TEST1 The Echo of Things: The Lives of Photographs in the Solomon Islands
240
TEST1 The Echo of Things: The Lives of Photographs in the Solomon Islands
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822377412 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/31/2018 |
| Series: | Objects/Histories |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 39 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Christopher Wright is Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. From 1992 until 2000, he was Photographic Officer at the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. He is a coeditor of the books Between Art and Anthropology and Contemporary Art and Anthropology.
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The Echo of Things
THE LIVES OF PHOTOGRAPHS IN THE SOLOMON ISLANDS
By Christopher Wright
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2013 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5496-3
CHAPTER 1
Tie Vaka—
The Men of the Boat
From the beginning of any regular European contact with the people of the western Solomons in the early and mid-1800s, headhunting—an important ritual, social, and economic feature of local cultures—was key to the kinds of imaginings that informed textual and visual representations of Roviana and its people. From the other side, referring to them as tie vaka—the men of the boat—Roviana people treated these visitors as potential trading partners, and they were not subject to any particularly strong prohibitions or forms of religious incorporation. Instead they were dealt with in a largely pragmatic way. Perceptions among members of both groups were heavily influenced by specific instances of contact, which were relatively sporadic, and for Europeans the encounter with headhunting was a powerful and enduring factor in how Roviana people were seen. Following a visit to Simbo Island in the western Solomons in 1844, the European trader Andrew Cheyne wrote this account: "[I] visited the Head-chief's village this afternoon on the low island, and on landing the first thing that met my view, was the wall plates of a large canoe house strung with human heads, of both sexes, and apparently of all ages. Many of them appeared to have been recently killed, and the marks of the tomahawk were seen in all" (quoted in Shineberg 1971, 303–4).
Cheyne was undoubtedly playing to the European abhorrence of headhunting, and it is unlikely that he could have discerned the gender of victim's skulls or that any skull displayed was "recent"—all skulls were ritually prepared prior to display. But his account does demonstrate the emotive language used to describe headhunting—language that defined colonial visions of a perceived Roviana savagery. However, despite featuring so largely in written accounts of all kinds, from logbook entries to published volumes, headhunting features in few actual photographs. There were of course many problems associated with obtaining any such images, especially the available technology and the impossibility of taking photographs in the dark interiors of canoe houses (paele) where skulls were ritually displayed. 1 But, importantly, it was also necessary for the Europeans to negotiate any access to evidence of headhunting with Roviana people themselves. In the absence of direct evidence, photographs of Roviana warriors holding spears or axes and wicker shields, or of the large canoes (tomoko) used in headhunting raids (but also for trading expeditions), often operated as visual stand-ins for headhunting.
The only photograph of skulls taken during a headhunting raid that I have come across in my research is by Charles Woodford (figure 1.1). Woodford became the first Resident Commissioner of the British Solomon Islands protectorate in 1896, but in early October of 1886, he was visiting Roviana Lagoon as a naturalist and geographer and stayed for two weeks to collect specimens of fauna for the Natural History Museum in London. As well as taking his own photographs, Woodford collected those of others, and his collection "was certainly the best ever obtained in the islands," according to Henry Brougham Guppy, who was commenting on Woodford's lecture to the Royal Geographical Society on March 26, 1888 (quoted in Woodford 1888, 376). However, to date I have been unable to locate any trace of the collection. In the accounts he published two years after his visit to Roviana in the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, Woodford notes that Roviana people "are the most notorious head-hunters and cannibals," and that during his stay he visited a small island in the lagoon, Hombuhombu, that, although occupied by a European trader, "belongs to the natives of Sisieta; they will not sell it, as they use it for their cannibal feasts. I was told that six bodies were eaten here a fortnight before my visit" (1888, 360). Woodford proceeded to the island of Nusa Roviana, where he found that most of the men were away on a headhunting raid to Santa Isabel. He then "photographed the interior of a tambu house, the post of which was carved to represent a crocodile. Along the rafters was a row of heads. [He] also took a photograph of a collection of sacred images, near to which was a heap of skulls, upon every one of which [he] noticed the mark of the tomahawk" (360). Woodford also wrote of visiting Inqava's paele in Sisiata: "The house contains two large canoes and several smaller canoes. In racks above my head are stowed away all sorts of gear; fishing nets ... are suspended by wooden hooks from the roof. Bones of fish, pigs' jawbones, and turtles' heads are hung along the rafter of one side, and from the other a row of eight human heads look down upon me" (Woodford 1890b, 152).
During the remainder of his two weeks in the lagoon, Woodford reports that he saw an additional eight heads in another canoe house, and thirteen in yet another. And, when the Nusa Roviana men returned from Santa Isabel, they brought with them the heads of three men and two women. Woodford recounts, "during the fortnight that I spent in the lagoon I heard of no less than thirty-one heads being brought home" (152). Woodford also comments on the cannibalism associated with headhunting: "Not only will the New Georgian natives eat the bodies of those killed in battle, or prisoners, they will exhume the bodies of those recently buried for their disgusting purpose." He goes on to say that cannibalism was "a matter of constant occurrence" and headhunting was "a perfect passion" (1888, 374). Although, as Woodford points out, various punitive raids had been carried out against Roviana villages by British gunships in an attempt to suppress the headhunting, and several white men had recently been murdered on the island of Rendova; heads were required by a local prominent banara (chief) for the launching of a new canoe. Woodford was so concerned about the level of headhunting that he wrote to Sir John Bates Thurston, the British High Commissioner for the Western Pacific, on the matter. Returning to Roviana in March 1887, Woodford stayed with two local banara, Inqava and Wonge, and he reported that six heads had recently been brought back from Bogotu on Santa Isabel Island, one of which was the head of a native teacher from the Melanesian Mission located there (Woodford 1888, 361).
William Arens has famously argued that the "myth" of cannibalism was a device that justified racism and imperialism and was a means of establishing difference, and Peter Hulme has suggested that the figure of the cannibal served as an Other for the modern subject as well as a legitimating trope for cultural appropriation (Arens 1979; Hulme 1986). The cannibal is the inverse of the European subject, but the cannibal also represents the dangers of reverting to a state of barbarism. Bronwen Douglas discusses French reactions to an eighteenth-century Kanak reenactment of cannibalism: "We cannot know whether the French reactions were those intended by the Kanak protagonists—textual inscription was certainly not one of them—but I am convinced the performance was consciously intimidatory and contestatory, a deliberate and successful psychological assault to exploit the evident horror of cannibalism previously expressed by these strangers" (1999, 81). The Kanak tease the French colonialists, feeling their arms and legs as a way of threatening a more powerful enemy and asserting their own agency and sense of humor. Douglas suggests that "merely to condemn colonial texts and deplore their tropes as repulsive is to re-empower them and endorse the continued, if now largely negative, discursive hegemony of colonialism" (92). In considering colonial visions of Roviana headhunting, we must remain aware of the possibilities of local concerns and local performances—notoriety might have been something that local Roviana polities actively aspired to.
So although, from one perspective, Woodford's photograph of skulls displayed in the interior of a canoe house on Nusa Roviana provides an illuminating illustration of so-called Roviana savagery, the canoe house is also a Roviana space of display. The skulls are lined up in the rafters for visitors to view, and they demonstrate the efficacy of the local banara. Woodford complains that although the banara allowed him to photograph this display of skulls, they did not allow him to photograph any of the "sacred images" on or near shrines (1888, 360).
Showing Woodford's photograph to Roviana people in 2000 and 2001 provoked a range of ambivalent reactions. Although the feats of headhunting ancestors belong to the taem bifo (time before)—they are a feature of the "darkness" of Roviana life before the arrival of Methodist missionaries in 1902—there was also a sense of pride in the fact that their ancestors and banara were "strong" and had mana (efficacy). Woodford's photograph was intended to reveal the savagery of headhunting, but for Roviana people, the display of enemy skulls demonstrated the power and efficacy of their banara. At the time the photograph was taken, Woodford's horror may have been seen as a positive outcome of the encounter, and in 2000 it evoked a range of emotional responses, from pride to apprehension to amusement.
Woodford's photograph was evidence of headhunting, and although he did not include the image in his book A Naturalist among the Headhunters, published in 1890, it was an object destined for the collection or the archive. Given that the publication and circulation of accounts and representations of Roviana headhunting were also intended to legitimate increasing British juridical and administrative interest in the area, it seems strange that Woodford's photograph was not published widely. Engravings based on some of his photographs, including one of the exterior of a Roviana paele, appeared in the Illustrated London News on February 23, 1889, where they were printed to look like actual photographic prints that you could hold in your hands. Woodford was a naturalist and geographer who amassed large collections of Solomon Islands flora and fauna—more than seventeen thousand specimens—which are now housed in the Natural History Museum in London. He preserved the specimens collected in Roviana by placing the dead bodies of mammals and reptiles in glass jars of formaldehyde and pinning the bodies of butterflies, moths, and insects to boards—a different, yet strangely related, display of efficacy to that involved in headhunting.
In 1907, the nineteenth-century explorer and travel writer Ernest Way Elkington accounted for the savage practices of headhunting and cannibalism as a kind of "religious mania," and he compared Roviana people to the "prophets and priests of old" who believed in sacrifice (Elkington 1907, 97, 95). He argued that "they do not kill and eat human beings for the sake of their taste, or because they are hungry, as some writers will insist on having us believe. The cause is farther back than this; in nearly every case when human beings are killed and eaten, it is on occasions when such a sacrifice is necessary, according to the natives' religious beliefs" (95). Although Elkington comments that headhunting is "losing favour, particularly with the younger generation," he makes numerous references to the "duplicitous nature" of Roviana people in relation to this savagery: "When standing before a chief, who is smiling at you and treating you to all the courtesies his nature can conjure up[,] ... it is difficult to realise that the same chief a week before was on the warpath, concocting the most devilish schemes, and carrying out the most fiendish atrocities on men, women, and children in his pursuit of heads" (97).
Another recurrent theme in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century accounts of Roviana, both visual and textual, is an attempt to establish a firm connection between people's appearances and their intentions. Roviana people look savage and behave accordingly. But there is also an acknowledgment that appearances can be deceptive. Henry Guppy, who visited the Solomons as a surgeon aboard HMS Lark in 1881, writes of a headhunter called Mai from Santa Anna island: "The cunning and ferocity which marked his dealings were sufficiently indicated in his countenance" (1887, 19). The revelation of interiority through external appearances and characteristics was a common concern shared by a nascent anthropological science and also by popular nineteenth-century movements such as phrenology. The revelation was also one of the central concerns of photography of that period, both in terms of its popular use in portraits and in the service of anthropology. Johann Casper Lavater's science of physiognomy had an enormous impact on nineteenth-century anthropological and photographic desires for legible bodies and faces: "Lavater suggested that individuals' moral beauty could be judged on the basis of external characteristics.... Certain structural features of the face were codified in a system which permitted the literal and precise 'reading' of character and disposition from external features. 'The countenance is the theatre on which the soul exhibits itself,' he proclaimed" (Pinney 1997, 51).
Lavater was interested in discerning "national physiognomies," and this was certainly one of the concerns of early photographers in Roviana, but the reading of character from external appearances also informed more popular accounts. Elkington met the banara Inqava during his time in Roviana:
The most notorious head-hunter in later years was Ingova of Rubiana lagoon.... He is old and wizened now, and his hand trembles as he lifts the glass of grog he begs from you, after telling a yarn of the good old days....
... His feeble limbs, his shaking hand, his bloodshot eyes....
Years ago Ingova's Euro [possibly a canoe house] was hung with skulls, hundreds of them strung in the cross-beams with staring, vacant eyeholes, which looked out of nothing and yet seemed to see everything. Their drooping lower jaws, showing sets of white teeth which glistened in the rays of the moon. (Elkington 1907, 98)
This visually descriptive passage contains many elements of European fantasies of headhunting, and here external appearances also form a narrative of historical change. The "dark" past is required to remain visible, a necessary counterpoint to the present. Elkington also points out the disastrous effects of alcohol on native populations, and his description of Inqava as old and malaria-ridden is intended to contrast with his, by then firmly established, reputation as the king of Roviana.
The photograph of Inqava (figure 1.2) standing next to his wife is one of several of Inqava taken by the Methodist missionary Reverend George Brown on a visit to Roviana in 1899, which he took with an intent to establish a mission there. Brown met the European trader Frank Wickham as well as Inqava, and Brown reported a visit to Rendova where he was told stories of cannibalism and headhunting. The photograph of Inqava does show an old man by Roviana standards, but according to Brown, the violence of the recent past is lurking just below the surface: "Mr. H. Cayley-Webster, writing of his visit to the Rubiana Lagoon as late as 1898, says; 'These natives are not only head-hunters and cannibals, but they make no secret of it. They are the most treacherous of all the people in the Southern Seas, and when apparently on the most friendly terms, are only awaiting a favourable opportunity to catch the stranger unawares, and to add one more head to their already huge collection.' These wild people are absolutely untouched by any Christian agency" (Australian Methodist Missionary Review, December 4, 1901, 4).
Both the missionaries and the colonial government in waiting had a stake in establishing a belief in Roviana savagery. When Sir John Bates Thurston visited Roviana as part of a tour of the Solomon Islands in 1894, just after the declaration of the islands as a British Protectorate, it was in his role as Commissioner of the Western Pacific, and he was there to preside over a court case brought by Inqava against a European trader named Edmund Peter Pratt over a land claim (Scarr 1967). This was a test case for the newly established jurisdiction of the Protectorate. Thurston was a keen amateur photographer who took many photographs of Fiji, and he also brought his camera to Roviana. One of the photographs he took during his stay (figure 1.3) depicts two lines of Roviana people arranged for the camera in a style that is typical of nineteenth-century colonial encounters with native populations. The taking of the photograph is itself an enactment of colonial power, and the imposition of order seems to suggest an imperial gaze. It is an official document and, like the written proceedings of the court, it is a record destined for the archive. But other photographs taken by Thurston at the same time complicate this gaze.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Echo of Things by Christopher Wright. Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ixAcknowledgments xiii
Prologue 1
1. Tie Vaka—The Men of the Boat 19
2. "A Devil's Engine" 59
3. Photographic Resurrection 111
4. Histories 163
Epilogue 191
Notes 195
References 205
Index 217