Authenticity and Authorship in Pacific Island Encounters: New Lives of Old Imaginaries 9781800730557

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AUTHENTICITY AND AUTHORSHIP IN PACIFIC ISLAND ENCOUNTERS

ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology General Editor: Rupert Stasch, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge The Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO) is an international organization dedicated to studies of Pacific cultures, societies, and histories. This series publishes monographs and thematic collections on topics of global and comparative significance, grounded in anthropological fieldwork in Pacific locations. Recent volumes: Volume 11

Volume 6

Authenticity and Authorship in Pacific Island Encounters: New Lives of Old Imaginaries Edited by Jeannette Mageo and Bruce Knauft

Engaging with Strangers: Love and Violence in the Rural Solomon Islands Debra McDougall

Volume 10

Money Games: Gambling in a Papua New Guinea Town Anthony J. Pickles

Volume 5

The Polynesian Iconoclasm: Religious Revolution and the Seasonality of Power Jeffrey Sissons Volume 4

Dreams Made Small: The Education of Papuan Highlanders in Indonesia Jenny Munro

Creating a Nation with Cloth: Women, Wealth, and Tradition in the Tongan Diaspora Ping-Ann Addo

Volume 8

Volume 3

Mimesis and Pacific Transcultural Encounters: Making Likenesses in Time, Trade, and Ritual Reconfigurations Edited by Jeannette Mageo and Elfriede Hermann

The Death of the Big Men and the Rise of the Big Shots: Custom and Conflict in East New Britain Keir Martin

Volume 7

Christian Politics in Oceania Edited by Matt Tomlinson and Debra McDougall

Volume 9

Mortuary Dialogues: Death Ritual and the Reproduction of Moral Community in Pacific Modernities Edited by David Lipset and Eric K. Silverman

Volume 2

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/asao

Authenticity and Authorship in Pacific Island Encounters New Lives of Old Imaginaries

Edited by Jeannette Mageo and Bruce Knauft

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2021 by

Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2021 Jeannette Mageo and Bruce Knauft

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mageo, Jeannette Marie, editor. | Knauft, Bruce M., editor. Title: Authenticity and Authorship in Pacific Island Encounters: New Lives of Old Imaginaries / edited by Jeannette Mageo and Bruce Knauft. Description: New York: Berghahn Books, [2021] | Series: ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology; vol. 11 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021005942 (print) | LCCN 2021005943 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800730540 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800730557 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Oceania—Civilization. | Ethnology—Oceania. | Authenticity (Philosophy) Classification: LCC DU28 .A95 2021 (print) | LCC DU28 (ebook) | DDC 995—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005942 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005943

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-054-0 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-055-7 ebook

Contents



List of Figures

vi

Introduction. On Authoring and Authenticity Jeannette Mageo and Bruce Knauft

1

Chapter 1. Tenues Végétales in Beauty Contests of French Polynesia: Authenticity on Islanders’ Own Terms Joyce D. Hammond

39

Chapter 2. American Colonial Mimicry: Cultural Identity Fantasies and Being “Authentic” in Samoa Jeannette Mageo

71

Chapter 3. Critical Reflections across Four Decades of Work with Gebusi: Authorship, Authenticity, Anthropology Bruce Knauft

105

Chapter 4. Recovering Authenticity: Garamut (Slit-Drums) among Kayan People, Madang Province, Papua New Guinea Alphonse Aime

137

Chapter 5. The Flying Fox and the Sentiment of Being: On the Authenticity of a Papua New Guinea Rawa Tradition Doug Dalton

161

Chapter 6. Digital Storytelling in the Pacific and “Ethnographic Orientalism” Sarina Pearson and Shuchi Kothari

184

Afterword. Authoring and Authenticity: Reflections on Traveling Concepts in Oceania Margaret Jolly

205

Index

233

1.1.

1.2.

1.3.

1.4.

1.5.

1.6.

1.7.

1.8.

Figures



In the 2017 Miss Puna‘auia contest, Mareva Domby wears a dress created by Myrna Taae, composed of the petals of pink ‘ōpuhi flowers. Photograph by NDZ Max; courtesy of the Miss Puna‘auia Organization.

38

In the 2017 Miss Puna‘auia contest, Vaite Fernandez Estall wears a creation by Manuarii Teauroa composed of red pitipiti‘ō seeds, red-dyed more, and a red-dyed chicken feather. Photograph by NDZ Max; courtesy of the Miss Puna‘auia Organization.

40

For the 2016 Miss Tahiti competition Vaiata Buisson wears a tenue végétale created by Heia Yip composed of pearls and small shells (pūpū nī‘au) with a headdress displaying the interior mother of pearl surface of oyster shells. Photograph by Stéphane Mailion.

50

Maruia Holozet creating a dress made of the bark of the fē‘i banana for Mareva Domby competing in the 2017 Miss Tahiti contest. Photograph by the author.

51

Christopher Prenat creating a garment made of more (from the inner bark of the pūrau tree) worn by Kalani Salmon in the 2017 Miss Tahiti competition. Photograph by the author.

52

Miss Tahiti contestants in their tenues végétales for the 2010 Miss Tahiti competition, the 50th anniversary of the event. Photograph by Teava Matareva; courtesy of the Miss Tahiti Organization.

53

Hinarere Taputu wears a dress made of tapa,‘ōpuhi petals, bougainvillea flowers, and tīpaniē blossoms created by Dominique Pétras, Nels Labbeyi, and Remi Vairua Teauroa for the 2014 Miss Tahiti contest. Photograph by Teikidev; courtesy of the Miss Tahiti Organization.

55

Vanille Guyot-Sionnest’s tenue végétale for the 2016 Miss and Mister Paparā contest, created by a couturière named Michèle and made of tiare Tahiti flowers, ferns, and vanilla seedpods. Photograph by Mata Hoata.

58

Figures

2.1.

vii

Jack stands on the deck of the Snark, 1908. JLP 429-119f., Alb. “Bora-Bora and Samoa,” Jack London collection, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

77

Nature Man, taken in Tahiti. JLP 498 Alb. 60, Jack London collection, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

78

Jack London and Samoan Tāupou, 1908. JLP Box 499-Alb. 61, Jack London collection, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

80

Ida Menzies Beck and friends on holiday, taken in Pago Pago, 1923 or 1924. Rollo Beck collection (#115142, original 599, 029), American Museum of Natural History Library.

83

Ida Menzies Beck and friends on holiday taken in Pago Pago by Ida Menzies Beck. Rollo H. and Ida M. Beck collection, Prints South Seas (N. 5, Box 46; on back “JMB Dec 25, 1923”), California Academy of Sciences.

84

Margaret Mead and Fa‘amotu regard one another. Library of Congress, Series P, “Photographic File, 1878–1978, n.d.” Box P25. Held by both by the Library of Congress and the National Anthropological Archives and available on their websites. Courtesy of Mary Catherine Bateson.

85

Sietu with Louise, Bill, and Bernard Kastenbein, all in Native costume with ornaments, 1929. Local Number NAA INV 05266000, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Library.

87

American congressional delegation to Samoa, National Anthropology Archives (USNM 05269400). Photograph by Merl LaVoy.

89

American congressman in Samoa, National Anthropology Archives (USNM 05269000). Photograph by Merl LaVoy.

90

2.10. American congressman in Samoa, National Anthropology Archives (USNM 05268900). Photograph by Merl LaVoy.

91

2.11. A National Geographic photograph of Inaugural Day festivities in 1940 (Bailey 1941: 620).

92

2.2. 2.3.

2.4.

2.5.

2.6.

2.7.

2.8.

2.9.

2.12. Major-General Sir George Spafford Richardson. Ref. PA1-o-446. Alexander Mathieson Rutherford, 1915–1998. Photographs of Samoa. Taken in 1915. (IRN 1572654.) Alexander Turnbull

viii Figures

Library, National Library of New Zealand. Wellington, New Zealand.

93

2.13. Cyril McKay photographs of Samoa, Tokelau, and Cook Islands. MSS & Archives 2007/5, item 1/15. 1/2 Individuals and Groups, 2.1 Events and Activities. Special Collections, University of Auckland Libraries and Learning Services.

94

2.14. Guy Powles, New Zealand High Commissioner for Samoa, his wife Eileen, and son Michael in Samoa. Photograph taken by Donald Ross. Ref. PA1-o-822-24. Powles Family collection. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. Courtesy of Michael Powles.

95

3.1.

Momiay Sori in initiation costume with Bruce Knauft in Yibihilu, 1981. Photograph by Eileen Cantrell (Knauft).

113

Tafiay Haymp with Bruce Knauft at Honinabi airstrip, 2013. Photograph by Latham Wood.

116

Kwuyl Bi with Bruce Knauft in Yehebi village, 2013. Photograph by Latham Wood.

119

Hugam Mosomiay with Anne-Sylvie Malbrancke in Gasumi Corners, 2016. Photograph by Bruce Knauft.

121

Mosomiay Yugul with Bruce Knauft at Knauft’s fieldwork departure at Honinabi airstrip, 2013. Photograph by Latham Wood.

128

Garamut from Kayan Village, Kainmbat clan. Carved by Philip Apa, Paul Kuri, Teddy Tamone, Willie Kawang, and Arnold Jongtai. From the Collection of The University of Queensland Anthropology Museum, Item #40650. Photograph by Carl Warner. Procured by Alphonse Aime. Photo reproduced by permission.

136

Garamut named Emrang, Kayan Village, 2012. Photograph by Alphonse Aime.

148

Women giving names to the garamut, Kayan Village, 2013. Photograph by Alphonse Aime.

154

5.1.

The myth of the yambo miro obviation sequence.

168

5.2.

Yambo miro in western musical notation.

170

3.2. 3.3. 3.4. 3.5.

4.1.

4.2. 4.3.

Introduction On Authoring and Authenticity JEANNETTE MAGEO AND BRUCE KNAUFT

Perhaps the most important contribution of this volume is a fresh perspective on how histories of ideas actually happen in social practice—how the transformations they entail are endlessly promiscuous. They spin out of and refract back onto relations of inequality, informed by relations of power and authority, yet everyone tries to appropriate what seems useful to them. Authenticity and authoring are projected objects (or subjects) of reference while also being “traveling concepts.” They are ideas transformed and rewritten in every culture that uses them, and they cross-fertilize in new contexts along the geographic and historical routes they traverse. This is not just a textual or intertextual or academic process of sedimentation. It is rather a dynamic of active social appropriation and recontextualization. Hence, we engage the morphing expression of authenticity and authoring among both Westerners and Pacific Islanders. This clues us in to their recursive and metamorphic histories. Indeed, it is hardly a new notion that ideas and concepts as well as material renderings mutate and resolidify, crisscrossing and reconstituting over time. In different permutations, such awareness has been central to a range of highly theorized and sometimes highly abstract Western intellectual stratagems. These relate to: hermeneutics and phenomenology; semiotics and deconstruction; speech genres and heteroglossia; epistemic subjectivity; sociologies of knowledge; interdisciplinary conceptualization; and the attribution of artistic or academic categories.1 In the present volume, we do not concretely engage these perspectives, and we do not attempt to amalgamate much less synthesize them. Our interest is more practical and applied: how is it, we ask, that influential or powerful notions—in this case, authenticity and authoring—get creatively used, changed, and reinvented in practice? This entails the power or privilege of assertion or promulgation, and also the counterforce of response, resistance, or appropriation—or seeming refusal or farce or parody (see Scott 1987, 1992; Knauft 1996: chs. 6–8; Mageo 1996, 2008, 2010; Clifford 1988; Ortner 1995; Abu-Lughod 1990). Beyond such an antipodal or polarizing mode of phrasing, however, our deeper goal is to see how these ideational asymme-

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tries and interchanges themselves render inadequate simplistic dichotomies of opposition between the powerful and the relatively powerless, especially as change ensues over time (cf. Hallam and Ingold 2007; Knauft 2019; Ortner 2016; Mageo 1998, 2002; Robbins 2013). In the insular Pacific, authoring and authenticity have a particular valence and historical character. Yet, we suggest, this valence and character throw into relief patterns that are common but may not be as obviously evident in other areas and regions.

Authenticity and Authorship in Anthropology

Why “authenticity” and “authorship”? These have special histories and implications in the insular Pacific, and we consider further how these traveling ideas have been deeply informed by their prior Western provenience and projection. But the attentive reader may have already noticed that while the main title of this volume refers to Authenticity and Authorship, this introductory chapter is titled, “On Authoring and Authenticity.” Though these titular terms can be reversed and tweaked to convey basically the same meaning, this small shift reveals underlying issues and nuances. Especially in a Pacific context, a historical-cum-contemporary view of “Authoring and Authenticity” tends to evoke or resonate with an originating primacy of Western authorship in anthropology. From a classic anthropological perspective and from a sociological of knowledge point of view, it was the Western anthropologist himself (in the nineteenth century at least it was usually a he) who authored the authenticity of the Pacific Islanders he studied. Without this authorship, perhaps through the mid-twentieth century, the “authentic” nature of Pacific Island peoples was considered largely “unknown”—to Western sensibilities, that is. In this sense both authorship and authenticity evoke Western prerogatives and imputations: the imputation of Indigenous cultural authenticity by means of Western authorship. This volume undermines and deconstructs this dichotomy between Western authorship and Indigenous authenticity. All the while that, from a Western perspective, anthropologists were “authoring” in the sense of writing about Pacific cultures, Pacific Islanders and Westerners alike were reauthoring their own cultures enriched by historical waves of ideas, feelings, and images that washed in from other places. While anthropologists were opining about Pacific authenticity, islanders—and Westerners too—were imitating and appropriating what they perceived as Pacific authenticity to define what it meant to be authentic in their own cultures (see Mageo, Chapter 2). In accounting for intellectual and societal transformations, one can emphasize the propriety of origination or one can emphasize the subsequent creativity of ongoing reconfiguration—which throws into question the notion of ideational “ownership” by anyone.

Introduction

3

If one reverses these terms, Authoring and Authenticity, an alternative meaning presents itself. Starting with authenticity—let’s say, the presumptive authenticity of Pacific islanders themselves—makes Western authorship appear more derivative. And Indigenous authorship assumes a greater superiority over Western “authorization.”2 These alternative perspectives, one highlighting Western agency and the other Indigenous agency, have strong political stakes (e.g., Keesing 1989; contrast Trask 1991). But each of these, we think, has pitfalls as well as promise. Asserting Pacific Islander authenticity champions the ability and the agency of Pacific Islanders to speak for themselves, to define their own authenticity in their own terms (see Jolly, Afterword). But this collapses the diversity within Pacific Islander communities themselves— who among them is actually speaking for whom. Ironically, it also elides the power of capitalist imposition, of scholarly literacy, and standards of art and status, which, for better or worse, have provided the conditions through which Indigenous authorship and assertions of authenticity have been formulated and have come to exist. Unless explicitly acknowledged, extending authorship to include art production risks imposing Western suppositions of individual authorship onto collective forms of agency along with their productive affiliations and identities. For instance, “authorship” can incite and reflect “individuality” in artistic authorship rather highlighting the pervasive “dividuality” of artistic production (e.g., Strathern 1988; cf., Marriott 1976; see Aime, Chapter 4). In Pacific performance art, dance and comedy in particular are salient if not dominant art forms and are typically collective creations (see for example Hereniko 1994, 1995; Mageo 1992, 1996, 2008, 2010; Sinavaiana 1992a, 1992b). Assumed Western authorship that presumes its own production of cultural authenticity has been roundly critiqued in many guises in anthropology during the past half century (for an early example, see Asad 1973, cf., Asad 1987). What is thereby rejected is an assumedly authentic Western objectivity that effectively asserts the dominance if not the exclusive province of the Western or at least the thoroughly Westernized author (cf., Chua and Mathur 2018). Until recent decades, this presumed the authenticity of objectivist method—of empirically investigating, documenting, and configuring modern dependable knowledge—not just indexed but vouchsafed the authenticity of non-Western Others. Anthropology in this sense has through much of its longer history assumed its own authoring and authenticating of Others’ authenticity. At the same time, the systematic documentary nature of resulting assertions—their ethnographies, articles, theories, and analyses—have not been without value as well as influence and even functionality, including, as we shall see, for Pacific Islanders themselves. As such, anthropology’s colonial and postcolonial history cannot be simply “thrown out” in practical terms, as if one could get around or behind it to some ostensibly purer, much less completely alternative form of authorship and authenticity that is genuine.

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Again, our present volume is designed not just to critique but to refuse the above antinomy. We expose and acknowledge it, but we do not reduce the wild play of ideas in situ or their development over time to a polarized view of political constraints vis-à-vis cultural “realities.” At the same time, of course, the assertion and imputation of both authorship and cultural authenticity are, indeed, real and influential in the world, including in academic politics. They function, as Durkheim (1966) might put it, as social facts with objective social and societal entailments. In its own history, the critique of anthropology’s imputed authenticity and authoring has been highly influential at least since the mid-1980s (e.g., Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Clifford 1988). But while critical accounts have provoked literary experimentation and elaborately abstract theoretical or (post-theoretical) positioning, the pragmatic spread and morphing of Western notions of objectivity—including into new presumptions of authenticity and authoring—has been much less considered or attended to, including with respect to nonacademic authored works, artifacts, and social practices. The practical import and usage of authorship and authenticity do not stop just because they have been intellectually critiqued. Stepping back, we can note that anthropology asserted itself as an authentic scholarly pursuit since the later nineteenth century and as an authentic science by the early 1900s (e.g., Tylor 2018; Boas 1982: ch. 8). Along with academic authenticity, anthropology brought a distinct sense of authorship, authorship that in a sense disappeared into the ostensible neutrality of its depictions, the proverbial realist tale (e.g., van Mannen 2011: ch. 3). And yet, anthropology was at the same time deeply informed in lived practice by a different authenticity—that of the anthropologist who was a scientist and yet also a romantic explorer, a heroic figure of sorts who traipsed to the most remote and otherwise unknown of human places. Here it is worth recalling Malinowski’s famous statement on anthropological method, published in 1922 based on his earlier fieldwork among the Trobriand Islanders of New Guinea (Malinowski 1922): Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village. (204) [T]he Ethnographer has not only to spread his nets in the right place, and wait for what will fall into them. He must be an active huntsman, and drive his quarry into them and follow it up to its most inaccessible lairs. And that leads us to the more active methods of pursuing ethnographic evidence. (206) In Ethnography, the distance is often enormous between the brute material of information—as it is presented to the student in his own observations, in native statement, in the kaleidoscope of tribal life—

Introduction

5

and the final authoritative presentation of the results. The Ethnographer has to traverse this distance in the laborious years between the moment when he sets foot upon a native beach, and makes his first attempts to get into touch with the natives, and the time when he writes down the final version of his results. (202) The scientific treatment differs from that of good common sense, first in that a student will extend the completeness and minuteness of survey much further and in a pedantically systematic and methodical manner; and secondly, in that the scientifically trained mind will push the inquiry along really relevant lines, and towards aims possessing real importance. (209, emphasis in original) Well into the mid-twentieth century these dimensions of authenticity and authorship flourished uncritically in anthropology, even as they neglected Indigenous authorship and minimized the contributions of women such as Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, and non-Whites such as Zora Neale Hurston. These women appeared to conceive their experience with local peoples not so much as a heroic discovery of uncivilized alterity but as a dialogue with honored friends and guests (see for example the photo of Mead and the Samoan Fa’amotu in Mageo, Chapter 2). Many academics saw these women’s authorship and authorings as less objective, less authentically anthropological, and as failing to merit a tenured academic position (see Behar and Gordon 1996). Our contribution here doesn’t pretend to parse the history of anthropology’s assertions of authenticity in authorship, including in relation to colonialism and Western projections of primordial authenticity. But we can note the relevance in all cases, not merely those mentioned above but also those authored here, of the importance and awareness of subject position, including as viewers, objects, and subjects of authenticity and authorship. In any enterprise that aspires to scholarship, some assertion of authorship in relation to authenticity—just by virtue of publishing—is part of the mix. We begin by offering some working definitions of these concepts and then turn to an intellectual history of the concepts of authenticity and authorship in the West more generally. This Occidental portrayal is in a sense an initial a down payment toward complementary perspectives about and by Pacific Islanders that occupy the latter part of our introduction and, indeed, the remaining chapters of this book. Terms of Supposition

Authenticity in our usage has a sense of attributed and presumed primordialism, of constructed originality. From a Western viewpoint, this primordialism

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entails a sense that time has passed without significantly effacing or confounding an essential sense of original or originating meaning. This stands in contrast to situations in which the work of time is admitted or acknowledged to have disjoined or transformed the content of the present, often irretrievably, in relation to the past. Before postmodernism (which impacted Anglo-American anthropology particularly during the 1980s and 1990s—see Knauft 1996), Westerners often viewed the taken-as-authentic to be original, albeit in historically variable relation to its own past. This optic allowed anthropologists to impute a sense of timeless importance to their ethnographic works while linking these to their recent observations and contemporary rendering. Analogously, authorship in our definition is the presumed or constructed original agent of an object or product—an artifact, art event, writing, invention, or discovery—without which the resulting phenomenon would be deemed nonexistent or even impossible to exist. This may carry implications of Westernized individualism but, by extension of reference, need not be limited to it. No Shakespeare, no Hamlet, but also, no Samoans, no Samoan Way. Not that there is no other agency or constraint or contingency involved. For instance, in art, the constraints of the pigments and the canvas, the number of hours that the artist invests, or the socioeconomic and political or religious experiences available to the producer, and so on, are all important. The emphasis in hindsight of attributing “authorship,” however, winnows and narrows such factors to the distinctive will and effort and consciousness or intent of the instigating person or group. In this sense, authorship is almost intrinsically anthropomorphizing; we could potentially say that God authored the mountain, but not that the weather or the geology authored it. So, too, in story the great chief Tagaloa authored fa’aSamoa, the Samoan Way; the oceanic tropical environment in which Samoans live did not author it. Anything “authored” is always an individual and a collective product. Take poetry: a poem may be individually authored but if it is any good it is likely to be in Kristeva’s words, “a mosaic of quotations” (1980), bringing a tradition into new manifestations, just as collective creations, such as the present book, bring together the work of individuals. In our perspective, the modern connection between authenticity and authorship is one of mutually constructed origination. Authenticity tends to be first produced by a group (in myth often personified by a god or spirit) or an individual, whose work is considered original either in historical time or in the present. Authorship taken in its broader “beyond-Western” sense is the human agency by which people presume to produce subsequent authenticity, especially primary or originary meaning or identity. As in the authorship of an authentic painting or an artifact of a given period in a recognizable style, people conceive and perceive such authorship to result from individual or collective social action. Of the two terms, however, authenticity is broader: it

Introduction

7

may include impersonal things like culture or nationality or custom that have identifiable attribution only in origin myths and yet which still have presumed historical origination and persistence. One question this volume asks is what linkage there is between Western conceptions of authorship and explicitly developed or conscious senses of authenticity within or across cultural identities. Dalton (Chapter 5), for example, finds customs as “authentic,” and argues that Rawa themselves also do so. This is not an assertion of authenticity conjoined to a modern sense of unidirectional time and agency, but a significantly different assertion of agency and authorship that evokes restoration of an endangered social covenant. One finds a roughly analogous contrast in Western intellectual history in the difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad (Homer 1998) begins with a broken social covenant and this degeneration is its subject throughout. By contrast, the Odyssey (Homer 2012) arguably reflects a new sense of authenticity by virtue of Odysseus’s standing apart from the onslaught of events, or, one might say, from the onslaught of temporality. His story is the self-consciously perceived result of his own self-willed intention. Odyssues prevails by virtue of his strength of will to return home despite endless trials—his heroic attempts to get back to his origin point, to Penelope and his son, which appears in retrospect as a personal golden age but one equally lost in time. His intention has resonance with a modern Western authorial self (cf., Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning [2005]). Of course, many nonmodern peoples, aboriginal Australians for example, have found the present to be a “degraded” time relative to a mythically larger, more powerful, and often better past. But the idea that an individual has willfully made this change through “authorship,” and that individual human agency is the cause of this change in some ways presumes or pretends a departure from a view that divine or other forces made a world that humans are often not up to the task of maintaining. So, the goal in these cases is to return to that golden past by mimicking and re-enacting it, a yearning for primordialism that eschews individual will and authorship in favor of what Victor Turner (1969) called communitas, which weaves such authorship into collective ritual returns and celebrations.

Traveling Concepts: Western Roots and Routes

Using the perspective developed above, we can trace the Western intellectual emergence, configuration, and projection of authenticity and authorship, first, vis-à-vis Western selves, and then, in the remainder of this volume, vis-à-vis Pacific islanders. At key issue here is the relationship between assertions of authorship and authenticity—in either direction. In our view, one of these terms can hardly hold without the other being evoked or implied. We think this

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has been true historically in Western discursive and conceptual history—and that this legacy still has important if unrecognized implications. Further, the way that authorship and authenticity are evoked in relation to each other has strong practical relevance, including for how power, agency, and representation operate in and through the anthropology of the insular Pacific to the present. This is also true, in different permutations, of the anthropology of other world areas. We also outline the dangers inherent in such analysis, including the reinscription of Western intellectual orientialism in new guises. Multiple volumes could easily be devoted to this history. Of necessity, our version is highly abridged and telegraphic. We highlight those aspects most relevant to this volume, and, like the essays to follow, ricochet back and forth between perspectives and locales. In Western conceptualization, authorship and authenticity are linked, echoing the etymologies of the words themselves. “Authorship” in common reference signals the individuality, autonomy, and genuineness of the producer; it connotes the coherence of a Western-style self as authentic agent and producer of the work in question. “Authentic” and “authenticity,” for their part, connote being real or genuine, not a copy, true to a deeper origin, reliable, trustworthy, and consistent and in agreement with known facts. In their earliest Western usages, authorship and being authentic or having authenticity are closely linked. Across Latin, French, and Anglo-Norman regions, the legacy of authenticus pertained particularly to titles, deeds, or other documents that were authentic because they were verifiably authorized by the true, valid, and individual authorship of the sovereign, authorized by his (or her) valid agent to convey the dictum by document. The sovereign had ultimate authority and hence as well the ultimate ability to author and to transmit authenticity. This seeded the train of subsequent authentications, which spread the power of the ruler, the primary author, across time and space. This depended on the writ being authentic and not needing to be reauthored or reauthorized. To stretch an analogy to a modern anthropological context, it’s like having your original fieldnotes as the ultimate guarantor that your fieldwork is genuine. In the Western era of nobles and unabashed hierarchy until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, it was especially the monarch whose very being was authentic and who could authorize or otherwise author writs, dicta, and exercise power of life and death. Others’ authenticity lay in acting their proper role in the order of status and deference. Thus, according to Trilling, the idea of non-monarchical authenticity is prefigured by the concept of sincerity, which in feudal times meant being true to one’s social role: that is, not acting “above oneself ” (Trilling 1997: 16). One still finds this meaning in the seventeenth century. Thus, Shakespeare’s Cordelia in King Lear acts only according to her “bond,” that is, in accord with her given role. Audiences since

Introduction

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Shakespeare’s time have recognized Cordelia as a sincere person, in contrast to her ambition-driven sisters who are false and feigning. With the rise of evangelical religion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, sincerity shifts its meaning, coming to refer to the truth of one’s experience as an individual and to the intensity of one’s resulting convictions (Trilling 1997: 23). In Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther ([1787] 1983), written in the late eighteenth century, the protagonist is supposed to be the model of the “honest soul”—a constant “one true self ” (Trilling 1997: 52). Werther testifies to the unchanging nature of his sentiments for a married woman through suicide. This novella, wildly popular in the early nineteenth century, precipitated a rash of suicides among young men, a phenomenon that came to be known as “the Goethe effect” (Swales 1987: 94–98; Phillips 1986; Philips, Lesyna, and Paight 1992). These suicides testify to the widespread historical shift that Trilling describes. With Rousseau, the idea of sincerity shifts again, becoming a “sentiment of existence” (Gauthier 2006), or in Trilling words (1997: 92), a “sentiment of being.” This “sentiment” referred to a life energy by virtue of which “the center shall hold . . . [and] the circumference of the self shall keep unbroken, that the person be an integer, impenetrable, perdurable, and autonomous in being” (Trilling 1997: 99). Embedded in Rousseau’s version of sincerity, we suggest, is the model of the self that Geertz (1984: 126) later associates with the West, the unitary bounded individual. It is this sentiment, Trilling believes, that becomes the source of authenticity in the work of existentialist intellectuals such as, in different permutations, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Heidegger, and Camus, who see authenticity as an idea about an irreducible quality of the individual resisting the influence of the group (see Golomb 2012). In Kipling’s words: The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. (Quoted in Gordon 1935) Embedded in this idea of the self is a bourgeois idea of property, indeed the self as one’s own property. This was accompanied by the nineteenthcentury Euro-American idea that our true natures are free from the corrupting influence of society, as celebrated in the work of the Romantic poets and Rousseau. Who we really are is supposed to pre-exist the present social order, to resist and often defy it. Inscribed in Rousseau’s “sentiments of being,” then, is an ontology of the self as “one of a kind,” an individual who exists apart from Thomas Hardy’s “maddening crowd.” So results a modern self/society dichotomy—the idea that human nature precedes modern social life and is eroded by

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it. Against this, non-Western societies were easily viewed as primordial windows into deeper or truer and more collective human nature. As Trilling explains, Rousseau’s “sentiments of being” also refers to a “primitive strength that . . . man brought with him from the state of savagery” (1997: 99)—an idea that evokes the figure of the “noble savage” in European and American literature and that in turn evokes Western social Darwinism. If Rousseau sought the natural individual in those cultures that nineteenth and twentieth century social Darwinism deemed “primitive,” however, such cultures tend in fact to be highly social (Markus and Kitayama 1991; Shweder and Bourne 1984; Strathern 1988). Giddens (1991) analyzed the psychosocial nature of the historical transition that Trilling traces. Its root, for Giddens, is the sequestration of experience—the fencing off of elements of existence that interfere with a sense of normalcy such as madness, poverty, sickness, and death. Foucault’s (1988) account of the extrusion of the mad from normalized Western society since the fourteenth century, for example, traces the sequestration of madness. Defining and then exiling de-normalizing elements, however, simultaneously tends to exile major existential questions and hence to deprive people of fertile sources of meaning. Think of the Buddha growing up amidst wealth and luxury, sequestered in his father’s palace, but then traveling beyond its borders to encounter a beggar and by doing so also encountering the existential questions at the core of so many religious traditions. During the Industrial Revolution in the transition from village farm economies to industrial capitalist ones, individuals became more isolated from prior community groups, if not from their own extended and sometimes immediate families. In the process, many social sources of meaning also evaporated. Authentic humanity, at least as it had been understood in Shakespeare’s time, was lamented as increasingly bleached out. As Tönnies ([1887] 2001) described it, the face-to-face interaction in communities (Gemeinshaft) gave way to the impersonality and facelessness of mass society (Gesellschaft). With the rise of impersonal cities, the anomie and alienation that accompanied them underscored and fueled the stakes of individuals’ quest for self-actualization (Giddens 1991). While the actualized self is supposed to be the authentic self, its meaning easily became narcissistic, referring only to “my genuine wants,” “my genuine desires.” As the associated chasm of meaning opens over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we find the complementary rise of the idea of the modern author or artist and with that the idea of authorship as the communication of individualized uniqueness and irreducible authenticity. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropology, the personal quest of the ethnographer was often if not typically that of bildungsroman—the formative quest for knowledge and understanding—by means of the radically non-Western Other. This romanticist quest for authenticity (e.g., Berlin 1988)

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also informed anthropology’s emergent notion of culture, which derived from the Germanic notion of “folk-culture” or volk-kultur, enshrined in the folkways, folktales, dances, costumes, and customs of the ethic and national past that garnered so much interest and attention as a waning European “authentic” against the march of modern society (see Wolf 1964; Zammito 2002). Crudely put, “culture” elsewhere became the authentic Other, the collectivized meanings of otherness that many saw as increasingly shattered and obliterated by the march of modernity in the West itself. The modern author as anthropologist, then, had the heroic task of recuperating, bringing to light, and objectivizing the lineaments of collective otherness otherwise lacking in the heart of the modern. In the romanticism of the Western modern—and the modernity of the Western romantic—the novel emerges as a new form in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. From the first, novels were often about women, for example Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and by women such as Jane Austen in England and George Sand in France, among many others. Virginia Woolf (1929) describes this transition as making it possible for women to “live by their wits,” as was also the case for other new kinds of new authorship, such as that of Jack London, discussed by Mageo in Chapter 2 of this volume. Similarly, male artists in particular could aspire to live by their art—rather than supporting themselves as acolytes, sculptors, or painters of aristocratic patrons (see Berger 1973, Bourdieu 1996.). Painter J. M. W. Turner, for example, was of modest origins and had a Cockney accent but became successful and famous through his distinctive seascapes and landscapes (Shane 2008; Bailey 1998). This status of the author as well-paid celebrity and personification of a primordial authenticity evinced by originality is so widespread in the twentieth century that it became both the aspiration and the signature of modern artistic production. Parallel to the stress on individual authenticity best realized by authorship was the threat, risk, or suspicion of degraded sociality. In the twentieth century, the French Marxist theorist and filmmaker Guy Debord (1983), for example, writes that Westerners had come to live in a “spectacular society.” Mesmerized by the social spectacle, people had ceased to author their lives, instead passively consuming what society placed before them. “All that once was directly lived has become mere representation,” Debord writes (1983: 1). Ours is The Society of the Spectacle, the title of Debord’s most famous work, in which passive consumption of the social supplants genuine activity and drains away authenticity. Like Rousseau, then, Debord projects individual authenticity elsewhere—in Debord’s case into a premodern Western past of genuinely lived experience. Against such degradation, anthropology was positioned to recuperate— and to author—just such collective authenticity among non-Western others,

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and in marginal boundaries and borders of so-called civilized society. In some ways, then, the putative authenticity of the anthropological author emerged in complementary relationship to the “discovery” of sincere sociality in Otherness, on the one hand, and the de facto effacement of individuality—and of individuating authorship—as might be asserted or developed by Indigenous non-Westerners. Against this, the Western scholar, following figures such as the “armchair anthropologist,” presumed to author the structures, functions, and cultural patterns of collective non-Western lifeways—and to authenticate them for a Western audience.

Authenticity, Contestation, and Modernity in Regional Perspective

Our usage of traveling concepts, and of authenticity and authorship more generally, can be productively put alongside notions developed by Fillitz and Saris in their volume Debating Authenticity: Concepts of Modernity in Anthropological Perspective (2012). As reflected in the book’s title, Fillitz and Saris are especially concerned with the contested and reinforcing or escalating complementarity between the assertion or attribution of authenticity, on the one hand, and what is by contrast considered inauthentic and not genuine, on the other. They link this dynamic intriguingly and insightfully to the challenges of modernity and Western capitalism in particular, including in relationship to consumerism and commodification, and in terms of art and aesthetics, to Walter Benjamin’s ([1935] 1968) famous essay on the work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction. In complementary fashion, drawing on the roots of Western romanticism (e.g., Berlin 1988), authenticity pertains especially to the search for and assertion of genuine experience and genuineness more broadly as a counter to the depersonalization and anonymity, atomization, and/or alienation of modern life. This theme—of searching for the authentic in a world that itself appears less and less so—has strong roots in Western thought, including the work of Rousseau, as discussed above, and Herder (see Zammito 2002). Fillitz and Saris link this to the critical analysis of social life in large-scale impersonal “society” as opposed to smaller face-to-face “community” as considered by Tönnies ([1887] 2001). The depredations of modernity vis-à-vis its precursors and alters informed much of Western social science from the start, including Durkheim (1964) per anomie, Marx (1964) per alienation, and Weber (1958) per the iron cage of capitalist rationality. The same was true, as if in mirror image, in the “authentification” of anthropology as a scientific field that concerned itself with the putatively authentic, nonmodern, and non-Western primitive (e.g., Kuper

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1988; cf., Knauft 2018). As Trouillot (2002) has noted, the Western modern has often if not always configured itself at least implicitly against an Other and an Elsewhere. Our own approach to authenticity compares with and to some degree contrasts interestingly with Fillitz and Saris’ perspective. On the one hand, we also view the assertion or quest for authenticity in dynamic relation to alternatives that may compromise or confound it. However, we see this less as a generic process of threats to authenticity shared widely across Western modernity than as a refractory prism of a Western quest for authenticity that engages—and to at least some extent presently also facilitates—non-Western and nonmodern perspectives that, from a local perspective, recast and reformulate Western notions of authenticity (or inauthenticity) themselves (cf., DeBlock 2018). We emphasize the playful ricocheting nature of authenticating and authoring subjectivity in the assertion and inversion of anthropological subjects and objects, including in the decolonialized attribution or self-attribution of Indigenous identity, autochthony, or primordialism. While this dynamic is evident to some extent in all world areas, including some of those considered in Fillitz and Saris’ collection, it is particularly developed and thrown into relief in world areas such as the insular South Pacific that have been—along with Sub-Saharan Africa and Amazonia—taken as maximally contrastive or antipodal (a.k.a., “primitive”) vis-à-vis Western modern practices, customs, and lifestyles (e.g., Knauft 1999: ch. 1). In this regional context, as mentioned above, anthropology has been prominent if not primary as the scholarly and disciplinary lens through which the insular South Pacific has been understood. From a sociology of knowledge perspective, it thus makes “sense” that the Indigenous/Western interface of projections of authenticity and their Indigenous recasting has been particularly pronounced in this volume’s world area of concentration. Our volume’s emphasis is hence on the “nestedness” of local and presumptively Indigenous appropriations and transformations of what it is to be authentic within larger Western tensions and dynamics that Fillitz and Saris effectively foreground. This process has often been poignant and intriguing in postcolonial conditions under which modern nation-states, regions, and cultural assertions self-contextualize themselves to be at once “modern” and Indigenously “authentic.” Further, this process in the South Pacific is often informed by a sense of playfulness, humor, and metaframing creativity that undercuts the Western reification of “authenticity” itself (e.g., Alexeyeff and Kihara 2018; Hereniko 1994, 1995; Mageo 1992, 1996, 2008, 2010; Knauft 1998; Hammond, Chapter 1). Though contestations as to what is Indigenously authentic are sometimes politically polarized and sharp, there is also often a spirited and lively embrace of ambiguity and less Sturm und Dram—“storm and stress”—than one finds in identity assertions of authenticity in modern

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Western contests, especially in the current twenty-first century political era. However, one wades into dangerously contested waters of subject positioning in making such a claim too strongly. In this respect, our assertions partake in the suggestive and playful ambiguity that we often find in assertions of authenticity in the contemporary South Pacific itself, especially in rural and/or hinterland areas. It is important here not just to note but also to emphasize the relationship of authorship and authenticity as concepts in the worlds of Indigenous Pacific Islanders. In intercultural reference, one can of course stretch our terms—authoring and authenticity—as we ourselves have done self-consciously above. But it is not a conceit so much as a Western auto-critique to acknowledge that the force of these notions—along with modern Pacific notions of national identity and tradition and custom or kastom or “The Melanesian Way” or “The Samoan Way”—are presently shot through with the refractions, appropriations, and transformations of what were in some senses Western notions and ideals of self-authored identity and authenticity to begin with. Contemporary Pacific Islander reconceptualizations of these terms are—if sometimes sadly or regrettably and often critically, playfully, and brilliantly—influenced by and respond to dynamics of colonial-cum-capitalist intrusion, domination, and representation. Without proper contextualization, it would be a sleight of hand, for instance, to say that “dividuality”—or some native term from one or another Pacific society—is a form of Indigenous agency that “authors” its own “authenticity.” Expressed in Pacific cultural vernacular, these terms could be woefully under-nuanced and misleading. Again, in our own analysis, the process of projecting and claiming authenticity and authorship—at turns both Western and Pacific—is thrown into relief by their relationship to each other. In terms of the anthropology of the Pacific Islands, this sets our approach somewhat apart from, though resonant with, a range of developed literatures concerning subjectivity, agency, and materiality in Pacific Islands societies. These include developed scholarly accounts and analyses that pertain to: • notions and embodiments of selfhood and agency in Pacific Island societies (e.g., Mageo 1995, 1998, 2002; Strathern 1988; Mosko 2010; Sykes 2007; Bonnemère 2018), • material and intellectual property and the assertion of property rights in the Pacific (e.g., Strathern 1999; Hirsch and Strathern 2004; Strang and Busse 2011; cf., Leach and Wilson 2014; Anderson and Geismer 2017), • the production and/or curation of artistic, artifactual, or photographic works and their circulation in the Pacific, including in reflexive relation to alternative subject positions and statuses (e.g., Mel 2020; Kabutau-

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laka 1997; Myers 2004; Negreiros and Howells 2012; Gell 1998; cf., Stanley 2008; Silverman 2015; Basu and Modest 2015; Bennett 2017; Mageo 2010, 2017b). All of these are important issues that are beyond our purview to address or review on their own terms, though they resonate in various ways with our concerns.

Colonialism, Christianity, Literacy

In the Pacific as in most of the classic anthropological world, the civilizing mission of colonialism—and its literate authorship—was closely twined with economic exploitation, on the one hand, and the seeding of moralized modern individualism through Christian conversion on the other (e.g., Barker 1990; Mageo 1998: 141–239; cf. Robbins 2004). The impact of white missionaries was particularly prominent and pervasive in Polynesia and eastern insular Melanesia. Missionaries were the first to develop dictionaries of local languages and to publish material in local languages (Bibles, catechisms, and so on). Soldiering on amidst rival throngs of traders, planters, administrators, and the occasional anthropologist, Christianity became deeply intertwined with colonial experience in the Pacific. Inevitably over time, however, the control of literacy, of authorship, and of claims to authenticity began to shift, if gradually and with embedded dual consciousness, to local elites and to eventual national voicing if not control of authorizing discourse for and about Pacific Islanders themselves (e.g., Schram 2019; cf., concerning dual-consciousness, DuBois 1903). This process is one that still plays itself out in assertions of authenticity and authorship in the Pacific. In the anthropology of the Pacific, many of these tensions are encapsulated in the critical contestation between Haunani-Kay Trask (1991) and Roger Keesing (1989). By the late 1980s and 1990s, anthropologists such as Keesing saw idealizations of custom by Pacific Islanders as emerging from Westernized local elites. Keesing believed that ideas such as “The Melanesian Way” or “The Pacific Way” were political rhetoric that enshrined the administrative and economic fictions of the postcolonial state while incorporating traditionalized missionary discourse, hyper-valorizations of the past, and fetishizations of what appeared to be newly invented culture. Against this, Trask, an active scholar in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, argued that Keesing’s analysis was academic colonialism. She saw Keesing as a latter-day missionary aspiring to enlighten bedeviled natives while ignoring native sources and authors. Many joined the debate. Margaret Jolly (1992) parsed alternative moderns of Pacific authenticity: la coutome in New Caledonia, Kastom in Vanuatu, Samoans’ fa’aSamoa (the Samoan way), and peu ma’ohi in Tahiti. She questioned

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Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) distinction between tradition and custom and the equation of unselfconsciousness with authenticity. Thomas (1992) argued that the distinction between tradition and invention exemplified processes of diacritical self-fashioning that were themselves intrinsic to cultural identity. From different directions and in different ways, these works attempted to deal with the moral and political issues that arose around the topics of authenticity and authoring, particularly concerning the appropriation of voice. At the time, anthropology was arguably unprepared if not unable to adequately address these issues, and the stridency of debate concerning them gradually subsided. Yet attributions of authenticity and critiques of authorship have continued to reverberate and transform in anthropology and among Pacific Islanders (see for example Kabutaulaka 2015; Reisinger and Steiner 2006; Belthassen and Caton 2006; Theodossopoulos 2013a, 2013b; Wang 1999; West and Carrier 2004; Arthur 2011; Hammond et al. 2014; Field 2009; Myers 2004; Hoerig 2003; Taylor 2001; Martin 2010). These transformations are particularly striking in writings about and in the practices of Indigenous Pacific arts and Western tourism, two domains that chapters of this volume explore (e.g., Mel 2020). Some of these insights will be summarized further below. The larger point is to draw attention to the invariably complex reciprocal, ricocheting, and ramifying rebounds, recursions, and resistances between national and/or “Indigenous” assertions and constructions of authenticity and right to authorship vis-à-vis those of Westerners. As Western senior anthropologist editors of this volume, our present authorship does not attempt to either re-assert or abnegate our own author function but rather to open issues of authority and influence over discourse in relation to larger politico-economic and historical contexts. These are invariably part of all present accounts and assertions of authorship and ethnographic or artifactual authenticity, whatever their provenience—not only of prominent cases that find their way to the Western press, such as the desire of Papua New Guinean Members of Parliament to dismantle as immoral or unethical suggestive neo-traditional totemic carvings in its national legislative chamber (e.g., Fox 2013). Issues of discursive construction and contestation of authenticity and legitimate or authorized authorship inform practically all contexts of published representation in the contemporary Pacific, including across national, provincial, local, and village registers as well as those of professional scholarship, academics, and publishing.

In and Beyond the Museum

Benedict Anderson (1991) regards the idea of the national state as developing out of romantic constructions of primordialism—i.e., the nation as the

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original, natural, and authentic social unit. Significantly, he takes the museum to be a primary locale for the practice of nationalism. This was the case for Western hegemons whose aspirations for nations-become-empires projected themselves as global curators of others’ cultural and artifactual diversity. Today the intersection of museums and nations is complex. Some museums are regional in scope—and Indigenous experts have leading roles in their management—for example the Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, New Zealand. Pacific nation-states may vaunt Pacific collections, for example the Auckland Museum and the Mitchell Library in Australia. And there are museums of local artifacts and historical photos dotted all over the Pacific, along with “ethnic” museums in Western locales with large Pacific Island communities, such as the Pacific Island Ethnic Art Museum in Long Beach, California. These types of museums are often devoted to notions of authenticity and indeed may identify as icons and actualizations of Pacific authenticity both of an artifactual and artistic variety. Speaking generally, in the history of Western social theory, theorists tended to project authenticity onto three primordial locales: (1) inaccessibly deep within the individual Western-styled self, (2) among “primitive” societies, and (3) in the deep past of Western history. This conceptual splintering exposes various kinds of authenticity: authenticity found in Western authors, past or present, or in their objects of artistic production, and authenticity purportedly endemic in “primitive” societies and in their “traditional” objects. This splintering of authenticity became, we suggest, a schismatic structuring principle for museums, including early choices about dividing and segmenting different locales in different sections of priority within the museum as well as in the generation of wholly different kinds of museums—for instance, fine art museums in which individual artistic authorship is foregrounded, and ethnographic or natural history museums where authorship of all but the most recent objects may be unclear or absent altogether. While nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Westerners believed that change and upheaval characterized their own societies, they tended to believe that non-Western societies where characterized by unchanging tradition, replete with perduring customs in the general absence of social transformation (Latour 1993). As we saw in the Trask-Keesing debate, Westerners often saw transformation in non-Western societies as an unfortunate fall away from the authenticity that such societies purportedly embodied. Anderson’s (1991) analysis of the Taj Mahal offers another example. Western colonists sought to purify the Taj in order to extricate and enshrine the traditions it represented by removing persons and objects that might denote that it was or would otherwise have been part of a living, changing culture. This purification made it, temporarily, postcard-pretty and a key tourist destination, a must-see stopover on the grand tour that aristocrats and upper-middle-class Europeans

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saw as integral to their education. Here “tradition” became, in Debord’s terms, spectacle. To contemporary anthropologists, a model of authenticity as unchanging tradition seems quaint at best and, like museums themselves (Goetz 1954: 15), may be an invention of the colonial period. But the quaint can also be the contemporary. Mel (2020: 48), a PNG highlander who is currently manager of the Pacific and International collections at the Australian Museum in Sydney, attests that still today Pacific museum collections tend to be “steeped in Western ideologies.”3 In a recent project on Samoan historical artifacts and photographs for which she visited twenty-three museums in Europe, New Zealand, and the United States, Mageo found that such ideologies or rather their historical legacy still characterized many ethnographic collections. By investigating museum acquisition lists and then investigating the biographies of donors, she could often roughly date objects. In all but a very few cases, however, there had been little attempt to discover when objects were actually collected, to document Indigenous artistic or social transformation, and certainly not to discover who made them—their author. Of course, this was usually not the fault of contemporary museum staff. In museums today in the Pacific and elsewhere, museum staff generally and the Pacific islanders who frequently number among them are intensely concerned with documenting artifacts and their histories. But there is often a widening gap between what people know should be done and what can be done. Resources to investigate provenience are limited and museum storages are replete with objects lacking substantive documentation. Museums cannot have experts in all cultural areas let alone all cultures, and artifacts come from a much wider range of locales than museum staff know about. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century travelers collected many museums items considered “traditional” and hence unchanging. In line with the biases of their time, they imagined that artisans simply repeated longexisting patterns rather than creating new originals like Western artists putatively did. This was the very signature of ethnographic artifacts’ authenticity. Authenticity meant an object was collectively authored and timeless. Ironically, “timelessness” was often legitimated by an object’s age, older items being more “timeless.” Often, too, during the period in which many objects were donated—the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—attitudes were similar at the museum. With photos, the situation was somewhat better—but only because tourists or official photographers might date their photos: in the first case as travel mementos; in the second because they depicted what photographers regarded as historical events in which dates were consequential. Contrast the imputed atemporality of early artifacts owned by museums with the detailed provenance that Aime’s Papua New Guinea Kayan people remember for their garamut drums (Chapter 4). Although Kayan see these drums as the

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very essence of their traditions, its spirit(s), these drums are far from authorless or without history. Today, along with accession dates, museums frequently have a record of who gave an item but not necessarily of the actual collector. This collector can sometimes be inferred from other records. For example, one might recognize the name of the donor as being the son of a famous traveler or expedition leader or iterant ethnographer who was in the Pacific thirty years earlier but who died around the date a set of objects was given to the museum. Even this gives no definitive hint as to when an object was made. While early travelers often sought old objects, locals often realized that age-cum-authenticity attracted travelers interest and so could “antique” objects to make them more saleable—practices that continue today (see for example DeBlock 2018 and Knauft, Chapter 3). Bifurcated notions of authenticity still often structure museum collections: on the one hand, the authenticity associated with nature and perceived naturalness in people (what Mageo in Chapter 2 calls “natural authenticity”); on the other, the authenticity imputed to the recognized Western artist, which we might call “artistic authenticity.” Frequently if not typically, there are distinct sections or even separate museums for ethnographic objects and for fine art. Today, recognized artists’ works, like individual subjects, are putatively unique, coming from the deepest core of an individual subject—as distinct from the ever-proliferating objects of commercial and commodified production. If they are famous, the objects that Western artists produce also have an elaborately published history. And yet, ironically, significant Western artists have found inspiration for their “original” works in so-called “primitive” cultures. From 1906 to 1909, Picasso famously took inspiration from sculpture and masks brought back to Paris from the French colonial expansion into Sub-Saharan Africa; such pieces were a formative influence in his Cubism (Negreiros and Howells 2012; Rubin 1984; Stepan 2006). The intermediary, of course, was the museum, in this case, the Palais du Trocadero, among others. Even Baudelaire’s famous original elucidation and formulation of Western “modernity,” in the 1860s, was deeply intertwined with and informed by his travels and intimacies with radically non-Western others. In material culture, artifacts and “art,” the locus of presentation is the museum, along with the art gallery, as Sarina Pearson and Shuchi Kothari (Chapter 6) suggest.

Authenticity and Christianity in the Pacific

To an important extent, ideas travel as if they have a life of their own, whatever our personal reservations. They circulate, passing from mind to mind, recontextualized by user upon user in different social and cultural locales.

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Colonials of many stripes brought the Rousseauian idea of primitive naturalness even to the fringes of empire, including a Western cultural model of the self embedded in this idea. But Christian missionaries had particular impact on ideation in the colonial interface given their often long-term residence, practical influence, and explicit project of introducing Christian texts and ideas in and through local languages (Mageo 1998: 141–239). These projections have selectively influenced Pacific Islanders themselves, including in their own assertions of authenticity and authorship (e.g. Barker 1990; Robbins 2004). A revealing case in point is the idea of sincerity brought and propagated among Polynesians by nineteenth-century evangelical missionaries (cf. Tomlinson 2020). In Samoa, for example, knowledge of the catechism was for the London Missionary Society a necessary but insufficient criterion for the privilege of baptism and for church office, to which many Samoans aspired. Missionaries looked for converts who displayed “knowledge of their own hearts” (Harbutt 1841); this alone indicated sincere adherence to the faith. As a result, converting Samoans, who modeled the self as a role player and who emphasized the importance of decorous performance (in Samoan terms teu le va, “decorate the relationship”), often came to feel like hypocrites. In an 1839 letter from Tutuila, the missionary Murray quotes a recent convert proclaiming, “Formerly . . . we uttered love . . . with our mouth while our hearts were full of hatred and murder but now, we know true compassion” (1839). Christianity purveyed Western ideas of authenticity and authorship in many locales although these ideas hybridized with local needs and feelings and with local models in highly specific ways (see Barker 1990, 2012; Mageo 1998, 2002; Robbins 2004; Tomlinson and McDougall 2012; Schram 2019). Pacific colonial officials of many varieties also brought contradictory Western ideas of authenticity to the Pacific, on the one hand grounded in individuality, originality, and authoring; on the other, based on notions of the primitive as pure nature and of tradition as unchanging culture. What was “authored” was putatively original, the very opposite of traditional—and, indeed, voided any legal claim to what we might call historical authenticity and legitimacy. While Christian missionaries brought the idea of sincerity as an honest accord between inner sentiments and outward expression to the Pacific, and while colonial officials brought the idea that “tradition” was a form of legal authentication, a multitude of people—museum-goers, tourists, anthropologists and others—recontextualized these ideas in playful and practical ways. One result is that in the contemporary Pacific, the “A word,” Authenticity, has increasingly become an emic category. Indeed, authenticity is now part of a “patois of culture” among islanders, tourists, and collectors as well as a key value in the practices of all three groups. As such, authenticity and the entailed idea of authorship deserve renewed consideration and evaluation. This volume will

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consider anew what cultural work these ideas have done and continue to do in Pacific settings today. In different locales and from various viewpoints, our chapters shift the focus of this “authenticity” conversation to the active entwinement of local and foreign cultural forms, to use Hammond’s (2017) phrase. We also investigate explicit and implicit commingling of ideas about authenticity and authorship in Pacific cultures by foreigners and locals, a commingling that has persisted since first contact. In most instances, the aims of these attempts were hybrid and the renderings themselves, multi-vocal. Often, such renderings have been and continue to be coauthored by foreigners and Indigenes in more or less manifest or latent ways that are generative for foreigners and Indigenous cultures alike. Troubled by concerns about voice, its origins, who is speaking, with what right and with what legitimacy, these renderings and their reception nonetheless represent creative hybrids of cultural orientations themselves. Their effects were and are to different degrees at once eroding and generative. Themes of tribute, gift, appropriation, and trade lace through such productions and their after-effects.

Thematic Contours

This volume develops four themes touched upon by all the chapters, with varying degrees of respective emphasis. First, obviously, is the thematic connection between Authenticity and Authoring itself. While some chapters emphasize one or the other of these notions more prominently, all pay some attention to both and to their interrelationship. From various places and perspectives, each chapter asks to what extent have these ideas implied and relied upon one another both in Western colonial incursions and in Pacific lives. Second, all the chapters consider how change is invariably a two-way street. How do ideas of authenticity and authoring and their usage in the Pacific toggle back and forth between metropolitan Western European locales (the academy, the museum, the gallery, the fashion show runway, etc.) and Pacific locales, both rural and urban? How, through the concepts of authenticity and authoring, do Pacific islanders talk and talk back to Western theorizations and ethnographic descriptions? How has cultural interactivity developed around these concepts? Third, the chapters touch upon authenticity and authoring as implicating a history of ideas, specially the history/transformation of these ideas in the West and in the Pacific. In some of this book’s chapters, the focus is more on Western production and assertion or dissemination of ideas, and in others on Pacific Islanders own sides of the coin. But in all cases the relationship is ultimately one of rebounding influence and combination.

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Fourth, like this introduction, the chapters suggest the place of concepts of authenticity and authoring in the ongoing development of anthropological theory and practice. Discourses that are alternatively transnational, national, local—and academic or not—rebound in complex ways that authors address in importantly different permutations and registers. In all cases, these have significant implications for the further development of authorship, authority, and authentification in anthropology as a field and as a discipline.

The Chapters

The following chapters of this book are vitally complementary both with respect to each other and with respect to this introduction. Some contributions tend ultimately to champion Indigenous authenticity across the ricochet of ideas and impositions (Dalton, Aime, and Jolly); others stress the hybridities and playfulness of Pacific Islander performance of authenticity (Hammond), the whiplash of competing notions of Pacific authenticity in the Western curation of Pacific art (Pearson and Kothari), the complicities and complications of Westerners visual self-renderings in the Pacific (Mageo), and the imputations and contradictions of Western ethnographic authorship (Knauft). Because each of these contributions is, we think, very strong on its own terms, we take it as a strength that their respective facets and nuances of understanding are not fully reducible or collapsible to the conceptual framework that our introduction itself sets forth—at the same time that they all fully engage and deeply resonate with its general perspective. Our introductory ideas themselves ricochet through the chapters in ways that are at turns intriguing, surprising, and beyond regimentation. We see the larger contribution of this work not as promulgating a coherent new dictum but as a reflexive scholarly illustration of the kinds of interchange and prismatic refraction that our introduction expresses in larger conceptual terms. Joyce Hammond’s chapter, “Tenues Végétales in Beauty Contests of French Polynesia: Authenticity on Islanders’ Own Terms,” is perhaps the best example of the toggling back and forth of concepts of authenticity and authoring between European and Pacific Islanders. From the beginning of the Miss Tahiti competition, contestants wore a variety of fashionable Western-style garments such as evening gowns, a practice associated with beauty contests globally. In the late 1900s, a Tahitian dance sequence was added to the program that featured costumes crafted from natural materials. That sequence was abandoned shortly after 2000 when the owner of the contest decided to add a segment parallel to the elegant gown section. Ever since, the tenues végétales segment has featured stylish garments of local design, all made from natural materials of the island environment.

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To create these tenues végétales, islanders often draw from their historical past as well as style magazines, fashion on the internet and in films and TV shows. Hammond suggests that this particular “fashion show” element of the Miss Tahiti competition was recast in local terms to give island artists the opportunity to author fashionable, cosmopolitan reconceptualizations of cultural identity. The practice, ongoing since 2000 and pervasive in a majority of beauty contests throughout French Polynesia, creates a venue for islanders to express authenticity as a creative engagement with global influence, with tradition, and with “nature” locally conceived. Hammond’s chapter shows how “authenticity” is a focus around which many other ethnographic oppositions collapse—such as that between the past and the present, between nature and artifice, and between “the West and the Rest.” Tradition, Hammond argues, is mutable, changing, and the focus of Tahitian designers’ creativity. In Western thought there had long been an analogy between the depths of the self and the historical past. In “Civilization and Its Discontents,” for example, Freud (1961) likens the depth of the self to Roman ruins on top of which many new structures are built. In the Pacific, islanders often sought an authenticity that was not deep within the individual but by reimagining and reconceptualizing traditional forms. Art plays a special part here—art as a source of authenticity. The Western artist purportedly plumbed “his” personal interior depths to create authentic art. The authenticity of Tahitian designers, Hammond argues, comes not from their ability to mine the inner resources of the self but to create cultural identity anew. This link between art, authenticity, and cultural identity is clearly pan-Pacific. Thus since 1972, island nations have hosted the Pacific Arts Festival. This traveling festival is a cultural exchange aimed at supporting and expanding Islanders’ sense of cultural identity. Next we turn to Jeannette Mageo’s, “American Colonial Mimicry: Cultural Identity Fantasies and Being ‘Authentic’ in Samoa.” Mageo’s chapter collapses the apparent opposition between imitation and authoring. In the traditional Western view, that which is authentically authored is original, but Mageo argues that people author their cultural identities in part by mimicking foreign others (see also Mageo 2017a, 2017b). In photographs from the first half of the twentieth century of Americans in Samoa, she examines American’s mimicry of Samoans. What she finds is that an artist and an anthropologist, along with women and children more generally, engage in playful mimicry of what they perceive as Samoan authenticity. They combine this mimicry with facial and bodily gestures that signal American authenticity understood as inclusiveness and openness to others. Official American colonials engage in a much more limited mimicry that preserves colonial authority while also signaling inclusiveness, which Mageo interprets as a platform offered in exchange for the right to rule. In contrast, she examines the New Zealand regime in the

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westerly Samoa’s post-World War I, which was more politically fraught than the American regime. In photos from the first several decades of the twentieth century, New Zealanders appear to imitate British imperial style: for them this is the authorizing source of social authority and legitimacy. Later New Zealanders, under scrutiny by the United Nations for their mismanagement, assume the task of shepherding Samoa to an independent state and then do mimic Samoans. In “Critical Reflections across Four Decades of Work with Gebusi: Authorship, Authenticity, Anthropology,” Bruce Knauft begins with Foucault’s genealogy of authorship as not just an individual but an individually recognized Western phenomenon of representational construction. How and under what conditions, Knauft asks, do nominations or imputations of authenticity in our own authorship change over the course of an anthropological career—and how have they changed over recent decades of anthropological history? Authenticity and Authorship thus seem to have, Knauft argues, a collaborative or collusional relationship by Western genealogical fiat: Authorship and Author-ity, Authenticity, Authentication, and Author-ization. The politics of authorship and authenticity are very much at stake in the shifting forms of representation that ethnographers have pursued or at least reflected over time. In its own way, and perhaps inevitably, professional anthropological scholarship presumes attributions that are at once real, true, and genuine, on the one hand, and, on the other, brought to light and delineated through presumptively original authorship. Though debates concerning the political assertion of authenticity and authorship ebb and flow over time, the pragmatic tasks of writing and publishing, curating, representing, and encouraging self-representation by and of other peoples and cultures continue. This chapter engages these issues in Knauft’s forty-year representational relationship of and with the Gebusi people of Papua New Guinea, starting in 1980. During this period, both the Gebusi’s and Knauft’s depictions or projections of them have continued across long cycles of effervescent “traditionality,” the effacement of traditions by local development, and the more recent resurgence of customs in the face of economic collapse. Knauft reflects on his own style of writing and representation as the themes and times of ethnography have altered and as his professional goals, and those Gebusi themselves, have morphed. He considers varied constructions of authorship and authenticity in relation to the intended or implied audience or addressee, self-critically tracing the twisted genealogy of his own authorship and assertions of Gebusi authenticity over four decades—and how they themselves have or have not reacted to this. In conclusion, Knauft adduces eight take-away points, relevant for junior or seasoned scholars, for considering authorship and authenticity in contemporary cultural anthropology. He suggests these allow and encourage anthropologists to be more self-aware and mindful of their own subject position vis-à-vis their subjects and collab-

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orators in research, and the status of our work in relation to diverse local, national, and international constituencies. In “Recovering Authenticity: Garamut (Slit-Drums) among Kayan People, Madang Province, Papua New Guinea,” Alphonse Aime explores resonances between Alfred Gell’s (1998) idea that objects mediate social agency and act as secondary agents that extend the agency of persons as spirit-charged objects. He suggests that conceptualizing objects as possessing agency and personhood is critical to understanding the production and use of garamut (slit-drums) among the Kayan people of Bogia District in Madang Province, Papua New Guinea. He uses this analysis to examine the potentials and complications of promulgating a neo-traditional return to an earlier Kayan village culture. Respect for authority and for elders is reinscribed by stimulating the production of garamut. Young men who Aime interviewed were highly aware and to some extent taken with this return, which they saw as helping them move from a disorderly kind of freedom by resurrecting the voice of the spirits of old. Garamut could only be initiated by Big-Men, and only owned by men, not by women, and were apparently paired. Garamut production today is seen to underscore the value of tradition in ways that help address problems of lawlessness and social unrest among younger men that are evident throughout much of contemporary Melanesia. Potentially, Aime argues, garamut can author a resurgence of tradition that is both productive and cross-generational. These talking “drums” exemplify the spiritual force and efficacy of traditional spirit-charged objects that was lost or explicitly extracted from them (or not encoded to begin with) by siphoning them off for touristic or other non-traditional display. This turn to commercialism risks interrupting these objects’ sacred voice, spiritual value, and ritual internalization. Here the appropriation of voice, so often discussed in the anthropological literature on tradition and invention, takes on new meaning—capitalism appropriating but then Indigenes taking back voices that express themselves in a new key. Aime’s chapter lets garamut speak as if for themselves to a new audience. In “The Flying Fox and the Sentiment of Being: On the Authenticity of a Papua New Guinea Rawa Tradition,” Doug Dalton suggests that Pacific Islanders are a genuine source of authenticity: they manifest what Rousseau calls “a sentiment of being.” The yambo miro or “song of the flying fox” of Papua New Guinea Rawa-speaking people harbors this sentiment. It is “anonymous” in the folklorist sense of having no original author. Involving a mythical origin and a magical bush spirit whose invocation in song elicits compassion and generosity and reminds men of their mortality, the song is at the heart of the marriage exchange system but is also employed in many modern contexts including a touristic encounter in the Rawa hinterland Dalton observed and the opening of a Lutheran church conference that his village sponsored.

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Dalton argues that this analytic move, asserting Rawa authenticity, is a way to recoup Rawa otherness—that is, what is valuable and different about them and what they have to offer us as a model of being human. Along these lines, Dalton also asks how Rawa’s sentiment of being is the same as or different than that sentiment as Rousseau envisioned it. He finds that for both Rawa and Rousseau this sentiment counters problems of deception and self-deception through a return to sentient experience and to the empathy inspired by others’ pain, grief, and death. This Rawa experience of authenticity, however, does not seem to travel easily across cultures or through time. Thus, Dalton also suggests that the song of the flying fox fails to create a sentiment of being among Western Europeans and, increasingly, even among Rawa themselves. Dalton suggests this failure is evident in an increase in postcolonial violence that reminds him of the revolutionary politics that Rousseau foresaw and attempted to avert. Sarina Pearson’s and Shuchi Kothari’s “Digital Storytelling in the Pacific and ‘Ethnographic Orientalism’” offers a powerful commentary on the ways authenticity is established in the Pacific today. One of the volumes’ features is to follow authenticity and authoring into diverse locales and through diverse histories. Pearson and Kothari’s chapter introduces a locale where authenticity and authoring have surprising contemporary resonances—the art gallery, which turns out, unsurprisingly, to be even more trammeled by capitalism than tourism and museums, all under auspices of being supercool and antiOrientalist. Pearson and Kothari were recording Pacific Islander life-history stories in Suva at the University of the South Pacific and at a USP extension in Tonga when the directors of a nursing program at the University of Auckland asked their team to pilot digital storytelling as part of the Māori palliative care research. They saw the project as offering a way to produce more authentic information than the program might get elsewhere. Here we find yet another version of “authenticity,” a scientific notion of genuine “truthful” data. Pearson and Kothari explore the notions of authenticity and inauthenticity embedded in the various response they got from their participants, from their colleagues before and after the project, and from the galley, documenting each group’s changing ideas about authenticity. Given that the videos were made by and about Pacific islanders, the chapter has fertile implications for our understanding of authoring and how various audiences evaluate it. Margaret Jolly’s Afterword begins by contrasting two evocative vignettes. The first is of remarkable pieces of art in a museum of “Old and New Art” in a subterranean quarry in Tasmania—where, for example, Winged Tang dynasty tomb guardians jostle against Egyptian falcons, plaster sculpted heads used for phrenology in early twentieth-century England, nineteenth-century Fijian clubs fashioned from tree roots, Picasso’s The Weeping Woman, and elaborate Pacific tapa cloths. The second vignette portrays Jolly’s poignant encounter with an embittered Vanuatu man dying of prostate cancer who claims authen-

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tic ownership of cultural property in a homicidal dispute over local land dive (gol) performances that have attracted the attention and visits of many tourists to Vanuatu. Having bookended a broad spectrum of issues concerning authorship and authenticity, Jolly then comments on the contested nature of authenticity and its relationship to authorship, particularly in Eurocentric readings of historical assertion or imposition. She engages the challenges to Western readings, histories, and interpretations posed by Oceanic ideas of authenticity, including in relation to Indigenous personhood as elaborated in the Maussian tradition of Leenhardt and by Pacific Islander authors themselves. Reflecting on the highly publicized argument between Roger Keesing (1989) Haunani-Kay Trask (1991), discussed earlier in this introduction, Jolly resituates this debate against centuries of colonial contact and change among most of the societies that this volume considers. After providing an analytic summary and review of each the book’s chapters, her final assessment is that adjudications of authenticity should be up to Indigenous agents themselves rather than outsiders, even as Islanders may disagree concerning the terms and contours of authenticity. She finishes poignantly by considering the current role of social media such as Instagram in mediating assertions of authenticity by Pacific Islanders amid consumerism and the marketing of commodities, brands, and experiences on the internet.

Well-Traveled Reflections

Pacific Islanders take Western genealogies, projections, and impositions of “authenticity” and “authorship” on board, recasting these traveling concepts for their own purposes—that is their power for good and ill. The Western proveniences for these concepts and their entailments are not “by right” only Western. And yet, this genealogy of imposition has had lasting effects, and ones not reducible to some imagined Pacific alternative ontology that has its own hagiographic and projective biases. That Pacific Islanders incorporate, subvert, recast, and re-tool Western notions of authenticity and authorship in their own ways does not reduce their responses to “Westernisms,” but neither does it signal some continuity-without-change in received Pacific islander notions. Under conditions of asymmetric power/dominance, the ricochet of traveling ideas is not evenly equal or reciprocal—being always to a degree inflected by postcolonial conditions or by local elites in at least some spheres and contexts. As such, cultural ideas are in continual process of reassertion and translation, colored by changing relations of power and influence both within the insular Pacific as well as outside of it (cf., Clifford 1997). In the process, the endlessly variant translations of these Western ideas have become vehicles

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of Pacific agency—like foreign words incorporated into an Indigenous language but used to convey (most authentically) transforming local meanings and values. In Papua New Guinea, what was once an English-based pidgin of indigenized Western terms has developed over time to become the full spoken and written national language of Tok Pisin (a.k.a., “Talk Pidgin”). If, as is often said, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, new and even subaltern languages can also assume and assert their own authenticity and authorship over time. So, too, Christianity in the insular Pacific encodes and reflects such conceptual travel (Barker 1990, 2012; Mageo 1998: 141–239; Robbins 2004; Schram 2019; Tomlinson and McDougall 2012). In many senses Christianity is now fully “Pacific Islander” and not an alien intrusion; its Western origin does not subvert its local “authenticity” or its originary provenience, definitions, assumptions, or impositions. The “Western” origin of the traveling concepts we trace is not one of ultimate determination—that is indeed our point—nor does it reflect a failure to appreciate Pacific Islander ontologies and received cultural constructions. Rather we hope to illuminate both the genealogical ancestry and the locally authentic construction of intrusions that, like Christianity, are now often “authenticated” and “authored” in new ways by Pacific Islanders themselves. Another larger question these studies raise for anthropology is how issues tend to get debated in the abstract only to be then neglected for years while their practical impact actually deepens and rebounds more fully among the subjects as well as authors of anthropological work. As the “light of scholarly interest” moves on to other topics (see Robbins 2013), it easily leaves an historical and ethnographic myopia concerning the continuing entailments of these same issues in the lives of the people studied. A number of critical concepts in anthropology demonstrate this progression. For instance, structural-functional notions of “clanship” went out of fashion in anthropology at the same time that Indigenous peoples increasingly started latching on to these same notions to assert their land rights and property claims. Another more general example is how anthropologists critiqued notions of “modernity” and “development” in the 1990s and then moved on largely as if this critique had done its job. At the same time, however, development schemes of modern progress were increasingly internalized and aspired to by local people across many parts of the world—and have been concretely adopted as national political strategies in many if not most countries to the present day. One could also make this argument about the notion of “culture”: as holisitic notions of culture were critiqued and rejected as overly reified, local peoples and national (and nationalistic) groups began employing such notions more and more in representational self-assertion. As Sahlins (1999: 403) suggests, quoting Brumann, “If anthropologists like it or not, it appears that people—

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and not only those with power—want culture, and they often want it precisely in the bounded, reified, essentialized, and timeless fashion that most of us now reject.” This resonates with the crooked course we follow in this volume for authoring and authenticity, along with their travels and the travails they have spawned. In combining different Pacific instances and locales where concepts of authoring and authenticity have played and still play major roles, Authenticity and Authorship in Pacific Island Encounters represents a new contribution to our disciplinary understanding of histories of ideas and their “routes” both within and across cultures (cf., Clifford 1997). This includes how concepts rebound and recast other existing concepts. In particular, this volume pries apart and refines our understanding of authoring in relation to the implicit or explicit assertions or renewed discoveries or reinventions of authenticity—be it through the defense, or the reconstruction or deconstruction, of primordialism. Perforce, this entails new relations and considerations of authorship, and of assertive agency and discursivity. The chapters show how thick cultural interactivity has grown crystal-like around these concepts—and how Westerners have uncritically lugged about this conceptual baggage from their first entrée into the Pacific, while islanders have adopted, sported with, and changed these ideas as they might any other novel import. Pacific Islanders combine externalizing and internalizing dimensions of authenticity and authoring, informing these with long-held concepts of their own that provide both new twists and old turns. As such, we hope this book will have strong relevance not only for scholarly work in the Pacific but for other audiences and for broader considerations of culture and history in anthropology.

Acknowledgments

The authors contributed equally to this introduction, though we list Mageo’s name first given her initial role in launching this project. In the authoring process, our respective ideas overlapped and intertwined continually in a mutually rebounding and, we hope, enriching way. We would like to thank Rupert Stasch, Tom Bonnington, and two anonymous reviewers for their extremely useful comments on our efforts. All shortcomings remain our own.

Since 1980, Jeannette Mageo has researched Samoan culture, history, and psychology. She has authored eleven books and edited collections as well as thirtyfour peer-reviewed major articles and numerous book chapters on Pacific anthropology and psychological anthropology. After earning her doctorate in 1979 from the University of California at Santa Cruz, Professor Mageo spent

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nine years in the field, returning to a postdoctoral position at the University of California at San Diego in 1989, which she held until 1993 when she assumed her current post at Washington State University. In recent years she has turned to examine the collision of Samoan and European cultures and psychologies in the colonial encounter through performance art, historical photos, and colonial artifacts. Bruce Knauft is Samuel C. Dobbs Professor of Anthropology at Emory University. He began fieldwork among the rainforest-dwelling Gebusi of Papua New Guinea in 1980 and has studied with them during five subsequent periods of fieldwork, most recently in 2017. Dr. Knauft’s interests include cultural and social theory, political economy, engaged anthropology, violence, gender and sexuality, subjectivity and mindfulness, and world history—and the anthropology of Melanesia, Africa, Asia, and the US. Author of nine books and edited collections, Dr. Knauft has, in addition to Papua New Guinea, worked in East and West Africa, Mongolia, Myanmar, India, and Tibet. Notes 1. These approaches include hermeneutics in the tradition of Dilthey (1976), Husserl (2017), and contemporary phenomenology (e.g., Ram and Houston 2015; Jackson 1996); deconstruction as différance in textual tracings à la Derrida (2016, 2017) or in semiotic usage à la Barthes (1996); dynamic multivocality of intersecting speech genres and chronotopes per Bakhtin (1986); the morphing of ideas as seen through an historical sociology of knowledge per Mannheim (2015); traveling concepts in interdisciplinarity (Bal 2002); genealogies of nuanced subjective change à la latter Foucault (1985, 1986); and the traveling of concepts or theories in a world of artistic or academic attribution à la Said (1983, 2014), or, in different register, Bourdieu (1996). 2. Academic works by Pacific Islanders have provided highly important contributions to ethnographic and larger critical understanding in and in relation to anthropological scholarship. Even outside Hawai’i, New Zealand, and New Caledonia, contributions include works by Melanesians and Polynesians such as Narokobi 1983; Hau’ofa 1994; Hereniko 1994, 1995; Mara 1997; Ketan 2004; Guo 2006; Stella 2007; Smith 2011; Tamaira 2010; Osorio 2011; Nanau 2011; Diaz 2012; Teaiwa 2014a, 2014b; Kabutaulaka 1997, 2015; Alexeyeff and Kihara 2018; and Mel 2020, among many others. In the Pacific as elsewhere, opportunities or lack of opportunity for higher education have a strong impact on the potentials for insider authorship. Given the relative marginality of many, or most, smaller Pacific islands in the global political economy, it is not surprising that the facilitation of Indigenous academic authorship faces special challenges and constraints across many parts of the region. 3. Similarly, Appadurai and Breckenridge (1992: 36) see Indian museums as “a product of the conscious agenda of India’s British rulers.”

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———. 1999. From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesia and in Anthropology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2018. “From Savage to Good: A Brief Genealogy of Anthropology—By Route of the Primitive, the Dark, and the Suffering Subject.” Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Jose, CA, 12 December. ———. 2019. “Good Anthropology in Dark Times: Critical Appraisal and Ethnographic Application.” Australian Journal of Anthropology 30(1): 3–17. Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in Language, trans. L. S. Roudiez and ed., T. Gora, A. Jardine, and L. S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Kuper, Adam. 1988. The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion. London: Routledge. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Leach, James, and Lee Wilson, eds. 2014. Subversion, Conversion, Development: Crosscultural Knowledge Encounter and the Politics of Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mageo, Jeannette. 1992. “Male Transvestism and Culture Change in Samoa.” American Ethnologist 19(3): 443–59. ———. 1995. “The Reconfiguring Self.” American Anthropologist 97(2): 282–96. ———. 1996. “Samoa, on the Wilde Side.” Ethos 24(4): 1–40. ———. 1998. Theorizing Self in Samoa. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2002. “Discourse and Sexual Agency.” In Power and the Self, ed. Jeannette Mageo, 141–76. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2008. “Zones of Ambiguity and Identity Politics in Samoa.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14(1): 61–78. ———. 2010. “Race, Gender, and ‘Foreign Exchange’ in Samoan Performing Arts.” Anthropological Forum 20: 269–89. ———. 2017a. “Introduction: Mimesis in Theory and in History.” In Mimesis and Pacific Transcultural Encounters, eds. Jeannette Mageo and Elfriede Hermann, 3–28. New York: Berghahn Books. ———. 2017b. “Transitional Images and Imaginaries.” In Mimesis and Pacific Transcultural Encounters, eds. Jeannette Mageo and Elfriede Hermann, 49–78. New York: Berghahn Books. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: Dutton. Mannheim, Karl. 2015. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. Eastford: Martino Fine Books. Mara, Ratu Sir Kamisese. 1997. The Pacific Way: A Memoir. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Marcus, George E., and Michael M. J. Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Markus, Hazel R., and Shinobu Kitayama. 1991. “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion and Motivation.” Psychological Review 98(2): 224–53. Marriot, McKim. 1976. “Hindu Transactions: Diversity Without Dualism.” In Transaction and Meaning: Directions in the Anthropology of Exchange and Symbolic Behavior, ed. Bruce Kapferer. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. Martin, Keir. 2010. “Living Pasts: Contested Tourism Authenticities.” Annals of Tourism Research 37(2): 537–54.

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Marx, Karl. 1964. Karl Marx: Early Writings, ed. Tom Bottomore. New York: McGraw-Hill. Mel, Michael. 2020. “Navigating for a Place in the Museum: Stories of Encounter and Engagement between the Old and the New from the Highlands of Papua New Guinea.” Contemporary Pacific 32(1): 48–71. Mosko, Mark. 2010. “Partible Penitents: Dividual Personhood and Christian Practice in Melanesia and the West.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16(2): 215–40. Murray, A. 1839. January 15 letter to London Missionary Society Headquarters from Tutuila. Council of World Missions Archives (12/6/A), School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Myers, Fred R. 2004. “Social Agency and the Cultural Value(s) of the Art Object.” Journal of Material Culture 9(2): 203–11. Narokobi, Bernard. 1983. The Melanesian Way. Boroko: Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies. Nanau, Gordon Leua. 2011. “The Wantok System as a Socio-economic and Political Network in Melanesia.” OMNES: The Journal of Multicultural Society 2(1): 31–35. Negreiros, Joaquim, and Richard Howells. 2012. Visual Culture. Cambridge: Polity. Ortner, Sherry B. 1995. “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37: 173–93. ———. 2016. “Dark Anthropology and Its Others: Theory Since the Eighties.” Hau 6(1): 47–73. Osorio, Jonathan K. 2011. “All Things Depending: Renewing Interdependence in Oceania.” Oceania 81(3): 297–301. Phillips, David P. 1986. “Natural Experiments on the Effects of Mass Media Violence on Fatal Aggression.” In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 19, ed. Leonard Berkowitz, 207–50. New York: Academic Press. Phillips, David, Katherine Lesyna, and Daniel J. Paight. 1992. “Suicide and the Media.” In Assessment and Prediction of Suicide, eds. Ronald W. Maris, Alan L. Berman, John T. Maltsburger, and Robert I. Yufit, 499–519. New York: Guilford Publications. Ram, Kalpana, and Christopher Houston, eds. 2015. Phenomenology in Anthropology: A Sense of Perspective. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Reisinger, Yvette, and Carol J. Steiner. 2006. “Reconceptualizing Object Authenticity.” Annals of Tourism Research 33(1): 65–86. Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2013. “Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(3): 447–62. Rubin, W. S. 1984. “Primitivism” in Twentieth Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Sahlins, Marshall D. 1999. “Two or Three Things I Know about Culture.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5(3): 399–421. Said, Edward W. 1983. “Traveling Theory.” In The World, the Text, and the Critic by Edward Said. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2014. Orientalism. New York: Random House. Schram, Ryan. 2019. “The Tribe Next Door: The New Guinea Highlands in a Post-war Papuan Mission Newspaper.” Australian Journal of Anthropology 30(1): 18–34. Scott, James C. 1987. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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———. 1992. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shane, Eric. 2008. The Life and Masterworks of J.M.W. Turner, 4th ed. New York: Parkstone Press. Shweder, Richard A., and Edmund J. Bourne. 1984. “Does the Concept of the Person Vary Cross-Culturally?” In Cultural Conceptions of Mental Health and Therapy, eds. A. J. Marsella and G. M. White, 97–137. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Silverman, Raymond Aaron, ed. 2015. Museum as Process: Translating Local and Global Knowledges. London: Routledge. Sinavaiana, Caroline. 1992a. “Traditional Comic Theater in Samoa: A Holographic View.” PhD dissertation. University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. ———. 1992b. “Where the Spirits Laugh Last: Comic Theater in Samoa.” In Clowning as Critical Practice, ed. William E. Mitchell, 192–219. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2011. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave. Stanley, Nick. 2008. The Future of Indigenous Museums: Perspectives from the Southwest Pacific. New York: Berghahn Books. Stella, Regis Tove. 2007. Imagining the Other: The Representation of the Papua New Guinean Subject. Pacific Islands Monograph Series. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Stepan, Peter. 2006. Picasso’s Collection of African and Oceanic Art: Masters of Metamorphosis. New York: Prestel. Strang, Veronica, and Mark Busse, eds. 2011. Ownership and Appropriation. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1999. Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. London: Athlone Press. Sykes, Karen. 2007. “Interrogating Individuals: The Theory of Possessive Individualism in the Western Pacific.” Anthropological Forum 17(3): 213–34. Swales, Martin. 1987. Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Tamaira, A. Marata. 2010. “From Full Dusk to Full Tusk: Reimagining the ‘Dusky Maiden.’” Contemporary Pacific 22(1): 1–35. Taylor, John P. 2001. “Authenticity and Sincerity in Tourism.” Annals of Tourism Research 28(1): 7–26. Teaiwa, Katerina M. 2014a. “Reframing Oceania: Lessons from Pacific Studies.” In Framing the Global: Entry Points for Research, ed. Hilary E. Kahn, 67–96. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2014b. Consuming Ocean Island: Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Theodossopoulus, Dimitrios. 2013a. “Laying Claim to Authenticity: Five Anthropological Dilemmas.” Anthropological Quarterly 86(2): 337–60. ———. 2013b. “Embera Indigenous Tourism and the Trap of Authenticity: Beyond Inauthenticity and Invention.” Anthropological Quarterly 86(2): 397–425. Thomas, Nicholas. 1992. “The Inversion of Tradition.” American Ethnologist 19(2): 213–32.

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Tomlinson, Matt. 2020. God is Samoan: Dialogues between Culture and Theology in the Pacific. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Tomlinson, Matt, and Debra McDougall. 2012. Christian Politics in Oceania. New York: Berghahn Books. Tönnies, Ferdinand. (1887) 2001. Community and Civil Society, ed. Jose Harris, trans. Margaret Hollis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trask, Haunani-Kay. 1991. “Natives and Anthropologists: The Colonial Struggle.” Contemporary Pacific. Spring: 159–67. Trilling, Lionel. 1997. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2002. “The Otherwise Modern: Caribbean Lessons from the Savage Slot.” In Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies, ed. Bruce Knauft, 220–237. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Turner, Victor W. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Transaction Publishers. Tylor, Edward Bennett. 2018. Anthropology: An Introduction to Man and Civilization. New York: Franklin Classics. van Mannen, John. 2011. Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wang, Ning. 1999. “Rethinking Authenticity in Tourism Experience.” Annals of Tourism Research 26(2): 349–70. Weber, Max. 1958. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Scribner’s. West, Paige, and James G. Carrier. 2004. “Ecotourism and Authenticity: Getting Away from It All?” Current Anthropology 45(4): 483–98. Wolf, Eric. 1964. Anthropology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Woolf, Virginia. 1929. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company. Zammito, John. 2002. Kant, Herder, and the Origin of Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Figure 1.1. In the 2017 Miss Puna‘auia contest, Mareva Domby wears a dress created by Myrna Taae, composed of the petals of pink ‘ōpuhi flowers. Photograph by NDZ Max; courtesy of the Miss Puna‘auia Organization.

1 Tenues Végétales in Beauty Contests of French Polynesia Authenticity on Islanders’ Own Terms JOYCE D. HAMMOND

Introduction

During 2013 research in French Polynesia, I decided to watch the Miss Tahiti contest on television. Conforming to a common use of the name Tahiti to refer to all of the Society Islands or even to French Polynesia as a whole, the contest is popularly understood as a competition for young women with Mā‘ohi (Indigenous) ancestry.1 I had never attended the competition or seen a televised recording of it, but I thought it would simply mirror a Miss America or Miss USA beauty pageant. Although there were many elements paralleling those in well-known beauty contests—a swimsuit segment,2 an evening gown portion, and the final crowning of the Miss—I was taken by surprise when the candidates appeared in one passage in couture-style dresses made from local flowers. The garments, created with such flowers as orchids, bougainvillea, hibiscus, and an endemic variety of gardenia, were stunning. Later, I was to learn that tenues végétales, the French term used by islanders for all fashionable attire made from many different island materials, had become a regular feature of the Miss Tahiti contest at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Their appearance in numerous beauty contests held in French Polynesia intrigued me, and four years later, in 2017, I returned to Tahiti for six months to learn more about tenues végétales, their place in beauty contests, and what they mean to those who make them, wear them, and see them. During my stay, I had many conversations and interviews with a wide variety of people: pageant organizers and judges, contest participants, stylists, people who go to beauty contests and those who do not. I attended several competitions on the island of Tahiti where most contests are held,3 viewed television and video coverage of past contests, and examined newspaper accounts of tenues végétales in former competitions. I learned that the elaborate garments are made from a wide variety of local natural materials, the choice often influenced by contest themes. Flowers, leaves, ferns, inner and outer bark of trees, pearls, feathers, shells,

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Figure 1.2. In the 2017 Miss Puna‘auia contest, Vaite Fernandez Estall wears a creation by Manuarii Teauroa composed of red pitipiti‘ō seeds, red-dyed more, and a red-dyed chicken feather. Photograph by NDZ Max; courtesy of the Miss Puna‘auia Organization.

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seeds, and seed pods are included in many contemporary beauty contests of French Polynesia, particularly in the Society Islands.4 I also learned about the significance of the garments to creators, contestants, and viewers. In this chapter, I examine tenues végétales as authentic expressions of Polynesian identities of the twenty-first century, drawing upon definitions of authenticity by scholars such as Chambers (2010), Gubrium and Holstein (2009), and Waterson (2011) who emphasize the agency of people defining authenticity for themselves. In contradiction to still widely held Western definitions of authenticity that link the concept to long-established and unchanging practices, I argue that the authenticity of tenues végétales emanates from the agency of islanders to make and to wear the garments as self-defined articulations of Polynesian distinctiveness. The innovative, couture-style apparel of tenues végétales foregrounds islanders’ creativity, skills, and knowledge; features a wide assortment of island resources; and presents recontextualized global fashion styles modified to suit islanders’ tastes and goals to perform sartorial expressions of contemporary French Polynesian islanders’ identities. The creation and display of tenues végétales affirm islanders’ values and pride in their ethnic identities, and, at the same time, highlight their imaginative selection and inventive use of borrowed ideas.

Whose Authenticity?

Prior to my 2017 research, I searched for recent scholarship on tenues végétales. In contrast to an extensive scholarship on Pacific Islanders’ adoption and adaptation of Western cloth and clothing styles to embrace social innovations and, in some cases, to resist outsiders’ hegemonic power (Arthur 2006; Bolton 2003; Colchester 2003; Hammond 1986; Herda 2011; Küchler and Eimke 2009; Küchler and Were 2009; O’Hanlon 2005), the only research I found that mentioned tenues végétales was Schuft and Massiera’s 2012 article. The authors examine sport and beauty contests of Tahiti and include brief comments about the tenues végétales segment in beauty contests (referring to them as “vegetal dresses”). They claim that the garments are a re-appropriation of Western stereotypes of islander authenticity created for economic gain in tourism marketing. Further, they declare the attire to be “symbols of pre-missionary traditions” (2012: 111).5 Evoking touristic imaginaries of the “true” and “authentic,” Schuft and Massiera suggest that in the Miss Tahiti contest (and by extension, other beauty contests in French Polynesia), islanders are deliberately creating a false authenticity to sell to tourists.6 I disagree: tenues végétales are examples of islanders’ agency to create and to proudly express a contemporary Polynesian identity, an identity that combines celebration for a legacy of island life with a cosmopolitan knowledge

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and sophistication that islanders accrue through their life experiences and interactions with people from abroad. Although I discuss the legitimacy of tenues végétales as authentic to islanders primarily in terms of how the creation and display of the garments communicate islander values and contemporary self-concepts, I first contest the idea that the tenues végétales are a tourism marketing strategy. Tahiti Tourisme staff in the French Polynesian capital of Pape‘ete told me that they do not actively promote the Miss Tahiti contest.7 Buried within a lengthy events calendar on the Tahiti Tourisme website, the Miss Tahiti contest appears only as an entry of a few lines, but when Tahiti Tourisme materials feature island women on websites, brochures, etc., the young women appear in two-piece dance costumes, swimsuits, or pāreu (wrap-around cloth “sarongs”). Moreover, despite the fact that the Miss Tahiti pageant has been, in Schuft and Massiera’s words, “diffused locally and internationally” through social media such as YouTube (2012: 110), very few tourists attend Miss Tahiti or other beauty contests in French Polynesia; almost all competition attendees are friends and family members of the participants or other local people.8 Owing to their assumption that tenues végétales are meant to evoke Western preconceived notions of authentic islanders, Schuft and Massiera never consider that the garments are distinctive, contemporary statements of cultural identity made on islanders’ own terms, deriving from similar motivations of Pacific Islanders to adopt and adapt Western cloth and clothing. While some attire may incorporate materials and techniques that Mā‘ohi ancestors used for fashioning a wide variety of things,9 especially in the context of certain contests’ themes, the garments, often compared by locals to the haute couture of European fashion runways, are not “symbols of pre-missionary traditions.” Rather, as Kaeppler has observed about Polynesian and Micronesian fashion, “Fashions change from within and as intercultural dialogues with neighbors and colonizers . . . Today, high fashion takes us back to traditional materials combined with globalized style” (2008: 133–34).10 Nonetheless, Schuft and Massiera’s claim that islanders use tenues végétales as a re-appropriated Western touristic stereotype is revealing: it betrays a popular Western definition of authenticity as cultural ideas, practices, and products original to a society, free of influence from other people, and passed down virtually unchanged through multiple generations (cf. Mageo and Knauft Introduction; Shiner 1994; Sperlich 2006). Compounding this problem is the fact that Westerners’ perceptions and imaginative understandings of non-Westerners’ lifeways contributed to an erroneous conclusion: change to what was conceived as the pure and originary suggested Indigenous peoples and their altered practices were inauthentic. However, Western definitions of authenticity, based largely on philosophical, artistic, and moral pronouncements, are increasingly critiqued, fracturing these definitions (Golomb 1995; Theodossopoulos 2013; Wang 1999). Some scholars, therefore, now advocate

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recognizing authenticity as what a group of people themselves identify as true to their realities and aspirations. Chambers, for example, argues “for a definition of authenticity that is determined primarily by a people’s ability to choose for themselves those elements of stability and change that make their lives meaningful” (2010: 5). Like Chambers, Waterson grounds her definition of authenticity in the truths of a people’s experience; she defines authenticity as “an ingenious response to a particular ecology and way of life” (2011: 79). Gubrium and Holstein view authenticity as “centered on its in situ social construction, as operating in practice and in relation to local relevancies” (2009: 123), and Arthur states, “When an indigenous culture adopts and incorporates a western item, it is culturally authentic by virtue of its cultural embeddedness” (2011: 103). All four perspectives include recognition of the active decision-making that allows people to determine what is relevant to their lives and to incorporate change as they see fit. Kaeppler, who has decades of experience working with Pacific Islanders, also emphasizes people’s agency in a statement about tradition, the latter often equated with authenticity: “I feel that tradition is a continuous process— constantly adding and subtracting ideas and practices, constantly changing, constantly recycling bits and pieces of ideas and practices into new traditions” (2004: 294). People in many societies incorporate new ideas and material culture without feelings of contradiction or a belief that they are undermining who they know themselves to be. Many societies’ beauty contests pointedly combine symbols of local ethnicity with borrowed aspects of global expression (Cohen, Wilk, Stoeltje 1996; Besnier 2011; Kozol 2005; Schackt 2005; Wilk 1995; Yano 2006). In the words of renowned tenue végétale creator Maruia Holozet: Polynesia contains enormous treasures in the sense of its vegetation, in the sense of what one can create with it. And that, in fact, everything, everything that we have today, one could say that our ancestors gave it to us. But today, with life—how shall I say it—with modern life, we have brought what they handed down to us up into the present. Because, back in that time, they made simple things, because their lives were simple. But today, life has evolved, so our way of creating has also evolved. (Holozet, pers. comm., 15 May 2017; translation by the author) Sahlins (1999: ix) calls the process of selectively combining elements from the past and the present (especially in modified borrowings from other people), “indigenized modernity.” Other scholars such as Newell (2010), Salmond (2009), and Thomas (1991) point out that Pacific Islanders have always selectively borrowed elements of Western culture and combined those with cultural practices, aesthetics, and concepts chosen from islander history.11 From

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the beginning of encounters with Europeans, Mā‘ohi often wore outfits that combined elements of their Indigenous clothing with Western attire. Spanish observations made on the island of Tahiti in 1774, for example, include descriptions of various Mā‘ohi warriors wearing breastplates decorated with dogs’ hair, pearl shell, and sharks’ teeth; towering wickerwork helmets; and thick white barkcloth turbans. Many of the same men also “proudly displayed shreds of European clothing—the arm of a jacket, the leg of some trousers or a dirty, torn shirt” (Salmond 2009: 341). Writing about the Tahiti of the 1820s and 1830s when missionaries and merchant ships were prevalent, D’Alleva recounts that islanders frequently wore elements of clothing from both cultural repertoires “in the complex and sometimes uneasy imbrication of European clothing and decorated Tahitian bark cloth clothing” (2005: 47). She asserts that “the hybrid wardrobes of the Tahitian elite, as designed and worn, have much to tell us about the ways that they negotiated new and old forms of political and social power at this time” (2005: 47). D’Alleva’s summary of ways Mā‘ohi combined Western and Indigenous clothing “to assert political power, social status, religion, wealth, artistic skill, taste, connection with the present and connection with the past” (2005: 47) clearly reveals the authenticity of Mā‘ohi choices. Some Westerners, such as the French naval captain Bernard who wrote in 1840 of Queen Pōmare’s use of both barkcloth and Western dress for different purposes, reacted in positive ways to the islanders’ sartorial choices (D’Alleva 2005: 56). However, as D’Alleva points out (2005: 48), the meanings that Mā‘ohi intended to project in authoring their novel combinations of attire were often not clearly understood by Westerners who described the clothing in derisive terms. Von Kotzebue, for example, writing in 1830, used terms such as absurd, tasteless, and comic to describe combinations of Western clothing with island attire. The cultural misunderstandings of messages authored by one group and interpreted by another still occur. Schuft and Massiera conclude, for example, that a Western stereotype was re-appropriated by islanders for marketing themselves to tourists. Ironically, this assessment, like the Western stereotype itself, is an example of the many ways that Westerners have failed to understand Polynesians’ actions, beliefs, and viewpoints. A much-quoted example of a contrast between Pacific Islanders’ perspective and that of many Westerners is Hau‘ofa’s 1994 phrase “an ocean of islands” referencing the boundary-less vision of the ocean for islanders as opposed to a Western characterization of the fragmentation and small size of many Pacific islands in a vast Pacific Ocean.12 Westerners have often collapsed the past with the present to characterize authentic others (Fabian 1983), a tactic frequently used to critique authenticity in tourism (Macleod 2006; McWha et al. 2016; Taylor 2001). Polynesians have also blended the past with the present but with very different intentions and

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outcomes. As Young Leslie and Addo indicate, when islanders combine selected elements of their past with contemporary (to any given period of time) ideas and things borrowed from others, they have created innovations, adaptations, and reworkings of former practices (2007: 12–13). Using the term “pragmatic creativity” to refer to islanders’ willingness to be flexible in modifying and adapting borrowed elements, Young Leslie and Addo state that such an approach is authentic by virtue of being natural outgrowths of Pacific places and ontologies (2007: 12–13). Furthermore, they argue that such growth is a socially sanctioned and culturally embedded process. This, of course, is in contradiction to much Western thought that change is “progress” when made by Westerners but a loss of culture and identity when made by islanders and other Indigenous groups (Jolly 1992: 57). Kaeppler’s concept of “inter-cultural dialogues” (2003) focuses on the interplay of cultural ideas and objects and demonstrates that such interplay can lead to an exchange of ideas and technologies, adaptations, innovations, and the blending of cultural and artistic forms. Pacific Islanders have borrowed and modified elements of both tangible and intangible cultural elements such as Western quilts, accordion music, and Christian beliefs (Hammond 2014; Kaeppler 2003; Ernst 2012) in order to author new things, practices, and ideas that fit into already existing or newly emerging schemas of island life (Mageo 2017). Islanders’ own understanding of authenticity underscores the dynamic nature of contemporary cultural expressions in the Pacific. I turn now to tenues végétales in French Polynesian beauty contests as exemplary of expressions of authentic identities on islanders’ own terms. After presenting information on how the garments came into existence, I discuss the performance of identities that simultaneously honor Mā‘ohi heritage and the creativity of islanders’ adaptations, dialogues, and innovations with global fashion. Through contest themes, materials, and the imaginative actions of those who fashion tenues végétales, Polynesians’ pride in their distinctiveness emerges.

A Brief History of Tenues Végétales

Tenues végétales are now inextricably associated with French Polynesian beauty contests. However, they only came into existence in the year 2000, forty years after the first Miss Tahiti contest, itself modelled on the Western institution of beauty pageants in 1960. From the competition’s inception, contestants wore Western style swimsuits, dresses, and evening gowns, mimicking typical attire used in global beauty contests. In the 1990s, the contest began to include a section in which participants individually performed a dance, wearing islander dance costumes fashioned

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from natural island materials. Each costume differed from the others in some respects, but all drew upon the basic elements of a breast covering, a skirt to accentuate hip movements, and, typically, an elaborate headdress. Adding dance and dance costumes to the Miss Tahiti contest (as well as other beauty contests that modeled themselves on Miss Tahiti) created a distinctive Polynesian cultural component. The inclusion may be aligned with the Pacific cultural renaissance movements that were, in many ways, responses to the political, economic, and social changes occurring throughout the Pacific (Chapman and Dupon 1989). In French Polynesia, the controversial French nuclear bomb testing that had begun in 1966 in the Tuamotu Islands was still underway; pro-independence and autonomist political movements were advocating further political changes vis-a-vis France; and population in Pape‘ete, the capital, was swelling as islanders throughout French Polynesia moved to Tahiti to find waged work (Fisher 2013: 71–79). Increasing numbers of islanders participated in Polynesian dance and began reclaiming tattooing and fire-walking as political and cultural statements that asserted Mā‘ohi identities and as part of Indigenous cultural revitalization that began in the 1970s and gained strength in the 1980s (Saura 2008; Stevenson 1990, 1992). By incorporating Mā‘ohi dance and dance costumes made from island materials, the Miss Tahiti beauty pageant was also able to assert a Mā‘ohi identity. At the same time, it could differentiate itself from other beauty contests in the world by honoring Indigenous identity and culture (see Cohen et al. 1996). Through dance and dance costumes, candidates could demonstrate something of their knowledge of and pride in their Polynesian identity and heritage. As Stevenson has noted, Tahitians have used dress in various venues to assert their identity (2010: 433), so performing island heritage and cultural identity through dance and costume in beauty contests was an easy fit. In 2000, the practice of Miss Tahiti candidates wearing island dance costumes for a portion of the contest was retained, but the emphasis on the uniqueness and natural materials of the dance costumes was also extended to an innovative passage in the contest’s program (La Depêche 2000: 18; Les Nouvelles de Tahiti 2000: 9). Dominique Pétras, the owner of the Miss Tahiti competition at the time, instituted candidates wearing stylish garments, much like those worn for the evening gown segment, but made from island materials. Thus, tenues végétales began as and continue to be unique fashionable garments with a distinctively Polynesian character. Although tenues végétales did not directly originate from former or more recent island costume traditions,13 they are part of a French Polynesian cultural repertoire of special attire created for specific purposes.14 Similar to many other populations that have combined elements of their own cultures with borrowed and modified elements of other cultures, islanders of French Polynesia are known for authoring innovation and modification

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of borrowed ideas to make them their own (Alévêque 2009; de Chazeaux and Frémy 2012; Hammond 1986, 2014, 2015; Moulin 1996, 2010; Stevenson 1990, 1992). Extensive travel and access to global media fuel islanders’ knowledge of world fashion. As frequent visitors to other countries and as French citizens who may travel to France for education or other purposes, many islanders have drawn inspiration from what they encounter outside of French Polynesia. Innovation and artistic creativity, greatly valued by islanders in French Polynesia,15 were undoubtedly key elements in the success of tenues végétales in the Miss Tahiti competition at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In 2000, when the contest first featured tenues végétales, the garments were worn in lieu of conventional evening gowns. Although tenues végétales did not replace Western evening gowns in subsequent years, they would come to occupy a permanent and distinctive place in the Miss Tahiti competition, with prizes awarded to them. In the years following their origin, tenues végétales in Miss Tahiti awed the public and impressed reporters of the two local Tahitian newspapers, La Dépêche and Les Nouvelles de Tahiti. Photos of some of the garments were frequently placed alongside other contest images, and journalists used exuberant language describing the Miss Tahiti tenues végétales segment as “a magnificent passage” (La Dépêche 2003) and “the most prestigious” part of the program (La Dépêche 2005). The garments themselves were pronounced “veritable chefsd’oeuvres” (La Dépêche 2004), superb (La Dépêche 2009), and splendid (Les Nouvelles de Tahiti 2009). Equally effusive language is often used by the contest’s hosts when they narrate the segment of the competition, frequently describing the materials used and naming the person who designed the garment.16 Beauty contests throughout French Polynesia—at the district level, in contests hosted by various organizations, on other islands of the Society Islands, and in the other four archipelagoes of French Polynesia—took their cue from the Miss Tahiti contest and began, to varying degrees, to include a passage of tenues végétales in their programs. The Mister Tahiti contest, competitions that include men as Mister counterparts to Miss candidates, and the Miss VahineTane (Miss Woman-Man) contest for homosexual men and transgender women also, although in some cases less consistently, began including a tenue végétale segment in their programs.

Performing Identity: Themes, Materials, and Authoring Creations

In The Frangipani is Dead, Stevenson identified the 1970s and 1980s as the period when Pacific Islanders began to look to the arts as symbols of their Pacific identity (2008). Visual arts, often combined with other expressive forms such as music, have been dynamic means for islanders in French Polynesia, as else-

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where in the Pacific, to affirm and shape their identities. It is not surprising, therefore, that beauty contests in French Polynesia have become a powerful means for islanders to selectively combine elements of their past with appropriated and modified elements of others’ cultures as a way to communicate their successful adaption to change while retaining core values of their cultural heritage. The French verb évoluer (to evolve) is frequently used by many islanders to express an embrace of selective change, allowing them to explore, shape, and affirm their identities as subjects. As Ochoa (2014: 105) observes, beauty contests are performances that can be appropriated to produce local meanings while also maintaining ties to extra-local events and authority. Like other cultural performances, beauty pageants may significantly contribute to expressing the complexities of contemporary identities (see Alivizatou 2011). The performance format of beauty contests seems particularly well suited to accommodating these guiding principles. Echoing Cohen et al.’s Beauty Queens on the Global Stage, Ochoa claims that beauty contests “showcase values, concepts, and behavior that exists at the center of a group’s sense of itself ” (2014: 108). Within French Polynesian beauty contests, islanders have simultaneously sought to preserve certain aspects of inherited culture, incorporate past borrowings and modifications of introduced cultural elements, and selectively include new elements that communicate their active participation in an ongoing dialogue with other societies. The music chosen for the various segments of contests, the stage décor, the entertainment segments featuring local singers and dancers, the themes of the contests, and even the crowns fashioned for the winners may all be described as promoting one or more of the elements described above. Tenues végétales passages are especially remarkable in showcasing French Polynesian distinctiveness. The extravagance in the attire’s cost, materials, embellishments, structure, and mode of wearing make tenues végétales costumes that Shukla (2015: 14) would identify as channeling core values.17 The communication of core values, transmitted to the audience, the majority of whom are islanders themselves, renders tenues végétales powerful visual symbols for signifying and mediating identities (see Dudley 2011: 57). The performance of tenues végétales takes two intertwined forms. Each garment’s appearance embodies a complex array of creative decisions on the part of contest organizers and creators of the tenues végétales. Artistry and skill are visible in the garments themselves. However, tenues végétales play their largest performative role when they are displayed from many angles on contestants’ bodies. Each garment and each participant enjoy the audience’s full attention as the competitors take turns gracefully walking the length of the stage. During the tenues végétales passage, the complementary roles of the garment and its wearer enhance one another.

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Audiences to the spectacles of the beauty contests bring the “beholder’s share” to the performances. The term, used by Gombrich (1972: 155), refers to the importance of the viewer and the way that performances are decoded. Audience decoding of tenues végétales deciphers the simultaneous display of artists’ creativity and workmanship in the spectacular outfits alongside the grace and beauty of the contestants whose complex identities as Polynesians are enhanced through the intercultural dialogues embedded in the tenues végétales. Themes

Themes provide organizational guidelines to many events in French Polynesia and beauty contests are no exception. Framing beauty contests with themes integrates them into other expressions of islander identities. 18 Themes are also manifestations of imaginaries that contest organizers employ to stimulate the visualizations of those who create tenues végétales. What is admired, valued, respected, or loved can be highlighted through a theme. Themes are one of the principle ways in which intercultural dialogues are manifested in beauty contests. Over time, the range of thematic material in the Miss Tahiti contest, as well as numerous smaller competitions, has emphasized island and ocean environments and resources, historical events and eras within the islands, and references to other cultures’ phenomena influential to and interpreted by islanders. The latter seems to be more common among contests outside of the Miss Tahiti “national” competition.19 The overall theme of a beauty contest, or in some cases, a specified theme for the tenues végétales segment itself, shapes the choice of materials, colors, and designs of the tenues végétales. In 2016, for example, the theme for the Miss Tahiti contest was Meherio (mermaids). The contestants’ glistening cloth evening gowns were in blue and green shades of ocean water; the candidates’ appearance in bathing suits was enhanced by the theme; and the tenues végétales variously drew upon a variety of shells of many shapes and sizes, pearls, sea urchin spines, dried seaweed, and starfish. Accessories for some garments included tritons and a conch shell. Island vegetation has been particularly important in beauty contest themes. Fresh vegetation is evoked by a theme such as “All the Flowers.” Processed and dried vegetation may be created for themes such as “Pūrau Rau” (the Hibiscus tilaceus tree and its many uses) and “Ha‘ari” (the coconut tree); both trees provide materials used for many purposes in the islands. In 2017, the overall theme of Miss Tahiti was “La Belle Époque,” the 1940s–1970s era of the famous Pape‘ete bar named Quinn’s. Contest organizers specified that 2017 tenues végétales should incorporate tressage, a French term for braiding and/or weaving, and create garments that one might imagine worn at a cocktail hour. All but one of the garments that year were made from dried materials.

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Figure 1.3. For the 2016 Miss Tahiti competition Vaiata Buisson wears a tenue végétale created by Heia Yip composed of pearls and small shells (pūpū nī‘au) with a headdress displaying the interior mother of pearl surface of oyster shells. Photograph by Stéphane Mailion.

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Figure 1.4. Maruia Holozet creating a dress made of the bark of the fē‘i banana for Mareva Domby competing in the 2017 Miss Tahiti contest. Photograph by the author.

Sometimes both fresh and processed vegetation attire appear alongside garments made from materials associated with the ocean. In 2010, for example, the fiftieth anniversary of the Miss Tahiti contest, the tenues végétales were composed of natural products strongly associated with various archipelago groups of French Polynesia. There were garments made from shells from the Tuamotu Islands, dresses of dried pandanus representing the Austral Islands, attire that incorporated nuts and seeds from the Marquesas Islands, and outfits featuring fresh leaves and flowers to represent the Society Islands.

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Figure 1.5. Christopher Prenat creating a garment made of more (from the inner bark of the pūrau tree) worn by Kalani Salmon in the 2017 Miss Tahiti competition. Photograph by the author.

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Figure 1.6. Miss Tahiti contestants in their tenues végétales for the 2010 Miss Tahiti competition, the 50th anniversary of the event. Photograph by Teava Matareva; courtesy of the Miss Tahiti Organization.

In addition to highlighting island environmental resources of land and sea, allusions to Polynesian cultural and heritage values may be embodied in themes. In 2017, the Miss Puna‘auia contest used “My Culture, My Heritage” as its theme. That same year the contest of Tuha‘a Pae (the Austral Islands), open to Austral Islanders living in Tahiti, had several themes associated with the event’s different passages, all of which revolved around the island of Tubuai, the principal island of the archipelago.20 Sometimes competition organizers use historical occurrences and specific time periods to reference aspects of heritage as, for example, “The Bounty” (of Mutiny on the Bounty fame), “Tahiti of Old” (the colonial period of Gauguin’s era), “past Tiurai” (a reference to earlier Polynesian-inflected celebrations held in the month of July to celebrate French independence)21 or La Belle Époque, previously mentioned. Commemorating the past serves to remind islanders of local history and events that shaped the lives of forbearers. Since the historical periods are intertwined with Western influences of the time, the interactive nature of different cultural influences of the past may be conveyed in the present in ways that evoke a sense of nostalgia. Other contest themes, such as “Masked Ball,” “Las Vegas,” and “Bohemian Woman,” reference places outside of French Polynesia. Still other themes, such as “Chic and Glamour” and “The ‘70s,” allude to transcultural phenomena.

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These themes are effective in emphasizing the worldly knowledge of islanders and underscoring cosmopolitan aspects of Polynesian identities. As a longitudinal survey of themes associated with Miss Tahiti and other beauty contests of French Polynesia demonstrates, islanders have embraced both island-based themes and themes from other societies as a basis of inspiration for tenues végétales. The combination of island resources with thematic material communicates a distinctive island signature to a contest, regardless of the origin of a theme. Borrowing ideas from outside the islands, both in terms of themes as well as the ever-present global fashion sense, demonstrates islanders’ worldly knowledge and participation. Materials

I especially thank nature, because, after all, it is she who gives us everything. —Maruia Holozet (pers.comm., 15 May 2017; translation by the author) For islanders, the significance of materials from the island environment integrated into tenues végétales cannot be overstated. As Clayton and Opotow, editors of Identity and the Natural Environment have argued, the experience of nature is not separate from social experience that contributes to the formation of group identities (2003: 6), and, as Stevenson has indicated, an emphasis on place of origin, combined with values, is part of Pacific identities (2001). As places of origin, the islands of French Polynesia are places of attachment. Therefore, the materials in tenues végétales, derived as they are from the islands, serve as contemporary symbols of identification with the islands and highlight a distinctive aspect of French Polynesian islander identity (cf. Kempf, van Meijl, and Hermann 2014; van Meijl 2004).22 Contest rules do not restrict the use of any natural materials found in the islands, regardless of whether they were introduced after European contact. Therefore, tenues végétales may be made exclusively from plants and other natural elements introduced after European contact. Those garments that do incorporate materials used by Mā‘ohi ancestors, such as tapa or barkcloth, may mix more recent introductions of natural materials with older materials as seen, for example, in Figure 1.7. The islanders’ affirmation of authenticity in tenues végétales radically departs from the Western romanticist quest for authenticity that Mageo and Knauft discuss in the Introduction of this volume. The Western conception that grew out of equating authenticity with lifeways attributed to an ethnic past led, in turn, to a strongly held connection of authenticity with a “primordial” past, a perspective still frequently promoted through tourism throughout the world (Chambers 2010; Macleod 2006; McWha et al. 2016; Taylor 2001). Western ideas about the use of natural materials, particularly in a “raw” state,

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Figure 1.7. Hinarere Taputu wears a dress made of tapa, ‘ōpuhi petals, bougainvillea flowers, and tīpaniē blossoms created by Dominique Pétras, Nels Labbeyi, and Remi Vairua Teauroa for the 2014 Miss Tahiti contest. Photograph by Teikidev; courtesy of the Miss Tahiti Organization.

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are frequently tied to the idea that some people and their societies are timeless. It seems possible that this vision is at least partially responsible for Schuft and Massiera’s misperception that tenues végétales are deliberate attempts to create a false authenticity. Shiner states that “the question of authenticity/inauthenticity is always historical and contextual, a matter of decision and not of discovery” (1994: 227). As illustration of this, the famous French designer Jean Paul Gaultier created a leafy bridal dress and the British artist Alexander McQueen designed a dress made of clam shells,23 yet no charges of inauthenticity were leveled against them! These and similar garments worn by fashion models on European catwalks, are, like many of the tenues végétales of French Polynesia, made from unprocessed natural materials. Gaultier speaks of the importance of taking inspiration from other cultures, and he visited French Polynesia in 1999,24 returning to France to create a collection clearly inspired by Polynesian creativity and use of natural materials, yet his identity as a French artist protected him from any accusation of inauthenticity. Borrowed ideas from Indigenous societies for new fashion trends in the West are typically enthusiastically embraced (Loughran 2009; Marks 2015; Mead and Pedersen 1995; Rovine 2009), but the reverse is often regarded by Westerners as spurious. As Shiner has observed, “whereas ‘foreign’ influences on European artists are not only admitted but celebrated, the acceptance of foreign influences by the artisans of ‘traditional’ societies is taken as a sign that their works are inauthentic” (1994: 230). In the same way that islanders in French Polynesia see no contradictions in borrowing from different time periods, various events, and a variety of global phenomena in creating themes for their beauty contests, so too, the mixture of different materials, particularly endemic and imported plants for fashioning tenues végétales, supports their eclectic approach to authenticity. It is not surprising that some trees and other plants imported by Mā‘ohi forbearers that have always been part of islanders’ lives and were extensively used in the past to fashion a wide variety of items are also frequently incorporated in tenues végétales and have been honored in some beauty contest themes.25 The coconut tree, for example, was the theme of the 2017 Miss Mo‘orea contest. All of the tenues végétales incorporated parts of the tree (some of which were processed) such as kere, ni‘au, ‘apu ha‘ari, and revareva.26 Pae‘ore (Pandanus tectorius laevis, the leaves of which are processed and used to weave mats, baskets, and hats), pūrau (Hibiscus tiliaceus, a tree whose inner bark taken from young stems is used to create more, the fibers most commonly used in dance skirts), and ‘autī (Cordyline fruticosa, a plant with dark green, purple or reddish leaves) have been French Polynesian beauty contest themes. When speaking of tenues végétales, islanders typically use Reo Mā‘ohi (Indigenous language) names for trees and other plants long-established in the islands.

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Among some of the more common plant materials used in tenues végétales are fresh and processed pae‘ore (Pandanus tectorius laevis) leaves; fresh ‘autī (Cordyline fruticosa) leaves; the processed, inner bark of young stems of the pūrau tree (Hibiscus tiliaceus), different parts of coconut trees and various ferns.27 The tree bark of the fe‘i banana (Musa troglodytarum), as well as moss and vines are less frequently used. ‘Ahu, better known by the term tapa (barkcloth), made from the inner bark of certain trees, especially the paper mulberry tree (Broussonetia papyrifera) and the breadfruit tree (Artocarpus altilis), is sometimes used in tenues végétales. Once prevalent as the primary material from which Mā‘ohi made clothing, islanders largely discontinued creating it by the mid-nineteenth century. Although small quantities of barkcloth are now made in French Polynesia, most notably in the Marquesas Islands, most barkcloth used in tenues végétales and dance costumes is imported from western Pacific islands such as Tonga or Samoa where production never ceased.28 It may have imprinted or painted designs, but plain, off-white barkcloth is particularly favored. A wide variety of flowers appear in tenues végétales, some of which are endemic such as the tiare Tahiti (Gardenia taitensis), the iconic, sweet-smelling flower of French Polynesia. Many others, imported after Western contact and named here in English with the names used by locals in parentheses if different, are often featured, such as heliconia (pince de crabe, a French name), anthurium, bougainvillea, flowering ginger (‘ōpuhi), plumeria (tīpaniē), hibiscus (‘aute), bird of paradise (oiseau de paradis, a French name), and orchid (orchidée, a French name).29 Different kinds of seeds include pitipiti‘ō (Abrus precatorius), pitipiti‘ō popa‘ā (Adenanthera pavonina), and faux acacia (a French name for Leucaena leucocephala), as well as various kinds of shells such as pūpū nī‘au or pūpū re‘a, tiny white and yellow shells; St. Jacques (a French name for scallops of the Pectinidae family), and pōreho (porcelains of the Cypraeidae family are also used. Poe (pearls) and pārau (mother of pearl) may be used extensively or as embellishments. Feathers from chickens and pheasants are another natural resource sometimes incorporated into tenues végétales. The use of certain materials is a way to signal different island identities since the five archipelagoes of French Polynesia and even specific islands are known for an abundance of particular resources. When creators of tenues végétales wish to foreground one or more islands, a tactic often associated with a regional or island-specific contest or the choice of a certain theme in Miss Tahiti, they may choose materials closely connected with a location. So, for example, along with seeds, the incorporation of wild boar tusks is associated with the Marquesas Islands. Certain shells are representative of the Tuamotu Islands and Raivavae of the Austral Islands. Although so-called Tahitian pearls are usually cultivated in the Gambier and Tuamotu Islands, their popularity

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Figure 1.8. Vanille Guyot-Sionnest’s tenue végétale for the 2016 Miss and Mister Paparā contest, created by a couturière named Michèle and made of tiare Tahiti flowers, ferns, and vanilla seedpods. Photograph by Mata Hoata.

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makes their use more universal. The creative use of pandanus is particularly associated with the Austral Islands. Since flowers grow in great abundance in the Society Islands, they may be used to signal connections to that archipelago. Sometimes, too, creators of tenues végétales will personalize outfits by using an element particularly favored by a candidate. Vanille Guyot-Sionnest, who competed in the 2016 Miss and Mister Paparā contest, wore a tenue végétale that incorporated vanilla seed pods on the bodice of her garment in reference to her first name. Authoring Creations

It is a point of pride that tenues végétales are designed and made by islanders. In addition to themes and materials, the actual creation of a tenue végétale is integral to the authenticity islanders equate with the attire in beauty contests. In the styling and construction, tenues végétales are distinctively Polynesian, yet they share more with contemporary global fashions than with clothing worn by Mā‘ohi ancestors, documented by early European explorers (Rose 1971; Salmond 2009). When I first began to learn about tenues végétales and asked who made them, the most common response I received was that it could be anyone but was often a contestant’s mother and other female relatives. At the district or “national” level, contestants or their sponsors (e.g., the mayor’s office of a district contest winner) are more likely to hire a stylist to design and create a tenue végétale than are contestants in smaller competitions. There are wellknown artists, both men and women, who have designed and created the special garments for beauty contests for many years. Emerging talents who hope to make a name for themselves often participate as well. In the 2017 and 2018 Miss Tahiti contests, the organizers included a short video featuring a few of the artists who designed the tenues végétales for that year. Although many creations are officially attributed to a single person, those who design and assemble a tenue végétale readily acknowledge the help of “les petites mains” (literally: “the little hands,” a French expression referring to helpers). Collecting materials; assembling components of a tenue by using such skills as braiding, weaving and sewing; assisting in the storing and transporting of a tenue; and even serving as a “stand-in” for fitting a tenue are possible steps that others may do to assist the person who designs a garment with a vision of the final creation. Mageo and Knauft’s assertion in the Introduction to this volume, “Anything authored is always an individual and collective product” is true, not only in the weeks leading up to a beauty content but also in terms of the inspiration for the styles of tenues végétales that come from many sources, including past contests’ tenues végétales and contemporary global fashions.

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The authors of tenues végétales acknowledge that the contest theme is foremost in shaping their creative choices, but beyond that they may take into consideration such factors as a candidate’s skin tone, the availability of materials, ways they intend to reference influences from cultural heritage and numerous other factors. Designers must also have knowledge of the characteristics of the natural resources as part of a larger complex of creating and assembling a tenue végétale. Some people have direct access to materials in the environment or relatives who collect and send them what they need. Others may rely partially or primarily on vendors at local public markets where many raw and processed products are sold. Some resources that may be used in processed form, such as pandanus leaves, coconut fiber, and pūrau bark, may be obtained or ordered in a final transformed state. In the case of flowers, a knowledge of the flowers’ budding, opening, and wilting times is essential. Creators know when to use techniques to keep flowers fresh by spraying them, wrapping them, and/ or refrigerating them. Knowledge of how to process certain elements through soaking and drying, in order to shape, weave, and otherwise transform materials is often involved. Coconut oil may be applied to some elements to achieve a glistening appearance. Jurists who evaluate tenues végétales consider construction details and award more points to those that are carefully crafted as, for example, materials sewn to a base rather than glued. A construction technique may itself be foregrounded in a competition. The 2017 Miss Tahiti contest, for example, specified tressage (braiding and/or weaving) as a necessary aspect for tenues végétales. Creators variously drew upon received knowledge from older generations or combined such knowledge with more recent experiences in working with fibers. Along with the use of natural materials from the island environment30 and inventive construction techniques, the most distinctive aspect of tenues végétales is their design, the element that conveys islanders’ coeval presence with others in the world and completes the equation of matching innovation with retaining selected elements, themselves often modified, taken from cultural heritage. Moulin’s statement (2010: 421) regarding islanders’ desires to connect with the past while incorporating fresh ideas that reflect originality and current aesthetic values when designing dance costumes, could just as easily describe the goals islanders have for tenues végétales. As Mageo (Chapter 2) explains, to have au courant authenticity “one has to be ever ready to re-author cultural identity and existing custom with it—to reprise all in new historically relevant and often culturally mixed guises.” Inspiration for designing tenues végétales comes from a variety of different sources. Given the abundance of contests in French Polynesia and the publication of images of tenues végétales, creators are aware of what others have

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created within the islands and strive to create something new and different. The competitive invention of new tenues végétales built into beauty contests provides the impetus for absorbing and modifying fashion ideas that may originate elsewhere. One artist cited Coco Chanel as influential to his creation; another told me he was inspired by Jean Paul Gaultier’s work. Some creators say they obtain ideas from looking at images in magazines, on the internet, in films and on television, but they point out that ideas they derive from these sources are starting points for making something “in their own manner.” The alterations they make and the materials they use are part of authoring performances of cultural identity. Building on Appadurai’s 1996 insight that contemporary globalization’s circulation of images and experiences supports new kinds of fantasy, Robinson claims that transcultural dynamics provide a foundation to discuss “subjects’ own questioning of identity, their recourse to fantasy, to artful imagination, their self-fashioning and rediscovery of who they are” (2007: 3). This stance is echoed by the authors of Fashion and Imagination who emphasize that the constant innovation associated with fashion lends itself to expressing ideas of relations of humans with the world and one’s own identity (Brand, Teunissen, and de Muijnck 2009: 13). Tenues végétales represent ideal media for islanders to demonstrate how adept they are at blending past cultural elements with newly acquired borrowings in innovative ways. Based on an espoused philosophy about the necessity to evolve and innovate, this amalgamation insures viability of a Polynesian identity. Tenues végétales are authentic to the artists who create them, the contestants who wear them, and the audiences of islanders who view them.

Conclusion

Tenues végétales are a relatively new addition to French Polynesian beauty contests that exemplify the way in which new ideas and practices can be adopted from other people and reconceptualized from within an existing cultural repertoire (Hermann 2016: 1). The phenomenon of tenues végétales is part of Pacific Islanders’ long-established approach to their environment, as referenced by Hviding’s observation of the “twin foundation of Pacific islanders’ worldviews—in intensive uses of the local and extensive overseas contacts” (2003: 255). Although tenues végétales did not directly originate from former or more recent island costume traditions, they are part of a French Polynesian cultural repertoire of special attire created for specific purposes. The interactions islanders have had with people of different backgrounds— through travel, exposure to visitors to the islands, and the global media—have

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provided them with a wealth of new ideas and practices. Among the transculturation processes that have resulted are influences on the creation of tenues végétales. Now that tenues végétales have become part of most beauty contests in French Polynesia as a tradition that combines pride in island origination with cosmopolitan knowledge, the garments play an important role in communicating aspects of islanders’ identities. As fashion, tenues végétales are expected to be innovative. Each year, new garments are created to showcase the creativity and skills of those who make the attire, to foreground contestants’ connections to the islands, and to enhance the natural beauty of the competitors. While many individual tenues végétales are ephemeral, as a category of attire, the garments collectively share essential qualities with Polynesian textiles which Young Leslie and Addo describe as “renewable—in their materiality, symbolism, and contexts,” and therefore “durable in their sociality” (2007: 16). Like Pacific textiles,31 tenues végétales are “a genre of material culture that welcomes, indeed thrives upon, innovation in form and technology across the Pacific ethnoscape” (Young Leslie and Addo 2007: 15). Tenues végétales are inventions that merge contemporary Polynesian aesthetics, local natural materials, and chosen aspects of received knowledge with borrowed global fashion, created and modified to suit islanders’ tastes and goals. As such, they are similar to parallel innovations born of a long and wide history of adoption and adaptation of cloth and clothing in the Pacific, as well as modifications Pacific Islanders have made to Western beauty contests (Besnier 2002, 2011; Teilhet-Fisk 1996). In short, tenues végétales exhibit an authenticity reflecting the agency of people to acquire and modify selected ideas and material culture from outside, as well as from inside their own culture. Tenues végétales share the quality of translation in clothing that Küchler and Were identify as permitting one “to craft one’s identity visibly and materially as a connection, thus allowing for innovation and change” (2005: xxii). That tenues végétales are worn next to the body makes a very strong statement about self-claimed identities. Connection, innovation, performance, and the expression of identities are all part of the creation and use of tenues végétales in beauty contests in French Polynesia. Contest producers who organize the time and space for the display and judging of the garments, local artists’ acts of authoring the creations, and candidates’ performance wearing tenues végétales all contribute to the communication of the extraordinary attire as authentic expressions of contemporary Polynesian identities and values. For their part, audience members’ enthusiastic response to the tenues végétales segment in contests strongly reflects their appreciation for the complex and meaningful messages conveyed through the creation and display of the spectacular garments.

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Epilogue

Among Dark’s 2002 predictions for Pacific arts was that the “new” and the “old” would fit compatibly side by side into new syntheses (2002: 34). Likewise, Sperlich observes “artistic styles and conventions, just like any other aspect of a given culture, are in a constant state of flux and change” (2006: 119). The tenues végétales of French Polynesian beauty contests provide an excellent example of a new Pacific art form, one that is authentic to those who create and use the attire to express who they are. This chapter highlights the ability of islanders to create self-assertive identities through material culture; the same ability exists throughout the world. Tenues végétales show ways people in many places define themselves and engage with others. The hybrid and multi-vocal products, ideas, and attitudes that result from humans’ engagement with sources including their own heritage and what Mageo (Chapter 2) refers to as a “radical openness to cultural others” can lead to the collapse of false dichotomies: the traditional and the new, the past and the present, nature and artifice. An approach that affirms the creative complexity of integrating otherness with one’s own values, practices, and aspirations has the potential, as the editors of this volume attest, of providing a new lens for understanding how a “dynamic of active social engagement, appropriation and recontextualization” can enable humans to adapt and creatively flourish in the face of constant challenging changes in our world.

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my heartfelt appreciation for the kindness and generosity of the many, many people of French Polynesia who helped me to learn about tenues végétales. I also thank the ASAO group on Authenticity and Authoring in the Pacific, especially Jeannette Mageo and Bruce Knauft for bringing this volume to fruition.

Joyce D. Hammond is a professor emerita of the Anthropology Department of Western Washington University. Her research and teaching interests include expressive culture, gender, and photographic representational issues. Much of her work has been with Polynesians. She is the author of Tīfaifai and Quilts of Polynesia (University of Hawai‘i Press 1986). Her research on Polynesian textiles, as well as other subjects, has appeared in such journals as Visual Anthropology, Uncoverings, Visual Studies, Pacific Arts, Journal of the Polynesian Society, and The Hawaiian Journal of History.

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Notes 1. Miss Tahiti rules specify that contestants must have at least one parent of Polynesian ancestry or be born in French Polynesia. However, most competitors who lack Polynesian ancestry opt for contests emphasizing Chinese or European ancestry. 2. In 2018, the Miss America pageant announced an end to swimsuit and evening gown segments. It is questionable whether other beauty contests, including those in French Polynesia, will follow suit. 3. Most beauty contests in French Polynesia occur in the Society Islands, especially on the island of Tahiti, since that is where the majority of residents live. 4. I use the term beauty contest generically to cover similar contests, including those that feature both women and men, as well as the Mister Tahiti competition. 5. Although some contests have used a theme equivalent to wild or savage (‘ōviri) featuring scanty attire of unprocessed leaves, feathers and shells, tourist expectations are not the impetus. Moulin has described ‘ōviri as “the new Pacific cool” (pers. comm. 1 February 2017). 6. Schuft and Massiera contend that the official Tahiti beauty contest replicates some Western stereotypical ideas about Tahitian women and accents Polynesian women’s role as “go-betweens, in colonial representations, between Western and traditional milieus seen as separate and unequal” (2012: 110–11). I argue that the contestants are expected to embody a complex mix of past and present influences adopted and adapted to islanders’ decisions of how they wish to participate in global trends. In his description of the Tongan Miss Heilala contest, Besnier comes to a similar conclusion about a mix of past and present influences in expressing identity. “While it is a deeply modern event, the pageant is also deeply embedded in what Tongans view as traditional and important” (2011: 133). He describes the Miss Heilala contest’s “island creation” costumes (expected to be made exclusively from materials from the local environment such as fragrant leaves, flowers, mats, and barkcloth) as “outfits that encode both tradition and inventiveness” (2011: 133). Unlike the Miss Tahiti contest, that I argue is not centered around tourism, Besnier writes that “official brochures, press coverage and publicity campaigns present the [Miss Heilala] festival as a stimulus for tourism” despite, he points out, that “the bulk of the ‘tourists’ are overseas Tongans who flock back to Tonga . . . for festivals, church conferences, high school reunions, family celebrations (kātoanga) and funerals” (Besnier 2011: 125). 7. When I asked a tenues végétales designer with a full-time job at the exclusive “Brando Resort” in the Tuamotu Islands whether he knew of the Miss Tahiti contest being promoted to tourists, he was astonished at the novelty of the idea and proceeded to muse as to why that doesn’t occur. 8. Until 2016, no live television broadcast of the contest existed outside of French Polynesia. There are French citizens from France who work in the islands for several years; some of them may attend contests, but they are not tourists. Tourists are welcome, but islanders agree that tourists seldom attend Miss Tahiti or other beauty contests. 9. Barkcloth, the main substance Indigenous ancestors used for clothing, sometimes appears in a tenue végétale. Some other materials ancestors used for various purposes are not incorporated into attire. 10. High fashion in French Polynesia may also include environmental materials not used before Western contact.

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11. Newell names Dening, Thomas, Salmond, Oliver, and Sahlins as scholars who, since the 1980s, have been addressing the active engagement and mutual agency between Pacific Islanders and Europeans (Newell 2010: 3). 12. In “Our Sea of Islands,” Hau‘ofa calls attention to ancestors who used the water to establish trade and contacts with other islanders, as well as the many Pacific Islanders who have recently expanded their oceanic world through migrant flows. 13. Islanders do not regard tenues végétales as outgrowths of costumes végétales of dance troupes, even though both kinds of attire may share some materials in common. 14. Europeans in the eighteenth century reported special clothing as part of Indigenous culture made for warfare, elite persons, and performative occasions (Stevenson 2010: 431). Contemporary costumes islanders wear in spectacles emphasizing cultural heritage are primarily worn for various heritage and dance performances. 15. Moulin has written, “Whereas some cultures value persistence and continuity in tradition, Tahitians value change—often for the pure sake of change” (1996: 145). 16. In 2018, three former winners emceed the Miss Tahiti pageant. The name of each contestant and the creator(s) of the garments were projected onto large screens alongside the stage. 17. Although opinions vary among tenues végétales creators as to whether the garments are costumes or exceptional attire, the apparel fits Shukla’s criteria for costumes. 18. Centennial contests, such as those held for the city of Pape‘ete, rely on relevant themes. The annual Heiva Rima‘ī (celebration of traditional artisans) uses themes that valorize the source of artisans’ materials, such as the coconut tree. Within the annual Heiva (celebration of Polynesian music, sport, and dance), dance troupes often use a legend or historical incident as a theme. The Salon du Tifaifai, an exhibition and sales event of quilt-like textiles, is always organized with a theme that dictates the design parameters of the entry tīfaifai for each participant. 19. The Society Islands and the other four archipelagoes of French Polynesia are not a country. They are an overseas collectivity of France. Islanders born in French Polynesia are French citizens. 20. See Figure 2 in Hammond (2019: 9) for a contestant wearing a white more tenue végétale holding a model of HMS Bounty (of Mutiny on the Bounty fame), also created from more. Mutineers of HMS Bounty spent some time on Tubuai before sailing on to Pitcairn Island. 21. Historically, the Tiurai provided a way for Mā‘ohi to sustain their Polynesian dance and entertainments despite changes introduced earlier by English missionaries (Stevenson 1990: 258). 22. In his book Tahiti Mā‘ohi Saura details the link of Mā‘ohi identity with the land and plants, as well as the way in which Mā‘ohi identity is opposed both to a French identity and to the former Tahitian identity. Mā‘ohi identity is nationalist and related to the global (2008: 59). 23. The reader can see these dresses at: https://www.livingly.com/runway/Jean+Paul+ Galtier/Couture+Spring+2002/prh8GsmfpKn; https://blog.metmuseum.org/alexand ermcqueen/dress-voss-2/. 24. One of my interlocutors who creates tenues végétales was a model in a fashion show Gaultier staged in Tahiti. 25. Featuring natural materials associated with Mā‘ohi heritage is a common theming device in many contests held in conjunction with artisan fairs and expositions.

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26. Kere is the cloth-like material from coconut tree spathes that enclose the flowers. Islanders may use kere to create skirts and other parts of garments. Nī‘au is a coconut leaf or midrib of the leaf that can be braided or woven after processing; nī‘au blanc combines the Reo Mā‘ohi term nī‘au with the French word for white and refers to the coconut leaf midrib bleached white. ‘Aho ha‘ari is the coconut shell found inside the coconut husk. Creators may cut it into various shapes and polish it for use as embellishment. Nape is coconut husk fiber that can be made into cords. Ribbon-like revareva is made from the white, nearly translucent sheath that adheres to young coconut leaves. 27. Pae‘ore refers to pandanus. Its processed leaves can be woven or formed into different shapes. The inner part of pūrau tree bark is processed to produce more, lightweight strips left in their natural off-white coloration or dyed. The word more is used for both the processed bark and for a dance skirt made from it. ‘Autī is a plant whose dark green, purple, or reddish leaves often appear in tenues végétales. Anuhe, ti‘ati‘a mou‘a, metuapua‘a and maire are among some of the ferns creators use. 28. The only other material sometimes imported is more, the processed fibers of the pūrau tree, but more is still produced in quantities in French Polynesia. 29. The mixture of French, Reo Mā‘ohi, and even English names for plants is itself indicative of a mélange of cultural influences. 30. Most contests allow for some elements to be dyed, using either natural or commercial dyes. However, apart from an oceanic theme, the colors allowed, whether dyed or natural, are the natural colors of environmental elements. 31. Drawing from a definition of textile that includes a type of cloth or woven fabric, it can be asserted that some tenues végétales—those made from barkcloth or woven from fibers—are themselves textiles.

References Alévêque, Guillaume. 2009. “Culture, Identity, and Heritage: Questioning the Past in Tahiti.” Pacific Science Inter-Congress, Tahiti, 1–4. Retrieved 16 January 2018 from http:// webistem.com/psi2009/output_directory/dc1/Data/articles/000516.pdf. Alivizatou, Marilena. 2011. “Intangible Heritage and the Performance of Identity.” In Performing Heritage: Research, Practice and Innovation in Museum Theatre and Live Interpretation, eds. Anthony Jackson and Jenny Kidd, 82–93. New York: Manchester University Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Arthur, Linda. 2006. “The Aloha Shirt and Ethnicity in Hawai‘i .” Textile 4(1): 8–35. ——–. 2011. “Cultural Authentication of Hawaiian Quilting in the Early 19th Century.” Clothing and Textiles Research Journal 29(2): 103–18. Besnier, Niko. 2002. “Transgenderism, Locality, and the Miss Galaxy Beauty Pageant in Tonga.” American Ethnologist 29(2): 534–66. ——–. 2011. On the Edge of the Global: Modern Anxieties in a Pacific Island Nation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bolton, Lissant. 2003. “Gender, Status and Introduced Clothing in Vanuatu.” In Clothing the Pacific, ed. Chloë Colchester, 119–40. Oxford: Berg.

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Brand, Jan, José Teunissen, and Catelijne de Muijnck, eds. 2009. Fashion and Imagination: About Clothes and Art. Arnhem: ArtEZ Press. Chambers, Erve. 2010. Native Tours, the Anthropology of Travel and Tourism. 2nd ed. Long Grove: Waveland Press, Inc. Chapman, Murray, and Jean-François Dupon. 1989. Renaissance in the Pacific. Paris: Survival International. Clayton, Susan, and Susan Opotow. 2003. “Introduction: Identity and the Natural Environment.” In Identity and the Natural Environment: The Psychological Significance of Nature, eds. Susan Clayton and Susan Opotow, 1–24. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cohen, Colleen Ballerino, Richard Wilk, and Beverly Stoeltje, eds. 1996. Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests, and Power. New York: Routledge. Colchester, Chloë, ed. 2003. Clothing the Pacific. Oxford: Berg. D’Alleva, Anne. 2005. “Elite Clothing and the Social Fabric of Pre-Colonial Tahiti.” In The Art of Clothing: A Pacific Experience, eds. Susanne Küchler and Graeme Were, 47–60. London: UCL Press. Dark, Philip J.C. 2002. “Persistence, Change and Meaning in Pacific Art: A Retrospective View with an Eye towards the Future.” In Pacific Art: Persistence, Change and Meaning, eds. Anita Herle, Nick Stanley, Karen Stevenson, and Robert L. Welsh, 13–39. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. de Chazeaux, Michèle, and Marie-Nöelle Frémy. 2012. Le Tifaifai. Pirae, Tahiti: Éditions Au Vent Des Îles. Dudley, Sandra. 2011. “Material Visions: Dress and Textiles.” In Made to Be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology, eds. Marcus Banks and Jay Ruby, 45–73. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ernst, Manfred. 2012. “Changing Christianity in Oceania: A Regional Overview.” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 157: 29–45. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Fisher, Denise. 2013. France in the South Pacific: Power and Politics. Canberra: Australian National University. Golomb, Jacob. 1995. In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus. New York: Routledge. Gombrich, Ernst Hans. 1972. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. London: Phaidon Press. Gubrium, Jaber F., and James A. Holstein. 2009. “The Everyday Work and Auspices of Authenticity.” In Authenticity in Culture, Self and Society, eds. Phillip Vannini and J. Patrick Williams, 121–38. Burlington: Ashgate. Hammond, Joyce D. 1986. Tīfaifai and Quilts of Polynesia. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. ——–. 2014. “Tīfaifai in Tahiti: Embracing Change.” Uncoverings 35: 42–68. ——–. 2015. “Tableau Style Tīfaifai of French Polynesia: An Evolving Narrative Form.” Textile: Cloth and Culture 13(2): 176–201. ——–. 2019. “Fashion as Tradition: Tenues Végétales in French Polynesia.” Pacific Arts, the Journal of the Pacific Arts Association 17(1): 4–17. Hau‘ofa, Epeli. 1994. “Our Sea of Islands.” Contemporary Pacific 6(1):148–61. Herda, Phyllis. 2011. “Tivaevae: Women’s Quilting in the Cook Islands.” Uncoverings 32: 55–78.

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Hermann, Elfriede. 2016. “Introduction: Engaging with Interactions: Traditions as ContextBound Articulations.” In Changing Contexts, Shifting Meanings: Transformations of Cultural Traditions in Oceania, ed. Elfriede Hermann, 1–19. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press in association with the Honolulu Academy of Arts. Hviding, Edvard. 2003. “Both Sides of the Beach: Knowledges of Nature in Oceania.” In Nature Across Cultures: Views of Nature and the Environment in Non-Western Cultures, ed. Helaine Selin, 245–75. London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Jolly, Margaret. 1992. “Specters of Inauthenticity.” Contemporary Pacific 4: 3–27. Kaeppler, Adrienne L. 2003. “Recycling Tradition in the Arts of Polynesia.” Paper presented at the Pacific Arts Association’s VII International Symposium, 2003. Christchurch, New Zealand. ——–. 2004. “Recycling Tradition: A Hawaiian Case Study.” Dance Chronicle 27(3): 293–311. ——–. 2008. The Pacific Arts of Polynesia and Micronesia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kempf, Wolfgang, Toon van Meijl, and Elfriede Hermann. 2014. “Introduction: Movement, Place-Making and Cultural Identification, Multiplicities of Belonging.” In Belonging in Oceania, Movement, Place-Making and Multiple Identifications, eds. Elfriede Hermann, Wolfgang Kempf, and Toon van Meijl, 1–24. New York: Berghahn Books. Kozol, Wendy. 2005. “Miss Indian America: Regulatory Gazes and the Politics of Affiliation.” Feminist Studies 31(1): 64–94. Küchler, Susanne, and Andrea Eimke. 2009. Tivaivai: The Social Fabric of the Cook Islands. London: British Museum Press. Küchler, Susanne, and Graeme Were. 2005. “Introduction.” In The Art of Clothing: A Pacific Experience, eds. Susanne Küchler and Graeme Were, xix–xxx. London: UCL Press. La Depêche. 2000. “Chacune des 12 Candidates avait Confectionné une Robe Végétale Ornée de Fleurs.” 23 June, 18. ——–. 2003. “Election de Miss Tahiti 2003.” 21 June, 28–31. ——–. 2004. “Toutes les couleurs de la nature.” 12 June, 20–21. ——–. 2005. “Mihimana Sachet élue 45e Miss Tahiti.” 21 May, 20. ——–. 2009. “Éblouisant!” 27 June, 12–15. Les Nouvelles de Tahiti. 2000. “Les coulisses d’une élection.” 26 June, 9. ——–. 2009. “Shelby, Styliste de Hinerava Ohu.” 29 June, 19. Loughran, Kristyne. 2009. “The Idea of Africa in European High Fashion: Global Dialogues.” Fashion Theory 13(2): 243–71. Macleod, Nicola. 2006. “Cultural Tourism: Aspects of Authenticity and Commodification.” In Cultural Tourism in a Changing World: Politics, Participations, and (Re)presentation, eds. Melanie K. Smith and Mike Robinson, 177–90. Toronto: Channel View Publications. Mageo, Jeannette. 2017. “Transitional Images and Imaginaries: Dressing in Schemas in Colonial Samoa.” In Mimesis and Pacific Transcultural Encounters: Making Likenesses in Time, Trade, and Ritual Reconfigurations, eds. Jeannette Mageo and Elfriede Hermann, 49–78. New York: Berghahn Books. Marks, Diana. 2015. “Appropriating the Mola: Forms of Borrowing by Textile Artists.” Journal of Textile Design Research and Practice 3: 87–115. McWha, Madelene Rose, Warwick Frost, Jennifer Laing, and Gary Best. 2016. “Writing for the Anti-Tourist? Imagining the Contemporary Travel Magazine Reader as an Authentic Experience Seeker.” Current Issues in Tourism 19(1): 85–99.

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Mead, Peggy C., and Elaine L. Pedersen. 1995. “West African Apparel Textiles Depicted in Selected Magazines from 1960 to 1979: Application of Cultural Authentication.” Family and Consumer Sciences 23(4): 430–52. Moulin, Jane Freeman. 1996. “What’s Mine is Yours? Cultural Borrowing in a Pacific Context.” Contemporary Pacific 8: 128–53. ——–. 2010. “Dance Costumes in French Polynesia.” In Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, ed. Margaret Maynard, 417–23, Vol. 7 of Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, ed. Joanne Bubolz Eicher. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Newell, Jennifer. 2010. Trading Nature: Tahitians, Europeans and Ecological Exchange. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Ochoa, Marcia. 2014. Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. O’Hanlon, Michael. 2005. “Under Wraps: An Unpursued Avenue of Innovation.” In The Art of Clothing: A Pacific Experience, eds. Susanne Küchler and Graeme Were, 61–69. London: UCL Press. Robinson, Kathryn. 2007. “Introduction: Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans: Self and Subject in Motion.” In Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans, Self and Subject in Motion, ed. Kathryn Robinson, 1–15. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rose, Roger G. 1971. “The Material Culture of Ancient Tahiti.” PhD dissertation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Rovine, Victoria. 2009. “Colonialism’s Clothing: Africa, France, and the Deployment of Fashion.” Design Issues 25(3): 44–61. Sahlins, Marshall. 1999. “What is Anthropological Enlightenment? Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century.” Annual Review of Anthropology 28: i–xxiii. Salmond, Anne. 2009. Aphrodite’s Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti. Berkeley: University of California Press. Saura, Bruno. 2008. Tahiti Mā‘ohi: Culture, identité, religion et nationalism en Polynésie française. Pirae, Tahiti: Éditions Au Vent Des Îles. Schackt, Jon. 2005. “Mayahood through Beauty: Indian Beauty Pageants in Guatemala.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 24(3): 269–287. Schuft, Laura, and Bernard Massiera. 2012. “Marketing a Nation by the Performance of Gendered, Exotic Bodies in Sport and Beauty Contests: The Case of Tahiti.” Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics 15 (1):103–16. Shiner, Larry. 1994. “‘Primitive Fakes,’ ‘Tourist Art’ and the Ideology of Authenticity.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52 (2): 225–34. Shukla, Pravina. 2015. Costume: Performing Identities through Dress. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sperlich, Tobias. 2006. “Embodied Inter-Cultural Dialogues: The Biography of a Samoan Necklace in Cologne.” Journal of the Polynesian Society 115(2): 119–44. Stevenson, Karen. 1990. “‘Heiva’: Continuity and Change of a Tahitian Celebration.” Contemporary Pacific 2(2): 255–78. ——–. 1992. “Politicization of ‘la Culture Ma‘ohi’: The Creation of a Tahitian Cultural Identity.” Pacific Studies 15(4):117–36. ——–. 2001. “Pacific Women: Challenging the Boundaries of Tradition.” Women’s Studies Journal 17 (1): 15–16. ——–. 2008. The Frangipani is Dead: Contemporary Pacific Art in New Zealand, 1985–2000. Wellington, NZ: Huia.

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——–. 2010. “Dress and Appearance in Tahiti.” In Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, ed. Margaret Maynard, 430–34, Vol. 7 of Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, ed. Joanne Bubolz Eicher. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, John P. 2001. “Authenticity and Sincerity in Tourism.” Annals of Tourism Research 28(1): 7–26. Teilhet-Fisk, Jehanne. 1996. “The Miss Heilala Beauty Pageant: Where Beauty Is More Than Skin Deep.” In Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests, and Power, eds. Colleen B. Cohen, Richard Wilk, and Beverly Stoeltje, 185–202. London: Routledge. Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios. 2013. “Laying Claim to Authenticity: Five Anthropological Dilemmas.” Anthropological Quarterly 86(2): 337–60. Thomas, Nicolas. 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. van Meijl, Toon. 2004. “Introduction.” In Shifting Images of Identity in the Pacific, eds. Toon van Meijl and Jelle Miedema, 1–20. Leiden: KITLV Press. Wang, Ning. 1999. “Rethinking Authenticity in Tourism Experiences.” Annals of Tourism Research 26(2): 349–70. Waterson, Roxana. 2011. “Visual Anthropology and the Built Environment: Interpretations of the Visible and the Invisible.” In Made to Be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology, eds. Marcus Banks and Jay Ruby, 74–107. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wilk, Richard. 1995. “The Local and the Global in the Political Economy of Beauty: From Miss Belize to Miss World.” Review of International Political Economy 2(1): 117–134. Yano, Christine Reiko. 2006. Crowning the Nice Girl: Gender, Ethnicity, and Culture in Hawai‘i’s Cherry Blossom Festival. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Young-Leslie, Heather E. and Ping-Ann Addo. 2007. “Introduction: Pacific Textiles, Pacific Cultures: Hybridity and Pragmatic Creativity.” In “Hybrid Textiles: Pragmatic Creativity and Authentic Innovations in Pacific Cloth Pacific Arts,” eds. Heather E. Young-Leslie, Ping-Ann Addo, and Phyllis Herda. Special issue, Journal of Pacific Arts 3(5): 12–21.

2 American Colonial Mimicry Cultural Identity Fantasies and Being “Authentic” in Samoa JEANNETTE MAGEO

Is “to mimic” only to feign and is mimicry intrinsically opposed to either authoring or to being authentic? This chapter argues that mimicry is a way of authoring, that one can express “authenticity” mimetically, and that all this is evident in Samoan colonial photographs. I also hope to show that a willingness to mimic is a gauge of openness to cultural others and that kinds of mimicry, their degrees and limitations, reveal much about interrelations between what I call the “identity fantasies” of interacting cultural groups. Mimicry can be a way of authoring because it is part of an image-based mode of thought and expression—different from but in my view equal to verbal expression and sequential reasoning (Mageo 2017a, 2018, 2019a). For Lacan (1968, 1977), image-based thought, which he calls the Imaginary, emerges around the age of two in what he calls the “mirror phase,” when children first recognize their image in the mirror and in others’ regard. Neither of these images, of course, is the child any more than words are what they name. Yet these mirrored images soon elicit identity fantasies that children entertain about themselves—as when they dress up and pose in their parents’ clothing or affect their activities. Groups, too, have identity fantasies about who they are and what they should be like that reflect social and political realities only to a degree—fantasies that inform and color national behavior but may not be coincident with it. Thus, Americans’ view of themselves as committed to democracy has often diverged from their real behavior—for example, supporting dictators in foreign locales or autocrats at home. And groups, obviously, have fantasies about the identities of other groups—for example that they are noble or ignoble savages. One might question the importance of investigating culturally shared fantasies, but Anderson (1991) showed us long ago that common imaginings constitute national communities. Imaginings that communities have about one another, I argue here, greatly influence their relations.

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One authors mimetically by repeating an image and altering it (Mageo 2017b, 2019b). Iteration states a subject; alterations say something new about this subject and in this sense are authorings. Mimetic authoring, I suggest, is similar to verbal authoring, at least in certain respects. Thus Kristeva (1986: 37) holds that literary texts are “mosaics of quotations”: they recycle ways of talk that have gone before, which becomes a vocabulary for saying something new. So, too, with the mimetic faculty: it borrows images circulating in a culture, often originating in culture contact, and uses them to (re)imagine manifold things—for one, cultural identity. People author their cultural identities, this chapter argues, by how they mimic archetypal personae that play roles in shared fantasies about their culture—fantasies that circulate in the public realm. Persona was the word for masks worn in ancient Roman drama. “Persona” means “mask” or “face” but also refers to roles played by those who wear such a face. Additionally, I use the word to refer to social fantasies about such “faces.”1 Culture members, I suggest, enact cultural identity fantasies by mimicking facial and bodily expressions associated with such personae and through a patterned use of props understood as objects that are likewise associated. Such personae may be drawn from a culture’s mythical past, for example the image of the cowboy in American culture, but they may also be drawn from foreign others. By watching for mimicry within historical photos, therefore, we can see groups’ fantasies about their cultural identity acted out as if before our eyes. Benjamin ([1934] 1986), Adorno (1981), and Taussig (1993), see mimesis as a way the self becomes alter. As Benjamin ([1934] 1986: 333) famously puts it, mimesis is “to become and behave like something else.” In this vein, Harrison (2006) sees mimesis as a way a group differentiates its own identity from that of another group, thus maintaining social boundaries (see also Russell 2012). In contrast, I hope to show that mimesis can appropriate the other to define and constitute one’s own cultural identity—indeed the very authenticity of this identity. Like a moving poem one has not read before, what we read in the other can teach us about our own undiscovered territories, which we prize more deeply for their novelty. Cultural self-definition, I argue, often transpires through an ongoing fluid playful identification with cultural others. Much cultural identity work, therefore, transpires visually and may be visible in photographs. I present this play in photographs from the colonial period in Samoa. In work on Pacific photography, scholars often argue that the colonized are well-nigh invisible in photographs colonialists take: what we see there are Western noble-savage fantasies or political intents such as mustering support for a “civilizing mission” (Bell 2005; Clifford 1988; Hemperstall 1997; Jolly 1997; Maxwell 1999; Nordström 1991a; Quanchi 2006, 2007; Stephen 1993; Thomas and Losche 1999; Tiffany 2001; Thomas 1991). In contrast, Edwards (2001: 109) argues that a variety of elements and agendas flow into colonial

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photographs, often beneath the gaze of the colonialist who took the picture (see also Sperlich 2014). The resulting photograph is not reducible to their intents, whatever these may be (see also Azoulay 2008; Pinney and Peterson 2003). A view of photographs as remodeling Pacific others presupposes that photographers see and control all that enters the photographic frame, which presumes authorial power scholars have disputed at least since Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” (1977). Such control is improbable, particularly outside the studio. What transpires within the frame, moreover, is often only evident in retrospect and then to a limited degree (Edwards 2001; Edwards, Gosden, and Phillips 2006; Edwards and Hart 2004; Gell 1998; Mageo 2017b). Less scholarly attention is typically paid to the colonists who appear in colonial photographs. In Samoan historical photographs from the colonial period, to varying degrees, American colonists frequently imitate Samoans. When they do, I suggest that photographs document American cultural identity fantasies about authenticity. The idea that Americans played out an authenticity fantasy by acting like Samoans may seem a contradiction in terms, but we saw in Chapter 1 that, at least since Rousseau, Westerners imagined authenticity as a primordial “sentiment of being” that so-called primitives were imagined to manifest.2 An American version of this fantasy, I believe, was that through their encounters on the frontier with raw nature and its denizens, the “red” Indians, early American settlers acquired a genuineness and an openness that distinguished them from their European cousins (see further Phillips 2012: 6–8; Reissman 1960: 16). I call this “natural authenticity.” This fantasy was also that this American type of authenticity could move people, at least to a degree, to credit others with humanity recognizable across the barrier of cultural and even racial difference. Nineteenth-century American literature provides evidence of this fantasy. In James Fennimore Cooper’s Leathersocking series, for example, Delaware Indians raise the main character, a white called Hawkeye. Hawkeye has an Indian “brother,” knows the wilderness intimately, and is himself “a mixture of the habit of the two races” ([1840] 1981: 17). Cooper’s Hawkeye, obviously, is radically open to those cultural others. The result is a distinctly American version of authenticity: Cooper tells us, “there was an open honesty, a total absence of guile in his face” ([1840] 1981: 18). Of course, American colonists had racist stereotypes and sentiments, too, documented by Lutz and Collins (1993). Yet in Samoa many of the Americans who mimic Samoans appear to at least imagine themselves as people who are genuinely open to cultural others. Often identity imaginings involve dress (see also Hammond, Chapter 1). Dressing like Indigenes has long been a common tourist practice, but in Samoa not all colonial visitors, not even all Americans, practiced it equally. Rather, I found what one might call a “distributed mimicry.” In the photos to follow, an artist, an anthropologist, women, and

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children don native dress. Official American colonial males don ulas (leis) or eat on mats on the ground at feasts like Samoans, but they retain their suits and formal manners. The politics of empire, I believe, helps explain this distributed mimicry. Pacific islands had long been chits in a European game of empire that began with the Portuguese takeover of the Spice Islands in the sixteenth century (Ricklefs 1991; Thomas 2010). The US played this game in the Pacific. The 1899 Tripartite Convention ceded the easterly Samoas to the United States (Gilson 1970), and Americans ruled in the easterly islands thereafter to the present day. American colonial men’s relatively limited mimicry of Samoans in photographs in comparison to that of colonial women, I suggest, helped to protect and preserve male colonial authority while also showing that they too participated in a national fantasy of Americans as inclusive. Relegating more blatant identifications with Samoans to those that were politically marginal—artists, anthropologists, women, and children—allowed these identifications while roping them off from the serious business of the state. Yet, these politically marginal mimicries were important, too, as these seemingly peripheral actors were unofficial if unintentional ambassadors of empire. Certainly, an author like Jack London or an anthropologist like Margaret Mead, whose photos are included here, would have rejected any such role. But inasmuch as these unofficial ambassadors shared and enacted an egalitarian fantasy of the national self, at its best, as open to cultural others, they were probably persuasive testaments in the flesh that Americans were as they imagined themselves to be. My interest, then, is also in American empire. Lutz and Collins in Reading National Geographic (1993) argue that published photographs are often part of what Frankfurt school theorists call “mass culture”: “materials created and disseminated by powerful interests for the consumption of the working classes” (1993: 5). This viewpoint assumes mystification—namely that these images organize desires and anxieties in hypnotizing ways that capture the popular imagination and persuade people to interpretations of social reality that are often against their interests. What I perceive in the photographs in this chapter is a subtle enacted dialogue between Americans and Samoans about relations of domination. This dialogue shows, I believe, how to “do empire” “successfully.” I am not saying that empire is a good thing, only that it works sometimes in some places and not in others at least in part because of what a dominating culture offers to a potentially subordinate culture—offers that may be misleading but that are neither mystifying nor hypnotizing. This perspective is an important complement to “dark anthropology” assumptions (Ortner 2016) that colonialism is not only bad (which it certainly was in many over-determined ways) but undifferentiated and uniformly so in its effects. Such offers—for example a degree of equity and inclusiveness or increased status—I shall argue, are often made nonverbally and are visible in Samoan historical photographs.

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The photographs that support these arguments are mainly of Americans in Samoa during the first half of the twentieth century. One might call this the American colonial period in Samoa. From the 1899 Tripartite Convention to the present day, the easterly Samoas have been an American territory. Yet in 1948 the American governor began convening a Samoan legislator, a Fono, and as of 1978 American Samoans elected their own governors. The US Department of the Interior oversees this local government but has had a largely hands-off policy as long as Samoans legislators did not seek to violate the American constitution. Through the first half of the century, however, the US navy directly administered these isles (Gray 1960). During this period, the photos I will present suggest Americans’ mimicry of what they perceived as Samoan authenticity conveyed shared fantasies about American cultural identity that I described. For contrast, I consider New Zealanders’ photographs during their colonial period in Samoa. The Tripartite Convention ceded the westerly Samoas to Germany but New Zealanders sailed into Apia harbor, the capital city of the westerly islands, at the outbreak of World War I and took those islands for the British Crown (Davidson 1967). After the war, first the League of Nations and later the United Nations made the westerly islands a Trust Territory under New Zealand (Davidson 1967). In New Zealand photos taken during World War I one can see a fantasy of the national self as representing the British crown on the outskirts of empire. Thus, one of the most common images I saw in New Zealander collections were photographs taken in 1914 of their Samoa Expeditionary Force either arriving in Apia by boat or running up the British flag there. In the photographs I saw up through the 1920s, New Zealanders in government service and their wives did not attempt to mimic Samoans but rather to mimic British upper-class society to which they likely aspired. Mimicry, it seems to me, reveals and enacts a real or desired permeability between groups, and a lack of mimicry a more exclusionary orientation, which as a governing principle appears to have failed New Zealand colonial administrators in the westerly Samoas. In the 1920s a movement called the Mau arose to represent Samoan concerns and demands to the New Zealand administration (Field 1991). In reaction to administrative deafness and the colonial murder of paramount chief Tamasese Leafofi III, the leader of this movement, the Mau became an independence movement.3 By the late 1940s, the United Nations had become suspicious of New Zealand’s governance of the westerly islands and a transition to an independent Western Samoa, now called Samoa, began (Davidson 1967). In photos from that latter colonial period, New Zealand officials do mimic Samoans. Samoans, too, appear in the photographs I present here and often, like American colonial officials, they engage in what I call a “partial mimicry”— meaning that they combine foreign dress, gestures, and practices with endur-

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ing local ways of dressing and behaving. When Samoans do, I argue, they are not trying to be “white if not quite,” to paraphrase Bhabha’s (1994) characterization of colonial mimicry. Rather, partial mimicry was a way that Samoans attempted to recreate and expand their Indigenous sense of exalted status and aspirational hierarchy in new forms and guises, which produced alternative forms of authenticity and cultural identity (see also Hammond, Chapter 1). Speaking to this volume’s first theme, this idea suggests that to be authentic one has to be ever-ready to re-author cultural identity and existing custom with it—to reprise all in new historically relevant and often culturally mixed guises. This idea may be useful in other locales for understanding and interpreting the hybridity that characterizes colonized cultures (Brathwaite 1971; Burke 2009; Hall 2003; Sperlich 2014: 307–9). The historical photos for this chapter come from large samples I made between 2012 and 2015 from major American and New Zealand museums and libraries including: the California Academy of Sciences, Scripps Institute of Oceanography, UCSD’s Pacific Collection, the Huntington Library, and Special Collections at UCLA, The Goldwater Library in the Metropolitan Museum and American Museum of Natural History in New York, the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian, the National Museum of Natural History, the Library of Congress, the National Geographical Society, the University of Auckland Pacific Collection, the Auckland Museum, and the Alexander Turnbull Library. These data collection trips were part of a larger project that began in 2010 and that also involved British and German photos and artifacts that I detail in other work (Mageo 2017b).4 As the project progressed, I became interested in photos that showed mimicry or its visible lack and saw repeated patterns that suggested American and, to a lesser extent, Samoan and New Zealand orientations toward mimicry during colonial times. Nordström (1995: 11) estimates that US libraries and museums alone house fifteen thousand photographs of Samoa taken between 1870 and 1925. I investigated from the 1870s up through the mid-twentieth century and not only in US collections: the number of photos was vast. As my interest in mimicry emerged over the course of the project, I cannot say what exact portion of this sea of photos it reflected. Unsurprisingly, once I saw it, mimicry seemed frequent, but it would require a much larger project undertaken from the outset with the intent to find mimicry to objectively determine what percentage of the time it was evident. I, therefore, do not use photographic material as statistical proof for this mimicry but do what Maxwell (1992) calls “purposeful sampling”: selecting photos that help to elucidate a set of plausible ideas—an approach that is instrumental to qualitative theorybuilding. Let us now turn to the photos, which tell these colonial stories more eloquently than I can. I present them in chronological order, beginning with photos of or by Jack London.

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The Photos Figures 2.1 and 2.2

In 1906 Jack London embarked from San Francisco on a long Pacific sojourn in a yacht he had built for that purpose—the Snark. The name Snark is from a nonsensical Lewis Carroll children’s poem, The Hunting of the Snark, defining the journey itself as an excursion into fantasy. In Figure 2.1 taken in 1908 Jack stands on the deck of the Snark and smiles engagingly at the camera. His bare chest and messy hair, I suggest, conveys a fantasy of Americans as natural in the sense of being wild and free—“called by the wild” in Jack’s idiom. Here, like the dog that returns to the Alaskan wilderness to lead a wolf pack in the novel by that name, Jack expresses natural authenticity. In American literature, not only Indians, but Polynesians, too, personified natural authenticity—for example the tattooed Queequeg in Melville’s Moby Dick ([1851] 2007). In the photo Jack wears a lavalava, a sarong, and in this he mimics Polynesians— people that in his book about this voyage, The Cruise, he identifies with authenticity and nobility. He thereby commingles Americans’ identity fantasies about themselves with their identity fantasies about Polynesians. In Figure 2.1 Jack also conveys natural authenticity through his resemblance to a white man whom he first met in San Francisco and then again in Tahiti—Ernest Darling (London 1913: 178–97)—a resemblance evident in Figure 2.2. London took this second photo when he was in the Society Islands. Stateside and later in Hawai‘i, people thought Darling crazy because he was unkempt and went about wearing little. In Tahiti, people accepted his dress and eccentric manners. There he grew his own food. Jack called him “Nature Man” and extolled the virtues of his simple way of life. In Figure 2.2 Nature Man wears a lavalava, as does Jack in Figure 2.1. He mimics “digging a garden,” posing with a shovel in a digging posture in the bush, a pick lying Figure 2.1. Jack stands on the deck to the side. I say “mimics” because the of the Snark, 1908. JLP 429-119f., Alb. spot does not appear sufficiently sunny “Bora-Bora and Samoa,” Jack London for real gardening and he has nothing collection, The Huntington Library, to plant at hand. San Marino, California.

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Figure 2.2. Nature Man, taken in Tahiti. JLP 498 Alb. 60, Jack London collection, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

As suggested by Nature Man’s living alone in the wild, Jack’s version of natural authenticity includes “rugged individualism,” which was also evident in the Snark voyage. With perilously little know-how, Jack commissioned the Snark and plunged into a trans-Pacific crossing that almost killed him (London 1913; Lutkehaus 2015). This term, rugged individualism, was not in common usage until President Hoover used it to argue against helping Americans in the Great Depression along with other humanitarian efforts across the world (McMahon 1931). Yet frontier fantasies of independence from “civilization” foreshadowed this model of manliness, which Americans imagined as manifest and tested in confrontations with nature. President Roosevelt’s forays into the wilderness are an example (Roosevelt 2005). Roosevelt and Jack, too, were archetypal Americans. By “archetypal” I do not mean that they were statistically representative of their group; rather, they consciously personified and enacted American cultural identity fantasies on a world stage. Here I am also reminded of “the rugged Anthropologist,” my term for another archetypal American who was pervasive in anthropology up through the mid-twentieth century (for an example see Knauft, Chapter 3). Jack’s rugged individualism blended natural authenticity with what I call “existential authenticity”: the idea that expressing the most spontaneous reactions of our individual natures is being authentic. Jack was ready to espouse existential authenticity all the while that he ranted against philosophy:

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The ultimate word is I like. It lies beneath philosophy, and is twined about the heart of life. When philosophy has maundered ponderously for a month, telling the individual what he must do, the individual says, in an instant, “I like,” and does something else and philosophy goes glimmering. It is I like that makes the drunkard drink and the martyr wear a hair shirt; it makes one man a reveler and another man an anchorite; it makes one man pursue fame, and another gold, another love, and another God. Philosophy is very often man’s way of explaining his own “I like.” (1913: 3) “I like” is Jack’s American individualist version of the “sentiment of being,” which Trilling (1997: 92–99) sees as the predecessor and source of the existentialists’ version of authenticity. As discussed in Chapter 1, for Trilling this sentiment was tantamount to a vital energy that insured the person would have clear boundaries—that “the circumference of the self shall keep unbroken,” and would be, “impenetrable, perdurable, and autonomous” (1997: 99). Yet in Figure 2.3 Jack’s boundaries seem flexible. Authenticity in the American identity fantasy Jack represents, then, diverges from its European original: although the American version features the idea of the highly autonomous individual, like Jack or like the frontiersman, it also features an inclusive element—like Lady Liberty and the open borders she represents. Figure 2.3

In The Cruise (1913: 249, 252), London identifies Figure 2.3 as taken in Samoa. The shot is clearly posed, as the album in which it appears includes an identical shot of his wife, Charmain, who accompanied him on the trip and who was as game and as venturesome a spirit as was he. In this companion photo, Charmain stands in between the same two tāupou—virginal village dignitaries who had a role in major ceremonies. Her arms are around their shoulders, just as Jack’s are in this photo. Jack’s smile plus direct gaze here and in Figure 2.1 convey a fantasy of Americans as existentially authentic in the sense of sincerely expressing feelings—the feelings being a friendly openness to others (see also the photos of Knauft, Chapter 3). Here Jack combines a notion of the national self as existentially authentic with one of being egalitarian. Phillips (2012: 3–4) observes that during the period of London’s brief life (he died of uremia at the age of 40), the US emerged as a major economic and military power; Americans asserted their national identity vis-à-vis their parent state, Britain, by identifying with social equality in contrast to British class stratification. In this photo, Jack again looks directly at the camera while he embraces the tāupou (1913: 249). Harkening in another vein to Jack’s version of existential authenticity (“I like”), Figure 2.3 also says, “I like them”—the Samoans he

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Figure 2.3. Jack London and Samoan Tāupou, 1908. JLP Box 499-Alb. 61, Jack London collection, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

embraces. This “like” suggests an affective kind of identification that augments the visual identification of Figure 2.1. Yet these two shots also assert difference and hence a relation between Jack’s natural authenticity and what I call “noble-savage authenticity,” attributed to Indigenous peoples by Rousseau ([1763] 1974) and thereafter by Western travelers including London in The Cruise. In the Huntington Library collection, in those photos where London dresses like a Polynesian, he is on board his ship, clearly separate from Polynesians by virtue of their absence and the context—a yacht. Next to these tāupou he dresses like an American in a long-sleeved white shirt, a tie, and belted trousers. In Figure 2.3 gender also asserts difference. Indeed, in both Figure 2.1 and Figure 2.3 visual identification is framed and limited: these images say, “I am like,” but not “I am that.” Unlike the male Samoans in the background who look at the scene and who are wearing everyday attire, the tāupou in Figure 2.3 wear ceremonial regalia. Among the general historical photos that I collected from museums in Germany, the US, New Zealand, and England, the “tāupou,” sometimes an actual tāupou and sometimes a girl merely dressed as one, is by far the most prevalent human figure (2017b). In part, this prevalence probably resulted from a Western fantasy of Polynesians as naturally noble—a fantasy that tāupou personified. In the missionary Pratt’s early English-Samoan dictionary

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the word tāupou is glossed as “virgin” ([1862/1911] 1977: 152), but foreigners and locals alike came to translate tāupou as “village princess,” implying an expansion of her representative role and status (Mageo 1998: 119–63; 2010). Already in the first decade of the twentieth century there were a number of photographic studios in Samoa, and professional photographers kept tāupou costumes on hand to dress photographic subjects (Nordström 1995). In such pictures, the tāupou was a centerpiece for artifacts that had come to emblemize the real Samoa in the colonial encounter, such as fine mats, tapa, and fans—objects common in artifact collections (Mageo 2017b). If a Western fantasy of Samoans as noble was one reason for the tāupou’s representative status, however, this fantasy overlapped with Samoans’ colonial imaginings of themselves. Thus, for impromptu photographs taken by visitors, villagers often donned elements of the regalia normally worn only by tāupou, chiefs, and chiefs’ sons on ceremonial occasions (see for example Mageo 2017b: 60–61). In Samoan principle, the ranking of titles was fixed, just as the past was fixed, but at ceremonies orators tended to attribute nobility to those high chiefs for whom they spoke by reciting ennobling versions of their genealogies (Keesing & Keesing 1956: 102). These versions represented claims that another villages’ talking chiefs acknowledged in responding ceremonial orations. Repeated attributions of lineage, defended in war, gradually gained legitimacy for an imputed lineage. Goldman distinguishes between inherited and acquired status in Polynesia (1970). Samoans—blurring this distinction—achieved status in the guise of inheriting it. Genealogic social principles appear to have predisposed colonial Samoans to entertain the noble side of a Western noble savage fantasy as evident in Samoan-English translations. As mentioned, when speaking English Samoans often translate tāupou as “village princess.” High chiefs are called tupu and high chief ’s wives, masiofo. Samoans tend to translate these terms as “king” and “queen” (Mageo 2010). On relatively small islands where there are numerous village virgins, high chiefs, and chiefs’ wives, and even a number of paramount chiefs, these local terms, rather than “princess,” “king,” and “queen,” would be more accurate translations. Colonial Samoans, then, re-authored traditional notions of hierarchy in a mixed idiom—as is evident in the dress of the two tāupou in Figure 2.3. These tāupou dress in what we might call their finery, which includes imported cotton cloth and pendants—neither items of traditional ceremonial dress. One girl’s pendant is a cross. The pendant the other wears looks like a cameo but is probably a shell worn in imitation of Victorian style. From early on in the colonial encounter, Samoans wore and sometimes made Westernstyle clothing to dress up for church and other occasions—for example Victorian bonnets made of tortoise shell (Drummond 1842; Turner [1884] 1984: 113). Like titled Hawaiians during the colonial period (Sahlins 1992: 57–81),

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if in a more temperate way, these tāupou thereby re-author their identity and Samoan identity with it by blending indigenized symbols of status with what were at the time modern images of status. Thus, mimicry, which is common to elite local dress in many world areas during early stages of colonization, can be understood as copying-plus-alteration; as such, it provides further insight into the cultural processes referred to as “creolization” or “translation” (Bhabha 1994; Brathwaite 1971; Burke 2009; Hall 2003; Sperlich 2014: 307–9). Originally, linguists used the term “creole” to describe languages that mixed words from the language of a colonial overlord with an Indigenous language. Translation is what we do to understand another language (find a similar word in that language). Creolization and translation, then, are both linguistic metaphors for cultural mixings that transpire at least as importantly in images; we might understand these mixings better by attending to them as such. In Figure 2.3, one tāupou looks quizzically at the camera; the other looks away. Unlike Jack, they do not smile. Neither do they respond to Jack’s familiar manner. Samoans differentiate dignified formal ceremonial contexts from informal joking contexts; in formal contexts one does not smile and joke. So, like Jack, these tāupou’s self-presentations suggest likeness via their co-presence but also clearly maintain difference. What we see is not mere identification. These tāupou combine imported elements with older images to say something new about themselves and about Samoan cultural identity (see also Hammond, Chapter 1). Their copying of the foreign does not abrogate authenticity but alleges what I call “au courant authenticity”: the idea that to be authentic one must also be at the crest of the tidal wave of history. This idea, I suggest, was and is found in many places that were, like the US and Samoa in the early twentieth century, beset by one world-changing event after another (see further in Mageo 1998). Figures 2.4 and 2.5

Next I turn to two photos taken in Pago Pago in 1923 or 1924 of Ida Beck and her friends on holiday dressed in Samoan garb. Ida was the wife of an American ornithologist who worked in Samoa and was part of the Whitney South Sea Expedition (Chapman 1935). Ida and her friends’ mimicry, like Jack’s, is cultural type casting. In Euro-American literature, the poetry of the Romantic Movement for example, women were attributed natural authenticity, as exotic others were also. Like most Samoans at the time, Ida and her friends are barefoot but unlike them they do not expose their breasts. The limit on their mimicry is American sexual morality for women—although by the 1920s Samoan women, too, often wore more on their upper body than they had earlier in the century, especially when in the presence of Westerners. The women in Figure 2.4 and 2.5, however, are also wearing less than most American women would

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Figure 2.4. Ida Menzies Beck and friends on holiday, taken in Pago Pago, 1923 or 1924. Rollo Beck collection (#115142, original 599, 029), American Museum of Natural History Library.

at the time; their garb is to some degree daring and probably reflects the sexual revolution of the 1920s. Arguably, Margaret Mead advanced a psychoanalytic version of the natural in Coming of Age in Samoa ([1928] 1961), i.e., that we are all compelled by sex, especially in youth, and that a society that accommodates these urges will, therefore, be more peaceful (Mageo 1988, 2001). Indeed, this view of the natural foreshadowed and in its own way helped instigate the Western twentieth-century sexual revolution, and probably contributed to the success of Mead’s book for many years after its publication in 1928. In Figure 2.4 from the American Museum of Natural History all three women smile and two look directly at the camera, conveying friendliness and personal engagement like in the Jack London photos. Two of the three wear their long hair down, unlike the tāupou in the Jack London photos, but like an American fantasy of a Polynesian girl. Samoan women’s hair practices were changing during this period (Mageo 1994; 1998: 119–40), so whether the women were copying American fantasies or current Samoan custom is unclear. Again, in Figure 2.5 all three look directly at the camera; these women are all smiles, friendly, and playful. Like Jack, Ida and her friends are authoring a cultural fantasy of Americans as authentic in the existential sense (expressing genuine sentiments) but also in the natural sense (being like a Polynesian).

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Figure 2.5. Ida Menzies Beck and friends on holiday taken in Pago Pago by Ida Menzies Beck. Rollo H. and Ida M. Beck collection, Prints South Seas (N. #5, Box 46; on back “JMB Dec 25, 1923”), California Academy of Sciences.

Their willingness to mimic thus conveys a fantasy of Americans as open to cultural others. Figure 2.6

This photo from the Library of Congress was taken in 1925. Here Margaret Mead mirrors a Samoan tāupou (Fa‘amotu) who is standing next to her and wearing a parallel costume. Here Mead’s mimicry goes far deeper than dress. At that time Mead herself was newly a tāupou, and Fa‘amotu was one of her tutors in Samoan culture and etiquette, including her tāupou role. Mead’s warm smile, like those of Ida and her friends, appears to display genuine sentiment

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and thus existential authenticity. Unlike the tāupou photographed by London in the first decade of the twentieth century, Fa‘amotu smiles back. At this time, the significance of the photographic context was arguably changing for Samoans, becoming less formal and possibly more open to Samoan authoring—as we also will see in Figure 2.8. These two women hold hands, which suggests a mutual “I like” and ethnographic rapport. Here Mead’s imitation of tāupou dress conveys an American fantasy not only of natural authenticity but also an openness to Polynesian others—and more. Mead imitated Fa‘amotu in much that she did. The two young women slept together on a pile of mats under the same mosquito net, ate together, as well as bathed and danced together (Mead 1977: 32; 1972: 148). This was, of course, participant-observation anthropology, which took hold of the discipline in the first half of the twentieth century. This method might also be called mimicry-and-observation: it entailed a radical openness to cultural others acted out through mimicry: living as they lived, doing what they did. Again, unlike the Samoan women photographed by London in the first decade of the twentieth century, Fa‘amotu hair is long, worn down, and her breasts are covered, which points to the rapid cultural change in sexual mores at that time (Mageo 1994, 1998, 2010). Even more than Jack embracing the

Figure 2.6. Margaret Mead and Fa‘amotu regard one another. Library of Congress, Series P, “Photographic File, 1878–1978, n.d.” Box P25. Held by both by the Library of Congress and the National Anthropological Archives and available on their websites. Courtesy of Mary Catherine Bateson.

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tāupou, Mead enacts a friendly inclusiveness—indeed, a family inclusiveness. Many of the photos Mead took in Samoa were of Fa‘amotu, and Hammond (2003: 363) suggests these were collaborative “family photos.” These photos had several aims, but among them was an attempt to visually commemorate a kind of kinship. Fa‘amotu’s chiefly father, High Chief Ufuti Leone Ulugaono, adopted Mead, which made the two young women fictive sisters. Ufuti conferred the same tāupou title on Mead as he had on Fa‘amotu—Sinaualo (Hammond 2003: 344), in a sense making them duplicates of one another. When Fa‘amotu poses alone in Mead’s photos she is often in the woods, indicating that Mead saw her as embodying natural authenticity. In one of these, the caption Mead chose for the published image was “A Spirit of the Wood” (Hammond 2003: 351). Thomas (1993: 48–49) and Nordström (1991b, 1992) point out that this kind of photograph was then common and conveyed stereotypes. My point is that such shots also conveyed a cultural fantasy about authenticity that affected Mead’s and London’s self-presentation, one they shared and cultivated. Like Jack, Mead was an archetypal American—a female version of the rugged individualist, an “original” who lived a life dictated by her adventurous spirit and her Enlightenment values: the end of prejudice and the advancement of knowledge. A quest for a purportedly lost natural authenticity against the constraints of Western convention inspired many early twentieth-century anthropologists—particularly Mead. In her 1928 book on Samoa, subtitled A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization, Mead, like Rousseau, seeks to recruit a primordial naturalness to address the weaknesses of her culture. Figure 2.7

I now turn to a 1929 photo of three American children of a US naval officer dressed as Samoan—probably with their Samoan nanny’s assistance. Two of the children smile; the Samoan almost smiles. Everyone but the child who closes his eyes looks directly at the camera, probably instructed to do so by the photographer. The little girl wears a fine mat and a boar’s tooth necklace, ceremonial items often worn by tāupou, but also a shirt. American sexual morality, then, extends even to her (she covers her chest), evidently more so than to bare-shouldered Ida Beck and her friends. Two of the children wear grass skirts and also ulas, as does the Samoan. Two also wear garlands and one carries a war club, like one of the tāupou in London’s photo, again showing that these ceremonial items had become symbolic of Samoans and of their authenticity. Here again this is cultural type casting. From Rousseau’s Emile ([1763] 1974) onward, many Europeans and Americans increasingly imagined children, like tribal peoples, as manifesting natural authenticity. In Figure 2.7 all the Kastenbein children wear wrist and or ankle bands. These children, the

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Figure 2.7. Sietu with Louise, Bill, and Bernard Kastenbein, all in Native costume with ornaments, 1929. Local Number NAA INV 05266000, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Library.

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Beck women on holiday, and Mead are the most thorough mimics among my American photos. Here again I suggest that Louise, Bill, and Bernard are ambassadors of empire who act out an inclusiveness that more official US visitors traded upon: they express an openness to Samoan culture that was a formal position for American officials but one we will soon see these officials enacted only partially. For Bhabha (1994), colonial mimicry is a profound form of subservience that deprives colonial subjects of personal authenticity. For me mimicry may or may not connote subservience, but it does connote likeness and, in this sense, at least potential or partial equality of essence if not station, which represented the political platform American officials sought to maintain. Figures 2.8, 2.9, and 2.10

Merl LaVoy took the three photos that follow. They are from the National Anthropological Archives and are of a congressional delegation to Samoa, probably in the 1930s. LaVoy was a cameraman who sometimes worked as an expedition photographer. He grew up in a log cabin in the Oregon woods, another icon of natural authenticity. Belmore Browne (1954), an explorer and mountaineer who met LaVoy in 1910 and invited him on a couple of expeditions, compares him to Kipling’s Mowgli, a feral Indian child from The Jungle Book ([1894] 1903) who is brought up by a wolf pack and later joins the British service. LaVoy, then, was another archetypal American and another Nature Man. Not only photographic subjects, but sometimes photographers, too, participated in the national fantasy described here—making for a layering of fantasies in the actual photograph. In Figure 2.8, Americans and most of the Samoans wear suits unsuited to the climate (USNM 05269400). The central Samoan woman and man and also the Samoan “photographer” wear ceremonial headdresses traditionally worn by tāupou but also by chiefs and chiefs’ sons. They may be genuine dignitaries or Samoans dressed to represent Samoan culture to the delegation and again suggest Samoans’ willingness to identify with a fantasy of themselves as noble. This tāupou’s chest is covered and most of the Samoans wear a lavalava below their jackets, shirts, and ties, partially mimicking American style. As with Americans’ partial mimicries, I suggest, the images they project combine the status and modernity symbolized by American garments with a flag of their loyalty to their own culture—the lavalava. Indeed, there are old Samoan songs sung at many events today that take the lavalava as a symbol of Samoan culture. The Samoan holding a movie camera and putatively shooting the scene not only denotes mimicry but also Samoan playfulness and agency. It is unlikely many Samoans owned a movie camera at the time; probably the Samoan has borrowed it from his American guests as a joke. The fact that he acts like

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Figure 2.8. American congressional delegation to Samoa, National Anthropology Archives (USNM 05269400). Photograph by Merl LaVoy.

a photographer within a photograph that is actually being taken from a more distant view underlines this ironic mimicry. One congressional delegate in the foreground and one in the background wear ulas. For Samoans, placing ulas around visitors’ necks is an inclusive practice that identifies them at once as as-if relatives and as-if visiting dignitaries: in welcoming ceremonies, visitors tend to be treated as both. One can infer, then, that some of the American male officials have allowed Samoans to dress them in this symbol of relationship, thereby displaying these officials’ willingness to engage in partial mimicry. During the 1930s, Samoans sometimes more thoroughly dressed Westerners in Samoan costumes to participate in traditional events. Aletta Lewis, for example, was an Australian teacher who visited Manu‘a at that time. Her Manu‘an hosts made her a tāupou, just as they did Margaret Mead (Lewis 1938: 120; Mead 1972). Members of Lewis’s village later went on a travelling party (malaga) to another Manu‘an village. Lewis describes her Manu‘an hosts dressing her for an evening entertainment in which she is to dance the tāupou’s part (1938: 206–8). She records a long discussion with these Samoans on what she will wear above the waist. They want her to wear a scarf tied around her breasts like her Samoan counterpart “tāupou,” a transvestite dwarf who is

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a wonderful dancer and who has coconut shell breasts with “horribly” realistic nipples. Lewis wants to wear her shirt like the little girl, Louise Kastenbein, in Figure 2.7. They compromise: Lewis wears the scarf tied over her shirt but her Samoan friends remark disapprovingly, “You no real taupo.” The scene shows how partial mimicry traffics in copies with variations and also indicates that by the 1930s Samoans understood Western notions of authenticity in several different senses of the word. Figure 2.9 features the central American from the same congressional delegation but this time wearing an ula and carrying what appear to be a talking chief ’s fly flap (his badge of office) and possibly a spear, probably gifts from his Samoan hosts. Here the American’s posture is open, his arms spread, unlike those of his Samoan interlocutor. Both have white hair. The Samoan’s hair is

Figure 2.9. American congressman in Samoa, National Anthropology Archives (USNM 05269000). Photograph by Merl LaVoy.

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Figure 2.10. American congressman in Samoa, National Anthropology Archives (USNM 05268900). Photograph by Merl LaVoy.

probably bleached with lime, a widespread practice in Samoa prior to modern times (Mageo 1994). In Figure 2.10 we see another congressman from the delegation, but he is sitting on ground and eating with his hands like Samoans: this too is partial mimicry. Here again, I suggest, this mimicry’s metamessage is inclusive and in a limited way displays both Americans’ willingness to identify with (to be like) Samoans. Figure 2.11

This photo is from a National Geographic article on Inaugural Day festivities in 1940 (Bailey 1941: 620). Paramount Chief Mauga had just won the post of Native Ruler after a five-year dispute about the title (Bailey 1941: 620–21; Gray 1960: 238). In the photo, Mauga, in ceremonial garb, shakes hands with the American governor’s wife, who leans toward him. By doing so, Mauga engages in a partial mimicry: well-appointed in Samoan ceremonial garb, he mimics American manners and modes of expression. Shaking hands is an inclusive American practice, although not as inclusive as the embraces in the Jack London photos. The role the American administration played in Samoan politics

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is also visible in these National Geographic photos; a brief turn to Samoan history is necessary to understand them. American Samoa consists most significantly of the relatively large island of Tutuila and the smaller Manu‘an islands. In the precontact Pacific, the most historically important paramount title in the entire Samoa-Tonga region— extending possibly even to Fiji, Uvea, Futuna, Tokelau and Tuvalu—was the Tui Manu‘a title (Mageo 2002). All the highest Samoan paramount titles descend originally from the Tui Manu‘a title. While Mauga and the chiefs of Tutuila signed a treaty ceding the easterly islands to the US in 1900, Manu‘an chiefs did not sign until 1904, and then only under duress (Gray 1960). The Manu‘an chiefs, I suggest, were resisting not only American incursion but also an attempt by Tutuila chiefs to re-author Samoan hierarchy by elevating the status of their titles. Likewise, High Chief Mauga sought to re-author the status of his title through his new post. Thus Gray (1960: 140–49), an American naval medical officer, recounts an incident in 1902, the year after Mauga signed the treaty, when Mauga insisted on being addressed as Tui Manu‘a’s equal in an ‘ava ceremony and only escaped retribution for this insult through the intervention of an American judge. For contrast, let us now turn to a few New Zealand photos.

Figure 2.11.  A National Geographic photograph of Inaugural Day festivities in 1940 (Bailey 1941: 620).

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Figure 2.12

This photo is from the Turnbull Library and is of Major-General Sir George Spafford Richardson who served as Administrator of Western Samoa from 1923 to 1928. In this village shot, Richardson is in military whites and regalia and carries a sword. Richardson was in fact an Englishman serving British interests on the outskirts of empire. He began his career in the Royal Regiment of Artillery but was transferred to New Zealand where he became an officer in the military there. Behind Richardson stands another officer, probably his second-in-command, and a Samoan along with two New Zealand women in dresses, hats, and stockings carrying handbags, two white men in white suits and black bow ties, one wearing a helmet, one hatless. Behind these men stands a Samoan in a white over-shirt and lavalava. There is a line of Samoan men in the background in uniforms consisting of white lavalavas, shirts, ties, belts, and bare feet. One similarly dressed Samoan appears on the opposite side of the frame. Here Samoans manifest partial mimicry—part Western and part Samoan. The shot also indicates a clear hierarchy and a suggestion of subservience. This suggestion, I believe, is reinforced by the New Zealanders’ dress: although

Figure 2.12. Major-General Sir George Spafford Richardson. Ref. PA1-o-446. Alexander Mathieson Rutherford, 1915–1998: Photographs of Samoa. Taken in 1915. (IRN 1572654.) Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand. Wellington, New Zealand.

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their dress is inappropriate for the climate, they attempt no mimicry. Richardson’s male associates almost smile and one of the New Zealand women does smile, while Richardson’s expression is serious. All the whites look directly at camera. The Samoans stand at attention in a military-like posture looking ahead, excepting one towards the back of the line who looks furtively either at Richardson or the photographer. Anderson (1991) argues that being sent to posts in the colonies tended to taint European officials’ status. It is unsurprising, then, that Richardson and other New Zealand officials would assert their relation to British power by imitating upper class English men and women rather than Samoans. This lack of mimicry and the exclusionary orientation it reflects, however, did not make for good local relations or good government. Richardson dealt poorly with the Mau and retired from his post under a cloud; he failed in his stewardship of British empire. Figure 2.13

This photo is from the Auckland University Library and is of New Zealand and Western Samoan ladies gathered for bowling in the1920s. The New Zealand women are dignitaries. Third to the left is Lady Richardson, as the legend indicates. In the center is the wife of A. L. Braisby, civil police commander in colonial Western Samoa from the 1920s to 1940s for the New Zealand administration. To the far left of the frame is Mrs. Tattersall, wife of an important New Zealand photographer who lived in Samoa much of his professional life.

Figure 2.13. Cyril McKay photographs of Samoa, Tokelau, and Cook Islands. MSS & Archives 2007/5, item 1/15. 1/2 Individuals and Groups, 2.1 Events and Activities. Special Collections, University of Auckland Libraries and Learning Services.

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It is likely that the Samoan women in this photo are also dignitaries, as colonial rulers mixed socially with titled Samoans—possibly it flattered their own aristocratic pretensions. Although the names in the legend all appear to be English, there were by the 1920s important mixed-race Samoan families that bore English surnames (Davidson 1967). Yet the mimicry in this photo is largely oneway. All wear dresses and hats, as might English ladies of the period. Of the New Zealand woman, only Mrs. Tattersall wears what is probably, given its length, a shell ula (as does the Samoan women at the far right): this is the single instance of New Zealand mimicry in the frame. Mrs. Tattersall was a long-term resident and her husband an accomplished student of Samoan custom and history, so it makes sense that she was most open to Samoans and willing to mimic them. Figure 2.14

Compare Richardson in Figure 2.12 to the last New Zealand High Commissioner, Powles, in Figure 2.14. Powles became high commissioner of Western Samoa (now called Samoa) in 1949. His mission was to shepherd the westerly isles to independence. Two-sided partial mimicry is obvious in this photo.

Figure 2.14. Guy Powles, New Zealand High Commissioner for Samoa, his wife Eileen, and son Michael in Samoa. Photograph taken by Donald Ross. Ref: PA1-o-822-24. Powles Family collection. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. Courtesy of Michael Powles.

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Powles, his wife, and his son, Michael, wear fabrics that mimic tapa cloth; around their necks are many ulas, meaning that Samoans have in part dressed them. Powles’s wife holds a Samoan fan, probably also given to her by a Samoan. The ulas suggest welcome or departure, which are gifting occasions. The two woven baskets are probably also gifts and, as artifacts, emblemize Samoan culture—as they did for artifact-collecting ethnographers and tourists. Michael Powles (pers. comm.) identified the Samoans as Tupua Tamasese Mea’ole on the left and Malietoa Tanumafili on the right—holders of two of the most exalted Samoan chiefly titles who became joint heads of state following independence. Michael Powles commented that “some observers believe the good working relationship these three men had with each other [Tamasese, Malietoa and his father] was a contributing factor in Samoa’s smooth transition from being a UN Trust Territory administered by New Zealand to full independence in 1962, the earliest in the Pacific.” Although the lower half of their bodies are obscured in this shot, Tamasese and Malietoa engage in at least partial mimicry, wearing Western dress above the waist—Tamasese in a white shirt, jacket, and tie, Malietoa in a white shirt. The Powles all smile broadly and so does Tamasese. Malietoa seems to half-smile. Imminent independence, I suggest, softened the social membrane between Samoan and New Zealand cultures—as well as elevating the status of the new Samoan Western government officials. It is unsurprising that such developments encouraged these officials to happily engage in mutual mimicry. Today New Zealand itself is what Gershon (2012) calls a “bi-cultural” society— Pakeha and Maori—and mimicry is much in evidence. The word Pakeha, meaning a white New Zealander, is a Maori word. Football games often begin with teams performing Maori war dances. Every tour guide pronounces Maori place names well.

Coda

Edwards (1995, 2001) argues that photographs are performances. All these photos, in my view, are cultural identity performances that in Bakhtin’s (1983) sense are addressed to an audience and that invoke an audience. Members of the photographer’s culture may represent a primary audience, but their photographic subjects’ cultures are potential audiences as well. Although colonial photographers generally expected Westerners to view their photographs, participants in the above scenes seem aware that they are authoring images that convey particular meanings both to their fellow culture members, in the American case through National Geographic for example, and also to an intercultural audience. Thus, Tamasese smiling broadly at the back of the Powles photo seems aware that he is making a political statement in support of Powles’s

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mission that New Zealanders and fellow Samoans could read in his face and dress. Photographers and those photographed seek to satisfy an existing audience but also reach out to define and expand other possible audiences. This excess suggests that these photographic subjects are not only interpellated in stereotyping ways but that they also called out to be hailed in new ways that expanded or altered their cultural identities. In these photos, for example, London was authoring a new American identity for a new century of expansion—expansion symbolized in popular culture and photographs by cultural forms of travel. Samoans were authoring a new cultural identity for the world stage—one that also made sense in local terms. The photographic subjects presented here express different kinds of authenticity and seek different sources of authentication. Americans, half-naked on the deck of a ship or barefoot on a beach, express natural authenticity. For these individuals being close to nature or dressing like those who they imagined to be unaffected and natural testifies to this authenticity. Yet they are mimicking images circulating in their culture, all the while they give these images twists and turns that say more about Americans and about themselves. Mimicry, then, does not always negate the authenticity of colonial subjects but can be a way of expressing ideas about what it means to be authentic in a place and period. The photos presented here suggest various kinds of mimicry: the partial– mixed mimicry of American officials; the close-to-complete but also (sexually) limited mimicry of American women and girls; the more complete but displaced mimicry of the artist, Jack London; the even closer American mimicry of (male) children and anthropologists; various Samoans’ partial mimicry of Westerners. Reciprocal mimicry—colonists copying Samoans and Samoans copying colonists—speaks to this collection’s second theme: that culture is a two-way street characterized by back and forth borrowings between, in this case, American and Samoan locales. These various instances evince degrees of cultural permeability deemed acceptable or cultivated among discrete groups and also identity differences within each culture; these are all evident in photo-encoded mimicries. Mimicry, then, implies a complex hybridity— Jack London, for example, as a primordial open traveler who sees himself as like a Polynesian but also as a highly independent, nonconforming rugged American individualist. These photos also imply a variety of subject positions: the American male official who is to a degree open to mimicking Samoans. American women as tourists, in contrast, play with indigeneity in ways that are less constrained probably because they had less official authority to protect. Then there is the male artist and philosopher who mimics Polynesians in order to manifest natural authenticity but also to be a rugged individualist. New Zealanders mimic remote others (the British) as a strategy for securing their own status and role

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in the politics of empire. Samoans mimic to maintain and expand their rank and status under colonial conditions. The photos also reveal specific contrasts as well as similarities of identity-experience and testify that cultural identity is composed of layered representations that bespeak a historical moment but also reach beyond it. Mimicry differs in its relative distance from its object. Its object can be immediate others in an ongoing interaction, for example Americans mimicking their Samoan colonial subjects. But mimicry’s object can also be remote others as in the case of early New Zealand colonial officials mimicking their far-away English sovereigns. This distance can be geographic, but it can also be affective. Mimicry may be a way to act like someone else, to other, as Taussig (1993: 33) following Benjamin ([1934] 1986) has it, but it is also a matter of likenesses, likeness asserted not only by copying but also by liking—that is, by evident rapport. We might say, then, that mimicry makes or attempts to make a relation, attempts that might diminish or intensify with distant objects. A lack of mimicry, on the other hand, repudiates or restricts a relation (see also Mageo 2017a, 2017b; Merlan 2017). Thus, New Zealand colonial officials not only failed to mimic Samoans but also failed to forge strong relations with them, the first failure being indexical of the second. These cases further suggest an opposition between mimicry and authority important in understanding empire. For instance, American colonial men in these photos keep an “apartness” that validates their authority, but they do not express the existential authenticity impersonated so charmingly by Jack London. Indeed, the openness to others that Jack displays suggests a shared humanity (“all men are created equal”) incompatible with colonial relations of authority and dominance. What, then, are the implications of my photos and analyses for the ongoing development of anthropological theory and practice, our volume’s fourth theme? Watching mimicry reveals, not only victims and victors, domination and subordination, as Bhahba (1994) argues is the case, but also how all parties cope with specific historical constellations to think and feel through their own and other cultures and to integrate all the resources that new experiences and new cultures offer. This is a more nuanced view than many well-intended perspectives that portray colonialism as a uniformly dominating scourge. More generally, understanding mimicry as a visual way of thinking/feeling through historical change can help reveal and transcend reductive and narrowing models of the “invention of culture,” discussed in the Introduction. In its place, mimicry offers to reveal local histories rooted in idea exchanges between interacting groups, along with the transformation of such ideas through time in the West and in the Pacific—our volume’s third theme. Mimetic deviation from a model is what continues to make the ever-new cultural identities that it authors original and fresh. These photos show, for

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example, that Americans mimicking Samoans were not just “going native” and Samoans mimicking Americans were not just “mimic men.” For Americans, visually enacted fantasies about cultural identity were in part about their historical notions of authenticity and, in the Samoan case, about their historical notions of nobility. For Samoans, “nobility” indexed enduring practices along with cultural memories of politicking for status and titles. For Americans, “authenticity” meant the strength of naturalness that they imagined they had gained through experiences on whaleboats and in encounters of the frontier. It also signified Americans’ idea of themselves as inclusive, egalitarian, and trustworthy—a platform, so to speak, offered in places like Samoa in exchange for the right to rule. Again, I am not saying that Americans had actually gained strength of being from the Indians they often slaughtered or from the continental or oceanic margins of their appropriated lands, or that they were consistently open to cultural others, egalitarian, or trustworthy. We know they were not. Yet, returning to the subject of empire, I merely suggest that American fantasies of the national self that are evident in the photos presented here to an extent and for a period were persuasive to Samoans and probably to others, too, with whom Americans interacted on a world stage.

Acknowledgments

I gratefully thank the numerous librarians and collection managers who helped with my research. I thank the Wenner-Gren Foundation and Washington State University for grants that made this research possible. I also thank Stanley Smith and two anonymous reviewers for their very useful comments on this chapter and Bruce Knauft for his inspiring suggestions throughout.

Since 1980, Jeannette Mageo has researched Samoan culture, history, and psychology. She has authored eleven books and edited collections as well as thirty-four peer-reviewed major articles and numerous book chapters on Pacific anthropology and psychological anthropology. After earning her doctorate in 1979 from the University of California at Santa Cruz, Professor Mageo spent nine years in the field, returning to a postdoctoral position at the University of California at San Diego in 1989, which she held until 1993 when she assumed her current post at Washington State University. In recent years she has turned to examine the collision of Samoan and European cultures and psychologies in the colonial encounter through performance art, historical photos, and colonial artifacts.

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Notes 1. In this vein, Feminist theorists have long regarded gender as a mime of embodied social identities but also the roles implicit in these identities (Butler 1990, 1993; Irigaray 1985: 76; McClintock 1995: 62; Riviere 1929). 2. In European literature at least since the seventeenth century this fantasy of tribal people as noble savages is evident. In Dryden’s play The Conquest of Granada ([1672] 1687), for example, this figure represents peoples putatively unschooled and uncorrupted by “civilization.” Europeans and Americans too tended to project nobility on Polynesians and savagery symbolized by cannibalism on Melanesians or, in other cases, to splinter Polynesia and to project nobility onto some Polynesians, most consistently Hawaiians or Tahitians, and savagery on others—the Marquesians for example (Lutkehaus 2015; Melville 1921; Obeyesekere 2005). 3. The Mau was also in the easterly Samoas but was never as organized or dedicated as the movement was in the westerly islands (Field 1991; Gray 1960: 191–210). 4. For this earlier project, I worked in German and British collections, namely: The London Missionary Archives at the School of Oriental & African Studies, the British Museum, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, the Institut für Ethnologie und Ethnologische Sammlung in Göttingen, the Übersee-Museum in Bremen, the Museum für Völkerkunde in Hamburg, the Museum der Weltkulturen in Frankfurt, the Linden-Museum in Stuttgart, Museum für Völkerkunde in Munich, and Museum Schloß Hohentübingen in Tübingen. References Adorno, Theodor W. 1981. “A Portrait of Walter Benjamin.” In Prisms, trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber, 227–42. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Anderson, Benedict R. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Azoulay, Ariella. 2008. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books. Bailey, Truman. 1941. “Samoa—South Sea Outpost of the US Navy.” National Geographic Magazine (May): 615–30. Retrieved 13 July 2018 from National Geographic Virtual Library, http://tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/6kLV40. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1983. Speech Act and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barthes, Roland. 1977. “The Death of the Author.” In Image-Music-Text, trans. S. Heath, 142–48. New York: Hill & Wong. Bell, Leonard. 2005. “Eyeing Samoa: People, Places, and Spaces in Photographs of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” In Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire, eds. Felix Driver and Luciana Martins, 156–74. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Benjamin, Walter. (1934) 1986. “On the Mimetic Faculty.” In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz; trans. Edmund Jephcott, 333–36. New York: Schocken Books. Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Brathwaite, Edward K. 1971. The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Browne, Belmore. 1954. “Merl LaVoy, 1886–1953.” AAC Publications. http://publications .americanalpineclub.org/articles/12195413202/Merl-Lavoy-1886-1953.

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Burke, Peter. 2009. Cultural Hybridity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. ———. 1993. Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge. Chapman, Frank M. 1935. “Whitney South Sea Expedition.” Science 81: 95–97. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cooper, James Fenimore. (1840) 1981. The Pathfinder. Albany: State University of New York Press. Davidson, James W. 1967. Samoa mo Samoa: The Emergence of the Independent State of Western Samoa. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Drummond, George. 1842. October 26 letter to London Missionary Society Headquarters from Savai’i. Council of World Missions Archives (15/5/D), School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Dryden, John. (1672) 1687. The Conquest of Granada. London: H. Hills. Edwards, Elizabeth. 1995. “Visuality and History: A Contemplation of Two Photographs of Samoa by Capt. W. Acland, Royal Navy.” In Picturing Paradise: Colonial Photography of Samoa, 1875 to 1925, ed. Casey Blanton, 49–58. Daytona Beach and Cologne: Southeast Museum of Photography and Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum of Ethnology. ———. 2001. Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums. Oxford: Berg. Edwards, Elizabeth, Chris Gosden, and Ruth B. Phillips, eds. 2006. Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture. Oxford: Berg. Edwards, Elizabeth, and Janice Hart, eds. 2004. Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images. London: Routledge. Field, Michael J. 1991. Mau: Samoa’s Struggle for Freedom. Auckland: Polynesian Press. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gershon, Ilana. 2012. No Family Is an Island. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gilson, R. P. 1970. Samoa 1830 to 1900. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Goldman, Irving. 1970. Ancient Polynesian Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gray, John A. C. 1960. Amerika Samoa: A History of American Samoa and Its United States Naval Administration. New York: Arno Press. Gunson, Niel. 1978. Messengers of Grace: Evangelical Missionaries in the South Seas 1797– 1860. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Hall, Stuart. 2003. “Creolization, Diaspora, and Hybridity in the Context of Globalization.” In Créolité and creolization, eds. Okwui Enwezor, Carlos Basualdo, and Ute Meta Bauer, 185–98. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz. Hammond, Joyce D. 2003. “Telling a Tale: Margaret Mead’s Photographic Portraits of Fa‘amotu, a Samoan Tāupou.” Visual Anthropology 16: 341–74. Harrison, Simon. 2006 . Fracturing Resemblances. New York: Berghahn Books. Hempenstall, Peter. 1997. “The Colonial Imagination and the Making and Remaking of the Samoan People.” In European Impact and Pacific Influence: British and German Colonial Policy in the Pacific Islands and the Indigenous Response, eds. Hermann Hiery and John M. MacKenzie, 65–81. London: Tauris Academic Studies, German Historical Institute. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. The Sex that Is Not One. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Jolly, Margaret. 1997. “From Point Venus to Bali Ha’i : Eroticism and Exotism in Representations of the Pacific.” In Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific, eds. Lenore Manderson and Margaret Jolly, 99–122. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Keesing, Felix M., and Marie M. Keesing. 1956. Elite Communication in Samoa. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kipling, Rudyard. (1894) 1903. The Jungle Book. New York: The Century Co. Kristeva, Julia. 1986. The Kristeva Reader, trans. L. S. Roudiez. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Lacan, Jacques. 1968. “The Mirror Phase.” New Left Review 51: 70–79. ———. 1977. Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton. Lewis, Aletta. 1938. They Call Them Savages. London: Methun. London, Jack. 1913. The Cruise of the Snark. New York: Macmillan. Lutkehaus, Nancy. 2015. “Jack London’s Pacific Voyage of Transformation: An Anthropologist Looks at the Cruise of the Snark (1911).” Pacific Studies 38(1/2): 51–73. Lutz, Catherine, and Jane L. Collins. 1993. Reading National Geographic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mageo, Jeannette. 1988. “Malosi: An Exploration of the Mead/Freeman Controversy and of Samoan Aggression.” Pacific Studies 11(2): 25–65. ———. 1994. “Hairdos and Don’ts: Hair Symbolism and Sexual History in Samoa.” Man 29(2): 407–32. ———. 1998. Theorizing Self in Samoa: Emotions, Genders, and Sexualities. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2001. “Mead and Critical Cultural Relativism.” Paper presented at a Presidential session, “New Anthropology for Old: Legacies of Margaret Mead in Oceania” at the centennial meetings of the AAA, Washington DC, 28 November–2 December. ———. 2002. “Myth, Cultural Identity, and Ethnopolitics: Samoa and the Tongan ‘Empire.’” Journal of Anthropological Research 58(4): 493–520. ———. 2010. “Race, Gender, and ‘Foreign Exchange’ in Samoan Performing Arts.” Anthropological Forum 20: 269–89. ———. 2017a. “Introduction: Mimesis in Theory and in History.” In Mimesis and Pacific Transcultural Encounters: In Time, in Travel, and in Ritual Reconfigurations, eds. Jeannette Mageo and Elfriede Hermann, 3–28. New York: Berghahn Books. ———. 2017b. “Transitional Images and Imaginaries: Dressing in Schemas in Colonial Samoa.” In Mimesis and Pacific Transcultural Encounters: In Time, in Travel, and in Ritual Reconfigurations, eds. Jeannette Mageo and Elfriede Hermann, 49–78. New York: Berghahn Books. ———. 2018. “Mimesis, Models, Metaphors, and Feet in American Dreams.” Ethos 46(2): 254–74. ———. 2019a. “Mimesis versus Simulation: Contemporary Dream Theory and the Nature of Dream Mentation.” Dreaming 29: 370–87. ———. 2019b. “Mimesis and Developing Models of Self and Other.” Culture and Psychology 25: 195–219. Maxwell, Anne. 1999. Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the “Native” and the Making of European Identities. London: Leicester University Press. Maxwell, Joseph. 1992. “Understanding and Validity in Qualitative Research.” Harvard Educational Review 62 (3): 279–300. McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather. New York: Routledge. McMahon, Arthur W. 1931. “Third Volume of the Seventy-First Congress, December 1, 1930 to March 4, 1931.” The American Political Science Review 25(4): 932–95. Mead, Margaret. (1928) 1961. Coming of Age in Samoa. New York: Morrow Quill. ———. 1972. Blackberry Winter. New York: William Morrow.

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Stephen, Ann. 1993. Pirating the Pacific: Images of Travel, Trade and Tourism. Sydney: Powerhouse Publishing. Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge. Thomas, Nicholas. 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1993. “The Beautiful and the Damned.” In Pirating the Pacific: Images of Travel, Trade and Tourism, ed. Ann Stephen, 44–59. Adelaide: Powerhouse Publishing. ———. 2010. Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press. Thomas, Nicholas, and Diane Losche. 1999. Double Vision: Art Histories and Colonial Histories in the Pacific. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Tiffany, Sharon W. 2001. “Imagining the South Seas: Thoughts on the Sexual Politics of Paradise in Samoa.” Pacific Studies 24: 19–50. Trilling, Lionel. 1997. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Turner, George. (1884) 1984. Samoa: A Hundred Years Ago and Long Before. London: Macmillan.

3 Critical Reflections across Four Decades of Work with Gebusi Authorship, Authenticity, Anthropology BRUCE KNAUFT

In “What is an Author?,” Foucault (1984) suggests that genealogies of authorship reflect changing assumptions about self-constructed representation. In anthropology, the parameters, strictures, and assumptions of authorship have also changed over time. This is certainly true across my own four decades of work with the Gebusi people, who live in the remote rainforest of Papua New Guinea’s Western Province. When I first reached Gebusi in 1980, they were a small isolated group of about 450 persons. Now, they number more than 1200. At one level, my relation with Gebusi resonates with what Shokeid (2020: 75) calls “the tradition of revisit ethnographies reporting on societal transformation under the forces of ‘modernity.’” This is especially feasible among small-scale rural communities in which face-to-face relations endure with strong continuity over many years (see Knauft 2011a; Howell and Talle 2011). Though my relationship with Gebusi is not exactly a “love story”—as Shokeid characterizes Read’s (1986) revisit to the Gahuku-Gama after thirty years—it is certainly one that I, and I hope Gebusi, have greatly appreciated. My feelings of strong friendship with Gebusi are an important reason why I have gone back to be with them again and again. Indeed, at one uncertain juncture in my life—and when politics back in the US seemed especially dismal—I fantasized about living with Gebusi long-term if not permanently. In ethnographic terms, the richness, surprise, and value of camaraderie across radical cultural difference is a theme that I have tried to develop in works about Gebusi for undergraduates and for a more general audience (e.g., Knauft 2016). This somewhat glowing perspective, however, is but the tip of the iceberg. My connection with Gebusi spans a bit less than three years over a total of forty, including twenty-two months in 1980–82; one half-year in 1998; several weeks in 2008 and again in 2013; and a summer with them in both 2016 and 2017. Some of my shorter Gebusi trips have been as much to catch up with dear friends as to do research. I have a range of close relationships with Gebusi, including two men, Sayu and Didiga, who I first knew as young boys

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and have kept in close and supportive contact with since. I have at least two children named after me (though they are not my own!). Given Gebusi’s deep and continuing sense of communality or “good company” (kogwayay), I have felt strongly connected to the community of Gasumi as a whole. Below, I develop analytic and theoretical reflections concerning authorship and authenticity. In the bulk of this essay, I then apply these reflections to different stages of my work and life with Gebusi. Finally, I reflect on this history in relation to contemporary anthropology, including the implications of what I have learned as compared and also contrasted to needs and demands of current new generations of ethnographers. I conclude by considering the denouement of my time with Gebusi, and, more generally, the stakes and significance of the end of authorship and its imputations of authenticity.

Anthropology and Authorship

Underlying and pervading my relationship with Gebusi are strategies and assumptions of making them (seem) authentic while listening to their own assertions of what they themselves find authentic, on the one hand, and worth authoring, on the other. Most Gebusi remain illiterate, and none have gone to, much less finished, college. Their level of education has in recent years declined from its previous very modest level, as schools have alternately been closed and poorly staffed. Gebusi have little opportunity for educational advancement beyond primary grades, and there is no high school in the Sub-District. Internet connection is non-existent and phone signal is all but absent. The airstrip is closed and there are no roads to other areas. Given this continuing isolation, authorship remains in practical terms my own, both as a professional academic and as an advocate and supporter of people I like and admire. When I first arrived in 1980, many Gebusi gave all indications of not knowing that other native peoples existed beyond the small groups directly adjacent to them. The provincial capital of Daru was considered by many to be the land of the dead, and Gebusi were visibly shocked when I showed them ethnographic photos of people living near Mount Bosavi, which they could see from their ridgetops on a clear day. As for my own subject position of authorship, I am a straight white male, now senior, born in Connecticut and with a long pedigree of white male privilege. This has extended from an honors track at a fine public high school in West Hartford to a BA cum laude at Yale, a PhD in anthropology at the University of Michigan, a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Diego, and an academic job at Emory University that has taken me from green assistant professor to distinguished named professor over the course of thirty-five years. Self-identifying or self-claiming as progressive, liberal, and

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against the grain, at college I became committed to progressive/liberal causes through inner city volunteer work, and I took a number of opportunities to live with and try to understand and support people whose background and status were very different from my own. While framed and influenced, often unknowingly, by my privileged circumstances, I gravitated toward an experience-near understanding of people very different from me while living with them in conditions of relative hardship. This seemed to make Gebusi a perfect fit. “Authenticity,” correspondingly, has had its own un-decolonized contradictions over time, including both my attribution of authenticity to Gebusi and the claims, albeit mostly implicit, that some Gebusi have made for themselves. “The Gebusi” are hardly monolithic, either between men and women, those older or younger, those relatively more or less modestly educated, and so on. Hence the substantial challenges in portraying Gebusi “authenticity” as well as developing my own “authorship.” On the other hand, my privileged status and history have afforded me numerous opportunities to document Gebusi lifeways, including via professional networks that facilitate access to top-tier journals and university presses. Publishing in such venues is an arduous task, but having elite mentorship provides enormous help that also reinforces confidence and motivation. In the following sections, I tease apart such professional dynamics in relation to my authorship and my assumptions or assertions concerning who Gebusi authentically are. These issues engage the tension and challenge of all ethnography to encode and portray a compelling larger narrative while also conveying the complexities, contradictions, and inconsistencies of fieldwork, both in the character of others’ realities and in our own attempts to re-present these. In fieldwork, the assumed “authenticity” of the experiences of the people one is studying intersect with our “authoring.” The relationship between asserting authenticity and asserting authorship becomes a dance over professional time, a dance that is hopefully enriching but at times also charged with grating tension. Larger patterns of “authenticity” and “authorship” then sediment, iterate, and ramify in relationship to one another during successive periods of fieldwork. My experience with Gebusi is in no way archetypal, but stages and patterns in my relations with them from 1980 to 2020 resonate with or refract off of changes in anthropology over that same time. Though somewhat too charitable, one colleague quipped that, when viewed in retrospect, my work has been something of a four-decade history of the discipline in one field site. Or, as she also put it, my work discovered what the discipline expected me to find at each period (Jeanette Mageo, pers. comm.). This also begs the reverse question: to what degree have these shifting realities been invented by me rather than ethnographically and empirically uncovered? Might a more introverted

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or sullen anthropologist have found Gebusi to be retentive and timid rather than exuberant and playful? This risk partly accounts for—or has subliminally informed—my seemingly strong desire to provide copious documentation of Gebusi lifeways, including many concrete examples and case histories, facts, and figures as well as statistical summaries. Commitment to ethnographic specificity was a touchstone of my indefatigable doctoral advisor, Raymond C. Kelly, and this emphasis seems to have stayed with me (cf. Kelly 1977, 1993). I leave it for others to judge whether my accounts of Gebusi are plausible given the information presented in each case. As Mageo and I discuss in our introduction to this volume, authorship, ethnography, and authenticity blend into each another as if by collusion. This occurs concretely through various means of author-ization, professionalized author-ity, and authenti-fication. As has been well raked over the coals in anthropology at least since the 1980s (Clifford 1988; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986), the politics of authorship and authenticity seem not just inescapable but inescapably critiqued in the reflexive examination of our field. This includes the credentialing of our scholarship in relation to the events, objects, and peoples that we represent or encourage to have represented as valid, genuine, and culturally real. In Foucault’s (1984) terms, the truth function of authoring and the author function of authenticating truth are closely linked, and perhaps especially so in cultural anthropology. In anthropology as elsewhere, one can configure a genealogy of how authorship and authenticity have been asserted over time. This does not mean, of course, that our representations have become progressively more authentic. It means, rather, that it can be valuable to chart how our ideas of valid authorship and of ethnographic authenticity have been propounded and asserted differently over time.

Discovering or Inventing Authenticity in Fieldwork

A well-rehearsed story has now introduced four editions of The Gebusi, namely, that my search for the unknown Gebusi started with a blank spot on the map—the large-scale ethnographic map of New Guinea at the library of the University of Michigan (e.g., Knauft 2016: ch. 1). At the time, I had never been west of Oregon. Eventually getting to the field, I failed to find the “Kabasi” or “Kasua” people who I was looking for deep in the uninhabited New Guinea rainforest. I ended up instead among the adjacent people, who I “discovered” to be one of the last unnamed tribal groups in New Guinea. In fact, Gebusi had been known from patrol reports but had for various reasons been misnamed the “Bibo,” which was one of the Gebusi’s three dozen varieties of plantains, their starch staple. So, in terms of the Gebusi’s authored and au-

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thentically named existence in the outside world, I became their serendipitous founder. Beyond authenticating and authoring the Gebusi’s ethnic or tribal name— which I rendered phonetically but which in subsequent years they themselves sometimes spell as “Gobasi”—I authenticated and authored Gebusi culture as well. I could claim authenticity in this insofar as I was among the last generation of anthropologists forced by necessity to learn the local language without the help of translators—monolingually, via the vernacular itself. During the early days of learning their never-written language, I stumbled across a Gebusi term, kogwayay, that they used to refer to their distinct customs of initiation, ritual, feasting, and camaraderie, and also to refer to the contrast between these and the practices and beliefs of adjacent peoples. “Kogwayay” seemed to refer at that time to their own customs and beliefs as opposed to those of other small language groups or “tribes.” I hence took kogwayay to be the Gebusi version of “culture.” Given that the three morphemes of the word convey prosocial togetherness (kog), casual talk and banter (wa), and exuberant joking and cheering (yay), I glossed the compound word as “good company.” Correspondingly, I took Gebusi “good company” to be the key symbol and authentic signifier of Gebusi “culture” as a whole.1 Though not totally unwarranted, this attribution had the effect not only of reifying a single uniform Gebusi culture as a whole but of second-classing women, who participated in the “togetherness,” “talk,” and “joking” of Gebusi social and ceremonial life to a much lesser degree than men. It was men who held decisive central sway in Gebusi collective activities, rituals, and feasts— while women were physically and socially peripheral. Women were excluded altogether from male activities such as all-night spirit séances. These latter focused on, appropriated, and fetishized the ideal sexualized identity of Gebusi spirit women, whose salacious activities real Gebusi women could be beaten for if they attempted to approximate (Knauft 1985a: ch 9; 1985b; 1989). To some extent for me (and for Gebusi themselves?) authentic Gebusi “culture” as “kogwayay” was, in fact, male culture. None of this was lost on my then-wife, Eileen Cantrell (Knauft). Though both of us had been exposed to and influenced by radical feminist politics at the leftist University of Michigan during the 1970s, this impact was earlier and deeper on her than it was on me. In the field, she and I had thought to vouchsafe our individual independence and integrity as researchers and authors by me studying the “men’s side” of Gebusi culture and her the “women’s side.” Impractical and impossible in practice, this led to tensions on different registers. Suffice it to say that as Cantrell did not continue on in anthropology, and that her results were not available for me to use apart from one published paper (Cantrell 1998), the absence of female perspectives and of feminist theorization in this highly male-dominant setting presented me a continuing conun-

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drum. I was at pains to rectify this balance when working solo with Gebusi in 1998 and in 2008—and with a male graduate student, Latham Wood, from the University of Oregon, in 2013. This yielded only compromised results given the highly segregated nature of Gebusi gendered interactions. Bluntly put, it was difficult and all-but-impossible for me as a male researcher to speak with Gebusi women in any serious way. Women could generally not be alone with an unrelated man, and they became reticent as soon as men came on the scene, as they invariably did, to see what was going on—and to take over the conversation (see Knauft 2016: ch. 8).2 It was not until I was able to return to Gebusi with a young French female anthropologist, Anne-Sylvie Malbrancke, three-and-a-half decades after my first fieldwork, in 2016 and 2017, that the women’s side of Gebusi culture, and my previous assumption of male-centered perspectives, became more fully and palpably apparent (cf. Knauft 1996: ch. 7). Two other aspects of authorship and authenticity during my first extended Gebusi fieldwork bear mention. First is the physical hardship of fieldwork among Gebusi—living for many months at a time in a roastingly hot, extremely rainy, and drippingly humid insect-infested rainforest environment with no modern conveniences, cut off from outside contact and supplies (e.g., Knauft 2016: ch. 1). In some ways, my initial fieldwork took place in the final historic chapter of anthropology’s search for and documentation of simple tribal—a.k.a. “primitive”—societies in highly remote places. As I have argued elsewhere (Knauft 2018), anthropology was arguably dominated by an emphasis on identifying and documenting so-called primitive societies for almost a century and a half, from its inception in the early nineteenth century through much or most of the 1960s and 70s. This emphasis often tended to assume, at least tacitly, that the authoring of ethnographic authenticity was linked to the valorizing import of severe personal hardship and privation endured by the ethnographer while doing fieldwork in remote and difficult locations. Though typically bleached from reference in credentializing publications, the hardship quotient of fieldwork often remained a significant badge of ethnographer status. This is perhaps all the more notable for being an officially unspoken dimension of anthropological habitus (cf. Bourdieu 1977, 1988). Hardship authorized and authenticated ethnographic authorship, what Geertz (1988) called the “I-being-there” of genuine anthropology. In my own case, I came close to dying from chloroquine-resistant malaria in the field in 1980—saved by an emergency dose of liver-pounding primaquine packed as a back-up—and I endured a snake bite from a death adder in 1998. In truth, neither of these carried traumatic repercussions; I was delirious and hence unknowing during my malaria attack, and the snake bite ended up not being very deep. I recovered from both within a couple of weeks and have had no recurrent problems from either. More challenging in fact have been persistent

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rashes and fungal infections, sometime ulcerating, which my skin seems acutely prone to in the tropics. Though less heroically debilitating, these have been a constant scourge. At times during my first fieldwork, they painfully prevented me from walking for more than short distances outside my house. I mention this because while the heroism of arduous fieldwork has now largely been exiled from the “authenticity” of ethnography, fieldwork often remains both highly discomforting and dangerous (see Howell 1990). I have more recently mentored students—in some cases working within their own countries of origin—who have despite prudent planning and precautions been subject to rape by field assistants, threats to their field situation by drug cartels, vandalism of their field residence, court cases in which they were effectively forced to indict members of their communities who were guilty but nonetheless exonerated and livid at them, and a host of other traumas and maladies. But as opposed to an older anthropology in which hardship was valorized, these slings and arrows no longer “count” very much as an underlying field credential—not a badge of ethnographic honor so much as begging suspicions that adequate precautions were somehow not taken. This is especially marked, and sometimes pernicious, in the cases of gendered discrimination and sexual harassment of female ethnographers, who now constitute the majority of cultural anthropology’s fieldworkers. As opposed to being a marker of hardship, such sexual affronts are easily chalked up to or even blamed on the assumed negligence of the fieldworker herself. This is consistent with the longstanding de-classing and diminution of status in occupations as increasing numbers of women enter and succeed in them (e.g., Kessler-Harris 2003). As Foucault would note, the march of “progress” in our genealogies of ethnographic self-valorization carry blind spots and regressions as well as self-perceived “advancements.” Second is the task or trick or trauma of authenticating for an anthropological and larger audience trends and behaviors that seem glaringly real to the ethnographer, but which are denied or backgrounded by local people themselves. While collecting genealogies among Gebusi in 1980–82, I found that a stunning number of deaths were homicides, often executions of people suspected to be sorcerers. Compiling and double-checking these accounts, I found that Gebusi had one of the highest homicide rates in the ethnographic record—almost one-third of all adult deaths, male and female together (e.g., Knauft 1985a: chs. 5–8; 1987a). Gebusi themselves discounted the significance of such killings, saying they were an unfortunate but necessary response to the practice of sorcery within and between their communities. To me, however, there was a glaring disjunction between Gebusi violence—largely within communities themselves—and their strongly palpable “good company” in (male) social life. This dynamic became the focus of my first book, Good Company and Violence (1985a).

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The larger point and continuing challenge is how and to what extent we should document and “authorize” patterns that those we study with do not acknowledge or worry about—despite or just because these glaringly contradict the cultural values and standards they otherwise espouse. Are these patterns less “authentic”—or more so—because they are not socially and culturally foregrounded? In a critical or “dark anthropology,” as Ortner (2016) terms it, exposing unacknowledged inequity and disempowerment is important if not the coin of the anthropological realm (cf. Knauft 2019a; see Robbins 2013). Speaking truth to power is all the more important when resisted or downplayed by the powers-that-be. But then, what do we do when we find this tendency at the heart of marginalized, disempowered, or disenfranchised peoples themselves? Hypothetically, what if we found virulent sexism or generational or class elitism within a Black Lives Matter organization, for example? Or within an advocacy group for Dalits (a.k.a. Untouchables) in India? Or accusations of sexual impropriety against an otherwise seemingly spotless and luminary public resistance leader, someone we otherwise admire? Or, as happened at my own institution, harassment charges against a high administrative official in charge of protecting inclusion and diversity? In such cases and practically by definition, the authoring and authenticating of inconvenient truths is not what people say, authorize, or even admit or tolerate being said about themselves. In a current world of identity politics and blowback, the challenge of voicing and publicizing inconvenient truths— wherever they occur—risks its own self-censorship. This self-censorship is often covered over as well as illuminated by “dark anthropology” insofar as it presumes to “know” as if in advance what is darkly unacceptable and what is seemingly so downtrodden as to be beyond reproach. At the other end of the power spectrum, pressures of authority and money that confer opportunities for ethnographic work enforce their own censorship. Contemplate, for example, a researcher studying the Chinese repression of Buddhists in Tibet who cannot publicly mention anything on the topic lest she or he be kicked out of the country and their Tibetan interlocutors imprisoned by Chinese authorities. Further is the question of who is speaking for whom. While all people should be afforded the right to author—that is, to speak for themselves— under what conditions should they have this right exclusively? This engages long-standing questions in anthropology (see Margaret Jolly’s Afterword to this volume). Our identity—be it racial, gendered, sexual, national, religious, and so on—is in tension with our ability to be authors in relation to people whose identity we don’t fully share. And yet, as Bakhtin (1983) emphasized, otherness and outsidedness, the difference of and in subjectivity, is central to communication in speech and to intersubjectivity; it cannot be simply rooted out. Crossing divides of otherness and communicating about them remains

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a key core value of anthropology to the present. But what authorial privilege should be extended—or withdrawn—based on the field researcher’s own racial, sexual, gendered, national, religious, age, or class-based identity? These awkward questions are not easy to answer but are increasingly central to twentyfirst century anthropology. In this context, far from being heroic, the meek challenges I have faced in authenticating and authoring works about Gebusi, including their violence, pale against the stakes and the politics of representation in anthropology today. This is not to critique but rather to champion the importance of finding ever-more creative, insightful, and skillful ways to expose and document otherwise inconvenient truths. Against this, in my own case, it is unlikely that the Gebusi and even the Papua New Guinean government will dispute my discomforting findings. By contrast, for new generations of field workers, representational politics, ethnographic authorship, and authentification are not less arduous but rather more so than they used to be. In line with the anthropology of the 1980s and the expectations of my doctoral committee (Ray Kelly, Roy [“Skip”] Rappaport, Sherry Ortner, and Aram Yengoyan), my first major work was a tightly typed two-volume doctoral thesis that was then revised into a 474-page monograph published by the University of California Press (Knauft 1985a). Such a book is almost impossible to publish today. At the time, however, it provided credentialed authorship about a new and authentic society, “The Gebusi.” In addition to supplying a “good old description-in-the-round” concerning Gebusi history, environment, subsistence, social organization, politics, and ritual and spiritual life, the work focused on issues of sorcery, sorcery divination, the killing of sorcery suspects, and the eventual reintegration of peoples and groups following killings within their communities. Thirty-seven numerical tables and twentytwo kinship figures documented the findings and authenticated the work. An expensive hardback, the monograph sold only a few hundred copies. But it received positive published reviews in major journals, and it got me tenure. Written before the era of desktop much less laptop computers, the book took a dauntingly large amount Figure 3.1. Momiay Sori of work to complete. But I was privileged in mul- in initiation costume with tiple senses to be able to undertake, complete, Bruce Knauft in Yibihilu, and publish it. In our present terms, we could 1981. Photograph by Eileen say that this was when I came out as an “author” Cantrell (Knauft).

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to chronicle an “authentic” new tribe from the deep rainforest of Papua New Guinea. During that period, I had little doubt how authentic Gebusi were. Riding the historical tail of anthropology’s search for distant and isolated peoples, I felt that Gebusi were pretty much the same way that they had always been. It was true that they were remote—a torturous walk from the nearest airstrip, primary rainforest all around, and no roads out. Out-migration, schooling, Christianity, cash-cropping, and wage labor were all nil. By contrast, all-night spirit séances, rituals, feasts, a social life centered around the longhouse, the intense festivity of male initiations, and male-male sexuality were all palpably evident. In retrospect, it is not surprising that I overlooked and downplayed issues of history and historical construction (contrast from that era, Rosaldo 1980). Gebusi were first contacted by whites in 1959. I did document that by 1980, significant introduced changes included the importance of steel knives and axes, the colonial pacification of the group next door, and alterations of trading networks. But it took me decades to realize the extent to which Gebusi of the early 1980s were a product of colonial and postcolonial development (see more generally, Wolf 1982; cf. Knauft 1999). The very demographic survival of the Gebusi had been predicated on the colonial pacification of their more numerous and bellicose neighbors, the Bedminimi, who had literally been eating them up. The Gebus rituals, spirit séances, and village feasts that I found so lavish and traditional were significantly enabled in scope, scale, and elaboration by the stability of pacification and by the larger houses and bigger gardens made possible by steel axes and other introduced tools. To some degree, Gebusi’s enthusiastic camaraderie, what Durkheim (1966) would have called their ritual effervescence, were a function of being able to live on their own relatively securely without threat of inter-tribal slaughter and decimation. Even during that early period, Gebusi learned outside ways very quickly. The facial sideburns of Gebusi men echoed those of Australian officers just a few years earlier. When a museum collector visited by helicopter, Gebusi learned within a few scant minutes exactly what the curator wanted, including what artifacts looked old and authentic enough to be valued for purchase. One man gained a high price by retrieving a pig’s skull from a rubbish dump, quickly rinsing it off, painting it with black charcoal, white clay, and red ochre—and then coating it with ash and soot to make it look old again (see analogous incidents in this volume’s introduction). I am reminded of Gary Larson’s cartoon of natives living in a thatched hut. As the village scout cries, “The anthropologist is coming!” everyone rushes to stash their TVs and don native garb. The same was not true of Gebusi. But my attentiveness to their patterns of ritual display, spiritual divination, and sorcery did betray a keen interest in what I took to be their long-standing traditions.

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Modern Challenge, Authenticating Change

In 1998, sixteen years after having left the Gebusi in 1982, I returned, this time solo, for six months. By that time my son had gone from birth to middle school, and my career had become well established. In accordance with anthropology’s then-burgeoning interest in modern development, my goal in returning was not to authenticate their long-standing traditions but to document and authenticate major social change. I was not disappointed. Unbeknownst to me, Gebusi from Gasumi had moved their entire community from the deep rainforest to the outskirts of the Nomad Station (Knauft 1998a). Here they had become deeply engaged with the Station’s churches, school, market, development projects, sports leagues, and national festivities and holidays. I had wanted to wipe my slate clean of old expectations and to treat this new fieldwork as an entirely new chapter, devoid of traditionalizing projections. What I didn’t realize was that this presumption became its own expectation. And yet, as before, the realities that I found seemed, if anything, to confirm my unstated hopes and assumptions. As such, my second fieldwork among Gebusi, and my second book about them, focused on schooling, the market, Church and Christian conversion, and new forms of politics and cultural representation. Though in many ways not unfounded, the title of this work was not particularly subtle: Exchanging the Past: A Rainforest World of Before and After (2002a). The title concept is in fact a reasonable translation of a quip made by a leading Gebusi man: that while I had been gone, Gebusi had “exchanged” (sesum) their past for their future. The phrase is poignant insofar as exchange relations—in marriage, feasting, sorcery retribution, and other aspects of social life—have been and continue to be central for Gebusi. And yet, the higher-order assertion—that “exchange” was not only “in” life but, over time, a condition of change in life itself—was basically the throwaway line of one man that I, as author, elevated to the status of a key overarching theme. In the process, I authenticated not “traditional” Gebusi culture, as I had done before, but the authenticity of dramatic change and transformation. Though I don’t impugn the detailed expositions and analyses of Exchanging the Past, the work does underplay Gebusi continuities, including concerning exchange patterns themselves. As one colleague jokingly reminded me, if I had gone back to Gebusi every one or two years rather than waiting more than a decade and a half, I would have seen more continuity and less radical change. At the time, while cut off from communications during fieldwork, I found myself developing a notion of local modernity: how people, including and especially the remote Gebusi, fashion their own cultural version of being and becoming modern despite conditions of great marginality and underdevelopment. Armed with this perception upon returning to the US, I found

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Figure 3.2. Tafiay Haymp with Bruce Knauft at Honinabi airstrip, 2013. Photograph by Latham Wood.

with some delight but much greater frustration that the idea of “alternative,” “local,” or “vernacular” modernity had, during my absence, not just arisen but had become anthropologically dominant in a tidal wave of new journal articles, books, and special collections. I found myself once again behind rather than ahead of anthropology’s changing curve of new interests. In retrospect, my new focus was more a function of anthropology’s emergent zeitgeist than I realized or wanted to admit. Nonetheless, my resulting work on Gebusi—and an edited volume entitled Critically Modern (Knauft 2002b)—received positive attention and opened new professional doors for me. One of the “authenticating” conundrums I still find important from this period is Gebusi’s changing assertions of cultural authenticity. These were strongly marked and made public during the celebrations of Papua New Guinea’s Independence Day at the Nomad Station in mid-September 1998 (see Knauft 2002c, 2007a, 2016: ch. 10). Thousands of local people, officials, and other visitors thronged the government sports field to watch elaborate traditional dances and other performances by villagers. These were staged for public consumption by the various self-described tribes of the Nomad Sub-District, including the Gebusi. This was not the enactment of “tradition” in a locally meaningful or ritual context; previously, ceremonies had taken place through the night, when spirits were considered active, in a dimly lit longhouse. Rather, these new performances were staged for an audience of strangers on the gov-

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ernment ballfield to celebrate Papua New Guinea’s Independence in the hot and harsh light of day. Government officials—one sporting a Michael Jackson T-shirt—rated and ranked the performances of different tribal groups. Top-scoring groups received government prize money, and this was indeed a prime motive for competing villagers to stage their performances. Many of the dances were seldom or rarely performed in villages anymore. As such, the display of tradition was authenticated as historic folklore—customs that had been active just a few years before, but which were now moribund and no longer actively practiced. Their display marked a current status of being authentically modern while authenticating traditional life as distinctly historical, a thing of the past. Complementing these traditional dances were rehearsed skits that mocked and parodied old-time customs. These portrayed previous beliefs and practices in a buffoonish and self-consciously savage way. A sloppily dressed traditional villager tried unsuccessfully to learn how to open a tin of fish from a snappily clad “patrol officer.” The second coming of Jesus Christ caused traditional dancers to fall to the ground and die in Hell. Men trying to chop a sapling with a traditional stone ax fell to arguing and fighting. As if there were any doubt about the relegation of traditional customs to “history,” the meaning of each skit was announced to the audience through a battery-operated bullhorn: “In the old days we were ignorant and did X; now we have ‘come up’ and understand Y.” Many if not most of the skits were arch physical comedy and were very funny, poignantly portraying the farce of tradition against its modern antithesis. The men from Gasumi staged a particularly powerful skit in which a “sick man” “died” despite the screaming antics of a traditional spirit medium who attempted to save him. Another man was then accused of sorcery and “beaten to death” in slapstick comedy, after which a fight ensued between the two sides. After racing off the performance enclosure, the actors returned with full modern decorum, bowing in stately fashion to the four sides of the encircling audience, which responded with thundering applause and shouts of approval. At one level this was a clear assertion of new authentic modernity, configured in figure-ground relation to customs now considered ignorant and anachronistic. The man who played the sorcery suspect had in fact killed several people for sorcery in his early years. The man who played the spirit medium was in fact the lay local leader of the Gasumi Catholic Church. Such assertions of what Mageo (Chapter 2) calls au courant authenticity rang true with my interpretative assertion that Gebusi were “exchanging their past.” And yet, as I laughed through my tears at the Gebusi’s mocking of their own deep traditions, some of which I had found stately and beautiful, I was left both then and now wondering what was really authentic and whose new view of authenticity should replace who else’s, either theirs or my own, either past or present. This question has deepened for me in subsequent years and visits.

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The Return, Revenge, or Recuperation of the Past

By 2005, my trope of authentic Gebusi change was strongly encoded in the first edition of my book for undergraduates: The Gebusi: Lives Transformed in a Rainforest World (Knauft 2016). It was highly successful and sold many copies, including as bundled with the then-current edition of Conrad Kottak’s introductory textbook. But against my story of Gebusi authentic change, returns to the field in 2008 and 2013 brought more challenges. In particular, my story of unidirectional change and local “development” among Gebusi got shattered. During the 2000s, services and activities at Nomad were withdrawn, and since then they have ended almost entirely. The airstrip is closed indefinitely. The Nomad Sub-District Office has been shut for a number of years, and, with the exodus of paid government workers and their funded programs, the local monied economy has cratered. It shows no signs of recovering. The Nomad area still has no roads to anywhere. In new ways, the Sub-District—and Gebusi—have gone back to being as relatively isolated and marginalized as they were in 1980. The hows and whys of this decline are an overdetermined issue beyond my present scope (see Knauft 2016: Pt. III; 2019a). Suffice it to say that government inefficiency, graft, the centralization of state “rent-seeking,” and the precipitous decline of profits from the Western Province’s gold mine at Ok Tedi converged to fuel a stunningly downward economic spiral. These dynamics afflict not only Gebusi but remote rural areas in many parts of Papua New Guinea as well as marginal areas in many other so-called developing countries. The march towards modernity easily leaves increasing numbers of people increasingly behind (see Knauft forthcoming). For the past dozen years and more, the effective absence of a monied economy has forced Gebusi to be more self-sufficient. In addition to highlighting the unevenness of modern “development”—whereby a few selected areas get rich while many more others are neglected and get poorer (e.g., Ferguson 2005; see Knauft 2019b, forthcoming)—these changes cast special light on the selective resurgence and redefinition of longer-standing traditions that I had previously documented in some detail. Thrown back on their rainforest subsistence economy, Gebusi could be said to have become more fully culturally authentic in their own way, on their own terms. Or have they? Patterns such as the centrality of a longhouse, the accusation of sorcery suspects, and sister-exchange marriage that I thought were declining or moribund in 1998 have reemerged—or were never as dormant as I had thought. Longstanding patterns of kinship, social organization, and celebratory feasting have continued unabated. And yet, other Gebusi beliefs and practices have been defunct or moribund for decades and show no signs of re-emerging. These include traditional spirit mediumship (Knauft 1989,

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Figure 3.3. Kwuyl Bi with Bruce Knauft in Yehebi village, 2013. Photograph by Latham Wood.

1998b), ritual initiation (Knauft 1985a: ch. 9; 2016: chs. 5–6), the killing of sorcery suspects (Knauft 1985a: ch. 5–8; 1987a), and what used to be called “ritual homosexuality” among men (Knauft 1987b, 2003; cf. Herdt 1982). At the same time, despite or because they raise no cash crops, Gebusi selfsubsistence strategies have mushroomed, fueled by a range of introduced crops and creative growing techniques (Knauft 2016: Pt. III). Gebusi have plenty of land, good nutrition, strong health, and surprisingly increased longevity in the face of negligible external health care. In the process, at least selected Gebusi have become more vocal in questioning my authorship and the ways I advocate for and attempt to help them. This has occurred in part as my closest Gebusi friends and I have gotten older, and a new generation, particularly of young men, is finding its voice. A case in point: in 2013, a colleague who runs a government-approved “Social Mapping” company informed me, prior to my return to Gebusi that year, that an Exxon-Mobile pipeline for Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) was projected, at least potentially, to cross a small portion of Gebusi territory. In attempting to ensure that Gebusi would get their fair share of land-rights compensation, I agreed to take GPS coordinates that could establish firm boundaries for Gebusi tribal territory, thus validating any potential claims that they might have (see Knauft 2013). Though the pipeline was never built—and perhaps never will be—the

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specter of such development fueled rampant local expectation, including fantasies of huge cash compensation windfalls (see Knauft 2016: Pt. III; forthcoming). At the time, I tried to explain to Gebusi—through vernacular terms that were woefully inadequate—both what the project would potentially entail and that its prospect was highly uncertain. One of the few young men from Gasumi who I had never really known—he had been born shortly after I had left in 1982 and had been away at the town of Kiunga when I had returned in 1998—asked to see my business card, which I gladly supplied. When he saw that I was affiliated with the Emory College of Arts and Sciences, he launched the idea that I was secretly drawing up Gebusi minerals into my GPS and stealing them to sell for profit, dispossessing the Gebusi. Though the idea was easily dismissed, it was harder to explain to him and others exactly how a GPS did work and why it was important for me to use it. My visit in 2016 had two other notable incidents that both illustrate and complicate features of authenticity and authorship. The first is that, unbeknownst to me, a large house had been built for me several months before my arrival—and well before Gebusi knew that I would be coming, much less that I would be accompanied by Dr. Malbrancke. It was built in hopes that I would indeed arrive and pay handsomely for its construction, an expectation that proved correct, as serendipitous as this was. (The challenge then became to delicately decline offers to build yet other large structures for payment.) In relation to the building of my house but much more generally, a newly authenticated concept and value had emerged for Gebusi: work as paid labor (see Knauft 2019a). In prior decades, the Gebusi word for work, hotola, meant literally “cause-to-be-held”: to hold something as an implement with intent to use it to do something such as chopping wood or cultivating or harvesting food. Now, however, hotola meant any activity that merited and deserved to be paid on an hourly and daily basis. All manner of industrious activities that had been collective in nature were now proclaimed to be “work,” that is, individually paid labor. That an average cash economy of only about fifteen cents a day per adult rendered any such payment either moot or ludicrous is beside the point. No matter, such work in principle at least should be paid.3 My second axis of newly discovered authenticity among Gebusi came courtesy of my acute and intrepid female French co-researcher, Dr. Malbrancke. Her presence and activities with me transformed the gendered dimension of my relation to Gebusi. I came to realize as I previously had not—no matter how hard I had tried logistically and conceptually—how my previous authorship and authentification of Gebusi had been centered around and dominated by men. In complementary fashion, our new emphasis in the field—including our new ability to include and compensate work with women—resulted in my relations with men becoming more strained, including with some of my closest Gebusi friends.

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Figure 3.4. Hugam Mosomiay with Anne-Sylvie Malbrancke in Gasumi Corners, 2016. Photograph by Bruce Knauft.

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The larger question, which I presently confront in relation to a potential 5th edition of The Gebusi, is how to present for a broad audience the complexity of my changing authorship of them, including what about them seems genuine or authentic. How to do this without making the result too complex or convoluted remains a challenge. Like a venerable introductory textbook of anthropology now in its umpteenth-plus edition, the addition of further new topics and perspectives risks undercutting the whole enterprise—a bit like a Christmas tree toppling over because it was loaded with too many ornaments. And yet, new dimensions of Gebusi authenticity—the outcomes of their experiments with newly authorized customs, both new and old—deserve, I think, to be made known, and in some ways celebrated. On the one hand, the intent of my future authorship concerning Gebusi includes their continuing lament of their dearth of economic development— in the face of mega-mining and petroleum extraction profits elsewhere in the country (Knauft forthcoming). I would also like to analyze how and why “democratic” elections are such a Kafkaesque experience for them and others in PNG. But my deeper concern is to consider “Why is there Peace?”: to address how and why over a half-century the Gebusi rate of killing has gone from virtually one-third of all adult deaths to absolute zero for the last thirty years. (We double-checked and confirmed these data again in 2017— see Knauft 2011b; Knauft and Malbrancke 2016, 2017.) For the past two decades and more, this absence of deadly violence has continued despite a virtual absence of police or any other agents of outside control. How have Gebusi have gone from being one of the most violent peoples documented in the ethnographic record to just about one of the most peaceful—on their own terms? Sorcery accusations still occur, but they do not end in homicide. In what senses are Gebusi authentically violent or peaceful? Of course, they have, at different turns, been both. On the cusp of defending my doctoral thesis, I had a dream that my dissertation was a beautiful statue with an elegant torso and limbs—but it lacked a head. In fact, it took me years to sift, winnow, and distill the deeper significance of my work, the larger picture of what I was painstakingly documenting about and with Gebusi. It’s the same for me now. What thread of connection authenticates myriad developments in relation to each other: cultural U-turns and “under-development”; resurgent versus dying customs; working in the absence of money; gendered changes; the continuing absence of homicide; the demise of same-sex relations between men? Finding a rope that can bind these strands takes time—and is greatly facilitated by privilege. Even so, engaging this task is akin to crafting a novel, trying to combat the Balkanization of pieces and parts that can so easily become, in writing, just shreds and patches. Younger generations of ethnographers now face this challenge face in spades,

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especially as the value and support for scholarly knowledge becomes less and less secure. It takes time and money—privilege—to facilitate authorship and aspirations for authenticity. This has never been easy across anthropology’s lengthening history. As we appreciate that history, it’s all the more important to engage current challenges that are in no less difficult and in new ways yet more so than they were in the past.

Take-Aways

Though my history with Gebusi is long enough to risk anachronism, I hope a few of its features can have some small value for reflecting on ethnography’s current challenges. I suggest this relevance in eight points below. 1. Establishing anthropological authorship and attributing cultural authenticity have always been challenging and difficult—yet in radically new guises over time.

Older scholars may claim that classic ethnography was both more difficult and more rigorous than it is today. But in many ways, it is now more challenging—and more interesting—than ever. This includes the increasing complexity of both our audiences and the politics of our assertions. We now speak to and across many new audiences and across new and older stakes of identity, representation, and political critique. It is important not to shirk from these complexities but to embrace them creatively, and, as Bakhtin (1983) would put it, as dialogically as possible. As Baudelaire suggested of modernity when coining the word back in 1863, “You have no right to despise the present” (cited in Knauft 2002b). 2. A genealogical approach to authorship and authenticity, the mere facticity of recognizing and admitting changes in approach over time, is useful.

Being self-aware of our own expectations of progress, of scholarly advancement and intellectual betterment, supplies strong critical grist against both anthropology’s past myopias, on the one hand, and its present new conceits and obsessions, on the other. All history is represented through the lens of the present. No matter how seemingly enlightened or progressive or advanced one’s present perspective is, it will be rendered humble by subsequent awareness in and through the future. Though questions about proper authorship and authenticity in the present may seem—and may ultimately be—impossible to answer, they can, for this very reason, be all the more important to raise and address seriously.

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3. Categories authenticate ethnographic experience even as they are later rejected, superseded, and then reinscribed in new guises.

In a sea of hard-to-grasp new phenomena, influences, and subject positions, new ways of making sense of their challenge arise spontaneously if not invariably—at the same time and in part for the very reason that older categories and optics of understanding are critiqued and debunked. The figure-ground relation between these processes is, on the one hand, one of criticizing and dereifying past concepts and categories—of rejecting them as problematic or at least putting them in “quotation marks.” Against this, new concepts and modes of orientation are proposed, often inchoate at first, but then with greater clarity and coherence. Over time, however, these are themselves exposed as inadequate and over-reified. This larger pattern remains in our intellectual heritage, a heritage that, in a larger sense, we have arguably not unshackled ourselves from at least since Hegel in the early nineteenth century. This is the intellectual dialectic of intended-as-progressive supersession, even if now in nonparadigmatic and unsynthetic terms (see discussion in Knauft 2006.) Though we may not be able to transcend this conundrum, we can more seriously and mindfully engage our audiences and their stakes as well as our own in the situated present. 4. Anthropologists must increasingly ask whose authenticity—of a culture, of men, of women, an insider, an outsider, an insider-outsider, an interest group, a contingent—should be represented? And whose authorship should be privileged—his, hers, theirs, ours, hybrid, coauthored; or performative, authoring outside or beyond the text?

These questions are not new, but they now emerge with increasing intensity and urgency. Similar issues have been present in anthropology since its preinstitutional origins in the anti-abolitionist movement in England during the 1830s: how and how much should we speak for and about the interests of others, and how and how much should we engage political stakes that resonate with our critical intellectualism? (see Rainger 1978, 1980). These conundrums link back to the reification and de-reification of categories over time—but now often hitched to the identity politics of claiming, or being relegated to, one or another subject position. Particularly poignant is the sliding scale of disenfranchisement and disempowerment, on the one hand, and of privilege and dominance, on the other. The boundaries and polarizations between these positions, their imputations or projections, now become important if not key social facts, particularly in our present era of political and social polarization. On the one hand, circling the wagons around principled categories of moral cleavage and identity can have important practical functions and serve

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political purposes, including bearing witness, speaking truth to power, and fighting oppression. We can take for example, Black Power, Malcom X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Louis Farrakhan’s Black Muslim Million Man March, Black Lives Matter, and many other related movements and developments in the cause of Black civil rights. On the other hand, the differences between such initiatives are also very important. At extreme, identity polarization risks reifying and reinscribing the very terms of difference, antinomy, and polarization that, in a larger sense, they fight to efface and transcend (see nuanced consideration of this issue by Haider 2018). This can hamper the subjectivity of subordination as well as, ultimately, the politics of combatting it.4 There is no easy recipe for knowing which side of the coin one will find: evidence for the critique of an oppressor, or evidence for the critique of the oppressor within the oppressed. This is a strategic and contextual matter in each case, and urgently so at the present time. These issues frontally inform the relationship between authenticity, authoring, and power in a fully engaged anthropology.5 5. A strong value as well as risk in identifying deeply with those we work among is being privy to their less charitable and unappealing attitudes and practices, the dark side of their moon.

Dynamics of prejudice, discrimination, and oppression can be strikingly “authentic” to our critical sensibility at the same time and sometimes for the very reason that they may be rejected and downplayed by our interlocutors in the field and afterwards. Gebusi effectively downplayed the glaring devastation brought by their execution of sorcery suspects, and Gebusi men downplay their domination of women. Trump supporters deny their racism. Bourgeois intellectuals deny their common racial privilege, and police deny the negative impact of their coercive power. Authenticities claimed and inhabited by people easily if not typically reject or disparage outsider critical assertions of fact over and against their own assertions of authentic truth. Such contestations of authenticity and authorship are no easier to resolve than they are to avoid—and are all the more important to seriously and contextually engage for this very fact. 6. Our identification and deep resonance with our interlocutors, the people we live with in the field, provide both the conditions and also the necessary points of departure for our own authorship and our own sense of authenticity.

For better or worse, and however much we squirm or want to wriggle around it, the authenticity of our own authorship is a space we must ultimately accept, inhabit, and cultivate—especially if we want to continue our commitment to an

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ethically engaged anthropology. In our digital and social media age, this is an increasingly difficult challenge during fieldwork, in post-field write-up, and in the transition or demarcation between these two. The increasing concern and attentiveness to engagement and reflexivity in anthropology intensifies the issues and the stakes of what Marilyn Strathern (1996) calls “cutting the network.” Whereas I myself rarely hear from or can effectively communicate with Gebusi when not physically with them, most research today is at the other extreme. For ethnographers working in the present, there is potentially no end to fieldwork. One’s friends and informants, their lives and needs, their interests and supplications, are ever-present on Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, or email. To this is added seemingly infinite new information, new sources, and new critiques that repeatedly come our way. How and when to cut the network of connectivity and simply write is an increasingly important challenge and question, that is, if one is to make a space, amid everything else, for contemporary authorship. Coauthorship and various forms of creative and experimental ethnography are and should be increasingly important (e.g., Vidali 2016, 2020). New, alternative, and underrepresented voices must have more places at the table and a bigger slice of the pie. Amid this process, either for better or for worse, the coin of the academic realm remains the single-authored or lead-authored journal article or book, that is, if one wants to court professional viability and an academic livelihood. All other obligations and expectations are added on top of this—including the pressures on underrepresented scholars and persons of color to represent “their people” in ways that take time and attention— potentially away from their own research and authorship. For the foreseeable future, a doctoral thesis is still likely to be the obligatory work of a putatively autonomous individual, an imputed authentic author. To acknowledge and underscore this if one wants to pursue or maintain an academic career is not to undercut but rather to underscore the complementary importance of persons of privilege themselves taking the time and effort to authenticate the authorship and representation of others. 7. Asserting authorship and attributing authentic value to the people studied and the means of representing them provide no guarantee of getting or keeping a regular academic job. But they are still the best way of increasing the chances of doing so.

Certainly this has been the case for me. And, judging from graduate students, it remains the case. Except for rare periods—the late 1960s are sometimes mentioned—obtaining and keeping a tenure-track job in anthropology has

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almost always been extremely difficult, for well more than a century. Certainly this is now getting no easier, and given the current COVID-19 pandemic, it is getting if anything an order of magnitude harder. But published authorship greatly increases the chances of doing so. And for many if not most of us, we have no choice but to study and to do fieldwork and to author things anyway, that is, as if authentically. Ours is not a job but a way of being, a vocation, what Weber (2004: ch. 20) calls a “calling.” Like someone who is at heart an artist or a musician or a creative writer or a cook or a potter, there is little way we can live without doing what we feel driven to do. This is also often true, it is important to register, for those who work as anthropologists or with anthropological sensibilities outside the academy, including in development work, NGOs, and a range of applied fields and professions. 8. Authorship and authenticity in a late modern sense are invariably declining.

Foucault (1984) suggested that authorship—the author function as we presently understand it—is declining and will eventually disappear. If so, our epistemic grounding and what we might call our modern construction of authorship will dissipate. The same could be said of authenticity: following Andy Warhol, Jean Baudrillard, and many others, the classic idea of being “authentic” is itself completely outmoded and anachronistic. This may be an advanced intellectual view, but—as with “clanship” or “development” or “culture” itself— authoring and authenticity are likely to have far more continuing purchase in our future practicalities, and politics, than critical theory or effete intellectualism may want to admit. As Marshall Sahlins once quipped, while people around the world adopt reified notions of their cultures with increasing gusto, it is anthropologists who shirk from attributing cultural coherence. The same could be said for ideas of modernity and development, as well as nationality: the anthropological critique has been strong if not obliterating, but in social and political life around the world, the purchase of these intellectually debunked notions seems if anything stronger and stronger. So, yes, claims of classic authorship and authenticity are waning and, in some contexts, moribund. Certainly, they are severely critiqued. But authorship, like authenticity, continually reinvents itself as it races against critique. Reconfiguring received categories with new terms and in new and subtle ways is now crucial for the future of critical ethnography and progressive anthropology. Everything eventually dies. But as history and culture also consistently show, old things get reborn in new ways. If we have no right to despise the present, we also have little right to despise the past—and risk simply reinscribing it if we reject it too crudely.

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Coda

Figure 3.5. Mosomiay Yugul with Bruce Knauft at Knauft’s fieldwork departure at Honinabi airstrip, 2013. Photograph by Latham Wood.

Concluding the various editions of my book, The Gebusi, is a section called “Farewell.” It conveys my sorrow at the airstrip on departing and leaving my Gebusi friends, me crying and them crying along with me. It is a true story, and I sometimes still tear up thinking about and recalling it, how I miss my Gebusi friends. But my last departure, in 2017, was not like that. With the Nomad airstrip closed, we had to trek and go by canoe across the full tilt of Gebusi land, up the Sio River to Yehebi, where a small Christian airstrip was still maintained. The trip with our gear was arduous, and the sun blazed down on our long trip by canoe on the unshaded river. By nightfall, the rashes and infections on my skin covered much of my body. I was already on antibiotics as well as Benadryl, prednisone, and pain killers. But none of these turned the tide; I really needed to leave the field. The Yehebi people were nice, but many of them didn’t know me very well. When the plane didn’t come for several days— the pilot was sick—I felt I had to do something. For the first time since 1998, I ended up either having or staging a Gebusi anger display, in this case targeted against the guy who for a few scant minutes had daily radio contact with the MAF plane service out of Kiunga. It was not his fault, but I screamed and yelled and screamed at him just the same. The plane came the next day. By that time, weary of waiting, most of my Gebusi friends had left and gone back to Gasumi.

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They needed to attend to their lives and their children; they couldn’t wait day upon day just to see us leave. As we finally flew off, I was beyond exhaustion. My final hugs to remaining friends were hardly more than half-hearted. Since then, I’ve realized that I probably can’t go back to the Gebusi; my contact with them is probably finished. I never say never, but I also face the odds. The Nomad airstrip can’t be reopened; it is now overgrown and rutted by pigs. The cost of a helicopter is prohibitive, tens of thousands of dollars, plus difficult and uncertain to arrange, and with little place for cargo. And as robust as I otherwise am, I have to admit that ignoring health risks would now be rash for me and beyond skin deep. It’s common for experiences and relationships to be marked by their end, judged by the terms of their conclusion. My own with Gebusi was not so uplifting as I had hoped or expected. And yet, does it matter? As a teenager, I recall reading a passage, I think by Aldous Huxley, that asked: what difference it would make if the very last thing you happened to do in this life before dying, the very last thing, was to pick your nose? Would it really make a difference, a difference to the life you had lived? As I wrote in my afterword to Howell and Talle’s wonderful book, Returns to the Field (2011), the end of fieldwork is not branded by its conclusion, not judged against the standard of a rousing finale. Like life itself, the waning of previous authorship or the ending of authenticity will work its own designs. It will then reappear somewhere else in some new guise, with and through others, perhaps unexpected. The deepest and most authentic thing I have learned and authored with and about Gebusi is how much they have enjoyed life in the face of privation and suffering. In early 1980s, their lives were amazingly short, poorly nourished, ravaged by disease—gravely if not fatally at all stages of life—and plagued by both the imagined horror of sorcery and the real horror of killing each other because of this. And yet, they were the happiest people I have ever known. Their collective bonding and joy and festivity—yes, primarily among the men, but women, too—were breathtaking, overwhelming. I have never experienced anything like it. Though tempered since by the upturns and downturns of their local modernity, Gebusi have weathered the cost and the stigma of being the left behind of the left behind in their ever-more-remote corner of the New Guinea rainforest. Not just their fortitude but their sense of meaning and value in the bargain have been and continue to be remarkable. There are worse things in a professional life than trying to authorize that. And render it authentic.

Acknowledgments

My foremost debt and acknowledgment in this chapter is overwhelmingly to Gebusi, especially those from the community of Gasumi Corners. The names

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of Gebusi friends and associates roll off my tongue, but there would be scores of them to list, and to list a few without the rest would pose its own bias of representation. I am indebted to all my co-researchers during different field trips, including Eileen Cantrell (Knauft), Latham Wood, and Dr. Anne-Sylvie Malbrancke, as well as the many different organizations and foundations that have supported my work among Gebusi over the years. The present chapter has greatly benefitted from the trenchant remarks of two anonymous reviewers, Dr. Malbrancke, and the gracious comments and collegial support of Jeanette Mageo. I extend especially deep thanks to Katherine Lindquist, a third-year graduate student in our anthropology doctoral program at Emory; her insightful comments on a previous draft of this chapter have been highly valuable to me in relating the potential relevance of my Gebusi experiences to current tensions and trajectories in cultural anthropology. All shortcomings remain my own. Bruce Knauft is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology at Emory University. He began fieldwork among the rainforest-dwelling Gebusi of Papua New Guinea in 1980 and has studied with them during five subsequent periods of fieldwork, most recently in 2017. Dr. Knauft’s interests include cultural and social theory, political economy, engaged anthropology, violence, gender and sexuality, subjectivity and mindfulness, and world history—and the anthropology of Melanesia, Africa, Asia, and the US. Author of nine books and edited collections, Dr. Knauft has, in addition to Papua New Guinea, worked in East and West Africa, Mongolia, Myanmar, India, and Tibet. Notes 1. Sherry Ortner’s famous article “On Key Symbols” (1973) was widely read among my graduate cohort, and Ortner herself was a member of my doctoral committee in addition to being the then-spouse of my faculty advisor. 2. See fieldwork video of me trying to talk with Gebusi women in 2013 at https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=wUBztaxVxXA&list=PLnmUPXm0T5YXTLsY0NMXeXO0 o9kF9R6Y0&index=7&t=0s. 3. In essence, this was a way to valorize wage work in the absence of wages (see Knauft 2019a). As we contemplate our own contemporary world of increasing digital-age joblessness, the idea that we may configure wage-earning value from industrious enterprise that is not much paid may be closer to home than we might want to imagine—as described in recent critiques of the contemporary gig economy (e.g., Kessler 2018), in David Graeber’s searing book, Bullshit Jobs (2019), and in Tania Li’s Land’s End (2014). 4. At extreme, when the political tables ultimately do get more fully turned, either in restricted contexts or more generally, this risks domination of a reversed sort, either contextually or more broadly, as Mamdani puts it, When Victims Become Killers (Mamdani 2020). One could plausibly view Jewish Israeli treatment of Palestinians in an

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analogous way (see https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/bknauft/engaged-anthropology/ israel-palestine-conflict-engagement-project/). 5. The “possession” of authenticity articulates directly with an engaged anthropology that not only includes but foregrounds the facilitation of local or Indigenous voices in pursuit of their own interests (e.g., Low and Merry 2010; Kirsch 2018). In my own career for the past twenty years, my local work with Gebusi has been complemented by applied project work, especially in postconflict conditions across a score of developing countries in east and west Africa, the Himalayas, and southeast Asia (e.g., Knauft 2007b, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015). A significant part of this work has been dedicated to “South-South” collaborations between highly dedicated national NGO staff from different countries who learn from each other in direct consultation across diverse world areas (see http://cprp.emory.edu/home/projects/liberia/index.html). There are myriad ways that local perspectives can be appreciated and championed depending on specific conditions and contextual opportunities. References Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1983. Speech Act and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1988. Homo Academicus. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cantrell, Eileen (Knauft). 1998. “Woman the Sexual, A Question of When: A Study of Gebusi Adolescence.” In Adolescence in Pacific Island Societies, eds. Gilbert H. Herdt and Steven Leavitt, 92–120. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Durkheim, Émile. 1966. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. New York: Free Press. Ferguson, James. 2005. “Seeing Like an Oil Company: Space, Security, and Global Capitalism in Neoliberal Africa.” American Anthropologist 107(3): 377–82. Foucault, Michel. 1984. “What is an Author?” In The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, 101–20. New York: Pantheon. Geertz, Clifford. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Graeber, David. 2019. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. New York: Simon & Schuster. Haider, Asad. 2018. Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump. London: Verso. Herdt, Gilbert H., ed. 1982. Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Howell, Nancy. 1990. Surviving Fieldwork: A Report of the Advisory Panel on Health and Safety in Fieldwork. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association Special Publication. Howell, Signe, and Aud Talle, eds. 2011. Returns to the Field: Multitemporal Research and Contemporary Anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kelly, Raymond C. 1977. Etoro Social Structure: A Study in Structural Contradiction. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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———. 1993. Constructing Inequality: The Fabrication of a Hierarchy of Virtue among the Etoro. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kessler, Sarah. 2018. Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kessler-Harris, Alice. 2003. Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. Kirsch, Stuart. 2018. Engaged Anthropology: Politics Beyond the Text. Berkeley: University of California Press. Knauft, Bruce M. 1985a. Good Company and Violence: Sorcery and Social Action in a Lowland New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1985b. “Ritual Form and Permutation in New Guinea: Implications for SocioPolitical Evolution.” American Ethnologist 12: 321–40. ———. 1987a. “Reconsidering Violence in Simple Human Societies: Homicide among the Gebusi of Papua New Guinea.” Current Anthropology 28: 457–500. ———. 1987b. “Homosexuality in Melanesia.” Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology 10: 155–91. ———. 1989. “Imagery, Pronouncement, and the Aesthetics of Reception in Gebusi Spirit Mediumship.” In The Religious Imagination in New Guinea, eds. Michele Stephen and Gilbert H. Herdt, 67–98. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. ———. 1996. Genealogies for the Present in Cultural Anthropology. New York: Routledge. ———. 1998a. “How the World Turns Upside Down: Changing Geographies of Power and Spiritual Influence among the Gebusi.” In Fluid Ontologies: Myth, Ritual, and Philosophy in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, eds. Laurence R. Goldman and Chris Ballard, 143–61. Westport: Bergin and Garvey. ———. 1998b. “Creative Possessions: Spirit Mediumship and Millennial Economy among Gebusi of Papua New Guinea.” In Bodies and Persons in Africa and Melanesia, eds. Michael Lambek and Andrew Strathern, 197–209. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1999. From Primitive to Colonial in Melanesia and Anthropology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2002a. Exchanging the Past: A Rainforest World of Before and After. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———, ed. 2002b. Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2002c. “Trials of the Oxymodern: Public Practice at Nomad Station.” In Critically Modern: Alterities, Alternatives, Anthropologies, ed. Bruce Knauft, 105–43. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2003. “What Ever Happened to Ritualized Homosexuality?” Annual Review of Sex Research 14: 137–59. ———. 2006. “Anthropology in the Middle.” Anthropological Theory 6: 407–30. ———. 2007a. “From Self-Decoration to Self-Fashioning: Orientalism as Backward Progress among the Gebusi of Papua New Guinea.” In Body Arts and Modern, eds. Elizabeth Ewart and Michael O’Hanlon, 88–107. Wantage, UK: Sean Kingston Publishing. ———. 2007b. “Liberia Redux. Band-Aid? Collectivity and Constraint in the Liberian Aid Industry.” Presented at the Institute of Comparative and International Studies, Emory University, 24 July. https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/bknauft/engaged-anthropology/ liberia-engagement-project/.

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———. 2011a. “Afterword: Reflecting on Returns to the Field.” In Returns to the Field: Multitemporal Research and Contemporary Anthropology, eds. Signe Howell and Aud Talle, 250–60. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2011b. “Violence Reduction among the Gebusi of Papua New Guinea—and Across Humanity.” In Origins of Altruism and Cooperation, eds. Robert W. Sussman and C. Robert Cloninger, 203–25. New York: Springer. ———, ed. 2012. Mongolians After Socialism: Politics, Economy, Religion. Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia: Admon Press. (Simultaneous English and Mongolian editions.) www.sarr.em ory.edu/MAS. ———. 2013. “Land Ownership in the Near-Western Nomad Sub-District (Honibo, Oybae, Gebusi, Samo, and Kubor) Western Province, Papua New Guinea.” Social Impact Monitoring and Programs (SIMP). Retrieved 20 January 2021 from https://scholarblogs .emory.edu/bknauft/files/2015/07/Gebusi-Land-Report.pdf. ———. 2014. “Monrovia Report & Position Statement.” Presented at the Comparative Post-conflict Recovery Project (CPRP) Land Concession and Rights Workshop, Monrovia, Liberia, 3–7 January. https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/bknauft/files/2015/07/ Monrovia-Report-Position-Statement-CPRP.pdf. ———. 2015. “Post-Conflict Recovery: Best-case National Organizations. The Carnegie Corporation of New York.” Retrieved 20 January 2021 from https://scholarblogs.em ory.edu/bknauft/files/2015/07/Carnegie-CPRP-Presentation-PDF.pdf. ———. 2016. The Gebusi: Lives Transformed in a Rainforest World, 4th ed. Long Grove: Waveland Press. ———. 2018. “From Savage to Good: A Brief Genealogy of Anthropology—By Route of the Primitive, the Dark, and the Suffering Subject.” Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Jose, CA, 12 December. ———. 2019a. “Finding the Good: Reactive Modernity Among the Gebusi, in the Pacific, and Elsewhere.” Australian Journal of Anthropology 30(1): 3–17. ———. 2019b. “Good Anthropology in Dark Times: Critical Appraisal and Ethnographic Application.” Australian Journal of Anthropology 30(1): 84–103. ———. Forthcoming. “Absent Development as Cultural Economy: Resource Extraction and Enchained Inequity in Papua New Guinea.” In Large-scale Capital in Small-scale Lifeworlds: The Establishment of Novel Inequalities in Papua New Guinea, eds. Bettina Beer and Tobias Schwoerer. Canberra: The Australian National University / Asia-Pacific Environment Monographs. Knauft, Bruce M., and Anne-Sylvie Malbrancke. 2016. “Homicide Reduction among the Gebusi of Papua New Guinea.” Report for The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, New York. ———. 2017. “Homicide Reduction and Conflict Management in the Nomad Sub-District, Papua New Guinea.” Report for The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, New York. Li, Tania. 2014. Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Low, Setha, and Sally Engle Merry. 2010. “Engaged Anthropology: Diversity and Dilemmas: An Introduction.” Current Anthropology 51(S2): 203–26. Mamdani, Mahmood. 2020. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Marcus, George E., and Michael M. J. Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Ortner, Sherry B. 1973. “On Key Symbols.” American Anthropologist 75(5): 1338–46. ———. 2016. “Dark Anthropology and Its Others: Theory Since the Eighties.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6(1): 47–73. Rainger, Ronald. 1978. “Race, Politics, and Science: The Anthropological Society of London in the 1860s.” Victorian Studies 22(1): 51–70. ———. 1980. “Philanthropy and Science in the 1830s: The British and Foreign Aborgines’ Protection Society.” Man (n.s.) 15(4): 702–17. Read, Kenneth E. 1986. Return to the High Valley: Coming Full Circle. Berkeley: University of California Press. Robbins, Joel. 2013. “Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19: 447–62. Rosaldo, Renato. 1980. Ilongot Headhunting, 1883–1974: A Study in Society and History. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Shokeid, Moshe. 2020. “The Lifespan of Ethnographic Reports: The Predicament of Returns to the Field.” Anthropology and Humanism 45(1): 74–85. https://doi.org/10.1111/ anhu.12268. Strathern, Marilyn. 1996. “Cutting the Network.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2(3): 517–35. Vidali, Debra. 2016. “Multisensorial Anthropology: A Retrofit Cracking Open of the Field.” American Anthropologist 118(2): 395–400. ———. 2020. “Ethnographic Theater Making: Multimodal Alchemy, Knowledge, and Invention.” American Anthropologist 122(2): 394–409. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13387. Weber, Max. 2004. The Essential Weber, ed. Sam Whimster. New York: Routledge. Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Figure 4.1. Garamut from Kayan Village, Kainmbat clan. Carved by Philip Apa, Paul Kuri, Teddy Tamone, Willie Kawang, and Arnold Jongtai. From the Collection of The University of Queensland Anthropology Museum, Item #40650. Photograph by Carl Warner. Procured by Alphonse Aime. Photo reproduced by permission.

4 Recovering Authenticity Garamut (Slit-Drums) among Kayan People, Madang Province, Papua New Guinea ALPHONSE AIME

In many parts of the world, ceremonial or spiritual objects of deep cultural significance and historical meaning are considered especially authentic and sacred. This is true for many communities of Pacific Islanders, especially in rural areas and in countries such as Papua New Guinea. In some cases, these objects are revered and even feared as they are believed to be imbued with the power of life and death. Though outsiders view the objects as mere material objects, Indigenous people do not; meanings are in this sense especially likely to reverberate and rebound across time, including when they are transposed and modified in translation between local people and outsiders, and ultimately between generations of villagers themselves. In a way, modern developments themselves predipose and reinforce this tendency. New developments are often perceived, especially by a younger generation, to recontextualize if not to supplant and supercede older beliefs and customs. And yet, as Marshall Sahlins (2000) and others remind us, longstanding cultural concepts and meanings can continue and selectively intensify even as they may seem to be recast or overshadowed. In signifcant parts of insular and coastal Western Melanesia, sacred objects of this nature include slit-drums or garamut. A slit-drum is often described as a percussion instrument, not actually a drum at all, but a large hollowed piece of wood with the ends closed so the shell resonates deeply when struck, usually with a mallet. Slit-drums have been used widely across parts of West and Central Africa (e.g., Herzog 1945; Cannaday and Moore 2011), Southeast Asia (e.g., Ogayashi 1966; Wessing 1999), Meso-America (e.g., Howell 2003), Polynesia (e.g., Moyle 1974); and they have been extensively used in Melanesia, including parts of eastern Papua New Guinea including the peoples of Madang Province (e.g., Leach 2002, 2015; Burridge 1959; cf., Kjellgren 2005). For a range of these latter communities, garamut have for many generations made significant contributions to social and cultural livelihood.

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As described below, however, the advent of European contact ushered in an extensive literature that described slit-drums/garamut as primarily musical instruments. Though some anthropologists have presented a richer and more culturally sensitive view (e.g., Burridge 1959; Leach 2002, 2015), earlier views continue to exert influence, including secular notions of slit-drums as mere music-making or signalling devices adopted by some young people in local communities themselves. This illustrates the richocheting pattern of traveling ideas about garamut over time and space, as described by Mageo and Knauft in their introduction to this volume. Deeper cultural analysis reveals how garamut have been much more than simply sources of sound or music. In many areas, they retain a sense of cultural authenticity for many people that outsiders, and even younger generations within the communities themselves, do not always appreciate. In the former perspective, garamut are multifaceted entities imbued with power of social influence over people—in some ways like the Song of the Flying Fox described by Dalton (Chapter 5). In this sense, garamut have had, and can continue to have, an asserted authenticity for adult villagers that exceeds their re-presentation in lingering Western authorship—and to some extent younger generations of Pacific Islanders as well.

Historical Background

For generations, garamut1 (the Tok Pisin2 word for slit-log or slit-drum, often referred to as slit-gong) have played a significant role among groups of people in much of eastern lowland and insular Papua New Guinea. Garamut were considered to have instantiated and even to have constructed people’s social and kinship structure as well as their clan identity leadership. Garamut were—and are, especially for older men—considered to be living social agents that foster intimate and personal relationships of people in political, social, economic, and religious domains. Garamut are used in ways that are at once spiritual, clan-specific, private, and sometimes “all-purpose,” as when they provide music during singsings3 or are use to send common messages. However, based on my research in 2012–13 among the Kayan people of Bogia District in Madang Province, I argue that since the time of European intervention, there has been a cultural shift in the social and cultural understanding of garamut; now they are more commonly understood—or misunderstood—as mere musical instruments.4 This illustrates the rebounding or remergence of early anthropological views of garamut as mere material objects into the world of Pacific Islanders themselves. The findings of this chapter unravel early foreign wrappings that have obscured the social and cultural understanding of garamut and informed the lens

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of local people. In a sense, early academic biases resonate with secular influences of modern life that rebound to undercut rich local meanings that are still held dear by many in older generations. Garamut were and still can be social objects. By calling them social, I mean that people have regarded garamut, and still do regard them to a significant extent in many communities, as social persons who have connected kinship relationships, bestowed leadership, and demarcated gender roles. By the term cultural, I mean that garamut as material cultural objects have ranked social status, they unify people and convey or confer on them group identity. They have their own agency and in this sense they authenticate the community they are in as well as being themselves authentic in a distinct way (cf., Leach 2015).

European Intervention and Imposed Definitions

Upon their arrival in the Pacific, colonizers and missionaries were often not aware that in the making of sacred objects, carvers were creating the habitat for a spirit being who was believed to have particular functions, such as protecting the health and welfare of the community and providing assistance in hunting, fishing or warfare, and so on. These outsiders did not realize that among traditional communities of Papua New Guinea, people see their masks and other artifacts as spirits who happen to be residing in certain manmade objects. These objects were motivated by beliefs in spirits and consecrated by magic rituals during their production. Those who do not understand the spiritual dimension of the objects consider them merely in aesthetic terms: in order words, in much the same way as they describe Western art (see Poletan 2012: 22). Lipset (2005: 112) says about Murik art that, “such objects possessed agency because culturally speaking they were persons and not inert art. In Melanesia, art was no less embedded in society than were people—not figuratively, but literally.” A review of the early literature concerning slit-drums/garamut reveals that in many cases, definitions and meanings introduced by early researchers have become the standard reference upon which further studies have been conducted. Given the functionalist and descriptivist orientation that pervaded much of early anthropology, material objects were often reduced in Western understanding to their bare physicality or their assumed instrumental function. The same may be said of the early understanding of many traditional cultural objects of the peoples of the Pacific, especially in Papua New Guinea (see Bell and Geismar 2009). Over the period of colonial history, garamut were subjected to these new sets of descriptions and definitions. For example, works of early anthropologists during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century (such as by Eberlein [1910], Ivens [1927], Layard [1928], and Black-

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wood [1932]; see citations in Fischer [1986]), suggest that the basic function of slit-drums is to send messages and to produce dance rhythms. Hermann (1943), having examined the drum signals, concluded that Oceania does not have a true “drum language.” I argue that this view, reflected in the translation of garamut as “slit-gong,” not only infiltrated Indigenous knowledge but also obscured the social and cultural meaning of garamut. By contrast, most early studies do not capture the deeper meaning and significance of garamut, merely identifying or refering to them as musical instruments used for signaling purposes, including during initiation ceremonies in male cults. Works of Schmidt (1923/26), Wedgwood (1933), Bateson (1958), Burridge (1959), Lawrence (1964), Tuzin (1980), Fischer (1986), Spearitt (1987), Niles (1992), Yamada (1997), and Zemp and Kaufmann (2010) present more information about garamut as musical instruments, sometimes in social and cultural contex, as emphasized, for example, by Leach (2002, 2015). On the whole, however, it is the earlier anthropological emphasis on the signaling and music-making functions of slit-drums that has informed broader understandings of garamut in modern contexts, including in musical performance, tourism, and among young people. For instance, a recent book-length account by Tony Lewis on Becoming a Garamut Player in Baluan, Papua New Guinea (2018) gives scant attention to deeper cultural significance and meaning while giving extended treatment to the organization of a garamut ensemble in Baluan and the specific musical training techniqes and roles and functions of different instruments. My own study acknowledges that garamut can be used at times to provide music or signalling, but, along with local people themselves, I look beyond these to discern the deeper role of garamut. Waiko (1993: 1) writes that Papua New Guinea’s images of history and its people have been pieced together by scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, botany, linguistics, and archaeology. My research findings resonate with this view. The current meanings and definitions accorded to garamut, increasingly by local people, have been heavily influenced by earlier anthropological work. Over the years, these earlier works have resonated with larger changes that have eroded understandings of deeper social and cultural traditions. Western notions, ideas, and scholarship have subsumed and re-authored Indigenous artifacts and practices in ways that efface and undermine their deeper authenticity for Melanesians themselves. In the present case, the relatively arbitrary meanings introduced by Westerners did and still do injustice to the social standing of garamut. This reflects and reinforces other modern changes that reduce the traditional power of garamut, including especially the views and attitudes of younger people. The rich significance of garamut continues to inform many aspects of Kayan social and cultural life and has deep social and culturally embedded meanings, including the assertion of leadership, clan identity, social control,

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gender relations, the continuation of men’s house activities, and intergenerational relationships. In this sense, the comments of Tuzin (1997) and others concerning the eradication of practices and symbols of longstanding beliefs and customs associated with male-controlled spirituality in Papua New Guinea are premature if not inappropriate. This is especially in societies such as the Kayan where the relationship between authenticity, authority, and authorship of and by garamut continues to be important. Tuzin (1997: 182) suggests that when one takes away the tambaran as a male cult, as occurred among the Ilahita Arapesh, you also take away masculinity in general. Tuzin considers this to dangerously compromise social integration, particularly for men. Tuzin suggests that amid the ensuing depression, anger, and disorientation, male behavior loses its meaning, its moral compass, and its charity towards women. He further suggests that since the male tambaran cult has died so, too, the masculinity of men which asserted power and control has dissipated. In the process, men have lost power and control especially over women, as well as over young people. Among the Kayan, garamut are not considered to be a male cult object but an object that gives life and enriches the cohesion and harmony of the community as a whole; garamut continue to give meaning, value, and collective identity. Tuzin, however, views the tambaran cult as a bastion of male privilege and a sanctuary of what is considered an exclusively male domain. He suggests that the protective requirements of this sanctuary explain why power, privilege, and misogynistic rhetoric are so often associated with male-exclusive settings. Regarding violence, Tuzin also suggests that though men are the usual perpetrators of aggression within communities, it is a dangerous mistake to think that masculinity makes them so; rather, it is the very loss of masculinity that makes them more unconstrained and aggressive toward women (Tuzin 1997: 192). A similar assessment can be made of Kayan men and their masculinity. However in the case of garamut, they are considered androgynous objects that embody energies of both men and women. Clan elders as custodians are considered privileged to represent the voice of their respective clans through garamut. Kayan take pride in maintaining their garamut tradition, not as a male cult, but as a representation of the character of men who are in principle socially responsible, traditionally grounded, and progressive in their thinking. This is expected of clan leaders and leadership generally. In this regard, garamut testify to the ongoing quality of Kayan leadership.

The Meaning of the Word Garamut

The Tok Pisin word garamut is said to have originated from east insular New Guinea, especially from the Kuanua language of the Tolai people of Papua

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New Guinea’s East New Britain Province. Today the word garamut is commonly used throughout PNG. This exemplifies the reciprocal traveling and influence of an Indigenous concept within Melanesia during the same colonial era during which the narrowed meaning of “slit-gong” was itself propagated. Mihalic (1971) provides the following meaning of the word garamut: (1) a tree with hard white wood (Vitex confossus), and (2) a native wooden signal drum, the slit-gong, used to give short signals as well as send messages. It is interesting to note from the literature that many anthropological and ethnomusicological studies use the term slit-drum and slit-gong interchangeably. The slit-gong definition was popularized as garamut began to be pounded as a signaling gong outside of its local cultural context. Taken away from the custodianship of the big-men and their restricted use, garamut were now used in a similar way that metal bells were used to indicate clock time in Western countries. This influence has travelled to Papua New Guinea. Some garamuts are placed at schools as a cultural symbol. A male board member of the Kayan Primary School in Madang told me that only male teachers and especially the headmaster beat it on some occasions when they want to call together school board members for a meeting (see also Leach 2015). Interestingly, the garamut there was placed under the school notice board. According to three Tolai elders whom I interviewed in 2011, the word garamut refers to a long slit-log traditionally used, among many other important things, for sending messages. It is a compound word made up of two words gara and i mut. Gara means singing/calling out, whereas i mut means to be quiet and listen. Its literal meaning thus conveys the calling out of the voice of spiritual ancestry and the respectful listening to this among those in the community. The interactive meaning of calling out and listening to a kind of nonhuman voice goes far deeper than considering garamut as simply a vehicle for sending human messages. In a particularly alluring way, as if to reverse the association of spirits with male ancestry and leadership, it also means the voice of a young virgin calling. This explanation of a voice calling out and those hearing it keeping quiet to listen is in agreement with Eberlein (1910: 635–36), who suggests the etymology of the word garamut as gara “song” and mut “to silence.” Eberlein explains that the muted singing and striking of bamboos, common in the evening, was an order to be silent (a gara i mut) so that villagers understood what the garamut was signaling. However the three Tolai elders I interviewed did not mention bamboos (known as tidirl or pakupak in their language), which are basically used in accompanying songs/singing and not for sending messages. I suspect that Eberlein thought that garamut were merely used to send signals or keep the beat of a song being sung and not objects for communicating ancestry messages or spiritual meanings as locals would have understood them.

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The three men also told me that garamut are highly revered objects. Special garamut are kept in houses and sounded on special occasions only, such as announcing the death of a big-man or someone else in the community. They further stated that, following tradition, male elders even today sound garamut for sending out messages and during custom-related ceremonies and special occasions. Garamut are not used on every occasion and also do not accompany every song and dance. However these men also said that in modern music and art performances or in Church worship, garamut are sometimes used, but such garamut are newly made and are not custom garamut: they have not undergone rituals of production and authorization. So, garamut today combine and sediment meanings of longer standing tradition with those of contemporary practical social usage—again illustrating how the idea of garamut travels and resonates in different social contexts that stem from alternative Indigenous and introduced notions. Arguments for and against the authenticity of a presumed Indigenous “primordialism” often fail to capture this complexity and nuance (see Eller and Coughlan 1993). In the context of the present volume, we could say that nonritualized garamut are considered, especially by elders, to be less authentic. Reciprocally, the production or authoring of a spiritually active garamut continues to be considered a practice of authentic tradition—of customs that are especially significant and meaningful concerning who the Kayan are and who they have been spiritually, socially, and politically. Not everybody owns a garamut, only the Kukurai or the big-men own them. The Tolai story of the origin of garamut cited by Fischer (1986: 25) from Meier (1909) does not refer to garamut as musical instruments but rather mentions two brothers, To Kabinana and To Karvuvu, who wanted to make canoes. To Karvuvu, the bringer of misfortune, makes a garamut rather than a canoe. To Kabinana tells him: “the deaths of our children will be drummed out on it when they die.” Tolai people regard To Kabinana and To Karvuvu as mythical “big-men” or spirit ancestors who introduced garamut to them. To ascertain whether young male Tolai students at Divine Word University, Madang, knew what garamut meant in their language, I asked them what might be the meaning of garamut. Each one of them told me, they did not know, they had no idea. They know garamut primarily as musical instruments. Likewise, a prominent Tolai local musician, who had been trained at the Papua New Guinea Music Arts School, responded that garamut are musical instruments. This response was not surprising given the fact that garamut are becoming more and more divorced from their use in a ritually authenticated cultural context (see Lewis 2018). In a Kayan village, I also enquired about the language meaning of their term rumbung. The elders explained that rumbung is a compound word, rumbung, which means “wind from the belly or stomach.” In general, rumbung is

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the name given to a carved slit-log from a tree named Waor in their language (garamut in Tok Pisin). They are considered sacred and powerful objects. In Tok Pisin, they said, “Garamut em ol i no pilai samting, ol i ken bagarapim ples na kilim man” (“Garamut are not toys, they can destroy the village and kill people”). Similar to the Kuanua meaning of garamut, the Kayan word rumbung also conveys listening in silence to their voice. As a way of emphasizing the power of garamut, an elder confided to me a story of a woman who sat on a garamut and brought upon herself a debilitating disease whereby her vagina dropped down and she died a terrible death. Drawing from this story, some elders told me that women, children, and even men should not treat garamut as toys because this can cause unforeseen consequences that can devastate the life of the community and may result in death. Women are often reminded of the restrictions and taboos concerning garamut that they must strictly observe to avoid mortal consequences to themselves, their families, and the community as a whole. In another story, a young woman who sat on a garamut became barren all her life and nobody wanted to marry her. These stories can be interpreted as social control warnings about the potential dangers garamut can bring upon the community. Being not married and having no children is seen as a curse among Kayan, as is also the case in many other Papua New Guinea communities. This story resonates with the larger notion that women are silenced by the garamut from enquiring and knowing the secret cult of men; by claiming the ownership of the voice of garamut, men have controlled and owned the voice of women. In complementary fashion, this exclusion demarcates a social space where women can freely talk in the absence of men, that is, in the privacy of their homes when men are at the men’s house.

Generational Differences on the Question: “What Are Garamut?”

Younger men’s responses to my questions were widely shared; they said that garamut are used for many purposes such as in singsing, and sending messages. Most young people answered that garamut are primarily musical instruments. This seems obvious to them because garamut are now being used more frequently in art and music performances throughout the country. This supports my argument that the introduction of new meanings applied to cultural objects such as garamut has obscured as well as complemented traditional cultural and social meanings. I realized that when I asked elders the question, “What is a garamut?,” they did not directly answer but instead indicated what a garamut does, namely, that a garamut works as a powerful object of social control. My conversations

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with elderly people from groups where garamut are used, including in Sepik, Manus, Rabaul, Bougainville, and Madang, all commented that culturally in the past, garamut were not understood as musical instruments. They were only used to accompany singsings when special occasions arose. They said that since garamut were considered sacred objects, they were used cautiously, with diligence and care. Interestingly, one person I interviewed suggested that it is an offence to call garamut musical instruments. For the Kayan, garamut are intricately linked with what they believe to be a sacred residential power associated with the agency of spirits who are considered their animating source. That the garamut as an inanimate material object becomes an animated sacred object is at the core of Kayan Indigenous beliefs that connect their landscape with a multitude of spirits (see also Poser 2008: 39–40). Relatedly, elders told me, they attribute the knowledge of making garamut to the garamut spirit. Therefore the agency of garamut among Kayan is not only about human agency, it is inclusive of spirit agency. One might say spirits are the ultimate source of authenticity, that they are themselves agents of cultural authentication.

Garamut Agency

From my observation, and based on stories told to me by informants, agency of Kayan garamut among Kayan are evident in three interlocking observational frames: spirit agency; human agency; and garamut’s own agency, which is in some ways a combination of spirit and human agency. Spirit Agency

In the past, Kayan believed that the production of garamut was a collaborative work of the spirits, called gnumtik, and people. Gnumtik live in the forest and are credited with giving voice to the garamut especially in the most critical process of digging out the slit from which the voice or sound is produced. Gnumtik were considered primary agents who animate the garamut with their presence and empower it with agency. Sacred garamut are considered abodes of spirits. Some of these spirits are considered members of clans and some are spirits known only to some people or individuals. To call their clan members via the garamut, Kukurai had to know their clan unifier garmut and their spirit names and clan call signs. Knowing these names and symbols is connected importantly with property ownership and with social cohesion and distinction among the different clans. Clans are exomagous, and garamut-clan relationships inform how marriage arrangements should be made. Below are names of the clan unifier garamut with their gnum-

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tick spirit name, except number seven, which has a tumbuan name (a name associated with tumbuan masks worn in ritual dance). 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Mutborong with the design Dauginamot owned by Gnombreak clan Watkopi with the design Dauginamot owned by Kainmbat clan Emrang with the design Baewarup owned by Kainmbat clan Ruknai with the design Raing owned by Samngae clan Matnger with the design Raing owned by Samngae clan Nokpai with the design Baewarup owned by Kadid clan Kaidaban with the design Dauginamot owned by Waot clan

In the same way that Strathern (1988) speaks of the distributed personhood of human persons extended through gifts or objects, Kayan believe in the distributed personhood of the spirit being present in a spirit or sacred garamut (cf., also Bonnemère 2018). In other words, the material agency of garamut mediates the personal agency of the spirit. This was evident when I heard Kayan speak of certain garamut as possessing the personal characteristics and attributes of a spirit whose presence is said to be in the garamut. I noted that although members of Kayan community profess to be Catholics who are not supposed to believe in other spirits other than God alone, many still believe in the immediate presence of other spirits. As witness or testimony to the interconnectedness of relationships between humans and the spirits, a Kayan elder told me of a particular village spirit garamut called Ruknai. Ruknai is said to have been carved in 1920. The garamut is owned by the Samngae clan. Though the garamut bears the name of the spirit Ruknai, the spirit who abides in the garamut is called Babacbi, a gnumtik spirit. These spirits are said to be living in the forests near the boundaries of the village. I asked the elder how the spirit Babacbi got into the garamut, and he told me that some of the Samngae men, by carving the garamut, trapped the spirit in the garamut with magic (see also Poser 2008). It was forbidden to take pictures of the inside of this garamut; only the outside could be photographed. The garamut is covered at all times with woven coconut leaves except when it is actually used (one must ask the custodians to remove the coconut leaves to take a photograph of the garamut, but this was also considered taboo. Here I use the term “taboo” as a prohibition imposed by social custom or as a protective measure.) Not adhering to taboos can bring about calamities, and there was an element of real fear concerning what the spirit might do if photographs were taken of the garamut’s inside. This is one of the garamut that cannot be sold. It has a stone in it, and the elder said that when Babacbi moves, the stone roles back and forward making noises that can be heard. I observed that very little noise was made around or near the shelter where Babacbi lives. Because this is considered as a sacred area, children are

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forbidden to play near the place and young people are constantly reminded not to sit and talk under the shelter unnecessarily. To illlustrate the power of the spirit Babacbi, two Kayan elders told me the following story. Some years ago, the men’s house where Babacbi lived started to leak and rain dripped inside the garamut. Babacbi was angry and caused an old man to fall from the veranda of his house and injure himself. They quickly built a new men’s house and placed the garamut under the new shelter to avoid further wrath from the spirit. Human Agency

Garamut are the work of human hands. Therefore garamut are also imbued with human agency and represent human intentions. In his Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, Gell (1998) suggests that objects mediate social agency and can be considered as secondary agents because they extend the agency of persons. If we apply this theory to garamut, agency begins with the process of production and continues in the garamut’s intentional use on various occasions. The Kukurai and certain influential leaders use garamut to endorse their leadership and as social indicators of their status in the community. Reciprocally, senior men who merit respect have their status associated with a gamarut. Caspar, an elder of the village of Kayan who works in town, is a clan Kukurai by birth. He told me that before retiring to the village he must commission men to carve him a garamut. Without a garamut he will lose face in the community and will feel embarrassed, as he would be a Kukuari senior man without a voice. In the village, I saw some garamut placed in front of the houses of a clan Kukurai or an influential clan leader; as such, they became social indicators of status. Teddy Tamone, one of my principal informants, an educated and influential clan leader, had four garamut, one for each of his three sons and one for himself. Girls are not accorded this privilege. According to one Kukarai bigmen, garamut is the “Chief Kukurai.” because its voice represents the voice of Kukurai generally. Kukurai hence see garamut as both a foundation and extension of their own voices. When clan members hear the garamut of their Kukurai, they refer to it as his voice. In the past, it was the Kukurai who beat the garamut to convey the message of death when someone died in their respective clans. This not only conveyed the message but obliged the community to observe silence. People spoke in low tones and no loud noise or voice was to be heard. This silence could last for weeks until the ban on noise and normal conversation was lifted. No feasts or singsings should take place during this time of mourning. Anyone making loud noises or laughing during the ban could be suspected of having caused the death through sorcery. I myself observed that when deaths occurred in the village, even listening to radios or music boxes—

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normally the favorite pastime of young people—was curtailed. To lift the ban of silence, it was again the Kukurai who beat the garamut. One morning, some elders demonstrated one of their past customs of lifting the ban. The elders told me that when a death was announced, all garamut were silenced from that very moment. Metaphorically, they say that the garamut sticks are bundled together and put aside. In Tok Pisin they said, “Taim wanpela i dai, mipela save pasim stik bilong garamut na putim i stap” (“When someone dies, we bundle the garamut sticks and put them away”). The voice of the garamut is silenced and not to be heard; there should not be any celebration of life when there is mourning. Then, after two weeks or even longer, an elder of the family of the deceased approaches the clan Kukurai with gifts called kup. These gifts are comprised of betelnuts, (buai in Tok Pisin), mustard (daka), and dried tobacco leaves (brus). In addition, they present to the Kukurai, a small red coconut mounted with dogs’ teeth and knotted betelnut leaf placed on the coconut as a special gesture of seeking the consent of the Kukuarai to lift the ban of silence. Garamut’s Own Agency

Garamut encapsulate representational agency inclusive of the owner, the clan, the carvers, and the Kayan community as a whole. The agency of garamut among Kayan weaves these into a web of interconnected relationships not only with humans but with spirits as well. This idea is well described by a Kayan elder Romanus concerning the garamut called Emrang, the unifier garamut of the Kainmbat clan (see Figure 4.2). Emrang has a characteristic “voice” different from other garamut. Carved from an aged garamut tree trunk, is said to have been made in 1935 by one of Romanus’s grandparents assisted by other carvers. They used traditional tools such as stone axes, fire, and hard sago barks. The design on the garamut, called Baewarup, was carved using sharks’ teeth and shark skin was used as sandpaper to smooth the garamut. It was carved near a water-logged area, where, during the dry season, small birds came to feed on small fish and insects. These forest areas are considered dwelling places of spirits (gnumtik) who animate garamut; Emrang is the name of the resident spirit of that part of the forest, and the garamut manifests its power. Carved on the finial on both its ends are images of two clan totems, the monitor lizards, which depict one of the Figure 4.2. Garamut named forms that the spirit takes in dispersing Emrang, Kayan Village, 2012. Photograph by Alphonse Aime. its agency.

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I counted approximately twenty-two grooves incised along the non-pounding side of this garamut. Romanus said this was the number of enemies that their grandparents had killed long ago. Romanus also told me that a businessman twice offered him K10,000 (about five thousand Australian dollars) to purchase the Emrang. The businessman even told him that he would top it up by buying him a big truck. According to Romanus, this offer had to be refused, as the garamut belonged to his Kainmbat clan and was not his personal property. He said, “If I were to sell it, I am afraid all sorts of trouble may befall us.” Among the Kayan, the sacred and clan garamut are of similar dimensions to the body of an adult human being. The material wood is transformed through a process of body creation in a secluded spatial location in the forest away from the village for a couple of months. The shaving off of the outer layers of the log gets rid of the wet substance of the wood just as young initiates go through the process of getting themselves of maternal and generally female substances through blood-letting. At this stage, the garamut is still a thing of the forest. From the first step of cutting the tree, the log is carefully transformed and created to resemble a human body; its material production and transformation not just echoes or informs but is the process by which males bodily become men. The new social body of the garamut receives careful and attentive preparation so that when it emerges from its seclusion, it looks attractive and strong, like the newly initiated body of a young man. Reciprocally, male initiation re-presents and re-embodies the spirit and authority of the garamut and empowers it with the agency of authentic masculine voice. The most critical step is the digging of the slit from which sound or voice is produced. In former times, the owner of the garamut killed a pig to celebrate this critical milestone and to commemorate the work of the carvers as well as to entreate the spirits to bless the work-in-progress. The finials of Kayan garamut always have a tumbuan face and also depict both male and female genitalia. The designs incised on the body of the garamut have social and spiritual meanings connected to people, clan, land, and kinship relationships, as reflected in the etching of designs similar to body tatoos. For the Kayan, a garamut is not just a hewn log bearing inscriptions of clan designs, totems, and motifs. These elaborate patterns, designs, totems, and motifs connect them as members of their respective clans and sub-clans. Kayan have four clan designs which they share, but the clan totem or motifs are not interchangible, as they belong to specific clans and family groups. An elder, Alois, told me that in the past, when different clans lived separately, clan designs were not shared: each clan had an exclusive design that identified them as clan members. The names of these designs are, Baewarup, Yoberber, Raing, and Dauginamot. On both ends of the Emrang garamut, the carved monitor lizards indicate the form the spirit takes in dispersing its agency. The finial

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carvings of other garamut including frogs, eagles, lizards, rats, and even bamboo leaves. Bamboo leaves imply that spirits also live in bamboos, as animated and personified by sacred bamboo flutes. Since I stayed with a clan called Kainmbat, I had people from the clan carve four garamut for me, with special designs: Raing, Yoberber, and Baewarup. The fourth garamut was not given a clan design name but the name of a bush spirit called Kabining. The owner of the name Kabining is Caspar, the Kukurai or clan leader of Kainmbat clan. In this way, I am connected as a member of the Kainmbat clan. The design carved on it is Baewarup. The garamut Kabining is now kept at Divine Word University Chapel in Madang. The one called Yoberber is in the University of Queensland Anthropology Museum, and the one called Raing is at the Queensland Brain Institute. The one with the name Baewarup has been placed at the Divine Word University Library. Garamut identity unifies members of clans or sub-clans, and each clan and sub-clan member is connected to a men’s house and the garamut drums of their respective men’s houses irrespective of their rank and status. For example, during my research I stayed with Teddy’s family. Teddy is a member of the Kainmbat clan, which has its own men’s house in which its clan garamuts are kept. Kept in this men’s house are also sacred objects such as spears, masks, and flutes. It is also the domain of their clan spirits. There they also have their own clan Kukurai. As an object, garamut thus connect and expand the agency of human relationships as secondary agents. The size of the garamut indicates the status of the Kukurai or an influential leader; they are social indicators of wealth, authority, and leadership placed in front of the leader’s house. In talking about ownership of garamut, Paul and Philip, two Kayan elders, noted that in the past, only the clan Kukurai or the clan leaders owned garamut, which represented their social status and served as symbols of authority. This also enjoined respect from fellow clan members as well as from other members of the community. Both Philip and Paul emphasized that, as a public demonstration of leadership and status, the Kukurai of each clan was responsible for organizing their clan members to carve garamut for their men house. When walking around the village, I observed this to be true. Though some young men have carved garamut for themselves, these are not exhibited in front of their houses but kept in back of them.

Garamut Are Social Persons

One of my intriguing findings was that Kayan people refer to their garamut as “social persons” who have unique characteristics and personalities associated

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with the spirits that animate them. This informs the sense that garamut are sacred and powerful spiritual objects that need to be revered and feared. Concerning the origin of garamut, Kurukai and elders informed me that, “Ol garamut i kamap wantaim graun. I no pilai samting, ol i gat pawa (“Garamut appeared with the earth; they’re not just there; they have power”). They emphasised that garamut “are powerful objects.” Like masked figures, they can kill people or make them sick. Garamut may take on alternative forms and walk at night, and they are used as such in initiation ceremonies. Proper relations with garmut means prosperity of life, whereas broken relations indicate decline and death. A Kayan elder told a potential buyer who wanted to purchase his garamut, “If you buy this garamut, you will be killing my entire family.” The elder explained that since his grandfather carved the garamut, it carries his grandfather’s clan and family name and status. As the male child, he is obligated to look after the garamut in order that through the garamut, his family’s name will be kept alive and connected to his clan members of the village. Through the garamut, he was connected to life, and he could see the design and the motifs that connect him to his clan members and wider kinship. “Sapos mi salim garamut, mipela bai no gat nem” (“If I sell the garamut, my family would not have a name”). Selling a clan garamut is thus like cutting off the life line or the umbilical cord that connects one’s family to the womb of the community. At the same time, he thought that many young people in Kayan do not really understand this significance and see garamut as traditional old-fashioned objects. Particularly for adult men, garamut are considered to have unique personal characteristics that set them apart from other cultural objects. They hold high status rank and are closely associated with big-man leadership. They command respect and reverence and also have influence on the social conduct and behavior of villagers. During my research, the illness of a young man became a matter or wider social concern. As no amount of medication was improving his condition, male clan members came together to deliberate. They concluded that his illness was caused by disgruntled men’s house spirits. Dreams pointed in this same direction. Teddy, an influential leader and one of my key informants, a member of the sick young man’s clan, reminded them of the urgent need to erect the new men’s house. He pointed out that the men’s house had fallen down and the clan garamut were placed everywhere near family homes where they were subject to rain and weathering; they had for too long neglected their men’s house and the clan garamut, and the spirits were not happy. Illness, sickness, and deaths resulted. What more clues were they waiting for? It was paramount that the building of new clan men’s house be given priority, with every clan member turning up for work.

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Teddy emphasized that they should act quickly to restore normality and bring life back to the clan members and to the community as a whole. He noted that various people and especially clan members had had dreams relating to spirits, clan garamut, masks, and the clan men’s house; these were messages they should not ignore. They had a duty to be responsible and care for the clan garamut. In the wake of Teddy’s admonitions, a new men’s house was indeed built quickly.

Garamut, Social Relations, and Social Organization

Garamut are multifaceted prestigious objects of high status: they drive political, social, economic, and spiritual values; connect people in a web of relationships; bestow and legitimize leadership; and empower leaders with the voice of authority. As such, garamut authorize and authenticate how people organize themselves in clans and family units in the village and more generally. Teddy described to me that the message(s) drummed out to people are through coded garamut messages. To send such a message, a person first must first signal via the garamut his clan code—which is further connected to the clan totem—followed by the signal code of the person he is sending the message to, followed by the message itself. During one research session, Teddy beat a garamut to request one of the garamut carvers to come over for a cup of coffee. This demonstrated the mingling of garamut use with modern forms of social connection and meeting. On a sad note, however, Teddy suggested that the art of garamut communication is slowing dying, as many young people are not eager to learn about and use garamut. And yet, their use has continued for many decades as other parts of social life have been influenced by external forces, including government, cash economy, and Christianization. Each garamut has its own cultural biography. This means they have their own names, knowledge of who carved them, which clan they belong to, and which spirit they reflect and embody. Garamut are passed on from father to son and are embedded in kinship relationships, social ranking, leadership, and gender roles. They even foster and establish lasting relationships with neighboring villages through the gifting of garamut. For example, Kayan Kukurai had garamut diplomacy with Kukurais or chiefs from Manam Island. This means that the Kukurai of Manam would request a garamut to be produced for him and through exchange it would be brought over to Manam and presented to the Kukurai. But leaders also indicated that the good behavior and respect associated with garamut are waning as young people become more individualistic. One leader said in a regretful tone that this has become a constant challenge to the social order of Kayan communities.

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Garamut Is the Voice of Kukurai

When I began my research, the Kukurai told me that garamut are their voice, and they said they use garamut only on special occasions such as announcing death, warning of danger, and calling people together for rituals, to accentuate music, and for festivities that celebrate life. As such, garamut expands the personhood of the Kukurai to clan members as well as to their extended family through kinship and bloodlines. For the Kayan, a Kukurai without a garamut has no voice. Garamut are also associated with masks that are kept hidden in the men’s houses and brought out only for special occasions such as the mask festival. Imbued with power that would be harmful to women, masks can be worn only by men. This can be interpreted as an enactment of their “power” derived from the men’s house, the clan garamut, and the spirits who are considered the primary agents from whom this power originates. The use of these masks in dances, generally known as tumbuan masks, are always accompanied by the beating of garamut, which reflects and further bolsters the power of the spirits. Though some garamut and masks are named after female spirits, men take control of these objects as a measure of their dominance over women, as has been common in Melanesian spirit embodiments (e.g., Allen 1967; Whitehead 1986).

Garamut Perpetuate Gender Demarcation and Gender Roles

A central feature of garamut is how they demarcate social space, assign gender roles, and perpetuate male dominance. According to customary laws and taboos, garamut are carved in secluded areas away from the prying eyes of women and children. In the past, any woman who trespassed near the secluded area where a garamut was carved could be killed, with the explanation made that the spirits killed the woman. Unlike a bilum (string-bag), which is considered by Kayan to be an androgynous object, which can be used both by men and women, garamut are reserved for men only (cf., MacKenzie 1991). This is reflected in stories that describe how garamut are a male province, reserved especially for Kukurai and the male elders of certain notable families. It encodes elite knowledge and authority that is not provided to others in the village and that is exclusive of women. During my research concerning garamut, women shared with me stories only about their contribution in cooking and preparing decorations for the launching of the newly carved garamut. A few of my colleagues raised the question of what the gender of garamut might be. In Papua New Guinea, many accounts have been written about ob-

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jects once owned by women and stolen by men and men, who took advantage of their theft to exert male dominance (e.g., Tuzin 1980, 1997). My research likewise suggests that garamut are male objects that contribute to male dominance. Yet garamut are neither male nor female, and some garamut are carved with female features. Interestingly, it is Kayan women past childbearing age who give names to garamut, especially garamut that have been produced in the customary way, as opposed to those carved for sale. The names are told to women by the men and then bestowed by these women themselves. They do this act by breaking a dry coconut in front of the garamut and giving the garamut its name (see Figure 4.3). This can be interpreted as giving a name to a child who then is recognized and identified as a fully fledged member of the community. Some garamut are named after female spirits but, importantly, the shape of the garamut represents a generic human body. From this observation, I conclude that garamut can be referred to as transgendered objects. However, men claim ownership and it is always men who carve garamut. By claiming ownership of garamut, men in a sense claim ownership of the body of women—and subdue the voices of women (see Whitehead 1986). Garamut not only segregate gendered space but silence women from asking questions. Throughout the production of the garamut that were carved for

Figure 4.3. Women giving names to the garamut, Kayan Village, 2013. Photograph by Alphonse Aime.

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me, very little information was shared about the work in front of women and children. Women did not ask about the progress of the work, as this was considered improper; as one woman said, it was against custom, and they could be upbraided by men for doing so or told to shut up, as it was none of their business. During interviews and discussions with women and girls, they expressed that they knew very little about the past secrets of garamut. I got the impression that continued female silence was not so much to safeguard the secrets of men but due to the fear of publicly flaunting activities that could make other people jealous and bring a magical curse upon them. The following stories illustrate the notable power of the men’s house and garamut. One village elder emphasized that according to Kayan tradition, women were forbidden to enter the men’s house and that they are still forbidden to do so today. However, I also observed that the young men of Kayan are torn between adhering to these taboos and adjusting to changing times, which make allowance for women to enter. The following example demonstrates this ambivalence—again indicating an overlay, resonance, and conflict between traditional notions of garamut and modern ones associated with outside influence and modern development. During the Garamut and Mask Festival that took place in September 2013 at Kayan, lunch was served for visitors at the Gnombreak clan men’s house. I had invited several visitors from Madang town to attend, but I overheard questions: there was some hesitation among the elders whether to allow the women who had come as invited guests to share food with men in the men’s house or whether they should be served at another location. The young man, Benson, who was in charge of catering, told me that he had no problem providing for the women; however, the elders had to be consulted. Benson was one of the committee members for the day’s event. He was also the person who was very sick in the previously told story, which resulted in the quick building of the new Kainmbat clan men’s house. The Kukurai and the elders were consulted and gave their approval, but women were not to climb onto the platform/bed but told to sit on chairs placed on the ground at the end of the house where the roof hangs down, thus being practically away from the garamut. When lunch was ready, Benson apologetically told these women that according to Kayan custom, women were forbidden to enter the men’s houses. However, for them as invited guests, a partial exception could be made, whereas no Kayan woman would have been allowed. (None of the ladies were from Kayan or a neighboring village or from Madang Province.) The young men were not too concerned about women entering the men’s house, but the clan elders were. In contrast to the invited women, the young men who had come as guests were seated on the chairs closer to the garamut, while some elders and invited guests sat on the platform of the men’s house.

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Conclusions

Garamut continue in important ways to be a continuing part of Kayan human and spirit experience. As discussed by Mageo and Knauft in their introduction to this volume, this continuity both reflects and reinforces diverse meanings of garamut, including those considered more Indigenous, traditional, and authentic, and those that derive from modern uses, influences, and interpretations. Amid this diversity, garamut continue to be both powerful and ambivalent social agents for Kayan. People continue to find common bond in the body of the materiality of the garamut, even if they are not entirely aware or appreciative of its combined spiritual and material agency. It is this mix of existences—spirit objects as well as material objects—that both reflects and, under contemporary conditions, renders problematic or ambivalent the supernatural relationship of garamut to people. The Kayan community of more than six hundred people continued as of 2012–13 to be an integrally organized group that recognized, and to some extent revered, garamut as their core “spirit beings.” Villagers balance contending influences in their various cultural and social domains. These include an enduring belief that spirits which inhabit the area personify forces that influence events; belief in God and the teachings of the Catholic Church; urgent interest in economic development and the demands of a cash economy; and modernday politics, schooling, policing, and the benefits and problems of change. Within this mosaic, the power and agency of garamut are identified with and embodied most strongly by and in senior men who are clan leaders; the contended meanings and associations of garamut continue to ramify differently between men and women, as they do also between older and younger men (cf. Leach 2015). Younger men, and women, are ambivalent towards the traditional power of garamut, but they still respect aspects of their power and authority, which is still considered in no small degree to be culturally authentic. That traditionally recognized clan leaders such as Caspar, who has worked in town, believe they must have garamut carved for them before they can effectively retire to life in the village suggests that garamut authority continues in new ways to represent the voice and authority of clan leaders. On the other hand, that I myself commissioned and paid for several garamut to be carved may itself have stimulated or reinforced local interest in their importance and authority. At the same time, that a Garamut and Mask Festival is locally held suggests that garamut are a continuing aspect of Indigenously authenticated tradition; however, this is also seen as a fading representation or re-invention of tradition from the perspective of women, younger people, and outsiders. This illustrates how within Kayan culture itself, different notions and versions of authorship and authenticity are disseminated and differentially reproduced, including as influenced by outside agents and forces.

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As suggested by Mageo and Knauft (Introduction) different notions of authorship and authenticity may rebound off each other over time, even, in the present case, within different segmets of a single society or culture. Some of these strains are more informed by longstanding values and beliefs, while others are more strongly informed by recent developments and contemporary orientations, including those associated with Christianity, commercialism, or national popular culture. My research suggests that Kayan garamut continue, in their considered authenticity, to be a voice, agency, and embodiment of the spirits. The spirits of the men’s house, and garamut, still give notable power, influence, and status to leaders, including both those who are more contemporary and those who are becoming marginalized in the modern village. As authorized forms of attributed cultural authenticity, Kayan garamut continue to: • • • • • • • • •

be ambivalent objects, imbued with both spirit and human agency have a voice like a human body have their own biographies contribute to the social and kinship structure of the Kayan people empower the Kukurai with power and authority of the voice suppress the voices of women demarcate gender spaces, gender roles, and social ranking promote male masculinity and power of the men give identity to Kayan and connect their kinship relations to neighboring villages following family and ancestral bloodlines • be considered person-like • be seen as spirits with the important power of social influence Change has affected the practices associated with garamut, including the production of some garamut for secular use, for musical accompaniment, or for sale—and with a wider range of owners than previously. In earlier decades as well, the advent of steel tools made possible changes in the production and potential diverse use of garamut. Yet, despite pressure on the Kayan from diverse quarters, and overbearing problems that include severe economic stress and deteriorating productivity in the natural economy of gardens and forests, it was clear to me that the Kayan community was not dysfunctional and not marked by fragmentation or cultural destruction. How do individual people of Kayan village see themselves as they grapple with the competing dichotomies of everyday life? Kayan continue to derive personal identity from their clan and community—and part of that identity continues to articulate with belief in garamut-associated spirits and the acknowledgment that spiritual forces and beings can have a bearing on the features and fortunes of social life. That belief may be qualified and compro-

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mised—the spirits may be relegated to a lesser place than in the generational past—but garamut and the elders continue, in the main, to be respected. There is general agreement that in recent decades most Kayan rituals have been weakened in expression, if not emptied of power. But there still exists a firm belief in the power of spirits with whom the Kayan share their social and physical environment.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank two anonymous reviewers, the volume editors, the people and Kurukai of Kayan Village, and Divine Word University, Madang. All shortcomings remain my own. Alphonse Aime is from East Sepik in Papua New Guinea. He obtained his doctorate in anthropology from the University of Queensland in Australia in 2015. The focus of his study was on material culture, especially the relationship of people with objects. He worked as the general editor of Melanesian Institute’s publications in Goroka for nine years. He obtained his BA in communication studies from Southern Queensland University Australia in 2000 and joined Divine Word University in 2002 as a lecturer in the Communication Arts Department. He is currently a senior lecturer in communication arts and chair of the department. His major research has been an ethnographic study of slit-gongs or garamut. He has presented papers at national and international conferences on relationships of objects and people. Notes Selected portions of this chapter were published in The Divine Word University Research Journal 25: 2016, Madang: Divine Word University. 1. Garamut: a Tok Pisin word for a slit-log which has been referred to in English as slitdrum or slit-gong. Throughout the paper, I will use the term garamut for both singular and plural reference. 2. Tok Pisin is a principal lingua francas spoken in Papua New Guinea. 3. Singsing is a Tok Pisin word for traditional dance. 4. My research was funded by AUD 3,500 (equivalent to PNGK 7,000) from the School Research Higher Degree Fieldwork Bursary at the School of Social Sciences, University of Queensland. I embarked on my field research on 16 June 2012. I was brought to the village of Kayan by a village Kukurai, Caspar, who introduced me to his fellow Kukurai of the area’s different clans. During this time I commissioned the production of four garamut drums. For each garamut I paid PNGK 1,000, a total of PNGK 4,000. In order to request the production of these garamut, I followed the custom protocol of negotiating with the all the Kukurai (chiefs or big-men) of the village. It was only after an

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agreement was given by the Kukurai that the production of the garamut began. I was again invited in 2013 to attend the Garamut and Mask Festival that local people had organized. This event was celebrated on 31 August 2013. This event, as one elder of the organization committee told me, was to encourage the community to hold fast to their traditions. I paid for this trip myself. References Allen, Michael. 1967. Secret Cults and Male Initiations in Melanesia. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Bateson, Gregory. 1958. Naven, 2nd ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bell, Joshua A., and Haidy Geismar. 2009. “Materialising Oceania: New Ethnograpies of Things in Melanesia and Polynesia.” Australian Journal of Anthropology 20(1): 3–27. Blackwood, Beatrice. 1932. Folk Stories from the Northern Solomons. London: Taylor & Francis Ltd. Bonnemère, Pascale. 2018. Acting for Others: Relational Tranformations in Papua New Guinea. Chicago: Hau Books. Burridge, Kenelm O. L. 1959. “The Slit-gong in Tangu, New Guinea.” Ethnos 24: 136–50. Cannaday, Ashley, and Thomas Moore. 2011. “Tuning Parameters of the Nigerian Slit Drum.” Journal of the Acoustical Soiety of America 130: 25–28. Eberlein, P. J. 1910. “Die Trommelsprache auf der Gazellehalbinsel, Neupommen.” [The Drum Language of the Gazelle Peninsula, New Guinea.] Anthropos 5. Eller, Jack David, and Reed M. Coughlan. 1993. “The Poverty of Primordialism.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 16(2): 183–202. Fischer, H. 1986. Sound Producing Instruments in Oceania, rev. ed., ed. Don Niles. Port Moreby, Papua New Guinea: Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hermann, E. 1943. “Schallsignalsprachen in Melanesien und Africa.” [Sound Signaling in Melanesia and Africa.] Nachrichten de Akademie der Wissenshafen in Gottigen, phil. hist. Klasse 5. Herzog, George. 1945. “Drum-Signaling in a West African Tribe.” Word 1(3): 217–38. Howell, M. 2003. “Concerning the Origin and Dissemination of the Mesoamerican SlitDrum.” Music and Art 1/2: 45–54. Ivens, Walter G. 1927. Melanesians of South-East Slommon Islands, eds. C. G. Antonius, M. Robben, and Jefrrey A. Sluka. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Kjellgren, Eric. 2005. “From Fanla to New York and Back: Recovering the Authorship and Iconography of a Slit Drum from Ambrym Island, Vanuatu.” Journal of Museum Ethnography 17: 118–29. Lawrence, Peter. 1964. Road Bilong Kago. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Layard, John W. 1928. “Degree-Taking Rites in South West Bay, Malekula.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 58: 139–223. Leach, James. 2002. “Drum and Voice: Aesthetics and Social Process on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8: 713–34. ———. 2015. “The Death of a Drum: Objects, Persons, and Changing Social Form on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21: 620–40.

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Lewis, Tony. 2018. Becoming A Garamut Player in Baluan, Papua New Guinea: Musical Analysis as a Pathway to Learning. London: Taylor & Francis. Lipset, David. 2005. “Dead Canoes. The Fate of Agency in Twentieth-Century Murik Art.” Social Analysis 49(1): 109–40. MacKenzie, Maureen A. 1991. Androgynous Objects: String Bags and Gender in Central New Guinea. New York: Routledge. Meir, J. 1909. Mythen und Erzählungen der Küstenbewohern der Gazelle-Halbinsel. [Myths and Stories of the Coastal Inhabitants of the Gazelle Peninsula.] Münster: Aschendorff. Mihalic, F. 1971. The Jacaranda Dictionary and Grammar of Melanesian Pidgin. Papua New Guinea: Web Books. Moyle, Richard. 1974. “Samoan Musical Instruments.” Ethnomusicology 18(1): 7–74. Niles, Don. 1992. “Konngap, Kap and Tambaran Music: Music of the Yupno/Nakina Area in Relation to Neighbouring Groups.” In Abscheid von der Vergangenheit, ed. J. Wassman, 149–83. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Ogayashi, T. 1966. “The Wooden Slit Drum of the Wa in the Sino-Burman Border Area.” Beitrage zur Japanologie 3(2): 72–88. Poletan, Goran. 2012. To the Beat of the Garamut. Novi Sad, Serbia: Center Of Ecology, Ethnology and Culture “Sphere,” Srbinda. Poser, A. T. 2008. “Inside Jong’s Head, Time Space, and Person among the Kayan of Papua New Guinea.” PhD dissertation. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University. Sahlins, Marshall D. 2000. Culture in Practice: Selected Essays. New York: Zone Books. Schmidt, J. 1923/26. “Die Ethnographie, der Nor-Papua (Murik, Kaup, Karau) bei Dallmannhafen in Neu-Guinea.” Anthropos 18–19: 21. Spearitt, G. 1987. “The Music of the Iatmul People of the Middle Sepik River (Papua New Guinea).” PhD dissertation. Brisbane: Department of Music, University of Queensland. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tuzin, Donald F. 1980. The Voice of the Tambaran: Truth and Illusion in Ihlaita Arapesh Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1997. The Cassowary’s Revenge: The Life and Death of Masculinity in a New Guinea Village. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Waiko, J. 1993. A Short History of Papua New Guinea. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Wedgwood, Camilla. 1933. “Girl’s Puberty Rites in Manam Island, New Guinea.” Oceania 4(2): 132–55. Wessing, Robert. 1999. “A Reverberating Voice: Some Slit-drums of Indonesia.” In Structuralism’s Transformations: Order and Revision in Indonesian and Malaysian Societies, eds. Lorraine V. Aragon and Susan D. Russell, 115–40. Tempe: Arizona State University Program for Southeast Asian Studies Monograph Series. Whitehead, Harriet. 1986. “The Varieties of Fertility Cultism in New Guinea, Parts I & II.” American Ethnologist 13(1): 80–99 and 13(2): 271–89. Yamada, Y. 1997. Songs of Spirits: An Ethnography of Sounds in a Papua New Guinea Society. Boroko: Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies. Zemp, H., and C. Kaufmann. 2010. “Towards an Automatic Transcription of Melanesian Drum Languages (A Kwoma example, Papua New Guinea).” Kulele 4. Boroko: Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies.

5 The Flying Fox and the Sentiment of Being On the Authenticity of a Papua New Guinea Rawa Tradition DOUG DALTON

In this chapter I show that the Papua New Guinea Rawa Song of the Flying Fox, the yambo miro, is an authentic tradition not only because it is “anonymous” in the folklorist sense of having no original author, but also because it embodies a “sentiment of being,” a concept that Trilling (1971) borrows from Rousseau. Thus rather than showing how authenticity can involve the interplay between local creativity and foreign ideas and imageries, this chapter shows how a purely Indigenous form of expression can be considered authentic. This is not accomplished through authoring, as is found to be the case by Hammond (Chapter 1) and Pearson (Chapter 6), among others, or even the agency embodied in the social enactment of Kayan spirit beliefs and practices that Aime (Chapter 4) discovers, whose chapter is, in the context of the present volume, both thematically and geographically closest to mine. Rather my chapter shows how this local situating of authenticity is predicated on an existential truth—that the flying fox “spirit” is a psychosocial historical reality which, as Jolly points out in her afterword, is inflected by gender. Trilling’s “sentiment of being” is not a clearly defined emotion or state. It instead must be understood in relation to what it is not: inauthenticity. Inauthenticity is the self-deception that Trilling finds characteristic of bourgeois society. The sentiment of being consists of the various ways that the characters in the literary world Trilling draws seek to affect, escape, and/or reconcile themselves to the inauthenticity of bourgeois self-deception. In contrast to this is a grounded sense of existence, devoid of deception and self-deception. Very often, as in Trilling’s and Rousseau’s accounts, this truer existence involves themes of mortality and compassion, which one can also find in the yambo miro. The authenticity of the yambo miro is thus not negotiated between European metropoles and Pacific locales. Rather it concerns Rawa existential issues of truth and falsity that Westerners can comprehend, however, the yambo miro

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does not easily translate and is losing its effectiveness in modern Western culture. Its anonymity does not make it ahistorical, and the Rawa history in which the yambo miro participates has been dramatic (Dalton 2017b). Rawa have known Europeans since the time of German colonialism. Though they scorned government, Rawa liked missionaries. After their antipathy for government resulted in punitive expeditions when Australian expeditionary forces took control of the north coast from the Germans, after World War I, this colonial violence displaced populations and set off extraordinarily violent endemic warfare among the dispersed hamlets on the southern slopes of the Finisterre Mountains. About a decade later, community leaders managed to bring peace and organize these hamlets into a nucleated village around a Lutheran Church where, almost fifty years later, I was able to undertake research. After I left in 1984, village factions splintered into three communities and the village has now apparently further fragmented into violence. The yambo miro precedes this history and participated in its unfolding. After reviewing the anthropological literature on authenticity and considering capitalist dispossession, I analyze the myth of the origin of the yambo miro, describe its song, and describe the contexts in which I have experienced or heard of the yambo miro employed to elucidate how the myth and song obviate patri-identity, or the identity that men form in “lines” of patrilineal kin, which elicits from men and women compassionate desire to give of themselves. I then turn to a discussion of Rawa ideas about language to explain local notions of falsity and truth and draw parallels between the yambo miro and Rousseau’s “sentiment of existence” before concluding with a discussion of the Rawa sentiment of being, its difference from Western “(in)authenticity,” and the waning influence of the yambo miro among contemporary Rawa.

(In)Authenticity and the Sentiment of Being

When I arrived in Papua New Guinea for my first fieldwork in 1982, with written permission in hand from the research office of Morobe Province, Premier Utula Samana decided that he would no longer allow anthropological researchers into his province (Zimmer-Tamakoshi 2018). While staying in the capital Port Moresby and trying to negotiate a research site, I attended the annual Waigani Seminar and a lecture given by Samana at the University of Papua New Guinea. In their first decade of political independence, Papua New Guinea nationals were busy replacing expatriate government officials and, at the seminar and lecture, Western anthropologists were faulted for not bringing development—for taking without giving. While Samana (1989) was lecturing and writing on locally empowered development, the Nova broadcast, Anthro-

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pology on Trial (Gullahorn-Holecek 1983), was questioning the accuracy and authority of anthropologists’ representations of Papua New Guinean cultures. Anthropologists of the 1970s and 1980s sought to distance themselves from charges of colonialism while reasserting their ethnographic authority to represent cultures by embracing the study of globalization and criticizing the comparative study of cultural difference (Asad 1973; Said 1978; Fabian 1983; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986). By 1990, Appadurai writes, “Recent work in anthropology has done much to free us of the shackles of highly localized, boundary-oriented, holistic, primordialist images of cultural form and substance” (Appadurai 1990: 20). Previous anthropological endeavors came to be seen as distorting Indigenous experience, ignoring the pain of colonialism, thwarting development, excluding natives from history, and denying their agency. Earlier anthropologists were likened to romantic primitivists. Sahlins shows that this critique of earlier work falsely claims “that our intellectual ancestors constructed a notion of cultures as rigidly bounded, separated, unchanging, coherent, uniform, totalized and systematic” and “admit no possibility of human agency,” leading to “the perverse reduction of cultural comparison to invidious distinction” (Sahlins 1999: 404; 2000: 160–61). In this chapter, I follow Sahlins in not being seduced by such criticism. I instead show how the authentic tradition of the yambo miro has participated in and furthered Rawa historical engagements with capitalism and globalization. In the early 1980s, Hobsbawm introduced the notion of “largely factitious” “invented traditions” (Hobsbawm 1983: 2). Intending to elucidate emergent eighteenth- and nineteenth-century state ideologies, Hobsbawm distinguished invented traditions from more malleable “custom,” which specific interest groups in nation-states employ as political precedents to further their agenda. Less noted is Howsbawm’s reference to “old traditional practices” that apparently recede into the remote past with unbroken continuity (Hobsbawm 1983: 8–10). Inspired by this work, anthropologists often brought “invented” to the analyses of local claims about traditions in modern postcolonial nations. In Melanesian studies, this concern involved the analysis of Indigenized kastom along with a broader critique of “authenticity” in Pacific Island culture studies. Together these spawned an extensive and contentious literature (e.g., Babadzan 2000; Falgout 1995; Feinberg 1994; Feinberg and ZimmerTamakoshi 1995; Fillitz and Saris 2012; Handler and Linnekin 1984; Hermann 2011; Jolly and Thomas 1992; Keesing and Tonkinson 1982; Lindstrom and White 1993; Linnekin and Poyer 1990; Otto and Pedersen 2000; Theodossopoulos 2013a). More significantly, it spawned debates between anthropologists and Indigenous activists and scholars (Briggs 1996; Friedman 1992; Hanson 1989, 1991; Inoue 2000; Jolly 1992; Keesing 1989, 1991; Langdon

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1991; Levine 1991; Linnekin 1983, 1991a, 1991b, 1992; Tobin 1995), who were deeply offended by the suggestion that their traditions were politically motivated and false (Hau’ofa 2008; Trask 1990, 1991; see Dalton 2017a). In the context of this debate, some scholars equated invention with authenticity. Theodossopoulos (2013b: 417), for example, asserts “even Emberá tourist presentations, are authentic in themselves, true to what they really are: authentic Emberá ‘tourist performances’” (see Parish 2009: 145). Other scholars substituted terms without shifting theoretical ground, such as the switch from “invented” to “constructed” (Jolly and Thomas 1992: 243; Linnekin 1992: 253; see also Hanson 1991: 450; Inoue 2000: 172; Ranger 1993; Theodossopoulos 2013a: 350; Hermann 2011) or proposed synthetic expressions such as “context bound articulations” (Hermann 2011: 1–14 passim) or a “postinventionist” methodological “double vision” (Biersack 2011: 337–38). In my view, these responses lose what Wittgenstein calls the “battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” because they remain in a false conceptual impasse between authenticity and (in)authentic invention (Wittgenstein 1958: 47). To summarize and clarify, my reading of Trilling goes contrary to the more common sociological interpretation of his idea of authenticity undertaken by anthropologists and philosophers (cf. Mageo and Knauft, Introduction). The more familiar interpretation is that the older “sincerity” has to do with playing a social role whereas “authenticity” involves the wayward, individualistic, asocial, and often narcissistic pursuit of a real and true self that participates in and furthers urban industrial social breakdown. Earlier anthropologists are thought to have attributed a reality and a truth to Indigenous cultures that were later found not to exist because these are situated by histories of colonialism that conferred such notions of authenticity. But Trilling makes it clear that the transformation from sincerity to authenticity does not have to do with the transformation from an organic society to an individualistic or invented one but instead from the problem of fooling others, for which sincerity is the counter, to the problem of fooling oneself—the inauthenticity of the self-absorbed bourgeoisie—for which authenticity is the counter. Interpreting authenticity as an individual, asocial, romantic, or narcissistic pursuit thus effectively misses Trilling’s point. Authorship gets one closer to something one might consider to be authentic but, to be true to Trilling’s theme, this is the case only insofar as it attempts to escape the bourgeois realm in which it finds itself. Trilling finds the model for this in Rousseau’s “sentiment of being” or sense of self that circumvents the self-deluded bourgeois social order. My argument is that one finds this not in the authenticity of Rawa social life or authorship but rather in its selfobviation. In other words, Rawa culture has an analog of bourgeois social life in the patrilineal conventions it constructs. And it has its counter—its authen-

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ticity, in Trilling’s terms—in the yambo miro’s obviation of it, which evokes remarkably similar sentiments to Rousseau’s. It should be no surprise that when anthropologists went to study Pacific Island cultures they did not find the crisis of inauthenticity that Trilling discerned in Western literature. Islanders not only lacked middle class mobility, they had no notion of “society.” Instead, they faced a crisis of foreigners. Indigenous people found themselves having to fathom and navigate secular exploitative capitalist business hierarchies and government tutelage as they jostled with one another and the religious truths of missionaries who sometimes supported these secular endeavors and other times criticized their abuse and oppression (Burridge 1960). Taken together, the deceptive duplicity of these diverse projects adds up to the inauthenticity that Trilling traced in European literature. The cataclysm of foreigners thus amounted to an imported crisis of inauthenticity. Rawa people preferred the missionaries to the government because, among other things, they did not organize punitive expeditions (Dalton 2017b). To overcome the violent aftermath of one such expedition circa 1914, Rawa adopted the mainline Lutheran Christianity that was spreading inland from the eastern tip of the Huon Peninsula in the early twentieth century. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, religious splintering occurred as some Rawa began practicing forms of Pentecostal Christianity. Pentecostalism promises a more direct connection to something real and authentic—God—through exacting and ecstatic practices in the face of the subterfuges of intruding capitalism (Jebens 2006). Rawa have thankfully thus far escaped the resource curse of having their lands dispossessed and communities displaced by large-scale mining projects like the one in Porgera that comprise the major portion of Papua New Guinea’s current national economy (Filer 2012). At the same time, Rawa sometimes express the desire for a similar transformation, as when they showed me a gas seep on their lands. After World War II, Rawa learned to grow coffee, and then figured out that this merely put them on the bottom of a national and international social class system. Many Rawa have worked at the nearby Ramu Sugar factory and elsewhere in the country and continue to do so (Errington and Gewertz 2004). But their continued interpersonal community ties have never allowed social classes to emerge among them (contrast Gewertz and Errington 2006). If I wanted to, however, I could easily narrate this historical dynamic as a story of capitalist dispossession, particularly regarding the punitive expedition that set off fighting and the millennial adoption of Lutheranism to counter its effects. Certainly young Rawa live in a different ontological world than prior generations. But that has itself happened before and will continue to do so. Their millennial movement and Christian conversion was of their own doing and agency, as is their recent reformation of it.

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My thesis is that through all of the above historical twists and turns, the Rawa Song of the Flying Fox (yambo miro) is an authentic tradition because it provides a comparable “sentiment of being” which can be deployed in the face of falsehood and self-deception. In addition to having to deal with an imported crisis of inauthenticity, Rawa culture has its own Indigenous issues with truth and falsity. The yambo miro largely addresses the latter. In the following section, I analyze the myth of the yambo miro to show how it speaks to Rawa issues of truth and falsehood by obviating the patri-identities that men particularly form in “lines” of patrilineal kin.

Obviating Patri-Identity

The headman who gave me permission to move into his village to study Rawa language and culture also told the villagers not to share with me the true basis (Rawa tamoni, Pidgin ass) of “one thing” (Pidgin wanpela samting; Rawa owardi, “fruit” or “food,” or Pidgin kaikai). In other words, he told them not to share any magical knowledge or secrets with me. The headman had been instrumental in establishing the Christian-based nucleated village that he watched over. Though he purportedly did not believe in magic, he that knew most villagers did; while lending credence to their views, his main concern was presenting his village to the world as comprising good, modern progressive Christians and therefore candidates for Western generosity and development. Though I was eventually able to get him to withdraw his edict, magical knowledge was nevertheless not very forthcoming. The one exception to the headman’s decree and the general secretiveness regarding “magic,” albeit with certain limitations, was the yambo miro. I don’t recall when I was first told the myth of the yambo miro or became aware of its existence, but it was present as a cultural expression from the beginning of my fieldwork until its end. Villagers were quite eager to share the myth of the yambo miro with me and acknowledge its use in song. But it was almost impossible for me to obtain the full lyrics of any particular version of the tune. This is probably because, on the one hand, the yambo miro puts Rawa culture in a very positive light and was instrumental in bringing Christianity and peace to the village. On the other hand, it is a magical song whose efficacy depends upon an ineffable attachment to the performer; sharing full lyrics out of context endangers this attachment. It is possible to sing the yambo miro in a collective performance without the experiential knowledge of that attachment, as I sometimes did. Not everyone, after all, is a practicing magician. But a great many if not most people are, and the Song of the Flying Fox is a common magical form, so a yambo miro chorus might contain numerous secretive lyrics along with more common ones. As far as I know, there is no common lyric

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that all versions of the yambo miro share. What they share is a song form and mythical origin. Here I recount and analyze the myth of the yambo miro. This is a direct English paraphrase of its most common version. Once there was a young woman who lived in a house with a banana tree growing behind it that a flying fox used to come eat from. One morning, she awoke to find the flying fox eating her bananas and scolded him saying, “You don’t have a house or make gardens. You just eat my bananas.” She went back to sleep. The flying fox was angry and went into her house and grabbed her saying, “You speak ill of me, now I am going to carry you off to my house and marry you.” And so the flying fox carried her off to a rock overhang deep in the jungle. The woman sat underneath the overhang while her husband hung upside down from the underside of the rock, as flying foxes do. His bright white teeth shown as he grinned. The woman made a fire there and slept. She was lonesome for her family and told the flying fox that she was going to see her family, but that she would return. She went and saw her family and told them that she had married a flying fox. They implored her not to return, but she insisted. When she left, her little brother decided to accompany her. The two of them went back to the flying fox’s jungle lair. She led the way, carrying sweet potato, while her little brother followed close behind carrying his toy bow and arrow. The woman showed her little brother the flying fox and they cooked and ate and slept underneath the rock. The next day the woman went to gather firewood, warning her little brother not to shoot the flying fox. But the boy paid her no heed and while she was gone, he shot the flying fox right in the teeth. The flying fox fluttered to the ground and lay there dying. His wife returned and found him, and he instructed her to make a big fire next to him and return to her family. He said she should watch the smoke from the fire, for if the fire died, this would mean that he too had died. She did as he said and when the smoke stopped, she felt sorry and sang the yambo miro. Rawa people say that the flying fox was a bush spirit, and this is how they got the yambo miro: it is the song the woman in the story sang when the flying fox died. It is his song. The song can be further described by simply singing “miro-ne” (miro: “flying fox” and ne: “my”) to a simplified form of the tune, which thus invokes the flying fox spirit. The flying fox is the spiritual force behind the magic employing the yambo miro. There are numerous themes in this myth that analysis could pursue in relation to the social cultural life of the village. The myth entails issues of wild—domesticated or nature—culture, gender, patri-locality and -lineality, marriage, affinal relations, taking and giving, death and dying, spirits, anger

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and compassion or sorrow, among others. Its narrative sequence consists of a series of substitutions or transformations that begin with a predator or bandit being domesticated and made into a husband, and a woman being made into a wife by the predator. The husband asserts patri-locality and identity but is turned into prey by the woman’s little brother. This leads to his death, transformation into a spirit, and the sorrowful lament of the yambo miro. To understand the “authenticity” embodied in this myth, it is most useful to analyze this series of substitutions in what Wagner calls an “obviation sequence” (Wagner 1978, 2010). Wagner realized that cultures are not just puzzles that myths cogitate but rather narratives involving sequences comprising either achievement or tragedy (or, alternatively, comedy). Myths thus involve heroic narratives of exercising agency and authoring cultural conventions by overcoming obstacles, or anti-heroic ones of having illusions unmasked. Either way, they involved self-obviating transformations that convert themselves from one cultural perceptual state or perspective to another. Most narratives of authorship in this volume comprise cultural achievements, but one can also discern in many of them (e.g. Mageo [Chapter 2], Knauft [Chapter 3], Pearson [Chapter 6]), as one can in the lives of most of Trilling’s characters, elements of tragedy. The yambo miro is clearly a narrative sequence of tragedy. One can be thankful that it does not involving mining. As a compact narrative, it thus comprises a series of substitutions that can be modeled as an obviation sequence, as depicted in Figure 5.1. This is a tale of a patrilineal, patrilocal marriage told from a woman’s perspective. It begins with a wild animal, the flying fox, being domesticated by

Figure 5.1. The myth of the yambo miro obviation sequence. Created by the author.

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the young woman belittling him for having no culture and being a mere thief. But this is no ordinary flying fox. He retaliates by marrying her and taking her off to his jungle lair. Thus the confrontation between wild and domesticated is resolved in a conventional way by being turned into a patrilocal, patrilineal marriage. Rawa men take women in marriage, form masculine “lines” of kin, and thus make patri-identities for themselves and their families. So far so good. But this transpires in the jungle, the woman’s little brother is not so keen on the arrangement and the woman herself is, at best, ambivalent. Despite her warnings, the young lad shoots and mortally wounds the flying fox. On the level of nature or wild, the bandit is thus transformed into prey. On the level of culture, men’s theft of women to form patri-identities is turned into men’s giving and sacrifice to the woman’s kin line. This is the point of mythical “obviation” wherein the questions or tensions between wild and domestic, patriand matri-identities, and between taking and giving are not synthesized but instead cancelled. In other words, once the men’s patri-project is turned into a woman’s matri-project, we are in a new, alternative universe of selves that has a different logic in relation to Rawa convention. The sequence of substitutions addressing the issues relative to masculine kin lines is thus invalidated and, at this point, the story begins what literary theorists call its denouement or “falling action,” viz. the death of the flying fox and obviation of patri-identity. At this point, the secret of self-deception has been made apparent and drives the narrative, and we enter into a new conceptual and perceptual universe that follows a different logic, embodying a female perspective. As the successful hunting of the flying fox transformed men’s patrilineal, patrilocal taking of women into giving of themselves, giving nevertheless becomes loss and memory. The flying fox never really dies but instead becomes a spirit. Some tellers of the myth emphasized the symbolism of the fire and of the glimmering teeth of the flying fox. In one version, in addition to viewing the smoke from the fire as an index of the flying fox’s demise, the last thing the woman saw was the glow of his bright white teeth, which continue to shine even after the flying fox dies. Rawa ideas include the notion that life energies originate in the sun; when prominent, magnanimous people die, their spirits can appear as stars. People are thus actually spirits and so never really die. As husbands give of themselves to their wives and children, they become spirits. Yet this is still a loss for the human embodied world of conventions, where all that remains is grief and lament. This myth thus entails the obviation of patrilineality and patri-identity. It shows patrilineality to be a self-deceptive illusion. The loss of patri-identities and self-delusions invoked by the yambo miro is supposed to create compassionate giving. Considering the degree to which Rawa culture involves the payment of bridewealth and arrangement of marriages so that men and women can “send and extend” or “grow” patri-“lines” (sowisawi) of kin and the effort and

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resources Rawa people expend to maintain kin lines, the obviation of patrilines in the yambo miro myth and song is absolutely remarkable, particularly as it belongs to a very prominent cultural expression. The song sung by the woman is a slow, mournful lament. It modules up a fifth interval, down a second, and then down a minor third before hitting the initial tonic note again. This is then repeated, often with small embellishments, adding an alternation between the fifth and second above it and another between the tonic and second above it in the descent from the fifth. From there it can be repeated ad infinitum although it may also segue into a faster tempo, collective singing-dancing performance driven by rhythmic drumming. For such group singing-dancing-drumming performances, the tune is simplified to a rhythmic descending fifth, second, minor third and then the descending fifth, second, and minor third again plus the tonic repeated several times. I hesitate to draw an analogy between the descent from the fifth above the tune’s tonic and falling action of the myth, but perhaps there is something to it. The individual performance is the form of the tune I was taught, which is sung alone, however the archetypal magical form described to me involves singing the yambo miro from a mountain top through a long bamboo flute to create empathy, peaceable relations, and elicit gifts. In the key of C, the individual melody appears in Western musical notation something like the rendering in Figure 5.2. As mentioned, I found it nearly impossible to obtain lyrics for the song besides the repetition of “o mirone, o mirone, mirone, mirone,” which is how it was partially demonstrated to me. One man finally privately provided me a text of a version of the yambo miro that he used for personal love magic that I was able to write down on a scrap of paper near the end of my fieldwork, but revealing the entire substance of one’s magic without employing it for its intended purpose or passing its powers to someone in very special circumstances risks destroying its powers. This is why I was unable to obtain any other text of the song. And one text does not make a thesis. I can hear some Rawa lyrics in a recording I made of a practice singing of a version of the song for a Lutheran church conference in 1983 but its author, a good friend of mine, never cared to share his composition with me. I found it perplexing how a large chorus can sing a song that contains a magical secret, but I also know that it is easy to sing along with a version of the yambo miro even if one does not know the lyrics. I have seen children do it and have done so myself. And in a collective singing-dancing-drumming per-

Figure 5.2. Yambo miro in western musical notation. Transcribed by the author.

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formance of it, one must always assume that there is more going on than meets the ear. In Rawa group musical performances that are supposed to magically influence an audience, there is always a magician behind them working something unknown to the performers and, in magic generally, it is not the secret names or texts themselves that matter but rather the bond they form between ineffable magical powers and the body of the magician. There is always something a magician or author will not reveal except in very special circumstances. What matters is not so much the yambo miro’s many secrets but instead its efficacy, which is how the veracity of magical secrets are judged.

Forgetting and Giving

I heard and learned of the yambo miro being used in numerous contexts during my year-and-a-half stay in the village where I resided. I first heard the song before I was aware of its existence when I moved into the house that I had built for me in the village. When Rawa people move into homes, they sponsor a feast for those who helped them build it, typically their extended kin and especially affines. I received resources and help from an unusually large number of villagers and, as the day of my house opening ceremony approached, a small group of villagers came to me with a very extensive list of beer and food they thought I should buy for the feast. Other villagers then came to tell me that the people who had presented that list were lying (gana) to me: people don’t give extraordinarily expensive feasts when moving into their new houses, and not everyone had helped as much as they claimed. These differences reflected rival factions in the village who had been involved in efforts to locate my house in different parts of the village of which I was then unaware. I had elected to locate my hut towards the top of the hill where the headman and his kin reside because I liked the view. I decided to sponsor a very large feast. The evening I moved into my house it rained and the villagers erected a tarp in front of my house and proceeded to engage in a large singing-drumming performance that included many rounds of the yambo miro underneath it as we drank beer and feasted on rice and corned beef. I was delighted. After all the factional to and fro and deceptive demands, the villagers came together to reconcile their mutual misgivings and especially any apprehensions that I may have had. The purpose of the yambo miro could not have been clearer and it apparently worked quite well. Rather than being upset or offended I was made to forget any qualms I might have to give generously to the community, as they had given generously to me in building a hut and welcoming me into the village. The last time I heard the yambo miro was shortly before my departure. Again, there were differences regarding what that event meant among the vil-

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lagers. The villagers did not want me to leave. I tried to extend my visa but the Madang provincial government, who at first indicated that I might do so, then decided against it, leaving me in the country with an expired visa. Unbeknownst to me, a group of villagers pleaded my case with the province, but to no avail. Other villagers, however, thought that they had given me a lot and that I was going, no longer to participate in or give back to the community. The issue came down to an argument about generosity. I gave a feast for the entire village that dwarfed my house-opening party. Some villagers made outward displays of compassionate generosity to me while others were angry that I was leaving. In the midst of all this, shortly before my departure feast, a man belonging to the kin line to which I had become most closely related went up on a hill across from the village and sang the yambo miro through a bamboo tube in a classic performance of the tune. This rendition exemplifies archetypal performance of the yambo miro that was described to me. When a man wants to produce compassionate empathy and sorrow in someone, he goes up onto a mountain top and sings the yambo miro through an eight- to ten-foot-long bamboo tube. This is to produce peace in and elicit giving from whomever the man wants to influence. Following that, he would approach them to make amends and/or obtain gifts. This is typically done out of sight but evidently not out of earshot of the performer’s intended audience. The only other times I have seen the yambo miro sung through a bamboo pipe was when the village headman had a young man demonstrate this technique to me behind my house, at the beginning of a very large singing-dancing-drumming performance that the villagers gave for the opening of the Kanama Lutheran Church Conference that they hosted, and in a touristic encounter. The performance for the conference followed a long history of such performances to bring missionaries and Christianity to the village, which was modeled on the singing-dancing-drumming displays that once were employed to bring guests into hamlets for pig feasts. The performance for pig feasts joined nicely with a community conversion rite the Neuendettelsau missionaries brought with them into the mountains (see Dalton 2017b). This ritual had been created by the German missionary Christian Keyser from an Indigenous peacemaking ritual under the direction of the Kate big-man Zake. It entailed antagonistic communities confessing their misgivings for one another and burning and burying their artifacts of war and sorcery before the missionaries announced a new beginning for a community rooted in Christianity. This ritual spawned a very successful missionary movement that native evangelists brought into the interior of Papua New Guinea from the eastern end of the Huon Peninsula. To end a period of violent warfare set off by colonists on the north coast, the people of my village went to get a Neuendettelsau missionary from the

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Ramu-Markham divide and brought him into the mountains with a performance like that employed for pig feasts. This was done again when the missionary was located further up in the mountains to establish the village where I undertook fieldwork in a large-scale regional Christian millennial movement. The last time that such a display and drama was undertaken prior to the Kanama Konfrens was in 1972, when the villagers inaugurated a new, modern church building that they constructed in the center of the village, which was accompanied again by burning and burying war implements and other artifacts. The Kanama Konfrens took place while I resided in the village and began with the performers bringing the delegates into the village through a barrier that had been erected on the path to it with a singing-dancing-drumming procession led by a pair of long bamboo flutes that wailed the yambo miro before the performers settled into the rhythmic rendition and danced toward the church, “pulling” the delegates into the heart of the village. The two flutes emulated the pair of much smaller male-female bamboo piston flutes once kept in the spirit house and used by men to express their alimentary and sexual desires to women, who lived in separate residences. As far as I know, this was not typical of the performance of the yambo miro employed for pig feasts. But the idea of the performance was the same, that is to affect the mental and emotional states of the guests to encompass and contain them, cool their hostility and anger, and appeal to them to give of themselves for the benefit of the hosts. Pig feasts were intended to obtain the shell valuables, which are body decorations (kunawo) employed in bridewealth. Hosts raised herds of pigs and then invited the guests, who wore their valuables in enticing somatic displays while singing and dancing around the spirit house, which lasted all night. Young men and women worked love magic on one another, one popular form of which employs the yambo miro. Hosts shed their valuables as they used them to buy pork as it was distributed for the feast and everyone feasted lavishly. Women and men had sexual trysts and women often accompanied their lovers home the next morning and married them. The yambo miro might be employed one last time in a marriage episode. When a couple’s first-born child reaches an age when she or he is able to come and go on her or his own, their line of kin hosts a ceremony for the youngster’s mother’s brother’s kin. The mother’s brother “decorates” (irosala, Pidgin bilas) the child with shell valuables, wealth and clothing, for which they are provided a feast. Affinal relations are often rather close but they can also be quite tense. While the child’s family tries to make up for the loss of the youngster with a generous feast, the mother’s brother’s line is typically aggrieved. Yet they give to the child in a purely generous act. After a night of drinking and feasting, in-laws might sing the yambo miro.

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I never got to observe a ceremony to “decorate the child” in its entirety because it is a strictly family affair and my close kin never participated in one. But one mother’s brother to whom I had loaned some money had come to my village to adorn his sister’s son, and he called me to the headman’s house to drink a case of beer with him the morning after the ceremony, where we proceeded to sing the yambo miro together. One young man who had received some schooling on the coast and had an idea that I was engaged in something he learned to call “social studies” overheard us, came into the house, observed us singing and became very excited, saying to me “You got it! You truly understand our culture!” (Yu save! Yu save tru long mipela!) Besides being shown and explained to me, the resident anthropologist, I saw the yambo miro demonstrated and referenced on two other occasions. One time I was visiting the government outstation at Tauta and saw some European expatriates from Ramu Sugar who had driven up into the mountains on a weekend excursion to observe local life, as they did on occasion. A man came out of his house and regaled them from his veranda with the yambo miro through a long bamboo tube. As far as I know, as was virtually always the case, the man never saw them again. On another occasion, while visiting Madang, on observing some flying foxes pass by, one of the villagers I was with told a man from another language group we had met in town “mipela i got dispela samting,” that is “we Rawa people have this thing.” I took this to be a statement to the effect that the yambo miro is an important part of Rawa speakers’ ethnic identity. Except for this expression of identity, all the contexts in which I heard of or observed the yambo miro being used entailed ones in which the performers appeal to people to forget who they are, or who they think they are, to give of themselves to others. It is the effectiveness of the yambo miro in doing so that, in Rawa discourse, gives it authenticity. The yambo miro enjoins people to forgo their identities as “lines” of kin and members of the religious spirit house or village church communities around which “lines” are organized and give to their affines, hosts, or others. It is thus supposed to obviate people’s selves, illusions, and self-deceptions. It is generally very effective, although apparently not so much with tourists and is of limited use with the anthropologist. For the moment, I concentrate on elucidating its effectiveness before concluding with a consideration of its limitations.

Lying, Sensing, and Dying

Rawa speakers have a metapragmatic discourse—that is a discourse about the practical effects of discourse—that they employ to measure authenticity. Here I elucidate that discourse and relate it to the yambo miro, thus making a twist

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in my argument: the yambo miro is judged to be authentic and true according to its demonstrated historical efficacy but, as I have already shown, that efficacy derives from its revelation of the fallacy or inventedness of Rawa convention, that of men’s patriliny. The yambo miro’s authenticity thus stems from its disclosure of inauthenticity. This is how the yambo miro anchors itself in a specific locality. I then discuss how the mythical denouement following that disclosure relates to the themes of Rousseau’s “sentiment of being.” Rawa judge the truthfulness of any statement or endeavor in relation to the “fruit” (owardi, Pidgin kaikai) that it bears. If it bears fruit, it is said to be “true” (amo, or amo ete—“true spoke-he”). Otherwise it is false (kini, or kini tewo—“did not come to be”) and its protagonist is said to lie (gana). Such judgments can be quite serious when dealing with affinal and bridewealth exchange or investments in cargo cults or business development. But it may be also applied to any undertaking. Bearing “fruit” is particularly employed to estimate the efficacy of any type of magic and the veracity of its secret “root” or “basis” (tamoni). Suggesting someone lied is more often much less serious and often even funny. Someone might announce that they are going to their garden the next day and then feel lazy and stay home instead. They might then be derided in all good humor for having deceived not so much others but themselves, like a trickster character. I did not see much deception or self-deception in the small face-to-face village community where I resided. Understandably, people do not generally share their intentions publicly. If someone openly declares their plans and habitually fails to follow through, they are judged to be inept “garbage” (pipia; Pidgin rabis) men or much worse in the case of serious matters. People are generally quite willing to share their intentions privately, however, necessarily among their own kin or cooperative group as most endeavors involve a number of people. Likewise, people do not impute intentions to others, certainly not in public, although I found Rawa generally willing to do so in private, unsolicited, but they generally have little reason to do so. Rawa notions of authenticity are apparent in their language ideology. The metapragmatic discourse surrounding the verb gana, to “lie” or “deceive,” shows that one assumption Rawa people have about language is that one can lie with it. Rawa also suppose that language is not abstract and representational but instead discursive, embedded, and contextual. This understanding is implicit in their reference to their own language as norengo mande, “our talk” or “conversation.” Rather than a structured set of rules or pragmatics, Rawa view “language” as an ongoing, ever-changing conversation involving an exchange of experiences and perspectives or, in other words, a discourse. Although Rawa metapragmatics assume that language can be used to lie, they also suppose that there are certain words and expressions that are indubitably true. This is the case with secret magical names and formulae that

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produce effects or “fruit” and with public oratory that everyone agrees is true, about which is it said “amo ete,” (true spoke-s/he) or that the speaker got (yo, Pidgin kisim) or hit (orote) it “straight” (nenengo). What is thus captured or obtained is the true “inside” (newendemo) of the subject matter, like its “root” (tamoni), in contradistinction to speaking “ontop” or around it (sanganimo). Finally, in their discussion of truth and falsehood, Rawa make the metalinguistic assumption that power is hidden and manifest in language as in everything else; this is the basis of their analysis of the “root” and the “fruit” of any discourse or endeavor. The Rawa yambo miro has become a timeless tradition by virtue of its veracity, both in terms of its effectiveness and in relation to the incontrovertible existential truth of men’s mortality that it employs to produce its effects. These truths of men’s illusions and mortality are tantamount to an authentic “sentiment of being.” The organic trope of the “fruit” and the “root” may be not metaphoric at all but rather literal: especially as it is subject to magic, hidden and manifest power that comprise a living aware universe in which everything potentially participates. Nonetheless, this trope expresses the importance of gardens for Rawa sustenance. Yet Rawa are at least equally devoted to the growth of kin. Rawa Indigenous religious conception was dedicated to the “eye of the sun” and endeavored to harness the sun’s energies to grow gardens, pigs, children, “lines” (sowisawi, “to send and extend” or “grow”) of kin, hamlet and village communities, and collections of shell wealth. As I have shown elsewhere (Dalton 2016a), Rawa bridewealth and other exchanges are not based on social rules, obligations, or values and such but are instead orchestrated by embodied gendered subjects intent on “sending and extending” their selves in lines of kin: rather than social obligations or gift-debts, Rawa employ enticements and appeals to overcome others’ self-making projects and obtain their embodied energies and capacities for increase, getting others to give of themselves. The yambo miro is one such appeal. Men invest their selves in the production of patri-“lines” of kin. They were never so happy as when I showed them the extensive kinship charts I had made of their family “lines.” Most seemed quite satisfied that their kin lines are as extensive as anyone’s. But smaller kin groups whose social networks had become so attenuated during a period of marauding warfare that some who had married their first cousins seemed somewhat embarrassed by this. Rawa also take pride in the size of their village church communities and jealously compare them with others. Villages and hamlets overflowing with children and kin are the “fruit” that demonstrates the power of its residents. Yet the extent of men’s kin lines is entirely dependent on women, who are as least as responsible for growth as men, and both women and men are aware of this. In addition, men suppose that, as they pass on their life energies to their wives and children through coitus, they enervate, grow old, and die.

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There are clear parallels between this set of conceptions and Trilling’s and Rousseau’s “sentiment of being.” Rousseau viewed the authentic “sentiment of existence” as first developing when a child literally comes to its senses (Rousseau 1979). His ideal of natural man was that of an individual employing her or his senses and intelligence to take care of basic needs and self-preservation, having been educated not to exploit others in the process. Rousseau contrasts sensing with judging and comparing, whence one becomes lost in a world of bourgeois opinions, divided from oneself and prone to pride, vanity, competition, resentment, slavishness, and all sort of vice (Rousseau 1979: 270). The Rawa understanding of hearing-smelling-thinking (ingo) comprising individual autonomy and authority seems to substantiate Rousseau’s ideal of the noble tribesman who lives within his sensate self rather than deriving his sentiment of being from the opinion of others (Rousseau 1997: 187), as does the fact that Rawa organize and conduct exchange as embodied gendered subjects rather than in relation to (in)authentic social obligations or values. Rousseau’s sentiment of existence is also apparent in the way that Tahitian tenues végétales are grounded in the truths of people’s experience, ecology and life ways, as Hammond (Chapter 1) so aptly demonstrates. Trilling adopts “sentiment of being” from Rousseau and employs it to measure the achievements and failings of various efforts to overcome, escape, or reconcile to the crisis of inauthenticity faced by the characters in the literary world he examines (Trilling 1971: 62, 92 et passim). Trilling defines it as “the individual’s experience of his existence” and takes his example of unquestionable “authenticity” from Wordsworth’s poem “Michael” (Trilling 1971: 92). An old man who lost the son with whom he used to build a stone wall to contain their sheep to the corruption of the city, Michael is known to sit all day at the wall without lifting a stone or saying or expressing anything: “he and his grief are one” (Trilling 1971: 93). Rousseau’s educational program involves moving the pupil’s natural sensate being into social awareness by first teaching him compassion, which consists of learning to identify with the suffering of others, making the student realize that the pain of others could just as easily be his own (Rousseau 1979: 221–27). This prevents him from forming his sentiment of being in relation to others on the basis of social opinion. One of the last things Rousseau teaches his pupil is to detach himself from worldly desires and the illusions of pride and imaginary pleasures so as to embrace rather than fear death (Rousseau 1979: 446). Grief, suffering, and death are also themes of the yambo miro myth and sorrowful lament. One also finds them in Pearson’s contribution (Chapter 6): a great many of the themes that Pacific Islanders chose to tell in their digital storytelling project concern pathos, suffering, illness, death, and the grief and care and giving evinced by relatives. The story Dear Grandma that was screened for these Digital Storytelling workshops is comparable to the

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sentiment of Wordsworth’s “Michael.” As I have discussed elsewhere, perhaps the most salient feature of Rawa mourning rituals is the palpable common experience of gross physical disintegration and death (Dalton 2016b). As the myth of the origin of the yambo miro obviates patri-identity and forces men to forgo their illusions, the song mourns the death of men whose energies support wives and children. In the course of men’s lives, before their final passing, men who hear the plaintive melody of the yambo miro are educed to give of themselves for the sake of others. In some respects this suasion is remarkably similar to Trilling’s and Rousseau’s “sentiment of being.” Besides being grounded in sensate experiences, Rawa culture deploys the yambo miro to obviate the illusions of patri-identity by substituting death, grief, and mourning. But there are also important differences between Rousseau’s and Rawa sentiments and cultures.

The Yambo Miro and the Politics of Authenticity

I have endeavored to show that the Rawa Song of the Flying Fox is an authentic cultural tradition. My argument is that its authenticity derives not from its authorship or agency but rather its sentiment of being. Indeed its agency derives from that sentiment. Trilling, like Rousseau, employs this sentiment to counter bourgeois self-deception. Similarly, the yambo miro tragedy obviates the self-deception of Rawa men’s patriliny, and its song expresses a sentiment of being. Rawa people have their own metapragmatic discourse regarding what is true and authentic in relation to their cultural conventions, find authenticity in their obviation, and measure truth by its effects. The yambo miro was not only ubiquitous in my field experience and effective in soliciting giving, it played a crucial role in Rawa history in relation to Christianity, selftransformation, and change. Trilling and Rousseau employ “sentiment of being” to critique the inauthenticity of self-seeking bourgeois duplicity; the Rawa yambo miro similarly counters men’s self-delusions, but it lacks efficacy in relation to a Western European imported crisis of inauthenticity. The two systems are in some ways very different. Gluckman noted that tribal people such as Rawa are prone to rebellion rather than revolution when confronted with the dysfunction of social political orders, of which Rawa women are especially well aware (Gluckman 1965). Though Rawa people undertook a complete millennial selftransformation last century, they did not seek to overturn their political system, which is embedded in their organization of kinship and exchange, even though they converted to Christianity (Dalton 2017b). Unlike Western polities, Rawa have no notion of “society” to critique and reform according to the ideal of (in)authenticity. Rather, Rawa culture contains

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its own obviation in the yambo miro, whereas Western European bourgeois culture has nothing analogous to this. Rawa culture is thus self-correcting, working as a negative feedback system. One might compare the balance of opposing powers that have come to comprise Western political systems and the differences between Whigs and Tories or liberals and conservatives; these maintain the social order, not overturn it, and are thus more rebellious than revolutionary. The bourgeois order itself, however, is unlike the organization of Rawa kin lines but is like the capital accumulation that feeds it; it grows without check at the expense of others until it precipitates a cataclysm. Liberals and conservatives of many ideological stripes participate in and promote the bourgeois social order, or their versions of it, while contesting their different political idealisms. They do not do anything like what Rawa men do: sing of their own deaths to elicit giving of their selves for the sake of others. For Berman, the “politics of inauthenticity” is the self-seeking pretense and deception that is necessary for social climbing and sycophantic success in a world run by bourgeois bureaucrats; the “politics of authenticity” is revolution (Berman 1970). Even though he became the darling of the French Revolutionaries, Rousseau foresaw and forewarned against a revolution and tried to educate a populace to avert it (Rousseau 1979: 194 et passim). More realist than romantic, Rousseau was apparently least well read by the very people whom he most needed to influence. History has no shortage of ironies. In recent years, some Rawa have organized themselves into haus man groups that go around killing people whom they do not like (Gesch and Julius 2015; Mark 2017a, 2017b). The victims are said to be witches or sorcerers. Rawa organize themselves into large groups in these situations to lend credence to their activities and avoid government prosecution and conviction. What seems to be new is that these groups are now much larger and have become well established rather than organized for each occasion, and such occasions have grown greatly in number. Perhaps displaced colonial violence stemming from years of capitalist dispossession has reached a crescendo. More likely, the bourgeois illusions of the contemporary capitalist epoch have reached their point of denouement, at least as far as many Rawa are concerned. The yambo miro’s efficacy in relation to the Western bourgeois capitalist world is now unknown to me, but doubtful. That is why, rather than writing a heroic tale that foregrounds Rawa escape from capitalist dispossession, I write a more somber and tragic narrative, in keeping with the tenor of the yambo miro itself. I think it is probably wise to heed Rousseau’s counsel. Doug Dalton has lived and studied in a rural Rawa speaking village in the northeast Finisterre Mountains of Papua New Guinea. He has published numerous articles on various aspects of Rawa culture and currently teaches anthropology at Longwood University.

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Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. Zimmer-Tamakoshi, Laura. 2018. “Fieldwork Interrupted: The Politics of Fieldwork in Papua New Guinea.” In First Fieldwork: Pacific Anthropology, 1960–1985, ed. Laura Zimmer-Tamakoshi, 131–47. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

6 Digital Storytelling in the Pacific and “Ethnographic Orientalism” SARINA PEARSON AND SHUCHI KOTHARI

Digital storytelling is a participatory visual and digital research method used in a wide variety of academic and nonacademic settings including the digital humanities and health sciences. Its popularity can be attributed to increasingly accessible digital technologies, but it also offers an attractive alternative mode of knowledge production to those sensitized to the relations of power in scholarly representation, referred to as the “reflexive turn” in ethnography (Behar and Gordon 1995; Clifford and Marcus 1986). The facilitated StoryCenter model of digital storytelling captures the social and dialogic nature of ethnographic knowledge production while focusing attention explicitly upon storytellers and their voice. These qualities make digital storytelling useful in projects as diverse as developing proto-cinematic and cinematic narratives, as a component of health research, and as a community arts practice that circulates both within insular Pacific communities and at the interface between minority diasporic Pacific communities and broader publics. Digital storytelling appears to address and perhaps even resolve some of the seemingly intractable and vexing issues about authorship and authenticity that have dogged cross-cultural scholarship. However, as Mageo and Knauft note in their introduction to this volume, conceptions of authorship and authenticity in the Pacific remain paradoxically promiscuous and contextually specific. They are also prone to “travel” across spaces and disciplinary formations. These concepts pick up particular inflections and discard or transform others as they course through various cultural fields such as contemporary beauty contests in Tahiti (Hammond Chapter 1), colonial photography in Samoa (Mageo Chapter 2) and academic ethnography (Knauft Chapter 3). This chapter uses digital stories produced as part of a project titled Digital Storytelling in the Pacific, which took place in Fiji, Tonga, and Aotearoa New Zealand, to examine how authorship and authenticity refract, ricochet, and rupture in discourses of contemporary Pacific narrative production, Māori palliative care health research, and Pacific fine art. In the process, it reveals how authenticity in its primordial cultural sense articulates or rather occasionally disarticulates

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with modern conceptions of authenticity as individualized and irreducible uniqueness (Mageo and Knauft Introduction). Digital storytelling refers to a diverse set of practices which include professionally produced instructional narratives such as those made by the US military (Cianciolo et al. 2007) and displays made by museum and gallery designers (Wyman et al. 2011). It can also refer to user generated content on social media sites such as Instagram and Facebook. Here, it refers to a specific genre and method of multimedia production developed in the 1990s by the Center for Digital Storytelling (now StoryCenter) in Berkeley, California. StoryCenter Digital Stories are short (between two to five minutes) and consist of a first-person voice-over narration (typically voiced by the author themselves), juxtaposed against still or moving images sourced by the storyteller; sometimes accompanied by music they have chosen or performed. People who usually have little or no professional media production experience make digital stories in a workshop setting where they have access to creative and technical assistance. Pioneered as a method to facilitate grassroots creative expression and foster cultural democracy because of its low cost and relative accessibility, digital storytelling is now used in a wide range of settings including, but by no means limited to: social anthropology (Gubrium and Harper 2016; Underberg and Zorn 2013), health research and communication (Ferrari, Rice, and McKenzie 2015; Gubrium 2009; Williams et al. 2017), tertiary media and communications education (Alexander 2011), cultural institutions (Ioannidis et al. 2013), and a variety of grassroots community organizations (California Listens, Silence Speaks, Staying Positive). The appeal of digital storytelling in many of these fields is its emphasis upon personal voice, the storyteller’s lived experience, and their point of view (Lundby 2008: 106). The narratives are often valued as authentic because individual authors know the event or subject intimately. However, there isn’t always an easy consensus on what constitutes authenticity and legitimacy. As many chapters in this volume attest, authenticity is “not so much a state of being as it is the objectification of a process of representation . . . it refers to a set of qualities that people in a particular time and place have come to agree represent an ideal or exemplar” (Vannini and Williams 2009: 3). In many respects constructions of authorship and authenticity in Pacific screen production, health sciences and fine art correspond, but they also occasionally contradict each other; sometimes quite forcefully. These sites of conflict not only illuminate how divergent disciplinary expectations, assumptions, and practices are, they yield insight into the role essentialism plays in contemporary New Zealand cultural and identity politics. The stimulus for this chapter emerged during a vexed and genuinely confusing encounter with curators at Auckland City Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. What began as a perfectly cordial preliminary meeting to discuss the possibil-

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ity of a gallery installation of digital stories by and about nonprofessional storytellers from Fiji, Tonga, and Auckland accompanied by an interactive outreach component where members of the public could interact with the stories and perhaps produce some of their own, rapidly devolved into a surprisingly tense and hostile encounter. The curators categorically rejected the digital stories in the project as irredeemably inauthentic. They argued that they had been fatally corrupted by digital storytelling as a genre and by its methods, specifically the workshop model where facilitators and peers offer suggestions and give storytellers feedback. We had apparently transgressed an ethical boundary by “teaching participants in our project to make films.” As we endeavored to clarify our project, its aims, our experiences, and the feedback we had received from participants, one curator condemned our project as an egregious and unforgiveable example of “ethnographic Orientalism” (Said 1978). The accusation was confounding. We were fully aware that our project had limitations but exoticising Māori and Pasifika1 in totalizing and stereotypical ways, suppressing their agency, and engaging in acts of imaginative misrepresentation by projecting hegemonic self-interested values and then claiming these projections as knowledge were not among them. Stung and insulted but also intrigued and curious, we sought further clarification but the meeting concluded abruptly and we left none the wiser. Moments of social rupture and misunderstanding potentially diagnose paradigmatic boundaries and offer insight into how contradictions arise and what they might mean. This chapter seeks to “unpack” the encounter at the art gallery to show how authorship and ethnographic authenticity are inconsistently understood and implemented across disciplines and to consider what implications these inconsistencies might have. It begins by characterizing authorship and authenticity in digital storytelling as an emergent media production practice, then turns to its use in health science research as a component of grounded theory and as public health communication before returning to the art gallery and its claims that digital storytelling extends and reinforces Orientalist practices.

Digital Storytelling in Pacific Screen Production Pedagogy

Despite the critical success of films like Tamasese’s The Orator (2011), One Thousand Ropes (2016), and Hereniko’s The Land has Eyes (2004); the popularity of the Sione’s franchise (Sione’s Wedding directed by Graham 2006 and Sione’s 2: Unfinished Business directed by Bennett 2012); and Vaiaoga-Ioasa’s grassroots features Three Wise Cousins (2016), Hibiscus and Ruthless (2018), and Take Home Pay (2019) cinematic representation in the Pacific remains a very marginal enterprise. Pacific creatives and communities face barriers that

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include an absence of infrastructure and resources (Pearson 2002) as well as a sense that many narratives are banal or quotidian and therefore not necessarily worth recording in audiovisual form (Kathari [sic] in Oughton and McVeigh 2014). Motivated by a series of discussions at CILECT (Centre International de Liaison des Ecoles de Cinéma et de Télévision) congresses and their Asia Pacific sub-association meetings about how to facilitate Pacific digital audiovisual storytelling, we, along with Peter Simpson, began Digital Storytelling in the Pacific. It was broadly inspired by the American digital storytelling movement’s political commitment to give minority communities greater access to audio-visual representation especially where they have been marginalized or excluded from broadcast media. Daniel Meadows’s ambitious and longrunning Capture Wales project was a key influence (http://www.bbc.co.uk/ wales/audiovideo/sites/galleries/pages/capturewales.shtml). Developed to shore up the BBC’s commitment to Reithian values to inform, educate, and entertain in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the UK’s broadcast ecology was experiencing seismic disruption (Meadows and Kidd 2009: 93), Capture Wales “intended to reveal and assemble a cohort of unique, individual stories of people living in Wales creating a narrative patchwork that reflected the diversity of Welsh life” (Lewis and Matthews 2017: 106). Meadows and his team ran monthly digital storytelling workshops across Wales for seven years between 2001–08. By the end of the project, Capture Wales facilitated more than a thousand stories both directly and indirectly, hundreds of which were available to view on the Capture Wales website (Meadows and Kidd 2009: 113). Capture Wales radically diversified the kinds of stories associated with Wales and it gave creative agency to a constituency of individuals who were accustomed to thinking of themselves strictly as audience rather than as content producers (Meadows and Kidd 2009: 92). Digital Storytelling in the Pacific was interested in leveraging a similar cultural and creative shift in the Pacific region, albeit on a much more modest scale. We began with two pilot workshops at the University of the South Pacific: one in Fiji and another in Tonga. After obtaining ethics approval from the University of Auckland we followed StoryCenter’s workshop model closely, conducting three-day workshops with groups of nine to ten participants. In Suva nine participants (six women and three men) were drawn from professional staff at USP’s Center for Flexible Learning. In Tonga, ten participants (eight women and one man) were drawn from academics, professional staff, and senior students. Several weeks prior to the workshop participants received a detailed email outlining what they were going to do and how they might prepare. We encouraged participants to watch a few digital storytelling examples on StoryCenter’s YouTube channel. They were also advised to read a short selection from Joe

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Lambert’s Digital Storytelling Cookbook (2010) and come to the workshop with a draft of a story idea and a selection of images in digital or analogue form. Workshops commenced with introductions, setting ground rules, and general housekeeping, and then participants were offered strategies for developing a story. We encouraged them to think carefully about why they wanted to tell this story at this moment in time and to find a “moment of change” around which a short narrative could be developed. These workshops had no prompt. Many digital storytelling workshops provide participants with a prompt or theme. Prompts vary widely but in the Pacific region, climate change, gender violence, and noncommunicable diseases are common. In Digital Storytelling in the Pacific participants were free to select any personal story they wanted. While these workshops were promptless we were aware that storytellers would be influenced (perhaps profoundly) by the examples we introduced them to. At both workshops in Fiji and Tonga we screened four stories Dear Grandma (MacArthur 2012), Names (Hoshino 2012), You Can Have This Back (Charlton 2003), and Doors (McDermott 2013). We showed these stories because they recounted positive and negative events, some illustrated how personal stories could also reflect broader social and cultural values, how sound and image could be used literally, figuratively, as documentary evidence, and metaphorically. We also wanted to alert participants to the dialogic and collaborative process of digital storytelling. Dear Grandma is structured as a letter to the storyteller’s late grandmother. MacArthur describes his love for his grandmother who prepared his favorite meals and doted upon him, but he also pays tribute to her accomplishments as a well-respected school principal and early defender of civil rights. We showed this story because a “letter structure” can be helpful in shaping a short narrative and because the storyteller deftly weaves his personal recollection with broader social and community history. Hoshino’s Names might also be considered a tribute story that weaves a personal narrative into a broader historical context. She recounts how her mother was given three different names over the course of her life. Shifting historical events in Sino-Japanese relations precipitated each name change. Whereas MacArthur’s story uses only personal photographs, Hoshino draws upon historical archival photographs (of Chiang Kai Shek for example) and she develops a sophisticated soundtrack with different types of score and sound effects. Her story shows storytellers how cropping, motion control, and reframing can be used to control emphasis. You Can Have this Back is a woman’s account of life with her abusive husband, her subsequent divorce, and what she did when tasked with clearing out what had been her marital home following her ex-husband’s death. We showed this story because it not only addresses personally difficult episodes in the storyteller’s life, but it adopts a metaphorical visual strategy. Most indi-

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viduals archive celebratory life events but rarely photograph traumatic events such as divorce, funerals, or sudden misfortune. Digital storytelling places a premium upon stories grounded in a personal experience or point of view but storytellers are free to adopt whatever visual strategy they feel is appropriate. The images accompanying this story were not necessarily Charlton’s own but rather images she felt authentically expressed her story. Doors recounts Matt McDermott’s heartbreak over his son’s drug addiction. He tells his story through the prism of his own dysfunctional relationship with his father; a toxic relationship that motivated McDermott to become a different parent to his son no matter how difficult. Doors is similar to You Can Have This Back insofar as both make use of metaphorical visual strategies presumably in the absence of adequate or appropriate personal photographic archives. We also showed this story because it was not the story McDermott originally planned to tell. He arrived at a StoryCenter workshop prepared to make a tribute to his grandmother who was an accomplished dressmaker and opera singer. Over the course of his first workshop day, he changed his mind. He was influenced to change course by stories and ideas told by his fellow workshop participants. With some food for thought and some lunch the workshop participants settled into the next component of the workshop—their story circle. For the next few hours each storyteller spent ten to fifteen minutes telling their story. In turn, we encouraged fellow participants and facilitators to respond and give feedback, identifying emotionally powerful, narratively compelling, or confusing moments. This feedback process helped storytellers in a number of ways. For some, feedback was primarily affirmation and provided opportunities to focus their story. For others however, questions and further dialogue alerted storytellers to latent possibilities in their stories and gave them inspiration to shift their focus or perhaps even to tell an entirely different story. In both pilot workshops, participants knew each other quite well and, in many cases offered advice or encouragement based on their personal and work relationships. Following the story circle, workshop participants had the remainder of the day to revise and edit their stories. Facilitators (in this case Sarina Pearson and Shuchi Kothari) typically story edit each participant’s narrative to ensure that it was an appropriate length (less than three hundred words). In general, digital storytelling advances an aesthetic that “aims to maximize relevance and impact. Economy is a core principle of this aesthetic” (Burgess 2006: 207). Pragmatically speaking, length is an important factor because one of the firm objectives of this workshop model is that complete stories are screened at the close of the workshop. The longer the story, the less likely it becomes that novice (or even experienced) multimedia storytellers will finish, and without significant support (technical, creative, and logistical) stories are rarely completed

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afterward. While there was a research imperative to finish stories within the temporal and creative constraints of a three-day pilot workshop, we were also aware that storytellers in other digital storytelling initiatives generally report deriving a deep sense of achievement and creative fulfilment from screening their completed story (Lambert 2010). We wanted everyone to feel this way at the conclusion of these workshops. The story editing process was as collaborative as the storyteller desired. Over the course of the two workshops facilitators intervened at this stage of the process in two primary ways. Some participants struggled to write their story. On these occasions, their story was recorded, sometimes a facilitator conducted an informal interview or conversation to explore what elements the story might contain and how it would be structured. This recording was then transcribed and edited in collaboration with the storyteller. In all cases, the storyteller retained ultimate creative control. Storytellers then recorded their completed stories. Facilitators assisted in this part of the process by directing the storyteller’s performance. Directing might include reminders not to rush, identifying where some aspects of the performance feel “read” or flat, and giving storytellers the opportunity to correct problematic stumbles. The remainder of the workshop involved some technical instruction, such as how to lay audio tracks in a timeline, how to scan and/or edit and insert images, create titles, and if time permitted how to achieve simple special effects. Once storytellers laid their voice-over narration into their timeline, they spent most of their workshop time selecting and placing images in relation to that narration. We encouraged participants to source images from personal archives and use them referentially but when these were inadequate, to use stock images sourced in the Creative Commons. Participants were also encouraged to consider using images abstractly and/or metaphorically if appropriate. Visual resources significantly influence the types of stories participants feel able to tell. In the Fiji workshop, Ronald Philitoga wanted to tell a story about how different his children’s childhoods were compared to his own. In the story circle he reminisced about driving through Suva in the seventies, windows down, warm night air billowing through the car while listening to a blaring 8-track. In contrast his kids sit in air-conditioned comfort, tethered to game consoles and their phones. When it came time to edit his story and consider his visual strategy, Ron realized he didn’t have the visual resources his story required. Consequently, he changed his story to one about the unexpected trials he faces raising four daughters while his wife works as a long-haul flight attendant on Fiji Air; a story for which he had abundant personal archives and some video. Not all participants changed their stories to fit their archives or felt obliged to slavishly adhere to documentary principles of visible evidence. Some storytellers used archival images as a proxy. For example, Katarina Foliaki told a story about how her i-Kiribati father served in World War II as part of the

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Allied forces in the Pacific. She sourced images showing military engagement from the National Archives in the US to supplement her own portraits of her father. Other participants sourced images entirely from the internet. For example, Joshua Handyside told a story about a memorable trip he took to his uncle’s house on an off-shore island some years ago. It was a story about a city kid going to the country for an adventure. He had no personal images of the trip but he was firmly committed to his story and consequently developed a strategy of appropriating found images to craft his narrative. A significant number of storytellers also created images during the workshop (usually by taking photographs or recording short videos) to supplement their stories. Some used these images literally and others had a more figurative approach. When participants requested help producing images, facilitators assisted. The collaborative dynamic initiated during the story circle continued through the story construction period. Workshop participants watched each other’s stories in progress, talked to each other about visual or audio choices and sometimes offered technical support. Facilitators were likewise on hand to help storytellers who wanted to achieve a particular effect but did not yet possess the technical capability to achieve it. Towards the end of the third day, stories were finished and assembled for the screening. We encouraged workshop participants to invite family and friends. After screenings in both Fiji and Tonga, participants gathered for a celebratory meal. Copies of stories were distributed to all participants (except for one where technical issues proved intractable). These stories can be viewed at http://digitalstories.nz/. In total, the Digital Storytelling in the Pacific pilot generated nineteen stories. Although they varied quite considerably, key themes emerged, many of which overlapped. Most stories addressed some aspect of family. Many addressed identity and experiences of displacement and transnationalism. Work also emerged as a significant theme probably because the workshops were conducted in participants’ workplaces or educational institutions. All of the stories engaged with conditions of modernity and while many were earnest, a few used humor. The digital stories generated in the pilot project are “authentic” Pacific narratives in the sense that storytellers were from Fiji and Tonga and the stories they told were about their personal experiences expressed from their personal point of view. These workshops reflected the cosmopolitanism of Suva and Nuku’alofa respectively with participants who were Fijian, Indo-Fijian, Rotuman, Samoan, Ni-Vanuatu, Tongan, I-Kiribati and Papua New Guinean. The stories reflected the storytellers’ ethnicity and cultural context. This sense of authenticity exemplifies how authenticity concepts can be nested (see Mageo and Knauft Introduction). Here Trilling’s “sentiment of being” (1997: 92) articulates with a self-attributed primordialist sense of authenticity. This ver-

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sion of authenticity is consistent with Māori filmmaker, theorist, and activist Barclay’s assertion that an authentic Māori film is a film made by Māori, not a film that fulfills some hegemonic ideal of a Māori film. He writes, A Māori film might be very violent, or frivolous. Māori films might deal with incest, robbery, or love under the apple tree—who is to say? A Māori film might have nothing whatsoever to do with what both Māori and Pakeha are pleased to think of as “the Māori style of life”— communal attitudes, a respect for the elders, a love of the land. (Barclay 1990: 20) Barclay chafed against what he viewed as narrow politically correct culturally prescriptive definitions of authenticity that perversely failed to appeal to the audiences for whom they were intended (Barclay 1990: 21). Ultimately the formal and substantive decisions in the digital stories lay with the storytellers, but the co-creative nature of authorship in making digital stories in Fiji and Tonga was reflexively and transparently acknowledged in both discourses about the stories and in the story credits themselves, which featured a Digital Storytelling in the Pacific title card, the facilitators names, and their affiliations. During follow-up interviews we asked storytellers to reflect upon the workshop process and specifically addressed issues of authorship and co-creation. None of the storytellers characterized the process of workshop facilitation, either copy editing to reduce length, discussion about the story’s focus or clarity, recording and transcription, or editing assistance with pacing and visual effects as abrogating their authorship. Every participant asserted ownership of their story. From a screen production pedagogy standpoint, Digital Storytelling in the Pacific was a potentially important project in a region where locally specific digital vernacular creativity (Burgess 2006) has been scarce. The stories, however, were only one outcome of the pilot. The workshops themselves turned out be rich sites of information about a range of histories, perspectives, cultural practices, and values that were not necessarily manifest in the stories themselves. We saw the promise of participatory action research using digital technologies first hand and just as we were mulling this aspect of our findings over, we were approached by the University of Auckland’s School of Nursing who wanted to pilot digital storytelling as part of Māori palliative care research.

Digital Storytelling in Health Research: Ma¯ori Palliative Care

In response to growing recognition that approaches to palliative care in New Zealand were unacceptably Eurocentric, Professor Merryn Gott and a team of

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researchers formed a bicultural (Māori and Pakeha) multidisciplinary research group Te Arai. Their primary objective was to redress the lack of research about what constitutes a “good death” for Māori (Williams et al. 2017), and produce culturally specific knowledge that would improve end of life health care. It was of paramount importance to the nursing researchers that they identify and develop a research method that generated high quality grounded knowledge that mitigated long-standing mistrust between Indigenous communities and non-Indigenous researchers. Many Indigenous communities feel beleaguered by research that produces little or no apparent benefit to them and leaves them feeling exploited and disrespected. Māori have been no exception (Smith 1999; Williams et al. 2017). Digital storytelling’s capacities to shift existing hierarchies between researchers and subjects, its focus on personal lived experience as expressed by subjects themselves, and its reflexivity about the co-creation process, potentially addressed deficiencies or weaknesses in other methodologies such as interviews or surveys used in qualitative health sciences research. A number of other health-related research initiatives such as those studying diabetes, cancer, viral hepatitis, and reproductive health undertaken around the same time (Briant et al. 2016; Cueva et al. 2015; Gubrium and Difulvio 2011; Otañez and Guerrero 2015; Wieland et al. 2017) seem to have come to similar conclusions about the utility of digital storytelling in their research. When organizing the palliative care workshops, we made minor modifications to the three-day workshop model based upon our experiences in Fiji and Tonga, and incorporated values and practices associated with Kaupapa Māori research. “Kaupapa Māori research is neither a methodology in itself nor an established set of methods. It is an Indigenous approach which at its most fundamental level involves making Māori concerns and priorities the focal point of research that is centered within Māori culture and practice” (Smith 1999). In addition to observing Māori protocol on marae and customs during workshops, we worked with the Te Arai Kaumatua Roopu, a group of culturally expert elders who helped ensure we maintained the project’s kaupapa (guiding philosophy). The workshop was held on Waipapa Marae at the University of Auckland. There were nine Māori participants (eight women and one man), all of whom had been involved in caring for an older relative at the end of life. Two of the storytellers worked as health care professionals, one as a nurse and the other as an advocate, two were part of the Te Arai research team, and several other storytellers served as part of Te Arai’s Roopu. After participants were recruited and briefed by Dr. Moeke-Maxwell, we followed up with a prefatory/preparatory email like the one we sent to the Digital Storytelling in the Pacific pilot workshop participants. The nursing pilot storytellers were mostly older adults (forty to seventy years of age) who described themselves as having either little or no experience with multimedia

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technology. As a result, we enlisted University of Auckland screen production students to assist during the story assembly phase of the workshop.2 We began the workshop with a pōwhiri on the marae. The pōwhiri is not simply a welcome or introduction but it sets a dynamic of exchange, cooperation, care and safety in motion (Williams et al. 2017). Afterwards we adjourned to the whare kai (dining hall) for morning tea where we introduced digital storytelling to the workshop. We screened the same digital story exemplars as in Fiji and Suva, discussed key creative concepts and briefed storytellers on the workshop schedule. After lunch we began the story circle back in the whare nui (meeting house). In order to keep to a tight schedule storytellers were typically given a strict time limit; however, this proved very difficult on the marae, where time takes on a more elastic quality and interrupting senior speakers is inappropriate. The subject matter was also emotionally difficult. Storytellers described how they cared for terminally ill and significantly debilitated relatives for long periods of time. As in our previous workshops, we worked closely with storytellers, helping them to identify key moments in what could be long narratives spanning many years, editing those stories down to two to three minutes, recording them and offering advice (when requested) on visual strategies and music choices. These storytellers tended to have more personal photographic resources but as was the case in Fiji and Tonga, they were encouraged to make creative choices sourcing Creative Commons images and using images abstractly or metaphorically when suitable or necessary. For example, Kiripai Kaka’s story of returning to New Zealand from Australia to care for her terminally ill mother made extensive use of stock images to tell a moving story about the central role food played in her childhood and community, in the way that she tried to sustain her mother’s appetite by finding kai moana, and in the way that her mother continued to show love and concern for her family and friends after her death by feeding them at her tangi (funeral) with all the food she had worked to prepare in her last months. Three stories were about caring for siblings (Our Brother George, Manaaki Poto, Baby Jeanette), three were about parents (How Does One Really Know, Mama, He Whaea o te Ao) one about a grandparent (My Mum) and one about a mother-in-law (The Lucky One). The illnesses varied: diabetes, kidney failure, dementia, motor neurone disease, cancer, heart disease. The stories, however, consistently detailed the role family (whanau) played, the caregivers’ emotional challenges and rewards, the logistics of dying, and especially what became important to the person dying and their family during this time. Many stories referred to lifestyle factors that may have contributed to their loved ones’ failing health, particularly smoking.

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As our approach to the workshop shifted from simply the process undertaken to produce stories, to a process in which research could be conducted itself, we found that the conversations we had with participants were significant sites of important knowledge. For example, a conversation Sarina had with Manaaki Poto, who told a story about organizing her whanau (family) to provide around-the-clock care for her sister Ritihia, care that included not only tracking pain medication and following appointments up but also rosters for karakia (prayers) and greeting and hosting the many visitors who came to pay their last respects, illustrated how incompatible the design of hospital wards and some hospices were with the importance of having extended whanau sing, pray, and visit with a dying person. Manaaki’s finished story alluded to mobilizing extended family but not specifically about how New Zealand health institutions might adapt to better suit Māori. This information emerged in the conversations we had about how to put her story together. In other words, the stories engendered by the dialogic storytelling process itself were valuable to Te Arai’s research objectives. As is customary in the StoryCenter model, the finished stories were screened at the end of the workshop. Storytellers invited family and friends to the screening. The screening was blessed beforehand and after viewing the stories there was an opportunity to talk about them and the research project before light refreshments. Some days later we debriefed the Te Arai pilot research team on our impressions and findings. The completed stories were then subsequently screened for a number of audiences including Māori community health organizations, nursing students, nurse trainees, and palliative care professionals. The stories are also available as a resource for patients’ families on our website (digitalstories.nz) and on Palliative Care TV (https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=G9zXJOnRuEI). From our point of view and Te Arai’s perspective, the digital stories produced in this pilot were authentic because they were grounded in personal lived experience. The stories had integrity because they were told by Māori in a context informed by Māori values, with Māori cultural practices and protocols. Protocols around food and social customs governing interpersonal relationships were observed and waiata (songs) were performed when appropriate. In addition to their research objectives, to generate grounded qualitative data on Māori experiences of palliative caregiving, Te Arai viewed digital storytelling as potentially effective health research communication. Rather than producing a dense inaccessible report or an impersonal pamphlet for circulation among health professionals and patients’ families, the Māori palliative care digital storytelling pilot not only pursued a mode of research that would produce high quality information but also offered patients and the public a more accessible mode of health communication. In other words the pilot

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sought to leverage emotional authenticity to increase the efficacy of health communication.

Pacific Digital Storytelling in the Art Gallery

In 2015, we submitted a proposal to the Margaret Mead Film Festival for a small installation where audiences attending the festival venue at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) could see digital stories from Tonga and Fiji and record their own stories. Our proposal was ultimately trumped by a well-funded Mongolian installation where audiences could sit in yurts to watch a father and son speaking to each other from different sides of the world. However, the process of putting the AMNH proposal forward persuaded us that we should seek offline opportunities because, despite having an online presence, digital stories tend to be seen by relatively few people. Paradoxically, digital stories seem to operate most effectively in social settings where audiences can talk about the process of making them, their content, and can use them to stimulate debate and discussion. We approached the Auckland City Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, because it is a leading cultural institution in the world’s largest Polynesian city with a stated commitment to “offer[ing] experiences that strengthen and enrich community . . . [and] provid[ing] visitors with fresh ways to think about art and participate in creativity” (Auckland Art Gallery 2020). The gallery’s Pasifika community outreach programmer liked the digital stories and set up a meeting to explore the possibility of an exhibit titled Talanoa. We chose talanoa because it exemplified the principles of inclusive and participatory dialogue that characterized our collaborative workshop process. We presented five digital stories: Filomena from Fiji, Who am I?, A Gateway, and Discipline of Life from Tonga, and Mama from Aotearoa New Zealand. Although very diverse in terms of subject matter, these stories reflected the broad themes that emerged in both the unprompted Tonga and Fiji workshops and the Māori palliative care project. We thought that these stories of modernity, displacement, identity, belonging, and loss would connect with Auckland’s large and diverse Pacific community. We hoped their exhibition in a gallery setting might introduce different ideas about vernacular creativity in the contemporaryPacific. The curators disagreed. Their estimation that the digital stories did not belong in the gallery was undoubtedly well justified on the basis of paradigmatic excellence or quality. However, the reasons they gave and their allegations of Orientalism suggested that something more fundamental than issues of relevance, quality, or suitability was at stake. Their objection to storytellers’ use of images sourced from the Creative Commons, the digital storytelling genre, the

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formal constraints and the co-creative nature of the enterprise suggests that these authorial characteristics and practices fatally compromised these digital stories’ legitimacy as genuine artistic expression. In other words conditions of authorship and their bearing on authenticity were at the heart of the issue. The curators objected to the use of proxy or metaphorical images in the digital stories they saw. The critique here seemed to be that only personal documentary images used literally were legitimate. Images openly appropriated or used metaphorically in this context were considered inauthentic. In fact curators seemed to distrust the use of images in general. One curator queried why storytellers did not speak directly to camera in their presentations. This question implied that the stories were principally personal testimony or reportage rather than imaginative acts of audiovisual creation inspired by personal events. Direct address to camera suggests oral history projects like those undertaken by the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California where the combination of a storyteller’s image and their performance of a first hand experience evokes authenticity.3 In this moment, the Auckland Art Gallery curator appeared to invoke a primordialist notion of authenticity. In our experience, the creation of the voice-over narration was deeply influenced by imagery not only in terms of material availability but also as a constitutive element. Stories often featured an almost “cinematic image;” a woman slipping on the floor of a fish shop, one last road trip home, or a beer at the pub. In most cases the storytellers did not have documentary images for their narratives about these events, instead they sought to creatively re-present them, often with appropriated images that “felt right.” Like the Tahitian Beauty Pageant tenues végétales competitions in Chapter 1 (Hammond), digital stories are authentic expressions of contemporary creativity in a globalized and transnational context. They exemplify practices of adaptation and innovation that are often overlooked or dismissed in pursuit of some rigid concept of cultural tradition and authenticity. We had hoped that digital storytelling might find a place in the art gallery as an “example of creativity in the service of social communication, where communication is not to be understood narrowly as the exchange of information or ‘ideas’ but as the affective practice of the social” (Burgess 2006: 210). It is also possible that the curators assessed authenticity in Indigenous contemporary art in terms of more radical formal innovation rather than primordial authenticity. StoryCenter’s model discourages formal experimentation. Advocates describe it as balancing the ethics of democratic “access” with an aesthetic that aims to maximize relevance and impact . . . . The philosophy . . . is that formal constraints create the ideal conditions for the production of elegant, high-impact stories with little or no experience with minimal direct

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intervention by the workshop facilitator. The personal narrative, told in the storyteller’s unique voice, is central to the process of creating a story and is given priority in the arrangement of symbolic elements. Narrative accessibility, warmth and presence are prioritized over formal experimentation or innovative “new” uses for technologies. (Burgess 2006: 207) Digital stories are typically produced in an institutional setting and engendered by a particular mode of sociality created in the workshop. Australian digital storytelling scholar Burgess suggests “it is becoming clear that these [institutional] constraints and the sociality of the workshop process combine to shape the practice of digital storytelling so that as a cultural form it is marked by a fairly predictable, if not uniform range of ways to represent the self ” (Burgess 2006: 209). Formal uniformity combined with an often uncritical approach toward sentimentality means that digital stories can seem deeply uncool and ideologically suspect. In contemporary Pacific digital art and screen production, postcolonial politics of critique, irony, and subversion continue to reign supreme. Lisa Reihana’s exquisite in pursuit of Venus [infected] which challenges nineteenth-century European depictions of Pacific communities in DuFour’s Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacificique (twenty panels of scenic wall paper) is a prime example of the kind of formal innovation and subversive politics the gallery recognizes as valuable and “authentic.” Digital stories never express this kind of virtuoso formal innovation. Their politics were in some sense postcolonial and sometimes coincided with the views of professional Indigenous artists, yet rarely if ever did they express irony or address the friction between colonial and Indigenous cultural paradigms. Identity politics also seemed to play some role in the gallery encounter. Sarina’s ancestory is Canadian- (Scots, Irish, British) Japanese, while Shuchi Kothari’s is Indian. We have been called “oriental” before but this was the first time we had been called “Orientalists.” As architects of Digital Storytelling in the Pacific and workshop facilitators we recognize that we potentially exercised disproportionate power to frame and curate the digital stories. We were keenly aware of the politics of appropriation and paid close attention to these dynamics in the workshops themselves and in the presentation of the digital stories on and offline. Our participants did not report, however, that we imposed our views or exercised an authorial imperative on their work. We were at some loss as to how we may have exoticized the stories or misconstructed them in an attempt to consolidate our own identities. The issue seemed to run deeper. Were we “Orientalists” because the curators thought we exercised disproportionate power or because we were not the right people to initiate this kind of proposal? We suspected the latter but were never able to discuss it further. It’s possible, indeed perhaps likely, that we were irreconcilably inauthentic, not Indigenous,

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and therefore by default presumed to be part of a settler colonial order that, ironically, also refuses to claim us. We were also all too aware that any type of defensiveness would legitimate all claims against us. Several months later our suspicions were partially confirmed when we attended an exhibit titled (ironically) Talanoa at the Fresh Gallery in Otara. The exhibition was advertised as “presenting the work of six of today’s most coco-chic storytellers . . . . Exploring Pacifika concepts of identity, inspiration, life and society the exhibition invites viewers to like, comment and share—in person!” Several of the works at Fresh (Emily and Vea Mafile‘o’s work for example) had some striking similarities to the digital stories in our gallery proposal. Authenticity was not simply a function of form and content and politics but our very association had become a troubling constitutive element. Authenticity in Indigenous fine art therefore seemed to rely on the appearance of a transparent and essentialist genealogy. We say “appear” because the reality of most digital art is that it is highly collaborative. Reihana’s magisterial work in pursuit of Venus [infected] to which the curators referred in their comments to us drew upon the expertise of Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors. The role of Reihana’s collaborators only becomes fully apparent when reading her exegesis (Reihana 2012). The curators argued that “teaching” storytellers “filmmaking techniques” was “inappropriate.” The implication was clear that “authentic” cultural expression had been tainted by our intervention. This criticism struck us as problematic because it raised the static spectre of “tradition” as the sole measure of authenticity, consequently relegating storytellers from Fiji, Tonga and Aotearoa New Zealand to Trouillot’s “savage slot” (2003). It denied the possibility that authentic or genuine expression could be expressed in a nontraditional idiom (again Hammond’s beauty pageants comes to mind, Chapter 1). It also raised the question of why the participation of non-Indigenous facilitators drew such criticism.

Conclusions

Historically, the only place “ordinary people” have in art galleries is as visitors. Art is by its very definition somehow extraordinary. The issue is not whether or not digital stories deserve or demand a place in the gallery. It is not clear that they do. However, the commotion about “ethnographic Orientalism” focused attention away from whether or not these digital stories were appropriate for the gallery and onto the cultural politics of authenticity. In a postcolonial setting where access to self-representation has been largely restricted, ensuring that Indigenous projects involve Indigenous agency is critically important. Barclay himself was deeply committed to training Māori in film and broad-

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cast media at all levels (technicians as well as writers and directors) precisely because who is involved in the project matters. Creative projects often require and draw upon competencies not already well established in various communities. Non-Indigenous collaborators can make productive contributions to future Indigenous creative and academic research. For example, Indigenous research collaborators who participated in early Digital Storytelling in the Pacific workshops have incorporated their experiences into ongoing research proposals, projects, and publications. Authenticity and authorship would appear, at first glance, to be relatively straightforward concepts. However, this chapter and the volume within which it sits, point out that they vary quite considerably even in fields that would appear to envision authenticity in relatively similar ways. Traditionally, authenticity in screen production has been characterized principally in terms of genuine emotion so that an audience responds to feelings of authenticity. This is consistent with “expressive authenticity,” which Dutton characterizes as committed personal expression (Dutton 2003). In Indigenous Pacific feature screen productions, the centrality of Indigenous storytellers (Barclay 1990) and ethnographic fidelity has also been important. Films shot on location, in vernacular languages, with largely nonprofessional talent invite high critical praise (Henderson et al. 2012). An emphasis upon ethnographic authenticity, however, has not been without controversy. Contemporary filmmakers like Māori director Taika Waititi challenge the expectation that Indigenous Pacific productions exhibit an “arthouse-ready anthropological edge” (Debruge 2012). Many of his films (Two Cars One Night 2004, Boy 2010, Hunt for the Wilderpeople 2016) represent contemporary Indigenous perspectives that do not conform to expectations of “tradition” or “anthropology.” Similarly, stories produced as part of Digital Stories in the Pacific, express genuine emotion but express cultural values in a contemporary globalized context. In health sciences, authenticity is a function of subjective lived experience expressed in a culturally authentic setting. For palliative care researchers, digital stories functioned simultaneously as data and as affective public health communication. They sought to collect information about health services that would potentially lead to positive changes in the delivery of palliative care in hospital, hospice, and in patients’ homes. Digital stories were also used in hui (meetings) with palliative caregivers to give them information, support, and validate their experiences, and with health practitioners both experienced professionals and trainees. In fine art, authenticity can appear to place little stock in emotion or affect but instead requires an identifiably Indigenous Pacific subject, formal innovation (most often by adapting “traditional” arts to contemporary idioms or vice versa) and some type of subversive or critical politics. Digital stories may have been too earnest, sentimental or amateur but none of these seem to justify

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accusations of Orientalism. Orientalism would seem to have been perpetrated as an exercise of appropriation, misrepresentation, privilege and self-interest. Our encounter with the art gallery draws attention to how ethnographic authenticity in contemporary arts practices such as digital audio visual media are profoundly shaped by historical ideas about cultural legitimacy. In this case authenticity continues to be something that can be tainted or ruined by contact with non-Indigenous people and idioms. It seems conservative and perhaps even antiquated. Change, as this volume attests, is a two-way street. In an increasingly transnational and networked world, an emphasis on cultural purity seems problematic and potentially disabling. When experts denounce or dismiss vernacular forms of contemporary creativity as inauthentic, they discourage cultural experimentation, dialogue and innovation. They also deny contemporary communities creative agency and new opportunities to be visible both to themselves and to others. In the ongoing development of anthropological theory and practice, authorship and authenticity have several implications for Pacific media scholars. Future studies may need to attend more closely to the gatekeeping effects that otherwise unmarked ideas about legitimate authorship and authenticity have on industrial and grassroots audiovisual production and distribution. We say unmarked here because the curators’ point of view was not one we would have anticipated or assumed. Idealizing sole authorship may also obscure or mask the creative and technical conditions under which digital works are made, producing partial and incomplete accounts. Ultimately, a more expansive approach to cultural production which acknowledges and allows for a greater number of inputs might ultimately lead anthropologists and other researchers to deeper cultural insights and understanding as storytellers feel empowered to represent their own experiences using any resources they feel are appropriate.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Theresa Koroivulaono, Peter Simpson, Dr. Lisa Williams, Dr. Tess Moeke-Maxwell, and Professor Merryn Gott. The funding for the digital storytelling workshops came from Te Whare Kura, the University of Auckland Faculty Research Development Fund, and the School of Social Sciences Performance Based Research Fund.

Sarina Pearson is Associate Professor in Media and Communication in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Auckland. She is a filmmaker and an academic. Her film work has screened at major international film festivals including Venice and Valladolid, and her television work has aired nationally

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in New Zealand. Her academic research has examined film and television in the Pacific region. Pearson and Kothari are currently working on a Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Grant about the history and cultures of Asian New Zealander screen production. Shuchi Kothari is a filmmaker and Associate Professor in Media and Communication in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Auckland. As writer and producer, her films have screened at more than one hundred international film festivals including Toronto, Cannes, and Venice. She is also the cofounder of the Pan Asian Screen Collective in Aotearoa New Zealand. Notes 1. “Pasifika” is used primarily by New Zealand government agencies and educational institutions to denote New Zealand-based Pacific peoples. Perrot describes the term as a “samoanisation of a Portuguese nod to the Latin phrase Mare Pacificum, or peaceful sea, so named by the navigator Ferdinand Magellan. In [New Zealand] it has becomean umbrella term for everyone living here with traceable Pacific Island heritage” (Perrot 2007). 2. The intergenerational aspect of this was so successful that subsequent digital storytelling workshops with Pasifika elders (Tapinga‘a Maama-Digital Stories https://www .ageingwellchallenge.co.nz/research/tapinga-a-maama-pacific-life-and-death-inadvanced-age/) and a multi-ethnic project documentary project “Promoting Social Connection Through Challenging Public Attitudes: A Participatory Project with Older People” paired university students with older research participants. 3. Avant garde filmmakers such as Trinh T. Minh-hà (Surname Viet, Given name Nam 1989) and Mitchell Block (No Lies 1973) play with this assumption that an individual performing an apparently personal text is authentic, by casting actors in roles that appear to have documentary authenticity. References Alexander, Bryan. 2011. The New Digital Storytelling: Creating Narratives with New Media. Santa Barbara: Praeger. Auckland Art Gallery. 2020. “Visions and Values.” Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki website. Retrieved June 2020 from https://www.aucklandartgallery.com/about/vision-andvalues. Barclay, Barry. 1990. Our Own Image. Auckland: Longman Paul. Behar, Ruth, and Deborah A. Gordon. 1995. Women Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Briant, Katherine J., Amy Halter, Nathan Marcello, Monica Escareño, and Beti Thompson. 2016. “The Power of Digital Storytelling as a Culturally Relevant Health Promotion Tool.” Health Promotion Practice 17(6): 793–801. Burgess, Jean. 2006. “Hearing Ordinary Voices: Cultural studies, Vernacular Creativity and Digital Storytelling.” Continuum 20(2): 201–14.

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Cianciolo, Anna T., M. Prevou, Dominic Cianciolo, and Rick Morris. 2007. “Using Digital Storytelling to Stimulate Discussion in Army Professional Forums.” In Proceedings from The Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation & Education Conference (I/ITSEC). Retrieved May 5 2020 from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/downlo ad?doi=10.1.1.113.3853&rep=rep1&type=pdf. Charlton, Glynis. 2003. You Can Have this Back. BBC. Telling Lives: Digital Storytelling. Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus., ed. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cueva, Melany, Regina Kuhnley, Laura Revels, Nancy E. Schoenberg, and Mark Dignan. 2015. “Digital Storytelling: A Tool for Health Promotion and Cancer Awareness in Rural Alaskan Communities.” International Journal of Circumpolar Health 74(1). https:// doi.org/10.3402/ijch.v74.28781. Debruge, Peter. 2012. “Boy.” Daily Variety, 29 February 2012. Retrieved 12 August 2018 from http://link.galegroup.com.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/apps/doc/A283945359/AON E?u=learn&sid=AONE&xid=afc7e2e1. Dutton, Denis. 2003. “Authenticity in Art.” In The Oxford Handbook of Eesthetics, ed. Jerrold Levinson, 258–74. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ferrari, Manuela, Carla Rice, and Kwame McKenzie. 2015. “ACE Pathways Project: Therapeutic Catharsis in Digital Storytelling.” Psychiatric Services 66(5): 556. Gubrium, Aline. 2009. “Digital Storytelling: An Emergent Method for Health Promotion Research and Practice.” Health Promotion Practice 10(2): 186–91. Gubrium, Aline C., and Gloria T. Difulvio. 2011. “Girls in the World: Digital Storytelling as a Feminist Public Health Approach.” Girlhood Studies 4(2): 28–46. Gubrium, Aline C., and Krista Harper. 2016. Participatory Visual and Digital Methods. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Henderson, April K., Emelihter Kihleng, Sadat Muiava, Tamasailau Sualii-Sauni, Myra McFarland-Tautau, and Galumalemana Afeleti Hunkin. 2012. “Review: The Orator/O Le Tulafale.” Contemporary Pacific 24(2): 434–46. https://doi.org.ezproxy.auckland.ac .nz/10.1353/cp.2012.0028. Hoshino, Lina. 2012. Names. https://vimeo.com/35934101. Ioannidis, Yannis, Katerina El Raheb, Eleni Toli, Akrivi Katifori, Maria Boile, Margaretha Mazura. 2013. “One Object Many Stories: Introducing ICT in Museums and Collections through Digital Storytelling.” Digital Heritage International Congress 1: 421–24. https://doi:10.1109/DigitalHeritage.2013.6743772. Lambert, Joe. 2010. Digital Storytelling Cookbook. Digital Diner Press. Retrieved 20 June 2020 from https://www.StoryCenter.org/inventory/digital-storytelling-cookbook. Lewis, Karen, and Nicole Matthews. 2017. “The Afterlife of Capture Wales: Digital Stories and Their Listening Publics.” In Digital Storytelling, eds. Mark Dunford and Tricia Jenkins, 103–18. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lundby, Knut. 2008. Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories: Self-Representations in New Media. New York: Peter Lang. MacArthur, Matt. 2012. Dear Grandma. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAVe4Bob3 Ys&t=53s. McDermott, Matt. 2013. Doors. StoryCenter. Meadows, Daniel, and Jenny Kidd. 2009. “Capture Wales, The BBC Digital Storytelling Project.” In Story Circle: Digital Storytelling Around the World, eds. John Hartley and Kelly McWilliam, 91–117. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Otañez, Marty, and Andres Guerrero. 2015. “Digital Storytelling and the Viral Hepatitis Project.” In Participatory Visual and Digital Research in Action, eds. Aline Gubrium, Krista Harper, and Marty Otañez, 57–72. New York: Routledge. Oughton, Nicholas, and Margaret McVeigh. 2014. “Pacific Voices: Screen Industries and Culture in the Pacific.” IM Interactive Media: E-Journal of the National Academy of Screen and Sound. Retrieved 20 June 2020 from http://sphinx.murdoch.edu .au/~20100408/nass_uat/issue10/IM10-SPARC-article-06-oughton-mcveigh.pdf. Pearson, Sarina. 2002. “Moving Image and Photography: Picturing New Zealand as a Pacific Place.” In Pacific Art Niu Sila: Pacific Dimensions of Contemporary New Zealand Art, eds. Sean Mallon and Fuli Pereira, 174–89. Wellington: Te Papa Press. Perrot, Alan. 2007. “Pasifika-Identity or Illusion.” Zealand Herald, 8 March. Retrieved 15 June 2020 from https://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&ob jectid=10455473. Reihana, Lisa. 2012. “Re-staging Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique: Theoretical and Practical Issues.” MA thesis. Auckland: Unitec. Retrieved 10 December 2019 from https:// unitec.researchbank.ac.nz/handle/10652/2544. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. New York: Zed Books. Trilling, Lionel. 1997. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. Global Transformations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Underberg, Natalie, and Elayna Zorn. 2013. Digital Ethnography: Anthropology, Narrative, and New Media. Austin: University of Texas Press. Vannini, Phillip, and J. Patrick Williams. 2009. Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Society. New York: Routledge University Press. Wieland, Mark L., Jane W. Njeru, and Marcelo Hanza. 2017. “Pilot Feasibility Study of a Digital Storytelling Intervention for Immigrant and Refugee Adults With Diabetes.” The Diabetes Educator 43(4): 349–59. Williams, Lisa, Merry Gott, Tess Moeke-Maxwell, Stella Black, Shuchi Kothari, and Sarina Pearson. 2017. “Can Digital Stories Go Where Palliative Care Research Has Never Gone Before? A Descriptive Qualitative Study Exploring the Application of an Emerging Public Health Research Method in an Indigenous Palliative Care Context.” BMC Palliative Care 16(1). http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/10.1186/s12904-0170216-x. Wyman, Bruce, Scott Smith, Daniel Meyers, and Michael Godfrey. 2011. “Digital Storytelling in Museums: Observations and Best Practices.” Curator: The Museum Journal 54: 461–68.

Afterword



Authoring and Authenticity Reflections on Traveling Concepts in Oceania MARGARET JOLLY

16 January 2013. I am standing in the middle of Theatre of the World, the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), a radically innovative private gallery adjacent to the working-class suburbs of Hobart, Tasmania where its provocative founder David Walsh grew up. Like many visitors I have crossed the waters of the Derwent River on a ferry and climbed a long staircase before descending into this subterranean temple of art, dug deep into a sandstone quarry. It refuses the white cubes of most contemporary galleries in favor of more open spaces where, on their journey through MONA, visitors see multiple locations from diverse perspectives. This exhibition, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin, aspires to create a museum of enchantment, “an interpretation of the world as an experiential whole founded on sensorial perception” rather than a “docile museum,” erected on a scientific pedestal and grounded in positivist taxonomies (Martin 2012: 11). Writing in the immense and expensive catalogue, Thierry Dufrêne proclaims the need to loosen or even sever the whalebone of the “chronological corset” and the spatial segregation of more conventional art history approaches and curatorial practices by splicing together “enchanting” art from different epochs and diverse places (Dufrêne 2012: 29). Winged Tang Dynasty tomb guardians jostle with Egyptian falcons, plaster sculpted heads used for phrenology in early twentieth-century England abut nineteenth-century Fijian clubs fashioned from tree roots, Kovave spirit masks from the Gulf Province of Papua New Guinea (PNG) face feline effigies made by Native Americans. I am especially enchanted by the extraordinary display of Oceanic barkcloth (loaned from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery), ivory fabrics with abstract geometries painted in palettes of ochres, greys, browns, and blacks. Their abundant beauty fills a large gallery with a vaulting ceiling. Each of the cloths is named for a place and time—for example, “Fiji, pre-1850,” “Collingwood Bay, Oro Province Papua New Guinea, collected pre 1970,” “Samoa collected c. 1897.” The artists are unnamed, though they are most likely women. In adjacent rooms, I view abstract Cubist and modernist works—including Pablo Picasso’s Weeping Woman, 1937; Brett Whiteley’s The Naked Studio, 1981; and the plaited black

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lines of Peter Perie’s Modernity Will Not Seduce Me, 2009. These are provocative juxtapositions across time and place, posing perduring questions about shared and divergent notions of authorship and authenticity in the world of art and about how these moving objects have traveled to and been congregated in Tasmania for this inaugural exhibition in a subversive, subterranean temple of art. Erakor Half Road, Port Vila. 5 April 2013. I am sitting on a bamboo frame, in the dappled light of late afternoon filtering through the bamboo and thatch house used by several men who have migrated from the kastom (non-Christian, traditionalist) villages of South Pentecost to live and work on the periphery of Port Vila, on ground leased by the people of this place through customary arrangements. As we are offered tinned fish, taro, and orange leaf tea, Murray Garde and I proffer our small gifts, including photographs from Australia, and words of greeting in Bislama, the lingua franca of Vanuatu and Sa, the tok ples (Indigenous language) of South Pentecost. I am struggling to reanimate my Sa while Murray, a superb linguist, is conversant in its five dialects. I joke about how I first came to Vanuatu in 1970 as a lalat (a young, nubile, unmarried woman) but am now a tsiwit (old, mature woman). We are here primarily to pay our respects to and talk with Jif Telekon Watas, who had been involved in a heated and ultimately homicidal dispute about performances of the land dive (gol) for outsiders and tourists (Jolly 2016).1 Earlier stories about and performances of the gol had stressed its collective origin and shared purpose; its increasing commoditization had unleashed a new masculine individualism in rival claims of cultural “property.” Jif Telekon was enraged by how other men in both Christian and kastom communities had challenged his presumptive authority and evaded his desired monopoly of the financial brokering of the land dive, in embodied performances, photography and filming, on Pentecost Island and beyond. In an extraordinary interview filmed at Erakor Half Road by the late Kim McKenzie in September 2012, Jif Telekon proclaimed that he was the true boss of the gol, the authentic owner of the knowledge of its true origins in his ancestral place, Rebrion. He stressed the gol’s intimate relation to the harvest of yams and the proper timing and protocols of its ritual practice. On film he legitimated his “true” authority both through a performance of an epic series of dun na ngamômô (stories of long ago) and because his claim was recorded and thus authenticated in a written document, even though as a non-Christian, he was illiterate (Garde 2015). He is palpably tired, emaciated and in pain, suffering an aggressive prostate cancer which might have been stalled in an Australian hospital but proves unresponsive to both the biomedicine of Port Vila Hospital and the kastom medicine of his island home. Later in April, as Murray and I leave Lonorore Airport on the west coast of Pentecost on an Air Vanuatu flight, we see him for the final time. He has just flown in; he has come home to Bunlap to die (Jolly 2016).

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I start with these vignettes from my own personal experience not as a display of narcissistic authorial authenticity, but to suggest how European and Oceanic notions of authorship and authenticity are deeply entangled, especially as “traveling concepts” in the contexts of art and of tourism. As Jeannette Mageo and Bruce Knauft argue so persuasively in their introduction, European and Oceanic genealogies of authorship and authenticity diverge in powerful ways but are mutually implicated and interpenetrating in colonial and contemporary encounters, breaching binary plots of Western individualism versus Oceanic relationality. Let me now consider how those divergences and entanglements are plotted across this volume, how these concepts travel across the diverse locations of the several chapters.

Western and Oceanic Genealogies: Divergent Plots and Traveling Concepts

In their introduction Mageo and Knauft argue that the twinned concepts of authorship and authenticity travel together not just in the history of ideas but in the daily dynamics of “active social appropriation and recontextualization” (p. 1) across the Pacific. Importantly this is not just a “textual or intertextual or academic process of sedimentation” (p. 1), but one that engages everyday processes in which these concepts are used, as they transform, metamorphose and cross-fertilize in ways that are “endlessly promiscuous” (p. 1). Still, their arguments are situated in a history of ideas told primarily through the temporal layers of European genealogies and English words. The editors observe how in Western conceptualizations authorship and authenticity are “linked, echoing the etymologies of the words themselves” (p. 8). Authorship “signals the individuality, autonomy, and genuineness of the producer”; authenticity connotes “being real or genuine, not a copy, true to a deeper origin” (p. 8). Yet, as Mageo and Knauft elaborate in their conjoint introduction, authorship “is the presumed or constructed original agent of an object or product,” (p. 6), a definition that allows for an agency beyond an individual: “Anything ‘authored’ is always an individual and a collective product” (p. 6). They also assert that authorship is “almost intrinsically anthropomorphizing” (p. 6). I wonder how this fits with both Western and Oceanic concepts of divine causation—of the agency of God/gods and ancestral spirits and with Oceanic notions that land and ocean, mountains and seas are animated agents, materializations of the divine energies of gods, ancestors or high-ranking people. Authenticity in Western and expressly English usage, for the editors, denotes “presumed primordialism, of constructed originality” (p. 5) whereby, even if time has passed, the original meaning has not been so effaced as to be

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disjunct between past and present. Of course, this construction depends on a specific view of the temporal horizons of pasts/present/futures, a view which has been opened up both by Western historians writing of “futures past” and by Oceanic historians meditating on how in many Pacific contexts, the past is conceived as in front of the person rather than behind (see the edited collection of Anderson, Johnson, and Brookes 2018; also Ballard 2014, 2018; Kossellek 1985; Salesa 2014). The editors argue that, in Western usages, concepts of authorship and authenticity are intimately linked. In their introduction there is a distillation of a Western genealogy tracing these twinned concepts over time. We are told that in Latin, French, and Anglo-Norman authenticus pertained particularly to documents (especially titles or deeds), which were authorized by the “true, valid, and individual authorship of the sovereign” (p. 8). (Note the pivotal importance of the written word, the document in this.) The sovereign author transmitted the authenticity of the “dictum by document” across the time and space where their power prevailed (p. 8). Mageo and Knauft trace how notions of authenticity in medieval Europe were conjugated with presumptions of the overarching authority of the monarch (presumably buttressed by the divine authority of the “word of God”). To be “sincere” in this epoch in Europe meant to be true to one’s prescribed role in a social hierarchy. The science of Enlightenment thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the new evangelism of Protestant Christianity combined to catalyze novel notions of authenticity and sincerity grounded in the experience of a bounded, unitary individual, Goethe’s “one true self ” ([1787] 1983), morphing into Rousseau’s ([1762] 1979) “sentiment of existence,”2 impenetrable, perdurable, and autonomous (p. 9). Ideas of “owning oneself ” were linked with new bourgeois ideas of private property but the authentic self was perceived as “natural,” as outside of, or prior to, the “social.” As Michel Foucault (1988) argued and Anthony Giddens (1991) echoed, this entailed the sequestration of abnormal selves in the asylums of nineteenth-century Europe: the mad, the poor, the sick, the criminal. The industrialization and urbanization inherent in capitalist development increased the impersonality of everyday life, catalyzing increasing isolation, anomie, and desire to actualize the self (pre-eminently the bourgeois self) through the consumption of new things and novel creations, such as the novel. Drawing on histories of European literature and visual arts by Lionel Trilling (1997), John Berger (1973), and Pierre Bourdieu (1996), the editors observe how nineteenth-century novels about women (and sometimes authored by them) celebrated the value of individual sincerity while new genres of painting by artists like J. (William) Turner (and we might add Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin) enshrined a masculinist cult of the artist, endowed with a primordial authenticity and originality.

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In his chapter Doug Dalton (Chapter 5) complicates and challenges this representation of European history and this reading of Trilling. His reading is contrary to the more common observation of anthropologists and philosophers whom, he suggests, trace a transition from an older European notion of sincerity, based on fulfilling a social role to authenticity, “a wayward, individualistic, asocial, and often narcissistic pursuit of a real and true self that participates in and furthers urban industrial social breakdown” (p. 164). Rather, he suggests that Trilling does not trace a shift from the sincerity of an organic society to the authenticity of an individualist one, or in the negative rendition from “fooling others . . . [to] fooling oneself ” (p. 164). He observes how Trilling (1997) borrows the concept of “sentiment of being” from Rousseau, whereby a child “comes to its senses” (p. 177), employing its senses and intelligence, without the miasma of bourgeois judgments which can divide a self and make them “prone to pride, vanity, competition, resentment, slavishness, and all sort of vice” (p. 177). Trilling traces how characters in European literature, such as the plays of Molière (e.g., [1666] 1992) “seek to affect, escape, and/or reconcile themselves to the inauthenticity of bourgeois self-deception” (p. 161). Dalton suggests that authenticity is best understood in relation to what it is not: inauthenticity. An authentic or grounded sense of existence is “devoid of deception and self-deception” (p. 161). I will leave it to readers of Dalton and Trilling to decide which interpretation of the transformations of European notions of sincerity and authenticity they find most compelling. I now move beyond this rather Western textual and intertextual debate to the more expansive questions raised by the editors about what happens when concepts of authorship and authenticity travel, and not just in one direction, but rather spinning out and spiraling promiscuously. The European story the editors tell about the emergence of individualism and its connection to capitalism and concepts of property is of course a story often told (and much debated). Moreover, as the editors aver, its counterpart was typically the effacement of the individuality of non-European others, who were seen primarily through the lens of a collectivized “culture” (p. 11). We might acknowledge that the discourses and practices of Orientalism exposed by Said (1983) for the Middle East which the editors allude to, were preceded in the Pacific in a litany of texts and images produced by explorers, scientists, and artists who saw Pacific peoples through the collectivizing lens of race and place: Polynesians, Melanesians, and Micronesians, situated at different levels in the teleology from savagery, to barbarism and civilization.3 In a way this mirrored the canonical history of Europe as perceived and received at the time and mapped their distance from the co-eval contemporary presence of the Europeans they encountered (Douglas and Ballard 2008; Jolly 2012; Smith 1960). The editors are astute in perceiving the complicity of early (and some later) anthropologists in this effacement of the individuality of others, kept at

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a distance in time and space (see also Trouillot 2002). They expose the ethos of an anthropology which combines the ideal figures of the anthropologist as objective scientist and wild explorer (both figures typically racialized as white and gendered as masculine) in a way which marks the early anthropology of Zora Neale Huston,4 Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead as different, even as suspect. Yet, in presuming to speak about the Samoans, the Arapesh, the Tchambuli early male and female anthropologists alike projected Western notions of a primordial authenticity, effaced the individuality of Indigenous others and presumed the authority to author the lives of others through their individual texts (a dynamic consummately explored in Chapter 3 by Knauft about his nigh forty-year relationship with the Gebusi people of PNG’s lowlands in Western Province). The hyper-valuation of fieldwork in unfamiliar places invokes the idea of a challenging individuated quest and an experience saturated by the authenticity of “being there.” This is not too dissimilar from the logic of the encounters of European artists like Picasso and Gauguin with the “primitive” arts of Oceania and Africa, encounters which were seen to unleash their primordial authenticity, a creativity infused with a desiring id, submerged by the layers of repression associated with civilization and its many discontents (Freud 1961; Price 2002). But what is the origin of these divergent plots of Western and Oceanic ideas of authorship and authenticity—one highlighting individual creativity, the other anonymizing collective cultural creations, one discerning authenticity in the “one true self,” the other in the primordial origins of a culture? How far are these figure/ground reversals confined within a European history of ideas which has long contrasted Self/Other in these terms? How far are such figure/ground reversals faithful to a history of Oceanic genealogies? Oceanic ideas and practices have dramatically transformed—evident in the momentous changes among the peoples of the interior of PNG from the time of first settlement ca. 50,000 BP through the epoch of the Ipomean Revolution and beyond, and equally evident in the extraordinary dynamism and diversity when ca. 4000 BP Austronesian-speaking peoples navigated their way from their homeland in Taiwan to settle islands across the Pacific (Kirch 2000). Transformations across the Pacific were catalyzed by powerful Indigenous forces long before the exogenous forces of European exploration, exploitation, occupation, and settlement. So, in constructing divergent plots of authorship and authenticity we are confronted with questions similar to those posed by Marilyn Strathern’s classic text The Gender of the Gift (1988). Is the binary of individual/dividual persons a logic internal to a European history of ideas or does this binary reflect crucial differences between the embodied practices and the dominant concepts and values of European and Oceanic peoples? I am inclined to agree with

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Holly Wardlow who, in her stellar book Wayward Women (2006), argues for the co-presence of relational and individuated models of personhood amongst the Huli people of the Highlands of PNG, and in PNG more generally, but also argues that various forces of modernity have precipitated an increased individualism, which is palpably gendered (see Jolly 2018). But with her we might ask, what is it about modernity that has this effect? Contemporary Pacific authors often engage Indigenous concepts of relation, for example in notions of the vā, the space between persons and positions celebrated in Tongan philosophy. This privileges a holistic genealogy connecting gods, ancestors, and the living, humans and nonhuman entities (e.g., Kame’eleihiwa 1992; Narokobi 1980; and the edited collections of Vaai and Casimira 2017; Vaai and Nabobo-Baba 2017). Since the early twentieth-century writings of Marcel Mauss and Maurice Leenhardt (on personnage and personne) there is a library of Western ethnography which suggests the hegemony of Oceanic concepts and values of relationality rather than individuality. But those same authors often also witness how colonialism, commodity economies, Christianity, and the multifaceted package of “modernity” catalyze and cultivate individualism (see Jolly 2018; and the debate between Robbins 2004 and Mosko 2010). Whatever the origin and the current status of this binary, between Western and Oceanic modes of being in the world, between Western and Oceanic persons, we must keep on asking how this binary occludes shared human universals and concepts and values emergent from co-creations in transcultural encounters and travels? This is especially acute in pondering notions of authorship and authenticity. The editors suggest that Western colonial agents brought rival notions of authenticity to the Pacific—on the one hand witnessing the authenticity of primordial (a.k.a. “primitive”) cultures untainted by modernity, on the other, and especially through the process of Christian conversion and introduced literacy, notions of authenticity as individual “sincerity” (see Robbins 2004). Both these notions of authenticity and linked ideas of collective versus individuated authorship have been appropriated by Pacific peoples. The work of missionaries in recording and translating Indigenous Pacific languages and cultivating Indigenous literacy had huge consequences. Memories which had been transmitted orally, in performances and the materials of place and artifacts, were reinscribed in Indigenous writing. And, as Noenoe Silva has shown so persuasively for the history of Hawai’i, the introduced arts of writing, like quilts introduced by New England missionaries, were appropriated, recontextualized and sometimes served anticolonial, Indigenous purposes (Silva 2004; also Jolly 2014). Thus, the fundamental arguments of the introduction are compelling. Against Western prerogatives and imputations,

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This volume undermines and deconstructs the dichotomy between Western authorship and Indigenous authenticity. All the while that, from a Western perspective, anthropologists were “authoring” in the sense of writing about Pacific cultures, Pacific Islanders and Westerners alike were reauthoring their own cultures enriched by historical waves of ideas, feelings, and images that washed in from other places (p. 2).

Diverse Itineraries of Traveling Concepts: Papua New Guinea

I now want to consider the rather different ways in which the twinned concepts of authorship and authenticity travel through the chapters of this volume. Let me start with the trio of chapters by Bruce Knauft, Alphonse Aime, and Doug Dalton, all of which focus on PNG (Chapters 3–5). Here decades of deep ethnography in remote places have too often been relegated to the “savage slot” (Trouillot 2002), in a way that emphasizes disconnection rather than connection between insiders and outsiders. Dalton (Chapter 5) argues for the Indigenous authenticity of the Rawa Song of the Flying Fox, the story and the associated singing and dance performance called the yambo miro. A widely shared story, it has no individual author and secretes powerful magic in efficacious performances. Yet, “its anonymity does not make it ahistorical” (p. 162), since, as Dalton shows, it has been performed in diverse contexts—to induce compassion and elicit gifts, in love magic, in making peace and in ceremonies of Christian conversion and celebration. As earlier observed, Dalton suggests that it embodies a “sentiment of being,” akin to that discerned by Rousseau, a “grounded sense of existence, devoid of deception and self-deception” (p. 161). He relates a common version of the yambo miro story (potent magical details in fuller lyrics were secreted) and the diverse contexts of its performance. He suggests that it can be analyzed with Roy Wagner’s obviation sequence of transformations. A predatory flying fox is turned into a husband and a woman into a wife by the flying fox who asserts his patrilocal power and identity. But he is killed and turned into prey by the woman’s little brother who burns him in a fire. At death he transforms into a potent bush spirit, his gleaming white teeth reflecting and condensing the primal energy of the sun. His sorrowful lament becomes the song of the yambo miro, often voiced by a woman. Dalton suggests that the yambo miro story creates an alternative universe in which “men’s patri-project is turned into a woman’s matri-project” (p. 169) and the mournful melody of the song reveals “patrilineality to be a self-deceptive illusion” (p. 169). This is remarkable given how Rawa culture celebrates lines of men and the necessity to effect the exchange of women for bridewealth

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in order to grow patrilocal patrilines. Across diverse contexts, Dalton shows how, when the yambo miro is sung efficaciously (and especially with haunting bamboo flutes), it induces compassion and generosity even between erstwhile enemies, making people forget and forgive. Dalton details Rawa speakers’ metapragmatic discourse about authenticity. This entails an analysis of ideas of truth and falsity. Language can be used to lie, but some words like magical formulae or powerful oratory are indubitably true. Words are true if their roots bear fruit, and false if they do not. People whose intentions are not realized are said to be lying. He suggests Rawa people share their own intentions among intimate kin, but do not impute intentions to themselves or others publicly. Dalton discerns affinities with Rousseau’s notion of a “sentiment of being,” grounded in natural and individual human sensorial experience. He also suggests that the way in which the yamba miro engages themes of mortality and compassion is consonant with Rousseau’s account. But the authenticity of yambo miro is “not negotiated between European metropoles and Pacific locales. Rather it concerns Rawa existential issues of truth and falsity that Westerners can comprehend, however, the yambo miro does not easily translate and is losing its effectiveness in modern Western culture” (pp. 161–62). I wonder how the Rawa binary of truth/falsity relates to the opposition of authenticity/inauthenticity Dalton critiques in his discussion of earlier anthropological debates (where I suggest some analyses did avoid the impasse of that binary). Clearly Dalton is relying on transcultural echoes between Rousseau (a named author) and Rawa people as a collectivity. But concepts here are traveling with an anthropologist engaged in acts of translocation and translation in the face of challenges both by Indigenous politicians and decolonial critics within and beyond the discipline. He celebrates the fact that, although Rawa people suffered punitive raids by colonial authorities, they have not been subject to the land dispossession, extractive industries, and emergent class inequalities endured by other Papua New Guineans. Rawa Christian conversion was, as in most of Oceania, an expression of Indigenous agency. But, Dalton’s traveling story ends with a denouement, about the incapacity of practices such as yambo miro to confront the crisis, “the cataclysm of foreigners” (p. 165) and its present inefficacy in generating peace and compassion. Recently some Rawa have formed large haus man (men’s house) groups which are killing those they claim are witches and sorcerers. Dalton laments this postcolonial masculine (and patrilineal?) violence. “Perhaps displaced colonial violence stemming from years of capitalist dispossession has reached a crescendo” (p. 179). He invokes the ancestral spirit of a distant Rousseau warning against the violence of his acolytes in the French Revolution, and suggests it is “probably wise to heed Rousseau’s counsel” (p. 179). His ultimate sense of the Rawa story is not of heroic Indigenous triumph but

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a “more somber and tragic narrative, in keeping with the tenor of the yambo miro itself ” (p. 179). Alphonse Aime (Chapter 4) is not so engaged with French savants but rather concerned with how Kayan people in the Madang Province of PNG are recovering the Indigenous authenticity of garamut (slit-drums) from their diminution by foreign misinterpretations of them as mere musical instruments. His argument for Indigenous authenticity resonates with Dalton’s argument about the yambo miro of Rawa people, but Aime expressly sees this local form of authenticity as exceeding the re-presentation of garamut by Western authors, in early anthropology and in more recent texts. Garamut are not just musical instruments but “living social agents that foster intimate and personal relationships” (p. 138), spiritually charged and clan specific but also capable of sending broader public messages. Garamut were (and sometimes still are) seen as the habitat of spirits, the materialization of divine powers creating health and well-being or conversely causing illness, death, and calamity. They are thus objects with agency akin to persons, not inert artistic or musical objects. Aime sees the agency of garamut as a combination of both spiritual and human agency. Bush spirits are summoned into the wood while a garamut is carved and live there as members of specific clans. Hence garamut are habitually covered with woven coconut leaves and it is forbidden to take photographs of their insides. But this indwelling spiritual agency is complemented by human agency and human intentions; senior men use garamut as endorsement of their leadership and see the garamut as a necessary sign of their status. Garamut thus amplify the voices of the elders/big-men associated with them. But the combined potency of indwelling spirits and of powerful male agents endows the garamut itself with an agency—its voice can unite or divide. The specific voices of garamut are linked with specific clans and the clan totems which are carved on their bodies distinguish them just as male bodies are distinguished through processes of male initiation or when male and female bodies are etched with tattoos. They are thought to have their own characteristics and personality like human persons. They have their own distinctive “voice.” In contrast to these deep, resonant meanings of garamut, Aime tracks how, in the work of many early anthropologists, garamut were reduced to objects which conveyed messages and produced rhythms for dancing. He suggests this diminished foreign understanding of garamut has infiltrated Indigenous knowledge and obscured their deeper cultural significance. Thus, the word garamut from the language of the Tolai people in East New Britain is now commonly used in Tok Pisin throughout PNG to refer to this narrower meaning of a slit-drum as a musical messenger, akin to the ringing of bells in Western contexts to mark time or call meetings. Still deeper meanings continue in Kayan life and especially in the context of clan identity, male leadership, gender and intergenerational relations, and

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the persistence of men’s house activities. Kayan male elders point to how the compound word garamut combines both calling out and quiet listening—the voice of ancestral spirits enjoins respectful attention. They also differentiated potent custom garamut sounded only on special occasions (such as the death of a powerful man) from those garamut used in churches, schools, or musical performances which have not undergone “rituals of production and authorization” (p. 143) and are thus adjudged by these old men as less authentic. Kastom garamut are spiritually charged and dangerous, causing disease, death, or infertility to those who do not respect their power, and especially to disobedient women. Women are supposed to be “silenced by the garamut from enquiring and knowing the secret cult of men” (p. 144). Aime emphasizes the gendered potency of garamut, their danger perhaps enhanced by gender ambiguity. At some level, he suggests they are “neither male nor female” (p. 154), representing a generic human body; they can be carved with female features or be named after female spirits. Yet, although seemingly androgynous or even transgendered, they are carved and claimed by men as owners so that “men in a sense claim ownership of the body of women—and subdue the voices of women . . . Garamut not only segregate gendered space but silence women from asking questions” (p. 154). But, in a telling vignette from a Festival held in 2013, he reveals that there are significant differences emerging between generations of men. Male clan elders were concerned about women entering the men’s house and being proximate to the garamut; young men were not so concerned. So, alongside the gendered resonance of slit-drums, there are large intergenerational differences in the meaning of garamut—young men and women see them as primarily musical instruments, used in performances, disavowing their status as sacred animated objects. So, while older men say that selling a garamut would be like killing the family, breaking the umbilical cord to the womb of the community, younger people do not credit this potency. Aime reads such disavowals as the infiltration of foreign misinterpretations and devaluations of the potency of garamut. But could they also derive from a more Indigenous dynamic whereby younger men and women are not deferring to the power of ancient things and of male elders? How far are the inroads of a more evangelical Christianity, the perceived increase in individualism, and the allure of modern things attenuating the power and the danger of both old men and of garamut? Cognate questions about generational transformation are foregrounded in Knauft’s lucid, self-reflective essay tracing the arc of his long experience living with and writing about Gebusi people of the lowlands of PNG over almost four decades. He combines this with insightful reflections on how anthropology is situated in broader transformations in notions of authorship and authenticity. He frankly acknowledges how his earliest ethnography (1980–82) was predi-

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cated both on the solo figure of an authentic, autonomous self, embodied in the anthropologist-author and the “field,” the ground of an authentic culture, isolated, deep in a remote rainforest—replete with long houses, elaborate rituals, spirit séances, and disturbing patterns of sorcery violence. No Christianity, no cash cropping, no wage labor, no schooling, no out-migration (see also Knauft 1985). Through several later visits Knauft becomes intensely aware of how that moment in Gebusi cultural history he first experienced was not a primordial state but one dependent on colonial and postcolonial processes: steel tools enabled bigger, more productive gardens; and the pacification of bellicose neighbors by Australian colonial administrators allowed abundant lavish feasts and an efflorescence in ritual life. On his return in 1998 Knauft discovers huge transformations: Gebusi have moved from their long houses to modern dwellings close to the Nomad air strip, children are attending school, families attending Sunday church, women buying and selling in the local market, men playing incessant games of football, and police and development officers are locally present (Knauft 2002). Yet this seemingly epochal shift, depicted in his second monograph as a “before and after” story proves to be not so linear. As commodity economy stagnated and state services deteriorated, the airstrip became degraded, the school and market closed down, and police and development agents disappeared. Gebusi people became even more “remote”; they returned to living in longhouses, depending on greater self-reliance in food and livelihoods and reviving some ancestral practices in what Knauft dubs “neotraditionalism.” Through his long-term engagement with Gebusi people, Knauft acknowledges how his academic career—moving from doctoral student to an academic position, securing tenure and ultimately a named distinguished chair was enabled by the succession of his books representing Gebusi people (1985, 2002, 2016, as well as publications with a more general, theoretical character or about other places). He acknowledges the shifting genres of his successive ethnographies—from his earliest, earnest long monograph replete with figures and tables to the more humanistic and reflexive style of later works—brimming with color photographs which display the individual diversity of “the Gebusi” and a short introductory text suffused with a rosy view of Gebusi persistence through turbulent waves of change (Knauft 2016). He ponders how far the differential emphases of his successive works reflect Gebusi transformations and how far they reflect changing preoccupations and conceptions within anthropology—from a privileging of remote, undiscovered “authentic” cultures to expressions of “vernacular modernities.” He notes how his more recent visits, with his “intrepid” co-researcher Anne-Sylvie Malbrancke have entailed processes of “reverification” and extension of earlier findings, coupled with a more complex view of gender dynamics in this highly male-dominant setting.

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He reflects on how the Gebusi concept of kogwayay, which he glossed as “good company,” the dominant motif of his first ethnography, was in fact a depiction of a male culture of initiation, all-night spirit séances, feasting, and camaraderie from which women were largely excluded. Women were peripheral or absent altogether from such expressions of togetherness, of engaged talk and exuberant joking. He reflects on how his then-wife Eileen Cantrell and he were both influenced by the radical feminist politics of the 1970s, but how this impacted her far more deeply. Approaching Gebusi fieldwork as a couple, looking at the “men’s side” and the “women’s side,” proved both impossible and impractical and generated tensions. Gendered segregation was grounded in male dominance—women could not talk alone to Knauft and became reticent when men were present. Thirty-five years later, working with Malbranke “my previous assumption of male-centered perspectives, became more fully and palpably apparent” (p. 110). But some Gebusi men manifest dissatisfaction with this novel attention to women. He also observes how the challenges of fieldwork have both changed and persisted over time. His (and Eileen’s) first extended fieldwork entailed much privation and physical hardship: a hot, humid rainforest where he was afflicted with malaria, snake bites, and especially skin rashes and fungal infections, no modern conveniences and few outside contacts or supplies. Moreover, working with a previously “undiscovered” tribe, whose language had not been recorded (and who had been misnamed as “Bibo,” their word for a variety of plantain) entailed a monolingual immersion, without the help of translators. But the opening afforded by local “development” closed down again in later years and in his last and likely final visit to Gebusi, Knauft again experienced formidable health and transport challenges, perhaps amplified by age. Although ethnographers have shifted into new locales which are not so physically challenging or remote, fieldwork often remains “both highly discomforting and dangerous” (p. 111) and cognate ethical and political challenges persist. Knauft early faced the challenge of speaking about an “inconvenient truth,” the very high rates of homicide among Gebusi people due to sorcery fears, accusations, and executions (which have reduced dramatically in recent time). Ethnographers today may face comparable challenges of violence, witnessing war, inequality and disempowerment, state terror against their interlocutors, and especially for women, rape and sexual affronts even from trusted assistants. Yet these are rarely credited with the same badge of honor as were those intrepid white men of an earlier era. This concern closely connects to another crucial concern Knauft confronts—“who is speaking for whom” (p. 112). He acknowledges his own privilege as a straight white male “with a long pedigree of white male privilege” (p. 106). He celebrates the deep friendships he formed with several Gebusi people and the “richness, surprise, and value of camaraderie across radical cultural

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difference” (p. 105). Following Bakhtin (1983) he sees difference and otherness as central to communication and intersubjectivity. But this does not eliminate important questions about the authorial privilege attached to certain identities on the basis of race, sex, gender, age, class or religion. The privilege accorded certain authors connects to disciplinary habits around sole authorship. Knauft is alert to how profoundly the credentialing of most anthropologists has been predicated on the solo ethnographer and author—my thesis, my book, my article. And he suggests that “[f]or the foreseeable future, a doctoral thesis is still likely to be the obligatory work of a putatively autonomous individual, an imputed authentic author” (p. 126). This is very different to many other scholarly disciplines, and especially the natural sciences where multiple authorship is the norm and where major discoveries or inventions are increasingly attributed not to a sole author but a research team or a laboratory. (In my university, most PhD theses in the natural sciences are awarded on the basis of a compilation and integration of published papers, most of which are coauthored by the candidate with several others.) Inspired by Foucault’s ideas about the changing nature of the author function and its link to authenticity, Knauft notes how the value of solo authorship more generally is declining in the latest stage of modernity. Novels and plays written by sole authors are complemented and often supplanted by movies and television dramas whose multiple authors are acknowledged in long rolling credits. Even in the discipline of anthropology we are witnessing more acknowledgement of “co-creations,” of shared knowledge between ethnographers and interlocutors, not just in written texts but in film, websites, and social media. As Knauft observes “fieldwork” now potentially has no end, it is not so readily “cut,” but continues as connections are maintained through social media. The space-time compression empowered by mobile phones and social media has further vitiated the value of the sole originating author as copies and retweets circulate “virally.” Yet, it could be argued that media such as Facebook have rescripted an individualist authorship of an “authentic” life. Knauft celebrates his own capacity to have a shifting authorial ego, responsive to diverse constituencies and audiences. Yet arguably the capacity for emergent scholarly authors including anthropologists to sustain an “authentic” if changing or polyphonic authorial voice, is cramped by the sclerotic, quantitative indices of value which increasingly prevail in contemporary research cultures (see Jolly 2005). But Knauft concludes on a positive note, suggesting that “claims of classic authorship and authenticity are waning and, in some contexts, moribund. . . . But authorship, like authenticity, continually reinvents itself . . . . Reconfiguring received categories with new terms and in new and subtle ways is now crucial for the future of critical ethnography and progressive anthropology” (p. 127).

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Whose Authenticity? Traveling to Aotearoa New Zealand, Sa¯moa, and Tahiti

Sarina Pearson and Shuchi Kothari’s contribution (Chapter 6), is also deeply reflexive, revealing how their work with digital storytelling was divergently evaluated in the contexts of fine art and health in Aotearoa New Zealand. This chapter was palpably provoked by the experience of Pearson and Kothari and their collaborators of a hostile meeting with curators at the Auckland City Art Gallery, an encounter which they depict as “vexed and genuinely confusing” (p. 185). The curators adjudged their work in digital storytelling as “irredeemably inauthentic” and an exercise in “ethnographic Orientalism” (p. 185). The authors’ shock at these insults and negative adjudications is clearly at odds with their own high valuation of this creative media practice. Digital storytelling is based on a particular genre of multimedia production developed in the 1990s in Berkeley California by an entity now called StoryCentre. It involved a video/film in which a first-person voice over was accompanied by still or moving images, sometimes with musical accompaniment, all sourced and chosen by the storyteller. Storytellers were assisted by creative and technical staff in a dedicated workshop context. This genre of storytelling has been celebrated for its emphasis on personal voice, for the authentic articulation of lived experience and for its capacity to “facilitate grassroots creative expression and foster cultural democracy because of its low cost and relative accessibility” (p. 185). Pearson and Kothari and colleagues developed Pacifika digital storytelling in pilot workshops in Suva and Tonga through processes which are carefully described and analyzed. The nineteen stories developed through these processes were from a Pacific screen pedagogy perspective, “authentic” both because the storytellers were virtually all Indigenous people living in Fiji and Tonga and because their stories derived from personal experiences and perspectives. Why then the negative adjudications by these fine art curators, that these stories were “irredeemably inauthentic”? Pearson and Kothari and collaborators later proposed a prospective exhibition called Talanoa (a word in several Pacific languages which refers to frank dialogue or informal storytelling and a term which evoked the inclusive, participatory, and transparent character of their processes). They saw a gallery installation of their works as potentially creating an off-line and embodied site for viewing, debate, and hopefully more stories. The curators thought them inappropriate for the gallery not just because of their quality and suitability, but because of three ideological objections. First, they suggested the collaborative, co-creative nature of the stories “fatally corrupted” their individual authenticity (p. 186). Second, they objected to visuals which storytellers had chosen that were openly sourced and

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not from their own lives. Third, in contrast to other examples of Indigenous contemporary art, the curators suggested that these stories lacked the formal innovation and the ironic subversion characteristic of postcolonial Indigenous art. The curators compared their stories invidiously with the celebrated work In Pursuit of Venus (infected) by Lisa Reihana. This is a very different cultural product; formally innovative and subversively ironic, it catalyzes dramatic emotional engagement in most audiences.5 But, as Pearson and Kothari observe, Reihana’s work entailed long-term collaborations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Moreover, we might add that Reihana has often in public discussions of her work in gallery contexts (for example, at the Gallery of Modern Art as part of the Asia Pacific Triennial 9 in Brisbane, November 2018) stressed her mixed Māori and Pakeha ancestry. This tends to be eclipsed in celebrations of her Indigenous authorial authenticity. Pearson and Kothari perceived identity politics at play in this fine art encounter—Pearson’s own status as a Canadian of mixed Japanese and Anglo-Celtic ancestry and Kothari’s South Asian ancestry seemed significant. “We have been called ‘oriental’ before but this was the first time we had been called ‘Orientalists’” (p. 198). “Were we ‘Orientalists’ because the curators thought we exercised disproportionate power or because we were not the right people to initiate this kind of proposal?” (p. 198). Their suspicion that they were not the right people was reinforced when an uncannily similar exhibition of storytelling opened later at another South Auckland gallery, also titled Talanoa but featuring only Pacifika storytellers. They concluded that: “Authenticity in Indigenous fine art therefore seemed to rely on the appearance [not necessarily the reality] of a transparent and essentialist genealogy” (p. 199). By contrast the digital storytelling work which Pearson, Kothari, and their collaborators did in the context of Māori palliative care did not attract such negative adjudications of inauthenticity. In response to a recognition that palliative care in Aotearoa New Zealand was unacceptably Eurocentric, a bicultural, multidisciplinary team of researchers wanted to know what a “good death” meant for Māori and to help make end of life care in Aotearoa New Zealand more culturally sensitive. The digital storytelling process was seen to redress the hierarchy of researchers and subjects and the weaknesses in methods such as interviews and surveys by focusing on the personal lived experiences of subjects and their reflexivity in co-created dialogues. Through a workshop on a marae at the University of Auckland, stories were generated by nine Māori people who had cared for older relatives towards the end of their lives. Significantly, eight were women. The finished stories were screened for all the participants, family, and friends and subsequently for Māori community health organizations, nurses, and students, and palliative care professionals. Across these contexts they were adjudged as excellent research data and a

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powerful health communication tool, “authentic” both in their articulation of a subjective lived experience and in their cultural setting. Ultimately in adjudging these two contrasting perceptions of digital storytelling as “inauthentic” or “authentic,” Pearson and Kothari seek to question how “inauthenticity” is perceived when there is a taint by “contact with non-Indigenous people and idioms” (p. 201) and suggests this antiquated notion is at odds with “an increasingly transnational and networked world, [where] an emphasis on cultural purity seems problematic and potentially disabling” (p. 201). It is interesting to compare this very contemporary contest about “authenticity” in Aotearoa New Zealand with Mageo’s appraisal of processes of colonial mimicry in Samoa (Chapter 2). Mimicry, as she observes is usually seen as the opposite of an authentic original, since it is by definition a copy. But mimicry perforce entails overlapping ideas of authenticity. “[M]imicry is a way of authoring, one can express ‘authenticity’ mimetically” (p. 71). For her mimicry is a “gauge of openness to cultural others” (p. 71). Based on a close reading of photographs from the first half of the twentieth century, Mageo examines how Americans’ mimicry of Samoans simultaneously revealed their notions of what was authentically Samoan and what was authentically American. In contrast to the pervasive mimicry and cultural cross-dressing in American photographs of the period, Mageo suggests that New Zealanders mimicked not Samoans but their British colonial masters. Contrary to Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins’s (1993) reading of photographs in National Geographic as part of an American imperial process of mystifying the masses, Mageo discerns something different in her photographic ensemble: “a subtle enacted dialogue between Americans and Samoans about relations of domination” (p. 74). Her argument with Lutz and Collins is persuasive but the photographic ensemble under discussion here—a few images published in popular books and magazines, many others still sequestered in private albums in diverse archives and libraries—is also distinctly different. The photos Mageo analyzes, especially focused on mimicry or its visible lack, derive from a large collection she assembled between 2010 and 2015 from the museum collections of all the major nationalities present in colonial Samoa. Mageo grounds her arguments about mimicry in research about the “mirroring” in mimetic exchanges between infants and caretakers and between conversing adults. She extrapolates from these interpersonal dialogues to intercultural dialogues whereby culturally shared fantasies about selves and others are communicated. The mimicry she considers oscillates between conscious and unconscious. It differs from Homi Bhabha’s (2004) analysis of colonial mimicry which focused on colonized “mimic men” copying colonizers (“almost white but not quite”). Mageo looks both ways at reciprocal mimicry.

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The subjects of these photographs are diverse. Jack London is seen during his Pacific sojourn in the Snark appearing as wild and free, natural and uncombed, wearing a lavalava and embracing two Samoan girls identified as tāupou (virginal village dignitaries) (See Figure 2.3). In this photo he embodies the natural simplicity and the rugged individualism of the ideal American male of the period (although significantly there is a twin photo where his wife Charmain poses with the tāupou in an identical embrace). In another shot with tāupou, Jack’s cultural and gendered difference is highlighted as he wears a long-sleeved white shirt, belted trousers, and a tie, while the tāupou are dressed in ceremonial regalia, signifying perceived Polynesian nobility. Samoans often responded with their own self-fashioning for photos—donning ceremonial dress even for impromptu shots and wearing novel attire based on Western dress or jewelry. Western terms for royals were increasingly used for Indigenous hierarchies—kings, queens, princesses (e.g. the tāupou, so frequently portrayed was often termed a “village princess” a fantasy of Samoan natural nobility). Mageo analyses this as a confluence of Western and Samoan valuations of “nobility” and of shared imaginings. Two photos taken in Pago Pago in 1923 of Ida Beck and her friends (Figures 2.4 and 2.5) evince a feminine American mimicry of Samoan women’s dress, rather revealing, breasts covered but barefoot. But unlike most Samoan women of the period their hair is long and flowing, a style central to romantic representations of “natural” women and one which became increasingly iconic in both the representations and the realities of Polynesian women’s self-fashioning. Like Jack London, Ida Beck and her friends smile and look straight at the camera—expressing in their direct gaze that authentic, egalitarian American openness. The mimicry Mageo discerns in a famous photo of Margaret Mead, (Figure 2.6), standing next to and dressed like the tāupou Fa‘amotu is “far deeper than dress” (p. 84). Fa’amotu’s hair is long and her breasts are covered. Mageo asserts that Mead imitated not just her dress but learnt Samoan culture and etiquette from Fa‘amotu, sleeping with her on a pile of pandanus mats, eating, bathing, and dancing together. Mageo celebrates this early embodiment of participant-observation in anthropology and the mutual regard imaged in their holding hands and smiling at each other as an exemplary ethnographic rapport. She also discerns similarities with Jack London’s self-fashioning. Both in these photos and in her book on Samoa, Mead authors herself as an archetypical adventurous American, a female version of the rugged individualist in pursuit of a noble authenticity to redress the weaknesses of American civilization. But she also enacts a “radical openness to cultural others acted out through mimicry: living as they lived, doing what they did” (p. 85) and performing a familial inclusivity. (Thankfully, there is no mention of the controversy generated by Derek Freeman’s later vilification of Mead’s research in Samoa.)

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A common feature in these photos is a persisting fantasy about the American self as open to a primordial experience with others (earlier rehearsed in encounters with Native Americans on the frontier), with a sincerity and honesty distinct from their European cousins. But Mageo also discerns a “distributed mimicry”: artists like Jack London, anthropologists like Mead, women like Ida Beck were more likely to don native dress; American male colonial officials might wear leis but retained their suits and formality. By contrast, Mageo discerns in photographs of the New Zealanders, who controlled the Westerly Islands as a Trust Territory after World War I, a visible lack of mimicry of Samoans, but rather a “fantasy of the national self as representing the British crown on the outskirts of empire” (p. 75) with the white military uniforms, swords, and plumes of English imperial style. This is clear in photos of Administrator George Richardson who dealt disastrously with the rebellious Mau movement during his tenure from 1921–28. It is not until Guy Powles became High Commissioner in 1949, appointed to shepherd the westerly isles to independence, that we see Powles and his wife in fabrics mimicking tapa cloth, holding Samoan fans and wearing ula around their necks. Based on these contrasts between Americans and New Zealanders and between early and later New Zealand administrators, Mageo argues that mimicry “reveals and enacts a real or desired permeability between groups, and a lack of mimicry a more exclusionary orientation” (p. 75). This is a telling suggestion from this visible, visual evidence but I wonder how this might be seen to play out in the divergent later trajectories of Western Samoa (now Sāmoa) and American Samoa. Are there continuing differences in how foreigners and Samoans relate in these two places—in cross-cultural interaction and how marriage and mixed ancestry is dealt with across this “permeable membrane”? It is interesting to compare Mageo’s analysis of mimicry in colonial photographs with Yuki Kihara’s recent restaging of Der Papālagi in Apia in Sāmoa and Auckland in Aotearoa New Zealand (see Alexeyeff and Kihara 2018).6 In Apia the cross-cultural masquerade and racial crossing enacted by local Europeans dressing up in Samoan ceremonial clothes drew responses of discomfort and critique of cultural appropriation and inauthenticity. Yet in Aotearoa New Zealand both diasporic Samoans and art critics relished the provocative humor. Finally, let me to turn to the chapter by Joyce Hammond which also focuses on questions of “authenticity” in visual culture and in dress in particular: the innovative costume of tenues végétales in contemporary Miss Tahiti beauty contests (Chapter 1). Through this example Hammond poses the stark question of “whose authenticity”? She challenges the claim made by Laura Schuft and Bernard Massiera (2012) that the garments reappropriate Western stereotypes of Islander authenticity and were designed for economic gain through tourism. They also claim such attire as “symbols of pre-missionary

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traditions” (p. 41). Hammond robustly challenges their claims that “islanders are deliberately creating a false authenticity to sell to tourists” (p. 41). Indeed, she observes that very few tourists attend Miss Tahiti or other beauty pageants in French Polynesia. Audiences are primarily the family and friends of the participants and other locals. Moreover, these garments in no way resemble “pre-missionary” clothing but, as with many other changes in Pacific clothes, fashions respond to both Indigenous and exogenous catalysts. She persuasively argues that these garments are expressions of a contemporary Polynesian identity “that combines celebration for a legacy of island life with a cosmopolitan knowledge and sophistication that islanders accrue through their life experiences and interactions with people from abroad” (pp. 41–42). In the early nineteenth century members of the Tahitian elite creolized European cloth and Tahitian barkcloth in their hybrid wardrobes. In the Pacific today “high fashion” again combines traditional materials with globalized style. In keeping with her prior publications which offer a dense and materially rich consideration of the changing character of tīfaifai in French Polynesia (e.g., Hammond 1986, 2014), Hammond offers delicate, meticulous details in words and images evoking the creativity of these novel garments. Up until 2000 Miss Tahiti contestants had for forty years, as in similar contests elsewhere, worn swimsuits, Western-style dresses and evening gowns. In the 1990s Islander dances and costumes celebrating Mā‘ohi identity were introduced, and after 2000 tenues végétales became a distinctive phase of the contest. A variety of natural materials were used in novel costumes: flowers (such as orchids, bougainvillea, hibiscus and gardenias), pandanus fibers, barks, ferns, leaves, pods, seeds, shells, and pearls. These are fashioned into garments which simultaneously express the bountiful beauty of island life and global fashion styles modified to suit Islanders’ tastes. On the basis of conversations and interviews with contest participants, organizers and judges, designers of costumes, audiences (and even those who don’t attend), and a range of textual and audiovisual sources, Hammond reveals the rich and diverse plaiting of materials and values in tenues végétales. It is clear that rather than being self-consciously designed as part of a tourist marketing program that tenues végétales emerged as part of the broader movement of the cultural renaissance in French Polynesia from the 1970s. This was intimately connected to anticolonial sentiments, pro-independence and autonomist movements, fueled in part by French nuclear testing in the region. It is also clear that many designers were, through their garments, expressing a distinctively Mā‘ohi identity and sometimes a particular island of origin— seeds and pigs’ tusks associated with the Marquesas, distinctive shells from the Tuamotus or Austral Islands, pandanus from the Australs, flowers and fresh leaves from the Society Islands and Tahitian pearls from Gambier and the Tuamotus, but also expressive of French Polynesia as a whole. The Miss Mo‘orea

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contest of 2017 was focused on the coconut tree and its multifarious products: leaves, bark, fibers, and oils. Beauty contests typically highlight annual themes—for example Mermaids in 2016 celebrating the diverse shells, pearls, seaweed, and fishes of the oceans. The dazzling bounty of these island treasures are consummately displayed on the beautiful and graceful bodies of the contestants, often inducing effusive praise from both audiences and reviewers for newspapers and television. But the dazzling artistry and lavish creations of these costumes also connect with intercultural history—for example, The Bounty or Gauguin. Foreign places and styles are also referenced—for example, Las Vegas or Bohemian Woman. Designers of costumes, be they contestants’ kin or professional artists, draw inspiration from fashion magazines, films, TV, and the internet. Moreover, there are creative connections with global fashion icons like JeanPaul Gaultier’s bridal dress composed of leaves and Alexander McQueen’s clam shell costume. Although they were both inspired by natural materials as Hammond notes, neither were subject to accusations of “inauthenticity,” clearly a double standard linked with racist ideas of unchanging authentic traditions versus progressive Western innovations (see Jolly 1992). Hammond thus argues that these garments are authentic expressions of Polynesian identities of the twenty-first century (p. 62), deploying notions of authenticity which stress the agency of the people involved to decide what is authentic. “In short, tenues végétales exhibit an authenticity reflecting the agency of people to acquire and modify selected ideas and material culture from outside, as well as from inside their own culture” (p. 62). Rather than be directed by foreign values that link cultural authenticity to ancient pasts and unchanging practices, she emphasizes the authority of Oceanic peoples to claim innovations as equally Indigenous. Tenues végétales thus declare Islanders’ simultaneous attachments to the old and the new, to the local and the foreign. They proudly declare their coeval presence with others in the world.

Final Reflections: The Who, How, and When of Traveling Concepts

In conclusion, I start by reflecting on an essay I wrote long ago, “Specters of Inauthenticity” (Jolly 1992), which was a partial catalyst for the invitation to author this afterword. That was written in a very different moment, in the context of a highly polarized debate about authenticity, distilled in the argument between Roger Keesing (1990) and Haunani-Kay Trask (1991)—a dramatic contest between the rival voices of a foreign male anthropologist and a Kanaka Maoli woman scholar, poet, and leader in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement (see Introduction).

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As I look back on my own article, I am struck by what has been foregrounded and what backgrounded in later interpretations. I was not only criticizing the historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s (1983) contrast between the conscious “invention” of tradition and unconscious persistence of custom but also what I saw as the “specters of inauthenticity” in writings about Christianity in the Pacific by anthropologists like Alain Babadzan (on Kanak people in New Caledonia) and Roger Keesing (on Malaitans of the Solomon Islands). It was harder for me to critique Keesing, an admired mentor and close friend, who like myself had worked with anti-Christian peoples in kastom villages (see Jolly 1994, 2019). But I was troubled, not only by some of his writing about Solomon Islanders’ Christianity but also by an experience at a workshop on cultural policy in Honiara in 1991. There, in concert with his male friends from kastom villages of Malaita, in a distinctive form of Solomons’ Pidgin, he attacked Christian Malaitans present as “men of the book” who had thereby lost the capacity to remember long genealogies. I was chairing and, afraid that violence might erupt in the middle of the workshop, sought counsel from Grace Mera Molisa, an influential woman leader from Vanuatu, as to how to negotiate this full-frontal humiliating attack. Fortunately, we managed to avoid the conflict escalating. I sensed that Roger refused to see that, although Christianity had come with an invasive colonialism that Solomon Islanders, like most Pacific peoples, saw it as their own and an equally authentic way of being Indigenous. The pervasive conversion of Pacific peoples to Christianity, a religion first associated with powerful colonizing whites was a prominent example of how dramatic change, especially those influenced by foreign models of modernity, can be seen to compromise an authenticity predicated on a notion of a primordial timeless culture. In “Specters of Inauthenticity” (1992) I argued that all cultures are created, contested, and shifting and challenged the racist moral and political contradiction whereby change is hyper-valued as innovation, progress, and development in some places while being seen in other places as a degeneration from an allegedly originary cultural or racial purity. I refused the language of invention (partly because of its individualist, cerebral inflection), choosing rather to speak of “construction,” a word which seemed more open to both individual and collective creation (cf. Dalton, Chapter 5). The editors suggest that the debate about authenticity in the early 1990s was abandoned because the discipline was “unprepared if not unable to adequately address these issues” (p. 16). I am not so sure. In Australia there were very public confrontations when an anthropologist, then employed by the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA a conservative think tank funded in part by Hancock Prospecting and other fossil fuel interests) suggested that Indigenous Australian notions of the Dreaming and mythologies of divine agencies in Arnhem Land were “invented” to stall the development of mining (Brunton

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1992). Similar battles were ongoing between both Māori and Pakeha authors in Aotearoa New Zealand, and again traversed scholarly and public contexts. As the editors point out there have been ongoing discussions about authenticity and the appropriation of voice in the writings of anthropologists and in the writings of Pacific Islanders, including by Islander anthropologists (e.g., Tengan et al. 2010). But this collection makes a robust and timely contribution to that literature. These chapters clearly establish intimate links between notions of authorship and authenticity. Both the editors and contributors critically review these changing ideas not just in Western genealogies or as sedimented in texts on the history of ideas but as traveling concepts. We have witnessed how the itineraries of such travels differ, however. The routes of travel and translocation in the first trio of chapters I discuss, all by white male anthropologists working in fairly “remote” parts of PNG, though they differ substantially in style, all involve a solo author comparing Western and Indigenous concepts, in relation to a particular group. Compared to the rest of the Pacific, these three peoples, Rawa, Kayan, and Gebusi, have experienced a relatively brief and telescoped experience of colonialism and postcolonial Western influences—less than a century from the present. The white female authors of the other three chapters, writing about colonial Samoa, and contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand and French Polynesia, are focused on cross-cultural encounters where contending ideas of authorship and authenticity have been circulating for far longer, for over two centuries in the wake of early exploration, colonialism, and Christian conversion. Probably the most telling conclusion for me is the argument made by Hammond (and by Dalton and Aime in different ways) that adjudications of authenticity should be up to Indigenous agents involved rather than presumptuous foreigners. Just like the tenues végétales of the Miss Tahiti pageant, Pacific peoples should be able to weave together old and new, local and global, collective creations and individual innovations without accusations of their thereby becoming “inauthentic.” But we should not expect that all Indigenous Pacific people, even those closely involved, will agree as to what is authentic and why. The example of the gender and generational differences in the recognition of the potent authenticity of Kayan garamut is suggestive. Robust debates between Pacific peoples about the authenticity of costumes and performances abound in contexts like the Pacific Arts Festivals (see Henry and Foana’ota 2015 and Stevenson and Teaiwa 2017). Moreover, these adjudications are being made more complex by the networked, mediated character of our world where texts and images can travel at lightning speed between distant sites. So, in this afterword I cannot resist a final telling vignette. I read with relish in a newspaper about highly paid Instagram influencers, living in what is described as a “multimillion dollar digital wild west” (The Guardian Weekly,

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12 April 2019, 40). The article describes how these “influencers” are employed to spread the word about and stimulate the consumption of new commodities, brands, and experiences on the internet. But managers are increasingly worried about the perception that some mega-influencers are “inauthentic.” “‘They worked with so many brands they couldn’t possibly be authentic,’ said Sarah Perry head of content at marketing agency Influencer Intelligence” (The Guardian Weekly, 12 April 2019, 41). The new frontier is “the quest for authenticity”: being more selective about the quality in the brands they spruik and connecting those brands more closely and sincerely to their authentic persona in their daily lives—as represented on Instagram, of course. Now, even in parts of the Pacific without electricity and running water, mobile phones proliferate (Foster and Horst 2018). And increasingly younger Pacific colleagues and friends are highly adept at using the latest digital media like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Are they thereby exposed to such notions of authenticity? There is no doubt that consumerism and branding is now part of contemporary Pacific culture as Robert Foster (2002) suggested many years ago for PNG. It will be interesting to see how such a commoditycentric idea of individuated authenticity connects with the individuated sense of authenticity some anthropologists have attributed to Christianity, especially in its Protestant evangelical forms, and to persistent notions of authenticity associated with collective concepts like “culture.”

Acknowledgments

I thank the editors of this volume, Martha Macintyre, Chris Ballard, and the two anonymous readers for helpful suggestions and comments. I also thank Carolyn Brewer, Ann DeVita, and Elizabeth Martinez for meticulous copyediting. All remaining errors and misinterpretations are mine.

Margaret Jolly, AM FASSA is Professor Emerita in the School of Culture, History and Language in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. She was an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow (2010–16) and has written extensively on gender in the Pacific, exploratory voyages, missions and contemporary Christianity, maternity and sexuality, cinema and art. She is currently focused on the ARC Discovery Project Engendering Climate Change, Reframing Futures in Oceania. She has taught undergraduates at the ANU, Macquarie University, the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and the University of California at Santa Cruz and has supervised over sixty PhD students and many postdoctoral fellows. She held a Poste Rouge (Visiting Professor) at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and École des Hautes

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Études en Sciences Sociales in France in 2009. Her full list of publications is available at https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/jolly-ma. Notes 1. This ritual, performed around the time of the yam harvest from April, involves the construction of a large latticed wooden tower with platforms at successive heights from which young men jump with lianas tied to their ankles, ideally just their hair grazes the ground. The tower envisaged as a human body is thought to harbor the spirit of a male ancestor from whose body yams grew. The origin of the ritual is traced to a woman. The land dive has been regularly filmed and written about and is a major tourist attraction in Vanuatu. It is the acknowledged inspiration for bungee jumping (see Jolly 1994, 2016). 2. Lionel Trilling renders this as “sentiment of being” (see also Dalton Chapter 5). 3. Although in the eastern Pacific, much more than the western Pacific, the individual character of high-ranking people was acknowledged and portrayed. So we have portraits of Omai and Oberea from Tahiti, but Man of Malekula and Woman of Tanna from the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu, see Jolly 2012). 4. Zora Neale Houston was of African-American ancestry and wrote about both AfricanAmerican and Caribbean cultures and racial struggles. 5. This is a brilliant and innovative work—a moving panoramic video of twenty-six meters, inspired by Joseph Dufour’s wallpaper of 1804 which imaged the diversity of Pacific peoples but re-presenting that with actors performing the diversity of dress, dance and daily practice across the Pacific and re-enacting some famous/infamous scenes from Cook’s voyages. It evokes both the wonder and the violence of those encounters and exchanges. A tour de force both technically and aesthetically, it was celebrated as the entry from Aotearoa New Zealand in the Venice Biennale in 2017. I saw it in three different settings in 2018: first as part of a Lisa Reihana retrospective Cinemania at the Campbelltown Art Centre in Western Sydney, second at the Asia Pacific Triennial 9 at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, and third as part of the Oceania exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. On each occasion I was captivated as were the large audiences in each locale. 6. Der Papālagi (The white man) was Yuki Kihara’s creative restaging of an original work in German by Eric Scheumann, a literary hoax in which he assumes the voice of a Samoan chief Tuivaii delivering a series of speeches. The article by Kalissa Alexeyeff and Yuki Kihara (2018) also compares the critical response to Kihara’s work to the celebration of the movie Moana in Apia, in contrast to the heavy criticism of cultural appropriation and insensitivity leveled at Moana in Aotearoa New Zealand and by many other Pacific islander critics. References Alexeyeff, Kalissa, and Yuki Kihara. 2018. “Polyface in Paradise: Exploring the Politics of Race, Gender and Place.” In Repossessing Paradise, eds. Kalissa Alexeyeff and Siobhan McDonnell. Special issue, Contemporary Pacific 30(2): 329–53. https://doi .org/10.1353/cp.2018.0030.

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Anderson, Warwick, Miranda Johnson, and Barbara Brookes, eds. 2018. Pacific Futures: Past and Present. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780 824877422. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1986. Speech Acts and Other Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ballard, Chris. 2014. “Oceanic Historicities.” Contemporary Pacific 26(1): 96–124. https:// doi.org/10.1353/cp.2014.0009. ———. 2018. “Oceanic Futurities.” In Pacific Futures: Past and Present, eds. Warwick Anderson, Miranda Johnson, and Barbara Brookes, 280–93. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Berger, John. 1973. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books. Bhabha, Homi K. 2004. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” In his The Location of Culture, 85–92. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996. The Rules of Art. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Brunton, Ron. 1992. “Mining Credibility: Coronation Hill and the Anthropologists.” Anthropology Today 8(2): 2–5. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2783491. Douglas, Bronwen, and Chris Ballard, eds. 2008. Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750–1940. Canberra: ANU Press. https://doi.org/10.22459/FB.11.2008. Dufrêne, Thierry. 2012. “Junking the Chronological Corset: Toward a Broader Art History that Splices Periods and Works.” In Theatre of the World, ed. Jean-Hubert Martin, 29–35. Hobart: Museum of Old and New Art. Foster, Robert J. 2002. Materializing the Nation. Commodities, Consumption and Media in Papua New Guinea. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Foster, Robert, and Heather Horst, eds. 2018. The Moral Economy of Mobile Phones in the Pacific. Canberra: ANU Press. https://doi.org/10.22459/MEMP.05.2018. Foucault, Michel. 1988. Madness and Civilization: The History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage Books. Freud, Sigmund. 1961. Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton. Garde, Murray. 2015. “‘Stories of Long Ago’ and the Forces of Modernity in South Pentecost.” In Narrative Practices and Identity Constructions in the Pacific Islands, ed. Farzana Gounder, 133–52, Studies in Narrative Series. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. (1787) 1983. The Sorrows of Young Werther. New York: Suhrkamp Publishers. The Guardian Weekly. 2019. Australian edition, 12 April. Hammond, Joyce D. 1986. Tifaifai and Quilts of Polynesia. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. ———. 2014. “Tīfaifai in Tahiti: Embracing Change.” Uncoverings 35: 42–68. Henry, Rosita, and Lawrence Foana’ota. 2015. “Heritage Transactions at the Festival of Pacific Arts.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 21(10): 133–52. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/13527258.2014.915870. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Jolly, Margaret. 1992. “Specters of Inauthenticity.” Contemporary Pacific 4(1): 49–72. ———. 1994. Women of the Place: Kastom, Colonialism and Gender in Vanuatu. Chur and Reading: Harwood Academic Publishers.

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———. 2005. “Antipodean Audits: Neoliberalism, Illiberal Governments and Australian Universities.” Anthropology in Action: Journal for Applied Anthropology in Policy and Practice 12(1): 31–47. https://doi.org/10.3167/096720105780644317. ———. 2012. “Women of the East, Women of the West: Region and Race, Gender and Sexuality on Cook’s Voyages.” In The Atlantic World in the Antipodes, ed. Kate Fullagar, 2–32. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. ———. 2014. “A Saturated History of Christianity and Cloth in Oceania.” In Divine Domesticities: Paradoxes of Christian Modernities in Asia and the Pacific, eds. Hyaeweol Choi and Margaret Jolly, 429–54. Canberra: ANU Press. https://doi.org/10.22459/ DD.10.2014.16. ———. 2016. “Moving Towers: Worlding the Spectacle of Masculinities between South Pentecost and Munich.” In Touring Pacific Cultures, eds. John P. Taylor and Kalissa Alexeyeff, 181–225. Canberra: ANU Press. https://doi.org/10.22459/TPC.12.2016.12. ———. 2018. “Gender and Personhood (Individual, Dividual).” In International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2540–49. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/ 9781118924396.wbiea2375. ———. 2019. “Tanna: romancer la kastom, éluder l’exotisme?” In Filmer (dans) le Pacifique, eds. Jessica de Largy Healy et Éric Wittersheim. Special issue, Journal de la Société des Océanistes 148(1): 97–112. (Simultaneous publication in English. “Tanna: Romancing Kastom, Eluding Exoticism?”) https://doi.org/10.4000/jso.10513. Kame’eleihiwa, Lilikalā. 1992. Native Lands and Foreign Desires, Pehea La E Pono Ai? Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press. Keesing, Roger. 1990. “Creating the Past: Custom and Identity in the Contemporary Pacific.” Contemporary Pacific 1(1): 19–42. Kirch, Patrick V. 2000. On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact. Berkeley: University of California Press. Knauft, Bruce. 1985. Good Company and Violence: Sorcery and Social Action in a Lowland New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2002. Exchanging the Past: A Rainforest World of Before and After. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2016. The Gebusi, 4th ed. Long Grove: Waveland. Kossellek, Reinhart. 1985. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lindholm, Charles. 2008. Culture and Authenticity. Malden: Blackwell Publishers. Lutz, Catherine A., and Jane L. Collins. 1993. Reading National Geographic. Chicago: Chicago University Press, Martin, Jean-Hubert. 2012. “Theatre of the World: The Museum of Enchantment Versus the Docile Museum.” In Theatre of the World, ed. Jean-Hubert Martin, 11–19. Hobart: Museum of Old and New Art. Retrieved 23 June 2020 from https://monad.ch/usr/ library/documents/main/jhm.pdf. Molière [Jean-Baptiste Poquelin]. (1666) 1992. The Misanthrope (or the Cantankerous Lover). New York: Dover. Mosko, Mark. 2010. “Partible Penitents: Dividual Personhood and Christian Practice in Melanesia and the West.” The 2008 Carl Lewis Prize Essay. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16: 215–40. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2010.01618. Narokobi, Bernard. 1980. The Melanesian Way. Boroko: Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies and Suva: Institute for Pacific Studies.

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Index

agency and authorship, 7, 29 and Capture Wales, 187 and divine causation, 207 and early anthropology, 163 Indigenous, 3, 14, 28, 199, 213 and myth, 168 suppression of, 201 Western, 3 See also under art; garamut; mimesis; tenues végétales America art and literature of, 10, 73, 77 and colonialism, 73–76, 97–99, 221–23 and digital storytelling, 187 empire, 74, 88, 98–99 and identity fantasies, 71–75, 77–79, 83–85, 99 and mimicry, 73–76, 82, 84, 88–92, 97–99, 221–23 Native Americans, 205, 223 and sentiment of being, 79 See also Euro-American; museums; natural authenticity; photographs; United States anthropological practice, 3, 6, 10, 22, 85, 98, 110, 201, 210 anthropological theory, 13, 17, 22, 28, 98, 201 of authenticity, 2–5, 16, 18, 108–114, 123–27, 131n5, 163–65, 216–18 of authorship, 2–5, 10–12, 16, 106–8, 123–27 Aotearoa New Zealand, 184, 196, 199, 202, 219–223, 227, 229 nn5–6 art and agency, 139, 147, 214 and authenticity, 3, 10–12, 19, 23, 56, 184–86, 199–201 and authorship, 3, 6, 10, 17



D’Alleva on, 44 in French Polynesia, 47–48, 65n18, 65n Indigenous Pacific, 16–18, 22–23, 210, 220 of Jack London, 74, 77–80, 83, 85–86, 97–98, 222–23 Kaeppler on, 45 performance and production of, 3, 14, 17 Western, 18–19, 22, 56, 208–10 See also under garamut; Orientalism; tenues végétales artifact, 114, 211 and authenticity, 16, 18 and authorship, 6 destruction of, 172–73 Indigenous views on, 114, 139 and objectivity, 4 Western curation of, 17–19, 114, 140 See also under Samoa au courant authenticity, 60, 82, 117 Auckland City Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 185–86, 196–99, 219 authentication, 8, 24, 108, 206 and garamut, 139, 143, 145, 152, 156 of Indigenous groups by anthropologists, 12, 13, 109–11, 113, 115–17, 124, 126 by Pacific Islanders, 28 and photographic subjects, 97 beauty contests, 14–15, 39–41, 62, 64n4 and authenticity, 41–45, 184, 223–25 and identity, 47–48 Indigenous and Western confluence of, 62, 64n2, 64nn6–8, 224 Miss America, 39 and themes, 49, 64n5, 65n18, 65n25 and tourism, 64nn6–8 See also Miss Tahiti; see also under tenues végétales

234

Index

bourgeois, 17, 169, 172, 185–87, 216–17 Christianity, 15, 152, 157 and authenticity, 19–21, 206, 208, 211, 216, 228 in Gebusi skits, 117 local constructions of, 28, 45, 115, 165–66, 226 missionaries, 172–73 See also under Flying Fox co-created research, 120, 192–93, 197, 216, 218–20 colonial encounter, 44, 73, 81, 207, 209, 223 commodification, 19, 206, 211, 216, 228 consumerism, 11, 12, 27, 208, 228 of Indigenous groups, 74, 116 creativity, 2, 45, 56, 63 and authenticity, 13, 21, 23, 161, 201, 210 and ethnography, 113, 123, 126 Indigenous Pacific, 56, 59, 119, 224–25 See also under digital storytelling; tenues végétales cultural change and agency, 7 and authenticity, 1–2, 42–43, 116–18, 226 and authorship, 1–2 as bidirectional, 21, 29, 201 among the Gebusi, 114, 115–17, 216 among the Rawa, 178 in Tahiti, 46, 48, 63, 65n15 and tradition, 118, 140, 144 Western perspectives on, 17, 45 See also under Kayan deception, 166, 169, 174–75, 178–79, 212 Trilling on, 161, 165, 178, 209 digital storytelling and Auckland City Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 185–86, 196 and authenticity, 184–85, 189, 191–92, 195, 197–201, 219–221 and authorship, 184–86, 192, 197–98, 200–01

and creativity, 185, 187, 189–90, 192, 194, 196, 200–201 Digital Storytelling in the Pacific, 187– 92, 193–94, 200 and photography, 188–189, 191, 194 and politics, 185, 187, 198–200 and identity, 19, 196 as methodology, 184–85, 193 and voice, 184–85, 190, 197 empire, 17, 20, 74, 88, 98–99 British, 75, 93–94, 223 See also under America Euro-American, 9, 82. See also under natural authenticity Europe art and literature of, 10, 82, 100n2, 138, 165, 198, 210 and authenticity, 11, 21, 22, 27, 56, 79, 86, 161, 178–79, 207–09, 213, 223 and authorship, 22, 27, 138, 207–10 and colonialism, 44, 59, 74, 94, 139– 141, 162 and fashion/clothing, 42, 44, 54, 56, 223–24 museums in, 18, 21 and tourism to the Pacific, 17 See also Euro-American existential authenticity, 78, 79, 83, 85, 98 fantasies, 71–73, 75, 77–78, 88, 99, 221 and photography, 71–75, 77–81, 83–86, 88, 99, 222–23 of Polynesia, 77, 80, 83, 85 See also under America fashion, 22–23, 39 global, 41–42, 45, 47, 54, 59, 224–25 Kaeppler on, 42 See also under Europe; tradition Fiji, 26, 92, 205 and storytelling, 184, 186–88, 190–94, 196, 199, 219 Flying Fox (yambo miro), 138, 161, 166– 169, 174, 178, 212 and authenticity, 161–63, 166, 168, 174–76, 178–79, 212–14

Index

and authorship, 161, 168, 170–71, 178, 212–14 and Christianity, 178, 212–13 and cultural identity, 162, 166, 169, 174, 178 and inauthenticity, 175, 178 and sentiment of being, 166, 176–78, 212–13 and spirits, 167–69, 173–74, 212–14 and voice, 212 Foster, Robert, 228 French Polynesia beauty contests in, 23, 39–42, 45–51, 53–54, 60, 224 and identity, 41, 45–49, 54, 57, 61–62, 222, 225 interchange with the West, 22, 44, 56 missionaries in, 15, 20 vegetation, 54–59 See also under art; fantasies gallery, 26, 185–86, 196–201, 205, 219–20, 229n5 See also Auckland City Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki; museums; Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) garamut, 137–39, 156–58, 214–15 and agency, 139, 145–150, 156–57, 214 and art, 143–44, 147, 152 and authenticity, 138, 140–41, 143, 145, 152, 156–57 and authorship, 138, 141, 143, 149–50, 152, 156–57 cultural meaning of, 140–45 and gender, 149, 153–55, 157 and identity, 138–41, 150, 157, 214–15 and materiality, 137–38, 149, 156 and photography, 146, 214 production of, 25, 149 and social organization, 152 as social persons, 150–52 and spirits, 19, 139, 142–58 and voice, 142, 144–45, 147–49, 152– 54, 156–57, 214–15 See also under authentication; Kukurai Garde, Murray, 206

235

health communication, 185–86, 195–96, 200, 221 historical routes, 1, 7–12, 29, 227 Hobart, 205 hybridity, 20–22, 44, 63, 76, 97, 124–25, 224 identity and authenticity, 7, 56, 60–61, 99 and authorship, 3, 6–7, 76, 112–13, 124–25, 218 fashioning of, 14, 16, 62, 97 Indigenous Pacific, 13, 45–46, 65n22 national, 14, 79 performance of, 47–49, 96–97 identity politics, 112, 124, 185, 198, 220 See also America; beauty contests; digital storytelling; Flying Fox; French Polynesia; garamut; mimesis; Miss Tahiti; New Zealand; obviation; tenues végétales imaginary, 41–42, 49, 61, 186, 197 Lacan on, 71 See also under tourism inauthenticity, 12–13, 198, 213, 221, 223, 225–28 Berman on, 179 and gallery curation, 186, 197, 201, 219–20 and Indigenous people, 42, 166 Shiner on, 56 and Trilling, 161, 164–65, 177 See also under Flying Fox innovation, 41, 45–47, 60–62, 197–98, 200–01, 220, 223, 225–27 Kaupapa Māori research, 193 Kayan, 138, 140–58, 214–15, 227 and cultural change, 140, 156–58 Keesing, Roger, 15, 17, 27, 225–26 Kukurai, 143, 145, 155, 157, 158n4 and agency, 147–48, 150 and garamut, 153 and social organization, 152 Lacan, Jacques, 71

236

Index

Malaita, Solomon islands, 226 Martin, Jean-Hubert, 205 masculinity, 206, 208, 210 Rawa, 169 tambaran cult, 141 See also garamut; mimesis material culture, 14, 43, 62–63, 225 in anthropology, 14, 74, 138–139 and museums, 19 See also under garamut; Miss Tahiti; tenues végétales men’s house, 141–44, 147, 150–53, 155, 157, 213, 215 metapragmatics, 174–76, 178, 213 mimesis, 23–24, 45, 75, 98–99, 221–23 and agency, 88 and anthropology, 140 and authenticity, 23, 71–72, 75–77, 82, 88, 90, 97–99 and authorship, 7, 23–24, 71–72, 74, 76, 82, 97–98 and colonialism, 23, 71–76, 82, 88, 97–98 distributed mimicry, 73–74, 223 and ethnography, 85, 96, 222 and gender, 74, 82, 97, 100n1, 222 and identity, 7, 71–76, 82, 88–91, 96–99 lack of, 75–76, 94, 98, 221, 223 mutual mimicry, 85, 96 one-way mimicry, 95 and tourism, 73, 97 See also agency; partial mimicry; see also under America; photographs; Samoa Miss Tahiti, 22–23, 45–47, 64n1, 64nn6–8 and authenticity, 41–42, 223–24, 227 and identity, 23, 41–42, 46, 49, 54, 57 and materiality, 39, 42, 46–47, 49, 51, 54, 59–60 themes of, 49–54 models of the person, 9, 20, 78, 211 modernity, 11–15, 105, 211, 226 and anthropology, 116, 127, 218 Baudelaire on, 19 in digital storytelling, 191

and the Gebusi, 115, 117, 129 indigenized, 43 Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), 26, 205–6 museums, 16–19, 76, 100n4 American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), 76, 83, 196 Anderson on, 16–17 University of Queensland Anthropology Museum, 150 See also art; Museum of Old and New Art; see also under Europe; New Zealand natural authenticity, 19, 73, 80, 88, 97, 222 in Euro-American literature, 77, 82 and Margaret Mead, 83, 85–86 and rugged individualism, 78 New Art, 26, 205 New Zealand, 75–76, 97–98, 192, 194–95 identity politics, 185 museums in, 17, 80 and photographs, 92–96, 221, 223 See also Aotearoa New Zealand; see also under palliative care noble-savage authenticity, 80 obviation, 164–66, 174, 178–79, 212 of patri-identity, 166–71 Orientalism, 186, 196, 198–201, 209, 219–20 and art, 220 Pacific fine art, 184–85, 199–200, 219–20 palliative care, 26, 184 in New Zealand, 192–96, 200, 220 partial mimicry, 75–76, 88–91, 93, 95–97 participatory methods, 4–5, 85, 184, 192, 219, 222 patrilineality, 162, 164, 166–71, 175–76, 178, 212–13. See also under obviation personhood, 14, 25, 27, 146, 153, 211 photographs, 18, 47, 71–76, 96–99 of American children in Samoa, 86–88 of American congressmen in Samoa, 88–91

Index

and authenticity, 5, 17–18, 71–73, 75, 77–80, 82–88, 97–99, 206, 221–23 and authorship, 5, 18, 71–74, 81–83, 85, 92, 96–99, 106, 184, 206, 221–22 and the Gebusi, 106, 216 of Guy Powles, 95–96 of Ida Beck in Samoa, 82–84, 222 of Jack London in Samoa, 77–80, 82, 222 by Lina Hoshino, 188 of Major General Sir George Spafford Richardson, 93–94 of Margaret Mead, 84–86, 222 and mimesis, 71–77, 82, 84–85, 88–91, 93–99, 221–23 in National Geographic, 74, 76, 91–92, 96, 221 of New Zealand and Western Samoan ladies, 94–95 See also under digital storytelling; fantasies; garamut recontextualization, 1, 19–20, 41, 63, 137, 207, 211 Samoa, 20, 57, 71–99, 210, 221–23, 227 artifacts, 81, 96 and authenticity, 14–15, 71–76, 79–80, 82–86, 90, 97–99 and authorship, 18, 20, 71–76, 81–85, 92, 96–99 and cultural change, 85 and mimicry, 73–75, 77, 82–85, 88–99, 221–23 The Samoan Way, 6, 14–15 and the Tripartite Convention, 74–75 See also under photographs sentiment of being and authenticity, 73, 79, 190 Trilling on, 9–10, 79, 161, 164–65, 177–78, 209 See also under Flying Fox sincerity, 9, 20, 164, 208–09, 211 spirits and ancestry, 142–43, 157, 207, 213, 215, 229n1

237

and authenticity, 6, 143–45, 149, 152, 156–57 and authorship, 19, 141, 143, 149–50, 152, 156–57, 207, 216 and mediums, 117–18 and ritual, 114, 116, 139, 143, 146, 158, 215, 229n1 séances, 109, 114, 216–17 spiritual objects, 137, 139, 142–43, 145–46, 151–53, 156–57 See also under Flying Fox; garamut StoryCenter, 185, 187, 189, 195, 197, 219 Strathern, Marilyn, 126, 146, 210 talanoa, 196, 199, 219–20 Te Arai, 193, 195 tenues végétales, 39–41 and agency, 41, 62, 225 and art, 47–49, 59, 61–63 and authenticity, 41–45, 54, 56, 59–63, 225 and authorship, 41, 47–49, 59–62 and beauty contests, 39, 45–49, 53–57, 59–63 creativity of, 41–42, 47–49, 60, 62 history of, 45–47, 224 and identity, 41, 48–49, 54, 57, 61–62, 224–25 materials of, 22, 39, 42, 45–46, 49, 51, 54–59, 224–25 and themes, 42, 45, 49–54, 56–57, 60 and tourism, 41–42, 64n7, 223–24 Tonga, 57, 64n6, 211 and digital storytelling, 184, 186–88, 191–94, 196, 219 tourism, 16–17 and authenticity, 20, 41, 54, 164, 223–24 and authorship, 44, 97 and imaginaries, 41 and photographs, 18 Indigenous encounters with, 172 See also under beauty contests; Europe; mimesis; tenues végétales tradition and agency, 43 and ethnography, 105, 114, 200

238

Index

and authenticity, 16–19, 23, 115–17, 143, 161, 163–66, 176, 178, 197, 199 and authorship, 20, 143 and costume, 46, 61, 224 Indigenous perspectives on, 14, 141, 155–56, 158n4, 200 and missionaries, 15, 41–42, 223 and tāupou, 81, 88 See also under cultural change traveling concepts, 1, 7–12, 27–29, 30n1, 142–43, 207, 209, 212–218, 225–28

United States, 18, 74 Vanuatu, 15, 191, 206, 226, 229n1 voice and authenticity, 16, 157, 225 and authorship, 16, 21, 119, 126, 152, 156, 218 and Indigeneity, 131n5, 141 See also under Flying Fox; garamut