Out of the Mouths of Crocodiles: Eliciting Histories in Photographs and String‐Figures

Abstract

Whom and what do we touch, hear and see when we hold, listen and look at photographs? What histories are enfolded within photographs’ materiality? What elided pasts do they contain, and what possible futures can be negotiated with source communities by engaging with these artefacts in the present? In this paper I consider these related questions through an exploration of the nexus of relations, perspectives and histories enfolded within a particular glass plate (A6510,499) held in the National Australian Archives. Taken by the government anthropologist F. E. Williams in 1922 in the village of Ukiaravi, this portrait of the two young boys Kauei Ove and Kauri demonstrating a string‐figure is one of some ninety‐six glass plates produced by Williams during his eight‐month trip to the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea. Viewed with communities, this photograph generated a series of conversations about a set of relations involving the mimetic faculties of Crocodile Monitor Lizards, the growth of knowledge through bodily transformation during male initiation, and various modes of history telling and making. In examining these relationships and the ways in which they unfolded around engagements with this glass plate, I contribute to discussions about the nature of fieldwork and the productive possibilities that connecting source communities to their photographic and archival legacies has for them, museums and the discipline.

Keywords:

• History
• Mimesis
• String‐figures
• Crocodile Monitor Lizard

Acknowledgements

Research for this paper was made possible by a Wenner–Gren dissertation grant (GR6700), a Crowther–Beynon grant from the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (2001) and support from the University of East Anglia’s Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas (2006), and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (2010). A version of this paper was given at the American Anthropological Association in 2009. I am grateful for comments from Aimee Douglas, Gwyneira Isaac, Ludovic Coupaye, Jamon Halvaksz, Richard Vokes and Marcus Banks, as well as conversations with Robin Hide, Allen Allison and Sam Sweet. This paper could not have been written without the support and faith of residents of Mapaio and Baimuru (particularly, the Rove and Aukiri families). This paper is dedicated to Kaia Rove (1964–2010), whose untimely death was a shock and incredible loss. Much of this paper is a result of our many conversations and work together over the last ten years. Any errors or omissions are my own.

Notes

[1] My question here is provoked by Haraway (2008: 3), who asks similar questions in relation to dogs.

[2] The divergence between Williams and my recording of the name may be historic or an example of dialectical variation between I’ai and Koriki. Komara refers to salt or fresh crocodiles, and ane is the verb “to come”. I was not able to get a clear translation of the lizard’s name, and suggest that it may literally reflect that the lizard comes after people.

[3] This paper is informed by fieldwork conducted in the Purari Delta in October 2000, from March 2001 to November 2002, in April 2006, and March 2010, as well as through letters, emails and phone calls with community members.

[4] The Ipiko, Pawaiians and Kaura border the Purari to the north, while to the east reside the Elema and to the west the Urama and Gope. Increasingly these groups are inter‐marrying, though tensions exist and are increasing between them as a result of the resource extraction projects.

[5] Based in Mapaio, my work was principally conducted with the I’ai, who reside in the villages of Mapaio, Old Iare, Maipenairu, Aumu, Kapai and the government station of Baimuru. I also worked in the Vaimuru village of Kararua, the Kaimari village of Varia and the Koriki villages of Kinipo and Kairimai.

[6] In the 1990s, Turama Forest Industries (TFIs) along with Frontier Holding, a subsidiary of the Malaysian conglomerate Rimbunan Hijau, commenced logging within the Gulf Province. Operating along the Purari River’s East bank Frontier Holding’s operations at Kaumeia (1999–2004) and now Purari Base Camp (2004–present) remains the closest resource extraction project. In 2002 the Canadian company InterOil, following earlier prospecting by the Australasian Petroleum Company in the 1950s and 60s, began oil and gas prospecting along the upper Purari River. As of March 2010, InterOil had begun a new base camp south of Bevan rapids several kilometres North of where the Purari splits into two distributaries. This new camp will replace larger operations at Subu and Wabo, which are more then a day’s ride by outboard canoe.

[7] Over the last ten years, men have slowly found employment through these projects. Communities are now also beginning to receive dividends from the royalties being paid out by the logging concessions (Bell 2009). More lucrative, however, are the informal economies that have sprung up alongside these projects, namely the sale of marijuana (Bell 2006c).

[8] Increasingly there are tensions between town and village populations, as the latter inhabit the land and through dwelling in it, know its histories and inter‐connections, while the former though disconnected from this daily activity are better able to liaise with government offices and thus secure registration rights for resource ownership.

[9] Emerging in the wake of the Second World War, the Kabu Movement was an indigenous modernization movement led by the I’ai man Tom Kabu with support by returning members of the Papuan Infantry Battalion (PIB), and Seventh Day Adventist youth. In order to create the grounds for cash‐cropping and other business activities in the attempt to transform communities socially and materially, Kabu initiated widespread iconoclasm of the artistic forms that since 1880s had fascinated Europeans (Maher 1961; Bell 2006a).

[10] While outside the realm of this paper to discuss the impact of Christianity here, it should be noted that though the London Missionary Society had been active in the region since the 1890s, and had established a mission in 1906, it was not until the 1960s that Christianity took widespread hold (Allen 1952; Calvert 1985; Bell 2006a & in press).

[11] Besides the actions of imunu, people are conscious of the unseen actions of the dead, who if displeased haunt the living, and those of sorcerers, who through their harnessing of imunu possess similar abilities to hide within other forms such as black cats, and crocodiles.

[12] Though a comprehensive environmental survey has yet to be completed, in March 2010 communities reported long‐term suffering from intestinal issues related to use of the Purari River for cooking and drinking, and of regularly catching fish covered with sores.

[13] For a discussion of Williams, see Griffiths (1977), Schwimmer (1977), Young with Clarke (2001) and Bell (2006b).

[14] A response to the moral and economic inequalities of colonialism, the ‘Vailala Madness’ involved communities in iconoclasm and the innovation of new rituals, often highly mimetic of European social and technological forms, to achieve connection with the ancestors and overturn colonial inequalities (Williams 1923c, 1934; Bell 2006a).

[15] In 1936, Williams remarks in a letter that an ICA Tropica 9 × 12cm. was his “old official camera” (Williams to Government Secretary, 23 June 1936, NAPNG, A447 ML MSS 5/1, 61/2989). Though photographs were taken in the Purari fourteen years earlier, a sample measuring of plates and prints taken in 1922 conforms to the ICA Tropica’s plate size (Bell 2006b).

[16] Williams took his fieldnotes on paper with carbon copies, which he then cut up and organized into different themes laid out in Notes & Queries.

[17] Later in Orokaiva Society, Williams (1930: vii) expresses more optimism about these relations and writes: “It is certainly true that there are some things which the native is anxious to conceal from the Government. But he quickly comes to realize that one is a Government Officer with a difference; that one is not equipped with any authority; and that one has no intention of playing the spy.”

[18] Tangalemo, who came from Papua’s “Eastern End”, worked with Williams until he developed yaws and was replaced by Aragita, who was dispatched 13 September 1922 and returned to Kerema 18 October 1922 (Williams 1924: 236; NAPNG A447, ML MSS 5/8 Item 71; NAPNG A487/429/20).

[19] Notes made on 7 July 1922; NPNGA, ML MSS 5/7 Item 68, Acc 447, Box 2993.

[20] Notes made on 1 July 1922; NPNGA, ML MSS 5/7 Item 68, Acc 447, Box 2993.

[21] Undated fieldnotes paginated 64, 66, 68 and 83; NPNGA, ML MSS 5/7 Item 68, Acc 447, Box 2993.

[22] 15 August 1922, NAPNG MLMSS 5/7 6/2993 Item 68. This notion of being able to tie the ane komara’s tail to a tree without its knowing was repeatedly told to me as well.

[23] Alongside tobacco, calico cloth and beads were important currency within the colonial economy, and quickly became part of existing aesthetic preferences. Such adoptions, particularly that of calico, were lamented by Williams (1924: 43).

[24] Among the Purari, the person is conceptualized as being composed of: bone; blood and stomach, as well as flesh. The first two substances are gendered and are received respectively from one’s father and mother to form one’s interior. Acts of feeding create the person’s body, and it is in this way that adoption is understand to work. These substances and actions coalesce over the course of the person’s life and situate them within a network of obligations to their paternal and maternal kin as well as the environment and their ancestors (Bell 2006a).

[25] Today, communities recall four initiation grades: pairama ukua, ke’ere ukua, upura ukua and mai ukua, to which Williams in 1922 added details about Gope, which involved initiates being shown secrets tied to hunting (Williams 1924: 171–175). Upura ukua were taught how to make bullroarers (upura or imunu viki ‘spirit‐being’s cry’), while the stages of initiation connected to the annual aia’imunu festival—ke’ere ukua, mai ukua and aiavararu ukua—were occasions when initiates were taught how to make barkcloth masks and dance regalia (1924: 198–202).

[26] It is outside the bounds of this paper to discuss the intersecting history of the Crocodile Monitor Lizard with Papuan communities and Europeans. First described in 1878 by the naturalists Wihelm Peters and Giacomo Doria, these lizards were renamed in 1885 by the zoologist George Boulenger after his friend Tammaso Salvadori, a noted zoologist and ornithologist. Though specimens were collected in the late nineteenth century, it was not until the 1960s that field biology was conducted on them, and to date, this has remained mostly with captive lizards due to their elusive nature. Dark brown to black with small yellow dots patterning their skin, Crocodile Monitor Lizards have been recorded to lengths of 2.65 metres of which two‐thirds is their tails. Living within the rainforest canopy, these lizards are notable for being the largest predator species in New Guinea. Hunting by ambush their diet includes insects, frogs, reptiles, birds and mammals (Horn 2004; Philipp & Phillip 2007; Horn, Sweet & Philipp 2007).

[27] The social and cultural salience of sound in New Guinea’s lowland rain forests has been explored by a variety of scholars (Feld 1982, 1996; Weiner 1991, 2003; Gell 1995), being both an important aspect of these environments and a way that relations to these environments and their hosts of non‐human entities are enacted in song and spoken word (Halvaksz 2003).