はじめによんでね！

パプアのチャー リー・パーカー

Charlie Parker at Papua New Guinea

池田光穂

Participation and Reflection  ■01；Prior to my arrival in Bosavi, Buck and Bambi Schieffelin told some of their Kaluli assistants that I was a "song man" (gisalo kalu) in our own land and that I would come to record and ask questions about their music. By the time my mastery of Kaluli was sufficient to be able to speak to people about musical ideas in any detail, I found myself on the receiving end of many questions . What Kaluli wanted to know was whether or not people wept for song in my society. The experience of formulating responses to such questions had two effects: it made me think about my own musical experiences in some previously unconsidered ways; and it led me to think about why my Kaluli friends had such a desire to question me and converse about aesthetic issues. I don't know whether I learned to be as sophisticated an interpreter of my society as Kulu, Jubi, Gaso sulo, Mewo, and some other men were for Kaluli society, but I am reasonably sure that their questions were not just manifestations of a slight curiosity. Some were deeply interested in talking about song in a rather broad set of ways. They listened with me to tapes I had made among the Samo people (about forty-five kilometers west of Bosavi) during a brief visit to another anthropologist; they played and commented on the Samo drum I brought back with me; they eagerly listened to music from my own and other societies and asked rather impressive questions about its form and meaning.

■02；Two types of music were popular with several men and provided topics of continued interest. Medium-paced blues with a melody line played by clarinet or soprano saxophone had a great appeal. The timbres of the clarinet and saxophone were said to be like those of fruitdoves, and the prominence of the descending minor third interval was regularly noted. A tape of this kind of music, featuring Sidney Bechet on soprano saxophone, was most popular. Some listeners were most impressed that this music originated with and was largely performed by black people. Koto music from Japan was another favorite. A few people went so far as to say that it sounded like water and to ask if this was intentional. In these cases Kaluli could find much in their own ideas about musical form to compare with the recordings, but it was equally true that they utilized the same criteria to discuss other items. Blues played at a fast tempo was considered by most to be too frenetic, and the timbre of many Western instruments and voices was considered unpleasant.

■03；In response to one of my letters home, a musician friend wrote back, "If they are so excited by birds you should tell them about Charlie Parker!" Shortly thereafter I played a recording by Parker, and although the tempo was much too fast to interest anyone, the alto saxophone timbre was considered pleasing. I told Kulu and Gigio that Parker was considered so extraordinary that people called him "Bird," and that after his death the phrase "Bird lives" took on a special meaning for musicians and other people who greatly appreciated his sounds. Their initial reaction was complete disbelief, then Kulu questioned me at some length about the phrase. Parker actually had the nickname "Bird" or "Yardbird" long before he was broadly recognized as the innovator remembered today with "Bird lives," but Kulu wanted to know whether the name was given because of the speed of the sound, "flying" on the saxophone. While Kaluli generally do not attach any positive connotation to the speed of sound, nor liken the pacing of song to bird flight, Kulu wanted to know whether this was the way we thought about song in my land. But what they most wanted to know was whether "Bird lives" actually meant that after Parker's death people continued to hear his music. My affirmative reply was met with incredible delight.

■04；More often it was the case that people spoke with me about my own experiences in playing and composing music. I tried to tell them about the jazz nightclub life I knew and to compare it to that of a Kaluli man. As in gisalo ceremonies, I related, young women sometimes would come to listen to jazz, lose their hearts to the performer, and go home with him for the night. This rather important feature of the socialization of bar musicians (which gained both notoriety and stereotypic dimensions as a result of the publicity about "groupies" and rock performers in the 1960s) particularly interested the young men. They considered it, despite the differences in potential consequences for elopement and marriage, to be an indication that I understood why song was powerful and an important skill for men to acquire.

 ■05；As time went on, I began to realize that the ways in which I communicated my own musical experiences not only affected the ways Kaluli spoke with me about song and weeping, but also led them to make certain assumptions about me as a feeling or emotional person. Once I began composing songs and singing more openly with my assistants, I came to understand that the ability to project a sense of dramatic interest in song typified Kaluli verbalizations about aesthetic matters.

■06；It seemed that the best way to make Kaluli understand my real desire to comprehend their songs was to learn how to compose and sing them, an ability that would require a detailed knowledge of a song's structure and elements. Sometimes I would stay up at night, listening repeatedly to recorded songs through headphones while looking at the transcribed texts. The next day, meeting with assistants for discussion and transcription sessions, I would review these songs while we wore headphones, singing along as best I could, sometimes accompanying myself with a shell rattle. My assistants seemed to enjoy this very much and to appreciate my melodic recall when we reviewed one section or another. But whatever their perception of my musical abilities, they were much more impressed when they saw me weep openly after receiving a letter from Buck and Bambi, whose departure had left me alone in Bosavi. If making music, talk ing about it, and being moved by it are not extraordinary things for Kaluli, it is because these behaviors are so deeply related to the sound and the emotions surrounding weeping . For Kaluli, weeping is a measure and an indicator of one's emotional nature as a person. My musical efforts demonstrated an interest in their songs and a desire to understand them in a personal way, but the sight of me weeping went a lot further to establish for them just what sort of person I might be.

■07；Against a background of experiences like these, the issue seemed to be not whether Kaluli "have aesthetics" in an objective, reverifiable sense, but rather how to describe the quality of experience they feel and the quality of my relation to it. To that end, the writings of Robert Plant Armstrong (1971, 1975) have provided much inspiration for me.

■08；Armstrong argues that aesthetics, "the theory or study of form incarnating feeling" ( 1975: 11), exists at a banal level in anthropology because an adequate theory of the "affecting presence" (the term he prefers to "art") depends on an adequate approach to culture, an approach that cannot be simply a reduction to functions and structures but must concern itself with experience. What he finds in anthropology is a "cryptoaesthetics" that is ethnocentric in its concern with "the beautiful" and its expectation of finding this concern to be "practiced, as opposed to formulated" (1975: 14-15). He proposes directing the level of analysis to the being of the affecting presence and the "feelingful" dimensions of its experience as it is "witnessed," a term he uses instead of "viewed," "heard," "seen," or "perceived" to suggest the importance of the rela tionship between witness and witnessed (1975:19-20).

 ■09；To address the "being," "feelingful experience," and "witnessing" of the metaphoric base of Kaluli aesthetics-becoming a bird-I turn to a discussion of two photographic images.

■10；The first image has a form that is frequent and conventional in ethnographies . We assume that it represents someone doing what he normally does. With no further information about who is represented there or what he is doing, it is easy to take refuge in the structure of the image --- conventional Western portraiture framed in a medium shot -- and to assume that this framing is a significant way to depict a Papua New Guinean dressed in a ceremonial costume holding a drum. Further attention can then be directed to the costume itself, the body painting, the red and white feathers, and the palm leaf streamers.

 ■11；It is clear, however, that these things are not the meaning of the image, nor is the simple meta-message "the photographer was in Papua New Guinea and saw this costuming." The image could have been made at any number of places, and we have no other internal information to indicate the photographer participated in some event for which the costume was made and used.

■12；Having read the preceding chapters, however, we are in a very different position to assess how the elements contained in the image have been selected and arranged meaningfully. The color symbolism of red, white, and black has been discussed; the use of cockatoo and hornbill feathers for costuming has been analyzed; the "flow" and spread of the streamers for dance has been indicated. Moreover, the general notion that Kaluli ceremonies involve men wearing the feathers of birds, thus making themselves beautiful like birds in song and dance performance, has been explicated. The inversion by which men go to elaborate degrees in composition and staging to move others to tears, while women spontaneously do the same with uncomposed weeping in response to death has also been considered in some detail. The image, then, can be said to depict in this context the elaborate cultural process males create in order to be beautiful and evocative, as well as some of the visual components of that process important to the staging of ceremonial performance.

■13；The second image is clearly not an attempt at iconic depiction, and only the deliberateness of its presentation here might lead one to decide that it is intentional and not a representation of incompetence. Since it does not conform to other typical features of realistic images and documentary photographs, one might further decide that it is an attempt at "art."

■14；Again, having read the preceding chapters, we are in a position to address how the elements arranged in this image are meaningful. In the blur of blacks and whites, some features are noticeable, like the shells and color patterns. Comparing the two photographs, we might surmise that the object of the second image is some distortion of the first, taken with the subject in motion. Costumes have been described as using pliable pieces of cane to hold arm and belt feathers in place, which suggests that the blurs of white are produced by the motion of feathers. This, combined with the descriptions of the flapping motion of the costumes, the bobbing, birdlike motion of the dancers, and the aesthetic ideal of becoming a bird, leads to the interpretation that the photograph is meant to reveal that in ceremonial dance, a man is seen as a bird.

■15；What we have in these two photographs are the opposite ends of the folk models of photography, described by Sekula (1975:45): "All photographic communication seems to take place within the conditions of a kind of binary folklore. That is, there is a "symbolist" folkmyth and a "realist" folkmyth. The misleading but popular form of this opposition is "art photography" vs. "documentary photography." Every photograph tends, at any given moment of reading in any given context, toward one of these poles of meaning. The oppositions between these poles are as follows: photographer as seer vs. photographer as witness, photography as expression vs. photography as reportage, theories of imagination (and inner truth) vs. informative value, and finally, metaphoric signification vs. metonymic signification."

■16；The first of these photographs clearly fits the attributes of a "realist" image and the second, those of a "symbolist" image. The first image was not theoretically premeditated. On an afternoon before a ceremony, I left my village with a group of men and traveled to another longhouse where they were to dance that evening. At two points along the way they stopped to work on various aspects of their costumes, and I took the opportunity to talk with them and make some snapshots. The pictures were not taken for purposes of analysis, nor did I think much, about them as I made them.

■17；The second of these photographs was very premeditated. Two days before the event at which it was made, I spent the day talking with Jubi and asked him to describe what was going to happen. I wanted to get a sense of the anticipatory feelings that accompany the planning and staging of ceremonies. At one point he remarked: "In the middle of the night, while the dancers continue, dancing and dancing ... you get tired and lie down ... and then, all of a sudden, something startles you, a sound, or something . . . you open your eyes and look at the dancer ... it is a man in the form of a bird." I was taken by this description of that hypnotic , tired , dreamy sensation promoted by a long evening of song, as well as the implication that one is emotionally prepared to experience the ceremony in this way.

■18；Jubi's remark was the basis for the second photograph; I decided to use a metaphoric convention from my own culture's expressive tradition in photography to make a synthetic and analytic statement about a Kaluli metaphor. This was the only time I planned and explicitly used photography in a way that required something more than reliable snapshot reflexes. In a sense, then, the imaging code typically considered to be the least documentary and the most "artistic" structures what is the most ethnographic of my photographs. The imaging code considered the most documentary has the least to do with my imaging behavior as an ethnographer. The more iconic image is explicit and readable, but the noniconic one is brought into explicitness here as a highly direct synthesis of what I have otherwise explained largely with words.

■19；On reflection I see the image of a kalu 'Jbe mise, a 'man in the form of a bird', as a meeting of minds, as an invention ofa co-aesthetic relationship more forceful than what I have been able to say about singing Kaluli songs or other attempts I have made to move emotionally closer to what I was trying to understand about Kaluli sound and sentiment. Many types of analytic and interpretive strategies have been utilized here to indicate how "becoming a bird" is a mediating scheme for Kaluli emotions and sound expressions. These analyses and interpretations have involved symbols about symbols, layered representations of representations of representations. The construction of the kalu 'Jbf'm. ise image, however, is of another order, a metaphor about a metaphor. Making my own "affecting presence" out ofa Kaluli myth takes me back to Armstrong's "being," "feelingful experience," and "witnessing" in the process of discovering how form incarnates feeling.

■20；I cannot understand how one might study aesthetic systems without a concern for aesthetic intent in the analytic posture or a concern for how others perceive the analyst's own aesthetic sensibilities. Concentrating on value-free, objective measurements of aesthetic preferences has done little to move us toward a more ethnographically informed or humanly sensitive understanding of other visual, musical, poetic, and choreographic systems. Illuminating experience (and not only function) and co-aesthetic witnessing can only be accomplished honestly if ethnographers let themselves feel and be felt as emotionally involved people who have an openly nondetached attitude about that which they seek to understand.

■21；While there were many things I was able to understand about Kaluli ideals of sound expression as a result of traditional participant observation, I don't think I really began to feel many of the most important issues, like halaido domeki and the construction of a song climax, until the day I composed a song about Buck's and Bambi's leaving Bosavi that brought tears to the eyes of Gigio, one of their oldest and closest friends. I wept, too, and in that intense, momentary, witnessing experience, I felt the first emotional sensation of what it might be like to inhabit that aesthetic reality where such feelings are at the very core of being human.

■22；During my last few months of fieldwork, I played my drum virtually every day and composed many songs, while plunging deeper and deeper into the analysis of recorded materials in order to grasp why Kaluli responses to song are so strong. Reading back over my diary, I must have become obsessed with the issue of how Kaluli perceptions ofme changed and developed as a result of my more open participatory actions in musicmaking. Some of my songs and drumming and dancing lessons were the cause of laughter and embarrassment for Christian Kaluli, who felt that a man from a powerful culture with medicine, missionaries, money, and airplanes had to be crazy to want to learn these things. Yet for me it was the physical sensations of vocalizing and drumming that brought me closer to the performance aesthetic and brought some Kaluli closer to talking with me about its inner dimensions. At that point, too, they began to disappear from my mind and notes as "functionally beautiful art forms" and to take hold as "affecting presences" that I could experience in a feelingful way.

■23；Such experiences were what made it easy for me to loosen up and tell my friends about Charlie Parker, listen to the blues with them, or recount nostalgically my own nights making music in bars. These processes of developing a co-aesthetic relationship with Kaluli are also the grounding of the appreciation informing the sympathetic depiction I have attempted here in explaining the importance of weeping, poetics, and song. That same grounding also stares back at me every time I look at or attempt to discuss the image of a kalu obe mise.

 ■24；What I have from my experience in Bosavi, in my body, notes, tapes, recollections, diaries, gifts, and photographs, is of a different order than what I can share through this one photographic image. I feel, however, that the image of a kalu -:,bem ise stands to this book as an encore stands to a performance. For musicians, an encore is that final blast of energy that keeps you high until the next time you perform. Encores are among the most experience-heightening aspects ofplayingjazz, and as a listener, I find that wherever the music has taken me, the encore makes sure I stay there.

■25；In the image is a man, a bird, a bird as a man, a man as a bird. My clear intention in placing the image here is to say that having picked these things to pieces, we deserve to conclude by seeing them as one. The image is indeed more immediate and direct in effecting this end than a recording of sa-yr.lab weeping or gisalo song would be. Even with all the analytic details offered here to prepare an outsider to listen to these sounds meaningfully and metaphorically, the perception of unfamiliar or exotic language and melody always serves to distance a listener and to hinder an immediate response or emotional attachment. Anyway, sa-yr.lab and gisalo belong to the Kaluli; the encore belongs to me. Not that the rest of the book is a precise mirror of Kaluli collective unconscious; clearly I have mediated, interpreted, translated, recoded, and imposed form and feeling throughout. But encores go somewhat further in both mediation and intention; they are acts oflove and appreciation. Additionally, I wish this one to carry the "underneath" that analysis must coexist with synthesis if ethnographers are to witness and feel the emotional dimensions of cultural form and expression.

Copyleft, CC, Mitzub'ixi Quq Chi'j, 1997-2099