Extract from M. O'Hanlon's Paradise
J. Clifford's review of Paradise
Field collecting (2)
Field collecting (3)
pp 55 - 64:
... the process of making a collection itself proved to be more interesting than I had naively expected. It confronted me with my own taken-for-granted assumptions as to the nature of the transactions I was engaged in, the definition of 'material culture', and what actually constituted a 'Wahgi artefact'. Collecting also proved to be more complex than its rather one-dimensional contemporary reputation ... would suggest. ... I did not find myself a free agent, assembling a collection according to my own whim. I discovered that my collecting was constrained by local processes and rules, with the upshot that the collection I made partly mirrored in its own structure local social organisation. And while many comments on collecting have focussed upon the 'rupture' involved in removing artefacts from their local context to install them in the rather different one of the museum or gallery, this was not necessarily the way in which the Wahgi themselves chose to view the matter.
Perhaps one reason for the rather negative stereotype recently enjoyed by collecting has to do with our own culture's particular view of money and transactions which involve it. ... we have tended to .. conceive it as a powerfully invasive force with necessarily depersonalises and commercialises the bonds of sentiment and morality we regard as characteristic of small-scale communities. Certainly, before leaving for the Wahgi, I did feel moments of unease at the notion of returning to the community I had lived in as an anthropologist, but now with the intention of purchasing artefacts for removal.
Yet ... the distinction between 'sentiment' and 'money' which underlay my disquiet is not universal. Social relationships in the Highlands are not regarded as somehow depersonalised because money, or other goods, have passed between those involved: indeed, it is through such exchanges that relationships are formed and maintained. ... it had been the context of my original work as an anthropologist, when I had been accused of wandering in the graveyard, siphoning off intangible ancestral power - behaviour felt to be witchlike. Removing the collection at the end of my stay was re-categorised in local terms: but now one implication was that I was in the position less of a witch than of an in-law, owing the payments due to 'source people'.
These points are not made in an attempt to invert a stereotype: to suggest that, contrary to much recent characterisation, ethnographic collecting is always a 'good' thing. My intention is merely to point out that it is a widely-engaged-in activity which lately has been more judged than described ...
I moved into the ... settlement where we had lived on previous visits to the Wahgi. ... three ... issues, at once practical and conceptual, had to be addressed: what exactly was I there to collect, how was the collecting to be organised, and what should be paid for the artefacts collected?
At one level the answer to the first question was simple: 'Wahgi material culture'. ... Though there is no precise Wahgi equivalent, what I had in mind was the full repertoire of portable Wahgi goods, including personal adornment of all kinds, clothing, netbags, household goods, weaponry. ... The emphasis was to be on completeness, with contemporary material, such as the contents of a trade-store, represented equally with traditional items.
Despite these catholic intentions, however, I found myself unthinkingly privileging as 'Wahgi' those items which were produced in the area, rather than merely used there. One instance of this arose from my wish to acquire a wooden pandanus processing bowl, a type of artefact displaced in most areas of the Wahgi by metal equivalents. At length, one Wahgi visitor ... brought what was said to be such a vessel; and produced for inspection what I was sure was a bowl made in the Sepik area for sale to tourists. My curatorial protests that this was not a Wahgi pandanus processing bowl were met with an equally firm assertion that it was. Belatedly, I realised that we were arguing at cross-purposes. For me, the bowl was ineligible on the grounds that it was produced by a Sepik carver for sale to visitors; the seller's point was that this was a Wahgi pandanus processing bowl because (whatever its origins) it had been used by Wahgi to process pandanus, as indeed the oily stains testified. I regret now that I did not buy this, or a surprisingly wide range of other items flushed out of Wahgi houses by the opportunity to sell them but which nevertheless fell outside my somewhat puritan definition of 'Wahgi material culture'.
... The great majority of items purchased, then, were brought to Topkalap [O'Hanlon's home base] and offered for sale there ...
... My return to Topkalap with money to spend on artefacts potentially raised [the] issue of the distribution of wealth ... Although my collecting trip commenced in July, when there is a considerable amount of coffee income in circulation, the money which I had available to purchase artefacts and assistance still represented a substantial local asset. I worried that it might prove difficult to manage the tension between the demands of the immediate community, who would be likely to want me to buy exclusively from them, and my own wish to purchase a wider range of artefacts than they would be likely to possess. On this occasion, the local claims had the added force that we were also dependent on community protection from armed raskol gangs, a matter of some moment when the equivalent of thousands of pounds in cash had regularly to be transported and stored.
My concern was largely misplaced: Kinden [O'Hanlon's main field informant] proved to have quite clear ideas as to how to proceed. There should, he declared, be a specific order in which people should be entitled to offer artefacts for sale ... First people living in the local community at Topkalap should be asked, then the remainder of the subclans ... then the paired clan ... then the other Komblo clans ... then other Wahgi. In fact this principle of structural distance did not rigidly govern subsequent transactions: some individuals from more distant groups, whom I happened to know well, took advantage of the fact to offer material in advance of their 'turn'; some artefacts, such as shields, were simply not available within Komblo ...
I ... knew it would be politically impossible to continue to reside within a community without giving them priority in offering material for sale. ...
At the same time such processes also made the collection itself more interesting. While at one level it certainly reflected my own conception of what 'a collection of Wahgi material culture; should include, at another level the collection necessarily embodied local conditions and processes. The fact that it was constituted predominantly of Komblo artefacts reflected the realpolitik of field collecting, and the order in which the artefacts were acquired partially reproduced local social structure ... I suspect that most ethnographic collections contain much more of an indigenous ordering than their contemporary reputation - as having been assembled according to alien whim and 'torn' from a local context - often allows.
A final arena of cultural negotiation related to what should be given in return for artefacts acquired. For, of the dozens of people who gathered daily at Topkalap with artefacts to sell only the occasional individual, generally non-Komblo, was willing to specify a price. 'It's up to you', they would say instead, and almost never demure at the sum I suggested. In some instances, this reflected a genuine uncertainty as to what a rarely transacted item might be worth. But at another level, reluctance to specify a price stemmed from the fact that the transactions were rarely purchases in any simple sense. They had as much the character of local exchanges, in which precise amounts are not necessarily worked out in advance. ...
In fact, I was not entirely without guidelines in suggesting prices. Some artefacts, such as items of adornment, are regularly offered for sale to other Wahgi in roadside markets, while others, such as netbags, are made for sale to tourists passing through Mt. Hagen airport. I took these, and the fact that there was a continuous supply of sellers, as an indication that I was pitching things roughly right.
The fact that these were not simply purchases was highlighted by those sellers who explicitly situated the transaction in broader moral terms. ... The transaction was thus re-defined not as a commercial matter but in terms of uncalculating exchange between kin. ... It is important to recognise the potent charge which such disavowals of material interest carry. By overtly moving the transaction out of the commercial realm, they actually require a response equally free of cost-counting.
As people became clearer as to what I wanted to collect (once they had internalised my stereotype of their material culture), they began to become interested in the collection's contents and representativeness. ... Men began on their own initiative to make examples of abandoned categories of artefact, such as the parry shields traditionally used in the limited fighting permitted within the clan.
Other artefacts ... I knew I would have to commission. ... Commissioned artefacts have, perhaps, a reputation in museums of being somewhat ersatz, inferior to items hallowed by local use. Yet if one goal of making a field collection is to obtain the fullest possible information about the significance of the objects being collected, the artificial process of commissioning them may, paradoxically, be the most effective way of achieving it. ... An afternoon spent ... watching an item being made for sale, confirmed far more about its local significance than twice the time spent watching the 'real' thing.
I also found that the practicalities entailed in making a collection of objects revealed complexities which I had not previously appreciated. Sometimes, these were minor social and technical details which I had observed before but never really seen ...
At other times, collecting highlighted variations among Wahgi
themselves in their approach to artefacts. ...
(p 114)
War. Some Wahgi were willing to sell O'Hanlon their shields because they expected that fighting would become more individualised, using guns now. The recent revival of warfare in the highlands ('pacification' was never, in fact, complete), and the emergence of larger scale 'tribal' rivalries, new economic inequalities and marauding bands of robbers (called raskol) all cast shadows on the story of peacemaking and alliance featured in the exhibition and catalogue [Paradise]. O'Hanlon points to an ambiguous prospect: new stresses leading to violence, but also successful peacemaking initiatives and voluntary local limitations on the use of guns ...