strathern, m. the decomposition of an event

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The Decomposition of an Event Marilyn Strathern

Department of Social Anthropology Manchester University

In one of the most remarkable visual memorials to first contact in the Papua New Guinea Highlands, Michael Leahy recorded the greeting given his companion, the patrol officer A. D. O. James Taylor.' A sequence of photographs shows him approaching a group of some eight men, taking off his hat, and opening his arms as he walks toward them. The men stand their ground, and are finally seen shaking hands. The event took place in 1933 in the mid-Wahgi; the people appear to be from the outskirts of what afterwards became known as the Mt. Hagen area.

Taylor removed his hat to give a clearer view of his face. But I wonder if that simple act was not more disconcerting to the watching men than reassuring.

I do not have access to evidence in the conventional sense. That the shot of him with his hat off also shows the men scattered and at least one of them turning away in apparent fear, and that Leahy sensed enough tension at that point to stop photographing and cover Taylor with his gun, are neither here nor there-by then Taylor had also advanced several yards. Nor can I refer to oral-historical recon- structions of people's memories of that event, as they have recounted so much of their reaction to the arrival of these Australians, or point to some clinching state- ment that they were afraid when he took his hat off. Yet even if there were such remarks to hand, I am not sure that they would be a substitute for what I wish to convey by other means.

We know from the evocative sequences of Connolly and Anderson's film, First Contact (1984), that Highlanders in general were curious about the apparel of the explorers, that they did not realize it was detachable and concluded it must, therefore, contain vast internal organs. We know that the droppings of these creatures were inspected and that in Hagen their detritus-old cans and suchlike- was avidly collected for a while (see A. Strathern 1984:22). We know that they were rumoured to be spirits. Yet there are also enough hints in people's recollec- tions, as well as in Leahy's and Taylor's diaries, to suggest that such amazement as Hageners might have felt was mixed with displays of bravado bordering on nonchalance. It is the element of amazement that I wish to explicate. For what is recorded in the Australian accounts as the subsequent "discovery" that these spirits were men seems to have come itself as a further moment of amazement, a revelation. Hageners were to surprise themselves by what they found out.

A Western observer is likely to be more impressed by fear than by amazement. Where fear is regarded as one of the emotions that drive human relations,

244


DECOMPOSITION OF AN EVENT 245

amazement may well be taken as a trivial reaction to a spectacle. By contrast with the descriptions of fear, therefore, the amazement that a Hagener recalls at the discovery that the strangers were human seems mere reflex-one, moreover, that puts the Highlander simply in the position of "realizing" the true nature of the world as a Westerner would see it.2

Yet when Gell (1975:243) observes of the Umeda that the identification of a masked dancer with the figure of a cassowary is only a disguise for the profounder identification of the cassowary with the man, he is pointing to the power of revelation. I suggest that it was not the distinction between Hageners and Australians that was to have the profoundest impact, but the collapse of that distinction. And that that collapse possibly gave Hageners the sense of power that was to be re- flected in Australian eyes as a quite excessive pragmatism in the pressure they put on their subsequent relationship.

Rather than deflect my speculations with qualification, I proceed as though they were a matter of report. Interpretation is conveyed in the form of ethno- graphic description and assertion. Thus I assert that the revelation that the strangers were human was not the slow dawning of the reality of the situation to the Hagen mind, but the result of their own analytic work; that what we might call analysis in Hagen takes the form of decomposition, taking apart an image to see/ make visible what insides it contains; that this is a process that gives the elicitors of those insides, the decomposers, power as witnesses to their own efforts of elu- cidation; that the elicitor/witness is in a crucial sense the "creator" of the image, and his/her presence thus necessary to its appearance-so that what might have been disconcerting about Taylor's gesture in taking off his hat was that this figure appeared to be autonomously decomposing itself.

If any aesthetic premise holds across all of Melanesia, it is that forms appear out of other forms (M. Strathern 1988). That premise makes perception a procreative act, as we might imagine a child being brought forth from the body of a parent. Indeed, it denotes the accomplishment of human beings. But the relationship between forms may be envisaged in several ways, and I take my cue here from Roy Wagner's analysis of Barok imagery (1986). Unmediated, the relationship may be prospective (the child appears as its parent in another form) or it may be retrospective (what makes the parent is that it contained the child). The parental body may also act in a mediating relationship, and thereby as a conduit for the reproduction not of its own but of another's form, as holds for the generation of clanship in the Highlands: from the bodies of non-agnatic strangers come the children of the agnatic clan. It is the process of mediation to which I draw attention.

For "child" and "parent" we can imagine any person and the relationships of which he or she is composed. However, the inclusive gender will not quite do. It is the production of forms regarded as male rather than female work that con- cerns me here, and the gender of the acts to which I refer throughout the article is masculine.


246 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

The procreative analogy between clans and children, or grown men and little boys, is not fortuitous poetics. From the fetal imagery of the crew members of a Gawan canoe (Munn 1986) to the pathos Andrew Strathem (cf. 1975) records afflicting Hagen men's sense of themselves as "mere boys" when they put on their grandest displays of wealth, there is an important temporal dimension here. To appear as one's child is like appearing as one's shells or pigs. One has antic- ipated the outcome of one's efforts. For to appear as one's child is to appear completed, as the end product of one's own activities. Certainly in Hagen at the moment of the most active display of their accomplishments, clansmen also present themselves as the objects of the accomplishments of others. Their presentation is necessarily under the gaze of a witnessing audience. Indeed they submit their persons to that gaze, for the audience's work is to decompose the image, to find the "parent" in the "child," the relationships that compose the person and are to be acknowledged as the cause of the activity. And from one perspective, the imaging activity is caused by the elicitory action of the witnesses themselves, who-cru- cially-include those who receive the wealth. The audience becomes the pro- cessing conduit for the creation of the image that the donors present.

Wealth that appears from the body of the clan is the clan in a particular form, the creation of something new, in Annette Weiner's phrase (1980). The body of men is decomposed: literally, they draw the valuables out of themselves, in the case of shells from the smoky packages kept in the recesses of their houses, in the case of pigs from their stalls. These now exposed indices of clan wealth are simultaneously signs, the outcome of relations with others, signifying the original capacity of the clan to draw the wealth to itself. But in this revelation, the men "finish"-to borrow an Austronesian idiom-that capacity: what is celebrated is the outcome. Donors dance impassively, completed; it is the audience that is sup- posed to be moved. The capacity to elicit wealth is now seen to lie with the recipients, for it was they who compelled the display, who decomposed the clan, even as their judgments compose the final image the dancers present (cf. Schieffelin 1985a). They have become the cause of the event. In that sense, the revealed wealth collapses the distinction between donor and recipient, for in its appearance both can be seen as creating it for the other.

Whatever other identities Hagen dancers project, no wonder they also sing of themselves as boys, for they face the procreators of their self-image and antic- ipate the audience's perceptions. The form of one body/mind is reproduced, then, by being processed through the body of another, a movement that takes place in time. In this sense, the perceived form is also a memorial to prior forms. Its com- position implies decomposition, as Battaglia (1990) has described for Sabarl memorials.

Kuechler's (1987) account of malanggan figures in northern New Ireland is pertinent. By convention, a hired carver is instructed to reproduce out of his own mind/body an image that someone else had seen a generation ago; the recall of the image substitutes for the recall of the deceased person whose presence/absence now takes the form of malanggan. The stranger-carver is the crucial processor of that image, for it further takes the form of his transformation of it. He is the ve-



hide of its reproduction; its source rests with those who have a right to have it reproduced. They implant it as they elicit it from him, through description and herbal ingredients that will make him dream the appropriate image.

Closer to the Highlands are the Kaluli gisalo singers as described by Schief- felin (1976) and Feld (1982), the visitors who come to a longhouse to elicit from their audience their memories of their bereavements. Presenting themselves as birds, among other things, the singers remind the hosts of the bird souls of the departed. The power of the singers' transformation of the sufferings of the men of the host community is the power of decomposition. The audience is moved to fierce reaction, to weeping and to demonstration. Their "insides" are brought "outside." It is not the singers' memories that are recalled or whose insides are turned out; on the contrary, the singers appear impenetrable. The enraged hosts brand them with torches-but these burns affect only the skin, as though the "stranger"-singers were solid, a reflecting surface for the community's display of emotion. Yet it is only through knowledge of the hosts' potential memories that the singer can engage their interiority.3 Memories of the deceased are evoked as though the ancestral deceased were outside the mind/body of their descendants; they are then reclaimed, as it were, reproduced among the present community of men who are moved to appear as little boys weeping for their lost parents.

Donors and recipients at a presentation of wealth in Hagen indicate a third relationship. We could almost imagine the Hagen displayer of wealth combining in a single male person the gisalo singer who is all surface, his external orna- ments, movement, and songs undoing the composure of the hosts' bodies, and the seated, undecorated hosts who are moved to their feet to bring their memories outside.

In the Hagen case, it is the decorated donors who dance, and who bring to the surface of their skins their own interior-their wealth-moving the undecorated audience, including the recipients, to acknowledge what they have done. The moment of display is simultaneously the climax of the men's activity and the finish of it: their acts can only now be reproduced in the form that the recipients will render to them some years hence. But as witnesses to what the recipients produce, they will in turn become the procreators and causes of the recipients' new activity. Meanwhile, the donors solicit that decomposition of themselves. Bringing out the wealth and thus the relations of which they are composed is tangibly translated into a transaction: the recipients must accept the valuables, consume them, take them into their own minds/bodies and houses. Otherwise no decomposition has taken place.

What convinced Hagen men that the Australians were human lay in the things they brought. Three accounts are recorded by Connolly and Anderson.

"At first", says Ndika Wingti, "we used to wonder why they had come. We thought, 'Who are these people?' But when we saw the things they were trading we thought, 'We must befriend them now. They must be our people.' " [ 1987:116]



"We got to Kelua," says Ndika Rumint, "and there were crowds of people gathered there to see. People from all over the place. And there it was, waiting for everyone to have a look. You should have seen it! It was a pretty thing, and shiny, like the oil on somebody's skin. . . . And it came with things-trade goods, axes, shells, to name just a few. Heaps of them! Then we said, 'These [strange] men must be men-of-all- things.' " [1987:115] "He opened a case full of shells," says Ndika Nikints, "and I looked into the case and cried out with amazement. Aaii! I was shaking my hand in excitement I was so impressed. Then he said, 'Pig!' I didn't understand and wondered what he was talking about. He said, 'Pig! Pig!' I still didn't understand. So he made a grunting noise.

"I realised he wanted to give the shell for a pig. Aahh! I really wanted the shell, but my house was far away. Father! What could I do? Then I thought of Ndika Powa. He had a settlement nearby, where the church is now, that's where his temporary home was then. ... So I went there and called out 'Is anybody there?' An old man came out, and I said, 'Where's Powa?' The old man replied, 'He's scared, and he's gone away.'

"I said to him, 'Bring this pig quickly!' He was afraid, and he hesitated, 'Give it to me! I'll take it!' So I took the pig to the camp and the white man saw it. He picked the big shell up and gave it to me. I took it to the old man and said, 'Take this and give it to Ndika Powa. And tell him the people-eating spirits wanted to eat the pig and gave this shell in return. You all ran off, thinking he was a spirit. Well, what do you think now? He is the shellman! And I'm with him! Go and bring Powa! '. . . This strange man that came, he's not a spirit, he's the shellman! Hurry quickly, there's a lot more shells!' " [1987:121-122] Rumint is probably describing the landing of the second plane at the Kelua

camp, some miles farther on from the initial spot where Taylor was photographed, in central Hagen country (Ndika are neighbors of the Yamka, who had claims to the land there). That would make it 11 days after Leahy and Taylor first appeared. Since the second day, they had attracted big crowds, and the expedition was able to procure vegetable food. But the Hagen men were also somewhat aloof, and would certainly not part with the pigs that the expedition needed to feed its huge line of carriers. The Australian men found that the small shells and steel goods and other trade goods were just not acceptable.4 That was to change over night. Noting the pieces of gold-lip pearl shell people wore, Leahy and Taylor sent a message back with the first pilot to bring some in his next load. And of all the "things" that the newcomers brought, these were the things that made Hageners change their mind.

The aircraft managed a return flight the following day. A huge number watched the landing and the disgorgement of its contents. After it had left, there was much speech making. Now among other things, the Australian men were interested in souvenirs, and with the new cargo tried to trade people's stone axes and spears. But they got no response from the Hagen men; they offered steel knives and ax heads, and were met with blank refusal-until Leahy recalled the shells. The moment the bag was opened and seen to contain pearl shells, one of the Hagen orators immediately took charge, held a specimen aloft, and began haranguing the crowd. The strangers had found their medium, and for a while a plane was arriving almost every day with shells, an immediate result being that the Australians were offered more pigs than they knew what to do with.



At the heart of the matter was, I suggest, a significant revelation. Not just that the creatures had things-but they had the kind of things that would move men, that would elicit from the Hageners themselves things that they valued, namely their pigs. "He gave us shell valuables in return for pigs, and we decided he was human" (A. Strathem 1971 :xii). It was the elicitory power of the creatures that made them men, and they could exercise that power because they showed they too had insides. This gave them a dimension in time. Or to put it another way, this made relationship possible. For in the Hagen view, one only has things "inside" oneself, one's clan body, one's house, if these things have come from other bodies, other clans, other houses. "Things" are the forms in which relationships appear.

The premise is an aesthetic one. Forms appear out of other forms, that is, they are contained by them: the container is decomposed, everted, to reveal what is inside. We can call this indigenous analysis. It follows that past and future become present; any one form anticipates its transformation, and is itself retrospec- tively the transformation of a prior form. It must also follow that forms already exist, and indeed when we talk of human creations this is so: it is the work of people to make new things appear-tubers from the ground, shells from houses, children from women. By contrast, things that appear by themselves may be regarded as nonhuman, as wild spirits are in Hagen.

Whether such wild spirits are regarded as solid or as completely hollow (the same thing), they have no insides, nothing to bring out, nothing to which one can make appeal. Now, people's insides are the faculties of both reason and emotion, and their communicational capacity, the intentions and things with which they interact with others. But such spirits are not moved by the plight of men (or women). Their voracity is autonomous. There is no time dimension to them; they hold no "memory" of prior relationships, for they are only themselves. Wild spirits are simply bizarre: neither the product of other forms nor anticipating a transformation into other forms. Having "no form" in that sense-that is, not being the particular transformation of another particular form-they can take "any form," appear in any guise, as features of the landscape, moving shadows, headless giants, or even disguise themselves as human beings.

The decorations that disguise a human dancer, and present him in spiritual form as his own ancestor, are different from the disguise by which wild spirits conceal themselves as human. For in the latter case, the external disguise is no inner form revealed, the transformation of an inside identity displayed on the surface, and has no intrinsic relationship with the spirit. And although such spirits may prey on people and may be placated with things on occasion, they do not have the power to elicit from persons what persons value. Here they stand in contrast to ancestral ghosts who do indeed elicit pigs from their descendants.

When Hageners first called the Australians spirits, they apparently meant just such apparitions, along with cannibal ogres and the more benign sky beings. From some of these beings valuables could be cajoled, but they had no power, it seems, to elicit a flow of counter gifts (except in the context of specific cults attached to particularized, named manifestations, under the control of ritual experts). Their



common characteristic was that they existed formlessly and timelessly in themselves.

There is no doubt that the Australians appeared bizarre. But the bizarre artifacts of a bizarre creature elicit no interest. The fact of difference becomes un- interesting if nothing comes as the outcome of it; an untoward conjunction of forms is not an event, not a relationship in the history of persons with a past and a future to it. The Australian men, impressed with their own technology, assumed that Hagen men would be equally impressed, and they "conjured" the first air- plane out of the sky, pointing to the direction from which it would come, and having their prediction materialize. There is no doubt that the size and noise of the machine had an effect. Yet once it had happened, it had happened, like the radio, cars, and all the rest of the paraphernalia with which Hageners were to become familiar. The one thing that moved and surprised them-that made Nikint cry out in amazement and excitement-was the very thing that the strangers almost forgot to show that they had: the gold-lip pearl shell. And this was the one item that already belonged to Hagen; everything else was a mere curio. The mar- velous thing about these creatures, then, was what they had within them. Hage- ners were confronted with an image of themselves.

Leahy and Taylor now appeared not as spirit analogues of Hagen men, but as transformations of them-not divided from "us" as "others," but "our- selves" in another form. Lederman (1986:373) reports of her own arrival at Mendi that people were eager to assure her they had not been caught off guard; their own accounts of themselves already contained the strangers who were to come.

Let me conclude by commenting on the difference between these two perceptions and the shift between them.

Wild spirits and sky spirits by and large occupied worlds conceived as analogous to those of human beings. "Our" pigs were "their" marsupials, "our" sky, their "earth," and vice versa (see Schieffelin 1985b). The Australians sim- ilarly came in their skins, conceivably an analogous but distinct form of being. This presented no intrinsic barrier to superficial interaction. For the first few days, the people at Kelua were pleased to supply "our" food for "their" trade items, but that did not undermine the distinction-on the contrary, that they were able to obtain small shells for food just confirmed that what to "us" is non-wealth, to "them" is wealth. What is of value to them (our rubbish/their wealth) appears analogous to what is of value to us (their rubbish/our wealth), but with the cor- ollary that what is of value to them, therefore, is not of value to us. It was the collapse of the analogy, the obviation of the difference, that was the moment of revelation: "their" wealth and "our" wealth were seen to be the same, to take the one form of the pearl shell.

From the start it seems that Hageners referred to all European goods by the term-mel, "thing"-they used for wealth, especially shell wealth. The analogy between the artifacts of these creatures and their own shells also implied a dis-



tinction between these creatures and themselves. But that distinction was negated at the moment5 that the Australians drew forth from their bodies exactly the same kind of shell as their own, and for which they desired its proper equivalent-pig. For the gesture collapsed a relationship between distinct elements in a potent image that contained that relationship within itself (cf. J. Weiner 1988).

As a gift, a shell embodies the efforts of both donor and recipient; in giving a relationship a past, it also gives it a future.6 But only a relationship can make a relationship "appear." That revelation was achieved through human effort. Con- sequently, the analogy may well have been negated in such a way as to release a sense of power for the witnesses. The astonishment was Hageners' own realiza- tion that these creatures were bringing forth what they themselves most coveted.7

The discovery that the Australians did indeed have insides was itself a process of elicitation. Hagen men compelled the newcomers to reveal what they had within, and in that compulsion a relationship was implied. This meant that the arrival of the Australians acquired a time dimension: it had become an event. The creators of that event were its Hagen witnesses, who analyzed, processed, and thus decomposed the image of the strangers' first appearance. For the strangers themselves now appeared also as procreators, processors of the shells that had been elicited from them. The sequel is well known. They were forced to freight planeloads of these special items into the Highlands, to an extent that within a month of the first plane arriving, inflation was rapidly pushing up the rate of exchange.8

It was not just that the Australian men had insides that stunned their Hagen counterparts, it was that they were the same insides that were inside their own bodies. Above all, they were recognizable as human because they contained within them the capacity to transact.9 This may well have prompted Hageners' counterpart sense of astonishment at themselves for what they had produced. Things that come from exotic places are always evidence of people's local capac- ities to draw them in. No wonder that the residents of Kelua took charge of the situation. The Australians presented them with evidence of their power.

Among the authors of the spectacle was a man called Yamka Kaura, to whose territory these strangers had come (Connolly and Anderson 1987:127- 128). He organized the bringing of resources such as timber and, in Michael Lea- hy's eyes, he exuded tremendous confidence. But most especially it was he who harangued the crowd. If the question was what to do with this strange presence, what was indicated about the past and what effects it would have in the future, that could only be known through people's own witnessing, as Kaura appreciated when he seized the opportunity to get up and tell people what was happening.

Taylor took off his hat because, to him, the features of the human face com- municated the nature of his person. But on the Hagen side, perception had to be mediated through people's own interpretative acts, through analyzing the impact it would have on them. And that would require time. The arrival of the Australians became an event, with a past and a future, the moment the strangers revealed in turn the effects of the Hagen presence upon them. It was not the end of the world



after all. Camped on Yamka ground, fed by local food, the strangers gave those facts a future in the return gifts they offered.

Perhaps what Kaura hoped was true for himself was true in a larger sense. Perhaps what made the strangers human was that they could be perceived as procreative conduits through which Hagen men could continue to reproduce themselves.

Notes

Acknowledgments. This article was originally written for the session Memory and Ex- change, convened by Debbora Battaglia and Susanne Kuechler, Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Phoenix, 1988. My thanks to both of them for affording the occasion; to Debbora Battaglia for further help; to Jeffrey Clark, Claudia Gross, and Andrew Lattas for their comments; and to Carl Pathian. This article is a companion to M. Strather (1990). 'Three are reproduced in Souter (1964). Connolly and Anderson (1987) reproduce a fourth photograph in which Taylor is mimicking a plane. It will be clear that what follows draws heavily on Connolly and Anderson's magnificent account. 2For their part, the Australians seem to have been rather taken with themselves as "spirits," and kept up what they regarded as the appropriate charade, producing a gramophone, for instance, to play to an open-mouthed crowd-showing off the technological marvel. Perhaps the Australians thought that their audience would think the gramophone some kind of magic, or as containing some kind of power similar to the power of their guns on pigs. But what they did not reckon with was the indifference with which Hageners greeted the principal instrument that divided the newcomers from these "men of the Stone Age": the steel knives and axes they had brought with them as trade goods. In fact it took some time before people were prepared to accept steel goods. Thereafter, there was a steady demand for steel, but one that never reached the inflationary dimensions of the demand for pearl shell. 31 am grateful to Andrew Lattas (personal communication 1988) for this refinement. 4The events are telescoped in Leahy's subsequent account (Leahy and Crain 1937); cf. also the abbreviated "diary" that was published in The Geographical Journal, March 1936. This account comes from the letters of the geologist, Kingsbury, cited in Connolly and Anderson (1987:120-121). 5There was, of course, no one "moment." Rather, shifts in perception must have recurred over and again. It should be clear that I do not offer an historical account here: I take my cue from Gewertz and Schieffelin's (1985) discussion on ethnohistory. 6In this sense, the Australians were already in the world, already known, before they appeared, for they were revealed to be a type of humankind, Hageners in another form. 71 have focused on exchange, but there were other dimensions to the obviation of the analogy, including the provenance of the Australians when thought of as "sky beings," and their coloration as "red people." 8The quantity of pearl shells became a persistent problem in Hagen, because people would not part with their pigs for less. The Leahy brothers chartered DC3 aircraft direct to the



principal source, Thursday Island, at an outlay of ?1,000 sterling for a planeload. Despite this, shortage of shells was an ever-present embarrassment to the settlers, who never had enough to meet demand. It is estimated by Hughes (1978) that between the establishment of the Hagen base in 1933 and the end of the prewar civil administration six years later, shells of all kinds distributed throughout the Highlands must have numbered between 5 and 10 million. This enormous activity on the part of the newcomers was the outcome of the repeated experience of someone such as Michael Leahy, who complained in his diary in April 1934, a year after first arriving in Hagen: We have a price war on our hands; they are demanding two gold-lip pearl shells or one gold-lip and a tomahawk [for a small pig], which is impossible-a gold-lip costs 2/6d in Salamaua and 4/6d air freight. [quoted in Hughes 1978:312]

9"So how did Wiru finally come to comprehend whites as human? When I asked this question I received the somewhat enigmatic reply 'because their arms bend,' i.e., they have elbows, tuku. Tuku is a verb for exchange" (Clark 1986). The image of the elbow recalls the Sabarl depiction of exchange relationships that act as a pivot in the departure and return of wealth (cf. Battaglia 1983).

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