Creativity as serious play in making ‘knots’ in the sequence of technical operations

In the course of making the lengkobus-luwara Malanggan with those elderly men who agreed to help me, I learned that the makers of lengkobus-luwara work against the possibility of failure by borrowing techniques. Each link of the chain that makes up the sequence of operations in the creation of a Malangan is borrowed, and still follows upon the previous links in the chain. To take an example of how life is a composite of borrowed social techniques, or the skilled practices which people share, Ingold (2007) looks into the minute acts of cutting wood. He shows that the process of cutting a straight line through a plank might show us that the failure of the relations of conceptual and material form is contingent on human error, but that makes all human creativity into a dangerous mistake that could result in splinters, breaks and useless blocks of wood. He argues that it is the process that is most interesting in understanding the creative work of a life, not simply its openness to the world. The failure to make a straight cut is less a problem of not being able to cut straight, and more a problem of a failure to make the human adjustments of the imagination to enable the straight line to emerge in the process of cutting it. Using saw and wood, he can show that cutting across a board in a straight line requires a series of minute calculations that ensures he can follow the imaginary form of a straight line there.12 _{Ingold, in these contemplations on technique, might be inspired}

by Mauss and those like Leroi-Gourhan who follow him. For Leroi-Gourhan, like those working after Mauss, artistic technique is less a tool, or a social effect, than it is a programme that releases memory, without literalizing it as linear text. Reflecting upon this, Derrida tells us that ‘ Leroi-Gourhan recalls the unity, within the mythogram, of all the elements of which linear writing marks the disruption,

the technics (particularly graphics), art, religion, economy. To recover access to this unity, to this other structure of unity, we must desediment “four thousand years of linear writing”.’ (Derrida 1974: 86). The experience of making a rope Malanggan, with all its jokes about the processes, glitches in social arrangements, or knots and muddles in techniques, made the ‘chain of operations’ less a sequence of transmissions, and more of a tangle of borrowings. Yet, these tangles in the techniques, these borrowings between participants, were a source of instability, and of creativity. The makers were careful to acknowledge their borrowings from each other or from their ancestors, and this made for twisted complex practices of knowledge transmission when they became anxious about their failure to imitate carefully or to borrow respectfully.

Much of the published work on Malanggan-making concerns itself with carving, rather than knotting as a construction technique. Although Kuechler (1999) has likened the form of carved sculptures to knots that bind memory, it is helpful to take some time to examine the process of making knots if we want to understand the very nature of creativity as imitation (as Tarde would have us do in the rethink- ing of political economy through the lens of economic psychology). Whereas Ingold’s meditations, which I noted in the previous paragraph, on cutting wood (with a saw) are helpful for redirecting our attention to the process of sawing in a straight line, I think that my less common experience of sculpting a Malanggan by knotting ropes spun from a decayed tree leads to a fuller understanding of imita- tion as a kind of borrowing. The examination of these processes helps to show the nature of imitation in innovation, and of the failure to imitate in relationship to that. Although the technology of its construction is laborious, it is surprising that the knotted Malanggan is rarely kept. I think this is largely due to the fact that it is already visible everywhere and all around the makers. It is life itself and underlines the serious nature of the play that goes into making it.

In what follows I describe three sequences of techniques, each one emphasizing a different column in the register of ethnographic understanding: the eidos, or the concentration of image and idea in the material product; the ethos, which is bound up in the display of how social processes attune both aesthetic and social relations; and the social, which is visible at the point of the dispersal of the relation (which are the very forms of the eidos.)

3.1 Concentration

A Trees into white rope

The lengkobus-luwara Malanggan is fabricated almost exclusively on the Lelet, but its work begins out of view of the plateau villages, on a sheltered sunny beach on the east coast. There grow two kinds of trees: one that is used for making canoes (which in coastal villages had been used both for practical purposes and for burying the dead at sea), and the one that usually grows alongside it. The tree is debarked, carried to the beach, and lashed firmly in place at the water’s edge in a place to capture the light. After three weeks or three months, depending upon the season

and the tree’s qualities of density, the tree is taken from the water and left to dry. We were fortunate this time, and after a month it was ready and the soft fibrous wood could be pulled from the trunk and hand-spun into long ropes.

I travelled several times with men who were watching over this project while the trees rotted in the water. Later we convened there to make ropes from the trees. The ropes were made on the coast, while sitting on the beach in the shade and while catching a pleasant sea breeze. Sometimes the rope-making was helped by coconut milk, both as beverage for the men working and as a lubricant for the spinning of the wood fibre. Turning trees into ropes is delicate work requiring a touch that does not break the fibres too short, yet manages to extract lengths of wood that are adequate for use in making strings.

During these days I learned about the ways of burial in the past. These burial practices focused on substantive changes in the corpse, the stages of decomposi- tion, marking a need for a new ritual process to be completed at each stage. These stages were 1, the cessation of breath; 2, the rotting of the flesh; 3, the burial or reburial of the bones; 4, the dispersal of the life force (Mandak: loroxan). I did not see the cutting of the tree, but the transformation of the tree trunk into rope could be understood as an idiom for second stage rotting of the flesh and the extraction of the white dry bones from the corpse. Given that bodies were analysed as com- posites of mother’s matrilineage (flesh) and father’s matrilineage (skeleton), this work of turning soft decaying wood fibre into ropes made me wonder if the ropes were like bones, or not. Here, the making of rope, which entails drying out a living tree in order to reconstruct it as a supple rope, is underlined by the possibility of the image of a past mortuary practice: the separation of bones and flesh for final burial.

These were convivial times, and the work began easily enough because the Lelet men enjoyed time on the coast. They said the cool winds from the sea stirred them to sing ancient tunes. Some of the songs made them feel sad, and they fell silent from time to time to experience that sadness more fully. After a few days, men began to suffer coughs and watering eyes. They flagged at the work, and worried about their health. As lively and pleasant as the work had begun, they could not complete the ropes as easily as they had hoped. Two men went to seek cures for influenza from the nurse at the aid post. Another retreated to his own men’s house for a period of time near the fire. A fourth went to stay with his cousin in a house down the road. All worried that they should not finish the work of making ropes. They said that their bodies were coming apart like rotten wood.

What was needed in order to rejuvenate the failing flesh of the elderly men’s bodies so that we could finish our work? We had come to the point of no return in the Malanggan construction. It was inappropriate to leave so much work incom- plete, and at the same time it was clear that the Malanggan needed a maker. I found Lenari, an elderly man of the Solon clan, who knew the techniques for the construction of a rope Malanggan. He took over the production, explaining that while it was a cooperative effort, the rest needed to have one person as the lead, and that he would help to organize the work of the others. I had been told as much about four months earlier, and had made several failed efforts to meet with men

who might take this leadership. Three had said yes, but soon relinquished the task, always for different reasons of business elsewhere. Lenari was different. As a clansman of Solon, he would be making the Malanggan near to the inspirited ground of his own clan near the hamlet Lemptanas on Lelet, where the Malanggan makers would congregate to turn rope into bodies.

B Rope into skeletal bodies

Ropes were carried to the Lelet, ready for use in constructing large round discs from the fibres. Each man took three ropes, joined them together and wrapped the end around his large toe and the one adjacent to it. Each man plaited the ropes from this ‘hook’ (that was a foot), so that the ropes would ultimately lie very straight and be easier to work with for the construction of the body of the Malanggan. The increasing lengths were wrapped around the foot and each man aimed to make their rope seamless and knotless. They said the Malanggan would not turn out ‘good’ if they broke the flow of the work. It would cause problems for the rest of the work, to fail to create a continuous length of rope. As we continued to straighten the ropes into plaited ropes, the work seemed endless. It was never clear to me when we would have enough rope to do the work of Malanggan construction: that was a judgement left to Lenari, who led the work.

We appropriated the front veranda of a new permanent style house, never used by the owners, and spent the day plaiting ropes there. In the evening, the group reconvened in the men’s house. I did not join them. There they dreamed disturbing dreams. In the morning they told me about them. This continued for three nights, until the dreaming finally stopped.

I was not privy to their discussions of the events of the dreams, and they did not tell me of the process by which they made their decisions. They had dreamed of dead ancestors and seen their faces in those dreams. As Thomas, an elderly man who is the most senior of his clan said, ‘I saw all the big men of my clan, even the ones that had been dead long before the day I was born’. As with the others, the dreams warned the senior men of the possible disasters of the work and they discussed whether it was wise to continue the construction of the rattan discs. Strangely, each man’s dreams stretched back in time to recover images from his matrilineage, a long queue of men from one clan only.

It was finally possible to construct the sculptures. First, each white wood fibre rope was flattened between two modern planks. In the past they would have split a tree trunk and pressed the rope between the smoothened flat surfaces, but now they took this short cut. The flattened ropes would be most useful for enabling the work. The disc was constructed of crossed over halves of wood, eight in all, which formed a star frame for the ropes, which they then wove through the eight bones of the body of the Malanggan. They wound the ropes in concentric circles, forming a large disc that stood to my shoulder. The weavers aimed to be continuous, as they did not want to knot the ropes and break the flow of the ropes around the disc.

3.2 Display

A Bodies animated with ‘eyes’

In the centre of the large disc, there is an open hole large enough for a man’s head to protrude. Sometimes it is filled with a man’s head, sometimes with a wood carv- ing – such as a pig’s head – from the expert repartee of the maker. Sometimes it is made of wood fibre rope itself. The effect of placing the eye in the Malanggan is overwhelming. As with the placing of the eye of the woodcarving, the eye of the woven carving can overwhelm the specialist maker. He is challenged to see himself in the placement of the eye, a pupil and iris unfolding from an open space.

B Bodies animated with paint

The last work of making a Malanggan is painting it. The paint must glow in the sunlight and have a lustre that catches the eye of the viewer. This is accomplished with magic, but also with a combination of ground seashell and the crushed sap or juice from tree fruits and bush leaves. Colours are applied with a brush made of coconut husk, and the work will be most successful when the final surface is as flat and ridgeless as possible. The paint is most like paste, and it fills porous surfaces until we create a smooth surface on the disc.

While preparing the Malanggan, I learned something new. The power of the visual memory on the landscape accounted for difficulties in assembling men and women to create a Malanggan. I shouted too loudly at a group of men passing by on the pathway to the next village, using a local idiom, ‘the men from Lavatkana just keep on advancing’, often used to express appreciation for their renowned tenacity. At the moment they appeared, they had come from a day of house-building near the aid post, and displayed their tenacity now in their community service. I have discussed elsewhere how the men of the contemporary Lavatakana village care- fully choose never to walk towards Lempatnas along the same paths as they took in battle a century and a half ago (when they advanced with the intention to murder all of the hamlet’s residents). In present times, they never repeat the same advance towards the Lempatnas hamlet because to do that would be to model the image retained in memory of the massacre and encapsulated in the idiom describing how they walked with tenacity for the purpose of making war. The idiom recalled that history of massacre, in which the tenacity succeeded in eliminating an entire clan, the same clan who could claim a history of relationship to the same Malanggan being made that month at the hamlet. The men from Lavatkana were ashamed at reference to the history of their leadership of massacre. This is an example of one way in which people shared their mutual vulnerabilities, and the ways in which I became embroiled in them.

3.3 Dispersal

A Bodies into memories

The songs of the knot Malanggan speaks from the experience of loneliness and lack of connection. (Consider, too, that this Malanggan is made appositely of rope, plaited and bound into a circular disc as if to emphasize how people are bound in relationships as a way of making the viewers imagine how life might be unwoven.) The Malanggan’s song underlines that human corporeal life is an ephemeral experi- ence against the prospects of a non-corporeal eternity. The song is short and its tune is fleeting in memory, just as is life. The lyrics of the knotted Malanggan song are brief: ‘Why did you leave me here all alone, weeping; I enjoyed your body for too brief a time compared with this eternity without you.’ When this song is sung, some women will hear it from a distance. Some will weep, some will mourn. The poetry evokes a response that draws from their common experience of death as the loss of the body, and their particular experience of the loss of kin. Some will speak of their long dead relatives, of whom they do not speak often in the course of everyday life because the social effects of the work of those dead has been completed at last.

Kraemer has written that Malanggan images return in dreams. A viewer of the knotted rope Malanggan should appreciate the images over the material forms, just as the viewer of the carving does. However, viewers of the knotted Malanggan must understand the play of ethics and aesthetics. The surface of the knotted Malanggan is painted with red, white, black and yellow paints mixed with powered seashell, which makes a glistening surface to reflect sunlight. The hues are vivid and said to be body colours, not symbols of these. They evoke rather than represent, and hold a place in the life of funeral goers well after the funeral. The viewer who sees the igumes of Malanggan captures an image on the back of their eye. The viewer retains the image after closing the eye; it can be viewed privately on the closed eyelid. What matters here is that the image of the Malanggan can be viewed on the back of the eyelid. The image reverses the colours of the Malanggan as it is viewed, so that what is painted black now glows as bright white light; and the red appears green. The experience of viewing a knotted Malanggan, painted with such glistening paint, underlines a problem central to Malanggans’ importance, namely a person learns about the beauty of seeing a Malanggan, and at the same time learns how to regard it. It is a central issue in the creation of Malanggan, that it is to be enjoyed in the course of a life and not deferred to its end.

4 Imitation as borrowing and creativity as serious play: a