‘Explaining the Unknowable’: Accessibility of Meaning and the Exegesis of Mali Baining Songs

Abstract

Songs and other expressive forms of language may carry meaning at a range of levels. A variety of factors influence the accessibility of these different layers of meaning. This paper explores issues associated with explanation of the meaning (exegesis) of night and day dance songs of the Mali Baining people of Papua New Guinea. We draw a parallel between accessibility of meaning in relation to cultural practices such as dance complexes, and accessibility of linguistic meaning in relation to specific texts, to present a framework for explaining why aspects of meaning or knowledge may remain inaccessible to researchers in cross-cultural settings.

Keywords:

• Fieldwork
• Research Ethics
• Epistemology
• Taboo
• Papuan Languages

Notes

¹We acknowledge that the issues discussed in this paper are of potential relevance to all social research situations, whether cross-cultural or not. However, given the scope and context of the current volume, we have chosen to restrict our comments here to cross-cultural field research.

²We would like to thank all members of the Mali community who worked with us on the songs we collected. We particularly wish to acknowledge Mr Julius Tayul, our principal advisor, who worked tirelessly with us over many months as a partner in our research and who took great care of our well-being while we were on fieldwork. We would also like to thank Myf Turpin for assistance with transcribing song material as part of the process of preparing this paper, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

³The first two years of Dr Stebbins’ research were sponsored by a post-doctoral fellowship from La Trobe University with fieldwork funding from the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology.

⁴We use the term ‘night dances’ here to refer to fire dances, which we were able to observe in Marunga in 2001, 2002 and 2006, and in Arabam in 2002. We use the term ‘day dances’ to refer to a range of dance forms involving masks which occur during the day, including the Malis’ elaborate mēndas dance complex which is similar to Baining day dance complexes described by other authors. While we were not able to observe a mēndas ceremony, we were given considerable information about the mēndas masks, choreography and structure of the dance complex by consultants, and were able to record a rehearsal of mēndas songs. We witnessed a separate day dance segment in Marunga in 2006, involving a Simbali mask.

⁵Because the masks are dangerous to women (see also Section 3), Planigale conducted this aspect of the research without Stebbins being present. Only aspects of the discussion that can safely be shared have been passed along to Stebbins and included here. This strategy has resulted in a gender bias in our respective knowledge and mirrors the gender division in the community.

⁶We have not yet been able to consult this work directly and comments here are based on quotes and comments in Fajans (1997).

⁸‘-’ = affix boundary, ‘ = ’ = clitic boundary, ‘.’ = phonological boundary within a single grammatical word, 1 = first person, 2 = second person, 3 = third person, I = concordial pronoun class one, II = concordial pronoun class two, III = concordial pronoun class three, ART = Article, ASSOC = associative, DL = dual, F = feminine noun class or gender, FILL = vocalization, H = human, LOC = locative, M = masculine noun class or gender, N = neuter gender, NEF = new event frame, NPRES = non-present tense, PAST = past tense, PL = plural, PN = proper noun, POSS = possessive pronoun, PURP = purposive, RCD= ‘reduced’ noun class, REL = relator, SG = singular, SPEC = specific article. Special orthographic symbols to note are: <ē> = <v> = [β], <ch> = [γ], and <th> =

⁷The songs we present as examples are typical of the night and day dance songs in our corpus in terms of form, themes and issues of accessibility of meaning associated with each genre.

⁹The use of noun class marking to distinguish among different senses of a word is common in Mali (see Stebbins in press, ch 8). The change of a = k to ch reflects a frequent pattern of lenition in Mali (see Stebbins in press a, ch 3).

¹⁰This is in contrast to the night dance songs which are often in the first person, allowing the listener to place themselves in the role of protagonist within the song.

¹¹Another aspect of this theme is the observation that communities may have well-developed practices of explanation and instruction that appear, at least initially, opaque or confusing to the researcher (cf. Crook 1999)—or may have no explicit model of instruction (cf. Rice 1994). Neither of these issues appeared to us to be barriers to accessibility of meaning in the Baining context.