Karen Sykes
4 Imitation as borrowing and creativity as serious play: a summary of the operational sequences
The ethnography of Malanggan-making shows how the economic psychology of ‘imitation’ is complemented by the social process of borrowing skills. In the case described here, the makers of rope Malanggans remain much attuned to each other’s well-being, and indirectly care for their own because they know it is the only way to make ‘a life’s work’. Each of the sequences of technical operations,
concentration, display and dispersal were recorded here as a story of interruption and near failure. To summarize:
Concentration: In the making of the rope from the rotting wood, they saw the permeability and the decomposition of their own bodies. In the making of the Malanggan sculpture from ropes, the makers saw the line of continuity of faces from the dead ancestors of their own clan. They acknowledged their borrow- ings from their ancestors, and discussed the limits of those borrowings.
Display: In the painting of the Malanggan, the makers saw the ghosts of the dead warriors who had murdered their own clansmen and so were reminded that meeting death is a part of living, but one that can be managed with dig- nity. They acknowledged that those who loaned them a place to build a display of Malanggan risked confrontation with the memory of a massacre, and they attuned their actions respectfully to that.
Dispersal: In viewing the complete Malanggan in daylight, the makers saw the disc as an after image, while behind the Malanggan a voice sang weakly of its life as a living body, and of the loss of that life. The after image is all that remains of the tree that grows in the shadow of the tree for canoe-making. It might represent the will, or even imitate it as it possesses the imagination of the viewers, and drives the person to see that Malanggan again. It is the after image that moves people to want to make the Malanggan, to really see it one more time and, in so doing, people in New Ireland generate a new sculptural display at another funeral feast.
There is a practical joke in all of this which the reader might not yet fully realize, but which I must point out before I turn to my conclusions (which summarize the point of it all). It is this: the after image that moves the Mandak to generate a new Malanggan carving emerges from a model borrowed from other people, the Barok. If it represents the will, or if it imitates the will, then the will that possesses the Mandak is borrowed from the Barok: it is not possessed by them as persons. Perhaps we could say that the Mandak are possessed by the Barok will. But there is one more turn of the joke yet. The model, and its teachings about the will, are borrowed from people who do not make Malanggans and thus cannot possess their neighbours’ imaginations with the products of their own.
What is the point of possessing the disembodied will of another people, what some would have called their ‘genius’. This odd question is simply a particular expression of a more conventional concern, which I introduced at the beginning of this chapter. How are the products of the intellect valued in relation to the prod- ucts of the labours of the body. Morturary ceremonies, where participants concern themselves with the relationship of the corporeal and non-corporeal person are a good context for considering this question. It is the same question as that of the eulogists, of the mourners, and all those left to grieve the loss of a body. How can a life, the body and the intellect, be valued?
Post–text/ after image: the pidik (the point) of it all
We Live on Borrowed Time.
Common to all considerations of death is the matter of human awareness that death will happen some day, and so, people value chances to live creatively. What is not known about death is when and how it will come. At the point in life at which a person meets death, they might not be able to weigh up the long chain of lived processes that composed their lifetime. This is because life is lived without the certainty that a meeting with death will occur on this specific occasion. This basic uncertainty about the timing of death predisposes people to live a particular kind of life; a life that is in anticipation of it as a certain fact, but a life that must be about more than the fact itself. It is observed that living a good life does not guarantee a long life, nor does living a wicked one ensure early death. It is the case that a person can find the value of life in triumphing over it, but that does not answer the question of how they might value specific relationships and live a good life.
In this ethnography of borrowing as imitation I aimed to provide an insight into the value of a beautiful memory (a life). Here, borrowing is a social act in which the value of social relations must be explicit and discussed as a chain linking people to each other through things and to things. Value in this case is an example of the general theory advanced by Gregory (1997: 12) that value is an ‘invisible chain’ linking people to things and to relationships between people and things. Value links relationships to relationships, at least as strongly as these relationships link people to things. His theory sheds new light on anthropology’s specialist considerations about how to value social relationships (12–40) because value is defined as a form of consciousness of the invisible chains that describe and prescribe. What I have shown here is how his theory opens new questions, rather than answers old ones. Valuing social relationships, what anthropologists describe as a judgement of them, must be undertaken differently from valuing objects in the way political economy does, although relationships can be valued as if objects, because ‘fact and norm are parts of a dialectical unity mediated by value’. The value of social relation can be made conscious and even discussed with concern; but most often borrowing is discussed in good spirits, and in a kindly even playful manner because people joking with each other know that time is neither their own, nor has it been given to them by another.
How different this anthropological approach to living on ‘borrowed time’ for understanding valuable relationships is from the post-structuralist philosopher’s claim that lives are valuable because we can contemplate what it means to lose them, as when lives are ‘given to death’ (or ‘put to death’ as Derrida better explains the English translation of the French idiom he invokes), as Derrida (1995) once told us in his curious use of Levinas to critique Mauss’s discussion of recipro- city.13 Instead of making life into an object to be known at the moment of its loss,
anthropologists have a chance to examine the processes by which people chose to live their lives, and the ways they compose the lives they share as they meet their obligations to each other. That is a project that really would take anthropologists
into the eidos, ethics and sociology of how a life is conceived, given and valued. In this chapter I have explored the creative work of valuing social relations by discussing imitation as borrowing and creativity as serious play. In order to explore how people value social relationships, I discussed my own ethnographic example of making the rope Malanggan, as I helped to fabricate it with a group of elderly men from the Lelet Plateau in central New Ireland in 1999–2000. I learned with them that it was quite right to say that the successful outcome of completing and displaying a Malanggan always remains uncertain, but that it is the case that a sculptor can claim correctly that the Malanggan will be made one day. A rumour that some carver will present one at a funeral feast can never be fulfilled with surety at this time. It may remain a rumour and the best intentions shamed by the failure to display a finished sculpture. It may be simple speculation about the possibility that the hosts of a funeral would display a Malanggan, even when never intending to do so. The value of the relationships can be weighed in the moment as people borrow on each other’s skills and capacities, even as they know that they might not be able to complete their work of living well with each other. They know that Malanggans are composed of series of technical operations, and making one reminds them that life is a process of composing life itself. Making a Malanggan with these men was both a grave and a hilarious experience, a period of serious play in our mutual understandings and misunderstandings about the value of the social relationships that make up a life, the value of a life, and the value of the memory of how that life was lived.
Notes
1 This chapter was presented as a paper in Verona, Italy, at the conference of the European Society for Oceanists, 8–10 July 2008, in a panel honouring the work of Roy Wagner as a principal ethnographer of Melanesia. This chapter and its critique of Durkheimian sociology is dedicated to him.
2 If this sounds all too familiar to readers who are also scholars of the Malanggan ritual, then it is also likely that they would baulk at both of Tarde’s assumptions about the will and creative genius.
3 The triad is borrowed from Latour, who names these as the suitable settlements embraced by the super-discipline of Actor-Network Theory.
4 The example of the case of the funeral arts puts the question ‘how should social sci- entists value life processes’ on the table for discussion by anthropologists. There is discomfort in confronting the loss of the substantive or corporeal human. In some songs ‘the beautiful corpse’ is replaced with the words ‘beautiful memory’, as if it were a euphemism for a life. It betrays a complex popular doctrine to be considered in this, as my epigraph to this section suggests. Life is celebrated with sadness as a beautiful memory. The quantitative measure of its duration (die young) is doubted by reference to its quality (live hard). It shows us that the problem is less; that Tarde separates the intellect from the material for the sake of temporary analytic clarity, but that he thinks that material wealth can somehow be exchanged only as economic value and that it can be free from any moral valuation.
5 Barry and Thrift (2007) have discussed this in greater length than I allow it here. My aim is different from theirs because I seek to unpack imitation ethnographically in order to understand how we can better discuss the value of a beautiful memory in social relationships.
6 I borrow this ‘correction’ from Mauss (2006: 30ff) whose annoyance with Tarde’s own borrowings is registered in the words, ‘Borrowing is shown all through Tarde, indeed it is borrowing one page after another’. What I wish to show by the end of this chapter is that Tarde’s essay on economic psychology is less inspired by classical theories of economy, and borrows rather heavily on Mauss, whose major point on the ‘economy’ of exchange is precisely this, that reciprocity is not simply economic exchanges of equivalent things; the obligation to reciprocate implicates the economy with moral and ideational concerns. Without discussing it at length, those who know Mauss’s book The Gift will recognize that it is with good reason that the Scandinavian edas stand as epigraph to it, emphasizing that giving and receiving is a way of valuing another person.
7 Elicitation is a central concept introduced by Wagner in his ethnography of the Barok to describe their creative acts that tease out, provoke or create specific responses in others.
8 My concept owes more to the insights of Leroi-Gourhan (1993), Mauss, in Schlanger (2006), and to Wagner (1986) than to Tarde or Durkheim.
9 See Gunn (1987) for a discussion of these concerns.
10 While this case seems a small ‘sample’, the work of mortuary sculpting is not often shared with ethnographers, and our best accounts are often based largely on interviews with expert Malanggan-makers, as the work of Kuchler (2002), Derlon (1997), Lewis (1969), and Brouwer (1977) have shown. This absence of a record of Malanggan-making is a problem for the production of a vulnerable form, the luwara, which is said to be a human body.
11 Lengkobus means to be bound fast with rope. The lashing of the lengkobus is used in the longhouse construction of the Mandak of the Lelet, where an intricate system of ropes and trees make a very warm secure dark house, with the distinctive feature of a moveable ridge pole, that nestles in the meeting of the round timbers at the apex of the house. The lashing at each increase in the height of the house wall is named for their habitual uses in the final house; for example, the lowest is named the rat-run, whereas the highest is named the tobacco row, because this is where fresh leaves hang to dry in the smoky upper area. The longhouse has one low door only, and people enter or leave by the same way, bending their heads low as they come into the home of their hosts. It is respectful to enter the longhouse by extending the bared back of the neck to the hosts. Showing deference upon entering the home is more than a manner of etiquette. It is this expression of vulnerability that makes ethical conduct in the household possible. Luwara does not translate but is demonstrated in various examples as the doorway to
the house, the pupil of the eye, the centre of a whirlpool, and the backwards curl of the water at the canoe prow. In many respects the luwara appears to be similar to another Malanggan found in northern New Ireland, the kap kap that is worn around the neck by adolescents. I believe they could have shown me more examples of the places in the world or on the body that are permeable. The examples showed me that the form of the luwara-lengkobus Malanggan is unstable.
12 The influences of Mauss’s theory of technique are notable here.
13 And like Schlanger (2006) and Lemonier (1992), who all build on Mauss’s study of technique, Ingold shows that vulnerability in relations between conceptual and material form is always specific to the sensual and personal experience, which is tacit and not explicit. We know more than we can tell and a reworking of the understanding of what a life is might well open up that part of experience to the anthropological examina- tion. Like Ingold, I propose that pursuing this line of enquiry aids anthropologists in understanding how objects such as Malanggan remain meaningful, without insisting on interpretation of them as representations of other objects, or of social processes. 14 Even more curious when compared with his earlier discussion of Mauss’s student,
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