Mundane Objects

Materiality and Non-verbal Communication

Pierre Lemonnier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315424231
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

This concise book shows the importance of objects that are considered ordinary by cultural outsiders and scholars, yet lie at the heart of the systems of thought and practices of their makers and users. This volume demonstrates the role of these objects in nonverbal communication, both in non-ritual and in ritual situations. Lemonnier shows that some objects, their physical properties and their material implementation, are wordless expressions of fundamental aspects of a way of living and thinking, as well as sometimes the only means of expressing the inexpressible. Through the study of the most mundane technical activities such as fence building, creating models cars, or trapping fish, we often gain a better understanding of what these objects mean and how they work within their cultures of origin. In addition to anthropologists and archaeologists, this book will also be of interest to sociologists, historians, philosophers, cognitive anthropologists and primatologists, for whom the intertwining of "function" and "style" is the very mark of all cultural behavior.

Chapter 1

Too Sturdy To Be Mundane: A Baruya Garden Fence

Wooden posts are such a common sight in the New Guinea Highlands that only three days after I first arrived in a Baruya village (Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea [PNG]), I was already looking at some rough-hewn planks being transformed into the wall of a so-called “beehive-shaped Anga traditional house.” At the same time, I was hectically recording the operational sequences (chaînes opératoires) of people making a bamboo floor nearby, of women carrying bundles of thatch, and of young men going into the forest to find and cut long rattan vines to be used for whatever lashing needed to be done (floor, house-frame, walls, scaffoldings, ladders). Many ordinary technical actions were going on at the same time in Wuyabo, high above the Wonenara Valley. I already no longer knew which way to look; I was late in making neat copies of my notes, and the rolls of film I had taken were becoming hard to manage. On my fourth day however, I had no choice but to add one more “technique” to my “technologist’s” menu because some men were cutting down the secondary forest a minute’s walk from Maurice Godelier’s house.

As both Maurice’s former student and his host, I could not ignore that, in the late 1960s, he had spent almost a year mapping hundreds of Baruya gardens¹ as groundwork for his research in economic anthropology. But even a newcomer would have immediately realised that gardens literally shape the Baruya landscape. I was not yet able to say three words in Tok Pisin (Melanesian pidgin) and even less in the Baruya language; however, I had the feeling that I would be able to get the names of the parts of a fence and of the different woods being used. And here I was rapidly observing other posts being sharpened on both ends to build the physical device that delimits and protects the cultivated plots.

Figure 1. Baruya garden (Wuyabo, 1978). (All photos by Pierre Lemonnier unless otherwise indicated.)

Prior studies have emphasised the diversity of the Baruya agricultural system, as well as the important circulation of taro cuttings, both from irrigated “nurseries” to high gardens, and from one family to another (Lory 1982). Baruya cultivation is also unique in the world, for the fat areas used to plant and irrigate fields of Coïx gigantea, the ashes of which are processed to make a particular vegetal salt formerly used as a local money and means of intertribal exchange (Godelier 1969; Lemonnier 1984b).

Sweet potato, which makes up around three-quarters of the daily diet, and taro are the two main garden crops, but a large portion of the sweet potato production is used to feed domesticated pigs, which also eat everything they can forage in old gardens or in the nearby forest. However, the agricultural system the Baruya people have developed is semi-intensive by New Guinea standards. They do not spade their gardens, make compost, or use manure or mounding, practices which in some other areas of the island are used to produce the large quantities of tubers necessary to the organisation of ceremonial exchanges (Feil 1984; Lemonnier 1990, 1991; Strathern 1971; Wiessner and Tumu 1998).

Contrary to many other Melanesian peoples, the Baruya’s pigs play no role in homicide compensations, in particular peacemaking ceremonies, and they are almost entirely absent at marriages, hence the relatively low pig-human ratio (0.6 per capita in 1985; i.e., 3.3 pigs per square kilometre). Strangely enough, pigs are rarely killed, due no doubt to the absence of “Big Men” or any kind of leader whose power and prestige is based on the organisation of ceremonial exchanges or “pig kills” (Lemonnier 1991). A mass butchering would mean killing 10 to 15 pigs, and would only happen in the event people feared an enemy attack (as in 1983 and 1985), or when it was felt that there were too many pigs around and not enough food in the gardens to feed them.

Pigs are nevertheless part of the Baruya universe. In particular, the damage a single pig can do in one night when rooting for tubers is amazing. Most of the gardens are therefore enclosed to prevent pigs from getting in and ravaging the crops. Most pigs are domesticated, but feral males roam near the gardens. All domesticated pigs are castrated, and reproduction relies exclusively on encounters of the sows with feral boars wandering in the vicinity of the village and gardens. These animals do not like raw taros, but they love sweet potatoes and try to sneak into every garden, even though all Baruya gardens are fenced. As a result, together with adultery and pig stealing, damaging a garden or a fence is one of the main reasons for feuding. In the case of pig damage to a garden, the owner of the garden complains about the manners of a badly raised or unwatched pig, while the owner of the accused pig deplores the scandalous state of the fence…. Normally, one is supposed to have complained three times before actually killing the pig, but a pig seen in a garden is sometimes immediately shot with an arrow, and things can then go from bad to worse. Fortunately, very strict procedures regulate the handling of such an incident: the pig is butchered by its owner and given to the gardener.

Gardens are everywhere in the Baruya valleys, and they play a central part in the daily life of women and men. The word for “work” is “to garden” (wawonya; Lloyd 1992:22, 80). Because of the frequent rotation of the areas cultivated and probably also because of the duration of settlement, the tropical forest has been replaced by large expanses of savannah, notably on the valley floors. However, one can see numerous dense patches of secondary forest a few minutes walk from the villages; once a garden is abandoned (say, four years after it has been planted), trees and shrubs grow back very rapidly. Indeed, it is more difficult to cut one’s way through an “old” garden than through primary tropical forest.

A BUSY OPEN-AIR WORKSHOP

Generally speaking, in New Guinea, the enclosures surrounding tuber gardens (and those containing sugarcane, bananas, etc.) result from the technical choice to enclose the gardens rather than having to watch or to enclose the pigs. The latter option is rarely taken because the pigs, which are big eaters, would have to be fed and then would not play their scavenging role in and around the village.

In the Baruya valleys, a garden is opened in a forest where a garden had been cultivated 15 to 30 years previously. Early one morning in October 1978, I heard the characteristic creaking and then cracking sounds followed by the heavy fall of a huge tree, bringing down smaller trees in its wake (which is in itself one way to save time cutting trees), all accompanied by shouts and laughter coming from Kumain’s garden.

I had come to PNG as a sort of materialist field researcher, having already written a doctoral dissertation on the “economic anthropology” of salt-making on the French Atlantic coast, to study all possible aspects of the technical system of the society long studied by an expert in economic anthropology, Maurice Godelier. So there I was, on the edge of the forest, trying to balance my notebook, pencils, cameras (colour and black-and-white films), stopwatch, 10 metres of tape measure, and, I guess, my tiny letter scale—in case I met someone carrying an unknown type of arrow: one never knows! At any rate, I had to pay close attention to every kind of material action, from shaping pieces of wood, to tying various types of vegetal ropes, to planting posts in the ground and cutting underbrush.

Having himself spent months mapping Baruya gardens in the past, Jean-Luc Lory had already told me about the complexity of the social interactions unfolding around a barrier, on which he later published studies (Lory 1982, 1985). I was well aware that there was more to see and understand than simply people preparing the future production of daily food and that, clearly, constructing a garden fence “revealed a rationality other than economic” (Lory 1985:80–82). But I had no idea that I would go back to the field notes of this very day almost 35 years later with a radically different theoretical agenda.

Figure 2. Baruya men collectively building a takola garden barrier (Wuyabo, 1978).

Near a big rock that was to become part of the future fence, Kumain had already adjusted a section of barrier, following the rugged terrain up and down, but he was now extending it with the help of two other men. His two wives were shuttling between his old garden, an hour’s walk away, and the present site, carrying on their head four or five old, grayish, fat posts, which they heaped in various spots around the perimeter of the future garden. One of Kumain’s sisters was cutting the brush and piling the branches at the edges of the plot. Later, the women would also do all the planting and weeding, and collect the majority—or even the totality—of the plants.

One man was felling trees with an axe, but most had already been cut the previous day, including the biggest one, whose spirit had been appeased by a ritual (Godelier 1979). A few trees had only been cut back, leaving the roots to retain the soil since the cultivated slopes are steep, and the Baruya do not practice terracing. Others were left standing until they could dry and be cut for firewood. Big stumps were left in the ground. All the trees cut the previous day were already hacked up into irregular planks or poles, piled against tree trunks. Rolls of rattan vines, freshly rehydrated in a nearby stream, were heaped here and there. A young man was roughly planing both sides of pieces of timber and sharpening the two ends to a point. On the upper slope of the clearing, two men were planting and tying together canes of pitpit,² which would soon take root again and make a strong “living” fence.

Figure 3. Baruya women preparing rope of lianas in a stream (Wuyabo, 1978).

Twenty metres away, five more men were assembling fat posts to b...