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Public art as the ‘taonga’ of socialist democracy:
Remembering the equality of the social trust under the new social
contact in Papua New Guinea
(Karen Sykes. Accepted for publication in Ethnos)
Abstract
Malanggans, ordinarily painted and used at funerals are displayed, unpainted
in New Irelands “international” airport. There they witness the return of dead
political leaders returned to their home-clans for burial. Malanggans
themselves in funeral use re-center the dead in kin-networks. In the airport,
they inspire me to ponder (as perhaps they ponder) the failure of PNG
socialist democracy, which I elucidate using Mauss’s concept of taonga, that
was to be the post-colonial nation-state. The article draws on Benjamin to
show that ‘brushing memory against the grain’ exposes how the
transformation of the values of socialist democracy to those of the neoliberal
state occurred through many imperfect transactions. As a value equality was
‘known’ best as a fleeting memory, and elusive experience which the memory
holds more completely, thatn the current era The changes in the display of
the art where made to fit with the purposes of the new airport terminal shows,
in even the most personal terms, just how fleeting were the promises of
independence.
[Key Words: Equality, Value, Social Contract]
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“Gold has a price, but jade is priceless” Chinese saying.
Displayed in an airport in Kavieng, New Ireland, ritual objects called
malanggans watch the body of a local parliamentarian as it returns from Port
Moresby to his people for burial. In ritual life, in active single days of use,
painted malanggans enable the distribution of personhood into wider social
networks. But the unpainted, deracinated malanggans of the airport display
bear witness to disrupted social networks. Indeed, in their afterlife as public
art and while witnessing the return of a local politician, perhaps they chart the
failure of the social trust once promised by the post-colonial nation-state.
Taking Marcel Mauss’s work to the postcolonial South Pacific, I aim to
understand the changing mutual confidence created by the delivery of social
services as the state’s social trust with its citizens. Henare (2005) argues that
the social trust between state and people in Aotearoa/ New Zealand was
instantiated and created by the treaty of Waitanga, a document authored
between the colonial state and its people and treated thereafter as a sacred
text. The treaty is not a ‘social contract’. Instead she describes it as a loose
agreement, wherein the documents come to have talisman like qualities with
the power fasten Maori and European interests to the common cause of
peaceful co-residence. Using the notion of taonga in the neocolonial, where it
is still found as powerful ‘greenstone’ in state and public ceremonies, echoes
the processes where by Maori leaders offered stones as markers of peaceful
co-residence between clans. Long associated with funerary exchanges,
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memorials and money, Maori taonga, like East Asian funeral jades, are
powerful emblems of equality, social trust and regeneration.
Henare argues that analysing governance in terms of the taonga is neither
westernization, nor anthropological conceit. It is a way of foregrounding the
nature of the middleground between Anglophone law, anthropology, and
indigenous concepts of of the political spirit that infuses social life (2006, 62).
Like Henare, I elaborate Mauss’s famous insights into the Taonga wherein he
understood that the gift, namely the taonga, constituted a form of bond
between individuals, clans, and villages. I am interested in moments when
Pacific Islanders remember independence as a kind of non-contractual form
of constitutional relationship between political leaders, civil servants and
people, one that can be enabled by an equitable redistribution of wealth in
order to create the independent nation state. Different from Henare, I examine
these moments when a shared memory of the independence era erupts and
disrupts the mundane life in the postcolonial world, and the sacred trust is
remembered, and finds expression in the public arts of a nation.
It should be noted that the taonga is sometimes known to work like a talisman,
it symbolizes a sacred trust that can be captured as easily in a state
document as it is in a stone carving in Aotearoa/ New Zealand. I suggest that
the wooden statuary, the malanggan described here as public art, are a
version of that loosely made agreement to trust in in the social relations of
state and citizens in Papua New Guinea. If that is so, then it is not too fanciful
to see in the wistful malanggans’ witness, a reflection on another object’s
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demise, the demise of the taonga? Does the malanggans’ own beauty arise
from their figuration of a postcolonial but pre neo-liberal life, invoking kin-ties
and public services?
Equality as a value in democratic states
There is an enigma about the concept of equality in the democratic state that
also is integral to its legitimacy in the postcolonial world. How did the
distribution of services that once made the social trust between leadership
and citizen later twist into an economic agreement between creditor state and
debtor citizen?i I focus on the memory of equality at the time of independence,
and analyze it in the light of contemporary ambivalence felt towards both the
aging nationalists of the postcolonial era and the political legacy of
independence. I have chosen to examine the funerary arrangements for some
of the politicians of the nationalist period in Papua New Guinea (PNG), a
Pacific Island nation that came to independence in 1975. There, the changing
face of equality is recalled in public art and ritual sculptures that are made to
host the return of the body of the politician to his home province for a village
funeral. I explore how these also bear witness to the changing face of equality
in the nation. Although these public ceremonials held in the provinces have
lost the lustre that makes funerary rituals effective mediums for regeneration
of clan life, they have become images that capture past times. These images
also move people to raise criticisms of the current times. I conclude that
continuity with the past is not the main concern of the participants; they use
malanggans as a value-form of the more intangible concept of equality, a
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concept that is currently under revision and review in the region. The image of
equality, once lost, has become an aspiration.
It is not surprising that the value-forms of equality are under stress today. In
the process of neo-liberalisation in the Asia-Pacific region the social contract
has gradually become more restrictive of rights and freedoms, and now forms
a rationale for political control, rather than a means of integrating political
society (Kwon 2010, Povinelli 2002, and differently Scott 2010). Equality has
become the watch word of the neoliberals, but the sense of that amongst
people who are the grassroots of the Pacific Island nations has not been fully
charted. Grassroots concepts of equality have been central to many critical
political theories, from Alexis De Toqueville (1935, 1840) on. Mauss (1925),
Durkheim (1925), Dumont (1970) recognized the centrality of the concept
equality to mid-twentieth century democracy. The concept of equality puzzled
ethnographers of Melanesia who hoped to see an egalitarian lifestyle in the
pre-independence era (Burridge 1964, Forge 1972, Jolly 1987, Shieffelin
1976, and differently A. Strathern 1986, M. Strathern 1987). In a different
synthesis, Lederman (1986) shows how the axis of political equality operates
in parallel to gender ideology. Later scholars point out that equality can be a
subject of scholarship, even while equality’s ideological legacy becomes an
impediment to scholarship in a liberal democracy (Robbins 1994). Oddly,
where equality is a key value, people often fail to practice it. Is the problem
that egalitarian relations are suppressed, or rather does the concept of
equality elude the here and now, being nothing more than a beautiful memory
of the quality of past experience?
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Mauss (1925) understood the methodological dilemmas entailed in any
attempt to discuss equality. He began by comparing the different forms of
equality expressed by the competitive kula-exchange, the redistribution of
potlatch gifts, and the delivery of the French social services in an evolutionary
perspective. Over half a century later, in an article researched in the decade
of independence, that Gregory (1980) argued that the different concepts of
equality that Mauss discussed as kula and potlatch were correlates: kula was
grounded on equality of competitive interests of individuals, and potlatch on
equality of potential access to social relationships. Gregory argues that at the
time of independence, the potlatch provided a mechanism of capital wealth
destruction in PNG because it made competitive capital accumulation difficult:
destruction reduced the media of exchange and increased the volume of
potential social relationships. The present is different. At independence it had
been true that Papua New Guineans measured equality as an outcome of the
distribution of potential to be realized in social services, however, the new
contract presumes a natural equality between citizens who each hold specific
economic interests in exchange and each give these up in return for individual
rights.
I
argue
that
Papua
New
Guineans’
contemporary
political
consciousness is shaped on shifting memories of the earlier social trust
between renowned politicians and citizens; and I show that the politician’s
funeral exposes variable images of equality.
Remembering the social trust under the new social contract
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Mauss recognized that the reciprocal meeting of obligations constituted a
social trust, as an extensively shared form of social cohesion, and he
authored some of the most compelling political essays on this theme amongst
others of his early 20th century political writings. He argued that the state’s
obligation to deliver social services was the very core of democratic social and
political development (Mauss 1925 (1990), Sahlins 1972, Gane 1998, Sykes
2009, Hart 2007). To put it in similar terms to those which Mauss used to
express his thoughts about France in the beginning of the 20th century; the gift
of social services from the state to the citizenry justified the state’s existence,
and the citizens met their obligation to return that gift by supporting the
development of the nation. Mauss’s early insight has inspired the launch of
the Revue du Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales,
(M.A.U.S.S.), a quarterly which aims to shift the scholarly assumptions of
political theory in French Social Sciences. Its editor, Alain Caille extends
Mauss’s political analysis to the French neoliberal state in the 21st century,
and considers the delivery of social services to be a form of potlatch. In similar
step, I take Mauss’s work to the postcolonial South Pacific, and aim to
understand the social trust created by delivery of social services as the state’s
social trust with its citizens. Like Mauss, I am interested in how taonga create
a kind of non-contractual form of the constitutional relationships between its
political leaders, civil servants and people that is enabled by an equitable
redistribution of wealth in order to create the independent nation state.
For readers unfamiliar with them taonga include beautiful sacred jade objects,
often made of ‘New Zealand greenstone’, and have a significant cultural and
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political heritage in the new Pacific states. The taonga were once used by
Maori leaders to establish bonds of trust and peace between communities.
They are now given as ceremonial gifts marking precious relations between
the recipient, the people, and the leaders of Aotearoa/New Zealand. They
continue to have constitutional significance in that country, where they were
central to the nation’s independence from Britain, an agreement made with
the Treaty of Waitangi that established co-residence of Maori with Europeans.
Treaties, as students of postcolonial social and political history can report, are
not contracts between newly arrived European settlers and long term
‘indigenous’ residents; instead the treaty entails responsibilities - each party
must reach recognize the agreement if it is to be valuable to their mutual cooperation over time.
I am concerned here with the memory of that that social trust, ‘the taonga’ in
New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, where the trust between clans that
fomented the idea of a wider social cohesion constitutive of the independent
state became a ‘Melanesian Way’ (Narokobi 1976), a cultural form by which
the state defined its imminent nationhood. That sacred trust, once built on
cultural connections across the nation, has passed into memory. Cultural
events in the present are praised for reinstating the best qualities of those
seen at independence in times when the state is less able to support national
celebrations of PNG arts: as many Papua New Guineans say, the present in
PNG is not like the past, and contemporary people struggle with the loss of
social services, confront the moral compromises that politicians made to
remain in power, and rely upon a volatile state currency. This new ‘disordered
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economy’ entails social complexity that escapes conventional terms of
analysis because within it many standards of value coexist and remain
inconsistent and unstable (Gregory 1997, 2009). The negotiations which had
been made at the time of independence have fallen into the shades of
memory, and the social trust no longer ensures social democracy, a politics
that it had once helped to foster in a region of 800 language groups. Critically,
the transition to neo-liberalism by the later part of the 1990s relegated social
and political democracy to no more than a beautiful memory.
In order to understand the present, in this article I have returned to the period
of independence. I acknowledge that I have begun with some grand, enduring
theories of anthropology that have been critically circulated through the
decades (without destroying them), and my article modestly develops some
insights derived from these, and along a specific line of argument raised by
Gregory (1980) at the time of PNG independence. For Gregory, the theory of
that people exchange gifts as a way of acknowledging an obligation is first
and foremost a value theory. In fact, Mauss argued any gift expressed the
religious, political, economic and moral beliefs in society. Hence, his book,
“The Gift” cannot be understood as an analysis of primarily one of several
domains of knowledge about the world, as later scholars have chosen to
argue (Levi Strauss 1963, Sigard 2001, Hart 2007) Erudite readers will recall
that it was Mauss’s student Dumont who refined Mauss’s theory of the gift for
the purpose of making comparative insights into the ideologies of whole
societies, and especially into hierarchical and egalitarian relations, Dumont’s
work is not often cited for its use in understanding the neoliberal era for good
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reasons. To effectively work with Mauss as a value theorist in the neo-liberal
era entails a more historically grounded approach to participant observation
and ethnography than Dumont once advocated in the post World War Two
era. That value theory, argues Gregory (1980, 1997) is one which grounds an
understanding of the gift in an analysis of how people compare equality as a
form of relationship between humans (gifts to men), with hierarchy as a form
of relationship between humans and gods, or often ‘the community’ (gift to
gods). He argues that,
‘the principle of interest does not underlie gifts-to-men systems, and
that, paradoxically, it is rather the principle of destruction inherent in a
gifts-to-god
system
that
offers
greatest
potential
for
capital
accumulation in the context of a 'modern cash economy aimed at
development’ (Gregory 1980, 627).
The crucial point is this: Gregory argued that equality as a value was not fixed
in an ideological system as a singular concept. Equality was predicated on
two different processes of value creation, namely wealth destruction (as in
potlatch) which created valued social relationships for those who could
disclaim need for or interests in material goods, and making of material
objects as valuables, (in moka or kula), in which individuals pitched their
interests against each other. He argued that at the time of independence, it
was not competitive interests in exchange between Europeans and
Melanesians that facilitated the process of capital accumulation and the
creation of economic value in small Melanesian towns during the early years
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of independence in Papua New Guinea, but rather, the processes of wealth
destruction undertaken by Papua New Guineans themselves that lead to new
social forms. He leaves us with the question of what equality is in the new
state, “the outward form of the system has changed much in the past one
hundred years, but the essential purpose-the ranking of men and clans-is still
the same” (Gregory 1980, 649). The next question must be how people value
equality in social relationships.
When contemporary PNG citizens recall the spirit of independence they
express regrets for what has been lost. They are most critical of the prestige
of mid-twentieth century leaders who have transformed the spirit of this gift of
state services, the taonga of socialist democracy into its current form. They
discuss in their personal, kin and village relations how the redistribution of
wealth as social services became an act of destruction, and turned the
tangible wealth of state institutions and services, into relations of credit and
debt. Most significantly they have come to regard the prestige of
independence leaders with some suspicion, and complain that the lustre of
independence has dimmed and its artful forms are faded. In order to
understand the place of the fathers of independence in the new PNG, it helps
to understand one of the key institutions that they used to bolster the new
state. In the next section I examine the state’s support of national culture, and
the role of public art in making the prestige of national politicians.
Public art as the taonga of socialist democracy
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Papua New Guineans claim that equality was central to the cultural values
that they held at the time of independence, and further they used different
forms of public art to record it. The era of independence is past, but the
artworks remain with us today. At independence, the National Cultural
Commission NCC was a vehicle that helped Papua New Guinean culture to
pave the
way for the hand-over of political leadership to Papua New
Guinean’s from their Australian ‘trustees’. The parliament buildings echoed
the style of the Men’s house of a region, the arts festivals held in provincial
and national capitals each year for the celebrated PNG Independence Day,
the National Museum collected examples of material culture, and recorded the
dances and songs on audio and video tape for preservation there. Selfgovernance was welcomed. All involved in these events looked back on them
and agreed that at this moment in history culture had been a ‘social good’.
PNG was rich in its many societies whose cultural values – expressed in the
languages, rituals, distinctive agrarian lifestyle, complex systems of land
tenure, and beautiful forms of material culture – sustained them over
centuries. In the light of such successes, many thought that the NCC has
been a jewel in the crown of PNG government departments simply because it
facilitated the preservation and validation of the legacy of core Melanesian
cultural values into the present.
A brief history of Papua New Guinean independence shows that government
bureaucracy, rather than a well-spring of nationalist spirit from its citizens,
ensconced support for the democratic values of the newly independent state.
In Papua New Guinea, the arrival of political independence promised
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Melanesians the same services available to the democracies of the developed
world (Foster 1995, Otto and Thomas 1998), if they also sustained their
values while they used the education, health, transportation, and local-level
government. The citizens of the new nation accepted the gift from the new
state of their ‘social services’ and planned to use them to support their many
cultures. This gift was a ‘good thing’, to put it in the words of an elderly man of
my acquaintance who had been a school headmaster at the time. He had
speculated, what other reason existed to legitimate the presence of political
leaders, civil servants, a bureaucratic class, and foreign business in the
country than to support the flourishing of the cultural life of their many different
societies? His words were meant as ironic. He had been reflecting on the
state of civil war between the national government and the people of the North
Solomons province. He commented that when Bougainvilleans became
disillusioned with the delivery of state services, both before and after the
Crisis of 1988, they argued that there was no reason to have a PNG state,
except to create good lives for its citizens. Elsewhere (Sykes 2009, 2007), I
have argued that the failure of the social trust created at independence, also
created the sense of the loss of the moral grounds of a social democracy in
PNG.
The words of the elderly man show that despite the founding of a social trust
with gifts of social services between leaders and citizens, after PNG’s
independence the integrity of the relations between citizens and political
leaders had been sorely tested. Social services were given for other purposes
than to cultivate the collective spirit: politicians aimed to win allegiance from
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clansmen, and also to acquire prestige through acts of benevolence by
bringing state-funded community development projects to their home villages
(Lipset 1989). A fuller exploration of these changing relations between state
and citizen would surely take us through the slippage of provision of public
utilities, the interruptions of the delivery of social services, and the related
intentional and unintentional collusions between politicians and foreign
companies in the development of resources for commercial exploitation, and
the separate studies of these exist. For example, my own research has shown
how the delivery of education might also be used as a bribe for votes or an act
of patronage (Sykes 2001), while access to health care might become the
rationale for making an inter-province adoption (Sykes 2009). A brief
summation of those processes shows that by the end of the twentieth century,
the promise of the delivery of social services to the citizens of PNG remained
invaluable to conceiving the future of the nation and a peerless gift to citizens;
but it was only a memory of the dreams they had held at the time of
independence. I will turn now to examine the services provided by a
department which was fundamentally concerned with the public display of
many forms of Papua New Guinean culture – ceremonial sculpture,
ethnographic artefacts, ritual dances and songs – and secondarily committed
to the support for the artists who make contemporary forms of it.
As I have proposed, government support for the arts would not at first appear
to have a primary location in a nationalist story of the taonga of social
democracy in PNG, but it did hold a special place for the founding fathers of
independence (and the Australian officials who supported them) so much so
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that support for culture was written into the PNG constitution. Up to the
present, amongst all the departments eager for a share of the national budget,
PNG chooses to provide funds first for the National Cultural Commission in
order to look after public art, and then attends to the budgetary needs of the
others. The government still makes a sequence of budget settlements to the
departments, and their succession represents the priority accorded to them by
the PNG constitution. The complexity in this arises only because public culture
is the smaller part of the wider concerns for the delivery of services, and in
Papua New Guinea the budget of the National Cultural Commission (NCC)
and the Department of Education are vastly different in size. Yet, despite the
NCC’s rank as the first in line for budgetary allocations, they remain the holder
of the smallest part of the national budget.
The paradox is resolved by calling on the social trust in the nation that had
been created by the PNG constitution. In settling the national budget upon the
different government departments every year, the parliament entrusts a
modest sum to the NCC. The Director of the NCC drafts an annual budget
and makes a request to the PNG government. In his letter he opens his with a
quotation from the nation’s constitutionii. The constitution aims first to promote
integral human development, most specifically through a ranked series of
government functions and principles of citizenship: first, contributions of every
person to the common good; second, education based in mutual respect; and
three, “all forms of beneficial creativity, including sciences and cultures, to be
actively encouraged.” Fourth, health; fifth, family; and sixth, local level
government; each department follows upon the previous one in the chain of
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budget decisions. I am told that the Director of the NCC must remind each
government to settle a budget upon his department first, before the other
departments. As he put it, “It is not that I do not want them to make large
settlements on the other departments of health and local government, neither
do I need them to make a large settlement on the NCC. I simply want the
government to think of my work first”. The Director is certain to use the
constitution as a reminder of his agreement with the government that they will
keep to the long term ‘trust’ to provide for the arts.
In a longer article, I would spell out how, in PNG, the value of national culture
lies in its specific relationship to the country’s citizens, and forms a part of the
triad of free market, state managed, and ‘traditional’ economy in the nation.
As would be the case for the complex economies of the very late stages of
liberal capitalism in the postcolonial state, culture is one of several
constituents of ‘the economy’, the state and the market are classically
accepted as the other two. The concept of hybrid economy (Altman 2009)
derives from other attempts to rethink such ‘mixed economies’iii, and better
describes the transactions of daily life in PNG (and perhaps other Pacific
Island nations) than either ‘consumer economy’ or the ‘traditional economy’.
Hybrid economy describes a wider social nexus of relations, and is neither an
instituted market economy nor a global capitalist system of unregulated,
loosely organized exchanges. In a hybrid economy, such as that of
contemporary PNG, public art is not valued simply as a product of the
collective artistic labours of craftsmen and artists to be risked in international
exchanges, nor is it valued only as an object to be exchanged with other
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commodities only to be consumed in new contexts that will re-signify its
meanings for that particular time, place and contingency. Nor is it valued best
by using frames of analysis authored by anthropologists following the value
chain theorists (Foster 2005) who assume worth can be captured in the
affective dimensions of value creation (Appadurai 1986, Kopytoff 1986), the
very same sentiments which anthropologists can expertly expose as social
constructions. The hybrid economy can be best understood through
ethnographic descriptions, and offers an alternative approach to other
theorizations.
For my purposes, the concept ‘hybrid economy’ is grounded in a critical,
radical ethnography from which one can pose questions about the value of
social relationships that neither political economy models nor sociological
theories do quite so fully. To put it (perhaps too) simply, with such a
conceptualization, anthropology might go beyond political economy’s concern
with homo faber as the motor or creativity and past sociology’s narrower
attention to consumer interests as the drivers of value creation (Baudrilllard
1974). Anthropologists can describe what they best know how to do; more
exactly, they can provide ethnographically grounded accounts of how people
critically perceive the creation of value within social relations. For the purpose
of understanding how social democracy is re-evaluated in the neoliberal
world, ‘the hybrid economy’ allows for a conceptualization of the vicissitudes
of the relations between the social contract and the sacred trust as a ‘hybrid
economy’, and therefore provides some leverage on an enduring problem of
how to critique the process of value creation.
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Public art, the social trust and the life of the civil servant
Contemporary citizens of PNG claim that they have lost national pride in the
equality of citizens, and may have ‘misplaced’ the social trust, taonga, given
to them at independence. As one elder statesmen speaking of equality as the
social trust said to me, “we had put it (taonga) someplace, but where is it
now? (Tok Pisin: mipela bin puttim long sampela hap, na em i bin go we
nau?) With the memory of independence behind them, the citizenry must take
a new critical approach to the limits of the state’s social contract with them. I
will turn now to a case, wherein the loss of the social trust between
government and governed, and the rise of a very limited and restrictive form
of social contract, are realized as a national tragedy. I will examine how some
people in the province of New Ireland consider and reconsider the prestige of
their country’s leaders and bureaucrats at the different events of their funerals
and in the display of funerary sculpture known as malanggan.
As an illustration of the status of national culture in a social democracy forged
on the social trust, there are few examples in PNG better than the stunning
sculptures that have been installed in the terminal building of the Kavieng
International Airport in New Ireland Province. They are renowned funerary
sculptures, known as malanggan, which otherwise can be found in most all of
the collections of national museums of Europe, the Americas, and the AsiaPacific region. They are important ritual objects because the sculptures have
the capacity to overwhelm the funeral guests with the beauty of design, paint
and presentation (Sykes 2010). The aesthetics of the malaggan funerary
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sculptures made such a powerful impact upon those who viewed them that
the sculptors destroyed their creations at the end of the ceremonies. Only a
memory of their lustrous beauty would remain in the participant’s mind’s eye,
and among those who have viewed the sculptures used in funerals, collectors
from the 19th century forward found them memorable. One wrote of how he
had been so enthralled by the figures that he dreamt of the images years later
after returning to his European homelands.
As funeral sculptures, now installed as public art, they appositely record the
memory of the independence era. Today, as permanent installations of public
art they stand as witness to the rise of a neoliberal economy in PNG simply
because they have ‘looked on’ the many comings and goings of government
officials,
national
businessmen,
foreign
investors,
missionaries
and
international visitors, since they were first erected twenty years ago when the
international airport was first built. The analogy that is sometimes made
between these sculptures and persons is appropriate in a broadly
anthropological sense. According to Gell (1998), art objects are the outcomes
of intentional human acts, but lack the capacity to express an intention
themselves. Gell theorizes the relationship, between the object as agent and
the viewer as patient, as the ‘art nexus’iv. This theory, which draws critically on
classical theories of art, explains how the art objects -- sculptures, paintings,
friezes – became analogous to persons, if only because they are
embodiments of creative human consciousness. Gell’s aim is to understand
how objects become the embodiments of human consciousness, as when the
land mine becomes the object of the military’s distributed agency in warfare. I
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take the art nexus to be the true subject of Gell’s theory, and I elaborate upon
Gell’s theory by deploying the theory of the art nexus as a specific version of
the hybrid economy, a wider nexus of social relations that capture the state,
commercial and traditional relations of the postcolonial state.
The sculptures constitute the art nexus of shared memory, the presence of
the past through its affective engagement with the present. Everyday citizens
of Papua New Guinea pass in front of the sculptures, on-going movements of
national and international travellers, businessmen and politicians, kindred who
prepare and host funerary rituals for the dead, and the comings and goings of
officials who work to support PNG culture. The airport sculptures are at a key
node of a network of relations which comprise contemporary society, wherein
value standards are various and proliferate and the economy is disordered
and even volatile. The Kavieng airport itself is a good example of the hybrid
economy and all that it might mean. It has always seemed unusual to find an
international airport in Kavieng, New Ireland, a town of the furthest most
destination and longest flight path from the nation’s capital, Port Moresby.
Kavieng had been more important in the past as a port, and is a fine example
of the somnolent small Pacific Island harbours, more familiar to readers of
Somerset Maugham, than this bustling international destination. However,
even today, Kavieng International Airport is not quite what a North American
or European visitor expects. Inter-continental jets do not land here, and
rumours circulate that neither the thin pavement on the runways nor the weak
foundations
could
support
safe
landing
for
intercontinental
flights.
Nonetheless, in the last two decades, the provincial capital has benefited from
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the associated work with a consortium of international mining companies,
which are exploiting one of the richest veins of gold in the world. Since the
1990s, international passengers are common, so much so, that this place is a
crossroads of regional, national and international traffic in business,
government, and tourism. Here, at the nexus of the hybrid economy, Kavieng
International Airport thereby earns the name that Sir Julius Chan gave it.
In New Ireland, as elsewhere in PNG, it became common throughout the
1990s for companies to invest in national culture by providing funding for
national art installations. This investment was more akin to a payback, of
sorts, for the benefits won through the licence to develop their business in
PNG. In this case, the art for the Kavieng Airport terminal was commissioned
with funds from an arrangement between business investors and then Prime
Minister Sir Julius Chan, numerous provincial government officials, and with
the support of village leaders. I have written elsewhere about the process of
installing these art objects, which are based on ritual sculptures normally
presented at funerals, and the tragedy that slowly played out over the years
following their first public display. In that article, I had argued that the complex
and sensitive negotiations between the politicians that commissioned the art
the bureaucrats who oversaw the installation, and the master carvers with
their clansmen that created it treated the carvings both as public art and
sacred objects (Sykes 2009). Those negotiations over the display of public art
had been intensely focused on the completion of eleven supporting posts for
the airport terminal, each one featuring the distinctive images of one of the
language groups across the province. The minimal pay for their carving, once
22
distributed amongst the carvers of each post, their assistants and their friends
barely appeased the concerns of the carvers that the work had been so
rushed that the sculptures stood as a sacrilege against the memory of the
ritual objects which they imitated. The carvers died, whether from shame or
from retributive sorcery, or from the continuing power of the malanggan
images to render the ill prepared carvers speechless or dead simply for
exposing the images to public eyes. What happened exactly is hard to say,
but the malanggans remained mute upon the subject, all the while the
politicians, businessmen and visitors came and went through the airport
terminal buildings. I discuss the aesthetics of the malanggan in a different
paper (Sykes 2010), but here my ethnographic account of their role as ritual
art shows how deeply the sculptures embroil viewers in existential questions
about how past experiences might be captured in the present.
The sculptures presented in Kavieng airport terminal are a good example of
the awkward nodal location of ritual sculpture as heritage art in an hybrid
economy, where the exchanges of private enterprise and state funding mix
with transactions in the economy of clan and personal kin relations. Not
surprisingly, when the sculptures became a permanent fixture in the Kavieng
International Airport terminal, they created considerable discussion and
anxiety at the time they were erected. These public art installations are copies
of the images used on sculptures for funerary rituals. The basic concern lay
with the politicians’ decision to blur of the role of public art and ritual objects,
whereas the ritual participants took care to separate these. In ritual, hosts do
not support any casual viewing of the sculpture, and reveal it to guests and
23
participants only at the zenith of the ritual activity. The issue is not simply that
the sculpture is ‘sacred’ and therefore dangerous: instead, a part of the
process of the creation of the ritual object relies upon the destruction of the
material form, leaving only an image emblazoned in memory. What really
matters is that the image is as unstable and ephemeral as life itself; its colours
and form shift and play with human memory. By contrast, in the airport
terminal the images are fixed and permanent. Unlike the ritual sculptures, the
memory of viewing the public art does not play in a person’s imagination, as
do the after-images retained from viewing the ritual sculpture before it is
destroyed and burnt.
Weighing their losses: The return of national leaders to the provincial
airport terminal
The malanggan in its role as public art is more than a symbol of the
independence era. As an object upon which human attention can settle in
order to measure the significance of the moment, it is material form through
which humans can think through more enigmatic aspects of shared existence
in those times. The sculpture also recalls the events of funeral, the original
settings in which it was raised. As Henare has derscribed the taonga as ‘living
documents (Henare 2006, 45), the malanggan as a funeral object reinscribed
as public art is ‘alive’ to the social relatonships which embrace it, in whatever
venue it stands..
24
It is commonly said that death is a great leveller. Although this is not a phrase
that is used in New Ireland, the idea that death is faced by each person is.
This general human problem draws my attention to a series of ceremonial
events at the airport to welcome the return of the elderly and infirm civil
servant, the politician, the overseas businessman on the way their home
villages. It is a common habit amongst expatriate New Irelanders to return to
their birthplaces in the years just before they die. Those who have spent lives
as career bureaucrats in Port Moresby, the nation’s capital, might choose to
be buried in that city, but it is felt it is better if the civil servant can be buried in
their clan ground, in their hamlets in the rural villages of PNG. Sometimes, the
relatives return from afar carrying the body of the politician who had died in
office, or had remained in the city for a short while at retirement. In the many
cases in which it is necessary to repatriate the body of the deceased person,
the body is flown from abroad to Kavieng International Airport, where their
coffin is de-boarded from the hold of the plane and delivered into the Airport
terminal. At the airport terminal the coffin passes through the halls of the
terminal buildings, which are supported with decorated posts, emblazoned
with the famous funerary carvings. The posts are more than decorative; they
are also thought to honour the passing of the dead, just as they bear silent
witness to the comings and goings of businessmen and politicians on their
way to the provincial offices or on visits to village relatives.
As the body emerges from the arrivals hall, the female relatives who have
gathered there to meet the coffin begin to keen. Their traditional laments
highlight the specific relationship which they bear to the deceased. A woman
25
who calls him grandfather, might wail by calling out repeatedly, the name that
the deceased once called out to her, and the silent witness of the sculptures
will be broken by the human female voice crying “my granddaughter, my
granddaughter, I’ll never hear him call me my granddaughter again”. The
intimacy of the kinship bond, although stretched by geographic distances and
passing time, is asserted as the coffin leaves the airport. Once past the
arrivals hall, the coffin is collected by the relatives who have come from the
village to meet it. The take the coffin into their hands, and typically, loaded it
onto the back of a truck. The women wail for the duration of the journey, as it
is driven to the hamlet where the Christian and traditional funerals will be held
and the body buried.
In the village the final funeral will be completed. A funeral in New Ireland
involves a redistribution of wealth of the deceased. In this sense, it is most
akin to a potlatch, wherein the wealth given away creates potential exchange
partners for those who are hosting the event, the children of the deceased
person. In the main, the wealth is given away to the clans of the deceased,
who are his affinal and consanguine relatives (for a fuller description see
Kucher 2002, Clay 1979, 1986, and Wagner 1986), and they remain available
to call on to reciprocate the hosts generosity. As members of a matrilineal
society, the villagers are generally highly conscious of their cross-cutting
obligations to each other. If I chose the case wherein villagers are burying a
man, then it is possible to say that those present are primarily members of the
matrilineal clan of his mother into which he was born and became a member,
and secondarily, the clan of his father; but most importantly, his funeral is
26
hosted by the clan of his wife and of his children, who are members of one
matrilineal clan, his children being born into the clan of their mother, who is
also his wife. The funeral, which is also a ‘potlatch’ ritual, exposes how giving
to the point where in the hosts are impoverished of any material wealth levels
any differences in material wealth that might be noted over the course of a
lifetime, and establishes the fame of the man, now deceased. The hosts aim
to impoverish their stores of material goods, and insist that they beggar
themselves to others by giving away the wealth of gardens, pigs, money and
shells of the deceased and themselves, and they call on the rest of the village
to give what they can. However, for all their material sacrifice what comes
back is simply this: the whole of society in the form of a network of social
relationships. As any Papua New Guinean will tell you, life itself in lived in the
company of others.
At the funeral, the malanggan sculpture will be erected for one day. Often it is
the case that the sculpture is presented at the time of the first funeral of the
politician, short cutting the longer sequence of about five funerals that a body
in New Ireland receives. That short cutting is interesting in its own right
because it shows the civil servants’ more shallow history of participation in
exchange relations in the village. The time away from the village, the more
minimal participation in village politics, means that his funeral cycle can be
completed quickly there. However, some civil servants have sent many
financial remittances to village relatives, and spent a lifetime making short
return visits. Although all kin are celebrated with the full sequence, the longer
time spent spinning out the cycle of funerals is necessary to complete the
27
mortuary work for these men and women who have more developed ties in
the village.
The most distinctive feature making the village display of the ritual sculpture
different from those on display at the airport terminal is paint. Paint creates
‘lustre’ on the sculpture, and provides an important role in making the beauty
of the carving. In the village with paint – the malanggan sculpture stands as a
gift to the mark the virtue of the deceased person, and to provide funeral goes
with a moment to share in his virtue. As they gaze once upon the malaggan
sculpture it captures their imaginations differently. The colours are trapped in
their minds’ eye, and the after image emblazoned on their retinas, their desire
to capture one final memory of the kin who had been lost to them is replete.
The image of the sculpture, with inversions of dark and light, red and green,
can be seen as they close their eyelids and focus their visions on the images
they see and imagine they see there. We can practice it like they do, by
looking out of a window onto the light reflected from a large building on a
sunny day. In turning away from that scintillating display, the retina captures
the view and reflects it back to us as an after image, one of the physiological
tricks of human sight. It is not easy to keep that image stable in front of our
sight. It shifts and fades.
The gloss on the funerary sculpture is frail; the physicality of human life is
ephemeral. That is the nature of it. The participants at the funeral in the village
participate in the redistribution of the dead person’s virtue into the network of
social relations in which they all had a share. However, in the airport the
28
sculpture stands without paint – an unreciprocated gift, no spirit to send
across wider the nexus of social relations. In his theory of the art nexus, which
positions the art object between the ‘patient’ and the ‘actor’, the agency of the
artist and the recipient of art is rethought in terms of the life stage of the art
object, for which the biography is written in relationship to the others present,
not as a tale of its solitary journey through many faceless hands, and its
capacity to represent its singular experiences along the way. When seen in
the airport, the images performed a role as witnesses. They stand by the
passing of the coffins of dead bureaucrats and business elites who are
repatriated from distant cities for burial in their home villages. The mourners,
who are assembled at the airport, say that the effect of viewing the coffin
through the rows of sculptures is like that of seeing the body leaving the
funeral grounds of the men's house: but for one key difference. In the village
the lustre of the ritual sculptures captured a memory of the virtue of the
deceased and shared it amongst the funeral-goers. At the airport terminal, the
paintless, dull carvings witness the comings and goings of a lacklustre career
bureaucrat, and sometimes the final day at the end of the life of a civil servant.
The funeral participant then wonders, what is memory of a life lived without
lustre, a colourless career, an unworthy leader? Gell’s argument that
mourners do not revalue the corpse as a ‘sign’ but do value it as a stage in
the life of the person is probably a correct, from the perspective of those New
Irelanders who might reflect on their assessment of their political leaders.
Malanggan sculptures in their ‘after life’ as public art evoke a memory of the
‘sameness’, or the common ground that all humans share. As a part of that
29
wider nexus of the hybrid economy, malaggans are used in Papua New
Guinea to demonstrate Melanesia's cultural heritage. As such, New Irelanders
used them in the arrival and departure halls at their International Airport, as if
they were handsome symbols of Melanesian ‘ethnicity’ and represented the
loss of virtues, more easily than they redistribute the virtues of social life
amongst citizens there. There, in the airport, the display of funerary objects as
public art cost New Irelanders dearly; the display set the price for New
Irelanders participation in commercial relations, and their participation in the
democratic state – a loss of vibrancy. The airport terminal carvings are not
lustrous with coloured paint as were the ritual images. I have shown how a
sense of ‘lost lustre’ marks the costs of displaying this ritual object as public
art, and in so doing I have extended Gell's theory of the art nexus to the
hybrid economy, where it also shown that value of social services are a the
priceless beautiful memory, which is fragile and at risk of destruction in the
postcolonial state.
“Gold has a price, but jade is priceless”
The taonga compares with the malanggan in uncanny ways Each conceptual
form directs anthropological, as well as postcolonial citizens' attention, to the
body politic. The treaty made between settlers and indigenous peoples in
founding the Aotearoa/New Zealand is, quite simply, a taonga. Whereas, the
display of malanggan indirectly raises or elicits discussions of equality as a
value in the social contract in post colonial Papua New Guinea. However, the
physical qualities of the ritual objects are intriguing. The taonga was
30
sometimes a jade object, a beautiful sculpture of green stone that humans
gave to each other in trust. Once used in the funeral cremations of south-east
Asia, the jade has carried a special vibrancy and patina akin to oiled skin. The
malanggan is likened to the human body, and in general terms to life itself,
(although it is not specifically an effigy of the deceased). The exchanges
leading to display of each – the malanggan and the taonga – accomplished a
generalized sense the human sociality that is both simple and profound. In the
rituals of death, jade carvings compared with the riches of a human life hold
an equity that cannot be priced with gold. At the funeral, also called a
malanggan, in New Ireland, the participants share a common wisdom, we all
die one day, and so human life, while we can know each other, is important.
When a person looks on a malanggan sculpture, they might consider what it is
that they have lost.
At the time that the body of the politician is returned to his relatives, waiting to
prepare the final funeral in his home village, Papua New Guineans may
observe the dull sculptures in the airport terminal. They may take stock of
their contemporary lives, they might be different than the equality they say
they once enjoyed, and they might aspire to become more egalitarian than
they are. The current political era in PNG is a challenging one for political
leaders of the national, region and village, and for all those Papua New
Guineans who think of themselves as joined as kindred-citizens of the nation,
the province and the clan. The philosopher Walter Benjamin once understood
that a person’s shifting memory of the past is powerful, and recalling the old
times can revalue the current state of a good, as when brushing a hand
31
against the grain of a velvet cloth, simply to reverse its worn nap and restore
its past sheen. In a broader social and political sense, Benjamin made the
work of scholars the work of critique. He shows that memory flies up in the
moment of danger, and that when this memory of past times can be shared
more widely in a society the need for specific and purposeful action is clearer
to its members (Benjamin 1969, 257). In the light of his insight, I have argued,
that despite their lacklustre finish the intricately carved malanggan sculptures
in the airport present a paradox: they seem to be valuable because they
evoke a beautiful memory of how Papua New Guinean society might become.
The ethnography shows that contemporary citizens of Papua New Guinea
value equality in their relationships and understand its various forms. They
show this simply in the course of fulfilling their obligations as citizens,
clanspersons, and individuals. As elsewhere in the Pacific their definition of
equality shifts and turns, even as they recall memories of the social trust
underpinning independence while the parity of individuals under the new
social contract forge different bonds of social cohesion. However, in this
article, I have shown how that the shifting memory of the several value-forms
of equality is a key to a process that is less well understood, namely that a
shifting memory of equality at independence is coterminous with the
emergence of powerful and intimate political relations that underpin the new
social contract in a neo-liberal Pacific.
32
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i
My thanks to Heonik Kwon for putting this problem clearly (personal communication, 8
November, 2010)
ii
Jacob Simet, Director of the National Cultural Commission, personal communication, 1
December 2001.
iii
‘Mixed economy’ was coined as a term to described the form of the late twentieth century
economy of the UK, where state socialism sustained international commerce until the end of
the cold war era there. A ‘hybrid economy’ includes the traditional economy of ceremonial life
with that of the mixed economy.
iv
Malanngans are examples of what Gell (1998), in his theory of the art nexus, defined as
artistic ‘agents’, whereas those who view them would be defined as ‘patients’. The theory is
35
as old as classical theories of aesthetics, which define beauty as an active capacity of an
object and the appreciation of beauty as a passive capacity of the viewer.