Mimesis and Pacific Transcultural Encounters by Jeannette Mageo Elfriede Hermann

Author:Jeannette Mageo, Elfriede Hermann [Jeannette Mageo, Elfriede Hermann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785336249
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Berghahn Books, Incorporated
Published: 2017-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Magic of Appropriation

Conceived as renditions of “Trobriandness” for a non-Trobriand Other, tokwalu need to cast an image that is simultaneously familiar and original. They need to look Trobriand enough, similar to each other and remain “understandable” for outsiders, but given the competition they also need to “stand out” (see Silverman 1999: 62). The view resulting from this dialectic is pieced together by Trobrianders through a diffuse dialogue with buyers in which their own desires and those of dimdims (as foreigners are known in Kilivila, the language of the Trobriand Islands) meet in the form of tokwalu. Artifacts are made so as to transcend local taxonomies, conforming to globalized, Western categories as these are conceived by Trobrianders.

The locals’ fabrication of translocal items embodies an indigenous technique—in its most ample sense—of engagement with and appropriation of an increasingly present Western culture and some of its most pervasive elements and ideas (Foster 1999: 148). If a tokwalu is a composite of images, it does not encompass Trobriand images only. Carvings for tourists also incorporate representations of global mass culture as Trobrianders and their fellow Papua New Guineans visualize them (see also Foster 2002: 134 ff; West 2012; Lohmann this volume). Carvings, thus, are repositories of aspirations and the material agents that facilitate the deployment of social relations beyond Kiriwina to achieve these aspirations.

These extended social relations are framed by a postcolonial “dialectic of the modern” (LiPuma 2000: 7) that, for Melanesia (as for other places in the Pacific and beyond), seems to oscillate between acculturation (Robbins and Wardlow 2005) and the maintenance of tradition as resistance to outsiders (Thomas 1992). As Mageo has pointed out in the Introduction to this volume, this oscillation is characterized by an intercultural conversation between Others. This talking back and forth elicits cultural appropriations that tend to be carried out in images and symbols, some of which take the form of intracultural reappropriations when the symbol is drawn from the past within the same cultural tradition. When trying to understand cultural encounters, symbols and images become key.

Our perception of the world and in particular how we make sense of it is arguably done through the creation and appropriation of symbols (Wagner 1981). Accordingly, it is possible to look at meaning as a particular type of perception (Wagner 1986: 13). With symbols as the necessary mediators used to perceive the world, the act of understanding is achieved through a dialectic enacted between two spaces: that of microcosmic, individual perception and its expanded conventionalized collectivity. The object we perceive—or “image,” in Wagner’s terms—is a “point metaphor” that needs to be apprehended in its relation to the interpretation we make of it—the “frame metaphor” or the elements that make up the object/image (ibid.: 29–31). This dialectic lays its own tracks, so to speak, when it is resolved in what Wagner calls “obviation” by incorporating newly invented symbols into the all-binding conventionalized frame we refer to as “culture.” Obviation is the “dialectic resolution of mediation” (ibid.: xx).

Exposed to outside influences for over

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