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.
