ft) and diameter (c.6") section of wood (unspecified), the top of which is cut at a sharp angle and the bark removed to c.lft down. This 'head' is painted red in a similar way to the yaikip, pig marker sticks, mentioned earlier. Just below this section, the 'necks' of the tonger are encircled with tanget leaves, highlighting their anthropomorphic nature with the customary decoration of a clan-leader. In a characteristic touch, care is taken to chew the ends of these tanget leaves so that they droop down around the post, covering their fastenings so, as a pidik, 'the women think they stay up on their own'. Even this trivial pidik must have its constructed nature disguised. Alongside the tongers, another structure 296

I -,

- - -

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/ /

Plate 38: Before. Soon after erection you can see the rangrang flanking the tonger and the net-bag and sock of the deceased on the fairly empty lalamar. Tangrai, the host, and two supporters stand In front. 0

4-,

4' ' -r:

Plate 39: After. By the afternoon many moiety members have added to the bulk of the lalamar. Tangral has been Joined by Toanarol, the paramount kastom leader and both have donned the tangets of 'big-men', highlighting the anthropomorphic tangets of the tongers. 297

called a rangrang (literally 'dry dry') is prepared. Two thin saplings are taken, all their leaves removed, and tanget leaves, which have been concertinaed into a decorative ridged pattern, attached in their stead. All these are then hidden, along with other supplies necessary for their erection.

A further set of pigs, provided by the hosts, are prepared as for the night before pongor br and come dusk, the men of the village gather in front of the hosting men's-house and lalamar to sing daut to the pigs and the spirits once more. Just before dawn, while (supposedly) the women are still asleep, they retrieve the material stored in the adjoining bush and construct the ton gers and rangrang in front of the men's-house.

The tonger are planted in a line, red 'head' up. In addition to the tangets already attached, two strips of bamboo are tied to either side with pandanus leaf. These are used to support two sets of four dry coconuts which are tied around the tonger about one-third of the way from the top and bottom. One tonger usually has an extra set of four dry coconuts attached: this marks it out as belonging to the host. Behind them, across the front of the men's-house is placed the ran grang, consisting of the two saplings, connected by a thin crossbar with small circles of red ochre on it called a yaiben, also the name for a bamboo pole built onto the outside of a fence to stop pigs jumping into a garden. As soon as these are all up, the slit-drum is started up and rattles out a short rhythm, then pauses while a man emits a long hoot, similar to that used to announce the bringing of a pig to the village, in front of each ton ger.

Distributing, disassembling and dancing

In the morning after the daut the pigs are taken to the earth-oven in preparation for the distributions that are to take place in the afternoon. Before the food is ready, and before the majority of visitors assemble for the distributions, a low-key exchange of betelnut takes place between the host and the anngan holders. These presage 298

the pig-exchanges that will eventually take place under the ton ger, the relative sizes of the betel indicating the relative sizes of the pigs.

In the afternoon, when everyone from the implicated villages have arrived, the men bring the pigs and the women bring root crops to a leaf-bed in front of the men's-house. In Maria's funerary sequence 5 pigs were produced. Two directly from the host, one of which was the sulai rn/nat pig he had received from the lead orphan at the funeral. One was a return pig for one he had previously contributed to another's custom; one a late anngan; and one a naoul from an orphan's husband. The distributions are arranged much as in the pongor br: 101 breadfruit leaves with portions of pig and cassava were laid out for the women; 9 other individual servings were given with money to overcome mourning food restrictions; 16 open baskets of pig meat, root crops, bananas and betelnut were sent to other men's-house as competitive prestations. The men eat from common pools of food in and around the men's-house, as usual for such feasts.

After everyone has eaten but before the closing speeches and general dispersal, the men disassemble the lalarnar once more. The loops of shell-money are taken and the personal objects removed, and the stand discarded. The shell-money is returned to its owners, it has only been temporarily loaned to construct the 'body' of the deceased. Each donor is normally paid for the use of his shell-money by the host with a basket of pig-meat and other food stuffs. A recent practice, however, which took place at Maria's lalamar is for the donors and the host to act together, each adding a further length of shell-money to each original shell-money contribution - in effect nobody gains financially from this but it is an effective demonstration of corporate (almost literally, as they have just made a body) action. As such it is a course that seems to be taken by less 'big' or ambitious hosts. It is innovative in that it is a shell-money for shell-money exchange. No other exchange, to my knowledge, takes this form, the more usual exchange counterparts to shell-money being persons, pigs, knowledge or services. Although more senior kamgo/ feel uncomfortable with the new practice, their exegesis as to why goes little beyond the fact that 299

it isn't 'right' or 'traditional'.

The women, meanwhile, mark another stage in the lifting of sum from them by practising a bulb singsing at the edge of the village. This is the first time since the death that anyone will dance and, although it is often peremptory, it is the beginning of a process ending in the presentation of a full decorated bulb at the tondong which marks the extent of the transmission from 'dirty' to decorated that the rites effect.

The impact of the images

What then, do the women when they awake, and other visitors when they arrive, 'see' in front of the men's-house? What linkages do these structures make? To what do they draw the attention of a knowledgeable person?

By being created in the foreground of a men's-house the installations are firmly placed under the auspices of a particular lineage and furthermore of a specific hosting kamgol. This is despite the manifold connections of the ton ger and lalamar to an array of persons not in that lineage: their presence and identity is to some degree subsumed by the primary social\spatial focus of\upon the host.

The rangrang, stretching across the length of the men's-house behind the other structures, rather like improvised goal-posts, presents a background to the foreground of the ton ger and lalamar. The yalben, the cross-bar, as a homonym garden-fence pig-barrier brings a strong sense of both the garden, the enclave of productive sociality within the bush, and of a boundary, presumably between categories such as the domestic and the spiritual associated with the spatial disjuncture of bush\garden. The rangrang themselves, the two stripped and the releaved saplings at either end of the yaiben, chime with the association of gardens quite naturally. Dried (rang - to dry), dead trees are a ubiquitous sight in gardens, where fires are lit at the bottom of trees that are too large to fell easily. These trees are killed in the cause of 300

growing crops, thus their's could be seen as a death associated with new life and increased sociality. The tanget leaves attached to the

rangrang, come from one of the few plants that Siar graft: giving a similar implication. They are also a spiritual male decoration.

The dry coconuts on the tonger have a comparable associations of life from death: the final section of the primary rites will not be held until these dry husks have been given time to sprout and may be replanted again. Another term for tonger is pokos, a man's carrying stick. The bunches of dry coconuts they bear are often carried on such sticks as food for pigs. As well as being indicative of men's labour, these coconuts are said to 'mark' the pigs that will be exchanged at the feet of these ton ger. The coconuts at the top refer to the pigs the

anngan hosts have expended, those at the bottom to those they will receive in return. They are icons of the projected exchange that exist only while the exchange is in abeyance, and are destroyed upon its completion.

The tonger are also anthropomorphic; they have a 'head' and a tanget neck decoration and are said to 'mark' the anngan feast holder they belong to. In as much as they are (collectively) sometimes said to relate to the deceased (whom in fact Albert 1986 suggests they represent), and as they signify their owners in their capacity as holders of feasts to clear away the debt\memory of the deceased in their villages, I think it is fair to say that they are icons of the relationship between their owners and the deceased. They also 'mark' the exchanges that will take place at tondong in which the central host repays those debts, in which case they are also icons of the relationship between the anngan holders and him. In fact, as these latter exchanges mark the destruction of the ton ger just as the debts of the anngan holders in relation to the deceased are cancelled out, the 'life' of the tonger can be seen as the 'life' of this three-way relationship. In these exchanges, the 'memory' of the deceased in the relationship of debt between the primary host and the anngan hosts is 'forgotten' as the debt is paid. In making a series of social, cognitive and exchange relationships into anthropomorphic figures, the Siar 301

are perhaps also revealing not merely how they see persons as composed of relationships, but how, for them, relationships are prior to persons. Persons, and other entities, are effects before causes of relationships. They are foci of interaction of relationships; a point of potential difference diagrammed by the tonger's illustration of the temporal, spatial and conceptual gap between two sets of coconuts, debt and payment, remembering and forgetting; produced by and producing differentials. When the differentials are annulled, the waves move on and the person disappears in the calm.

The lalamar configures the relationship between the living and the deceased in a complementary fashion. Unlike the tonger it does not appear 'out of nowhere', nor is it framed by the secrecy of supposedly spiritual origin. Instead it is constructed by the contributions of men out in the open. In its case, secrecy and obscurity frame and highlight an alternative element. What is revealed is not so much the lalamar, as the capacity and intention and identity of the men who make it. This is disclosed in the moment where they reach into the hidden confines of their baskets to place their shell-money on the stand. It is important that the temporary use of the shell-money is construed as a loan to the host. Shell-money from multiple sources is used to construct a single body, and for that period is under the 'ownership' or 'name' of the host alone. The transition of the shell-money back to multiple and individual ownership again is marked at the dismantlement of the lalamar.

The ton ger make an anthropomorphic figure for each of the anngan holders and their relations to the deceased and host. Their multiplicity of figures and relations is only replaced by the singularity of the host at the moment of repayment of debts and destruction of the ton ger. The body of the deceased, which started off life as 'all blood' from his\her father (ie. affines) and has now finished it as shellmoney valuables from his\her own can\moiety, placed squarely 'under' the auspices of the host by the lalamar. The host has already been given 'the corpse' in the form of the sulal minat pig and shellmoney from the descendants and close affines. The display of this 302

unitary body, made from perduring matrilineal spiritual substance flanked by the multiple temporary tonger, emphasizes that the latter's figuration of the anngan holder's dual relationships with deceased and host are ultimately a relationship with only one 'body', one 'corporate' entity. A corporate entity because the entailment of supporters from his clan\moiety in the host's (the deceased's) body is made quite overt. However, this too is only a stage and gathers much of its import by contrast with the second lalamar in the secondary rites. There the focus is much tighter, the la/amar is overtly constructed solely by the sponsor and not publicly dismantled, but taken away by his nataka. Pulpul, gar and preparations for tondong

Another period of indeterminate length, but usually no longer than a week or two, now follows. The next visible sign that the denouement is approaching is the hanging up of pu/pu! upon the tonger. These are sugarcane, young drinking coconuts, betelnut and taro plants that are used to 'decorate' the tonger. If possible, they should come from the garden of the deceased, 'finishing off' the food there. This is the same adornment that is placed upon the exchange-bed in the dal and the tonger in marriage. They will be torn down at the conclusion of the

exchanges and rite. Their presence on the ton ger is a sign that the culmination of the tondong cannot be much more than a week away because these foods should not be too dry. Certainly by the time of the pu/pu!, preparations for singsings and exchanges should be well under way. These can vary hugely in extent, just as the range of people implicated in the rites may. A subtle indication of the imminence of the performances and their likely size is the progressive withdrawal from the village of the men involved. They work less in the gardens, begin avoiding food and may begin sleeping in the bush, returning to the village very little. A more overt indication is the inauguration of gar singing, and the subsequent enthusiasm, numbers and volume of those taking part. Gar consists of people of all ages and both sexes pacing a clockwise circle around 303

the slit-drum in front of the men's-house while singing to its staccato drill. Variants of gar occur all over New Ireland, and are known in the local pidgin as bot. They begin at dusk and, if the singers have enough gusto, conclude at dawn. Singers tend to go and gar as groups of friends, often coming from nearby villages. There is a certain competitive element, such that if a group from one men's-house gar until dawn they will then challenge all the other nearby men's-

houses to do the same. Gar are fun, social occasions, and as one of the only times of mixed singing that is undertaken in Lak, they are a key forum for the flirting and dalliance of youth. The songs are composed by men and may include topics such as gossip, recent events or comment on other villagers. Only singsing groups sponsored by the host, or by anngan holders can perform at the tondong. The sponsors themselves may not dance, but may be involved in assuring that the preparations go well . The singsing groups of the tondong host must include the orphans and other close kin and affines of the deceased. Women practice their singsings in the village. The men's singsing groups meet to rehearse and to prepare their decorations away from the women in the bush, generally near to the beach. Their dancers, in order to be 'sharp' and at their most effective and beautiful must become as dry, like spirits, as they can. To this end they may fast, refrain from water and undertake various magical preparations. The kinds of spiritual selfdecorations they produce for the dances have already been described in Ch.4. During the day and evening before, the tondong pigs from all the anngan holders will arrive, as well as various pigs being brought on

the hosts behalf (such as those called for in distributions of shellmoney (matal) at the funeral), will arrive. With many pigs come a coterie of men 1 ' from a distant village, a number of whom will often be the dancers for the singsings that they bring with them. The pigs

Sometimes women travel with them, but it is unusual that women would travel from a distant village for a tondong. 304

will be placed under a specially built shade until needed. The men will crowd out the men's-houses and seek hospitality from their clanmates.

Mangis ngis: the time of dancing The time of singsings is called man gis ngis, literally moiety\clan good or beautiful. This starts during the night before the exchanges. The night singsings are not as important as those of the following day. Early on in the evening is generally an opportunity for the young children to demonstrate their prowess at singsings with the help and coaching of older youths. Large tondong may involve 15 or more night singsings - tabaran, bobo, tipang, solomons and others. Small affairs may elicit only 3 or 4 performances.

If there have been many night singsings, then in all probability there will be a tight schedule for the daytime dances which may start again after only a few hours intermission. The first two of these dances are the most important, and are the only dances whose commission is essential to the rite. They are the dances sponsored by the tondong host. The first is the bulb of all the women of the deceased's village. The widow and female orphans of the deceased must take part in this. In dancing they are marking their full entry into normal life once more. The second, and more highlighted performance, is the men's

libung sum, in which the male widower, orphans and other kin and affines take part with a similar rationale. They are covered in black body paint' 2 and may not susun, carry upon their head, any decorations: this is because they, or rather their sponsor the

tondong host, still has sum. Here we can gain further insight into the relationship between sum and the spirit of the deceased. Decorations on dancers bring back to

12

In 'short-cut' rites which combine the primary and secondary rites into one, the dancers may not be covered in black, but instead have some marking of it in their decoration, such as a black circle around an eye. 305

mind memories of deceased persons for the viewers. The decorations are spiritual imagery, much of their poetic power is based upon bringing to mind that which is absent. The libung sum dancers absence of decorations relates to the untransformed nature of the deceased. The deceased has not yet been forgotten, his 'absence' and spirit are still with the family and the tondong host. His copyright decorations, such as his tubuan, may only be produced once more by those who have succeeded to their rights, when the secondary mortuary rites have taken place and his skull and other nambu remains have been removed to the obscured spirit realm. To reiterate, the decorations can only be produced once the last vestiges of the deceased are removed. Their action as a focus of poetic remembrance is a transformation of the diffuse negative, sum laden, reminders of the deceased that are residues from the en meshing of their personhood with the material and social environment.

It is the host who has the duty of consolidating this sum, and my informants stressed that the tondong is not a time of happiness for him. Indeed, sometimes I saw a host quietly crying during the initial singsing of his dance troupes. He is taking on the memory and debt of the deceased while releasing others. The death is still painful for the family and for him, although their everyday business is no longer affected. It is only after several years when they think much less of the deceased that they 'truly forget' at the secondary funerary rites and can subsequently be moved by image provoked remembrances.

Only the anngan holders may sponsor the many subsequent dances. Despite the mixed affiliations of the actual dancers, it is therefore only one moiety, that of the deceased and anngan holders, that is 'represented' by the singsings: hence the term mangis ngis, moiety beautiful\clear of sum. The troupes are fully decorated and apparently have little to do with mourning, but their very 'brilliance' is an overcoming of sum. It is only those who have taken on the blackness of sum, those who have 'consolidated' it from the villages of the area which they have 'cleared', that may shine forth with the contrasting splendour of their spiritual dancers. To adapt a phrase 306

used earlier, these figures are more compelling against a blank or absent background, their light more blinding coming out of the dark. The colours and spiritual incarnations of their dances, which are 'brilliant spirits', frame (and are framed by) both the contrasting sum of their sponsors previous condition, and the covered blackness of the dances of the host that are still 'dirty from life'. The taking of the communal loss upon the shoulders of the host is again exemplified. This is not, of course, the singsings' only function. Women and especially men get a large amount of pleasure and satisfaction from performing in singsings. They are a psychological highlight and relief not just from the routine of the quotidian, but from the particular 'heaviness' (ubah) of the period following the death and the seclusions and restrictions necessary to a successful performance. Some men become particularly well known for the relish and skill with which they partake in their composition, preparation and performance travelling large distances to take part in singsings and spending much time isolated in the bush. Such men gain magical knowledge and relationships with spiritual entities, and this becomes a source of power and respect. For men, their dance performances are an opportunity to exemplify their spiritual capacity. They are judged by the splendour and power of their spiritual transformation. These demonstrations are intrinsically competitive, and the more consequential ones can be of some political import. When a singsing is going well the troupe's sponsor will publically acclaim them and claim them. If he is a clan-leader he will dance up to and into the troupe, shouting such things as 'yiau, yiau' (me, me), 'wakak, wakak' ( g ood\well done). If they are tubuan adepts they do this with a particular hopping dance at which they mimic throwing a spear at the troupe. This is known as sursur, and is used when they greet the tubuan spirits entering the village.'3 In a particularly pleasing or powerful singsing there may be half-a-dozen leaders (ac)claiming the dancers at once. This is a genuine mixture of approval, recognition

13

See also the use of mock spears by the women in the dal ritual in Ch. 6. 307

and appropriation. An important point to remember in this sometimes audible cacophony of claims of identification is that 'sponsorship' ramifies just as other aspects of personhood do in Lak. There are always other people behind, or as Siar folk would say 'covering', an individual. As the host of one of the more minor feasts the anngan holder, who is nominally the sponsor of a troupe, may be of quite modest standing: he may well be an unmarried man in his twenties. His lineage leader and those who have claims to be his clan leader will most likely be amongst those who sursur at 'his' singsing. His father, as one who is likely to have helped the young man in his political career, may also be amongst those (ac)claiming the troupe. Some of the most important leaders promote themselves as being causes of almost all the successful dances of their village or moiety. The host of the tondong himself will praise most dances; he has 'caused' them all to appear. He himself, although certainly above the minimum repute for an anngan host, may find it difficult to avoid being overshadowed by the most powerful kamgois of his moiety. At a secondary mortuary feast, especially one involving tubuan, such ambiguity is less likely to take place as their focus is more powerfully upon the 'host' as the apical individual. Toanaroi, probably the regions most powerful kamgoi explained to me, it is ok (allowable and feasible) for tondong to be worked by non-kamgoi, but for secondary rites the name of the kamgoi must 'go first' even if it was actually the work of others otherwise their may be deaths from sorcery due to arsaikiap ('status jealousy'). The term for the incorporation of perhaps multiple persons' efforts under the identity of a single individual is p/sen uni tan name covers, or hides - the same term and process whether it be a husband's identity occluding that of his family or a powerful kamgoi that of a rites 'true' originators. In understanding the dynamics of this as it relates to singsings, it is key to underline that the benefit may flow in both directions: the powerful leader 'appropriates' the power of the singsing, the singsing troupe gain part of their aura of spiritual and poetic power from their ability to move multiple leaders to so identify with them. Furthermore, their multiplicity of identifications are unified in the singular 'body' of the singsing troupe, hence their ability to symbolize the mangis ngis, beautiful moiety. Lastly, it should not 308

be imagined that all identifications are made or regarded with equal weight: although this may not actually mean that an audience gives the 'true causes' of the singsing their 'true credit' because of the systematic secrecy which covers preparations for the revelation of singsings, exchanges and kastom performances.

Plate 40: The local member of parliament identifying with a particularly powerful singsing troupe.

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As foci of spiritual power and political competition, it can perhaps be seen why singsings in particular and kastom productions in general, are potentially dangerous. They can be trials of strength in which jealousy provoked sorcerers attempt to overcome the performers' magical defences. This may result in illness or even death. It may also result in failure or embarrassment in a performance: at its worst the loss of control of one's bladder, at its most common the breaking of decorations. Should such an event occur the entire row of the troupe must withdraw back to the bush immediately. Sometimes, especially when there are too many singsings for the time available, two groups of dancers with their musicians will take to the plaza at the same time. Side by side, each group sings and plays to their maximum volume and dances their best in competition with the other. The warrior's pride and aggression that many men's dances exemplify make best sense in this context of magical and artistic battle. A powerful singsing emits a definite aura of excitement, noise and tension audible in their accompanier's singing and drumming even as they approach the village from the bush. The dancers walk to the men's-house in silence surrounded and lead by their atmosphere invoking support who may be spraying their troupe with magical ginger and coconut water. The accompanists then sit in front and facing the dancers to play hour-glass drums and sing for them. A general audience of men, women and children spectate the dances. They take place in front of the men's-house, around which the men tend to congregate while the women watch from other points in the village. Women and children keep a long way back from some of the more powerful men's singsings which may be dangerous. The most powerful are those with the most pidik decorations (e.g. as judged on one axis by their approximation to tubuan), who smell the most perfumed, who have fasted and propitiated the spirits to be the most dry and sharp, so that their skins quiver and their eyes bulge as they demonstrate their spiritual and sum free nature.

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The exchanges Early on the morning of the tondong exchanges, the women of the village undertake their own exchanges called arsosok, glossed as 'races' or 'competition'. They exchange a kind of pudding made from coconut milk, cassava scrapings and Tahitian chestnuts. The women go round from house to house giving the pudding to female kin, affines and friends and receiving their own pudding in return. The aim is to gain status by giving more than one receives; however, judging by the apparent lack of tension surrounding these transactions, the outcomes are of much less import than the men's exchanges. In the late afternoon, after or as the last of the singsings are finishing, the pigs are removed from their shelter and tied to the ton gers. Each pig is tied to the tonger of its owner - if as sometimes happens an anngan holder failed to erect a tonger he will use the tonger of the host. Theoretically, but often not in practice, the pigs should all have a dab of red ochre on their foreheads. The host begins the exchanges by placing his foot upon the first pig tied to his post and calling out the name of the eldest male orphan: this is the repayment for the sulai rn/nat pig which the orphan gave at the funeral with the body of his parent. It should be the same size as the pig it replaces. Next, mat/n yah (return fire) pigs of equivalent size to those expended in the anngan feasts must be reciprocated by the tondong host. If present these too are stepped upon to mark their transfer. However, it is often the case that the host cannot produce all these pigs at the event and it is acceptable instead to give his creditors ya/k/p, cut posts with a red angled top, as markers of the debt that he still owes them.

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0

Plate 41: Pigs ready for exthange attached to the ton gers, which have been covered with pulpul.

The host's main priority is to 'beat' the gar challenge pigs that the anngan hosts have affixed to their tongers. For this only live pigs not

markers are acceptable. The anngan holder with the largest pig places his foot on it to mark its transference to the tondong host. He must reciprocate with a larger pig. The same process is then undergone for the second largest pig offered as a gar, except this time the tondong host uses the pig he has just received to beat it. This continues until the host receives the last and smallest gar pig known as the bong. This pig is said not to belong to the host, primarily I think because his role is built around giving not receiving. Instead it is generally used for the small feast the next day in which the structures are dismantled and the village tidied once more.

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These exchanges mark an important point in the mortuary process. In them the host exercises his right to overpay all who have contributed to the funerary series (although the exchanges are described as a competition, it is one in which the 'winner' is always carefully arranged to be the host). This is the culmination of the primary rites. All the community's sum has been removed, and those who have helped in its removal have been recompensed. The support of his moiety (as well as their claims) is visibly enacted for the last time and disposed of under the ton gers. The debts incurred by the loss of the deceased have been successfully consolidated: first from the communities in general to the anngan holders, and now from them to the single tondong host. The deceased now becomes solely the concern of the host. This redirection of focus onto the host is concomitant with a transformation in the modality of exchange. The host moves from having the responsibility of paying for the debts generated by the death, and of being the more passive moral agent from whom distributions are extracted under the requirements of duty and wishes to maintain claims to clan leadership, land and possessions (which might be forfeit if a predatory or 'helpful' leader from another clan held the tondong for their dead). Instead, he begins give without return, forcing the community to become indebted to him. This is the switching point to the secondary rites in which the host's unilateral giving transforms him into a spirit and a focus for the entire community.

Finishing the tondong

As soon as the last of the exchanges are done, before the pigs are even removed, the pu/pu! food wrapping the ton ger is pulled away by the audience of men, women and children. Much of this is now eaten on the spot. The women immediately cut off the tops of the taro corms so that they can plant them in their gardens.

Up until this point a certain amount of decorum is meant to be kept 314

in front of the tonger. Now they are so much wood. The crowd begins to thin as people begin to say their goodbyes and return to their homes. The next day the bah rangrang, 'break the rangrang is held with a much smaller gathering of the host's consociates and the bong remainder pig of the tondong exchanges is eaten. This occasion may also be known as sar Ion tondong, 'broom on the tondong' and is similar to the sar Iakman, 'broom village' feasts described earlier, held after other ritual occasions. The village is cleaned and broomed again to remove indications of the events and peoples that were there. The tongers and rangrang are thrown away in the bush.

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CHAPTER. 8 secondary, rites: spectacle and spirits

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'One way in which the "object of secrecy" is traditionally represented is by the archaic mask and masquerade: by this hiding that is so conspicuously, even blatantly displayed for ever,'one to see. The mask hides a secret, and the secret of the mask is actually a person - usually an already initiated, secret-filled, "knowledgeable" person. This person, however, is peculiar, because at the same time he is "there" and "not there"; moreover, to the extent that this "he" becomes manifest (in a given place), this occurs at once at a given "time" and in "no-time" (the "other" time, the time of death): it is the epiphany of an entity from "another world" (another time/space continuum, discontinuous with ours, yet still connected with it). (Francesco PeIlizzi, 1994, 'Secrecy' Res 25:80)

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any years generally pass after the tondong before secondary mortuary rites are instigated for the dead. Families and communities have long since accustomed themselves to living without the deceased. Although these last ceremonies are seen as another and final stage in the process of forgetting, they actually involve resurrecting active consideration of the dead, not only the recently deceased individuals who are the nominal subject of the rites, but also those longer dead, the plurality of persons recalled in viewing pidik such as the tubuan. While this is the last time the individual dead will become a topic of public attention, through such foci as a shell-money effigy of their body and nambu objects that were associated with their life; the icons of the collective dead, the masks or bullroarers that take away the reminders of the individual to their realm, will reappear again and again in future years long after all the those who remember the current subject of the rite have themselves died. Thus it is that the mechanism for the 'forgetting' of the dead in the final rites is twofold: firstly, the mnemonic items (nambu) that are likely to provoke their remembrance are

transferred to and disarticulated in an obscured zone somewhat similar to our conception of the unconscious. Secondly, on future occasions for remembering, the conception of the individual becomes transformed and subsumed into the more poetic focal imagery of the collective dead. Imagery that emerges out of the formless non-living, non-being of the secluded pidik areas. There are various degrees of fulfilment of the rites. Because their efficacy partly derives from the degree the community's attention is shifted from the deceased and reshaped, it is the maximum extent which offers most insight as to the processes and principles involved, and around which indigenous (and anthropological) conceptions and ideals are constructed. To take an example from another chapter, it is the BROTHER who exemplifies that kinship category who is of most use to us in delineating the meaning and implication of that construction, rather than the failed, compromised or uncommitted performance of the "brother" with which 318

we may subsequently wish to investigate the pragmatics of brotherhood. Thus in this chapter I will be describing and analyzing the largest rituals of the most powerful leaders in Siar, and paying rather less attention to the attenuated but more common rites of more average men in which their lineaments are not so visible. The most focused and powerful projections present the crispest pictures with most light and shade.

In Siar, lesser secondary mortuary rites involve distributions to destroy

nambu left over reminders of the deceased, such as the remains of a house or a tree or personal possessions. Somewhat more important ceremonies also involve singsings and perhaps pidiks such as bullroarerspirits, as well as the production and subsequent removal of lalamar and

ba/ba!, structures associated respectively with the body and spirit of the deceased. The most important and compelling performances, both in the sense of political capital and in their incorporation and determination of almost all activity in a sizeable region, are without doubt those that bring forth tubuan. I took part in two of these rites, that held by Daniel Toanaroi in Siar village and that held by Putimi in Rei. The former involved attendance by villages as far afield as King in the west-coast Kandas language group and Feni, an island in the Tanglamet area: implicating and creating 'name' over a huge region. It was also the source for my best data as it was held at the very end of my fieldwork by one of my closest informants in my home village. These two rites, together with generalizations from my experience of innumerable lesser ceremonies and many discussions with Lak men and women, who experience the tubuan performances as central to the formulation of their cultural worlds', provide the basis for the description and analysis of this chapter.

1

Men and women position the tubuan rites variously in relation to their own life projects. Some may experience it quite seldom, some see it as an annoying distraction and imposition, others as the pinnacle of personal and cultural expression. However, all that I met thought it central to their notion of Lak culture, ep wol. 319

The host

A large event like a tubuan season is hard to organize with any great degree of secrecy. It is the fruition of years of planning, readying gardens, amassing shell wealth, growing pigs, , and co-ordinating the calling in of debts from various exchange partners. Kamgoi still indulge in misdirection and attempt to obscure their plans as long as possible though: like other customs its initiation should be a revelation, both for maximum dramatic effect.and in order to minimize th.e.difficulties of rival's interference.

There has been an increase in the cash income of some kamgoi in recent years because of logging payments, and this has been associated with a flurry of tubuan rites. Cash per se is of little use, it may not be used in the distributions. Instead it has to be converted: mainly into pigs and shell-money, but also transport, betelnut, other sundry food, and materials for the construction of the tubuan. Working through the expenses for the Siar rite, it seems that over 3000 kina (c.f 1500) was expended in this way.

Unfortunately, the conversion is anything but straightforward, especially for pigs. While there is a fairly standard price for lengths of shell-money (if their owner can be persuaded to sell),, pigs' owners may set any fee they desire. With an important kamgoi who is known to be readying for a tubuan custom, and who wants large pigs, that fee can be very high indeed. This is not so much to do with supply and demand as status driven challenges on the host. Prices quoted are construed as attempts to 'try' him and to 'see if he's up to it'; the host himself is far more likely to boast about the price he has paid for his pig than complain about it.

This is in fact the agonistic tone of the entire exercise: like the wellknown potlach, secondary rites involve aggressive expenditure whereby one shows one's worth by disposing of it. It is bound to, and meant to,

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arouse the envy and ire (arsaikiap) of those powerful competitors that have been put in the shade by the host's distribution and disclosure of valuables and compelling production of 'beautiful' spirits. Sorcery is an expected response to this. As Toanaroi 2 , a caring but at the same time proud and ambitious man, told me more than once: 'Every big tubuan custom such as his must have deaths in its wake (in the clan of the host). Maybe it would be one of his grandchildren. But never mind ('maski') the deaths. He would be proud of the deaths: it would be no good if his competitors could say he wasn't up to such customs [anymore].' (translated fleldnotes)

As already noted, before missionization, a mask would drag a sacrificial victim to the taraiu at every large tubuan performance. Now, the host still expects the death of one of those he 'covers'. Moreover, the expenditure of all his pigs and shell-wealth is construed as a comparable sacrifice. We have explored in previous chapters how pig meat and shellmoney are closely associated with persons and their bodies. This is also so in the context of the tubuan where their payment substitutes for the death of the neophyte in initiation. In obsolete practice once common in secondary rites, the shell-money lalamar was not merely regarded as a body, but had to be 'killed': the host would invite other kamgoi to kill it, and when they refused, do so himself by taking it to the tarafu. Toanaroi himself told me that his pigs and his shell-money were like his mother and father: they had been the means by which his parents had cared for him (food and valuables), once his parents had died his shell-money and pig wealth had 'looked after' him as his parents had and he felt reassured when he saw them. Once he had given them away he felt like an orphan.

As in most sacrifices, the sacrificing host expects and gains some transcendence above the living who treasure such valuables (and life), obtaining something of the divine or spiritual in character and authority. Toanaroi stressed that this happens after the host has distributed all his

2

Toanaroi gave me the best information on the position and behaviour of an important 'old-style' custom leader. In the following exegeses he describes not only his own feelings, but those ideologically appropriate to the role of a great kamgoi. 321

exchange goods in the rite, when his mind becomes clear, he no longer has things to hold him, and he becomes light (a!): in fact he becomes like a spirit. The spirit whose qualities he gains is his lead nantoi, mother tubuan. As already discussed in Ch.3 the host, who lets men take betel from his basket in addition to feeding them unreciprocally, is the 'mother of all men' - they are in a mother-son, nan-toi, relationship. He gains the power over them that a mother - a violent, aggressive, spiritual mother - would have over her children: that of life and death.

Tubuan rites are a departure from human society and normative modes of sociality. The host is responsible for imposing an onerous regime of segregation and discipline on both the women and men. Exaggerating the responses of resentment and jealousy towards him is the rite's provision of a culturally apical moment of individual elevation and hubris in a social environment where such things are normally disguised. In everyday life all things that are not to be mutually implicating, , things of the individual or family - valuables, choice foods etc - are kept hidden, out of sight of those to be excluded. 3 Although most Lak ritual offers opportunity for the public differentiation of persons via exposure of their decorations and valuables, they usually entail great care to enjoin that family, lineage, clan, moiety and affines demonstrate their interconnected responsibility through recognized exchange. In large tubuan rites this is not the case, the host has his supporters (lit. sin gah posts), but they are subsumed under his identity, the pigs they provide are never returned as they would be were they recognized as external political agents. The grand host publically makes himself the atomic point that 'covers' not just his own clan or even moiety, but the entire area. For the preparation and running of tubuan customs, Toanaroi told me that his ears must close, he must stand alone, he cannot befriend those around him, and he cannot talk with them - 'ía sa bil malo', 'me and no other'. He must, in other

This is a common and recognised strategy, despite its negative moral overtones. Those accused of 'cooking in the bush' (ie. not eating\cooking in public) are attempting to keep items for themselves. 322

words, demonstrate his isolation so that 'he and no other' is the cause and centre of events. The tubuan are the most dramatic focal point of the rite and at their centre is the host's lead nantoi. This mask which is identifled with him is a projection of the host's position. He imposes himself as not only the source (feeder) of the living, but also of the ancestral dead. The rite's subjects (the individual dead) find themselves incorporated into the wake of what is ultimately the host's imagery and masks. Hence the host's potential claim to their land and pidiks, and the amount of resistance there sometimes is against their holding predatory mortuary rituals for those whom others would like to position as belonging to clans of distinct origin and cause. If a host holds a tubuan ritual for a deceased and produces his masks he becomes the 'cause' of their clan by virtue of being the 'cause' of their 'inalienable' ancestral possessions. This is how one kamgoi comes to 'cover' and control previously distinct clans. The dead and the balbal

The recognized sign of the customs imminent occurrence is the planting of a pole known as a ba/ba! in front of the host's men's-house. This is

Plate 42: A balbal this green must mean a kastom is imminent.

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done with little ceremony to the beat of a slit-drum, and is followed by a small feast for the local men. Ba/ba!, as well as having the associations of regrowth already discussed in Ch.4, is a particularly quick growing variety of tree. This piece of wood, initially completely bare, harbours the spirit of the deceased: people must behave respectfully in front of it under penalty of fining. By the beginning of the ritual the ba/ba! has resprouted green shoots and leaves, indicating the revivification of the deceased's spirit.

Although there is only one ba/ba!, large tubuan rituals often 'finish' more than one deceased. Almost certainly one or more of these will be yaiinpidik tubuan adepts, because one of the main political purposes of hosting a large tubuan rite is the succession to the control of tubuan (nantoi and koropo, not dukduk). By 'finishing' their owner, their masks are freed from sum. By producing the deceased's masks, which is necessary to the demonstration of their sum free state, just as the production of singsings is necessary to the demonstration of the sum free state of the moiety in the tondong, their successors lay claim to them.

If, as is almost always the case, the host desires the contributions of others (to aid with the logistics of shell and pig wealth, to help produce a sizable and impressive display of tubuan and to lessen the political problems of his individual elevation and isolation), the succession to tubuan presents a mechanism whereby the closer involvement of other kamgoi can be prompted. For instance, Toanaroi, the leader of KoroeMarmar clan, held a tubuan custom in Siar which 'finished' two powerful yai-inpidiks. The first, Toatandai, had been of a lineage which claimed to be distinct from Toanaroi's Koroe-Marmar while Toatandai was alive, but which now somewhat grudgingly accepted defacto amalgamation under Toanaroi because they had no kamgoi capable of competing with him. The second, Parang, had no surviving members of his lineage, which was accepted to have been an independently functioning branch of KoroeRakangot. There were local off-shoots of Rakangot whose leaders wished 324

to succeed to Parang's possessions, but they lost out to Paulus Tili of a branch of Rakangot in Rei, a village c.30 miles away, who has precedence in tubuan and was able to contribute resources and masks for the performance.

Toanaroi's custom was also, however, to 'finish' other less politically important people including his own mother. The different subjects of Toanaroi's rite were important to him for various reasons, personal and political: either aspect can be favoured in different rites depending on the circumstances and character of the host. For similar reasons asking which individual spirit the regrowing balbal presenced is not an appropriate question in this context, despite the fact that sometimes informants would talk of one or another of the deceased having priority and 'covering' the others. In fact, the ba/ba! is a highlighted foci which 'covers' the individuality of each (all) of the group of deceased. As should already be clear, an important theme in this ritual is the eclipsing of the individuality of the dead (such as evidenced in their personal history) so as to amalgamate them within matrilineal valuables; the ancestral spirit forms of the tubuan.

Gar and the readying of tubuan

The erection of the ba/ba! is the mark for the beginning of gar singing which, as in tondong, takes place every night until the eve of the rite itself when the dances begin. It is also a signal that preparations of the masks and the taralu should start in earnest. These take a great deal of time and labour, both in the collection and provision of materials for the masks and the extra shelters needed, and also in a large amount of ritual work that needs to be done to 'clear' the taraiu and many masks of the sum that remains on them since their last use.

As the date of the feast approaches, men, especially the senior 'carpenters', spend more and more time away from the village and

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gardens in secluded and secret work in the taraiu. In a typically Lak fashion the non-initiates and women are neither supposed to enquire where the men are (as if they didn't know), nor even to complain or query when their gardens are raided for supplies for the increasing number of people, including visitors arriving from other villages, staying in the taraiu.

Most of the nantol, koropo and dukduk masks are constructed in the hosting taraiu, but the rite usually also involves the attendance of tubuan produced in distant villages. Yai-inpidiks bring, their tubuan to other villages festivals for various political reasons (e.g. the contingent from Rei at the Siar rite mentioned above). They also come in reciprocal visiting partnerships. All the tubuan in a rite, whether locally owned or not, 'die' at the end of the ceremony, 'stranding' visiting tubuan in a foreign taraiu. When required at their home once more they must then be accompanied back to their own taraiu by their host tubuan, who in turn die there. In this way visiting relationships are often established upon the basis of an initial political visit.

Dukduk masks, which are the children of nantol, are made on behalf of those who have reached the appropriate point in their initiation. Their birth and development used 4 to be made known to the villagers before the actual invasion of the tubuan during the feast. Like birds ('chickens') they are spoken of as sleeping on top of their eggs and breaking those eggs. A nantoi would burlesque taking leaves to wash in the sea by the village, just as mothers take leaves or now nappies with babies' faeces upon them to wash. It would come to the men's-house and with its spear draw a line in the ground for each dukduk that had been born in the taraiu. 5 Finally the dukduk would be seen walking to the sea with a

Pre world-war two. See also Ch.4. The parallel with the spirits of dead persons drawing lines in a cave to mark their death is, no doubt, significant. 326

nantoi: comically unsteady at first, and then somewhat more strongly the next day. The mortuary feast would take place very shortly after this.

Tangur putus, cutting the weeds

There are two parts to a secondary rite which are necessary to the 'finishing' of the dead, however grand or modest the event. The first is tan gur putus, which means to cut the secondary growth, such as that which has grown on an garden once cleared. The garden of the deceased was cleared in the tondong, and in fact the process of doing so was associated with the 'clearing' away of the deceased (the garden is worked in for the last time by the orphan and widow(er) and the last produce from it is used to make the pulpul of the ton ger and then eaten by the attendees). So, the implication of this cutting of secondary growth of the deceased - in conjunction with Siar linkages of clearing, brooming and weeding with removal of memorial traces of the deceased and others is of a second stage in removing the products of the deceased so as to forget him\her.

The 'growth' that is cut is that of nambu, the left-over objects that remind people of the deceased. This is enacted most literally in the removal of the tangets which were planted on the deceased's grave at the funeral. Trees that the deceased planted, or was in habit of sitting under, are also frequently symbolically cut by having a limb removed. The remains of the house of the deceased must also be 'cut' by taking away one of its posts or a piece of wall.

This can take place at a number of points in the mortuary sequence. It often happens as a small isolated rite when it is desired to cut a nambu tree or remove a nambu house. In a larger ceremony it normally takes place the day before the singsings. In a tubuan rite it may also be enacted by the tubuan when they invade the village after the singsings.

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Nambu items of deceased persons, such as photographs or personal items, are seen as belonging to their relatives and the host of their mortuary rites. When returned to them they should be given with a payment in recompense for the sorrowful remembrance they are likely to provoke. The destruction of nambu similarly involves distributed payment. Its essence is a distribution of shell-money to all the men of the locality, along with the removal of the nambu objects. This takes place at a feast for men only. 6 Smaller nambu items, such as a pipe or a basket are burnt in the earth-oven on which the pigs are being cooked. Baskets of food with a token of the nambu object, such as a sprig from a tree, and a length of shell-money are made up for each of the competing men's-houses.of the.area.

Large nambu items such as trees and houses are often removed by pidik, especially buliroarer-spirits, who take them away to their sacred and secluded spirit area in the bush. This happened before both the tubuan festivals in Rei and Siar, despite the fact that the tubuan themselves were to take further nambu of the deceased away in only a day or two. The parts of house or tree that the tubuan or buliroarer take away with them, are known as the bones (sur) of the deceased,, as indeed is the shellmoney that makes up the 'body' of the deceased on the lalamar, which is taken to the bush at the same time.

From some older informants there was the suggestion that, complementing , this bone,, the pig eaten in the anngan and pongor br of the primary rites could be regarded as the flesh (sisim) of the deceased. This makes some symbolic sense, in as much as it links the process of drying that the mortuary rites overall are seen as enacting with the spatial geography of the body. The flesh was removed off the skull for the

tondong and the bone was exhumed for the secondary rites. It also links with the respective colours of the rites - red for the primary and white

6

As in anngan the men are the primary target for the feast, but if there is enough food the women may receive portions. 328

for the secondary rites - as marked upon the foreheads of the pigs involved.

More exoteric was that removing the nambu ' bone' was male, spiritual work. It is only men that are paid shell-money (which itself has many resonances with bone) at their removal, and bone as dry, perduring, male substance is a common and powerful bearer of spirits. This is a counterpoint to the ngasa distribution of pig meat and vegetables for women that follows the tan gur putus. Here the contrast between shellmoney\nambu\bone and flesh, is conjoined with the distinctions created in distributing permanent spiritual substance to the men and ephemeral nurturing food to the women. There is the same gendering and temporalizing of the contributions towards the person in their disarticulation upon death as there was in their combination at birth.

Furthermore, not only does the host disaggregate the deceased persons with these distributions, he is also de-composing himself. As already noted, exhausting himself of exchange goods transforms him into dead spirit. His living 'death' is one very much memorially activated, each recipient of his 'substance' and 'nurture' has its source and their debt foregrounded throughout the entire rite; it is the legitimation of the hosts power over them. This duality of the persons that the exchange goods relate to is a key mechanism in the subsuming of the dead into the identity of the host. In so much as the host is foregrounded and remembered, the dead, who are being 'covered' by him, are 'backgrounded' and forgotten. In fact it would seem that not only does the host subsume the dead but also, at least temporarily, the living. His nurture and substance have not been forgotten or disappeared but distributed around the community forming one corporate entity to which he, as the spirit, gives life, identity and control.

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Singsings, lalamar and ngasa

Singsings normally take place the night after the tangurputus and then, after a short break, again the next day. I shall refrain from describing them in detail here, because they take place in largely the same way as already described for the tondong. The main significant differences are: the lack of a black-painted libung sum; that anyone may present a singsing; and that the host pays each dancer in each singsing with a length of shell-money after their dance. This is because, unlike in the

tondong, the dancers are dancing on behalf of the host rather than on their own\sponsors' account, as demonstrations of their\his overcoming of

sum.

Overnight a lalamar will be erected next to the ba/ba!. This time it is solely the host's work, with no formal demonstration of the co-operative construction of the body as in the tondong. When questioned as to whether the spirit of the deceased was in both of these, I was firmly informed that the lalamar was the body and the ba!bal the spirit. At Toanaroi's custom there were in fact two lalamar, one at the village men's-house and one at the initiate's men's-house on the edge of the

taraiu. 7 On the second of these was hung payments for the tubuan dancers from the mask owners.

In a tubuan event there are very few normal day singsings, perhaps only two or three. After the singsings the large ngasa distribution of portions of pig and vegetables to all the gathered women takes place. The invasion of the tubuan may either interrupt the singsings, scattering the women dancers in fear, as it did in Siar, or it may be delayed until the chore of distributing the meat has taken place, as at Rei.

This was only the case in the one of the two tubuan events I witnessed in which there was a separate initiate's men's-house. 330

The tubuan enter the village It is not only the host and his supporters that create masks for the ceremony. It is also usual for the opposing moiety to bring a number. This was welcomed and encouraged by both hosts in the ceremonies I witnessed as a way of reducing arsaikiap (status jealousy) that might lead to sorcery. In fact it is an aspect of competition between leaders in both moieties as to who has the most masks in the rite to their name. There are also matters of succession to the masks of deceased persons, demonstrations of new masks that have been dreamt or purchased, and production of new initiates' masks for payment. These provoke the raising of tubuan on every side of the community. Both the Siar and Rei events elicited a large number of masks: around thirty in each case.

Plate 43: The yai-Inpidik and their tubuan get ready to wo. Prior to their entry to the village the tubuan are usually divided by moiety for the wo. This entails a stylized walk from either end of the beach in front of the village. With the host at the head of his column, each yaiinpidik, decorated and holding their ceremonial bone-hafted spear, leads

their nantoi, koropo and dukduk in line. The two sides meet, exchange volleys of spells in lime powdered flashes, and then retreat, rejoining to enter the village together. This opposition, exchange of missiles in 'play', and then unified entry to the settlement follows the same template as the beginning of the dal, when instead of the male spirits taking control of the village it is the women. 331

Plate 44: The matamatam In Rei, looking 'through' the yal-inpidiks.

Plate 45: A senior woman (in blue) weeps for the memory of those she sees in the faces of the tubuan.

The entrance into the village is known as mat a matam, 'the dead come and look', confirming the identity of the tubuan as the dead (if not individuals) and also implying a reverse dynamic to that of men's

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initiation into pidiks such as tubuan, where they enter into their 'world' by looking or seeing within. This parallelism will be suggested in other aspects of the rite. I raise it here to underline the role of vision and its control in the delineation of realms of distinct character. The tubuan are usually separated and excluded from the village; their incorporation into (of) it is construed in terms of seeing it.

The mat a matam in the two rites I saw were rather different, but both were full of dramatic tension and menace. The first in Rei was more orthodox: after the wo the masks, led by the premier nantoi of the host, progressed as a forbidding mass straight to the men's house. There all the yai-inpidiks greet them with a sursur, just as they do for lesser singsings, except this time they shout the names of the tubuan and wave their bone-hafted ceremonial spears at them. While the women and children watched from a position well to the side of the plaza, a senior woman stood slightly forward and wailed. She cried out the names of the previous yai-inpidiks who had held such events, seeing their faces in the masks before her.

In Siar, Toanaroi did not have a wo, perhaps because of an imbalance in the number of performing tubuan in each moiety. Instead he had three different groups of tubuan and their yai-inpidiks simultaneously invade the village from different corners. Hence they did not mat a matam as a single group as is orthodox, instead they had a three-way confrontation in front of the men's-house, rather like the wo. These came suddenly and the women unsure what was happening, ran to the far corner of the village to watch the hopping sursur of the yai-inpidiks, as they threw coloured lime spells at each other that would reputedly kill an unprotected person stone-dead.

Once they had come into the village, the paths of the tubuan in my two examples diverged once more, for the two kinds of tasks that are generally undertaken by them at this rite. In Siar detachments of tubuan 333

nambu tree and house, the distributions for which took place in the

seclusion of the taraiu. In Rei, four nantoi removed the planking from a freshly made concrete grave, which had replaced the tangets that had been removed in a tangurputus a short while previously. This is known as portung, 'cover the hole'. 'Traditionally' after tan gur putus there should be no reminding remnants of the deceased left in the village. However, sometime after the mission had established burial instead of exposure of the corpse, they began putting white stones in place of the removed tangets: a substitution called portung which highlighting a similar transmutation to that of tangur putus in which the nambu of the once living, such as trees, are seen as bones and 'replaced' by shellmoney payments. The construction of Christian gravestones is a further post world-war two innovation: whose unveiling and the removal of the wooden slats used in making it, by the tubuan or bullroarer-spirit, has become an additional stage in the mortuary rites. As a permanent marker of the deceased it might seem to interfere with the action of the secondary rites, to remove the signification of the deceased person by objects in the village. However, graveyards are usually in a cleared spot in the bush away from the village, making them less in everyday sight and mind, and rather more like the presence of transformed spiritual images of the dead such as sin gah or tubuan which are kept in the obscured darkness of the men's-house or the taraiu. Furthermore, in addition to their Christian motivations, relatives have a very practical reason for wishing to cover the grave of the deceased with a concrete tomb: it stops the disinterment of bones for magical practices (e.g. spirit possession devices).

Plate 46: Revealing a grave.

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Killing the men, becoming spirits

The tubuan then move off to their dance area at the edge of the taraiu. There the sequence of affairs varied once more. In Siar, all but four disappeared into the taraiu. In Rei the tubuan first formed a circle around the perimeter of the dance area and each of them in turn was 'whipped' once with a length of shell-money by one of the officiating yai-inpidiks. This payment bore many similarities with those termed kes a dokdok in Siar, which took place at a later stage, and shall be described there. Then they left leaving only the four lead nantol.

The four nantoi first performed a dance, leaning over to one-side and then the next, to the slit-drum. They then stood in a line, still gently bobbing up and down, and were given a short length of wood each. The yai-inpidiks then put down their baskets, ran up to one of them, turned away and then received a blow on each side of their back with the wood. All the other initiates then run forward for the same treatment, except that they receive only the one blow, and then immediately disappear into the tarafu. This is the burbur, a close homonym to bOrbOr - sleep, in which the masks kill the men. From this point on they are no longer living but dead spirits and,, bar the yai-inpidiks, may no longer be seen in the village in human form (le. they may only appear in masks).

Yai-inpidiks leave the crowds of men being killed by the masks to fetch new initiates from amongst the women. These may be completely new to the tubuan, or may already have been secretly initiated in which case this acts as the announcement of their status. They are taken by the hand and led to the masks to be killed and to join the other men, while the women wail and weep for them, their 'death', and their transformation and henceforth distinction and separation from women.

This segment of the rite makes clear a symmetry between the realm of the tubuan spirits and of the living village and in the means by which the 335

boundary between them is crossed in either direction. Just as the nantoi give birth to the dukduk so as to enter into the village; so do they then kill the male initiates for them to enter the taraiu. Furthermore, the nature of the identity between dukduk and the new male initiates that they are given to is exemplified by the synchronicity of birth and appearance of the one with the death and disappearance of the other. The yai-inpidiks are even more overtly identified with their nantoi, for the duration of the rite they are referred to by the name of their premier mask, and given the same respect and attributed the same powers as a tubuan. This is why they too may roam both spheres, taraiu and village. If for some reason a yai-inpidik dies while his mask is extant, his spirit will then immediately inhabit the mask (substitute body) of his nantoi and injure or kill any dancer who dons it.

Only seeing the dead dance: surveillance and display

The masks dance in their liminal performance area between the taralu and the village on the afternoon of their initial appearance, the first of their four days of such display. Henceforth they dance in two sessions, morning and afternoon, each day. These are initiated and concluded by a yai-inpidik playing a motif upon the slit-drum to which the masks perform the same nimble hopping and leaning moves as at the commencement of the burbur.

The number of masks on view varies from perhaps just two or three rather less skilifull performers early in the morning sessions, to a full complement crowding the arena at peak periods. They perform two types of dances, an older form said to be indigenous to the Lak area and, more frequently, a Tolai variety. The former, at which few of the younger men are expert, involves straight legged kicking and some formations and is sung in a largely impenetrable language. The latter are rather similar to the libung dances performed by men at lesser occasions and involve repeated ducking and twisting moves which twirl the leaves of the masks 336

in an aesthetically pleasing manner they are sung in Kuanua (Tolai), which is little understood by most in central and northern Lak, but comprehended by many from the south and western coasts.

The singing and drumming to which the masks dance is performed, initially, out of sight of the watching women. Yai-inpidiks come and go into the village and stand and sit in the open, singing and playing during the performances. Other chosen men sing and drum, , but on the first day they remain completely concealed while doing so. They, along with others (such as anthropologists) who wish to watch, either hide in the bushes or inside the initiates' men's-house. The complete ban on the visibility of any man (bar yai-inpidiks) relaxes gradually through the course of the four days, until at the end of the rite the accompaniment of singers and drummers play completely in the open, albeit with their backs turned to the viewing women.

While 'men' may not be seen from the village, the masks are to be carefully watched. They do not limit themselves to the dance area, but roam around, making, forays around the bush and the village, led by nantoi sometimes carrying the ceremonial spear of a yal-inpidik. These masks are given a wide berth by men and women alike. The discipline of obscuring ordinary uncostumed men is a pervasive theme throughout the rite, both within and without the taraiu. There is pressure on them to hide not merely from women, but also from the eye of the nantoi and yal-inpidik. They are only safe when 'covered' by the authority of the dead, whether in the guise of mask or ritual adept.

While men face punishment if they are reported to be seen, that does not necessarily mean they actually limit themselves to the confines of the taraiu for the duration of the rite. On the contrary, local men especially are liable to talung - act like a spirit by wandering invisibly through the bush and the night. They may even see and be seen by women, so long as they are careful about which women see them, and no-one sees them

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doing so, and the women in turn are careful that no-one hears about it. The main motivations for this, apart from a desire to lie low and out of harms way, are food and shelter. There is rarely enough food for the large number of men gathered to have a full stomach for the duration of their seclusion, nor is there ever enough shelter should the weather be unfavourable for sleeping out-doors. This means that a certain amount of absenteeism from the taraiu is tolerated or even sanctioned by the yai-

inpidiks. So Rei, where the weather was appalling every night, saw the church, which was on a hill above the village, packed with men from nightfall to just prior to dawn. In Siar, my wife was asked to take her pressure lantern indoors so that it lit up less of the village and allowed men (including myself) to acquire food from their wives.

The women are also subjected to a series of restrictions, which shape their activities quite severely. These bear some similarities with those in force during sum, but are far more extensive. So, as during sum, women are not allowed to broom in the village, or make fires in the garden, or work in them except to gather food. In addition, planting things, like sexual intercourse or contact with a tubuan by someone pregnant, is especially taboo because something 'bad' my be produced. In fact women are not supposed to leave the village except to gather supplies. This is probably connected with the fact that most things loosely categorized as 'of the bush', such as betelnut, betel pepper, coconuts or fruit are also taboo to eat (at least openly). Other taboos link to the identity of the nantol, so women may not be seen to hold sticks, nor hit children, because of the resonance with the nantoi striking the men in the

burbur. A similar logic applies to a ban on sewing, weaving and the use of leaves: the women are not permitted to make packets, mats, baskets, or especially pandanus capes\cradles, because these link too closely with the construction of the tubuan - which, we may recall, is known as the 'umbrella of men'.

What the women, adolescent\uninitiated men and children are compelled 338

to do, is gather to view the masks dance each morning , and afternoon. They form ranks of proximity to the tubuan shaped by degree of concern for the dangers of the tubuan and degree of seniority and political ambition. This means that young adolescents and elderly women tend to be at the front and mothers with young children at the rear: a couple of hundred yards away in the church for one pregnant lady after a few disturbing sorties by the tubuan.

They are enjoined, under threat of punishment, to watch the performance, yet they are also warned not to look too closely. These contradictory injunctions reflect overlapping imperatives, some of which I have already discussed. Many of those proscribing over-close examination reflect concerns with the performance's aesthetics and a desire to protect men's secret in a context where seeing is associated with knowledge and possession. For instance, when a part of a tubuan's decoration breaks or is misaligned, as inevitably happens during their vigorous dancing, the tubuan should retire and the women look away. Often, to underline the redirection of their attention, another mask charged the women - many of them scattered and fled in disarray, but some of the more senior merely bowed their heads and turned away.

Much of the concern over women looking too closely, is expressed in terms of anxiety over their seeing 'inside' the pidik. However, pidiks which are often displayed at tubuan dances, despite yai-inpidiks' warnings, are the dancers' genitals. Many dancers are (and 'traditionally' all should be) naked under their masks. The effect in the dances of bending the tubuan over and then throwing and twisting , them vigorously up, can send more than leaves flying... This creates a certain frisson amongst the younger women, who pay a great deal of attention to observing the show. With the description of the tubuan as the most powerful ma/erra (love magic), this perhaps exemplifies the sexual nature of pidik and their display, as well as underlining the ancestral and spiritual overtones of mate sexuatity.

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The tubuan visit the men's wives

On the third day of the Siar seclusion, groups of tubuan associated with each yai-inpidik and led by their senior nantoi came into the village and sat on the grass outside the clean and swept area of the house of their yai-inpidik sponsor (if he was from elsewhere the house of a nominated clan representative was used), and then the house of newly initiated dukduk owners. This practice is known as keskes beren, which means to sit in the area between bush and village where women throw refuse. Beren is the area in which new initiates into tamianpoipoi, the bullroarerspirit, were formerly left for their mothers to find. They were told that the spirit had eaten their child and shat them out. Decaying , substances such as those found in beren are particularly associated with the dead and spirits, e.g. tamianpoipof ('man eats rotting detritus'). Rubbish is thrown to the beren every time the women broom. The significance of sweepings has been indicated in relation to sar Iakman, where their removal is used as an index of the forgetting of the dead via the destruction of the traces of the persons and spirits that were caused to be gathered by their death. The association of the tubuan with the beren therefore creates an apt linkage between the 'sweepings' of forgetting and the revisitation of the forgotten dead.

This section of the rite is also known as keskes dok, as when the tubuan sit they are given a dok shell-money fee for viewing a pidik. The yaiinpidiks slap each tubuan with a length of shell-money and give them a basket of food and betel prepared by the wife of the owner. This payment is a dok similar to that initiates make for seeing the inside of the mask and the taraiu; however this time it is described as the wives' payment for seeing their husband's masks in the village. Aijmer (1997:Ch8) suggests that an analogous moment in the related Duke of York tubuan rites actually marks an initiation of the masks into the village balancing their owners investiture into the taraiu. There is something in this, but in Lak a closer parallel than initiation (which is a one-off occasion) is the 340

burbur in which the nantol 'kill' the men by hitting them with wood so

they become spiritual denizens of the taraiu. In Rei, the tubuan were hit with the shell-money at the beginning of their time in the village. The tubuan are transformed replacements for the women's husbands, and it is their spiritual aspect that they pay to see.

- I.'•

'

t

* . ..

___ .d'

Plate 47:

A koropo sits in the grass to be whipped with shell-money.

The spirits dance to death, the men killed to live

After the keskes dok, but before the tubuan die, a second burbur is held on the dance ground at the edge of the village. Before the disclosure to the women that this entails, the men decorate themselves with ator ('writing' or 'drawing'), markings that are distinct to their 'mother' nantoi - ie. the nantol that initiated them. These vary around a standard template. This consists of linear red and white markings to the side of the eyes and on the biceps, and circle and dot motifs on the sternum. I was given a narrative to go with these designs: the eye marks indicate that one must watch the tubuan well, the chest designs that you must think of the tubuan in your belly (seat of emotions), and the arm designs are the mark of carrying the tubuan. In addition the men mark their spiritual nature by wearing a strong smelling bubual bunch of herbs around the 341

back of their necks.

In Rei, all the men came out of the bush and progressed in a long silent line around the edge of the taraiu to the dance place, baskets in their left-hand (bar new initiates) and slapping their right thigh in time. Many of the women cried at seeing them. In Siar they merely came straight from the bush. The nantoi arranged themselves much as in the first burbur with sticks in hand. The yai-inpidiks leapt in front of the nantoi to be hit first. Next those succeeding to the position of a deceased yaiinpidik were then publicly given the ceremonial spear of that office before being 'killed' by the tubuan. Finally the rest of the initiates ran to receive their blows.

This second 'killing' is the inauguration of the men's return to the living's side of the frame of obscurity, just as the first marked their removal to the side of the spirits. From this point on the men are gradually freed from their seclusion and its restraints. Some of the visitors from more distant villages may be allowed to return home to see out the remainder of the requirements. However, they must all remain in ator for the remainder of the rite whenever they are on view to women, now with the addition of one or two white lines on the back which indicate the number of blows they received in the burbur (two for the highest two ranks, one for everyone else). These markings indicate that they are still 'of the tubuan' and not yet ready to return to full humanity.

In the afternoon session of the fourth day, the full quota of masks performed their most vigorous display of dancing. They then returned to the bush, only to come back a few minutes later to 'die'. Their eyes, the icons of their powers of determination and surveillance, were smeared with black, exemplifying their deathly sum ridden state by adumbrating the erasure of their gaze. They shuffled slowly and feebly, performing an echo of their former vigorous dances to a slow drum-beat and faint singing from their accompaniment. The men sang, almost whispering, of 342

their sorrow. At its end a yai-inpidik gave the host's nantoi a stick ember from a fire. This is said to indicate that the masks will be burnt, but also resonates with the ember with which the spirits of human deceaseds are meant to make their mark for four days after their death. 8 The audience of women then began to wail, and the yai-inpidfks also cried as the host stood among the masks and wished them a tearful farewell. Once they had slowly departed the scene, the host's nantoi returned one last time, bearing , a pu/in its hands. The pu/is two rattan canes tied with their roots upwards around a pole which the nantoi planted in the dance area in front of the initiate's men's-house. Once it had done so, Toanaroi clasped his mask in his arms and accompanied it, weeping, back to the taraiu from whence it might not reappear again in his lifetime.

The pu/invokes a complex of iconography. The word means to remove a plant (esp. sugarcane) by pulling it out, roots and all. It also has obvious resonance with pu/pu!, the sugarcane, taro and betel etc. from the garden of the deceased that cover their ton ger until they are eaten at the moment sum is finally overcome. The pul also marks a period of sum mourning, this time for the tubuan and is taken away once it is over. However, while the pu/pu! is a covering made of the deceased's food media from which the social person was constructed; the pu/is rattan the medium from which the covering mask was constructed. The form of the pu/pu! suggests that food is a 'skin', a part of the person that is interstitial between them and others; the rattan of the mask is more overtly an obscuring intercession between categories of person and spirit. Both structures also involve the inversion of plants, suggesting the inversion of life's processes of growth and becoming vis the decay and diminishment of death. The former are associated with the formation of the boundaries of food and cover which join and yet separate, the latter with the removal of the interstices entailed by the differentiation of social entities.

8

See Ch.7. 343

*

Plate 48: A dying nantol with smudged eyes.

Plate 49: Toanaroi weeps as the tubuan leave for the last time.

344

'I

Plate 50: The pul. Plate 51: A gorgor tabooing coconuts Plate 52: Men in the ator about to be

L; '

symbolically fed by Toanarol.

A

b

Plate 53: A munum The leaf would go under one's arm.

.:• II

345

Visually the pu/is almost identical to a gorgor, a variety of tall ginger that is also tied to a stick, but to assert ownership of land or resources such as coconut or betel palms. These gorgor protect property, and should only be worked by a person with the appropriate relationship to the dead associated with the Iand\resources. They are said to be bones of the dead (like those removed in tangurputus). The pu/is explicitly likened to the

gorgor used to taboo a deceased's garden and betel trees before their use in the tondong, for purposes such as pu/pu!. Just as the garden produce of the deceased is taboo while the gorgor is standing, so, as long as the pu/is standing, are all bush products such as coconuts, fruits and betel taboo.

Next, either the same or the following day, the men come into the village to anngan amanlar, that is 'eat in the clear'. In Siar all the men gathered in full ator in one large singsing troupe which marched, already singing, out to the village to perform a libung. There, Toanaroi offered each man a symbolic bite of a sweet potato. This is the first time since their 'death' that the men have eaten, drunk, smoked or chewed betel in public view of the women. By being seen to do these activities which are at the heart of Lak sociality, they underline their humanity once more. Once the potato had been offered to the last man they began to sing and dance in a relaxed fashion what was described as a 'pretend' Iibung, showing their more overtly human (not covered, but still decorated) participation in the spirit world. On completion there was a small public meal, and then the men could briefly see their families in public once more before having to return for further duties in the taraiu.

Not present at the anngan amanlar I attended in Siar, but still considered part of the liturgy of the rite, was the construction and carrying of

munum. Rafael Feeling was kind enough to construct a demonstration munum for me (see illus.). These are made for each man and should be carried under the left arm like a basket. The men should have them at the anngan amanlar and on all occasions they are seen in public for the 346

duration of the rite. They are in effect part of their ator. The munum are spoken of as models of dukduk: they are conical and should have markings relating to the mask of their bearer. Although a further visible affirmation of the identity between the masks and the men, they are also a step in the direction of the externalization of the man from the mask. Instead of the men being obscured by the masks and existing only in the hidden space within them, the masks and the hidden interior space they incorporate begin to be something that is carried around, controlled and owned by men.

Endings

Once the anngan amanlar is over, those that attended the ritual from other villages are free to return to everyday life. The Siar contingent returned from the Rei ceremony the day after the death of the tubuan, stayed another day in the bush to be sure that they had not preempted the anngan amanlar and then resumed their normal affairs once more. The experience of being a member of the host taraiu in the Siar rite was quite different. There, although the men could be now be seen in public, they still had to spend most of their time in the tarafu under the control of the host and seeing to various secret duties and activities.

The next public marker of progress in the rites is, four days after its erection, the overnight removal of the pul. This signifies the end of the mourning period for the tubuan, the four days of which are explicitly linked to the four days of mourning for a person from death to pongor br. Further analogues of elements of the human mortuary cycle such as tondong are enacted in the privacy of the taraiu subsequent to the pub's removal. In this light, the ceremonies for the final removal of sum from the masks that precede their production for a tubuan rite can be seen as the counterparts of human secondary rites

The removal of the pul also signifies further lessening of the public

347

restrictions associated with the tubuan. Men no longer wear ator, women may once more openly go about such productive activities as gardening. There is often a small feast in the village for the women to mark this point, although this was omitted in Siar. Wild, bush produce may now be eaten, and the men may be observed collecting drinking coconuts, betelnut, fruits and nuts of all kinds, and attempting to trap wild pigs for a further feast of the tubuan's funerary sequence in the bush.

The period of tubuan law and the meetings at which it is enforced are known as kilung. In Siar kilung stayed in operation long after life had otherwise returned to normal. For some time almost every night 9 was interrupted by all the men being called to the ihitiate's men's-house to hear and discuss accusations'° and receive their share of punitive fines - shell-money that had to be found and distributed while the kilung was still sitting, and pigs that had to be eaten in the taraiu by all the initiates the next day. Examples of cases included people charged with arguing loudly in public, or charged with revealing information privy to the taraiu as evidenced by the gossip of women. Such accusations are known as warai nataka, 'talk of the tubuan', and are widely considered to be malicious and an avenue for the pursuit of political grudges. It is also often said that the hosts of tubuan rites having given away all their wealth are eager to regain it through imposition of kilung fines. In Siar most of the accusations originated from one source (not the host) and were maintained by one clan to be aimed specifically at them. Some complained that kilung should not normally progress past the removal of the pul. However all know that one of the aspects of the power the host has gained by his distributions and invocation of the tubuan is the power to keep the men in the bush and the kilung in process as long as he wishes. Though more modern and moderate yai-inpidiks have under the

In fact this went on, albeit at a slowing rate, until I left the field a couple of weeks after the end of the rite. 10 Which accused non-initiates or women could not be present to hear, and which accused initiates who could be present were not allowed to reply to.

348

influence of Christian precepts generally discouraged the practice of spiteful waraf nataka and freed the men soon after the pul. A senior man in the tubuan and the main instigator of the accusations publically reasserted that the traditional adage that the k/lung remained in force 'until the grass grew again on the cleared dance ground [of the tubuan], and until all the leaves currently on the trees were rotting'. In other words until the natural growth\decay\regenerative cycle had removed all indexes of the tubuan and their rite - processes comparable to elements of the funerary sequence, such as sar lakman or tan gur putus, in which human agency swept away or otherwise removed visible indexes of deceaseds and their rites.

349

PART 4 conclusion

350

CHAPTER 9 thoughts on the life-cycle

351

he approach I have taken in this thesis, attempts to preserve a sense of the irreducible and implicationary character of lived2? experience, so that a focus on any one aspect draws a host of others in its wake. I shall now try and stand back from much of the ethnographic detail and consider 'the life-cycle' as a whole in terms of its implicatory structure: that is I treat the life-cycle as a form-cycle. In the course of the transformational chains of ritual, persons are reformed in many different ways - stretched, covered and disintegrated - yet still the cycle reproduces the 'same thing' (cf. de Coppet 1981). In Ch.4 I quoted Bachelard on 'projective' poetry; now let me paraphrase: what elements of a form can be deformed in a way that poetic coherence remains, what are the limits of formal causality? Formal causality is certainly central to the life-cycle: in cultural terms the form-cycle is co-eval with the biological cycle. Both show great conservatism in the reproduction of human form despite our morphological potential. In that conservatism is a kind of memory, and it is this that forms my entry point to the processes of the cycle.

Memory and form in the life-cycle 'The act of exchange is registered on the senses that seal it as a social relation. ... Sensory memory is a form of storage. Storage is always the embodiment and consetvation of experiences, persons and matter in vessels of alterity. The awakening of the senses is awakening the capacity for memory, of tangible memory; to be awake is to remember, and one remembers through the senses, via substance. Memory is stored in substances that are shared, just as substances are stored in social memory which is sensory. '( C. Nadia Seremetakis 1994:216)

The Lak world is suffused with memories. These are far from the inert backwards facing archives that the dull word 'memory' might suggest in the western context. Everyday, Siar people interact with an active landscape which cheers and depresses, distracts to distant places and times, and redoubles the sensation of the instant at hand. In their work and activities they build, chop, burn, cook, collect and distribute 352

these memories into different shapes, contents and locations, and in doing so they transform their environment, themselves and each other. As we have seen, and as must surely be the case in all societies, lifecycle rituals are a major forum for the social manipulation of remembering. Memory is a prime mode of the inter-linkage and poetic mutual 'forming' of persons and their environment. Summarizing the memorial transformations the life-cycle rituals enact will give us an insight into the formal aspects of social reproduction. The pattern of 'ecological' relationships a person has with their milieu through their life-transformations can be conceived as the life-course's 'carrier wave', visible under the modulation of individual circumstance and agency.'63 From birth each person is a resultant and nexus of a whole range of relationships, with and through which they are remembered. So, for instance, should his mother's brother die the child will be mourned over by relatives. The child evokes his kin for those who have witnessed their social investment in him,, or for those who see him as evidence of those relations. Those kin remember him in and with their gifts of food. The child's form, his very appearance and behaviour, are remembered as being those of a deceased by a friend or relation. He does not merely evoke this dead spirit, he is that spirit; not a memory of the deceased, but remembered as the deceased. Furthermore, the spirit remembered is someone who has been forgotten through the process of the death rites. The memory of the other, the deceased, has been forgotten; it is not 'there' to be remembered. The child is a memory of himself. It is he who is said to tell the observers his identity as someone else, either literally or through his actions. Those who recall the deceased in the child do so as recognition. This is 163 The analogy is with the uniform carrier waves used in radio transmission, which are either amplitude (AM) or frequency (FM) modulated in order to transmit a signal.

353

remembering as revelatory insight. It is also form as memory. People do not know who the child really is until they remember him, until they see it in his visage, when what they see is a memory.

On birth, the child is revealed from within the inchoate and hidden interior of a woman and a house. These zones are obscure and not available for inspection. In Lak, where knowledge and presence are garnered through sight, they are an aporia, a fundamentally indeterminate realm in which the lineaments of knowledge are literally not visible. Revealed, the child can be seen to become an object of knowledge, a more determinate form. That form becomes more determined and sharply defined through processes of remembering. He is remembered through gifts of food and through recognition as a certain person. Throughout their life-course, without remembering each other people would have no form, they would be unknown. Thus remembering can be seen to be at the very heart of sociality: it is the means by which people know each other and themselves.

'Dust is not deposited only on the object but also on the eye. Sensory numbing constructs not only the perceived but also the perceiving subject and the media of perception...' (Seremetakis 1994:226) On death the entire memorial form which the person has built up during their life career is transformed. Their memory suddenly has no future. Those who were incorporated, by remembering, in the deceased's relational self find themselves obscured by sum, 'dirt from life'. The mourners are afflicted by a loss of definition, of form. They suffer both memories of loss, and a loss of memory. They have lost both someone whom they took care En remembering, and someone important in remembering them. That is why they are covered and obscured by blackness, dirt and enclosure. The village is left unswept not merely because it contains the traces of the deceased and his being remembered by visitors, but also because it too has suffered a loss of form, as it is no longer remembered by one of its inhabitants. Remembering the village and remembering the mourners anew, is 354

reforming them and replacing the remembering of the deceased that once formed them with that of the ritual host.

The mourners experience their loss as like a debt. A debt is memory in potentiality, a marker with which one reminds oneself and another that one needs remembering, that that remembering in the form of an exchange good is absent, in abeyance, and morally deserved. This is why, whether or not there were any exchange goods outstanding from the deceased, the mourners have debt, a debt that has been defaulted. The remembering that they were expecting from the deceased has been rescinded, while their remembering of him lingers on. Hence the compensatory remembering by feeding of the mourners by the anngan hosts and their compensation in turn by the tondong host.

The result of this kind of compensation is spoken of as to/on ngis, both 'washing the hands' and making beautiful the mourners. The mourners are relieved from the enclosed obscurity of their dirty sum, to perform and display their decorated and brilliant selves to each other and the audience. They are revealed anew,, made to display the lineaments of ideal form, by the host's remembering. Just as dust, dirt and obscurity indicate failure to remember, to know and thence form; so does brilliant decoration and performance indicate and create a powerful, polythetic, focused remembering. The form given to men, when they are recalled from the darkness of sum is a spiritual one. They wear pidik decorations, their sponsor's lineal valuables, and when they perform the audience see the faces of previous owners. This is one of the reasons the dancers take great care to disguise the 'join' between themselves and their decorations. They aim towards an ideal in which the audience remembers the dancers as the lineal dead connected to the sponsor via these valuables; although as their own identity is visible beneath the decor they can only approach that desired outcome.

Meanwhile, the forgetting of the deceased progresses along with the disarticulation and decomposition of his body. As Seremetakis 355

suggests in the quote at the beginning of this chapter, memory provides the medium by which matter is known. Matter and memory are formed reciprocally and socially (see Ch.4); the socially contrived reduction or disguise of form or coherence in the one is reflected in the other. Hence the hiding of the skull, the remaining matter of the body. The social delimitation of the memorial and material foci that this hiding effects also has implications of power and succession. The social delimitation of a memory may render it more powerful. It will certainly render definition of and power over that memory to the cache's possessor. In this way the deceased and his lineal memorial possessions become part of the identity of the funeral host, who now has the ability to reveal, and have remembered as part of his own social form, the memory that was the deceased. This process is culminated in the secondary rites, where the host brings forth the 'bones' of the deceased(s) before having them finally removed from sight to the oblivion of the taraiu. It is more than the deceased(s) who are forgotten though - the initiates seclusion and 'death' is also a de-materialization which dramatically alters their memorial form. They, do 'not' exist for the women any, more; their identity is completely subsumed in their dancing display of beautiful regalia by the spirits they, are remembered as. The masks are remembered as spirits of the dead up to and including their present owners. The actual person inside the mask is completely obscured, yet ironically receives vicarious pleasure in presenting the beautiful lineal valuable well. Just as men have to 'die' and be forgotten in order that the spirits are remembered, or rather so the men are remembered as spirits, so the tubuan spirits have to die and be forgotten in order that the men are remembered once more. But the men forgetting themselves in order to be spirits has the effect of transforming the memory of biologically dead men into remembered spirits which are, and belong to, livingdead yai-inpidik ritual leaders. These dead are not re-membered when the tubuan die and the initiates are recalled back into their quotidian forms as village men. Whether the death of the tubuan has any 356

equivalent action of 'leaving' an addition to the living side of the frame is hard to say with surety.

There are two complementary mechanisms for the forgetting of the tubuan that seem to be suggested by the restricted death rituals in the taralu that I was privy to. Both these are commensurate with other aspects of the life-cycle already discussed. Firstly, there are suggestions that as the men become externalized from the masks, the tubuan becomes internalized and enclosed within them. This process is already intimated in the transformation of the tubuan into the munum basket. Secondly, the tubuan seems to be decomposed in an analogous fashion to human corpses. These are combined when the 'fruits' of their decomposition are ingested by the initiates. This chimes with the tale of babies eating the decomposition juices of their mothers (see Ch. 6), and with the processes of the last and least overtly memorial life-cycle rite, the dal.

The dal, like other life-cycle transformations, involves an initial effacement and a subsequent display. The girl is neither visible nor nameable for the duration of her enclosure. Her social form and role are forgotten because they are neither seen nor enacted. Instead she is called by a name of a dal that is a lineal possession incorporating the identities of a historical sequence of women that have used that name in this ritual. This is similar to the memorial structure of tubuan designs and names.

The reciprocal presence of humans and spirits

In fact, as already noted, the dal has many formal resonances with the tubuan; yet it is also a rite of redness and decomposition just like the primary mortuary tondong. Unusually, the pidik spirits display a relatively unstructured nature during her enclosure and form is 'firmed up' throughout the rite until it reaches its apogee in adult, and ideally married, women and men. So, if human birth of white spiritual babies echoes the dispatch of human 'bones' to the spiritual realm in the secondary mortuary rites, which are also the occasion for the tubuan's 357

birth; might not the dal, which pre-flgures human birth and which in turn echoes the decomposition of humans in primary mortuary rites, also relate to the decomposition of tubuans in their primary mortuary rites? This suggestion, and the logic of mutually implicated life-cycles of humans and tubuan spirits which provoke it, are illustrated in the diagram accompanying this text. In it the rituals, their thematic colours, and the inverse relation of spirits and humans to the same events are shown. The process of the rituals is governed by a memorial and formal oscillation between human and spirits, the most iconic and fully developed form of the latter being tubuan.

MEMORIAL AND FORMAL INTERLINKAGE OF HUMAN & TUBUAN LIFE-CYCLES

HUMAN DAL ('PRE-COM POSITION TUBUAN DEATH (MOURNING)

HUMAN

TUBUAN

PRIMARY RITE CD E CO M POSIT

I

)

TUBUAN (HUMAN SECONDARY\J)BIRTH

SECONDAI7L\TUBUAN RITES 'T1 BIRTH

RITES

'Crossover'

'Crosslover'

TUBUAN PE-COMPOSITION' HUMAN PRIMARY RITES (DEOMPOSITION)

HUMAN DEATH (MOURNING)

Figure 6 358

The human life-span is a relatively short arc, starting with a birth that is the remembrance of a spirit as a human and therefore the forgetting and 'backgrounding' of the spirit's independent existence. The analogy is of a transformation of the spirit akin to that secondary mortuary rites enact on human social existence. This resonance is certainly highlighted in linkages of colour, and earlier practices of dramatizing the dukduk's birth etc. Human secondary rites remove or 'de-activate' all material reminders of the person and incorporate the person into spiritual decorations. The deceased person, to the degree that they are socially recalled and recognised as an individual, is remembered as a spirit. The memory of the person is transformed into the visage of a spirit at human secondary rites, at human birth the memory of a spirit is transformed into the visage of a human: so we are justified in correlating birth with spiritual secondary rites even though, to my knowledge, no actual ritual manipulation of spiritual memorabilia takes place on birth.

Human death is a failure of remembering whose blackness has already been commented upon. The way black markings are applied specifically to nantoi's eyes upon their death,, confirms that the initial loss of form and remembrance is of those that the newly dead would have seen. The decomposition and forgetting of the form of the human dead proceeds to its first conclusion in the tondong primary rites. During these the deceased is forgotten by. the community, and his remembering replaced by the host's. This is made into a performative reality by the men dancing in spiritual decorations that are lesser versions of the tubuan. The diminishment of the social, cognitive and physical presence of the human deceased is marked by, and functionally connected with, the coalescing adumbration of tubuan in the same modalities. Hence the lack of spiritual adornment by those more closely related to the deceased, who represent an 'enclave' of the absence left by his death. It is perhaps because of the continuing material and mental 'remains' of the deceased that the tubuan are not yet fully remembered into their most complete and compelling form. This presaging of the tubuan, which is associated with the 359

decomposition of the person, I have labelled 'pre-composition'. The tubuan are 'fully' composed at the secondary rites in which the deceaseds are 'fully' forgotten. Their death follows an even shorter life than man's. From that time, until human secondary rites of sufficient scale are performed once more, the tubuan themselves are not seen in the village. In fact, apart from their death, which is itself the rebirth of the initiates, the tubuan life-cyde is only apparent through the mirror of the human cycle. Taking the human sequence as our guide, we return to the dal, the point of human pre-composition signified by spiritually induced rotting from the numinous obscured interior of the woman\house\mask. The pidik displays are even more 'free-form' than in the tondong and less directly iconic of recognised lineal spirits. Their decay in form compared to the tubuan is, I suggest, directly correlatable with an equivalent reduction in memorial evocation and poetic power, and the physical evidence of decay inside the woman. This cycle is converted into a wave in this final diagram:

Degree of implication In spirit world

THE CARRIER WAVE Tubuan death

uman dal SplritV humans Tubuan birth/Human Total coverage of human by spirit

uman bIrth Total coverage of spirit by human

Tubuan birth/Hum an secondary rite

Hum an prim ar rites Hum an spirits

Human death Degree of Im pllcatlon In human world

Figure 7

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This is one representation of how a person might be implicated into the human and spiritual world during 'his' life-course, the 'carrier wave' I hypothesized earlier. Birth is the beginning of a person's cumulative sedimentation into the minds and lives of others; their death marks the peak of their investment in the social and material milieu. The mortuary rites essentially organize a re-investment of limited 'focal resources', diminishing the deceased's social existence by refocusing attention towards the host and towards spiritual forms. Hence their implication in the human world decreases until it is removed at the secondary rites and the tubuan's birth.

The tubuans' death is also the point of their maximal implication in\of the milieu around it. Over the period from the tubuans' birth to death the initiates have been slowly revealed as co-eval with the masks: appearing in their ator decoration and having less strict restriction of visibility applied to them. This could be seen as portending the death and beginning the removal of the men and tubuan to their respective 'sides of the fence', but I feel that would be missing something, as at that stage the men certainly do not separate themselves in anyway from the tubuan and their realm. I think it is more accurate to regard this as the tubuan's milieu extending to its maximal and leaking into, or incorporating the village. That implication of the spirit world decreases through the dal to the point where the spirit form becomes a human form through the labour of a mother.

A further argument that can be made with reference to this wave, is that the forms of greatest definition and poetic impact occur at the cross-over points from human and spiritual realms. This is because these phases highlight their image nature, reliant on the virtual relationship between foreground and background, absence and presence, humans and spirits. The new born baby and tubuan most completely portray a paradoxical, virtual image upon a support of a contrasting character: the human on the 'absent' ground of the spirit, the tubuan on the 'absent' ground of the human. As the most 'virtual' images they also present the greatest differential to the milieu they are launched into. They are the points of maximal poetic and 361

implicationary energy in terms of 'potential difference' and rate of change of implication. This is a subtle but important contrast to the points directly before death in which the entity is at maximal implicationary extent, its identity intertwined with the greatest span of milieu. The analogy I'd draw is with the force of a wave at the point of entry or impact into a medium, and the much diminished impetus but greatly enlarged quantity of shaping enacted by the same wave once it has become a ripple spread to far shores.

Death is perhaps as poetic as birth, but in a very different way. It causes rapid change in mutual implication by inverting its positively valued incrementation into negatively valued diminishment. Primary rites and dal rituals present images of considerable poetic power, yet they are still not so formed or powerful as tubuan or babies as their status as half-way between man and spirit is as eminently discernable as the ground the men provide for the spiritual decorations. They represent a position of flux in implication of the two realms.

It is the movement between being fully 'present', spread and enmeshed in the socio-material milieu as a mature adult, and being minimally 'present' and largely 'absent' as an image with a spiritual component, that provides the motor for the progress of the wave of implication. Human absence is made visible in spiritual presence, and vice versa.

In fact, the human presences of greatest extent and influence are those of the kamgoi, who achieve that position by means of producing the most powerful and focused spiritual forms in the wake of others' deaths. They use, and amplify, the negative, spiritual, 'pull' of these deaths to augment their human presence and power. Every poetic wave appearing above the median surface of a lake, must be a result of or itself create equivalent wakes, or 'negative waves', below the median surface. Just as every figure must have its negative space, and every image its frame. Thus it is that the images men create in a 'spirit world' imperfectly reflect those that they create in the 'human world'. The production of powerful spirits equates the 362

production of powerful men.

Although both men and spirits die, losing their form, tubuan are also recreated time and again with great attention to the exact recreation of the designs. In a paradox reminiscent of Weiner's (1994) 'KeepingWhile-Giving' they both exemplify and deny the flux of form in time. They are inalienable possessions in which an accretion of historical personages and powers are embedded. By this coalescence of differential individuals into a figure of sameness they not only provide a repository of identity for those that connect themselves to them, but at the same time institute hierarchy through people's differential positioning in relation to them (yal-inpidiks, initiates, potential initiates, women). But the hierarchy of humans is only ephemeral; control over tubuan enables the kamgoi to 'cover' other persons and lineages for only so long. Once they too are dead they become subsumed within the over-arching identity of the tubuan, only for another to take brief custodianship.

The tubuan is more than a political or authenticating tool. It is the sonorous poetic image produced by and for the ongoing reproduction of the Lak social world. It exemplifies an intersection of contrasting temporal dynamics: ephemerality so that people may live anew and permanence so that there is identity of form in that renewal. It is an instant of 'pure' form recurrently emerging from the timeless formless

taralu, and sinking back once more to its oblivion. It gives specificity to a generality of human absences. Everywhere that Siar people impose one form on another, whether they need to produce something from nothing, or nothing from something, it is the echoes of the tubuan that are used to shape the transition.

363

It is hard to know if they are blessed or cursed in having created such a dominant focal form. Certainly Siar is unusual in their maintenance of the coherence of the tubuan and its derivatives, and it is this which gives it such poetic power. But recent innovations, such as permanent houses and anti-kastom pentecostalism, are likely to be increasing sources of interference in the future. It may be that turbulent times are ahead.

364

365

APPENDIX marriage

366

Marriage (Un)observed Full marriage rites are a complex and important source of Lak imagery. They are the concluding segment of the da/, ideally, although rarely in practice, following on directly from the final food distribution. Known as tondong arbas the marriage rites show many similarities with, and are important for our understanding of, the tondong exchanges which conclude the first sequence of death rites dealing with sum and, as such, are important evidence in discerning the relationship between fertility and mortuary imagery. In fact very few marriage productions, even of the 'short-cut' variety have been staged recently. One reason given for this, in the Catholic area of Lak in which I was based, was that no priest had visited the area to undertake church marriages for many years, and many people regard a church wedding as a pre-requisite for a traditional ceremony. Elopements still go on though, as do more formally recognized marriages in which bridewealth is given. Attention is not drawn to these acts however - they are not for public display. In nearby Susurunga, Bolyanatz (1994:243) quotes the following explanation for their discretion: 'If we stand up and make a big deal by giving brIdewealth to another line, then we are doing the equivalent of shouting "Our brother wants to screw your sister!" and nobody wants to hear that sort of thing, right?'

In Lak people seem to have comparable sentiments: knowledge of a cross-sex siblings sexual activity is shameful, and shell-money gifts to women are associated with sexual services. A consequence of this is that I never witnessed the actual handover of bridewealth, although I was able to gather detailed information shortly afterwards. The tondong arbas is on the contrary a foregrounded public presentation. But in the 20 months that I lived in Lak I did not witness 367

any.' In fact, I was told that what some elders regard as a 'full' tondong arbas has not been performed in the Siar area for about 20

years. So the details and the poetic effects of tondong arbas are only estimated via secondary reports rather than reported more fully from the experience of observation and participation. Structures

The tondong involves the erection and, upon completion of the requisite exchanges, decommissioning of the yai-arbas or tonger by the wife-giving clan. This is a single large tonger at a wedding, unless there is an auspicious exchange of women and exchange valuables between clans, when there is one for each wife. The ton ger has many sets of 4 tied dry coconuts covering much of its length. At the top this yal-arbas is cut off flat, and the bark peeled away from a band of

around a foot width, this 'head' is coloured red with ochre. On this flat top an additional dry coconut would be affixed, except this one will be sprouting a green shoot. Running from its top to nearby tree tops, spaced at right angles, would be four decorative ropes of kawawar, small ginger, and banana leaves. The ton ger is in the middle of a circle marked in bamboo, which is known as a wor, a garden fence. This circle is bisected into two halves, again by bamboo, one half for the woman's moiety and the other for the man's. This structure is closely related to the ton ger of funerary ritual, which are also pulled down on completion of the exchanges related to sum. Both kinds of tonger are also known as pokos, men's carrying sticks - upon which, amongst other things, dry coconuts are lugged in bunches of 4. However there are significant differences to funerary ton ger. They are produced in number, one for each of the aangan

1

One was apparently performed in the distant village of Lamoran while I was on

a month break in Australia.

368

feast holders2, and are smaller, with only two sets of 4 dry coconuts on each. They have tangets, the insignia of a kamgoi at their 'neck', and their tops are cut at an angle and have no coconut atop them. Nor do they have the lines or bamboo boundaries, although they do have an accompanying construction called a rangrang which contains references to fencing within it. As one might imagine, much of the poetic effects of these constructions denve from their differences to each other as well as in commonalities and references to imagery from other realms. Not arbitrary divergence, but directed transformation of the same motifs is the key. There is, on the whole, creative and positive interference of reverberations from the multiple focal images presented at the two tondong. The composite form of ton gers, pokos, and the completion of exchanges, are points of identity between the rites of death and marriage and may be regarded as presenting the same focal point from which contexts of identical form are reproduced - repetition redoubling the poetic force with which they act. The tops of the tongers are treated differently: de-barked, ochred and cut in the

death rites which are associated with the removal of the head of the corpse; and de-barked, ochred and flat with a sprouting coconut\skull in marriage rites associated with fertility from spiritual sources. These present distinct focal images which, while they disrupt the realization of certain implications or contexts which each atone might be used to provoke, they positively reinforce the power of, say, skulls as effective, that is particular meaning or context provoking, imagery not by repetition of a single focal form, but by mutual resonance, or positive interference between two differentiated forms.

2

This is certainly the both usual and the 'ideal'. Occasionally, when tondong and ngasa are combined a single large funerary tonger will be produced. 369

Exchanges A sign of intended marriage is the husband-to-be coming and receiving food from his prospective wife. He reciprocates with gifts. At this point the two clan or lineage leaders will meet and discuss marriage. If they are agreed then the wife would have her hair cut all around with a razor - to mark that she is 'given'. Prior to the tondong, the wife's kin will bring her to her husband and new home. The giving of the wife is undertaken by her mother's brother, who gives a live pig with her. This pig is known as sulai fal-in, literally 'accompanying the woman', and is said to be 'the same' as the sulai minat ('accompanying the corpse') pig which is given back to the

lineage leader with the body by the deceased's dependants at a funeral. The pig accompanying the wife is also known as borrol arbas - thrown pig, or kamtiken yai, base or root of the tree. This former

relates to the supposed grudging nature of the giving of the wife, and the latter to the foundational or causative role of this prestation in the erection of the yai arbas\tonger structure in the tondong arbas, when, if held, a matching return pig will be given. While its reciprocal will be kept, the sulai fal-in pig must be eaten by the husband's clan, and its head given to his mother. This is associated with the wife's duty of service and care for her husband's mother, as is the matan gurar ('eye of the women') bride-payment which is transferred from the husband to the wife's kin to ensure this fealty. This obligatory shellmoney payment is mainly made at this point, although should there be a tondong further expenditure is made in correspondence with the reception of additional gifts of pigs from the wife-givers. So the bride is already in her new house with her new husband when the yai arbas is erected. It's construction is a minor pidik and takes place in the bush. It is brought to her mother's brother's men's-house at night so that it is, supposedly, a surprise revelation for all to see it in the morning. On its erection her clan will place foods - a rope of 370

young coconuts, cooked and uncooked taro and packets of corms cooked in coconut milk - in a woman's food basket and give it to the husband. This is said to be a sign that he must now make the baskets for her to fill with produce from their garden. The presence of an impending kastom is, just as for death rites, now marked by villagers parading nightly around a slit-drummer singing gar songs. As in mortuary tondong, neither the songs nor the nightly

processions have much direct linkage to the rite itself - rather they are occasions for increasingly heightened sociability in readiness for the main event. When all the arrangements have finally been made the wife's clan put up the pu/pu!, that is the upside down foodstuff's already familiar in the context of the dal food stand, on the ton ger. Again as in funerary ton ger, on the night before, and the day of, the exchanges, decorated singsing groups perform. Both the husband and the wife must be decorated and sing and dance. Both will be moderately hazed during their dance by members of their spouse's clan - thumped with lime, possibly doused with water and circled around before having gifts of cigarettes, betelnut and most importantly shell-money thrust upon them. This is the general procedure for arbung rites upon seeing a cross-moiety, especially an affine, dance or make some other achievement for the first time. In the marriage singsings, the two clans are said to dok ep fai-in and dok ep barsan, pay for the revelation of the woman and the man respectively. This is the same terminology - dok - as is used for payments to see\leam pidiks in general. This too has parallels with the singsings in the mortuary tondong in which the widow\er and the orphans of the deceased must be decorated and dance, to realize their freedom from the mourning that has previous hidden them and restricted their social interaction. As already noted 3, prior to marriage cross-cousins and other suitable marriage partners should have an avoidance relationship with each other, and 'be new to each other' on

See Ch.3. 371

marriage. The marriage dances mark their release from the previous restrictions that delimited their interaction, and reveals them in their new status to the gathered audience. Finally the exchanges are made. The husband collects cooked food and pig from his wife's section of the yai-arbas. 4 Several pigs are also fastened to the wife's side of the ton ger on her behalf, and just one to the husband's side to repay the sulai fal-in pig. The exchange of each of these pigs is marked by passal-ing: the donor steps on them and calls out the name of the recipient. The husband must 'buy' each of these pigs with shell-money. The husband then places a kb (wooden tongs with which women take food out of the earth oven) with more shell-money in it at the base of the yai arbas. This money is to remove the yal arbas and, once it is handed over, it and the pulpul are pulled down and dismantled. The yai arbas is said to belong

to, or mark all the women of the wife's village. It was also said to designate that 'only one woman of all of them is getting married'. The exchanges underneath and subsequent destruction of the yai-arbas's counterpart, the funerary tonger, are overtly to remove the 'memory' and concern with the deceased by giving closure and repayment to all the debts and exchanges related to them. The wedding rite in this sense resembles a funerary rite in that it is concerned with the removal of a woman from the daily concern and exchanges of her family. When life and social presence are conceived in terms of nurture and duty expressed in gifts and reciprocations, this is in fact a small social death and forgetting. Matan gurar (lit, eye of all the women), the bridewealth payment, in this context makes sense as a payment for the wife's departure from her natal village and her 'absence' from their eyes and thoughts. The payment is distributed amongst the wife's close family and an important portion of it is set aside for the mother and known as kam lo sus, 'to buy the milk'. Men

The wife's representative may also collect food from the husband's side. However it is unclear whether this is cooked food or not. ce,-tainly there is a heavy rhetorical emphasis that only the husband's moiety eat on this occasion. 372

say they pay for women specifically so that they will look after their mothers - in effect they buy or reciprocate for the wife's mother's milk, so that their wives will transfer their concern and care from their own mother to their husband's. The general emphasis which is repeated is the asymmetric exchange of pigs from the wife's clan for shell-money from the husband's; this is alongside, or in Siar terms literally 'accompanying' the exchange of the wife for shell-money. In interpreting these 'substitutions' we must bear in mind Strathern's sensible injunction, "substitution" as contained in idioms of marriage exchange has to be taken for what it is: a symbolic process of metaphor building which juxtaposes and transforms parts of persons and things to create hierarchies of value.' (1984:65)

The almost unanimous Siar comment upon discussion of marriage ritual is that only one moiety - the husband's - eats during it. Often people will say that they would consume such food quickly because they feel sorry for their affines. Given what we know already about Siar notions of gender and mothering, it is clear that their marriage exchanges promote the image and metaphor of the provision of a wife as provision of nurture, food, to be consumed. The kin term used by the woman's parents for her 'wife-taking' husband is, after all, ianmuk, literally he who 'eats but does not give food'. The conception

of wifely duties, in addition to child-bearing 'for her own clan', is an array of gardening and food provisioning responsibilities for her husband, his mother, and all his other kin. It is this aspect of the woman, and her clan, that is partible and transacted. What then of the return - what is it that the husband and his clan present as a partible aspect? Ultimately it is a child, or rather the substance which he plants within his wife for her to grow and feed into a new born. It is for this that the wife's clan repay the husband after his child's birth in a kawass taman ka - ' father goes on top' - when 373

the father now gains the moral superiority over the clan he was previously indebted to for his wife. Proximately the husband's clan gives shell-money which, in common with other arenas of sexual interaction in Lak and as in symbolism shared by many Melanesian societies (cf. Lindenbaum 1984), probably metaphorizes the man's contribution of substance, 'semen', to the child. The gendered nature of shell-money is highlighted in its direct metaphoric comparison with the food and cooked pig that the wife-takers receive. It is in mortuary ritual that their roles are clearest: fundamental to the 'deconception' and 'forgetting' of persons is the (re)payment of pigs to women and shell-money to the men before the material remains and the shellmoney effigy of the deceased can be removed by the (tubuan) spirits for the last time. The exchange of these goods is used to exploit and exemplify a qualitative contrast between permanence and ephemerality which is itself both gendered and linked with separate spatlo-temporal realms. The permanence and dryness of shell-money is associated not merely with the ongoing reproduction of male lifesubstance in the world of the living but also with the transgenerational continuity of the clan through depersonalized and largely inalienable male-controlled and animated copyright ancestors spirits dwelling in the world of the dead. The ephemeral, edibility of non-male 5, bloodfilled6 cooked pig is contrastingly associated with the personalized, life providing, but transient nurture typified as feminine and characteristic of the village.

Male pigs bred to be eaten are castrated. 6

Pigs are killed and cooked so as to avoid as much blood loss as possible. 374

GLOSSARY

375

This list is quite selective. All words are Siar/Lak, except those marked (TP) which are Tok Pisin - Papua New Guinean pidgin English. a! - light, and by extension spiritual anngan - an initial mortuary feast arat - sharp, effectual arbung - cross-moiety exchanges artanat - an avoidance relationship ator - men's decorations after a tubuan rite ba/ba! - tree fungus, reef sponge, a cutting from a tree used in secondary mortuary rites women's initiation, young fertile woman. da! dok - shell money fee for seeing a pidik, also mask. dukduk - a child tubuan. fakereng - opposite moiety. f/ram - a decorative axe associated with tubuan. gah - rattan cane. gorgor - tall ginger used to used to reserve property ía! - fasting and avoidance of liquids, cf. a! ianmuk - ' wife-taker', one who eats without reciprocating kabut - a man's decorative head—dress, or a woman's head—born food basket. kadi - pandanus leaf cape. kamgoi - leader, big man. kampapal - co-operative social unit based on a men's house, row in a singsing troupe. kamtiken oon - base\ root of banana,, group based on common matrilineal descent, clan. kastom (TP) - traditional practices. kilung - regulatory meetings, laws and enforcement of tubuan. koropo - a recent kind of tubuan. kundu - a handheld drum. Iai - a feather, or the spine of a head—dress. Ia!amar - shell money effigy of the deceased. !ibung— a men's singsing. lum - secret 'houses' of ancestors and clan valuables. ma! - barkcloth. man gis - a singsing troupe, moiety. mans - sorrow. marisoi - 'things of the men of before', , heirlooms. mat a matam - ' the dead come and see', the tubuan come to the village. nambu - memorial items of the deceased. nantof - a mother tubuan. nataka - tubuan spirit mask. ngasa - a feast to give food, especially to women flu - nest, leafy 'body' of a nataka. odo - regulatory meetings, laws and enforcement of tamianpoipoi. pal - men's house. 376

palanpidik - pal restricted to tubuan initiates. pampam - device used to induce spirit possession in singsings. pidik - secret possession. pokot - pandanus leaf cradle. pul - rattan tied to a stick, marking a period of mourning for the tubuan. pu/pu! - reversed food decorations for ton ger. rumai - house. sar - white shell money, broom. sar Iakman - to broom the village, the final stage of primary mortuary rites. singsing (TP) - a song and dance presentation. sin gah - a post, a carved men's house post, a sibling's spouse or spouse's sibling. sulmin - a subdivision of kastom particularly relating to sum. sum - a condition of mourning, loss. sur - bone, the yai—inpidiks ceremonial spear. susun - to carry something on one's head, or to breastfeed. talngan - one's spirit, soul. talung - spirit, also euphemism for bullroarer cult (tamianpoipoi). tamianpoipoi - buliroarer spirit, lit. 'man who eats decaying forest matter'. tan - man, mother. tangalaup - bullroarer. tan marit - man of the bush. tanruan - place—spirit associated with a particular location. taraiu - sacred are.of the tubuan. tar ep wataten - speeches and commentary given at end of kastoms. Tinsan!ik - 'Jane Doe'. ton ger - a type of food stand constructed at tondong. tondong - culminating section of primary funerary rites. tubuan (TP) - spirit mask, known as nataka in Siar. warkurai - secular judgmental meeting Vtrial'. wo - the tubuan divide by moiety and 'attack' each other wol - tradition, ritual performance, ritual law. yai - tree, wood. yai—inpidik - lit, tree bearing secrets, a ritual leader that owns nantoi. yaikip - stick for carrying pigs.

377

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