Creative Spirits. Bark Painting in the Washkuk Hills of North New Guinea.
Craig, Barry
Creative Spirits. Bark Painting in the Washkuk Hills of North New
Guinea By Ross Bowden Melbourne: Oceanic Art Pty Ltd. 2006. Pp: x + 202.
Price: Aust $70.
The information in this richly-illustrated book is based on a
period of intensive fieldwork among the Kwoma from October 1972 until
January 1974, followed by many visits for shorter periods up until
recent years. Bowden has published in detail on the culture of the
Kwoma, especially his 1983 Pitt Rivers Museum publication, Yena: art and
ceremony in a Sepik Society, his chapters on Kwoma art and architecture
in Sepik Heritage (1990, edited by Lutkehaus et al.) and in
Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics (1992, edited by Coote and Shelton),
and his Dictionary of Kwoma published in 1997 by Pacific Linguistics (C134) at ANU.
The clarity and depth of understanding demonstrated in Creative
Spirits is due to Bowden's knowledge of the language. There are
many references to vernacular terms relevant to the subject at hand.
Sometimes these terms are translated in ways that give the reader a
window into how the Kwoma experience their world. For example (p.80),
Bowden glosses the term hokwa not only as sung poetry but also as '
... "noise" or "sound" in general, such as a noise
that someone might hear outside their house at night and wonder whether
it was made by a person or some other entity'.
The material in the book incorporates information given in the
publications cited above, but goes well beyond that by analysing in
detail 135 paintings (on the base of flattened sago palm fronds,
commonly and mistakenly referred to a 'spathes' by many
authors, as Bowden points out). The oldest of these paintings were
produced in the second half of the 1960s and the most recent in 1988; 25
of them are in the PNG National Museum and 45 in the National Gallery of
Victoria. Some no longer exist as they were photographed in situ and
have since been destroyed.
Such paintings are fixed to the underside of the roof of a
men's cult house, the main structural elements of which are carved
and painted with figurative designs. Each Kwoma village has at least one
such men's cult house in which ceremonial displays and rituals are
performed having to do with the planting and harvesting of yams, and the
affirmation of homicide as an admirable trait in the context of warfare.
Bowden provides an outline of the social structure of the
Kwoma--the division into four 'tribes', each of which is
divided into many clans. The tribe that produced the paintings dealt
with in this book is called Honggwama and it has 18 clans located in
three villages. Both tribes and villages vary considerably in size (see
Bowden's Table 1.1) and the number of clans in each village also
varies--in the case of the three villages of the Honggwama, from two to
nine (see Table 2.1). Cross-cutting this village and clan structure of
the Honggwama are six totemic divisions. Each totemic division is
characterised by a particular set of totem plants, animals, non-living
objects such as the sun and moon, spirits and mythical figures (Tables
2.2, 2.3). It is necessary to grasp the structure of Kwoma society to
understand the iconography of the paintings, as the subjects of the
paintings are usually, but not always, representations of the totems
'belonging' to the painter's clan; painters must have
special permission to paint the totems of other clans. Ideally, the
clans present in a village could be discerned from the subjects of the
paintings in the men's cult house, though in practice this is not
so easily done as Bowden explains in detail in Chapter 6.
Chapter 5 deals with the characteristics that may be identified as
definitive of Kwoma 'style', that is, a distinct way (nobo) of
doing things. The Kwoma also have a term for the distinct personal style
of painting or carving, which is tapa or 'hand'--the same as
in English.
In his discussion of style, Bowden refers to a number of
writers--archaeologists, art historians and anthropologists. He favours
the archaeologist Sackett, who believes that the degree of similarity in
style between the objects produced by two societies is an indicator of
ethnic relatedness. Bowden is happy with this if the relatedness is not
confined to genetic relatedness, as indicated by linguistic relatedness,
but can extend to proximity. Thus near neighbours speaking a different
language may share a style of painting that is not shared with
linguistically-related, but more distant, communities. The relative
effect of language and propinquity on differences in material culture is
an issue that has been tested by Welsch and Terrell (American
Anthropologist 94: 568-601) with disputed results.
The painted designs may be figurative or, much more frequently,
non-figurative (Table 5.1). Following Boas, Bowden discusses this
difference in terms of images that are essentially an outline of the
form of the subject of the paintings versus disarticulated images where
various components of the subject are represented non-figuratively and
assembled into a design that does not resemble the appearance of the
subject. What characterises all of the designs is symmetry. Bowden is
perhaps the first to reference the system described in Washburn &
Crowe's 1988 Symmetries of Culture, albeit in simplified form, in
an analysis of the structure of graphic designs produced by a Pacific
culture. He sets out in Tables 5.2 and 5.3 the various types of symmetry
found in Kwoma paintings, namely vertical and horizontal reflection,
rotation and translation. He admits no instances of glide reflection yet
Plate 5.8 (compare to Fig. 5.2) clearly shows one example; but it must
be rare. This is interesting because glide reflection is common for
designs on arrowheads and arrow foreshafts in the upper Sepik and
central New Guinea (see Craig, Chapter 12 in Smidt et al., 1995, Pacific
Material Culture). In addition to the usefulness of this approach to
analysis of the paintings of other Sepik cultures, the analysis of
Lapita pottery designs could be radically advanced by application of the
Washburn & Crowe system.
There is general agreement among members of Kwoma communities that
there is only one correct 'meaning' of a design but Bowden
found that this 'meaning' is decided by the painter himself
and may not be known to many others. This accounts for the wide
variation in interpretations of designs. Even the painter himself may
not know at first what it is he is painting and might even change his
mind, during the process of painting, about what is being represented
(also, Bowden points out, reported by Forge for the Abelam to the
north-east).
In Chapter 6, Bowden shows that while some images represent only
one kind of entity that is consistently recognised as such, others are
'multi-vocal' --similar designs may depict different entities
and different designs may depict the same entity. He compares this with
the report by Schuster for paintings (and shield designs) in the May
River area further up the Sepik to the west. Schuster accounts for the
multi-vocality of designs in that area in terms of imperfect knowledge
and deterioration of the culture due to contact with Europeans. Bowden
prefers to see multi-vocality as a characteristic of society prior to
European influence; this is certainly true for the Namie of Yellow
River, the Abau of Green River area and the Mountain-Ok of central New
Guinea, where 1 found that the designs on arrows, smoking tubes,
shields, house boards and other artefacts are multivocal and this could
not be attributed to imperfect knowledge on the part of informants.
The technology of painting and learning to paint are clearly
described in Chapters 3 and 8 respectively; Chapter 4 shows how
relatively few design elements can be combined to make more complex
designs (compare the more elaborate Abelam system demonstrated by
Hauser-Schaublin, 1989, Leben in Linie Muster und Farbe, pp.32-47).
Chapter 9 discusses recent developments in the use of materials, and
changes in the imagery brought about by contact with a wider range of
cultures.
Chapter 7, on artistic values and aesthetic creativity, is perhaps
the most provocative section of the book in that Bowden shows how Kwoma
beliefs and practices challenge Western notions of art, aesthetics,
artistic creativity and the cultural importance of the artist.
Discussing whether or not Kwoma have a word equivalent to the Western
notion of 'art' (p.81), Bowden notes that the term jebwa,
meaning 'design', can include also 'rough designs
scratched in the earth to indicate the relative positions of two
entities, and the letters of the alphabet that people form when
writing.' He concludes that the most accurate translation of jebwa
would be '... intentionally made, meaningful mark' and that
this overlaps with the Western notion of 'art' but is not
equivalent to it. Nevertheless Bowden continues to use the word
'art' and 'artist' in the book when perhaps it would
have been more consistent to use the terms 'painting',
'painter', 'carving', 'carver', and so on.
Even more significantly, painters and carvers are not acknowledged
as creators of the designs they produce; rather, the Kwoma believe,
'their art replicates prototypes of supernatural origin and owes
nothing of cultural significance to human creativity' (p.78). The
outcome of this is that 'no effort is made to preserve the memory
of the names of the great artists of the past, or of the paintings or
carvings they produced.' (This is, Bowden notes, a cautionary tale for those, like Sally Price, who accuse museum curators of neglect in
routinely failing to name the creators of the objects in their
collections). Further, no effort is made by the Kwoma to preserve a
deteriorating cult house, with its carved and painted works, and there
is no compunction about burning it when it has passed its use-by date and replacing it with a new one. Bowden contrasts this with the sense of
loss Westerners would attribute to such an outcome but in fact it
provides the conditions for individual creativity, even if
unacknowledged by the Kwoma themselves.
Chapter 10 is a worthy tribute to the work of six Kwoma painters. A
short biography, with a photograph of the painter, introduces several
paintings by each man; each painting is provided with a detailed
commentary on the subject depicted, often with a relevant myth. It also
provides the reader with the opportunity to apply to the works the
principles learnt from the preceding text.
The book is splendidly designed, and illustrated with crisp
photographs, most in colour. The map is clear and the Index
comprehensive. There were only about a dozen typos that I could find and
only three could possibly lead to a confusion of understanding: p.34:
'since the other pigments do [not] adhere to it'; p.51
'through the use of relief [shading] (chiaroscuro)'; p. 131:
'bisected by a yellow [red] bar'. This book is the product of
an enviable depth of field research and scholarship and is a model for
what others might do with their field observations of the material
culture and 'art' of New Guinea societies.
Barry Craig
South Australian Museum
