ABSTRACT
In February 2003, I sent an email to Brother Pat Howley, a Marist missionary and co-founder of the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Peace Foundation Melanesia, one of many groups involved in the work of reconciliation and rebuilding civil society in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea (PNG), following a decade of violent conflict:
Dear Brother Pat,
I wonder if you could offer some advice. I’m an academic working in the Department of Performance Studies at Sydney University. It’s a department where we study theatre but also dance, sport, festivals, rituals and so on—something like a cross between a Theatre Studies, a Sociology and an Anthropology department.
I’m looking to develop a post-doctoral research project into ‘restorative justice’, ideally by comparing and contrasting the way it works in an urban, Western setting (like the New South Wales juvenile justice system) to the way it looks in a rapidly changing Melanesian society. (There’s a significant sentimental reason for focusing on Bougainville which I’ll come back to in a minute.)
Obviously restorative justice is not what we normally think of as performance. The participants are not actors in a play engaging with an audience sitting in neat rows in a theatre auditorium. There is so much more at stake for all the participants in a restorative justice ceremony. Nevertheless, it does seem to me that the way in which the participants conduct themselves in this event—the way they dress, the way they speak, the kind of gestures of reconciliation they make, the place where they agree to meet—all of these ‘performance’ factors are closely related to the social healing process that the event is meant to foster. There’s no way restorative justice will work if the participants simply go through the motions: their performance is going to be carefully assessed by all those present. It seems to me that there is a lot to learn about these different societies—urban Sydney and the villages of Bougainville—by studying the different ways they enact such ceremonies of reconciliation.
