One of the arguments of my work is that Papua New Guineans are creative, innovative people and not the type of folks to try to carry on their traditions unchanged ‘from time immemorial’. Anthropologists reading this will know that I am not the first person or the last person to make this argument, although it often is in tension with certain forms of the Papua New Guinean imagination for which ‘traditional culture’ is often imagined to be ‘intact’. One well-known anthropologist who has made this argument much more persuasively, and much longer ago than me is inimitable Roy Wagner. Shortly before I left PNG I reread his book The Invention of Culture for the first time since I started graduate school and was blown away by its power and insight in a way that I don’t remember being when I was a first-year graduate student.
And so, in honor of Roy I wanted to share some pictures that I took recently. These come from a social club in Port Moresby, specifically from floor-to-ceiling murals each of which is about two meters long. There are three in the set. They are ‘dogs playing poker’ murals, except it is not ‘poker’ but ‘snooker’. And instead of — or rather, I should say, in addition to — wearing bits and pieces of Victorian apparel, some of them are wearing traditional PNG bilas.
One dog with a bilum and another with a pig’s tooth necklace:
Here’s a closeup of the necklace dog:
And the bilum dog:
And here is my favorite: a dog with a bilum cap.
This is a little too rich for me to untangle. There is something going on with race here (white attire/traditional bilas/anthropomorphism) that I don’t understand. Or not. Looks like its hard to make a bridge with your fingers when you have a paw — that guy with the necklace is shooting across his forearm.
Creativity: It Happens.
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