ABSTRACT
It is rare to make a gift of an ethnographic insight – especially one borrowed from the Barok – to the principal ethnographer of the people who speak that language in Papua New Guinea. 1 It may be foolhardy to borrow the work of those who came before you by imitating them. Forgive me. I want to speak in the key of the artists of that country’s region of central New Ireland, although I choose that of its more gently spoken northern people, the Mandak, for whom the will to create the beautiful sculptures known as Malanggan is never straightforward. They speak about their renowned creations in the most understated ways, telling us that the pinnacle of their ritual life, the final feast of the Malanggan, is ‘a little thing that we do that our ancestors once did too’. Their neighbours to the south, the Barok, however, are not so interested in gentle recollections that liberate into conversation so many of their memories of days long past (even as they create and embed those memories in new material forms). The Barok prefer to pre-empt their ancestors in a bit of serious play. Nonetheless, for both, it is the case that they believe that the Malanggan remains inviolate, along with the memory of the ancestors, and that these images are only a beautiful memory of what the contemporary sculptures could be at their best. The Mandak and the Barok each remember and style their sculptures differently, one gently the other brashly, but each is poor imitation of all that went before. Here, I choose the Mandak style of making understatements about the work of imitating sculpture, and explore the power of not saying too much.
