Public Art as the ‘Taonga’ of Socialist Democracy: Remembering Equality as a Value in Papua New Guinea

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-centre the dead in kin networks. In the airport, they inspire me to ponder (as perhaps they ponder) the loss of Papua New Guinea socialist democracy, which I elucidate using Mauss' concept of taonga, that was once the postcolonial nation-state. The article draws on Benjamin to show that ‘brushing memory against the grain’ exposes how the transformations of equality as a value in the socialist democracy into the new social forms of equality as a value in the neo-liberal state occurred through many imperfect transactions. The ethnographic description of the changes in the display of the art to fit with the purposes of the new airport terminal shows, in even the most personal terms, just how fleeting were the promises of equality during independence.

Keywords:

• Equality
• value
• social contract

Notes

My thanks to Heonik Kwon for putting this problem clearly (personal communication, 8 November, 2010).

Jacob Simet, Director of the National Cultural Commission, personal communication, 1 December 2001.

‘Mixed economy’ was coined as a term to describe 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.

Malanngans are examples of what Gell (1999), in his theory of the art nexus, defined as artistic ‘agents’, whereas those who view them would be defined as ‘patients’. The theory is 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.