Saõ Paulo: 25 August 2014 Opening lecture for XII GEC (‘students in the field’) conference.

DRAFT Some passages in note form

From Papua New Guinea to a UK Council on Bioethics:

fieldwork at the beginning and end of an anthropological lifetime.

Marilyn Strathern

(Introd) It is a huge pleasure for me to be addressing you all – one of the things I miss in
retirement is contact with undergraduates – although I am not sure all undergraduates in the
UK are as adventurous as yourselves in embarking of fieldwork, and I am sure those who
do would welcome a forum such as this to exchange ideas, issues, problems …

What counts as field work varies enormously – and so it should, for anthropologists cherish
the diversity of topics and issues that are open to study. And obviously anthropologists
themselves don’t stay still either – they move between all kinds of places and situations in
the course of their work, as they do in everyday life, and the course of one day for that
matter, so we might ask, what are the moments that we call fieldwork? That is not such a
silly question as it sounds, because the moving anthropologist always takes his or her head
along too! One is never free of thoughts and memories and expectations, and there is
certainly a sense in which the field moves around with one. So can we be ‘in’ the field
whenever we think about ‘it’? But even to ask that question already presupposes something
rather specific.

I am not here to define ‘the field’ – you will do that for yourselves -- but would comment
that of all the changes and movement that accompanies daily life there is often a particular
tenor to what we call ‘fieldwork’, when for the sake of what you are studying you put
yourself in the hands of other people. When for the sake of what you are studying you put
yourself in the hands of other people. That implies entering into some kind of relationship
with them, and that in turn implies some sense of an enduring presence that is a co-
presence. Not necessarily with the same individual people, but with the milieu from which
they come. Circumstances vary of course, and depending where you are it may require
more or less time, but that kind of immersement leads the fieldworker to the other side of

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his or her situation: realizing that there is a double to the idea that for the sake of what you
are studying you put yourself in the hands of other people. You find it becomes equally true
that putting yourself in the hands of other people you discover what it is that you are
studying. Putting yourself in the hands of other people you discover what it is that you are
studying.

That is quite a precious insight. You just have to explain to everyone else why your
research topic has changed direction, turned a corner, won’t stay still …

Moving, immersement and a reversal

It is not new to talk about ‘immersement’ in fieldwork, but I have wanted to suggest a way
of thinking about it that does not involve huge stretches of time, since I know that at the
stage at which you will have been doing your projects lengthy fieldwork is simply not an
option, and indeed under various other circumstances may not be either. But even for a
short time, it has an interesting side effect. Once you have realized what it is to be
immersed in a situation, you can do it again. In this sense it is possible to move between
field sites. Once you have learnt what it is to be in other people’s hands – to make
relationships – you can probably do it again.

And I say this because, as you might expect in my own case, I have not remained at a single
site of study. I have moved between several arenas that have held my attention, in which I
have become immersed. Yet at the same time, and even when it has involved data
collection, it has not always been in the manner of ‘fieldwork immersement’. Over a life-
time, ‘the field’ has often been in my head, but I have not myself, as a person entering into
relations with other persons, been ‘in’ the field as nearly as frequently as the field has been
‘in’ me.

There were no MA programmes when I began studying, so I went from a BA into a PhD,
and the work I shall be talking about was doctoral or postdoctoral. However, as an
undergraduate, I did spend a very brief period in a village near Cambridge under the
direction of Audrey Richards and Edmund Leach. It was where Audrey Richards, an
Africanist pupil of Malinowksi’s, lived. The idea was to ‘practise by doing’, namely
collecting genealogies and finding about about land holdings. I have to say that experience

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had terrifying moments far more acute than I was ever to encounter in PNG. (Elaborate:
question of knowing the codes, not being protected by ignorance / faux pas etc.)

In Papua New Guinea I spent time in two distinct language areas: Hagen and Pangia,
though have written much more about one than the other. Hagen I have returned to on
several occasions – sometimes the re-immersement has worked, sometimes not so evidently.
And the people I was first with have themselves moved location. I have also worked from
other bases, notably an enduring interest in English kinship, which sprang from revisiting the
materials collected by Audrey Richards and several generations of students in that village
near Cambridge (Elmdon), though I never re-opened relations with the residents of the
villager. I became interested in the NRT through the discussions about kinship matters that
suddenly began being heard in the UK, and it was about kinship – ideas of relatedness – not
just about families. (Elaborate) The NRT took me to IPR. I had read of a surrogacy case
in which one court found in favour of the commissioning parents against the birth mother on
the grounds that they had had the mental concept of a child and were thus its conceivers.
One lawyer likened this to an argument about IP.) I discovered that IP was in the air in
other ways: biodiversity, cultural diversity and property rights. Took me back to PNG
conceptually speaking, but no fieldwork … And alongside this, I was sustaining a research
interest in audit – the audit society as it had been called, the audit culture -- that came from
my administrative position as head of department, first in Manchester (1985) and then
Cambridge (1993). But none of my immersement in these latter interests would I label as
‘fieldwork’ (though I was in the company of people who did do fieldwork, eg on kinship
and the NRT in the UK; on ideas of cultural property in PNG).

It was a combination of some of them that led to my being asked by a national ethics body
in the UK to chair a fact-finding working party. This was the Nuffield Council on Bioethics.
(Elaborate: why I say national etc. Funders: MRC, Nuffield Foundation, Wellcome Trust.)
They wanted to return to a topic they had dealt with at the beginning of the biomedical
revolution in transplantation. Then the question had been what kind of regulations in the
use of human tissue would serve this medical sector best. Now, it was, to re-examine a
question with which numerous international bodies had pronounced on, the ethics of
encouraging people to sign the organ donation register or even to donate what they could
as living persons (eg a kidney). Given that purchase was universally outlawed, what was
the ethical line between purchase and incentives of various kind?

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Anyway, I go into this because I am going to reverse the sequence in my title, initially talk
about the NCOB experience, and then come back to the first fieldwork in PNG. Partly
because if I look back to that first period of fieldwork, I can only do so though the lenses of
everything that has happened since, here and there, and partly because PNG is in fact ahead
of me. I am planning what will be a ‘last’ visit next year, and there are some issues that I
would like to air with you. I mean this: you will see what they are, and why I should wish
to consult people like yourselves, brought up since the digital revolution, and engaged in
exercises of communication and relation-making very different from what was conceivable
50 years ago.

Anyway I divide the rest of what I say into two parts. I. NCOB 2010-11, and the
question: was this fieldwork? And II. Mt Hagen, PNG, 1964-5 and 1967. Indubitably
‘fieldwork’, although not an experience to be repeated in its original form (as I found on
return visits in the 1980s and 1990s). After that I really would appreciate your questions,
views, comments and so forth on how I should be thinking about certain aspects of Mt
Hagen in 2015.

I. NCOB 2010-11
SLIDE 1 The cover of the eventual report – same as this guide (2011), Guide cover page.

18 months work with an interdisciplinary working party (12 members plus NCOB
secretariat) [from anthropology, epidemiology, biomedical ethics, pharmacology, philosophy
of science, health psychology, science and technology studies, medical law, along with a
director of fertility services, a transplant surgeon and a clinical histopathologist]. May be I
should add that the work was voluntary. Not ‘my’ report. It was for and belonged to
NCOB, and had to be signed off by its Council.

1st time an anthropologist had chaired one their working parties. [Hugh Whittall, the
Director] Wanted someone ‘sensitive to relationships’! Plus my involvement with NRT
(gametes were included) and gift exchange. Ubiquitous language of gift giving. [I had also
been on the Council itself recently.]

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Let me very briefly give you a sense of what the Working Party was about. Here is a
sequence of slides prepared within the first few months of the WP for a presentation to a
World Congress on Bioethics held in Singapore (July 2010). [Allow time for people to
read each one]

SLIDES 2-10: Taken from 1-12 of the NCOB pp presentation. Labelled 10th World
Congress. Numbers 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12.

SLIDE 11 blank
So this was how they laid it all out, and basically determined the format of the consultation
exercise that we had to get off the ground very quickly within weeks of starting the work.

None of the WP did any first hand research with people, beyond opinion-gathering: we
solicited views from ‘the public’ via the consultation exercise, and some other public events,
invited in specialists of various kinds to talk to us, assembled a large literature and between
us read a lot of it, commissioned literature reviews on specific topics, and as the WP we had
intensive face to face discussions among ourselves at regular intervals – 9 full [and formal]
meetings in all.

Was it fieldwork? Ethics bodies have been the subject of research, including
anthropological research, and some colleagues of mine assumed that was my interest in
agreeing to chair this WP. However I was clear in my own mind that this was NOT a
research opportunity, even to amass information to be used long after the requirements for
confidentiality were over. I simply couldn’t deal with the doubling or slpitting required.
Now I have happily split myself on other occasions – for instance, between being a head of
Dept and a critic of government and university-imposed demands for a certain kind of
accountability. But on this occasion I did not see how I could split myself between chair
and observer-researcher. That was because of immersement of another kind: as chair I had
to be alive and alert all the time to the deliberations of the working party members and what
they wanted to say. It was for me to interpret the sense of the meeting …. I had to be
attentive to the different conversations going on in the multi-disciplinary group. The
splitting would have required a performative finesse I just couldn’t command.

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Anyway, I did not see how I could ethically justify any research gains over my commitment
to the NCOB’s efforts in this field.

There was a parallel issue. As chair, I didn’t feel I should be ‘to much’ of an anthropologist
(luckily there was another anthropologist on the WP who could be!). I was there for the
WP as whole, not to impose my discipline. If there were anthrop. arguments to be made,
they had to stand up on their own.

That didn’t mean I had to suppress an anthropological voice, only not use my position to
promote it. As it turned out, there were a number of junctures at which an anthropological
view seemed to make sense. (a) A comparative framework – we insisted on attending to all
kinds of body parts and body tissue for the interest of the different ways in which they were
already being treated. (b) An attempt to deal with the demonisation of money -- the very
mention of money in the context of organ donation turned it into a scare word. (c)
Challenging assumptions about issues such as the public : private divide. May be you can
see the effects in our conclusions.

Here are some slides prepared for the launch of the report. They start with current state of
affairs (regulation) with respect to payments and introduce our own vocabulary.

From second set of NCOB slides labelled ‘Marilyn Stathern’

SLIDES 12 - 18
Taken from ppt. 5-7, 11-14

One of the things we tried to do is distinguish between money for a purchase and money for
other uses, given that in English ‘payment’ is used for everything. (The intervention ladder
was very different from the original list of ‘ethical values at stake’.)

The actual recommendations showed some of the effects of comparison. Not treating all
bodily tissue alike.
SLIDES 19 - 21
Taken from ppt. 15-17

SLIDE 22 Blank

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Well, it was not fieldwork. However, looking back on the experience, with the NCOB
secretariat as well as the WP members, and everyone we met, I think I now know what the
subject of further ‘work’ might be. Putting yourself in the hands of other people you
discover what it is that you are studying – or could have been. I could envisage a future
project, something that was not just in the background but enfolded our endeavours within
it: the impetus and genre of the whole exercise of report writing was driven by a
‘consultation culture’. I am not speaking only of the consultation exercise within our
project, though it was a miniature version of the whole, but of the very need to be informed
in this mode. It seemed to me that a huge proportion of the literature we studied
(consulted) were other reports. Reports drawing upon and leading to further reports – the
phenomenon has been described in NGO and UN and many other circles [especially in field
of ‘soft regulation’, advice to governments, model laws etc]. NCOB was ratcheting up the
number of reports it produced to demonstrate its productivity to its funders. Just one small
part of communications, but seemingly for ever diminishing returns.

I say this because the impact of the 1995 report on the regulation of use of human tissue
had a significant impact. Indeed its success contributed to the present day situation: since
then there has been a huge increase in regulation, largely welcomed on all sides, and huge
increase in fact-finding missions, consultations, expert reports. Each one usually also
welcomed, but in the mass overwhelming. Cant do any simple trade-off analysis. Getting a
handle on the phenomenon would in fact require ‘fieldwork’ of a kind.

A final comment. The slides I have shown you are visually very simple, intended as aids to
summarizing a lot of complex information. (Deceptively simple, of course, since they
conceal all kinds of decisions about how to frame certain issues, and give them sort of
benign facticity.) In its slightly longer exposition, the 14 pp guide to the 254pp report
drives the point home with images.

SLIDE 23 (surgeons) Guide p. 7

Even where it goes into more detail than the pp slides, it gives visual reminder that people,
human beings, are crucially involved. But what kind of reminder is it?

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SLIDE 24 (portrait) Guide p. 9

The anonymous, generic portrait, with an inscrutable, unknowable, expression fills a third of
the page. Images of all, available for all. Ubiquitously, images of all, available for all.
This introduces some of the issues I would like to discuss with you later. Remember her:
this anonymous, generic someone.

I turn to the second part.

SLIDE 25 Blank

Pause for one or two immediate questions?

II. Mt Hagen, PNG, 1964-5 and 1967

You will recall that I said earlier that fieldwork implies putting yourself in the hands of
other people, for the sake of what you are studying. That implies entering into some kind
of relationship with them. Anthropological fieldworkers sometimes think of themselves as
studying relations by entering into relations. Whatever their subject of study, at some point
they will impinge on other people’s lives, find themselves in face to face encounters. Well,
of course, but a question immediately follows: what kinds of (social)relations are possible?
(Above Q: how I should be thinking about certain aspects of Mt Hagen in 2015.)

I do not just mean in a practical sense – what one has to know to enter into a conversation,
what it means to give someone something, the implications of being seen here or there, or
how to chair a working party, for that matter. I also mean implicit assumptions about the
very idea of what social relations are. There were many questions to ask in the NCOB
context, but not this one. Looking back now on my fieldwork in Hagen, PNG, in 1964-5
and then again in 1967, I realize that much of what I did turned on that question, though it
wasn’t one I articulated to myself at the time. And it was certainly not something I could
have asked people. People in Mt Hagen do not have an abstract conceptualization of social
relations, even though the ethnographer might say they are enacting them all the time. [I
leave aside the role of relations in anthrop. description.]

So what I am talking about now is with hindsight! After the event! At the time I am sure I
participated in the ongoing assumptions about relations that are frequently raised in debates

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about the reality of – or the illusion of – or conditions of possibility for -- closeness and
distance between observer and observed.

One of the stereotypes often held about places such as the PNG Highlands is that in small
scale communities there must be a correlation between distance and strangeness or enmity –
that the further away ‘others’ are the more socially remote they are, while the family lies at
the centre of one’s security circle. Decreasing closeness becomes increasing distance. May
or may not be true. But what is true is that this is a Euro-American stereotype. I would
say this belongs to a much wider – not just Euro-American but in some aspects Eurasian –
set of assumptions about social relations that connect closeness and distance to familiarity
and strangeness. It has an analogue in ideas about privacy and its opposite. What is near
you is close, private, and what is far is strange or hostile, or just part of an indifferent public
life. Always relative, of course, with closeness and distance on that sliding scale: decreasing
familiarity becomes increasing strangeness. This is the strangeness that anthropologists
setting out on their studies often feel their interlocuters and those with whom they work
must be projecting on to them.

In fact we know that when in 1933-4 the first Australians entered the Highlands areas of
Papua New Guinea on foot they were regarded as strange, but not all that strange. In many
places they were greeted as returned ancestors or taken to be spirits [wamp nui wamb] …
[The area had been discovered by light aircraft etc Elaborate] They set up a camp at
Hagen.

SLIDE 26 Iconic picture of first contact: Kiap Taylor walks into the Wahgi, filmed by Mick
Leahy (one of first Australians to explore the area / establish a plantation).
Caption: 1933. Patrol officer walks into a valley near Hagen. Photo: M Leahy

The encounter ends in a handshake. In any event the newcomers were obviously human
beings because they entered into exchanges with people.

SLIDE 27 Taken by Mick Leahy [given by Leahy to Haddon. Museum no 80: ‘pig feast’]
Caption: Late 1930s. Prestation of pork, Hagen. Photo: M Leahy

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Prob late 1930s. Men at a pig prestation. Sides of pork. The shells you see will have been
traded into Hagen by the colonizers, the currency the locals demanded for pigs and food. It
was those transactions that confirmed the identity of the newcomers as human like everyone
else. Hagen was closed down during WWII, reopened in late 1940s.

SLIDE 28 Taken by Raymond Firth, 1951.

Caption: 1951. Women selling produce (sweet potatoes). Photo: R Firth
Women selling vegetable produce for flying to the coast.

SLIDE 29
Caption: 1971. A court case, men and women sitting separately.

Twenty years later (1971) you see evidence of income from the cash crops (coffee) [point
out the car], the spread of roads, and the effects of the administration and a judicial system:
these people are holding an informal ‘court’ – and I shall come back to this.

Let me go back to my previous visits in the 1960s. I had a problem I didn’t really realize.
How was I going to modulate my ‘relations’ with the Hagen people I encountered? I came
from a context where closeness and distance are all bound up with sliding-scale contrasts
between near and far, the familiar and the strange, if not self and other. Did the relations I
thought I had established make me near or far, or somewhere in between? Didn’t think
about it at the time, but how might I look back on it now?

SLIDE 30 [M3.2.65]
Caption: 1965 At a women’s house: Wora and Kukile

A late afternoon (nearly) 50 years ago … Wora is eating a sweet potato, at the courtyard of
a women’s house. There is an adolescent boy lounging nearby, while Kukile, half hidden in
the doorway, also holds a piece of sweet potato in her hand – ‘typical domestic scene’.
Then you notice only the two of them are eating. Although the homesteads are only a short
walk away, Wora is visiting her neighbour [own house key round her neck / wearing
netbag]: maybe the two of them have shared a sweet potato [special foods: become
namesakes, but not usually sweet potatoes, the staple]. At any rate, they appear
comfortable in each other’s company.

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I am visiting too. When I was in Hagen in 1964-5, one of the things I would do in the late
afternoons is visit a regular number of households in the vicinity of our own and weigh the
sweet potato that women had harvested that day. Homesteads were separated from one
another – people hated to be crowded – and the task had to be done in the narrow time slot
after women had come back from the gardens and before the food – food for both people
and the pigs they kept – was cooked. So I couldn’t linger too much. A regular visitor, but
one very evidently with an agenda of her own. The visits generated a sense of intimacy that
I think was shared; certainly people were amused and pretty tolerant. Part of it was
precisely that I had my own agenda, my notebooks and questions, since I was doing
something no Hagen woman would dream of – visit a neighbour perhaps, but not go from
homestead to homestead.

At these times women were often by themselves. But then we are used to the difference
between the camaderie of friends and the kind of intimacy we expect of conjugal relations.
At that stage in their history, Hagen men and women often slept in different houses [they no
longer do]; men had their own men’s houses. The most intimate encounter that others
might also witness would be the moment when a husband would come of an evening for
food and conversation with his wife. [Didn’t necessarily eat at the same time.] Close
personal relations, as we might put it, could build up over the years, and many couples were
what we might also call friends. At the same time husbands and wives were deeply divided
from one another. By work, by politics, by gender. Each division reinforced or
recapitulated others.

SLIDE 31 Gardens at Mbukl [A10.15.64]

Caption. Gardens, fallow land, bush

By work … The division of labour is the model here, a single project (household
provisioning) divided between the distinct tasks carried out by men and by women as wives
and husbands. These tasks did not just determine how they spent their daily lives but were
the source of different orientations and values.

SLIDE 32 Men making fences

Caption: Pundukl and clan mate cutting fence posts

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SLIDE 33 Husband and wife in garden [M5.5.64]
Caption: Kukile (preparing soil) and Pundukl (digging)

By politics … This created a radical difference between spouses. Clan exogamy meant that
their natal groups were distinct, a formal distinction overlaid by clan histories of their
interactions as allies or enemies. Politically, there was always a question of divided
loyalties: husbands might be suspicious of their wives, wary of the thin line between fed and
being poisoned.

SLIDE 34 [M34.2.64]
Bridewealth exchange … two set of kin …
Caption: Bridewealth: men from bride’s and groom’s clans negotiating

By gender … Ideas about gender were themselves a source of division; I have referred to
the separate lives the sexes led, and the presence of people of opposite sex always altered
the tenor of a gathering.

Now, the difference of clan origin -- like the division of labour or gender -- between
husband and wife was not something to be erased, but the basis of their ongoing
relationship. In fact we might want to think of these ‘divisions’ not as a rift or gap between
them but precisely as binding them together. It was an intense bond, as either amity or
enmity might be intense, and based on radical differentiation. Differentiation was cultivated
through rituals and taboos.

People differentiate themselves further: movement between different spheres of life is often
a matter of deliberate transformation.

SLIDE 35
Caption: Transforming her pig into wealth (photo A Strathern)

I don’t know who this is preparing a pig for ceremonial exchange, but with the streak of red
ochre she is effecting a categorical transformation: turning a ‘domestic’ pig into ‘exchange’

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pig, one she has reared into one to be given away (by her husband) … For an occasion like
this:

SLIDE 36 [A19.15.64]
Caption: Dancers on display (photo A Strathern)

Crowded ceremonial ground. Men dancing; the spectators are other men but also many
women. There is a marked division between those on display and those not. In the case of
donors and recipients of exchange gifts, while at any temporal moment they are only one or
the other, over time they also switch their positions: donors become recipients, recipients
donors. What you take in of others, you give out of yourself -- not unlike the categorical
effects of exogamy itself. ‘Others’ are not a distant form of self: they are oneself in different
form.

SLIDE 37
Caption: Woman in dance decorations (1967)

Formalised in decorations: here a special occasion – you can see pig stakes in the
background -- on which a donor’s wife is decorated. Transformed like this, she has been
‘produced’ or’ created’ by the combined efforts of her natal and conjugal clans. Red and
black code the ambiguous mix of alliance -- friendly and hostile feelings together; future
possibilities of fertility and aggression.

SLIDE 38 Copy of slide 30.

Go back to the original scene.

From the perspective of their menfolk, Wora and Kukile come from different (natal) clans of
a single ‘tribe’ (Tipuka); they are married into two quite distinct clans with land claims in
the area [Tipuka ‘Eltimbo’ and Kawelka Klammbo], between whom are multiple ties of
marriage. Nentepa (older boy) is Wora’s classif. ‘son’ (HBS) and Kumbamong (younger
boy) her husband’s classif, sister’s son (H’Z’S). [The very little child must be Koka’s.]
However, the composition of the photograph is misleading: it looks as though Kukile is the
hostess and Wora the guest. Actually, my notes tell me, the house belongs to someone who

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is not in the photograph at all [Koka], Kumbamong’s mother, who is also Nentepa’s father’s
sister (the boys are cross-cousins). Both Wora and Kukile are in fact visitors!

Whom are they looking at? That is obvious. But the nature of the encounter? They seem
pretty relaxed -- the photographer is smiling too, but feels intrusive … though it looks as
though they were expecting me -- and indeed I am there to weigh sweet potato. But then
again they are not exactly waiting for me before cooking and eating! Look at those smiles
again. Are they smiles of closeness or distance, or are they acknowledging a bond --
positive? negative? in the obvious difference between us?

SLIDE 39 Blank

In fact this is a question Hagen people constantly put to themselves. Cant see what is in
another’s mind. You can only tell what they intend by what they reveal – what they let you
see, by their actions etc. Intimacy is not a matter of access to the mind, getting ‘closer’ to
the interior of an individual, but rather the capacity to align diverse sentiments and thoughts.

Come back to the 1971 court case.

SLIDE 40 [court case]
No caption

See Pundukl with house key round his neck (Kukile will be her garden)
Big man Ongka. At the core of it: two young women.

Not going to talk abt this case specifically though people were happy enough for me to be
there. Part of widespread phenomenon. Already prevalent in 1964-5. What struck me
about Hagen -- constant court hearings. In fact it led me to change my research topic –
[explain] -- Putting yourself in the hands of other people you discover what it is that you
are studying.

[Re-tell the story of my ‘discovery of gender relations’. Disputes involving women and
their relations – often over marital relations – separation, divorce. Women were a problem
for men, ie for men’s politics and alliances. They were talked abt a lot. Women as “in

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between” clans. Old paradigm of udg and ‘strength’ of conjugal bond. Conclusion: must
have high divorce rate. Compiling the divorce rate …

SLIDE 41 from WIB

Caption: Calculating divorce rates (Strathern 1972)

What I had to do to calculate divorce rates in the field at the time (1965). …. Not very
interesting (one or two examples already in draft at hand in field). Dawning realization: the
talk of women was indeed just that: talk. ‘Discourse’ (not a word on my horizon at that
point.) Gender (neither…) [1972 Ann Oakley] In other words I was witnessing what
within a few years would be called gender ideology … What I had worked out was that
gender did not just refer to the affairs of men and women but was used to talk about,
compare, elaborate on, all kinds of values.

SLIDE 42 [court case]

No caption

End of this particular case: Ongka is haranguing everyone, holding notes in the air
(Australian dollars) -- Reminds us of the ethos of exchange: compensation being paid for a
wrong or injury perceived.

The basis of transactions of all kinds: eg ceremonial exchange predicated on past homicides
in warfare or on the flow of maternal nurture from one’s mother’s clan to one’s father,
crucial for health of children. All mobilized flows of wealth. Calibrated to relationships.

SLIDE 43 Kompensensen
Caption: Cartoon from national newspaper

Not confined to Hagen or the Highlands … Across PNG, came to dominate later
negotiations with mining companies etc. What people can extract on the basis of what the
other can afford etc. Became a bit of a national joke in the media… Relationships, yes, but
open to interpretation and dispute.

Discussion

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I have introduced an otherwise obtrusive note because I want to pull these reflections into
the future – my prospective trip --

You have been looking at various photographs. Consider this one.

SLIDE 44 bl & wh kaukau market. [3.10.64]
Caption 1964 Private scene? Public event?

A woman selling sweet potato – dug out, harvested, washed, carried to the roadside verge.*
She is holding up her fingers in a counting gesture, and seems to have turned her away from
the man in shorts who has made an inadequate offer … I have caught her with her eyes
closed, momentarily indifferent to the camera. (Not the only person selling – there are
others nearby.)
*The occasion (in 1964): Tipuka and Kawelka pulling a post for the river Mö ka bridge, and
women taking the opportunity to market their vegetables to the crowd. I have not recorded
her name.

The question is: 50 years on I am planning to give my collection of photographs to the

CUMAA -- along with the NMAG Port Moresby. I can call it an ‘ethnographic collection’,
but it also contains many portraits of individual people. And pictures such as this one. Is
there an issue here? Now my problems wont be relevant to yours. Dealing among other
things with the consequences of an old technology … But don’t imagine that because one
set of problems is solved – e.g. the paraphernalia that taking photos once entailed -- there
are no problems! So alongside what I am saying about mine you can think about yours. –
And other issues, not necessarily about visual records.

SLIDE 45 Blank

Elaborate on plans for the donation. Several issues arise

1. New technology, digitisation, that facilitates the making and donation of the collection,
and its display, also makes the collection potentially available to anyone. The Museums
might put restrictions on accessibility … but the first technical step (digitization) has been
taken. Converse problem of continuous maintenance and upgrading.

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2. Not appropriate these days to give to Cambridge Museum and not think about the
Museum in PNG. Available for public access in own country – indeed the Moresby
Museum has already asked to put on an exhibition. Made me realise I should try to find out
how people in Hagen would take it.

3. General ethical issues. Q of my original privileged access. (a) Taking the photos in first
place (1964-5). Sometimes asked permission, many times did not. (Where possible gave
photos back – required developing and printing etc). (b) Reproducing, ie publishing, them.
I just didn’t think of this [except much later e.g. Kupi for PSE.] (c) Nowadays many people
take photos for themselves …

Informed consent is the basis of professional guidelines eg ASA. [Identifying oneself as a

researcher. Filming should be overt. Including some attempt to gain consent at public
events (4b).]

4. Other consent issues. (a) Where people knew I was taking a photo, I often didn’t respect
local conventions of photo taking: full frontal portrait, from head to foot. [Here Kirk was
much closer and did a better job.] (b) Very often they weren’t aware, or only partly aware,
as in the case of the woman with sweet potatoes. (c) Occasionally protests, esp. from
people I didn’t know, and demands for payment, eg on public occasions such as ceremonial
dancing, when dancers were on display and expected admiration from the crowd. [Reverse
of paying compens. to someone one has moved.] (d) Usually people willing / glad
/sometimes asked to have photo taken. [cf framed portrait of Ru in my office in Cambridge
that he took back with him in 1999.] Would it be best to anonymize the collection? Would
anonymity help or make things worse (many anthropologists’ tales of people who want to
be named / want their story told).

5. When the subject has died, difft ethical questions. Many of the subjects of my photos are
no longer alive. But their descendants are: these people are someone’s parents,
grandparents, aunts and uncles. What about the descendants, then? -- Do they have any
privacy interests? Or other interests -- to do with ancestral ‘property’ / cultural heritage.

6. Legal issues. In English law. And PNG law.

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I drew attention to the increase of regulations in relation to medical ethics. We are all much
more attuned these days to intellectual property and related issues.

A. Copyright (formal ownership of right to reproduce) in photo is quite straightforward:

the creator of the photograph holds the copyright.
B. Privacy (relationship with subjects of image). Data protection. Basic question is who
might be harmed by publication of a photograph. UK: inclusion of right to privacy in
relation to photographs (and film) in 1988 Act. Commissioner of photo now has some
rights to prevent publication that would be an unwelcome invasion of privacy or that of the
persons appearing in the photograph. Would prevent copies of the work from being issued
to the public, exhibited or broadcast. But doesnt apply to photographs made before 1988
Act. Data Protection Act (UK) 1998, only applies to living people, identifiable as
individuals. A photograph can be ‘personal data’ when image and name are linked, ie
person can be identified as an individual. (Putting an image of someone on a public internet
site cd amount to transferring personal data (to a country) without adequate protection.)
Exemption of requirement for consent for artistic and literary purposes is ambiguous: for
research purposes appears to be wider. Professional photographers are keen to protect their
right to take photos in public spaces (eg milit. installations) – this is an issue for them. –
Plenty of let-outs. But does one want a let-out? In any case all based on original informed
consent …

Now you will at once see the issue for the fieldworker. All this is predicated on English
(EA) conventions to do with private and public domains, and ‘protecting’ individual
privacy from public disclosure. However careful I might want to be in respect of these
ethical protocols, what about Hagen ones?

For example, the photo of Kukile and Pundukl in their garden:

SLIDE 46 Repeat of Slide 33

A kind of analogue to EA ideas of privacy – but an inversion of what is exposed and what is
displayed. These people tell you nothing about themselves, their status, their wealth:
wearing next to nothing, they hide everything. By comparison with occasions of display.

SLIDE 47 [Ndika moka / running alongside pearlshells]

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Caption (top): Donors display themselves and their gift

A contrast in fact, between concealment and revelation. The dancers have brought outside
– like the formerly hidden pearlshells brought outside from their men’s house – everything
that is within, in terms of claims, aggressively made, to wealth, prestige power: the dancers
expose themselves to the eyes of onlookers. This to be naked – with their insides hanging
out. And anonynous.

SLIDE 48 Blank

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Omit if no time -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In fact although I have shown you some intimate scenes, looking back on my photos from
that early period, less so later, I realize there was a bias in the photographic coverage.

To some extent the collection reflect my mundane photograph-taking practices as a child /

young adult, ie life before the field. I didn’t go the PNG to make a systematic visual
recording, and had only a commonsense appreciation that photographs would be a record of
sorts / to supplement note taking. The point is my photos tend to be of ‘occasions’ (and in
the case of SDMH specific occasions for purposes of analysis / Wiru stone tools also
photographed more systematically). Much less of ‘ordinary life’. I took a scale with me to
measure sweet potato being brought back in the evening, when I did my rounds of
households, but rarely took a camera. -- Was that why Wora and Kukile were smiling when
I did? -- Some photographs of gardens etc. but relatively few. Why?

Shyness. My own inhibitions. Domestic situations too intimate. Women would have been
either in gardens, or else preparing food at home (inappropriate to bring out a camera).
Part of it also to do with what I perceived as repetition of daily activities or kinds of
gardens – was too keen to hear instead about relationships, events, happenings. Didn’t
mean I didn’t spend a lot of time in women’s company, in the gardens, but it didn’t get
‘recorded’. Too extensive somehow? An analogy with my private life? Cf I gave up
keeping a detailed diary as a teenager because I found I was writing for it: thereafter I just
jotted down the ‘events’. Where does this sense of event or occasion come from? Had I
been planning a photographic collection then I might have systematically photographed (for
example) everyone I interviewed in working out divorce rates. But we come back to the
hesitant note above: I would have felt the camera intrusive – less because I think people will
have minded than because it would have altered the way I was (greeting, entering household
space etc). (But then I could have done it on parting!) Looking back, I feel pretty foolish.

It did however feel appropriate to be photographing people in decorations, at dances, at the

market, that is, when presenting themselves on special occasions to the public eye. (People
in ‘domestic’ contexts are of course -- as I have indicated -- ‘hidden’ from eye, especially
when in old clothes.) More than that, the occasion is also a condensed moment, a
singularity, available for observation somehow, and however often occasions happen are

20
available to be made ‘unique’. [Obviously I could have made daily happenings into
‘unique’ events, in the experimental-science sense, namely, specific as to place and time, but
that would have run against the grain of things??] Certainly the numerous ‘occasions’ in
1964-5 and 1967 on which men -- and women – decorated for an audience were occasions
for the camera. (Ditto large-staged funerals.)

But may be there was another reason: the role that photographs had played in my life till
that point. As a teenager, I took a lot of photos, but mainly of holidays, special visits,
archaeological digs, monuments etc, and the family on ‘special occasions’. Although by the
later 1950s film was no longer short, it (and the processing thereof) was relatively
expensive. But I was I think especially influenced by my father’s practice, his still treating
film somewhat as he had done in the war. He used film very sparingly … certainly it became
almost impossible to get at that time if you didn’t have professional reasons. (Cf. his delight
that a press photographer came to take some early photos of me [1941].) One aspect of
this was that he gave great thought to every shot, and (if my memory serves me) everyone
around would be aware that he was taking a photograph. The act originally defined by the
limitation of materials (apropos film rather than cameras), became part of his regular
practice, alongside the care also imposed by accompanying techniques: focusing, adjusting
for film speed, getting the lighting right, and thinking about angle and composition. All this
meant that taking a photograph was an event itself. So it made a happening into an
occasion. And brought with it a sense in which a photographed event was already not
mundane – people would be dressed up or posing for the camera or smiling for it.]

This bias of mine dovetailed in fact with my feeling most comfortable in Hagen when
photographing special occasions when people put themselves before an audience for display.
[It wore off … cf the Moresby photographs of migrants …] But if that is my bias, what
about bias on the part of my Hagen acquaintances?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--

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[Yet] If truth be told, I felt most comfortable in Hagen when photographing special
occasions, when people put themselves before an audience for display. [It wore off … cf
the Moresby photographs of migrants …] But that was because I equated the public nature
of the event with the expectations that EA have about individuals on public occasions. It is
true the dancers are there to be seen – they solicit people’s approval -- but they also run the
risk of failure. A bad display is a bad omen for the future.

In any case, in what sense were they individuals, as in the subject of privacy laws?

Well I cant rehearse all the discussions I have had at various times about Melanesian
personhood, relations, people making themselves the objects of others’ regard, and so forth,
so will instead refract some of these notions though an anthropologist of photography
(Christopher Wright) who has drawn on them.

From Christopher Wright 2005 ‘Supple bodies: The Papua New Guinea photographs of
Captain Francis R Barton, 1899-1907’, in C Pinney and N Peterson (eds), Photography’s
other histories, Durham: Duke University Press. Pp 146-169.

At the end of his account of Barton’s photographs of Hula girls and their tattooes, put into
the context for example of Victorian photographs of children as well as colonial
surveillance, Wright turns to MS’s analysis of gender in Melanesia (pp 163 ff)..

‘The body in Hula culture is not seen as the expression of an inner individuality, the sign of
a person belonging to her or himself’ (163-4). Rather tattooes are evidence of an exterior
individuality that is constructed through relations with others. – A specific kind of
individual partially created through the relations that are realized in the making of the
tattooes. He has already described ceremonies surrounding puberty and marriage and the
girl’s reproductive potential, for the tattooes indicate clan affiliation, relations with maternal
kin, and ancestral spirits both human and animal, made for public viewing through a process
of concealing and revelation (154-5).

As he summarizes it, ‘[T]o read the photograph as a representation that stands for an
individual is to ignore the ways in which individuality is constructed in Hula culture’ (164).
For Melanesians, individuality lies in relationships. [nb This is a clever formula on Wright’s

22
part.] Apropos ‘pre-figured features’ (MS 1997), Hula tattooes do not represent relations
with others but are there because of them; they are the effect of mobilizing relations.

Photographs have similar effects, he goes on to say (quoting a study in New Britain), like
the initiation objects placed on the person, which can be said to memorialize the identities of
past owners, the initiate’s identities being augmented by ancestral ones (165). Photographs
bring into being other selves. In some respect, says Wright (165) we treat photos as Hula
treat tattooes when we see them as containers of relations. O.K.! BUT, he asks (166)
‘would a photographic representation of Hula individuality look like?’

You see the point of the question. Not just a matter of putting the photographs into ‘a
social context’. It may be rather a question about how people ‘own’ others – specific others
may ‘own’ the image of the person [KLU: 129]. The decorations reify of the body [KLU:
121] and objectify certain relations – other relations eclipsed in the enactment of the one: a
‘clansman’ etc. [eg Omie owners p. 144-5: the image of a person that has come from a
parent and is reproduced in a child.]

SLIDE 49 Assembling feathers (AJS)

Caption (top): Clansmen collect feathers from many sources Photo: A Strathern

O.K. So what if the photographs of decorated persons are not photographs of individuals
in the way we might think, but records of the reification of the body that is a sign of certain
relations that make the person? A photograph of a dancer would not be a portrait in the
EA sense. Well, then, what does this do for how people might regard the interests of others
– such a museum curators, the curious, an ignorant audience. Is ignorance in fact the best
‘protection’: what is created out of specific relations only has meaning for specific relations?
Maybe, in Hagen eyes, a generalized audience is neither here nor there. (I should make the
obvious point that not a question of revealing something that should be kept secret – such
as cult activity.)

But see what has also happened. This discussion is a criticism of the very area where I had
felt most comfortable about taking pictures – when people are decorated to be seen, i.e.
are on display!

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How on earth do I begin thinking of the pictures I took of people not displaying – as in the
woman with averted gaze selling sweet potatoes?

SLIDE 50 Repeat of slide 44

Or are these questions all blown away by what has happened since – familiarity with the
technology of social media / people’s adoption of EA conventions of photography / new
kinds of individuals created through new kinds of relations? Were the biases of 50 years
ago already then running in parallel with new practices, an already transformed political-
economy, consumerism, changing ideas of ownership, the visual conventions of primary and
secondary education, church iconography, and so forth? …

Does that throw me back into EA practices? Is the picture of the lady with sweet potatoes
to be regarded just like the anonymous, generic someone, reproduced in the NCOB guide to
the report?
SLIDE 51 Repeat of slide 24

End

POSTSCRIPT
NB If asked: photos of me in the field

To be appended
Three photographs selected; to be made up as SLIDES.
52, 53, 54

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