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Public art as the ‘taonga’ of socialist democracy:
Remembering the equality of the social trust under the new social contact in Papua New Guinea
(Karen Sykes. Accepted for publication in Ethnos)
Abstract
Malanggans, ordinarily painted and used at funerals are displayed, unpainted in New Irelands “international” airport. There they witness the return of dead political leaders returned to their home-clans for burial. Malanggans themselves in funeral use re-center the dead in kin-networks. In the airport, they inspire me to ponder (as perhaps they ponder) the failure of PNG socialist democracy, which I elucidate using Mauss’s concept of taonga, that was to be the post-colonial nation-state. The article draws on Benjamin to show that ‘brushing memory against the grain’ exposes how the transformation of the values of socialist democracy to those of the neoliberal state occurred through many imperfect transactions. As a value equality was ‘known’ best as a fleeting memory, and elusive experience which the memory holds more completely, thatn the current era The changes in the display of the art where made to fit with the purposes of the new airport terminal shows, in even the most personal terms, just how fleeting were the promises of independence.
[Key Words: Equality, Value, Social Contract]
“Gold has a price, but jade is priceless” Chinese saying.
Displayed in an airport in Kavieng, New Ireland, ritual objects called malanggans watch the body of a local parliamentarian as it returns from Port Moresby to his people for burial. In ritual life, in active single days of use, painted malanggans enable the distribution of personhood into wider social networks. But the unpainted, deracinated malanggans of the airport display bear witness to disrupted social networks. Indeed, in their afterlife as public art and while witnessing the return of a local politician, perhaps they chart the failure of the social trust once promised by the post-colonial nation-state.
Taking Marcel Mauss’s work to the postcolonial South Pacific, I aim to understand the changing mutual confidence created by the delivery of social services as the state’s social trust with its citizens. Henare (2005) argues that the social trust between state and people in Aotearoa/ New Zealand was instantiated and created by the treaty of Waitanga, a document authored between the colonial state and its people and treated thereafter as a sacred text. The treaty is not a ‘social contract’. Instead she describes it as a loose agreement, wherein the documents come to have talisman like qualities with the power fasten Maori and European interests to the common cause of peaceful co-residence. Using the notion of taonga in the neocolonial, where it is still found as powerful ‘greenstone’ in state and public ceremonies, echoes the processes where by Maori leaders offered stones as markers of peaceful co-residence between clans. Long associated with funerary exchanges, memorials and money, Maori taonga, like East Asian funeral jades, are powerful emblems of equality, social trust and regeneration.
Henare argues that analysing governance in terms of the taonga is neither westernization, nor anthropological conceit. It is a way of foregrounding the nature of the middleground between Anglophone law, anthropology, and indigenous concepts of of the political spirit that infuses social life (2006, 62). Like Henare, I elaborate Mauss’s famous insights into the Taonga wherein he understood that the gift, namely the taonga, constituted a form of bond between individuals, clans, and villages. I am interested in moments when Pacific Islanders remember independence as a kind of non-contractual form of constitutional relationship between political leaders, civil servants and people, one that can be enabled by an equitable redistribution of wealth in order to create the independent nation state. Different from Henare, I examine these moments when a shared memory of the independence era erupts and disrupts the mundane life in the postcolonial world, and the sacred trust is remembered, and finds expression in the public arts of a nation.
It should be noted that the taonga is sometimes known to work like a talisman, it symbolizes a sacred trust that can be captured as easily in a state document as it is in a stone carving in Aotearoa/ New Zealand. I suggest that the wooden statuary, the malanggan described here as public art, are a version of that loosely made agreement to trust in in the social relations of state and citizens in Papua New Guinea. If that is so, then it is not too fanciful to see in the wistful malanggans’ witness, a reflection on another object’s demise, the demise of the taonga? Does the malanggans’ own beauty arise from their figuration of a postcolonial but pre neo-liberal life, invoking kin-ties and public services?
Equality as a value in democratic states
There is an enigma about the concept of equality in the democratic state that also is integral to its legitimacy in the postcolonial world. How did the distribution of services that once made the social trust between leadership and citizen later twist into an economic agreement between creditor state and debtor citizen?[i] I focus on the memory of equality at the time of independence, and analyze it in the light of contemporary ambivalence felt towards both the aging nationalists of the postcolonial era and the political legacy of independence. I have chosen to examine the funerary arrangements for some of the politicians of the nationalist period in Papua New Guinea (PNG), a Pacific Island nation that came to independence in 1975. There, the changing face of equality is recalled in public art and ritual sculptures that are made to host the return of the body of the politician to his home province for a village funeral. I explore how these also bear witness to the changing face of equality in the nation. Although these public ceremonials held in the provinces have lost the lustre that makes funerary rituals effective mediums for regeneration of clan life, they have become images that capture past times. These images also move people to raise criticisms of the current times. I conclude that continuity with the past is not the main concern of the participants; they use malanggans as a value-form of the more intangible concept of equality, a concept that is currently under revision and review in the region. The image of equality, once lost, has become an aspiration.
It is not surprising that the value-forms of equality are under stress today. In the process of neo-liberalisation in the Asia-Pacific region the social contract has gradually become more restrictive of rights and freedoms, and now forms a rationale for political control, rather than a means of integrating political society (Kwon 2010, Povinelli 2002, and differently Scott 2010). Equality has become the watch word of the neoliberals, but the sense of that amongst people who are the grassroots of the Pacific Island nations has not been fully charted. Grassroots concepts of equality have been central to many critical political theories, from Alexis De Toqueville (1935, 1840) on. Mauss (1925), Durkheim (1925), Dumont (1970) recognized the centrality of the concept equality to mid-twentieth century democracy. The concept of equality puzzled ethnographers of Melanesia who hoped to see an egalitarian lifestyle in the pre-independence era (Burridge 1964, Forge 1972, Jolly 1987, Shieffelin 1976, and differently A. Strathern 1986, M. Strathern 1987). In a different synthesis, Lederman (1986) shows how the axis of political equality operates in parallel to gender ideology. Later scholars point out that equality can be a subject of scholarship, even while equality’s ideological legacy becomes an impediment to scholarship in a liberal democracy (Robbins 1994). Oddly, where equality is a key value, people often fail to practice it. Is the problem that egalitarian relations are suppressed, or rather does the concept of equality elude the here and now, being nothing more than a beautiful memory of the quality of past experience?
Mauss (1925) understood the methodological dilemmas entailed in any attempt to discuss equality. He began by comparing the different forms of equality expressed by the competitive kula-exchange, the redistribution of potlatch gifts, and the delivery of the French social services in an evolutionary perspective. Over half a century later, in an article researched in the decade of independence, that Gregory (1980) argued that the different concepts of equality that Mauss discussed as kula and potlatch were correlates: kula was grounded on equality of competitive interests of individuals, and potlatch on equality of potential access to social relationships. Gregory argues that at the time of independence, the potlatch provided a mechanism of capital wealth destruction in PNG because it made competitive capital accumulation difficult: destruction reduced the media of exchange and increased the volume of potential social relationships. The present is different. At independence it had been true that Papua New Guineans measured equality as an outcome of the distribution of potential to be realized in social services, however, the new contract presumes a natural equality between citizens who each hold specific economic interests in exchange and each give these up in return for individual rights. I argue that Papua New Guineans’ contemporary political consciousness is shaped on shifting memories of the earlier social trust between renowned politicians and citizens; and I show that the politician’s funeral exposes variable images of equality.
Remembering the social trust under the new social contract
Mauss recognized that the reciprocal meeting of obligations constituted a social trust, as an extensively shared form of social cohesion, and he authored some of the most compelling political essays on this theme amongst others of his early 20th century political writings. He argued that the state’s obligation to deliver social services was the very core of democratic social and political development (Mauss 1925 (1990), Sahlins 1972, Gane 1998, Sykes 2009, Hart 2007). To put it in similar terms to those which Mauss used to express his thoughts about France in the beginning of the 20th century; the gift of social services from the state to the citizenry justified the state’s existence, and the citizens met their obligation to return that gift by supporting the development of the nation. Mauss’s early insight has inspired the launch of the Revue du Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales, (M.A.U.S.S.), a quarterly which aims to shift the scholarly assumptions of political theory in French Social Sciences. Its editor, Alain Caille extends Mauss’s political analysis to the French neoliberal state in the 21st century, and considers the delivery of social services to be a form of potlatch. In similar step, I take Mauss’s work to the postcolonial South Pacific, and aim to understand the social trust created by delivery of social services as the state’s social trust with its citizens. Like Mauss, I am interested in how taonga create a kind of non-contractual form of the constitutional relationships between its political leaders, civil servants and people that is enabled by an equitable redistribution of wealth in order to create the independent nation state.
For readers unfamiliar with them taonga include beautiful sacred jade objects, often made of ‘New Zealand greenstone’, and have a significant cultural and political heritage in the new Pacific states. The taonga were once used by Maori leaders to establish bonds of trust and peace between communities. They are now given as ceremonial gifts marking precious relations between the recipient, the people, and the leaders of Aotearoa/New Zealand. They continue to have constitutional significance in that country, where they were central to the nation’s independence from Britain, an agreement made with the Treaty of Waitangi that established co-residence of Maori with Europeans. Treaties, as students of postcolonial social and political history can report, are not contracts between newly arrived European settlers and long term ‘indigenous’ residents; instead the treaty entails responsibilities - each party must reach recognize the agreement if it is to be valuable to their mutual co-operation over time.
I am concerned here with the memory of that that social trust, ‘the taonga’ in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, where the trust between clans that fomented the idea of a wider social cohesion constitutive of the independent state became a ‘Melanesian Way’ (Narokobi 1976), a cultural form by which the state defined its imminent nationhood. That sacred trust, once built on cultural connections across the nation, has passed into memory. Cultural events in the present are praised for reinstating the best qualities of those seen at independence in times when the state is less able to support national celebrations of PNG arts: as many Papua New Guineans say, the present in PNG is not like the past, and contemporary people struggle with the loss of social services, confront the moral compromises that politicians made to remain in power, and rely upon a volatile state currency. This new ‘disordered economy’ entails social complexity that escapes conventional terms of analysis because within it many standards of value coexist and remain inconsistent and unstable (Gregory 1997, 2009). The negotiations which had been made at the time of independence have fallen into the shades of memory, and the social trust no longer ensures social democracy, a politics that it had once helped to foster in a region of 800 language groups. Critically, the transition to neo-liberalism by the later part of the 1990s relegated social and political democracy to no more than a beautiful memory.