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Promiscuous Things: Perspectives on Cultural Property Through Photographs in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2008

Joshua A. Bell
Joshua A. Bell
Affiliation:
Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. University of East Anglia, United Kingdom. Email: joshua.bell@uea.ac.uk
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Abstract

Within this article I discuss the productive potentials of looking at historic photographs of the Purari Delta with indigenous communities today. A particular type of artifact, the meanings of photographs are promiscuous. Thinking about the shape of cultural property relations that are manifest photographs, I show how engagements with indigenous communities unsettles European preconceptions about what photographs are as well as how doing so raises issues about what cultural property is, and perhaps can be. Instead of being a discreet entity, cultural property for the I'ai emerges as a network of relationships that envelopes people, environment, and ancestors. This expansive notion of cultural property can help us rethink how we treat and handle objects within museums and archives.

Type
Special Section: Museums and the Pacific
Information
International Journal of Cultural Property , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , May 2008 , pp. 123 - 139
Copyright
Copyright © International Cultural Property Society 2008

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References

Bibliography

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Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. London: Fontana, 1984.Google Scholar
Bell, Joshua A. “Looking to See: Reflections on Visual Repatriation in the Purari Delta, Gulf Province, Papua New Guinea.” In Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader, edited by Peers, Laura and Brown, Alison, 111–22. London: Routledge, 2003.Google Scholar
Bell, Joshua A. “‘A Gift of the First Importance’: A Preliminary Report on the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology's Papuan Gulf Photographic Collection.” Journal of Museum Ethnographers 17 (2005): 176–90.Google Scholar
Bell, Joshua A.Intersecting Histories: Materiality and Social Transformation in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea. Unpublished D.Phil. Oxford: University of Oxford, 2006a.Google Scholar
Bell, Joshua A. “Losing the Forest but Not the Stories in the Trees: Contemporary Understandings of the Government Anthropologist F. E. Williams' 1922 Photographs of the Purari Delta, Papua New Guinea.” Journal of Pacific History 41 (2006b): 191–206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bell, Joshua A. “Marijuana, Guns, Crocodiles and Radios: Economies of Desire in the Purari Delta.” Oceania 76 (2006c): 220–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bell, Joshua A., and Geismar, Haidy. “Materialising Oceania: New Ways of Thinking About Things in the Pacific.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology, forthcomingGoogle Scholar
Bolton, Lissant. Unfolding the Moon: Enacting Women's Kastom in Vanuatu. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Binney, Judith, and Chaplin, Gillian. “Taking Photographs Home: The Recovery of a Maori History.” Visual Anthropology 4 (1991): 431–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Alison K., Peers, Laura Lynn, and Nation, members of the Kainai. “Pictures Bring Us Messages”: Sinaakssiiksi Aohtsimaahpihkookiyaawa: Photographs and Histories from the Kainai Nation. Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Brown, Michael F.Who Owns Native Culture? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Demian, Melissa. “Seeing, Knowing, Owning: Property Claims as Revelatory Acts.” In Transactions and Creations: Property Debates and the Stimulus of Melanesia, edited by Strathern, Marilyn and Hirsch, Eric, 60–82. New York: Berghahn Books, 2004.Google Scholar
Edwards, Elizabeth. Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums. Oxford: Berg, 2001.Google Scholar
Edwards, Elizabeth. “Photographs and the Sound of History.” Visual Anthropology Review 21 (2006): 27–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edwards, Elizabeth, and Hart, Janice. “Introduction: Photographs as Objects.” In Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, edited by Edwards, Elizabeth and Hart, Janice, 1–16. London: Routledge, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion Books, 2000.Google Scholar
Geismar, Haidy. “Copyright in Context: Carvings, Carvers, and Commodities in Vanuatu.” American Ethnologist 32 (2005): 437–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geismar, Haidy. “Malakula: A Photographic Collection.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48 (2006): 520–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geismar, Haidy, and Herle, Anita. Moving Images: John Layard, Fieldwork and photography on Malakula since 1914. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haddon, Alfred Cort. “The Kopiravi Cult of the Namau, Papua.” Man 19 (1919): 176–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harrison, Simon. Fracturing Resemblances: Identity and Mimetic Conflict in Melanesia and the West. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006.Google Scholar
Herle, Anita. “Objects, Agency and Museums: Continuing Dialogues between the Torres Strait and Cambridge.” In Pacific Art: Persistence, Change and Meaning, edited by Herle, Anita, Stanley, Nick, Stevenson, Karen, and Welsch, Robert L., 231–49. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Kalinoe, Lawrence, and Leach, James, eds. Rationales of Ownership Transactions and Claims to Ownership in Contemporary Papua New Guinea. Wantage, England: Sean Kingston Publishing, 2004.Google Scholar
Lattas, Andrew. “Telephones, Cameras and Technology in West New Britain Cargo Cults.” Oceania 70 (2000): 325–44.Google Scholar
Leach, James. “Owning Creativity: Cultural Property and the Efficacy of Custom on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea.” Journal of Material Culture 8 (2003): 123–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leach, James. “An Anthropological Approach to Transactions Involving Names and Marks, Drawing on Melanesia.” In Trade Marks and Brands, and Interdisciplinary Critique, edited by Bentley, Lionel, Davis, Jennifer, and Ginsburg, Jane. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Maher, Robert Francis. New Men of Papua: A Study in Culture Change. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961.Google Scholar
Maher, Robert Francis. “Purari River Delta Societies, Papua New Guinea, after the Tom Kabu Movement.” Ethnology 23 (1984): 217–27.Google Scholar
Merryman, John Henry. “Cultural Property Internationalism.” International Journal of Cultural Property 12 (2005): 11–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peers, Laura L., and Brown, Alison K., eds. Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader. London: Routledge, 2003.Google Scholar
Philp, Jude. Resonance: Torres Strait Islander material culture and history. PhD diss., Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1999.Google Scholar
Pinney, Christopher. “Piercing the Skin of the Idol.” In Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of Enchantment, edited by Pinney, Christopher and Thomas, Nicholas, 157–80. Oxford: Berg, 2001.Google Scholar
Poignant, Roslyn, and Poignant, Axel. Encounter at Nagalarramba. Canberra: National Library of Australia with the assistance of the Morris West Trust Fund, 1996.Google Scholar
Rowlands, Michael. “Heritage and Cultural Property.” In The Material Culture Reader, edited by Buchili, Victor, 115–34. Oxford: Berg, 2002.Google Scholar
Rumsey, Alan, and Weiner, James F., eds. Mining and Indigenous Lifeworlds in Australia and Papua New Guinea. Adelaide: Crawford Publishing House, 2001.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Picador, 2001.Google Scholar
Smith, Benjamin R. “Images, Selves, and the Visual Record: Photography and Ethnographic Complexity in Central Cape York Peninsula.” Social Analysis 47 (2003): 8–26.Google Scholar
Strathern, Marilyn. The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Strathern, Marilyn. “Cutting the Network.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2 (1996): 517–35.Google Scholar
Strathern, Marilyn. Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons And Things. London: Athlone Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Strathern, Marilyn. Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives Are Always a Surprise. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strathern, Marilyn, and Hirsch, Eric. Transactions and creations: property debates and the stimulus of Melanesia. New York: Berghahn Books, 2004.Google Scholar
Thomas, Nicholas. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4 (1998): 469–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wagner, Roy. Asiwinarong: Ethos, Image, and Social Power among the Usen Barok of New Ireland. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whimp, Kathy, and Busse, Mark, eds. Protection of Intellectual, Biological and Cultural Property in Papua New Guinea. Port Moresby: Conservation Melanesia, 2000.Google Scholar
Williams, Francis Edgar. The Natives of the Purari Delta. Port Moresby: Government Printer, 1924.Google Scholar
Wright, Chris. “Material and Memory: Photography in the Western Solomon Islands.” Journal of Material Culture 9 (2004): 73–85.Google Scholar
Young, Michael W., and Clark, Julia. An Anthropologist in Papua: The Photography of F. E. Williams, 1922–39. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Williams, F. E., Papers, Accession 447, ML MSS 5/7 6/2993. National Archive of Papua New Guinea, Port Moresby.Google Scholar
Appadurai, Arjun. “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Appadurai, Arjun, 3–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. London: Fontana, 1984.Google Scholar
Bell, Joshua A. “Looking to See: Reflections on Visual Repatriation in the Purari Delta, Gulf Province, Papua New Guinea.” In Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader, edited by Peers, Laura and Brown, Alison, 111–22. London: Routledge, 2003.Google Scholar
Bell, Joshua A. “‘A Gift of the First Importance’: A Preliminary Report on the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology's Papuan Gulf Photographic Collection.” Journal of Museum Ethnographers 17 (2005): 176–90.Google Scholar
Bell, Joshua A.Intersecting Histories: Materiality and Social Transformation in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea. Unpublished D.Phil. Oxford: University of Oxford, 2006a.Google Scholar
Bell, Joshua A. “Losing the Forest but Not the Stories in the Trees: Contemporary Understandings of the Government Anthropologist F. E. Williams' 1922 Photographs of the Purari Delta, Papua New Guinea.” Journal of Pacific History 41 (2006b): 191–206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bell, Joshua A. “Marijuana, Guns, Crocodiles and Radios: Economies of Desire in the Purari Delta.” Oceania 76 (2006c): 220–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bell, Joshua A., and Geismar, Haidy. “Materialising Oceania: New Ways of Thinking About Things in the Pacific.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology, forthcomingGoogle Scholar
Bolton, Lissant. Unfolding the Moon: Enacting Women's Kastom in Vanuatu. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Binney, Judith, and Chaplin, Gillian. “Taking Photographs Home: The Recovery of a Maori History.” Visual Anthropology 4 (1991): 431–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Alison K., Peers, Laura Lynn, and Nation, members of the Kainai. “Pictures Bring Us Messages”: Sinaakssiiksi Aohtsimaahpihkookiyaawa: Photographs and Histories from the Kainai Nation. Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Brown, Michael F.Who Owns Native Culture? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Demian, Melissa. “Seeing, Knowing, Owning: Property Claims as Revelatory Acts.” In Transactions and Creations: Property Debates and the Stimulus of Melanesia, edited by Strathern, Marilyn and Hirsch, Eric, 60–82. New York: Berghahn Books, 2004.Google Scholar
Edwards, Elizabeth. Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums. Oxford: Berg, 2001.Google Scholar
Edwards, Elizabeth. “Photographs and the Sound of History.” Visual Anthropology Review 21 (2006): 27–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edwards, Elizabeth, and Hart, Janice. “Introduction: Photographs as Objects.” In Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, edited by Edwards, Elizabeth and Hart, Janice, 1–16. London: Routledge, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion Books, 2000.Google Scholar
Geismar, Haidy. “Copyright in Context: Carvings, Carvers, and Commodities in Vanuatu.” American Ethnologist 32 (2005): 437–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geismar, Haidy. “Malakula: A Photographic Collection.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48 (2006): 520–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geismar, Haidy, and Herle, Anita. Moving Images: John Layard, Fieldwork and photography on Malakula since 1914. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haddon, Alfred Cort. “The Kopiravi Cult of the Namau, Papua.” Man 19 (1919): 176–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harrison, Simon. Fracturing Resemblances: Identity and Mimetic Conflict in Melanesia and the West. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006.Google Scholar
Herle, Anita. “Objects, Agency and Museums: Continuing Dialogues between the Torres Strait and Cambridge.” In Pacific Art: Persistence, Change and Meaning, edited by Herle, Anita, Stanley, Nick, Stevenson, Karen, and Welsch, Robert L., 231–49. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Kalinoe, Lawrence, and Leach, James, eds. Rationales of Ownership Transactions and Claims to Ownership in Contemporary Papua New Guinea. Wantage, England: Sean Kingston Publishing, 2004.Google Scholar
Lattas, Andrew. “Telephones, Cameras and Technology in West New Britain Cargo Cults.” Oceania 70 (2000): 325–44.Google Scholar
Leach, James. “Owning Creativity: Cultural Property and the Efficacy of Custom on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea.” Journal of Material Culture 8 (2003): 123–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leach, James. “An Anthropological Approach to Transactions Involving Names and Marks, Drawing on Melanesia.” In Trade Marks and Brands, and Interdisciplinary Critique, edited by Bentley, Lionel, Davis, Jennifer, and Ginsburg, Jane. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Maher, Robert Francis. New Men of Papua: A Study in Culture Change. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961.Google Scholar
Maher, Robert Francis. “Purari River Delta Societies, Papua New Guinea, after the Tom Kabu Movement.” Ethnology 23 (1984): 217–27.Google Scholar
Merryman, John Henry. “Cultural Property Internationalism.” International Journal of Cultural Property 12 (2005): 11–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peers, Laura L., and Brown, Alison K., eds. Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader. London: Routledge, 2003.Google Scholar
Philp, Jude. Resonance: Torres Strait Islander material culture and history. PhD diss., Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1999.Google Scholar
Pinney, Christopher. “Piercing the Skin of the Idol.” In Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of Enchantment, edited by Pinney, Christopher and Thomas, Nicholas, 157–80. Oxford: Berg, 2001.Google Scholar
Poignant, Roslyn, and Poignant, Axel. Encounter at Nagalarramba. Canberra: National Library of Australia with the assistance of the Morris West Trust Fund, 1996.Google Scholar
Rowlands, Michael. “Heritage and Cultural Property.” In The Material Culture Reader, edited by Buchili, Victor, 115–34. Oxford: Berg, 2002.Google Scholar
Rumsey, Alan, and Weiner, James F., eds. Mining and Indigenous Lifeworlds in Australia and Papua New Guinea. Adelaide: Crawford Publishing House, 2001.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Picador, 2001.Google Scholar
Smith, Benjamin R. “Images, Selves, and the Visual Record: Photography and Ethnographic Complexity in Central Cape York Peninsula.” Social Analysis 47 (2003): 8–26.Google Scholar
Strathern, Marilyn. The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Strathern, Marilyn. “Cutting the Network.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2 (1996): 517–35.Google Scholar
Strathern, Marilyn. Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons And Things. London: Athlone Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Strathern, Marilyn. Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives Are Always a Surprise. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strathern, Marilyn, and Hirsch, Eric. Transactions and creations: property debates and the stimulus of Melanesia. New York: Berghahn Books, 2004.Google Scholar
Thomas, Nicholas. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4 (1998): 469–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wagner, Roy. Asiwinarong: Ethos, Image, and Social Power among the Usen Barok of New Ireland. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whimp, Kathy, and Busse, Mark, eds. Protection of Intellectual, Biological and Cultural Property in Papua New Guinea. Port Moresby: Conservation Melanesia, 2000.Google Scholar
Williams, Francis Edgar. The Natives of the Purari Delta. Port Moresby: Government Printer, 1924.Google Scholar
Wright, Chris. “Material and Memory: Photography in the Western Solomon Islands.” Journal of Material Culture 9 (2004): 73–85.Google Scholar
Young, Michael W., and Clark, Julia. An Anthropologist in Papua: The Photography of F. E. Williams, 1922–39. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001.Google Scholar