Essentially what the dancer is, in this case, he starts to sing a series of place
names, which then identify in the audience someone who has passed away.
So, if my brother has passed away, this guy will sing places associated
with my brother. I will recognise suddenly that that's the case and be
overcome with grief, right. You get a path, a movement, along which a life has been
embedded in terms of place and suddenly you recognise that that life is the
close kin, friend, and you become overcome with grief and you pick up one of these
torches in your anger at being assaulted by the pain and push it into
the shoulder of the dancer and cry over the dancer, sometimes holding, so this
highly cathartic ritual and the idea is that basically brothers should burn each
other... but then, even more intensely, it's best if the person you're
burning in this dancer is your namesake. So, yeah, this is the strongest
relationship of identity that you could have in this culture but at the same
time, and this is important, the person themselves is transformed in,
particularly in this case, into a spirit which actually is providing the song.
So in a sense, the namesake, your identity,
is absent in the
same way that the person you're mourning for is your identity but also absent, right.
So it's mapped into this beautiful sonic representation of some of those
places, which... the song also amplifies bird calls
and other elements of the rainforest and so intensifies poetically the experience,
the everyday experience of life, into a poetic form and it's not just a sonic,
it's also aromatic because there are special substances that are placed on
the fronds here that have this intense aroma. The sound sort of comes from all
over and different levels and, by being slightly out of kilter, though where the
the singer, the lead singer, and the chorus creates this similar aesthetic
effect -- that you're not quite sure where the sound is coming from. It's not
simply coming from... So there are very specific aesthetic echoes of the
rainforest.
I'm Michael Wood and I'm an Anthropologist working here at JCU and I
spend a lot of time working with communities in PNG and have worked with
the Camorra speakers in the Western Province of PNG
for many years now, coming up to 30 maybe even 40 if I think about it. The capacity
of Anthropology or Ethnography to answer philosophical questions (or raise them, I
think would be better) is quite intense because the fundamental
understandings of philosophy are about what it is to be human and what
processes are fundamental to the construction of knowledge by humans. And
equally you confront slightly different ideas and concerns, which generate out
again the capacity to force you to rethink those kind of philosophical
assumptions you might have. Ethnography and fieldwork do that.
I started out my undergraduate career was as an economist. I had managed to top
and get in the top 10 of the state whenever I did my high school
certificate and so I was destined to become an economist and I sat in a
introductory lecture where the Professor who, just at one point I think,
it's hard to explain, he was talking about a society and, yeah, as a result of
that lecture and sitting in a bus I realised I was in a society -- there was
something wider than just me and my experience but structuring organisation
of that experience through collective rituals like sitting on a bus and, yeah,
this conjunction of my experience with this lecture was, yeah, like a moment -- a
real moment of illumination -- about the possibilities of this entity
(call it culture, call it social structure, call it rules) but that was just really
again fascinating and I think Anthropology is in a sense a theory of
those possibilities of those kinds of collective experiences. A collective
organisation and your personal experience of them and the
resonance between. The fact that there are these, at that point in particular,
structuring principles really interested me. The radical difference that
Anthropology tries to deal with as really important -- that studying your own
society is like reading a novel. It's easy in some sense, right, a Western novel
right, but when you are dealing with a group of people who are potentially
quite different to the traditions you're aware of that is
just so much more interesting. So from my bus trip to, I suppose, the
possibilities of understanding something that is very different to your everyday
normal experience.