Collecting Colonialism

Material Culture and Colonial Change

Chris Gosden, Chantal Knowles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000180763
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología

Colonialism has shaped the world we live in today and has often been studied at a global level, but there is less understanding of how colonial relations operated locally. This book takes twentieth-century Papua New Guinea as its focus, and charts the changes in colonial relationships as they were expressed through the flow of material culture. Exploring the links between colonialism and material culture in general, the authors focus on the particular insights that museum collections can provide into social relations. Collections made by anthropologists in New Britain in the first half of the century are compared with recent fieldwork in the area to provide a particularly in-depth picture of historical change. Museum collections can reveal how people dealt with changes in the nature of community, gender relations and notions of power through the shifting use of objects in ritual and exchange. Objects, photographs and archives bring to life both the individual characters of colonial New Britain and the longer-term patterns of history. Drawing on the related disciplines of archaeology, linguistics, history and anthropology, the authors provide fresh insights into the complexities of colonial life. In particular, they show how social relationships among Melanesians, whites and other communities helped to erode distinctions between colonizers and locals, distinctions that have been maintained by scholars of colonialism in the past. This book successfully combines a specific geographical focus with an interest in the broader questions that surround colonial relations, historical change and the history of anthropology.

—1—
People, Objects and Colonial Relations

Let us start by considering an object, since objects are the subject of this book. The focus of our attention is a small brown strip of material, presently housed in the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (1938.36.1301). In itself this is an unprepossessing object. The material, which is probably difficult for many to identify, would be immediately recognized by people throughout the Pacific: it is barkcloth. Barkcloth is produced by removing a long strip of bark from the tree of a suitable species, pounding it flat with a wooden or stone beater on some sort of anvil and then leaving it to dry. Barkcloth can be used in a single strip, as is the case here, or combined into larger pieces. In either case, barkcloth is frequently decorated using local pigments or store-bought paints.

The small strip of barkcloth we are considering was collected by Beatrice Blackwood of the Pitt Rivers Museum on the 30 July 1937 from Möwehafen in the Arawe region of the south coast of New Britain, a large island then part of the Australian colony of New Guinea. The Pitt Rivers’ accession book entry for this object (written by Blackwood) reads ‘First head-binding of new-born child, ewep, bandage of bark-cloth, talis, fastening made from split stem of alikuiyi bush-creeper; Moewehafen, July 1937’. Much the same information was repeated on a metal tag attached to the object. Blackwood also noted in her diary ‘30^th July: ewep: Baby’s first head bandage: Aloia: beads’. This was her short-hand way of saying that she paid the mother, Aloia, in beads for the head-binding cloth; just one of 275 transactions made with money or trade goods to make a collection of local artefacts. Blackwood also took photographs of Alola and her little baby, Awadingme (Fig. 1.1) and took cine film of the process of head binding. Surrounding this one object there is a mass of recording and documentation, all of which is held in the Pitt Rivers today and provides insight into life in the Arawe region at the time, but also into Blackwood’s interests and field practices.

Figure 1.1. Aloia, binding the head of her daughter Awadingme. Passismanua village, Kandrian (Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford)

When collected the strip of barkcloth was already a recycled object and was being used for a purpose other than that for which it was originally produced. In this part of the Pacific, barkcloth was (and sometimes still is) used as male clothing. A strip of barkcloth, decorated with designs using pigments obtained from elsewhere in New Britain through trade, was wrapped around a man’s waist and between his legs (Fig. 1.2). When Beatrice Blackwood was in New Britain the barkcloth was made in a number of inland villages and traded throughout the region (Fig. 7.5). The barkcloth had been a vital part of male regalia when the Germans set up their colony in 1884, and was still commonly worn by men when Blackwood did her fieldwork over fifty years later. However, Blackwood’s fieldwork coincided with the coming of the missions which presaged considerable changes, one of which was a change from the relatively scant clothing of both men and women, shocking to the missionaries, to more modest forms of store-bought dress.

Figure 1.2. Man kneeling on ground beating barkcloth with stone barkcloth beater over wooden block (Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford)

The barkcloth Blackwood collected was no longer a men’s malu (belt), but had been re-used for a second, but vital, cultural purpose. A part of the original belt had been cut off and used to bind the head of a new-born baby. Central to the local bodily aesthetic is the shape of the head, which is in its most pleasing state when elongated, not round, with the elongation of the skull emphasized by hair short on the sides and longer on the top. Blackwood had originally been instructed to carry out fieldwork in New Britain by Balfour (Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum) because of two local practices: the use of blow pipes and the existence of head binding. It was unusual to find either of these features in the western Pacific, the nearest parallel to the blow pipes being in Borneo to the west and head binding being found in what was then the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) to the east. The relations of the Arawe people of New Britain to those elsewhere in the region was of considerable culture historical interest, as head binding and blow pipes might represent a substrate of ancient customs, once widespread, but now submerged beneath later migrations and developments. Part of the impetus to the New Britain fieldwork was culture historical. But there was also a museological dimension. Balfour, then Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, was anxious to obtain head-bound skulls for the collections, and so Blackwood went not just to document the practice, but to bring back tangible evidence of how head binding was carried out and what effects it had (Blackwood and Danby 1955: 174–95).

There were also concerns of the missionaries and colonial administrators surrounding the practice. Chinnery, the New Guinea government anthropologist, comments often on head binding in his notes on the south coast of New Britain.¹ There was considerable debate as to whether head binding affected the intelligence of those on whom it was practised, and although the general conclusion was that it did not, many in the administration were probably happy to see the custom cease. The missionaries were also unhappy with such an idolatrous practice, which might be seen as tampering with god’s prime creation – the human body. Once the Catholic and Anglican missions established themselves on the south coast of New Britain after 1935, they put pressure on local people to abandon the practice, which they did in part and only started to revive it again in the 1980s.

The head-binding cloth, which is not a striking object in anybody’s eyes, can be seen as the centre of a mass of historical connections and debates, some of which are ongoing. For the baby whose head it bound, the cloth is crucial to her personal identity, with the elongation of the skull carried out in the first few weeks of life having a lasting effect throughout the whole of her life. The effect might have had extra piquancy in the time Blackwood was collecting, as an individual then would have been one of the last generation to have a long head. For Beatrice Blackwood the barkcloth would have been amongst one of the most tangible results of her work, and the cloth, whilst not attractive as an item for museum display, was an important piece of culture-historical documentation and thus vital to the teaching and research aspects of a university museum. To the colonial administrator and the missionary, getting rid of head-binding cloths was a sign of progress for many, although for some it might have seemed a dangerous erosion of a harmless local custom. For us, looking back over sixty years after the item was collected, the barkcloth has all these connotations. It was, and is, an important element of an Arawe aesthetic; it is a tangible mark of Beatrice Blackwood’s interest at a particular stage in the history of anthropology and museology, and can be connected to the other 274 items she collected, plus her photographs, diaries and notebooks. It can also be linked to other collections made in the area at different times, and other forms of fieldwork, as we shall see.

The apparent singularity of objects when sitting in a glass case or museum store room should not mislead us. Their complexity derives from the fact that objects such as the barkcloth are always in a state of becoming, and this is true not just when produced and used in their original cultural context, but once collected and housed in the museum. The physical circumstances of the object change continuously, but so also do its sets of significances as it accumulates a history. It is possible, when records are made, to reconstruct this history, which carries with it the lives of those involved with the object. An object is best viewed as indicative of process, rather than static relations, and this process is ongoing in the museum as elsewhere, so that there is a series of continuous social relations surrounding the object connecting ‘field’ and ‘museum’.

Barkcloth used for head binding, as other collected objects, contains information on a range of histories. In addition to our main focus, the historical processes of colonialism, there are also the histories of the individuals involved with collecting these objects, their position within the history of anthropology and of museology. This last history leads us to consider what the role of museum objects is and what constructions of past and present we can place upon them. We will look at all these issues in an introductory manner in the present chapter, but need to start by considering the huge and difficult issue of colonialism and its histories.

New Guinean Colonialism

Understanding colonialism is no easy task, especially once one focuses on historical change. There are three basic models of historical change employed to understand the meeting of initially different cultures through colonial relations. Acculturation sees the local culture as being taken over and submerged by the culture of the incoming group, and this may be seen either as a benign change in which case it is labelled ‘development’ or as less positive in which case it is seen as cultural loss. The second possibility sees a lack of change and the maintenance of tradition, which was the main model for many anthropologists who emphasized the ethnographic present. The third, most subtle, view of change stresses hybridity as an outcome whereby new cultural forms arise out of the meeting of existing cultural logics (Rowlands 1998). In Melanesia there has been a debate between proponents of a model of little change and those who emphasize the changes brought about by colonialism. The nub of the disagreement is about whether Melanesian forms of sociability and of representing the world are utterly different from those of the Western intellectual and social tradition, or whether the last several centuries of colonial involvement in the region have created social forms influenced at quite a deep level by the economic, social and philosophical practices of the West. Foster (1995) has crystallized this difference by distinguishing between what he calls New Melanesia Ethnography and New Melanesian History. The former, associated most obviously with Marilyn Strathern (1988), highlights the fundamental difference between Western and the Melanesian presuppositions about social reality, and uses these differences to highlight the manner in which anthropology has approached Melanesia within a Western mindset. New Melanesian History, by contrast, associated with the work of Thomas (1991), stresses the similarities created by shared histories of colonialism and exchange. Foster also calls for a joining of the two approaches in the New Melanesian Anthropology (Foster 1995: 5). Our view is different to any of these. Europeans and Melanesians have been part of a field of social relations since the middle of the nineteenth century in coastal areas, relations constructed through the movement of goods, gifts and ideas. This has not left either party untouched, but has added to social and cultural change. However, such change has not brought convergence or acculturation but has created new forms of difference, so that Melanesian and Euro-Asian cultures have maintained themselves as different, but the nature of this difference has changed continually.

Melanesian society and culture in New Britain has changed over the last 150 years, but this has not made New Guineans more like Europeans than they were (nor has it made them less like Europeans), they are merely different in novel ways. Similarly, long-term white residents of New Guinea before the Second World War participated in a colonial culture quite different from the form of life they had left in Australia or Europe. But this must not involve ‘going native’, a constant fear of all and an encouragement to keep up standards. At the risk of over-simplification, we can outline three fields of social interaction (at least) within colonial New Guinea: that provided by indigenous Melanesian society, whether this was found in plantations, towns or villages; that provided by long-term settlers (our focus here is on Europeans); areas of interaction between these two. Looked at temporally, these form three linked arenas of change, with interactions between whites and Melanesians a constant feature, but one which helped create difference between Melanesian or white society, rather than engendering more similarity. In constructing this model we are attempting to provide a general set of ideas which is in tune with, and does justice to, the complex and contradictory nature of change within New Guinean colonial society.

Objects were crucial to the maintenance of an arena holding together the various parties in New Guinea. Blackwood’s acquisition of the head-binding cloth was a tiny instance of the sort of exchanges which were constant in New Guinea. Paradoxically the constant movement of objects helped reinforce difference rather than break it down. We shall now tum to the consideration of the movement of objects and the intellectual and social values attached to them.

Cargo Cults

Colonial relations always involved material culture. The main motive for Europeans going to New Guinea was material: to extract copra, rubber, gold or oil, hunt whales or human labour, and make a profit in so doing. Such pursuits necessitated the payment of local people in cash and/or material things, and many relationships of planters and business people were constructed through the flows of materials. Melanesians desired Western objects, but did not want to become Westerners themselves. Rather they attempted to use objects to track down the sources of spiritual power it was thought that whites possessed.

For many Melanesians the coming of whites and colonialism posed a series of intellectual and cosmological puzzles. Puzzlement revolved around the origins of the large amounts of material things Westerners possessed. Cargo cults have been common in New Britain over the last century (Lattas 1998), but are also found in many other parts of Papua New Guinea (Lawrence 1964; Williams 1976). In all areas there are commonalities, as well as differences, in the nature of these cults. Cargo cults derive from the belief that cargo, in the form of Western goods, derives from a non-human, divine source and that Westerners have privileged access to this, an access wrested from Melanesians. Lattas (1998: xi) reports that many in the Kaliai area of West New Britain are convinced that imported cargo is secretly produced by their ancestors, over whom whites have gained control, and that similar beliefs are found widely throughout New Britain. Lawrence (1964) for the southern Madang District records how the local god Manup went to Australia and found white natives there for whom he built the city of Sydney. He then wished to return to his original followers in New Guinea and to do this he turned himself into the Holy Ghost, entered the womb of the Virgin Mary and was reborn as Jesus. When he tried to return to New Guinea, the Jews turned against him, as they did not want to share their wealth with New Guineans and crucified him. The missionaries were told to keep all this secret once they got to New Guinea as no whites wanted New Guineans to know the source of their wealth. The killing of a black Christ by whites, as told in this myth, was the basis for the present colonial order. As well as praying in church for the return of Jesus-Manup, a set of rituals was developed to awaken the consciences of their ancestors and cargo deities and alert them to their plight. Some people destroyed gardens, pigs and other forms of property, and in village cemeteries people set up European-style tables that they decorated with cotton cloth, flowers in bottles, food and tobacco. These acts and rituals, plus the revival of old dances, were designed to create new relationships with the ancestors through which material wealth would flow, and to prevent Europeans stealing cargo from the ancestors before it could reach the villagers (Lawrence 1964: 94–5). Lattas (1998: chap. 2) documents similar beliefs and activities existing in New Britain from the German period onwards.

Cargo cults were not primarily about the desire for objects, but were rather a search for access to the power which is the source of objects and material wealth. Objects were at the centre of Melanesian views of their relationships with whites, relationships which had a series of moral and political aspects to them, aspects which many whites would not have readily grasped in their dealings with the local inhabitants of New Britain. Whites were seen variously as the spirits of the dead or as blocking access to mass-produced goods. Melanesian desires for Western goods were not spurred by a yen for assimilation or basic cultural change, but rather people saw Western goods as posing a series of questions about their standing with ancestral powers and other spiritual forces, causing them to search for reasons...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 People, Objects and Colonial Relations
• 2 Colonial Culture and History in West New Britain
• 3 The Collectors and their Collections
• 4 Albert Buell Lewis
• 5 Felix Speiser
• 6 John Alexander Todd
• 7 Beatrice Blackwood
• 8 Comparing the Collections: Experiment, Social Relations and Agency
• 9 Varieties of Colonialism
• 10 The Morality of Colonialism
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index