Extract from J Clifford's review of Paradise, in Visual

Anthropology Review

http://web.prm.ox.ac.uk/Kent/musantob/display7.html
You are walking up a ramp - wheelchair access - into a place called 'Paradise'.
There is a sub-title 'Continuity and Change in the New Guinea Highlands'. This is
the Museum of Mankind, Mayfair, London. ... You follow the arrows into a light
open gallery with curved walls and raised display platforms, several spaces flowing
into one another. A feeling of calm: gentle music ... colored objects in front of soft
painted landscapes, uncluttered ... a high valley. Paradise.

A small space near the entry contains background information on the Wahgi
Valley. Photographs sow a street scene, a contemporary house, a netted bag
whose design in based on the flag of Papua New Guinea. There is information on
social structure, contact with Australian explorers in the 1920s, and the traditional
livelihood. Change is there from the start .... the next, larger, space draws you in. It
contains striking things: a reconstructed highland trade store, rows of oddly
decorated shields, wicked-looking old spears, and bamboo poles covered with
leaves which, on closer inspection, turn out to be paper money.

... Beside the trade store stands a phalanx of five-foot-high metal shields decorated
with impressive designs based on South Pacific Export Lager labels and slogans
such as 'Six to six'. Panels explain the history of inter-clan warfare in the highlands,
including its recent revival. Homemade guns hang on the walls. 'Six to Six,' a
common expression for a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. party, here claims a clan's ability to fight
from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. The phrase is combined with skulls, a border from San
Miguel beer packaging (reminiscent of traditional designs) and Pacific Lager birds
of paradise.

... Immediately to the right ... as you leave the installation, you encounter four small
panels containing black and white photos and text: 'The Making of an Exhibition'.
The first and largest picture shows women who provided many of the netbags,
smiling, at ease. On the next panel you see an elderly man, plaiting an armband for
the museum collection. Then a man identified as Kaipel Ka stands beside one of
the shields displayed in the show ... A professional painter, Kaipel Ka labelled the
crates that transported the collection. ...

On the third and fourth panels you find scenes from the Museum of Mankind:
curators and conservation staff unpacking artefacts, repairing a shield, fashioning
pigs jaws from polystyrene for the bolyim house, building the exhibit (without the
fabric ceiling in place), painting backdrop mountains ...

From old Persian (pairi, about, around + daeza, a wall), via Greek, Latin, old
French; a garden or park, a walled enclosure. The New Guinea Highlands were
one of the planet's last enclosed spaces: 'lost' valleys, 'uncontacted,' 'stone-age'
peoples. The lateness of Wahgi contact with the outside world is signalled by the
fact that it was accomplished by airplane, in 1933. ... There are reasons for
skepticism about 'first contact' stories, for they often establish an outsider's act of
discovery by suppressing histories of prior contact and by forgetting the travel
experience and knowledge of indigenous peoples. But however permeable the
Wahgi Valley's 'garden' walls, it is clear that many highland societies were ignorant
of White people and went through unprecedented, rapid changes in the last half of
the twentieth century. Paradise (the exhibit) tracks these processes with lucid
subtlety.

Change in the Highlands is not portrayed on a before/after axis, with a 'traditional'

baseline preceding the arrival of 'outside' influences. Rather, we are thrown into the
midst of transformations. Modernity's effects are immediately and dramatically
registered in the diverse commodities of the trade store. An influx of new wealth
permits the Wahgi to compensate battle deaths, to make bridewealth payments
and to stage pig festivals in a more elaborately 'traditional' way than ever before.
External influence does not necessarily bring loss of tradition. By placing the trade
store and beer-bottle-influenced shields in the space preceding the bolyim house
and pig festival paraphernalia, the exhibition sequence confounds a common
sense narrative that would cluster ritual with tradition and commodities with
modernity. Instead, everything in the exhibit presupposes the trade store, the
entanglement of Wahgi hybrid productions in regional, national and international
forces.

The use of shell wealth in 'pre-contact' rituals would be evidence enough that
Highland groups such as the Wahgi were long connected to extensive trading
networks. During the 1930s the miners' airplanes re-routed these sources,
increasing the supply of shells available for ritual use. The influx of new wealth also
facilitated the import of exotic bird of paradise feathers from other parts of New
Guinea. Later, coffee income sustained the accumulation of such valuables. By the
1970s, spectacular Stephanie plumes in the headdresses of the pig festival
dancers (all of which look thoroughly 'traditional' in the exhibit photos) testified to
changes that also brought beer bottles into the bolyim house ensemble. If we
wished, still to associate Stephanie plumes with tradition and beer bottles with
modernity, we would have to do so with many caveats.

It is hard to sort Wahgi material culture along a linear progression of change, a

before/after model of contact. Big Boy bubblegum wrappers might seem to belong
to the trade store, but folded and woven together into a headband they clearly go
with the pig festival costumes. While formally different from feathers, they function
in the same way .... By contrast, Stephanie plumes are strikingly different, both in
form and color, from the red Raggiana feathers they replaced. They, too, come
from outside the Wahgi area: bought and sold, they are 'commodities.' On what
grounds might a museum curator of indigenous Wahgi objects collect Stephanie
plume headdresses and not gum wrapper versions? What would justify selecting
shell wealth but not PNG banknotes - especially when the latter hang on
impressive bridewealth banners? ...
Paradise is gently reflexive. It makes one wonder how it was put together ... 'Wahgi
material culture' could simply mean any object used by the Wahgi. In practice, the
display is more narrowly focused, showing the interaction of traditional Wahgi
artifacts with new materials and commodities. So, for example, beer-label imagery
and the slogan 'Six to Six' are prominently displayed on metal shields, but not on
the custom painted mini-buses that now link various regions of Papua New Guinea
... The shields show the continuity and hybridization of a 'traditional' activity,
interclan warfare; the bus is less obviously a mediation of old and new material
culture. But one could imagine an exhibit on the history of regional trade that would
include it.

... Paradise dwells on war and alliance-making, shields and weapons, bridewealth
payments, shell wealth, the pig festival's spectacular activities and adornments,
religious change, and women's crafts. The fundamental strategy is to work within
accepted categories of the tribal - translating, complicating and historicizing them.
Two linked stereotypes are questioned: remote tribal peoples presumed to
be either primitive and untouched or contaminated by progress. While such all-or-
nothing assumptions no longer hold much sway in professional anthropology, they
are certainly alive and well among the general public. Witness the continued
appetite for true primitives, from the 'stone age' Tasaday (whose specific historical
predicament has emerged with difficulty) to the !Kung San of the popular film The
Gods Must Be Crazy (awakened to history by a Coke bottle dropped from an
airplane). The Wahgi at the Museum of Mankind are both tribal and modern, local
and worldly. They cannot be seen as inhabitants of an enclosed space, either past
or present, a paradise lost or preserved.

... As a consistent historicizing strategy, the use of large color photographs

in Paradise breaks with established conventions for the aesthetic and cultural
contextualisation of non-Western objects in Western places. An aesthetic
presentation tends to exclude, or minimize, the use of contextualising photographs.
Where they appear, they are kept small, or at a distance from objects displayed for
their formal properties. Cultural treatments tend to include photographs of objects
in use. But in both cases, photographs cannot become too prominent without
blurring the focus on material objects. Given the overriding focus of Western
museums on objects - collected, preserved, and displayed whether for their beauty,
rarity or typicality - a distinction between object and context, figure and ground, is
crucial. Paradise, an exhibit about historical change seen through material culture,
walks a fine line, both maintaining and blurring this distinction. ...

The historicity of objects poses slippery problems for standard museum practices
of conservation and authentication. O'Hanlon points this out in the exhibition
catalog:

I was struck, for example, by the questions which the museum's conservation staff
asked as they worked on the Wahgi artefacts. One of the shields had been stored
in a smoky house roof, only partially protected by a plastic wrapping: should the
accumulated grime be removed from the shield's outer surface? The question
raised the issue of what it is that an artefact is valued as embodying. Is it the shield
as a perfect example of its kind, a kind of snapshot in time, taken grime-free at the
outset of its career? Or do we seek, rather, to preserve the evidence of the shield's
biography through time, even when (as with the grime) the evidence also begins to
obscure something of the artefact's original purpose?

The example is far-reaching, for there is no unproblematic solution to O'Hanlon's

dilemma. The same artifact cannot be both new and old. Change adds and
subtracts, reveals and obscures. A before-and-after presentation could present the
pre- and post-cleaning object, with the help of a photograph or other simulacrum.
But in current collecting and valuing practices the representation would never have
the same value as the 'original'. Notions of authenticity reify and value a specific
moment in the ongoing history of an object, thus evading the aporia O'Hanlon
notes. But exhibits and collections seriously devoted to historical change cannot
escape this fundamental tension between process and objectification.
Like Paradise, they will have to supplement, and de-center, collected objects, using
photographs, texts, and reconstructions.

The historicizing of Paradise is aimed primarily at a visitor who believes the New
Guinea highlands to be one of the last wild, untouched places. ... And for many
who pass through the gallery, the notion that traditional culture must diminish in
direct proportion to the increase in Coke and Christianity is axiomatic. Against this,
the exhibit shows the people of highland New Guinea producing their own fusion of
tradition and modernity. The Wahgi make their own history, though not in
conditions of their choosing. They are part of a complex Melanesian modernity
which is not, or not necessarily, following preordained Western paths. To the extent
that visitors to Paradise understand something like this, the exhibit will perform an
important service. ...

Michael O'Hanlon's detailed, provocative catalog (1993) reinforces the complexity

of cultural change, but with more reservations ... This ethnographic history is
followed by chapters on 'Collecting in Context' and 'Exhibiting in Practice' .
The former describes the interactive process of assembling a collection in the
highland. O'Hanlon is forced to question his own assumptions about what could be
considered 'Wahgi material culture'. ... The catalog's third chapter, 'Exhibiting in
Practice', includes the usually forgotten record of an organizer's plans before they
bend to the practice of putting objects and messages into specific, often limited,
spaces. O'Hanlon makes a virtue of necessity here, for the book's publication
deadlines precluded any description of the actual installation. ... From this location,
O'Hanlon analyzes his own museum practices, opening a space for critical
speculation by others on curatorial roads not taken. ...

The Paradise catalog is directed at a certain London museum public and at a

sophisticated ... catalog readership. That it is not addressed to the Wahgi is
obvious and, given who is likely to see and read the productions, appropriate. This
fact does not, however, close the personal and institutional questions of
responsiblity to the Wahgi. It may be worth pushing the issue a bit farther than
O'Hanlon does, for it is of general importance for contemporary practices of cross
cultural collecting and display. What are the relational politics, poetics and
pragmatics of representation here? In what senses do the Paradise exhibition and
book reflect Wahgi perspectives and desires? Should they?

O'Hanlon's purchase of artifacts was enmeshed in a 'cultural negotiation' , which

meant entering into specific, ongoing alliances. For the Melanesians, who are
accustomed to buying and selling objects, songs, rites and knowledge, the purpose
of payment was not to quit, but to be in relation. ... O'Hanlon offers a sensitive
account of all this, portraying himself yielding to, and working within, local
protocols. He tends, overall, to present a potentially fraught process as a steady
convergence of interests - a fable, if not of rapport, at least of complicity. ...
O'Hanlon closes his second chapter [of the catalog] with [an individual's] power
play, an incident that reveals how dialogical relations of collecting both include and
exclude people. Moreover [it] raises ... a far-reaching political question: What do
O'Hanlon, the Museum of Mankind, and indeed the visitors and readers who
'consume' these artifacts, owe to Wahgi who have sent them? ... in collecting
relations, money, objects, knowledge and cultural value are exchanged and
appropriated in continuing local/global circuits. ...

The most specific Wahgi request concerning the exhibition was, in fact, passed
over. In the highlands, special or restricted places are marked off by small clusters
of 'taboo stones' and painted posts... [The Wahgi] asked that the exhibit be
identified as a Wahgi area by placing similar stones and posts at the entry. Indeed
two posts were specifically painted for the purpose and given to O'Hanlon. But no
stones or posts appear at the entrance to Paradise. Apparently the museum design
staff thought they might obstruct the flow of visitors ... In this instance, practical
concerns that were surely soluble (the stones are only foot or two high) were here
able to override a clearly expressed Wahgi desire for the exhibition.

London is distant from the New Guinea Highlands. There is no Wahgi community
nearby that could constrain the exhibit organizers' freedom. It is worth noting this
obvious fact because in many places today, it is no longer obvious. An exhibition of
First Nations artifacts in Canada will be under fairly direct scrutiny, often coupled
with demands for consultation or curatorial participation (Clifford, 1991). Many tribal
societies now place restrictions on what can be displayed, and they participate in
planning, curating, and ritually sanctifying exhibitions far from their homelands. ...
O'Hanlon's rather scrupulous reciprocity in collecting did not have to be reproduced
in exhibiting. A general intent to do something that would not offend the (distant)
Wahgi was enough. Thus if the Taboo Stones were 'impractical' they could go.

How far must an exhibition go in reflecting indigenous viewpoints? Some Wahgi

urged O'Hanlon not to emphasize warfare in the exhibition. The exhibit does
feature war (dramatic shields and spears) but compensates by following with
peacemaking. Would this satisfy those Wahgi who asked that fighting be played
down? And would we want to satisfy them on this score? Indeed, who speaks for
'the Wahgi', who are a rather loose regional unit, including contentious clans?
[Clifford gives an answer to these questions] ...

Discussions of the politics of collecting and display, especially in colonial and/ or

neocolonial situations, have tended to begin and end with structural dominance,
overriding more local, and equally political, contingencies.

... there will always be discrepancies, sometimes extreme, between the wishes of
the people represented, the interests of academic or avant-garde consumers, and
the broad public for any exhibition ...