Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2012. 205 pp. (Figures.) US$74.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-61132-056-5.
Until about the middle of the last century, chapters on “material culture” were a common component of ethnographies. Often this inclusion was related to many early anthropologists’ close association with museums, but it also fit into anthropology’s larger agenda, that of cataloguing and ultimately accounting for the myriad lifeways of the peoples of the world. Things changed, and by the close of the twentieth century it was difficult to identify what, if any, agenda characterized the discipline.
Today, while art museums and galleries continue to draw admirers of masks and carvings, it is unusual to find analytic as well as descriptive attention to “mundane objects,” those artifacts “that would not find their way into museum cases and that are uninteresting to most anthropologists, sociologists, and historians, but nonetheless lie at the heart of the systems of thought and practices of their makers and users” (13). His particular interest here is in garden fences, eel traps, drums, and magic bundles as these are fashioned and used by the Baruya and Ankave people, speakers of languages of the Angan family in Papua New Guinea, among whom Lemonnier (often in collaboration with Pascale Bonnemère) has resided for years, producing a rich body of sensitive, yet rigorous, ethnography.
We learn here a great deal about the manufacture and use of such objects—not only those of the Baruya and Ankave, but also the model racing cars that captivated youths such as Lemonnier in the 1950s but still enthrall matured baby boomers—though such documentation is mainly the context for a larger point: “What these particular artefacts wordlessly evoke deals with basic rules, tensions, or unspeakable aspects of social relations that pervade people’s everyday lives, their strategies, material practices, anxieties, and hopes” (13).
Here the reader initially will recognize the functionalist premise that has been a subtext of most social/cultural anthropology for almost a century, viz., that societies and cultures are systems, with each component both reflecting and reinforcing others. Thus, the design of their garden fences “communicate the nonspoken ultimate interest of the Baruya … in cooperation”; an Ankave eel trap “refers simultaneously to primordial violent sexuality, patrilineal rights, and mortuary rituals,” and the magic bundles used in male initiation rites manifest “the link between the Anga’s formidable past and the present, and are the basis for their gender relations, collective force, and ultimate fate” (20)
But Lemonnier wants to say more than this, to stress “what needs to be understood; namely, how objects, gestures, or physical activity participate in human relations in a way that nothing else but material actions and artefacts can achieve” (77), or, in another formulation, that “some objects, their physical properties, and their material implementation are not only wordless expressions of fundamental aspects of a way of living and thinking; they are sometimes the only means of rendering visible the pillars of social order that are otherwise blurred, if not hidden” (13; emphasis added). Further, he wants us to see “why material objects and actions lend themselves particularly well to blending thoughts, which in turn allows the actors to mentally grasp cardinal social relations and values underlying their daily life” (14). Thus, “mundane objects” do not merely illustrate the functionalist premise, but validate it in a special, maybe unique, way.
It is true that Baruya fences serve the utilitarian purpose of keeping pigs out of gardens, but they are “too sturdy to be mundane” (21); rather, underscoring a purported Baruya cultural emphasis on cooperation (unlike their Ankave neighbours’ value placed on autonomy, “the built artefact is in itself an image of the strength and efficiency resulting from leaning on each other” (41). Similarly, the magic bundles employed in Ankave initiation rites contain ingredients that are commonplace, but in the right context, they serve as a “conjunction, [a] way of putting together myth, ritual action, and living things” (97).
What Lemonnier wants us to appreciate is the role of “mundane” objects as “resonators,” and that “(1) their making and using relate different domains of social life that are thus brought together in the actors’ mind in a unique way; (2) they are part of some kind of non-verbal communication; (3) that special communication concerns key values or key characteristics of particular social relations that are usually hidden, although they pervade everyday life; and (4) the very physicality of the artefacts in question is involved in that process and is not equated to a vague and putative link with their ‘materiality,’ but it can be precisely shown” (119). Such artefacts, in a simultaneous “gathering,” do not just “refer to” but “communicate something about the ensemble of these spheres of life that underlies all of them” (120).
Expanding upon the insights of colleagues who have proposed the power of art as being due to “the triggering of non-verbal messages resulting from the confluence of thoughts and domains of experience” (133), Lemonnier sees the same role being served by his less visually spectacular subjects: “these objects, plus their physical making and use, are not [just] another way to say things. They are a particular and unique way to deliver essential statements about the actors’ social lives by serving as reminders that some things and thoughts and hierarchies and histories and materials and gestures have to be thought together” (138).
It is difficult to predict what impact Lemonnier’s argument might have on future ethnographers. Given the “irruption of modernity” (122) that has transformed so much of the world, including neighbors of the Ankave, as both their material and cosmological inventories have altered radically, few may have the opportunity to enjoy this gifted ethnographer’s experience of being enmeshed in such a living system of objects and thoughts, although his disquisition on “Race Cars, Dinky Toys, and Aging Boys” (chapter 5) gives one hope.
Terence E. Hays
Rhode Island College, Providence, USA
pp. 400-402