Respuestas del cuestionario

The bilums, also known as string bags, of the Telefol people in central New Guinea are used in both the everyday and in ceremonial life and are described by MacKenzie as a

157 “a vehicle for their ideas about their world and their place in it… it is a particularly apt medium… to articulate their views on the axis between the sexes” (1991, 191).

Telefolmin bilums are a fascinating site where female and male come together.

MacKenzie calls them androgynous, as women work the principal form of string bags, whilst men add to and elaborate some bags to create a subset of bilums to be used in their male rituals; a fairly typical state of events according to Bolton (2003b). Both men and women therefore appropriate string bags. It is said that ‘the bilum is our mother’ as everything in the region fell out of a bilum carried by Afek, the androgynous mother of the Ok peoples who allocated aspects of the production of bilums to both men and women. MacKenzie therefore argues that the Telefol concept of motherhood is androgynous.

It should be noted that the majority of MacKenzie’s claim for androgyneity is however based on the bird-feather bilums elaborated by men during male initiations and used to indicate their status. The bilums women use for transportation of foodstuffs and infants, called aam bal men,mouthband bilums, do not have the same androgynous character. Indeed the general view of women’s mouthband bilums is very much connected to women as it is through what is carried in the bilum that people are nurtured and fed, while other visual and linguistic clues create connections between women, wombs and bilums.

With such a connection between women, social reproduction and bilums, men’s bird- feather bilums seek to re-address the balance between the role of men and women in procreation and highlight their interdependence. MacKenzie notes that the feathers used by men in their string bags come from wild fowl, hornbill and cassowary birds which are all notable for the role the male of the species plays in incubating and caring for the young. An additional mythological connection between the cassowary and Afek makes the addition of these cassowary feathers to a bilum a physical metaphor of Afek’s womb. Men’s bird-feather bilums are therefore androgynous because they are

constructed by both genders but also because they are physical acknowledgements of the role of men and women in procreation.

158 Interestingly, MacKenzie argues that bilums demonstrate both the clear distinction between genders and their necessary integration. Thus male and female are physically and visually separated in a bird-feather bilum, which has feathers added on its side facing away from the body and which retains its visibly female looping aspect on the face that lies against the back. Yet whilst a bird-feather bilum’s outward appearance shows the opposition between men and women, it is said that they hold within them a hidden truth, that of the interdependence of men and women. According to MacKenzie these different relationships between men and women can be physically seen in the segregation of men and women in village life and their coming together in familial gardens:

“The values associated with the public space of the village are oppositional and stress inequality through differentiation and separation of the sexes, while the values associated with the intimacy of domestic partnership are egalitarian and stress interrelationship.”

(MacKenzie 1991, 43).

Bilums therefore contain opposing models of gendered social relationships: they simultaneously highlight the difference between the genders whilst evidencing their underlying complementarity. It is a contradiction that mirrors some of the differences in opinion prevalent in the gendered imagery of pandanus baskets on Futuna.

Similar to the evidence above demonstrating how women on Futuna use gendered imagery in the construction of pandanus baskets, MacKenzie considers the material imagery of bilums to be an important arena through which “problematic situations are rephrased and reframed and somehow made sense of” (1991, 206). The oppositions and contradictions and the interlaced texture of the very fabric of the baskets and bags allow for creative interpretation of stories and metaphors.

It is tempting to see in MacKenzie’s analysis of the Telefomin string bag a historic equivalent of the pandanus basket complete with the connections to ancestors and the spirit world that Schneider and Weiner (1989) describe as typical to the production of cloth. Given the early conversion to Christianity on Futuna and their greater and more

159 frequent contact with Europeans it is clear that traditions have changed and evolved with time and become more aligned with a Presbyterian ideology. Added to this, the 30 or so years between my fieldwork on Futuna and MacKenzie’s fieldwork with the Telefomin would also account for any significant differences in local ways of thinking. MacKenzie mentions that in the late 1970s a Christian revival movement caused the abandonment of male cults in the region and the availability of wage work at the Ok Tedi Mine has reformed the segregation rules between genders within villages. Already at the time of her fieldwork, the social situation that MacKenzie describes is the

exception and not the norm. Nevertheless, there are many differences between life on Futuna and in the Telefol-speaking region that stop me from pushing this point further and suggesting that a great body of thought concerning the usage and meaning of pandanus baskets has been lost. On Futuna, there has never been a men’s house or men’s cult and men do not add further decoration to their pandanus baskets. Most importantly, the important imagery in plaiting Futuna baskets, its hkano, is an element of the actual technique of construction that cannot be understood by sight alone, unlike in string bags, where much imagery instead arises out of visual resemblance. The differing sources of the gendered understandings of social life is crucial.

The ideas concerning social life encapsulated within baskets on Futuna offer a contrasting perspective to Schneider and Weiner’s thesis that the work of producing cloth is a work that is connected to “past and present, the dead and the living, ancestral authority and contemporary political claims” (1989, 8). The lack of ritual activity, proscriptions and ties to ancestors or spirits in the processes of making clearly distinguish pandanus work on Futuna, although it should be noted that Keller’s

dictionary includes a reference for ara tapu, a sacred row of plaiting in mats but I was unable to elicit any information about this during fieldwork: neither the term ara to refer to a row of plaiting, nor ara tapu more specifically. Perhaps this is a concept that was connected to the old bakhaunea mats? The only restrictions on pandanus work on Futuna concern access to pandanus trees and a ban on working pandanus on a Sunday, the day of rest.

Similarly, it has already been mentioned that skilled pandanus work, whether of construction or patterning, is not due to the intervention of any spiritual powers but

160 rather a worker’s own focus and attention to their work. In contrast to Trobriand

Islander skirts and banana leaf bundles and Samoan fine mats (Weiner 1989), basketry on Futuna has no clear ties to rank or hierarchy. The construction of pandanus mats, baskets and fans is therefore not so much tied to the spiritual aspects of life, but to the key social relationships that underscore life on Futuna: relationships between men and women, that are, fundamentally, relationships that maintain and sustain social life.

5.5

Conclusion

This chapter has looked at gender as a lived characteristic and as a form of imagery in the construction of pandanus baskets. The complex ideas about men and women on Futuna have transformed over time after living with missionaries and expatriates and these ideas continue to be discussed by people on the island as they work out their positions and relationships and how they would like these to be.

Pandanus work has been shown to be an important activity that highlight’s what it is to be a woman on Futuna. Plaiting pandanus has also been shown to be a key tool and opportunity for women to discuss, challenge and express their ideas about gender and sexuality. Women take pleasure in manipulating gendered imagery in pandanus work to discuss and explore their relationships. Indeed women play with concepts of sex and gender to vent their frustration and poke fun at people who do not follow prescribed cross-sex relations. The technique of plaiting is ideally suited to the physical exploration of such ideas as warp and weft are equal elements, balanced in their construction as in the resulting basket or mat. Pandanus plaiting is therefore interesting as it is able to simultaneously demonstrate one point of view whilst asserting the truth of the opposite point of view.

This chapter has shown that working pandanus is something that women do. It is an activity that creates female persons and which narrates processes of social life and its reproduction. The importance of processes of production on Futuna are evidenced by restrictions on the sharing of basketry construction techniques with people from beyond the island. In contrast, as will be seen in the next chapter, the more visible basket patterns can be freely shared, copied and reproduced throughout Vanuatu. Chapter 6

161 explores these decorative forms, the ata, visible meanings of baskets as the

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