ONE-LEGGED GENDER

MARILYN STRATHERN

Among the several contributions to the Hansons' recent aesthetics, we should not forget that vision is embodied. In
book on art and identity in Oceania (1990), three have that case, in what kinds of bodies are the eyes set? I ask the
prompted the present exercise. One is Schwimmer's question as a commentary on modernist assumptions that
reminder that LeVi-Strauss referred to art as miniaturization; run through the best efforts to avoid the traps of
the second is the Hansons' brief reference to Maori figures representationalism and constructionism.
which, posted at door lintels, appear to re-compose body It is no good simply putting the endless sophistication
features into n ew forms; and the third an essay by Smidt on of knowing displacement in the place of authoritative
'one-legged'figuresfrom the Middle Ramu (Kominimung) modeling nor, indeed, complaining about the
area of Papua New Guinea. This last is a rather odd but disembodiment of knowledge while imagining that all that
nonetheless evident presentation of bodily form — he is at issue is greater reflexivity. Nichols (1991:34) refers to
records the spontaneous gesture of a man who turned the body blindness which afflicts depersonalized film
himself into a one-legged figure to show Smidt what it all narration. It is an insistence on embodiment that marks
meant. certain feminist quests. Sometimes, though, that talk seems
Among the challenges that Papua New Guinean and to share with rather than obviate earlier representationalist
other Melanesian cultures present to visual interpretation, obsession with uncovering facts about the world.
people's play on form has also prompted the present Embodiment is brought from under the text, a hidden
exercise. Smidt's PapuaNew Guinean demonstrator dressed influence is made explicit, and analysis invites us to see what
up the part with considerableflamboyance,stuffing the end we did not see before. So such appeals to vision often serve
of an elongated apron into his mouth and jabbing at an as metaphors for greater awareness. What in that case does
unseen novice with the one-leggedfigurein his hands. This the anthropologist do in the face of deliberate provocations
was a display. A tension that runs through Melanesian to vision? The question would be particularly acute when
display is the tension between what is concealed and what s/he in being shown something is also being forced to see
is revealed. The invitation to 'see is an invitation to witness with one eye only—insofar as vision itself is, in the context
the appearance of a specific form, and to have in that sense of Melanesian display, rendered one-eyed.1
elicited it. The individual witness is inevitably placed by the I focus on the effects of particular kinds of displays,
performer, then into the position of seeing only what is such as accompany initiation practices or ceremonial
revealed. It is as though the witness 'sees' one side of the exchange, though I suspect the point could hold more
performer. Indeed, in the tales people in the Papua New generally across Melanesian social life. Display always
Guinea Highlands sometimes tell, one-sided creatures, selects out of multiple possibilities the one that is made
with back but no front, or with one eye rather than two, evident, and one only ever sees what is displayed. What is
occasionally flit across human vision. hidden is deliberately hidden, yet the secret may also be
Among the many refinements of analytical pleasure trivial: with the other eye one would simply see the other
that inspire the present wave of anthropological interest in side. That fact about vision is only ever made evident

42 Volume 9 Number 1 Spring 1993 Visual Anthropology Review

through embodiment. As a consequence, there is nothing supported his inference, dividing the carving into head,
in this visual play to be 'uncovered' about embodiment, torso and leg.
since the body is the medium. And deliberately incomplete. But, then, as Forge (1966) observed of the Abelam
So what is this one-sided body that is imagined as the men's house, it is all right to infer that the ridge pole of a
only kind of body that can be seen because it is the body that house is being treated as though it were a phallus, but what
elicits vision? It is a personified body; a person only sees is a phallus? We might ask what a leg is.
such a form as the outcome of relationships with others. It In another context, Forge comments on the fact that
is also a gendered body: a man or woman only ever sees it 'art' is supposed to have an effect. "One of the main
as male or female. functions ofthe [Abelam] initiation system with its repetitive
exposure of initiates to quantities of art is, I would suggest,
to teach the young men to see the art, not so that he may
ONE-LEGGED consciously interpret it but so that he is directly affected by
it" (1970: 290). The enthusiastic Kominimung who
One postulate of feminist critique is that it is a mistake to showed Smidt what the 'one-legged' figures meant was
imagine we know what a body is when we see one. Much showing him what they could do. These wooden figures
effort has gone into de-naturing the received 'body' of kicked. At one point in the course of male initiation,
Euro-American discourse, and what is thus brought to view novices are rounded up and prodded with them. Smidt has
is the trivialization or the aggrandizemen t of sexual identity a demonstration photograph (figure 1) ofa man in ordinary
(the effort is how to get 'between' gender obsession and dress jabbing such afigure— 'leg' extended — at the back
gender blindness). But in de-naturing the gender of he of a pretend novice. The figure held by one strikes the
body perhaps we ought also to de-nature body composition. other. On the previous page is the photograph (figure 2) of
I mean the arrangement of torso, limbs and organs. However the enthusiast who dressed up, his own two legs firmly
labile contemporary analytic strategies appear to be in planted wide apart. Among other decorations, on his chest
seeing or not seeing gender, their conclusions may already is a string bag with female breasts; nipples are also painted
be compromised by modernist and Euro-American on the wooden figure. In this guise, the performer makes
naturalizations that locate a principal source of sexual visible a powerful tambaran (ancestral spirit) as does the
difference in one part of the body. Sexual symbols tend to wooden figure itself. The figure is held in alignment with
be interpreted as phallic or vulvic/ uterine before they are the man's head and chest, projecting downward and out.
interpreted as anything else. The problem is not that Euro- Indeed, the photograph draws attention to the way that the
Americans cannot imagine almost any part of the body as gesture is, so to speak, repeated in the long, narrow apron
genitalized, but that it tends to be only the genitals that that forms a loop between the legs and is drawn up into the
migrate in their imagination. Melanesians present gender man's mouth. Visually, however, there is no direction to
through re-figurations of which genitalia are only a part — this wrapping— it could as well be coming from the mo uth
limbs, organs and insides, including the eye, may all migrate. as entering it. In the same way, the figure that is held by a
That figuration can as much be created between persons as body also finds its mark on a body: the novice presents his
made manifest in one. back (novices may be beaten on the back or chest, but
It was sheer inspiration on Smidt's (1990) part to call archetypically the back) to be kicked. So the figure in effect
the Kominimungfigures'one-legged.' However, I suspect points in either direction, from the body that projects it and
that it was for naturalistic and compositional reasons: these from the body that invites it.
carved wooden figures with a head and torso from which Elsewhere in the same volume, the Hansons (1990)
extends a single limb/ organ could be stood upright as draw on an analysis offered by Jackson (1972) to make a
though this extension were its (single) leg. In any case, the point about the otherwise awkward composition of Maori
carver whose activities Smidt followed seems to have lintel carvings over house doorways. What is disjoined is

MARILYN STRATHERN IS WILLIAM WYSE PROFESSOR OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE. PROBLEMS
IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENDER RELATIONS HAVE PREOCCUPIED HER SINCE HER LAST FIELDWORK IN P A P U A N E W GUINEA.
OTHERWISE HER INTERESTS ARE DIVIDED BETWEEN MELANESIAN ( WOMEN IN BETWEEN, 1972) AND BRITISH (KINSHIP AT THE CORE,
1981) ETHNOGRAPHY. THE GENDER OF THE GLFT ( 1 9 8 8 ) IS A CRITIQUE OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORIES OF SOCIETY AND GENDER
RELATIONS AS THEY HAVE BEEN APPLIED TO MELANESIA, WHILE AFTER NATURE: ENGUSH JONSHIP IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY
( 1 9 9 2 ) COMMENTS ON THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION AT HOME. A MONOGRAPH ON COMPARATIVE METHOD IS CALLED PARTIAL
CONNECTIONS (1991).

Visual Anthropology Review Volume 9 Number 1 Spring 1993 43

then conjoined in a new juxtaposition of elements. The the confined space of the structure of the door.2 If the
body is thereby reassembled in the same way as the person Melanesian examplefrom Kominimungis also the recreation
entering and coming from the house is redefined by his or of a body, there is no such architectural confinement. Yet
her actions. Such decomposition and recomposition 'may the one-legged figure, protruding from the head/ chest or
be taken to represent the individual's dual roles in society— jabbed at the back, is not extended into space either Rather,
as a tribal, public figure and as a domestic, private figure" it is specifically aimed at another. More than one person is
(1990:192). In the Maori case, the body is recreated within requiredforthis re-composition. I bfer that the composition

FIGURE ONE.

44 Volume 9 Number 1 Spring 1993 Visual Anthropology Review

is of relationships, and that the relationships contain and the novice. Yet while Euro-Americans would have little
create an internal difference: initiator and novice are trouble in considering the man and his wooden figure as a
differen dated by die kicking act. pair of sorts, they might less easily see that the wooden
If novice and initiator are to naturalistic eyes evidendy figure itself, with its own head and torso and the organ that
two persons, I want to suggest that die duo is also there in extends from it, is also a set of relationships. But in fact any
one. The man who holds up the one-leg parallel to his body singular figure is already a composite. The man who grips
is paired with it, in the sense that both present tambaran to his penis-covering between his teeth conveys that. Like the

FIGURE TWO.

Visual Anthropology Review Volume 9 Number 1 Spring 1993 45

ancestral monsters that elsewhere in Papua New Guinea is being presented: s/he does not see her or himself, for s/
may appear now as swallowing and now as regurgitating he is coerced (like the novice) into having the sight (a view)
(initiates), persons cannot act—on themselves or on others of someone else. What the spectators see is an androgynous
— without instantiating the difference between them. figure in a single-sex form. Smidt infers that the one-legged
If the differentiation of persons here follows the figures connote male fertility. This is the male side: the
Melanesian aesthetic of gender, then are these not single-sex men create a male version of afigurecomposed ofboth male
but androgynous figures? (The performers, as Smidtremarks and female elements.
(1990: 34), show both male and female elements in their So what you see in this photograph is an all-male
dress.) Indeed, there is a sense in which all objects are version of a figure that in its composition is androgynous.
androgynous (cf. Mackenzie 1991) insofar as their But you are not meant to see the composition, for it is out
personification requires that they are composed.3 I suspect of composite relations that the singular form-to-be-seen
that Kominimung novice and initiators are gendered by the comes. And sinceit is thespectator who elicits theappearance
actions that one does to another, just as the penis-swallower/ of the singular form, the spectator is part of the composition
child-regurgitator recapitulates the gendering of any that is not available to sight.
extensive activity. So what is a leg? Perhaps the leg in the one-legged
It is thoroughly consonant with what is known from Kominimungfiguresis an extended body. It is both organ
other parts of Papua New Guinea to suggest that extensive and product, we might say, just like the shells that circulate
activity itself may be imagined in terms of receiving sexual in exchange in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. And die
attention or giving birth — including relations between extension that is both body and organ product may be
partners in gift exchange who may stand momentarily male perceived as belonging to and coming from a body that is
and female to each other. I say 'extensive' insofar as one either male or female. For to be in an extended state means
body takes in/ brings forth another body. It is together that that in being detached from one body the organ/ product
the bodies form a single androgynous figure; and insofar as is taken into another. Unextended, it remains part of an
the capacity to form such a figure is also present in the androgynous composition that cannot itself be felt or seen.
singular body, that body is inevitably androgynous as well. With its potential extension in mind, people may say it is
It does not matter how many people you see: each is a still'hidden.'
composition of persons.
But you do not see the composition. That is, as a witness,
you do not see both genders at the same time; you only ever GENDER
'see' one, because that is what being made to see means. Let
me explain the observation. The accompanying photograph (figure 3) was taken in
Look at the novice. The novice may eventually equate 1964 in Hagen, in the Papua New Guinea Highlands.
himself with the man holding the one-leg, for he is being There is hardly a woman in sight, though several were
made into the kind of man who can do exactly that to present. However, the products of women are evident: die
novices. At the end of the initiation sequence where the children (including the little girl at the far end of the line
former initiate has been transformed into a marriageable who glances in the photographer's direction), the Goldlip
person, he now appears decorated "in the same fashion as pearl shells laid out in front of the men's house, many of
the one-leggedfiguresand the tambaran performers" (Smidt which will have come to the men via their connections
1990: 31). But at the moment of impact, the novice- through women, and the empty pig stakes to which women's
initiate is in one position only. He sees, that is, 'feels' the pigp will be attached. If children and pigs are acknowledged
jab, is receptive to it, and can only be receptive. He is the extensions of women, so too are the men themselves. Every
'other side' of what one-leg can do. The recipient who feels one of them is a mother's son, and on some occasion in their
one-leg, in feeling it gives it 'back' to the man who is jabbing lives will have acknowledged the fact in gifts to matrikteral
it at him. The novice is in this sense a spectator. He kin.
responds to what he is shown. None of this was in the photographer's mind. She was
The Kominimung who dressed up to display to Smidt too preoccupied with the sequence of events. (The shells
what a man holding a one-leg looks like might imagine he were still being laid out, and she had turned back from the
was putting the spectator into a recipient position, as main bustle of activity to view the line that already existed.)
though the camera could respond. Now in being on one It was the first public moka (ceremonial exchange) she had
side, the spectator can only ever see the 'other' one side that witnessed. Subsequently she would be aware of the fact that

46 Volume 9 Number 1 Spring 1993 Visual Anthropology Review

FIGURE THREE.

Visual Anthropology Review Volume 9 Number 1 Spring 1993 47

shells circulate exclusively among men and never come into whom they previously received. So too are the shells
the care ofwomen except only in the most notional way; she reduced: they are laid out in one line, streaming from the
would know that the men's house at the head of the mouth4 of the men's house at the head of the ceremonial
ceremonial ground is an all-male preserve; that although ground. The event shows time to be recursive: what
the men have not decorated elaborately for this occasion flowed before 'into' the house now flows 'out' again. But
they sport the long bamboo tallies (omak) which indicate the event also momentarily detotalizes theflow(cf. Weiner
their successes at earlier exchanges, and that the discussion 1991) into one of its two directions, that is, towards these
and calculating going on would be about the kind of politics recipients.
with which men are preoccupied (the occasion was a Second, multiple possibilities are reduced to one. The
compensation payment between the clans of two tribes clan is sustained by more than its relationship with the
(from Kawelka to Roklaka, see A. Strathern 1971: 124)). recipients, and the particular shells are not those the
But in any event, the photographer probably took it for recipients might have given but others gained through
granted that she was seeing an all-male affair. Retrospectively, other relationships. Yet the diverse relations that formed
the fact that women hardly appeared in the photograph the composite, and androgynous, figure of relationships
indicated a kind of truth, for women were effectively 'out ofwhich' the shells have come cannot be seen. They are
excluded from active roles in shell exchange. in the background: other events, other exchanges other
This particular event was a relatively small version of partners. The shells instantiate the recomposition: drawn
what is played out on a much larger scale at displays that together from many relationships, they are now presented
demand formal decoration. On such occasions, the in a single line, as the 'one' gift that will make the recipients
appropriation of public space by men, and when pigs are 'see' and 'feel.' (When pigs are handed over, a donor will
involved of women's products, may be made evident by kick the stake as he marks out the gifts.)
women's participation as 'producers.' But they have The extended line is thus a reducedfigureof the clan
produced the objects, so to speak, not the performance: that body. We might put it that the recomposition of the body
is men's creation. is effected through reduction by making the body appear
Yet suppose I choose to see this as a moment in as its own extension: it is as though the extension were also
miniature, what is being miniaturized? I suggest it is not the the body. Thus the body is presen ted through an extension
scale of the performance. Schwimmer (1990: 11) cites which is also only a part of itself. Certainly the donor clans
Levi-Strauss' observation about art; as a reduction from appear in an extended form through the way their shells are
nature (and thus a miniature), art implies abstraction. He being brought 'outside,' and what the male shells are seen
adds that people who decorate as spirits thereby miniaturize to do is extend a male men's house. Potentially detachable,
the spirits, for they abstract from the idea of spirit certain any part of the body may then be the subject of
qualities or features which can be made visible. Let me differentiation from other parts. Either house or shell
suggest what the Hagen performance here miniaturizes. could be imagined as male or female in relation to the
In my understanding of Melanesian practices, a other. Thus the shells with their red ochre surround can be
performance is always a reduction: a single act created out thought of as little embryos in the womb, carried by the
of composite relationships. It appears gendered, as the handles women once netted (cf . Clark 1991). In that case,
display of single-sex qualities detached from androgynous the long line ofshells extendingfrom the house decomposes
ones. In this case, for all the appearance of masculinity, one the male clan into its procreative (male and/ or female)
is looking at a male side of male version of an androgynous body and its countless 'children.'
composition. I do not mean that women are implicitly To all appearances, the procreative body and organ/
present, although they are; I mean that the whole event is product is replicated in several forms. The photograph
a recomposition ofrelationships. Indeed, thatrecomposition (fig. 3) shows that on this occasion, while the shells extend
involves two kinds of reductions rendered visible by the (from) the house where they were once notionally hid, they
gender of persons and their extensions. also stream out from another shell, the sin^e one standing
Recomposition is made possible, first, by the division at the head of the line as though it were the source of them
of the men into donors and recipients: what the men all. Each individual shell in turn is positioned on its board
recipients see are other men in the guise of donors. This is with its opening downwards, out of which (barely visible
the side that the performers present. Dual possibilities are on the photograph) extends a short bamboo 'tally' like the
reduced to one. The same (donor) men are recipients on tallies men wear; this is where the carrying handles to bear
other occasions and indeed may well be giving to those from the shells away are attached. These replications suggest a

48 Volume 9 Number 1 Spring 1993 Visual Anthropology Review

 series of figures: the house door and the line of gifts that this were so, what would be miniaturized in that spectacle
come forth/ go in; the head shell and the shells that come becomes the procreative possibility of gender difference.
forth; the mounted shell and the tally that come forth with
the handle so that the whole thing can be lifted up and away.
Yet this is not a series contained in any simple way by
diminishing scale. Look at the man close to the These are speculations. Yet suppose, as Wagner (1991)
photographer. He is another figure, similar to all or any of suggested, Melanesian sociality implies that persons are
these. fractally realized.5 That is, insofar as persons are imagined
This man is looking intently: what is looking at the as entities with relations integral to them, they cannot be
pearl shells is a figure with an enlarged head from whose thought of in terms of whole numbers, whether as entire
neck fells a line of bamboo sticks, the omak tally which units or as parts of a whole. Persons act as though they have
records previous shell transformations and hangs down afractal dimensionality: however much they are divided or
over his apron. On ceremonial occasions, large aprons are multiplied, persons and relations remain in proportion to
elongated to conceal the displayer's two legs behind one each other, always keep their scale. Indeed, persons can
single sweeping cover. only exist so divided or multiplied (by relations). It is as
Whether the man is a donor or recipient, or one of the though their relationships were also themselves. There is no
visitors whose interest in the destiny of the shells is more reason, of course, why the fractal person so conceived
indirect, in looking at the shell he is looking at a transformed should be visible to the anthropologist. Yet if it were, what
version of himself. Conventionally speaking, however, it is might it look like?
the recipients of the gifts who are marked as 'the spectators.' The anthropologist would be looking for a figure that
The donors are on display to these receptive partners, these keeps its complexity through all the scales of diminution
witnesses who will later take the donated shells (and pigs) and enlargement (cf. Wagner 1991: 172). What keeps its
into their own men's houses. Hence the recipients looknot (complex) form in these Hagen performances is the
at mirror images of themselves, but at the other side of reducibility of the body: every appearance manifests its
themselves: the extended body (the line of shells) of the reduction from a dual or multiple composition to the single
donors. What is replicated in each figure is the capacity to side it inevitably presents to the world. For the extended
bring that extension forth. If each shell is such a figure, so body contains the elements ofits reduction, as we might say
too is the spectator in the photograph; but while his omak that in separating into its constituents a relationship is made
tally and apron falling from the enlarged head is like the visible. What is made up of multiple relations decomposes
tally and handle of the rounded shell itself, his extension is into the entity that seeks relations with others.
not contained in what the observer would see as his individual Reducibility is thus the capacity to be effective, that is,
figure. He is aperson who moves in/ through relations with to procreate, to bring forth a product that is also the body
others. In the same way as the shells have been brought itself, to realize 'a' relationship. If the capacity lies in the
forth and will be borne away, his body extension liesfirstin future, it also lies in the past. So the fractal person appears
his presence and second in his seeing. True for all spectators, in the effectiveness of those relations integral to it, and thus
this extension is condensed, abstracted and miniaturized always as an instantiation of itself. Now if persons can turn
for the recipients ofgifts as the explicit object of the donors' complete relations into relations requiring completion, one
endeavors. It is the recipients who are bound to receive the way to be completed is to be seen by others. That means,
gifts. first, that the person is only ever 'seen' as a (partible)
The donors have composed the shells on their own extension of itself. It means, second, that it is only ever
ceremonial ground, in front of one of their men's house. 'seen' from one side, for the other side of the (one) person
The recipients have come out of their houses in distant is the (other person of the) elicitor who evokes and completes
territories and have come to the open ground — elicited the relation. And it means, third, that everything one 'sees'
forth by the promise of shells. In being present, and in oneself is one's own other side. In this world, persons eye
gazing at the shells, the recipients extend their own men's the effects of their extensions.
house body: what they 'see' is what they have brought forth It is not a place that the photographer inhabits. She
from the bodies of other men. Ifone were to make explicit belongs to a world where it is thought possible to see
for Hagen what other Highlanders abstract in terms of without having an effect. She also belongs to a world that
gender, the feminized recipients masculinize themselves by understands likeness as copy or image as representation,
eliciting the gifts and detaching them from the donors. If that inspects photographs and endlessly compares graphics.6

Visual Anthropology Review Volume 9 Number 1 Spring 1993 49

Indeed, she would not have looked again at this particular as a 'child* in relation to male and female guardians of the
photograph ifshe had not been so intrigued by the computer tambaran who accompany the performer; a fourth actor is
graphics of fractal geometry. Yet drawing replications out the tambaran j'friend.' On the androgyny of children see,
of the photograph, seeing the same form in every form, for example, M. Strathern (1992).
making visual connections between entities that are all part 4. Melpa keta, 'mouth,' 'door,' 'opening.'
of a single image, is far removed from the procreative 5. The context is Wagner's reflection on the kind of
activity which in Hagen must rest on its effects. There, individual/ society antinomy anthropologists have
effectiveness is gendered: itlies in the way persons draw one conventionally brought to the analysis of Big Men regimes
form out of another. Each form is divided from the other in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, prompted by
in the process, as recipients are divided from donors. Two Maurice Godelier's counter-figure of the Baruya Great
persons but one figure: the body of one of them is also the Man. The idea of individuals somehow aggregated into
body of the other. society contains an implicit mathematics which Wagner
We might imagine this as the figure of a body whose here uncovers through another mathematic metaphor
organs are distributed between persons (much as Euro- (fractals as conceptualized in chaos theory).
Americans think of'society,' their own miniaturization of 6. On modernity's commitment to mimesis, seeTaussig
sociality, when they imagine it as so many roles distributed 1992. Per contra, Don Kulick and Margaret Willson
between individuals). For to be effective is to witness the ("Rambo's Wife Saves The Day: Subjecting the Gaze and
impact — through seeing, say, or kicking — of one's own Subverting the Narrative in a New Guinean Swamp,"
body on another. Butin this modeofMelanesian imagining, manuscript) describe how Gapun villagers seeing films try
the body that is seen or kicked is already only 'half the to make the films 'work' for (have an effect on) them.
figure; the eliciting organs are located in the other half. So
it would be a one-eye that 'sees' one-leg. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Biersack, Aletta
NOTES 1990 Histories in the Making: Paiela and Historical
Anthropology. History and Anthropology, 5: 63-85.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Some of the theoretical work on 1991 Prisoners ofTime: Millenarian Praxis in aMelanesian
which this paper is based can be found in The Gender of the Valley. In Clio in Oceania: Towards a Historical
Gift (1988) and in Partial Connections (1991). I thank Anthropology. Washington: Smithsonian Institution
Sarah Williams and Lucien Taylor for allowing me to Press.
present this in such an experimental manner. I am grateful Clark, Jeffrey
to Dirk Smidt, as well as Alan and Louise Hanson, for 1991 Pearlshell Symbolism in Highlands Papua New
permission to reproduce the photographs (figs. 1 and 2), Guinea, with particular reference to the Wire people of
and for Nigel Rapport's comments. A version was presented the Southern Highlands Province, Oceania, 61: 309-
to the workshop "Material Culture, anthropology of art," 339.
convened by Jose'-Ant6nio Fernandes-Diaz and Cesare Forge, Anthony
Poppi at the 2nd EASA conference, Prague 1992, and 1966 Art and Empowerment in the Sepik. Proceeding* of
comments made there have been most useful. the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1965, 25-31.
1. And in people's commentary on themselves. Biersack 1970 Learning to see in New Guinea. In Socialization: the
(1991:260; also 1990:78-9) observes that thePaielapeople approachfrom SocialAnthropology. London: Tavistock
of the Papuan New Guinea Highlands contrast themselves Public.
with the all-seeing, all-knowing sun in the phrase: "We are Hanson, Allan and Louise Hanson
one-eyed: the sun is two-eyed." The sun includes everyone 1990 The Eye of the Beholder: A Short History of the
in his vision, and is himself thereby without body (cf. 1981: Study of Maori Art. In ArtandIdentityin Oceania, eds.
260). The interest of the point will be evident in the A. and L. Hanson. Honolulu: University of Hawaii
argument that follows. Press.
2. Though the form that the recomposed body takes (a Jackon, Michael
double-sided or 'split' figure) is found in a variety of 1972 Aspects of Symbolism and Composition in Maori
contexts, not only doorways, and may also be freestanding. Art. Bijdragcn totde Taal't Land- en Volkenkunde, 128:
3. The performer who holds one-leg may be referred to 33-80.

50 Volume 9 Number 1 Spring 1993 Visual Anthropology Review

Mackenzie, Maureen inMountHagen. Cambridge: Cambridge University
1991 Androgynous Objects: String Bags and Gander in Press.
Central New Guinea. Chur: Harwood Academic Strathern, Marilyn
Publishers. 1992 TheMother's Brother's Child. inShootingtheSun:
Nichols, Bill RitualandMeaninginthe WestSepik, ed. B. Juillerat.
1991 The Ethnographer's Tale. Visual Anthropology Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Review,!: 31-47. Taussig, Michael
Smidt, Dirk 1992 Physiognomic Aspects of Visual Worlds. Visual
1990 Kominimung One-Legged Figures: Creative Process Anthropology Review, 8: 15-28.
and Symbolic Function. In Artand identity in Oceania, Wagner, Roy
eds. A. and L. Hanson. Honolulu: University of 1991 The Fractal Person. In BigMen and Great Men:
Hawaii Press. The Personifications of Power, eds. M. Godelier and
Schwimmer, Eric M. Strathern. Cambridge: Cambridge University
1990 The Anthropology of the Ritual Arts. In Art and Press.
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