ONE-LEGGED GENDER
MARILYN STRATHERN
Among the several contributions to the Hansons' recent
book on art and identity in Oceania (1990), three have
prompted the present exercise. One is Schwimmer's
reminder that LeVi-Strauss referred to art as miniaturization;
the second is the Hansons' brief reference to Maori figures
which, posted at door lintels, appear to re-compose body
features into n ew forms; and the third an essay by Smidt on
'one-legged'figuresfrom the Middle Ramu (Kominimung)
area of Papua New Guinea. This last is a rather odd but
nonetheless evident presentation of bodily form — he
records the spontaneous gesture of a man who turned
himself into a one-legged figure to show Smidt what it all
meant.
Among the challenges that Papua New Guinean and
other Melanesian cultures present to visual interpretation,
people's play on form has also prompted the present
exercise. Smidt's PapuaNew Guinean demonstrator dressed
up the part with considerableflamboyance,stuffing the end
of an elongated apron into his mouth and jabbing at an
unseen novice with the one-leggedfigurein his hands. This
was a display. A tension that runs through Melanesian
display is the tension between what is concealed and what
is revealed. The invitation to 'see is an invitation to witness
the appearance of a specific form, and to have in that sense
elicited it. The individual witness is inevitably placed by the
performer, then into the position of seeing only what is
revealed. It is as though the witness 'sees' one side of the
performer. Indeed, in the tales people in the Papua New
Guinea Highlands sometimes tell, one-sided creatures,
with back but no front, or with one eye rather than two,
occasionally flit across human vision.
Among the many refinements of analytical pleasure
that inspire the present wave of anthropological interest in
42 Volume 9 Number 1 Spring 1993
aesthetics, we should not forget that vision is embodied. In
that case, in what kinds of bodies are the eyes set? I ask the
question as a commentary on modernist assumptions that
run through the best efforts to avoid the traps of
representationalism and constructionism.
It is no good simply putting the endless sophistication
of knowing displacement in the place of authoritative
modeling nor, indeed, complaining about the
disembodiment of knowledge while imagining that all that
is at issue is greater reflexivity. Nichols (1991:34) refers to
the body blindness which afflicts depersonalized film
narration. It is an insistence on embodiment that marks
certain feminist quests. Sometimes, though, that talk seems
to share with rather than obviate earlier representationalist
obsession with uncovering facts about the world.
Embodiment is brought from under the text, a hidden
influence is made explicit, and analysis invites us to see what
we did not see before. So such appeals to vision often serve
as metaphors for greater awareness. What in that case does
the anthropologist do in the face of deliberate provocations
to vision? The question would be particularly acute when
s/he in being shown something is also being forced to see
with one eye only—insofar as vision itself is, in the context
of Melanesian display, rendered one-eyed.1
I focus on the effects of particular kinds of displays,
such as accompany initiation practices or ceremonial
exchange, though I suspect the point could hold more
generally across Melanesian social life. Display always
selects out of multiple possibilities the one that is made
evident, and one only ever sees what is displayed. What is
hidden is deliberately hidden, yet the secret may also be
trivial: with the other eye one would simply see the other
side. That fact about vision is only ever made evident
Visual Anthropology Review
through embodiment. As a consequence, there is nothing
in this visual play to be 'uncovered' about embodiment,
since the body is the medium. And deliberately incomplete.
So what is this one-sided body that is imagined as the
only kind of body that can be seen because it is the body that
elicits vision? It is a personified body; a person only sees
such a form as the outcome of relationships with others. It
is also a gendered body: a man or woman only ever sees it
as male or female.
ONE-LEGGED
One postulate of feminist critique is that it is a mistake to
imagine we know what a body is when we see one. Much
effort has gone into de-naturing the received 'body' of
Euro-American discourse, and what is thus brought to view
is the trivialization or the aggrandizemen t of sexual identity
(the effort is how to get 'between' gender obsession and
gender blindness). But in de-naturing the gender of he
body perhaps we ought also to de-nature body composition.
I mean the arrangement of torso, limbs and organs. However
labile contemporary analytic strategies appear to be in
seeing or not seeing gender, their conclusions may already
be compromised by modernist and Euro-American
naturalizations that locate a principal source of sexual
difference in one part of the body. Sexual symbols tend to
be interpreted as phallic or vulvic/ uterine before they are
interpreted as anything else. The problem is not that Euro-
Americans cannot imagine almost any part of the body as
genitalized, but that it tends to be only the genitals that
migrate in their imagination. Melanesians present gender
through re-figurations of which genitalia are only a part —
limbs, organs and insides, including the eye, may all migrate.
That figuration can as much be created between persons as
made manifest in one.
It was sheer inspiration on Smidt's (1990) part to call
the Kominimungfigures'one-legged.' However, I suspect
that it was for naturalistic and compositional reasons: these
carved wooden figures with a head and torso from which
extends a single limb/ organ could be stood upright as
though this extension were its (single) leg. In any case, the
carver whose activities Smidt followed seems to have
supported his inference, dividing the carving into head,
torso and leg.
But, then, as Forge (1966) observed of the Abelam
men's house, it is all right to infer that the ridge pole of a
house is being treated as though it were a phallus, but what
is a phallus? We might ask what a leg is.
In another context, Forge comments on the fact that
'art' is supposed to have an effect. "One of the main
functions ofthe [Abelam] initiation system with its repetitive
exposure of initiates to quantities of art is, I would suggest,
to teach the young men to see the art, not so that he may
consciously interpret it but so that he is directly affected by
it" (1970: 290). The enthusiastic Kominimung who
showed Smidt what the 'one-legged' figures meant was
showing him what they could do. These wooden figures
kicked. At one point in the course of male initiation,
novices are rounded up and prodded with them. Smidt has
a demonstration photograph (figure 1) ofa man in ordinary
dress jabbing such afigure— 'leg' extended — at the back
of a pretend novice. The figure held by one strikes the
other. On the previous page is the photograph (figure 2) of
the enthusiast who dressed up, his own two legs firmly
planted wide apart. Among other decorations, on his chest
is a string bag with female breasts; nipples are also painted
on the wooden figure. In this guise, the performer makes
visible a powerful tambaran (ancestral spirit) as does the
wooden figure itself. The figure is held in alignment with
the man's head and chest, projecting downward and out.
Indeed, the photograph draws attention to the way that the
gesture is, so to speak, repeated in the long, narrow apron
that forms a loop between the legs and is drawn up into the
man's mouth. Visually, however, there is no direction to
this wrapping— it could as well be coming from the mo uth
as entering it. In the same way, the figure that is held by a
body also finds its mark on a body: the novice presents his
back (novices may be beaten on the back or chest, but
archetypically the back) to be kicked. So the figure in effect
points in either direction, from the body that projects it and
from the body that invites it.
Elsewhere in the same volume, the Hansons (1990)
draw on an analysis offered by Jackson (1972) to make a
point about the otherwise awkward composition of Maori
lintel carvings over house doorways. What is disjoined is

MARILYN STRATHERN IS WILLIAM WYSE PROFESSOR OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE. PROBLEMS
IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENDER RELATIONS HAVE PREOCCUPIED HER SINCE HER LAST FIELDWORK IN P A P U A N E W GUINEA.
OTHERWISE HER INTERESTS ARE DIVIDED BETWEEN MELANESIAN ( WOMEN IN BETWEEN, 1972) AND BRITISH (KINSHIP AT THE CORE,
1981) ETHNOGRAPHY. THE GENDER OF THE GLFT ( 1 9 8 8 ) IS A CRITIQUE OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORIES OF SOCIETY AND GENDER
RELATIONS AS THEY HAVE BEEN APPLIED TO MELANESIA, WHILE AFTER NATURE: ENGUSH JONSHIP IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY
( 1 9 9 2 ) COMMENTS ON THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION AT HOME. A MONOGRAPH ON COMPARATIVE METHOD IS CALLED PARTIAL
CONNECTIONS (1991).

Visual Anthropology Review Volume 9 Number 1 Spring 1993 43

then conjoined in a new juxtaposition of elements. The
body is thereby reassembled in the same way as the person
entering and coming from the house is redefined by his or
her actions. Such decomposition and recomposition 'may
be taken to represent the individual's dual roles in society—
as a tribal, public figure and as a domestic, private figure"
(1990:192). In the Maori case, the body is recreated within
FIGURE ONE.
44 Volume 9 Number 1 Spring 1993
the confined space of the structure of the door.2 If the
Melanesian examplefrom Kominimungis also the recreation
of a body, there is no such architectural confinement. Yet
the one-legged figure, protruding from the head/ chest or
jabbed at the back, is not extended into space either Rather,
it is specifically aimed at another. More than one person is
requiredforthis re-composition. I bfer that the composition
Visual Anthropology Review
is of relationships, and that the relationships contain and
create an internal difference: initiator and novice are
differen dated by die kicking act.
If novice and initiator are to naturalistic eyes evidendy
two persons, I want to suggest that die duo is also there in
one. The man who holds up the one-leg parallel to his body
is paired with it, in the sense that both present tambaran to
FIGURE TWO.
Visual Anthropology Review
the novice. Yet while Euro-Americans would have little
trouble in considering the man and his wooden figure as a
pair of sorts, they might less easily see that the wooden
figure itself, with its own head and torso and the organ that
extends from it, is also a set of relationships. But in fact any
singular figure is already a composite. The man who grips
his penis-covering between his teeth conveys that. Like the
Volume 9 Number 1 Spring 1993 45
ancestral monsters that elsewhere in Papua New Guinea
may appear now as swallowing and now as regurgitating
(initiates), persons cannot act—on themselves or on others
— without instantiating the difference between them.
If the differentiation of persons here follows the
Melanesian aesthetic of gender, then are these not single-sex
but androgynous figures? (The performers, as Smidtremarks
(1990: 34), show both male and female elements in their
dress.) Indeed, there is a sense in which all objects are
androgynous (cf. Mackenzie 1991) insofar as their
personification requires that they are composed.3 I suspect
that Kominimung novice and initiators are gendered by the
actions that one does to another, just as the penis-swallower/
child-regurgitator recapitulates the gendering of any
extensive activity.
It is thoroughly consonant with what is known from
other parts of Papua New Guinea to suggest that extensive
activity itself may be imagined in terms of receiving sexual
attention or giving birth — including relations between
partners in gift exchange who may stand momentarily male
and female to each other. I say 'extensive' insofar as one
body takes in/ brings forth another body. It is together that
the bodies form a single androgynous figure; and insofar as
the capacity to form such a figure is also present in the
singular body, that body is inevitably androgynous as well.
It does not matter how many people you see: each is a
composition of persons.
But you do not see the composition. That is, as a witness,
you do not see both genders at the same time; you only ever
'see' one, because that is what being made to see means. Let
me explain the observation.
Look at the novice. The novice may eventually equate
himself with the man holding the one-leg, for he is being
made into the kind of man who can do exactly that to
novices. At the end of the initiation sequence where the
former initiate has been transformed into a marriageable
person, he now appears decorated "in the same fashion as
the one-leggedfiguresand the tambaran performers" (Smidt
1990: 31). But at the moment of impact, the novice-
initiate is in one position only. He sees, that is, 'feels' the
jab, is receptive to it, and can only be receptive. He is the
'other side' of what one-leg can do. The recipient who feels
one-leg, in feeling it gives it 'back' to the man who is jabbing
it at him. The novice is in this sense a spectator. He
responds to what he is shown.
The Kominimung who dressed up to display to Smidt
what a man holding a one-leg looks like might imagine he
was putting the spectator into a recipient position, as
though the camera could respond. Now in being on one
side, the spectator can only ever see the 'other' one side that
46 Volume 9 Number 1 Spring 1993
is being presented: s/he does not see her or himself, for s/
he is coerced (like the novice) into having the sight (a view)
of someone else. What the spectators see is an androgynous
figure in a single-sex form. Smidt infers that the one-legged
figures connote male fertility. This is the male side: the
men create a male version of afigurecomposed ofboth male
and female elements.
So what you see in this photograph is an all-male
version of a figure that in its composition is androgynous.
But you are not meant to see the composition, for it is out
of composite relations that the singular form-to-be-seen
comes. And sinceit is thespectator who elicits theappearance
of the singular form, the spectator is part of the composition
that is not available to sight.
So what is a leg? Perhaps the leg in the one-legged
Kominimungfiguresis an extended body. It is both organ
and product, we might say, just like the shells that circulate
in exchange in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. And die
extension that is both body and organ product may be
perceived as belonging to and coming from a body that is
either male or female. For to be in an extended state means
that in being detached from one body the organ/ product
is taken into another. Unextended, it remains part of an
androgynous composition that cannot itself be felt or seen.
With its potential extension in mind, people may say it is
still'hidden.'
GENDER
The accompanying photograph (figure 3) was taken in
1964 in Hagen, in the Papua New Guinea Highlands.
There is hardly a woman in sight, though several were
present. However, the products of women are evident: die
children (including the little girl at the far end of the line
who glances in the photographer's direction), the Goldlip
pearl shells laid out in front of the men's house, many of
which will have come to the men via their connections
through women, and the empty pig stakes to which women's
pigp will be attached. If children and pigs are acknowledged
extensions of women, so too are the men themselves. Every
one of them is a mother's son, and on some occasion in their
lives will have acknowledged the fact in gifts to matrikteral
kin.
None of this was in the photographer's mind. She was
too preoccupied with the sequence of events. (The shells
were still being laid out, and she had turned back from the
main bustle of activity to view the line that already existed.)
It was the first public moka (ceremonial exchange) she had
witnessed. Subsequently she would be aware of the fact that
Visual Anthropology Review
FIGURE THREE.

Visual Anthropology Review Volume 9 Number 1 Spring 1993 47

shells circulate exclusively among men and never come into
the care ofwomen except only in the most notional way; she
would know that the men's house at the head of the
ceremonial ground is an all-male preserve; that although
the men have not decorated elaborately for this occasion
they sport the long bamboo tallies (omak) which indicate
their successes at earlier exchanges, and that the discussion
and calculating going on would be about the kind of politics
with which men are preoccupied (the occasion was a
compensation payment between the clans of two tribes
(from Kawelka to Roklaka, see A. Strathern 1971: 124)).
But in any event, the photographer probably took it for
granted that she was seeing an all-male affair. Retrospectively,
the fact that women hardly appeared in the photograph
indicated a kind of truth, for women were effectively
excluded from active roles in shell exchange.
This particular event was a relatively small version of
what is played out on a much larger scale at displays that
demand formal decoration. On such occasions, the
appropriation of public space by men, and when pigs are
involved of women's products, may be made evident by
women's participation as 'producers.' But they have
produced the objects, so to speak, not the performance: that
is men's creation.
Yet suppose I choose to see this as a moment in
miniature, what is being miniaturized? I suggest it is not the
scale of the performance. Schwimmer (1990: 11) cites
Levi-Strauss' observation about art; as a reduction from
nature (and thus a miniature), art implies abstraction. He
adds that people who decorate as spirits thereby miniaturize
the spirits, for they abstract from the idea of spirit certain
qualities or features which can be made visible. Let me
suggest what the Hagen performance here miniaturizes.
In my understanding of Melanesian practices, a
performance is always a reduction: a single act created out
of composite relationships. It appears gendered, as the
display of single-sex qualities detached from androgynous
ones. In this case, for all the appearance of masculinity, one
is looking at a male side of male version of an androgynous
composition. I do not mean that women are implicitly
present, although they are; I mean that the whole event is
a recomposition ofrelationships. Indeed, thatrecomposition
involves two kinds of reductions rendered visible by the
gender of persons and their extensions.
Recomposition is made possible, first, by the division
of the men into donors and recipients: what the men
recipients see are other men in the guise of donors. This is
the side that the performers present. Dual possibilities are
reduced to one. The same (donor) men are recipients on
other occasions and indeed may well be giving to those from
48 Volume 9 Number 1 Spring 1993
whom they previously received. So too are the shells
reduced: they are laid out in one line, streaming from the
mouth4 of the men's house at the head of the ceremonial
ground. The event shows time to be recursive: what
flowed before 'into' the house now flows 'out' again. But
the event also momentarily detotalizes theflow(cf. Weiner
1991) into one of its two directions, that is, towards these
recipients.
Second, multiple possibilities are reduced to one. The
clan is sustained by more than its relationship with the
recipients, and the particular shells are not those the
recipients might have given but others gained through
other relationships. Yet the diverse relations that formed
the composite, and androgynous, figure of relationships
'out ofwhich' the shells have come cannot be seen. They are
in the background: other events, other exchanges other
partners. The shells instantiate the recomposition: drawn
together from many relationships, they are now presented
in a single line, as the 'one' gift that will make the recipients
'see' and 'feel.' (When pigs are handed over, a donor will
kick the stake as he marks out the gifts.)
The extended line is thus a reducedfigureof the clan
body. We might put it that the recomposition of the body
is effected through reduction by making the body appear
as its own extension: it is as though the extension were also
the body. Thus the body is presen ted through an extension
which is also only a part of itself. Certainly the donor clans
appear in an extended form through the way their shells are
being brought 'outside,' and what the male shells are seen
to do is extend a male men's house. Potentially detachable,
any part of the body may then be the subject of
differentiation from other parts. Either house or shell
could be imagined as male or female in relation to the
other. Thus the shells with their red ochre surround can be
thought of as little embryos in the womb, carried by the
handles women once netted (cf . Clark 1991). In that case,
the long line ofshells extendingfrom the house decomposes
the male clan into its procreative (male and/ or female)
body and its countless 'children.'
To all appearances, the procreative body and organ/
product is replicated in several forms. The photograph
(fig. 3) shows that on this occasion, while the shells extend
(from) the house where they were once notionally hid, they
also stream out from another shell, the sin^e one standing
at the head of the line as though it were the source of them
all. Each individual shell in turn is positioned on its board
with its opening downwards, out of which (barely visible
on the photograph) extends a short bamboo 'tally' like the
tallies men wear; this is where the carrying handles to bear
the shells away are attached. These replications suggest a
Visual Anthropology Review
 series of figures: the house door and the line of gifts that
come forth/ go in; the head shell and the shells that come
forth; the mounted shell and the tally that come forth with
the handle so that the whole thing can be lifted up and away.
Yet this is not a series contained in any simple way by
diminishing scale. Look at the man close to the
photographer. He is another figure, similar to all or any of
these.
This man is looking intently: what is looking at the
pearl shells is a figure with an enlarged head from whose
neck fells a line of bamboo sticks, the omak tally which
records previous shell transformations and hangs down
over his apron. On ceremonial occasions, large aprons are
elongated to conceal the displayer's two legs behind one
single sweeping cover.
Whether the man is a donor or recipient, or one of the
visitors whose interest in the destiny of the shells is more
indirect, in looking at the shell he is looking at a transformed
version of himself. Conventionally speaking, however, it is
the recipients of the gifts who are marked as 'the spectators.'
The donors are on display to these receptive partners, these
witnesses who will later take the donated shells (and pigs)
into their own men's houses. Hence the recipients looknot
at mirror images of themselves, but at the other side of
themselves: the extended body (the line of shells) of the
donors. What is replicated in each figure is the capacity to
bring that extension forth. If each shell is such a figure, so
too is the spectator in the photograph; but while his omak
tally and apron falling from the enlarged head is like the
tally and handle of the rounded shell itself, his extension is
not contained in what the observer would see as his individual
figure. He is aperson who moves in/ through relations with
others. In the same way as the shells have been brought
forth and will be borne away, his body extension liesfirstin
his presence and second in his seeing. True for all spectators,
this extension is condensed, abstracted and miniaturized
for the recipients ofgifts as the explicit object of the donors'
endeavors. It is the recipients who are bound to receive the
gifts.
The donors have composed the shells on their own
ceremonial ground, in front of one of their men's house.
The recipients have come out of their houses in distant
territories and have come to the open ground — elicited
forth by the promise of shells. In being present, and in
gazing at the shells, the recipients extend their own men's
house body: what they 'see' is what they have brought forth
from the bodies of other men. Ifone were to make explicit
for Hagen what other Highlanders abstract in terms of
gender, the feminized recipients masculinize themselves by
eliciting the gifts and detaching them from the donors. If
Visual Anthropology Review
this were so, what would be miniaturized in that spectacle
becomes the procreative possibility of gender difference.
These are speculations. Yet suppose, as Wagner (1991)
suggested, Melanesian sociality implies that persons are
fractally realized.5 That is, insofar as persons are imagined
as entities with relations integral to them, they cannot be
thought of in terms of whole numbers, whether as entire
units or as parts of a whole. Persons act as though they have
afractal dimensionality: however much they are divided or
multiplied, persons and relations remain in proportion to
each other, always keep their scale. Indeed, persons can
only exist so divided or multiplied (by relations). It is as
though their relationships were also themselves. There is no
reason, of course, why the fractal person so conceived
should be visible to the anthropologist. Yet if it were, what
might it look like?
The anthropologist would be looking for a figure that
keeps its complexity through all the scales of diminution
and enlargement (cf. Wagner 1991: 172). What keeps its
(complex) form in these Hagen performances is the
reducibility of the body: every appearance manifests its
reduction from a dual or multiple composition to the single
side it inevitably presents to the world. For the extended
body contains the elements ofits reduction, as we might say
that in separating into its constituents a relationship is made
visible. What is made up of multiple relations decomposes
into the entity that seeks relations with others.
Reducibility is thus the capacity to be effective, that is,
to procreate, to bring forth a product that is also the body
itself, to realize 'a' relationship. If the capacity lies in the
future, it also lies in the past. So the fractal person appears
in the effectiveness of those relations integral to it, and thus
always as an instantiation of itself. Now if persons can turn
complete relations into relations requiring completion, one
way to be completed is to be seen by others. That means,
first, that the person is only ever 'seen' as a (partible)
extension of itself. It means, second, that it is only ever
'seen' from one side, for the other side of the (one) person
is the (other person of the) elicitor who evokes and completes
the relation. And it means, third, that everything one 'sees'
oneself is one's own other side. In this world, persons eye
the effects of their extensions.
It is not a place that the photographer inhabits. She
belongs to a world where it is thought possible to see
without having an effect. She also belongs to a world that
understands likeness as copy or image as representation,
that inspects photographs and endlessly compares graphics.6
Volume 9 Number 1 Spring 1993 49
Indeed, she would not have looked again at this particular
photograph ifshe had not been so intrigued by the computer
graphics of fractal geometry. Yet drawing replications out
of the photograph, seeing the same form in every form,
making visual connections between entities that are all part
of a single image, is far removed from the procreative
activity which in Hagen must rest on its effects. There,
effectiveness is gendered: itlies in the way persons draw one
form out of another. Each form is divided from the other
in the process, as recipients are divided from donors. Two
persons but one figure: the body of one of them is also the
body of the other.
We might imagine this as the figure of a body whose
organs are distributed between persons (much as Euro-
Americans think of'society,' their own miniaturization of
sociality, when they imagine it as so many roles distributed
between individuals). For to be effective is to witness the
impact — through seeing, say, or kicking — of one's own
body on another. Butin this modeofMelanesian imagining,
the body that is seen or kicked is already only 'half the
figure; the eliciting organs are located in the other half. So
it would be a one-eye that 'sees' one-leg.
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Some of the theoretical work on
which this paper is based can be found in The Gender of the
Gift (1988) and in Partial Connections (1991). I thank
Sarah Williams and Lucien Taylor for allowing me to
present this in such an experimental manner. I am grateful
to Dirk Smidt, as well as Alan and Louise Hanson, for
permission to reproduce the photographs (figs. 1 and 2),
and for Nigel Rapport's comments. A version was presented
to the workshop "Material Culture, anthropology of art,"
convened by Jose'-Ant6nio Fernandes-Diaz and Cesare
Poppi at the 2nd EASA conference, Prague 1992, and
comments made there have been most useful.
1. And in people's commentary on themselves. Biersack
(1991:260; also 1990:78-9) observes that thePaielapeople
of the Papuan New Guinea Highlands contrast themselves
with the all-seeing, all-knowing sun in the phrase: "We are
one-eyed: the sun is two-eyed." The sun includes everyone
in his vision, and is himself thereby without body (cf. 1981:
260). The interest of the point will be evident in the
argument that follows.
2. Though the form that the recomposed body takes (a
double-sided or 'split' figure) is found in a variety of
contexts, not only doorways, and may also be freestanding.
3. The performer who holds one-leg may be referred to
50 Volume 9 Number 1 Spring 1993
as a 'child* in relation to male and female guardians of the
tambaran who accompany the performer; a fourth actor is
the tambaran j'friend.' On the androgyny of children see,
for example, M. Strathern (1992).
4. Melpa keta, 'mouth,' 'door,' 'opening.'
5. The context is Wagner's reflection on the kind of
individual/ society antinomy anthropologists have
conventionally brought to the analysis of Big Men regimes
in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, prompted by
Maurice Godelier's counter-figure of the Baruya Great
Man. The idea of individuals somehow aggregated into
society contains an implicit mathematics which Wagner
here uncovers through another mathematic metaphor
(fractals as conceptualized in chaos theory).
6. On modernity's commitment to mimesis, seeTaussig
1992. Per contra, Don Kulick and Margaret Willson
("Rambo's Wife Saves The Day: Subjecting the Gaze and
Subverting the Narrative in a New Guinean Swamp,"
manuscript) describe how Gapun villagers seeing films try
to make the films 'work' for (have an effect on) them.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Biersack, Aletta
1990 Histories in the Making: Paiela and Historical
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