Kingston, 2003, Form, Attention and a Southern New Ireland Life-Cycle, JRAI

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    Form, Attention and a Southern New Ireland Life Cycle Author(s): Sean Kingston Source: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Dec., 2003), pp.

    681-708Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and IrelandStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3134706Accessed: 26-04-2015 16:19 UTC

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  • FORM, ATTENTION AND A SOUTHERN NEW IRELAND LIFE CYCLE*

    SEAN KINGSTON

    From a phenomenological perspective, form is intrinsically linked to attention. This article explores that relationship with a view to highlighting the potential importance of the experience of form to anthropology. It is suggested that in Melanesia the management of attention as a mechanism for the control of form and vice versa are key vehicles for the social definition and transformation of persons. It takes as a case study the life-cycle rituals of Lak in southern New Ireland, where the articulation and disarticulation of the form of persons and tubuan spirits are linked together and also, through a discourse of remembering and forgetting, with social attention.

    One of the ways in which we experience our surroundings is as a world of forms. Many of our interactions with that world, on that construal of our sur- roundings, are in the modality of form; certainly many of the ways in which we express our experience of ourselves in the world are formal. This is in a manner that transcends other major distinctions in our experience, such as that between mind and matter. As I write, I am attempting to inculcate formal qualities of coherence, clarity, and clear articulation in my thoughts, but I could as well be attempting to instil the same qualities into a physical sculp- ture or painting - though that is not to say that they would appear in the same way or that form can be freed from its substrate.

    Form's ubiquitous role in subjective experience may indicate its importance in social processes composed from, and shaping of, human life worlds. As such, I believe that it is a topic of some importance to anthropology.This article high- lights one way in which the experience of form becomes relevant to social processes through an investigation of its essential relationship with attention. A theoretical discussion of this relationship is followed by an attempt to demon- strate the explanatory potential of this approach through an ethnographic analy- sis of a series of life-cycle rituals in Lak1 in southern New Ireland.

    Perhaps because of its ubiquity, form as an aspect of subjective experience is a slippery subject to write about. Indeed, the concept of form itself despite, or perhaps because of, its long philosophical genealogy (see Summers 1989) has been relatively little discussed by specialists in the anthropology of art (the place one might most expect to find it), though much ink has been spilt on the production, interpretation, and interrelationship of'forms' without corre- sponding attention to the term on which these analyses are predicated.' Within anthropology, Gell argues (1998: 163-4) that formal approaches have

    * J.B. Ionne Essay Prize, 2001

    ? Royal Anthropological Institute 2003. J. Roy. anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) 9, 681-708

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  • SEAN KINGSTON

    become unfashionable, damned by unviable oppositions between form and content to an association with sterile iconography or unproductive 'struc- turalist' methodology. It may also be that a lack of reflection on the root concept (form) has given most formal analyses little purchase on questions that tend to interest anthropologists not specializing in the 'anthropology of art'. Recently, two theorists have done much to buck this trend, reviving and revising form as a topic within anthropology. Gell (1993; 1998; see also Pinney & Thomas 2001) renewed the relevance of formal analysis for anthropologi- cal theory by focusing on the active cognitive force exerted by the form of art objects and suggesting that the interrelationship of forms in an oeuvre might usefully be regarded as traces of intentionality, of mind no less, distributed over space and time. Ingold (2000) has particularly contributed to our under- standing of making and the generation of forms, both in terms of their rec- iprocal shaping of the maker in the acquisition of skilled practices, and as unfolding within morpho-genetic fields of forces that interrelate object, envi- ronment, and maker.

    These authors raise important themes that I also touch upon in this article: Gell, in particular, highlights the subversion of the subject/object distinction implied by the connection of form with cognition and the ineluctable impli- cation of process, future and past transformation, in any specific materializa- tion of form.' Though Gell does not link attention to form, Ingold does. In an important parallel to the argument of this article, he argues that forms are emergent from an 'education of attention' prompted by the engagement of a subject with its environment, and that their perception is a learnt skill. While this may be a step forward from the unproblematic 'giveness' of form that Gell seems to assume, it still, in my view, implies a directionality to attention and a substantiality to form.4 To my knowledge, there is no implication in Ingold's writings that form itself waxes and wanes with the volatility of subjectivity and the politics of sociality, and not only with the cumulative emergence of the evolutionary or learning processes he describes so well.

    Another pertinent usage of'form' has developed within Melanesian anthro- pology, where the term has a currency inspired by the role it plays in the writings of Marilyn Strathern (e.g. 1988; 1991). In her work, form is used as a ternl for reified ways of objectifying relationships. These forms may exert cognitive and social force in their elicitation of similar or different objectifi- cations (forms) of related bundles of relationships within Melanesians' 'aes- thetic' or manner of perceiving (and therefore of categorizing and subdividing) their environment including, most importantly, persons. Strathern usefully highlights the fact that the same phenomenon may present itself in multiple forms (for example, male and fenmale) dependent on the social context. In her account, forms depend on viewpoint. But while she considers their inter- linkage in terms of the social motivation for the perception of one rather than another, form per se is always there to the same degree. In the model outlined in Tlhe ,etder of the ,ift forms appear out of other forms, but they do not 'come into being' in any way related to perceptual realities, nor are subjec- tive experiences of qualities and degrees of form elaborated upon generally.

    It may be that if form is to have anthropological import, then we nust continue the process of abandoning unwarranted elements of objectivism begun by some of the discipline's most advanced theorists (such as Gell,

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    Ingold, and Strathern), developing more phenomenologically accurate models which examine the actual engagement of the social with the formal. In the next section I introduce several aspects of form's entwinement with the social, with theoretical elaboration and ethnographic exemplifications setting the scene for a subsequent discussion of the role of form within the Lak life cycle.

    Form, attention and memory The fundamental realization of the approach I am advocating is that form as a perceptual phenomenon is connected with attention and is therefore in- separable from social interaction. The initial connection is highlighted by Merleau-Ponty who, in demonstrating the weaknesses of an objectivist notion of attention in his dismissal of empiricism, outlined a more phenomenologi- cally accurate description of attention as bringing the object into perceptual being:

    To pay attention is not merely further to elucidate pre-existing data, it is to bring about a new articulation of them by taking them as figures. They are performed only as hori- zons, they constitute in reality new regions in the total world ... Thus attention is neither an association of images, nor the return to itself of thought already in control of its objects, but the active constitution of a new object which makes explicit and articulate what was until then presented as no more than an indeterminate horizon. At the same time as it sets attention in motion, the object is at every moment recaptured and placed once more in a state of dependence on it (1962: 30).

    Merleau-Ponty's ambivalence over the motivation of attention - it being both set in motion by, and yet remaining constitutive of, the object - is impor- tant, but he does not explicitly address its social formation. The social nature and implication of'attention' as an avenue for the interrelation of subjectivity to its environment has been most revealingly explored by the cultural histo- rian, Jonathan Crary (1999), for fin de siecle European culture.5 In that period, subjectivity's freedom, or otherwise, was the subject of widespread debate and endeavours focusing on the determination of perceived form in arenas as diverse as Impressionism, behavioural psychology, phenomenology, and early varieties of cinema. Crary argues that attention itself emerged as a discursive object at the point when perception became severed from the historical codes and prac- tices that had invested it with an assumption of certainty and naturalness. Once it became clear that vision was not transparent, that the same object was per- ceivable in different ways by the same or different subjects, attempts were made to explain and control the variations of form in terms of attention. Recipro- cally, management of attention, via mechanisms of both 'discipline' and 'spec- tacle', also became a route for the promotion of particular kinds of subjects for the institutions of state control, mass entertainment, consumerism, and mass production (cf. Debord 1977; Foucault 1979).

    I would argue that, in this regard at least, similar preoccupations are present in Melanesian 'traditions' as in Europe at the onset of modernity. A host of ethnographies (e.g. Barth 1975; O'Hanlon 1989; Tuzin 1980) bear witness to Melanesian concerns with both the interpretation and definition of forms and their action in producing the appropriate kinds of subjects, though obvi- ously these are rather different from those demanded by European capitalism.

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    The management of attention, whether in initiatory or exchange contexts, whether glossed in terms of secrecy, revelation, fame, or memory, could even be seen as a key cultural motif for the region as a whole. Certainly, these are very important themes in Island Melanesia and New Ireland (e.g. Battaglia 1990; Kuchler 1988; 1993; 2002; Maschio 1994; Munn 1986; Wagner 1986), where a number of ethnographers have focused on the role of discourses of remembering (or more often forgetting) the person at the end of the life cycle through the manipulation of artefacts connected with them. I too have written about the Lak life cycle in terms of memory (Kingston 1998), though I now believe that attention and form are more powerful analytic terms to bring to it.

    Imagination and Memory are but one thing, which for divers considerations hath divers names (Hobbes 1968: 89). I have not considered remembering simply a subjective process triggered by an objec- tive mnemonic medium; or as a particular activity going on within a given spatiotempo- ral field. Instead, I have argued that in any given instance remembering is a particular configuring of this field, and that its form consists of the relations of the field that are being produced (Munn 1995: 95).

    Munn's spatio-temporal account of remembering gives a succinct point of departure for an approach enriched by replacing an analytic discourse of memory with one of attention. There are several arguments for this. Perhaps the simplest is that remembering is generally considered as orientated to the past and the already constituted (see Casey 1991), and this is an unwarranted bias to models of (inter-)subjectivity and the spatio-temporal field it consti- tutes. As Munn implies, memory's configuring of the past is also of the present and future and is not divorced from more conventionally future-orientated aspects of cognition and personhood such as imagination or birth. Equally important for my discussion here, remembering's apparent causal connection with form is unevenly weighted. While perceived form is certainly an impor- tant factor in triggering remembering (as Munn suggests, see discussion below), the reverse function, the importance of memory for perceived form, is not so clear or direct as it would be if we thought of remembering in terms of'attention'. The flexing of the mind, of attention, configures the field of the subject not just in spatio-temporal terms, as an emphasis on memory might be seen to imply. Identical spatio-temporal extensions may, depending on attention, have very different perceptual and cognitive characteristics. Just as the perceptual form of the 'same' object may vary dependent on attention, so the remembered form of the 'same' place or time may also vary in ways best expressed in terms of attention.

    In Lak in southern New Ireland, emphasis on the power of the artefact or performance to create, direct, modify, and extinguish thoughts - on, in fact, the movements of the subjective mind most easily categorized as of 'atten- tion' - is particularly strong. There, social relations must be brought to cog- nitive prominence in order to take effect. For instance, a gift causes the recipient to think of one, and giving the gift is spoken of as 'thinking of' or 'remembering' (uainntai) the recipient. Failing to heed the presumed relation- ship is, of course, spoken of as 'not thinking' of someone or forgetting them.

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    An 'associational', 'thoughtful' mode of sociality, and of identity formation, is based on interaction with persons, practices, objects, and places. These come to form an associational field or topography that is negotiated in social life. The thoughts that items in this topography will inspire - turning the mind's eye towards this or that person or activity, exciting envy, shame, lust, or duty - are prominent motivations that are attributed to actions in all spheres of life. One man will sit in view of his brother's house so that he will be thought of and fed; another will hide a laplap given to him by a friend so that his thoughts do not turn painfully to his absence; passing a clump of bush, another will reaffirm your relationship by reminding you how you cut some posts together there.

    The object of many if not all of these recognized modes of'cognitive' action is to affect the social constitution of persons, particularly in relation to tran- sitions of the life cycle. For example, much like the use of malanggan docu- mented by Kiichler (1988; 1993; 2002) in northern New Ireland, in Lak mortuary ritual (as is described in more detail below) a number of ephemeral effigies are constructed, viewed, and then disarticulated as part of a process that is spoken of as 'forgetting' or 'finishing the thought of' the deceased person. Here, we have the management of physical form in the disarticula- tion of the effigy being seen as the avenue for prompting the disarticulation of social attention. But how are we to understand this kind of process? To do so we need to turn our attention once more to the properties of form.

    From the formless to the absolute

    The phenomenological relation of attention to form has several implications which are important in my analysis and are elaborated below. First, form, like attention, is, if not exactly quantifiable, certainly gradable along some kind of continuum. There may be more or less of it, for a combination of subjective and objective reasons. So an 'object' may be more or less distinct: perhaps seen at speed or from the corner of the eye, or the object of a detailed and slow examination; or it may be socially or personally marginal or central to the 'subject'. Secondly, and following from this, the relationship between form and attention is such as to suggest some sort of correlation (or even identity) between the two: that as the association of disarticulation and forgetting implies, the disruption of one also effects the disruption of the other; or, con- versely, that their concentration is also a combined affair. More even than this, I propose, thirdly, an inverse relationship between common poles of percep- tual experience: form itself only exists in relation to the formless, as areas of focused attention are relative to inattentiveness. Heightened form, thus con- ceived, is a near relation of the term 'gestalt' within Gestalt theory - this being generally defined as a perceptual object which forms a whole or unity inca- pable of expression simply in terms of its parts. I would argue for the partic- ular relevance of the insistence within later Gestalt theory that 'good' forms, gestalts, have the capacity to produce attentiveness in a subject (Crary 1999: 155-8; see Arnheim 1968 for numerous examples of'good' form). From this perspective the relationship of figure and ground which was developed as an analytic tool by Roy Wagner (e.g. 1986; 1987) is only one of many possible

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  • SEAN KINGSTON

    factors in the creation of 'good' forms and unified perceptions (again, see Arnheim 1968 for detailed descriptions of other factors).

    But how exactly are we to characterize the 'negative' pole of this experi- ence, the formless? There has been renewed interest within art theory (see Bois & Krauss 1997) in Bataille's pithy and powerful formulation:

    [F]ormless is not only an adjective having a meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it des- ignates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape ... On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit (Bataille 1985: 31).

    For Bataille the formless is unassimilable waste, the spider and spit are similes for its operation by virtue of their escape from conceptions of geometry and morphology. Metaphor, figure, theme, meaning - everything that resembles something, everything that is gathered into the unity of a concept - these are what the formless undoes.' In particular, the formless is opposed to such focusings of attention as remembrance.

    This conclusion is reinforced by correlations between memory and form that appear to be cognitive universals. So, for instance, folkloric work on oral accounts show how a piece evolves to its most culturally memorable form through increased 'formalization' (e.g. Fentress & Wickham 1992; Lord 1960; Parry 1971; Propp 1968): that is, through rhythm or temporal schematization; through reference to specific visual imagery; and through a density of causal and semantic linkages which create internal context-dependence. These modes of conceptualization provide techniques whereby reliance on external context is lessened - the main factor in strongly defining a figure or form in relation to its background. Similar conclusions are available from accounts dealing more directly with the medium of images (e.g. Luria 1968).

    The Western recognition of the linkage between form and cognition goes back at least to Aristotle's (1994) modelling of perception as sense impressions upon the wax of the soul. This material metaphor of wax, a viscous fluid always sliding towards blank equilibrium, effectively conveys the insight that not merely do perception and memory compose form from the formless, but that forgetting consists of the disarticulation of that form. This intuition is shared in Lak, where the term for forgetting, namnuni, literally means the hiding or covering of thought,7 and the lack of the ongoing remembrance of persons, places, and objects by a deceased is termed sum, a kind of'dirt' that literally obscures them before they are remembered 'clean' or 'bright' (ngis) again by mortuary rites (see below). Seremetakis appositely invokes dust as a material, external component of the formlessness of thought's decay, writing 'Dust is tot deposited onl), on the object but also on the eye. Sensory numbing constructs not only the perceived but also the perceiving subject and the media of per- ception' (1994: 226). This goes beyond Douglas's (1966) formulation of dirt as matter out of place. Dust materially obscures and diminishes perceptual and cognitive form. In Lak, the reduction of social attention that dirt and dust instantiate is used as a mechanism for forgetting which contrasts with the use of compelling forms which demand attention.

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    Experiencing absolute form, even more than experiencing absolute form- lessness, provides us with a number of difficulties expressed by Merleau-Ponty, who held that ambiguity was an intrinsic part of our relationship to objects: '[I]f there is to be an absolute object, it will have to consist of an infinite number of different perspectives compressed into a strict co-existence, and to be presented as it were to a host of eyes all engaged in one concerted act of seeing' (1962: 70).

    However, in Lak, at their heightened pole of experience is a particular, compelling form which is concentrated to such an extent that it might be considered a cultural estimation of absolute form. This is the tubuan mask (locally known as nantoi, Figure 1),8 a key (see Ortner 1973) and somewhat totalizing symbol which is a violent spirit mother owned by leaders of a men's initiatory society. These are large, enveloping, forward-inclined masks with prominent eyes which are produced in secrecy9 by initiates before being revealed for four days of dancing and public display in a rite which is the culminating point of the mortuary segment of the life cycle. It manifests form in excess, highlighting a number of the aspects of form discussed above, including its graded nature and its relation to the formless. As befits its 'male mother', arguably androgynous, nature (cf. MacKenzie 1991), the tubuan stands at the apogee of two complementary kinds of form. On the one hand, the mask, which hides its bearer, is the icon of containers and enclosures which conceal an inchoate realm from which entities may be revealed: so houses, betel-containers, pandanus cloaks, men's close-weave baskets, and women themselves are all tubuan of a lesser sort. On the other hand, the tubuan itself is dramatically unveiled from its secret and inchoate enclosure in the bush and is at the apex of a hierarchy of revealed spiritual entities such as decorated dancers, revealed valuables and heirlooms, and infants (see Kingston 1998: chap. 4 for a detailed demonstration of these linkages).

    The tubuan is all the more concentrated or absolute because when it emerges from the secrecy and formlessness of a bush area, in which percep- tion is both naturally and socially disrupted, to dance, all the living (that is, all who are not concealed within the masks or the bush) are socially com- pelled, under threat of spiritual vengeance, to gather together and watch only the tubuan as it dances. All other social activities and visual displays are sup- pressed during this time. The tubuan is experienced as the most powerful image in Lak culture, one which is both dangerous and beautiful, and one which affects the thoughts of the spectator markedly, bringing to mind all those dead who have been associated with them through the ages.

    In fact, paradoxically, the tubuan can be regarded not only as the greatest form but also as a key instrument of the formless. For not only is it the ruler of the inchoate from which it emerges, and which it elicits as a ground to its figure, but the task for which it is brought to the village is a final 'finishing' of the dead, the removal and disarticulation of their evocative traces and their absorption into the amalgamation of historical identities that the tubuan pre- sents. This is the final stage in a mortuary sequence whose rationale is the forgetting of the dead and whose mechanisms involve the redirection of atten- tion from the deceased to the host of the rituals via the medium of his tubuan masks. The tubuan's totalizing form is at the person's expense, acting as a vehicle of the formless upon their memory and social presence.

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    FIGURE 1. Compelling form: this mask is a nantoi, a mother tubuan, the apical image of the men's initiatory cults and the most fearsome yet seductive sight in Lak. Its appearance radically changes the village space. All women and uniniti- ated men are compelled to watch its dances and must obey strict codes of behav- iour while it is abroad, for fear of their lives. While it is said to have strong love magic, and be sexually attractive to women, it is also very dangerous to them. Photo: S. Kingston.

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  • SEAN KINGSTON

    The life cycle With this active vision of attention, form, and the formless we are ready to bring these concepts to bear on a consideration of the Lak life cycle as a whole. I say 'as a whole' here because, as Barraud, de Coppet, Iteanu, and Jamous (1994) suggest, each stage of a life cycle should be seen as a link in a chain of transformations without end. The result of one transformation is necessarily implicated in the next transition. It is this morphological redefin- ition of the entities involved that I examine here.

    What I wish to argue is that to understand the cognitive aspect of a life cycle it has to be regarded as a cycle of form, conceptual form as much as physical. Consider the beginnings of life in this light: an irreducible aspect of any notion of procreation is that it is supplementary, it adds something to the world. What it adds lies on the boundary between the subjective and the objective, because what is created is form, a new perceptual entity, a new gestalt. Whether fertility involves a chick from an egg, a leaf from a bud, or a child from a womb, the production of this new gestalt invokes a movement from the unseen to the seen. Similar processes, in reverse, can be seen in the end of life and the removal of the physical and conceptual person from social attention. Because of this, the two 'ends' of the life cycle are often connected to each other, and to revelation and communication from a realm inaccess- ible or transcendent to everyday perception.

    Among the Lak, life-cycle transformations are managed largely through intercourse with a spirit world. Although it is difficult to understand any one of the rites in isolation, they are easily divisible into those that concern mortality and those that concern fertility. The former are associated with transformations that are said to be owned by men, and the latter with transformations owned by women. They are: Men's rites of death:

    (a) primary funerary rites to clear sum (negative relations of loss and debt associated with the deceased) and its restrictions from places and people, culminating in exchanges known as tondong;

    (b) secondary funerary rites, many years later, in which men's initiatory spirit masks (tubuan) take away nambu - material evocative of the deceased, including a lalamar shell-money effigy.

    Women's rites of fecundity: (a) the dal female initiation in which women are made fertile, by spirits; (b) giving birth to children, again via interaction with men and spirits. As in much of Island Melanesia, death garners a great deal of social atten-

    tion in Lak, and is the focal point of politics and ritual. It is death which pre- sents the greatest public spectacle with the revelation of the tubuans, and thus provides an arena for the demonstration of access to the ancestral power that they represent as an amalgam of the collective dead.?1 While new-born chil- dren are also revealed in the form of the dead, instead of the collective dead they present an individuation and differentiation of ancestral spirit. Corre- spondingly, birth and its rituals command only a small proportion of the atten- tion, and exhibit only a fraction of the aesthetic power, of the tubuan, and are of equally reduced social and political import. This is, of course, not uncon- nected with the gendered division of the life cycle. The greater elaboration

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  • SEAN KINGSTON

    of mortuary rites means that the relationship between the cognitive and formal articulation of the tubuan and the person is more visible than in the reverse processes in rites of fertility. I therefore turn next to life's ending.

    Primary mortuary rites

    On death, the entire cognitive form which the person has built up during their life career is transformed. Those who were incorporated, through the activities glossed as 'thinking of', in the deceased's relational self have lost both someone whom they took care to think of, and someone important in giving them attention. They find themselves afflicted by a loss of social definition. This deficit suffered by people, places, and objects associated with the deceased is known as sum. Sum has two glosses. The first, as already mentioned, is as a kind of dust or dirt. At death those implicated in the deceased have their visible form diminished to various degrees, from being painted black and remaining in enclosure, to not washing. The hamlet of the deceased is left littered and unswept. Objects they looked at before death are broken and scattered (this process is known as sasai, see Figure 2). Activities they took part in are neglected by those that would do them with the deceased. In each case, explanations run along the same lines, that is that the objects and activities in question not only remind the living of the dead but are 'dirty' because of the deceased's association with them. For instance, people refuse to eat certain foods because they remind them of the deceased and how they would 'think of' them with that food, that is, through sharing or giving. The task of the primary mortuary rites is to think of the village and the mourners anew, and by so doing re-form them and replace the attention of the deceased that once formed them with that of the ritual host.

    FIGURE 2. Sasai: one consequence of sum, the breaking of belongings on death. Photo: S. Kingston.

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  • SEAN KINGSTON

    The second sense of sum is of a loss like a debt. A debt is a marker with which one reminds oneself and another that one needs thinking of, and that attention in the form of an exchange good is absent, in abeyance, and morally deserved. This is why, whether or not there were any exchange goods out- standing from the deceased, all the mourners have debt, a debt that has been defaulted upon. The attention that they were expecting from the deceased has been rescinded, while their thoughts of them linger on.

    At the first stage of the mortuary process, the initial burial,"1 the two primary activities are the determination of who will take responsibility for the ensuing series of rituals and the instantiation of mourning and sum in the first sense - the breaking and the dirtying of the objects, persons, and places that are diminished by the death. In particular, the spouse and eldest child of the deceased become chief mourners and are coated in a black substance and secluded in the darkness of a house.

    The following stage dwells more on the second sense of sum. This is anngan (an imperative meaning'eat!'), the compensatory feeding of, and thinking of, the entire village by local hosts in all the hamlets where the deceased is known. Those being fed are at least notionally reluctant to take part, and may need coercing to eat. This is partly because the overt rationale of these feasts is that the participants will think no more of the deceased once the meal is consumed, but partly also because political capital is surrendered to those that feed one. Rather than 'finishing' thought of the deceased, the local hosts in anngan effectively consolidate their village's sum debts of thought of the deceased upon themselves. In turn, they too will be compensated and have their thoughts turned from the deceased by a primary host in a further funer- ary ritual known as tondong.

    In the home village of the deceased, the leader (kamgoi) of their matriclan holds a series of anngan. These are more elaborate than those of the sur- rounding villages and, together with ancillary rituals, stretch over four days during which large numbers of men and women are fed, and the secluded mourners are given staged payments of shell-money to 'clean' them, both literally and in terms of allowing them to eat, drink, and rejoin village life. During this period the exposed corpse would, in pre-colonial times, also have food brought to it. On the last day the corpse would have begun to decom- pose and the skull would have been taken and hidden, while the rest of the remains were disposed of in the sea. Just as the body is disposed of and no longer given food, so the deceased is now no longer to be thought of and their close kin may leave their seclusion.

    Some weeks later, the primary rites culminate at a tondong ceremony, where the clan-leader brings all the local feast-holders to himself so as to remove their sum and further consolidate the debt that absence of the deceased had scattered. Each of the local hosts brings four things to this central tondong at the deceased's village: an effigy constructed from food crops called a tonger, shell-money with which they will contribute to the construction of a lalamar effigy, a dance troupe, and an exchange pig.

    The aim of the tondong is spoken of as tolon ngis, which literally means to make beautiful, or colloquially to 'wash', the family of the deceased and the local hosts. Ngis - clean, bright, or beautiful - is also the word used to describe the decorated men who dance under the auspices of the local hosts. In these

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    dances the hosts and the mourners whom they have fed are demonstrably relieved from the obscurity of their dirty sum. The male dancers come out of seclusion in the bush wearing decorations on their heads, known as kabut, which are clan valuables of their sponsors, and are iconographically and conceptually lesser versions of tubuan spirits (see Figure 3). The dancers both performatively ensure a redirection of attention and demonstrate their state by approaching the form of the iconic thought-provoking object, the tubuan. Like tubuan, the dancer's visages are focal points for the remembrance of pre- vious owners, whom the audience may 'see' in their decorations. The men are revealed anew, and made to intimate the tubuan's ideal form by the host's thinking of them. Just as dust, dirt, and obscurity of sum indicate failure to attend, to know and thence form, brilliant decoration and performance indi- cate and create attention.

    The only male dancers who do not wear the spiritual kabut on their heads are those dancing under the auspices of the primary host (see Figure 4). They dance still smeared in black sum, showing that the primary host alone now bears the burden of the deceased. It is he alone who cries at the tondong ceremony; it is he who has consolidated the debt that the dead leave behind them by paying and thinking of the living so that they are beautiful and the deceased is thought of no more.

    At the end of the day attention turns to the effigies, in front of which the dancing has been taking place. Each is associated with the deceased and their social relationships, and must be dismantled by the primary host; this is achieved by the making of payments to the local hosts. The lalamar shell-money effigy is explicitly identified as the deceased's body and used to incorporate the skull of the departed (Figure 5). The primary host pays each contributor with shell- money of his own, to have them remove their shell-money and disassemble this 'body' once more. Each of the tonger food effigies is constructed with produce from the deceased's garden, and it is under these that at the end of the tondong the pigs are tied (Figure 6). These are gar ('challenge') pigs, and a series of exchanges is initiated in which the host must give compensation pigs in return for the initial annqgan expenditure and must also replace gar in succession with a larger pig of his own (see Figure 7).1 At this point, the effigies, which rep- resented the outstanding relationships, thought, and debt the local hosts still had with regard to the deceased, are torn down. The rest of the community now have no claim on the deceased, who becomes entirely the host's concern. The host moves from having the responsibility of paying for the debts generated by the death, and begins to give without return, forcing the community to become indebted to him. This is the switching-point to the secondary rites, in which the host's unilateral giving transforms him into the focus for the entire community.

    Secondary mortuary rites

    Many years generally pass after the tondong before secondary mortuary rites are undertaken. Families and communities have long since accustomed them- selves to living without the deceased. Only exemplary rituals hosted by the most powerful men bring forth the tubuan masks, the most powerful and most

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    FIGURE 3. Dancers with kabut, lesser versions of tubuan. Photo: S. Kingston.

    FIGURE 4. Dancers with sum from the host's lineage. Photo: S. Kingston.

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    FIGURE 5. Lalamar, the shell-money body of the deceased, prior to its disassembly. Note the small photograph of the deceased on the post. Photo: S. Kingston.

    FIGURE 6. Tonger with pigs attached to them ready for exchange. Photo: S. Kingston.

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    Transference of pigs\food Mourners 4

    Anngan :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

    Mourners

    host . :r hos A O |,Mourners

    Mourners T Mourners " ourners I Tondong Mourners Mourners Mourners : : ourners hostrnr

    Anngan Anniiiiiaii _B ^i nns.fln hostr host

    ourne Mourners ourners

    ~M~~~~ ourners _ Mourners "ue

    :iiiiii11iii ii A nngan

    Mourners Mourners

    Transference of debt\loss Mourners 4

    :. :::::: :.

    Mourners

    Anngan .::::.

    host % Il Mourners

    Mourners

    Mourns T'ITondong urnes Mourners mourners 9host

    n gsourners

    * '4lourners Mourners ' i!

    :: iiiiii Anngan s':"i?',??.

    Mourners ! Mourners

    FIGURE 7. Exchanges at tondong.

    Mourne ers {

    Anngan , ! host ':::' '

    Mourners

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    FIGURE 8. Nantoi tubuan remove 'bones' of the deceased. Photo: S. Kingston.

    iconic form of spirit, and the incarnation most obscuring and transforming of their bearers. Although hosts may make do with lesser spiritual forms, the role of the tubuan is closely identified with the secondary mortuary rites - the masks rarely appear in public at any other time.

    Once all the tubuan are ready in the taraiu - their secret, formless bush realm only accessible to initiates who have'died'- the host holds a feast at which he unilaterally feeds, and gives shell-money to, the entire populace of the region. This action causes him to be classified as the 'mother' of the community, with power over all that are indebted to his nurture. In fact, the host converts his consolidated dusty sum into the most complete rendition of subjective form, the tubuan. By giving unreciprocated pigs and shell-money to the entire com- munity, giving until he has nothing left, the host himself becomes like a spirit and like a mother who has nurtured and thought of them all and in turn forced them to attend to him. He becomes identified as a mother tubuan.

    Sometime during the feast, the mat a matam ('dead come and look') will occur - tubuan will invade the village from the taraiu, to take away the 'bones' of the deceased (Figure 8). These 'bones' are the remaining physical reminders - known as nambu - such as the remains of their house, the tree they once sat underneath, or their ceremonial axe. In addition, they remove another lalamar shell-money effigy, this time constructed by the primary host alone. The women retreat from the masks, who are dangerous to them, watching them from a distance, wailing as they see those who have died in their faces.

    The individual whose death is the occasion of the rite is said to be for-

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    gotten from this point onwards, and is in effect incorporated in the plural lineage evoked by their mask. It is more than the deceased who is elided from social attention during the ritual. Those initiates who are not already hidden within the masks, and new initiates who are seized from their mothers, accom- pany the tubuan back to the edge of the taraiu, where they are symbolically killed by the host's mask before disappearing into the taraiu. This is the last time that any of these men may be seen by the women and non-initiates for the extent of the tubuan appearance. The initiates may not be seen or men- tioned and no longer 'exist' for the women; their identity is completely sub- sumed in their dancing display of beautiful spirits. Only the tubuan adepts, who are themselves identified with masks and are called by the name of a mask for the duration of the rite, may pass between taraiu and village outside a mask. The host is identified with the premier mother-mask, who has the power of life and death over the entire community. All initiates have child- masks, dukduk (Figure 9), showing the reproductive parallels between human and tubuan mothers, given to them on initiation. These are without eyes, which mark their subservient position. Many leading members of the tubuan society also own other varieties of masks of higher status, known as koropo (Figure 10), which are relatively recent imports from northern New Britain and the Duke ofYork Islands.

    The masks now dance at the edge of the village, morning and afternoon, for four days. The women are compelled to watch these performances, yet at the same time they must avoid the gaze of the masks, lest they too be transformed in a damaging way. While the spirits are abroad, they are under similar conditions to those of sum for a recent death.

    The tubuan that the men incarnate eventually have to die and be forgotten in order for the living men to be known once more. After four days, the tubuans' eyes are smeared with black sum, their dance loses its vitality and they leave to die off-stage (Figure 11), where the processes for their disarticulation and the removal of the sum that their death produces take place in secret.What is visible to the women is the intermittent reappearance of the initiates as living humans enveloped in decreasing tokens of the tubuan at the edges of the village, before finally reintegrating themselves into social life at the end of a period of sum.

    Female initiation

    The tubuan's overt role is the disarticulation of human gestalts, not their production. But as in many other Austronesian societies death is a 'de- conception' (Mosko 1983), a disarticulation of the social relations that the person embodied as well as their physical constitution and indeed their cog- nitive realization. Conception and birth are the reverse of that process, the physical and social articulation of persons as cognitive gestalts. The cognitive, especially memorial, aspects of death have been much discussed by other ethnographers of Island Melanesia, but without much attention being paid to the origination of the person as a social and therefore cognitive entity (though see Lutkehaus & Roscoe 1995 on female initiation). In Lak, birth and its rites are also construed cognitively, being spoken of as a remembering and bring- ing into mind that contrasts with the forgetting and absenting from mind of death. The 'conception' of babies at their birth only takes place through a

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    FIGURE 9. A dukduk, sightless child- mask. Photo: S. Kingston.

    FIGURE 10. A koropo tubuan with its face smeared in sum. Photo: S. Kingston.

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    disarticulation of the totalizing figure of the tubuan, mirroring the forgetting of the dead as a coherent nexus of social relations and attention by the coa- lescence of the tubuan form at the other end of the life cycle.

    The stage prior to birth in the Lak theory of the body is menstruation, conceived as a rotting initially caused by interaction with spirits and there- after by intercourse with men. The girls' initiation, called dal, is a rite in which first menstruation is provoked and she is made fertile and ready for marriage. The rite has many similarities to those of the tubuan, only some of which I mention here. In particular, the young girl and her enclosure are highly redo- lent of the tubuan mask. She is painted red, her eyes encircled with roundels similar to the tubuan's, and she is covered with perfumed herbs both to attract spirits (who are also perfumed) and to hide the smell of her impending decomposition (Figure 12). Her enclosure, within which she must stay until menstruation is deemed to have occurred, should be a conical tubuan-shaped container within a house.13

    The hidden space within women's bodies, where menstruation takes place and whence children are born, is explicitly likened by men to their own secret spaces within masks, which are in turn associated with the dark interiors of houses. The young girl is neither visible nor nameable for the duration of her enclosure, her social form and role neither seen nor enacted. Instead, she is treated as a spirit, not allowed to walk on the floor and fed on a diet of greasy substances normally connected with men's preparations for the incarnation of spiritual decorations. Just like tubuan and their owners, she is called by a name that is a lineal possession, except that in this case it is one that incorporates the identities of an historical sequence of women who have previously been initiated.

    Every night while she is enclosed, the women must gather in front of the house to sing kubak songs and watch the visitations of the spirits, just as they are obliged to watch the tubuan. These, although encompassing of the men who must not be seen by the women, are free-form, theatrical, and often improvised incarnations of spirits, completely different from the carefully reproduced, jealously guarded, and conventionalized designs of the tubuan (e.g. Figure 13). In one performance they ranged from a giant pig to giant birds and a floating ship. The songs that the women sing during the spirits' visita- tion are of sexual attraction and are transparently symbolic accounts of spiri- tual snakes biting the girl and making her bleed.

    When the girl is finally revealed in her blood-like, red decoration from her tubuan-shaped container, she watches a parade of young men in spiritual cos- tumes, this time called malerra, the local term for love magic (Figure 14). They try to woo her away from her designated husband - and are far more clearly men wearing 'copyright', tubuan-inspired designs, than were the spirit forms that appeared during the nights of her seclusion. Ideally, the final act of her initiation is marriage on a subsequent day to her fully human, non-decorated husband.

    During dal, the girl is linked to tubuan in an overdetermined fashion and her decomposition is also firmly associated with the hidden and internal while being correlated with the decreasingly spiritual and increasingly human nature of her male suitors. Whether or not she has physically menstruated, her spiritual interior is imaginatively and cognitively decomposed in a manner

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    FIGURE 11. The ritual leader weeps as his tubuan goes back to the taraiu to die. Photo: S. Kingston.

    FIGURE 12. A dal in her spiritual deco- ration; note the tubuan roundels on her eyes. Photo: S. Kingston.

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    FIGURE 13. A less-formed male spirit (tam- saikio) appears at night. Photo: S. Kingston.

    FIGURE 14. Malerra, men with various owned spiritual decorations and qualities (such as smoke) display themselves to the dal in front of the exchange platform which is decorated in the same manner as tonger. Photo: S. Kingston.

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    analogous to that in which the social person is decomposed in mortuary rites. In the dal ritual, the form of spiritual performances is manipulated to shape the cognitive form of the girl's social body; in mortuary ritual, it is exchange- good effigies that are disarticulated to decompose the social person.

    Birth

    In Lak conception beliefs, the child is composed from coagulated and dried male blood. The baby is dried into a firm and formed being, both inside the mother and by the application of hot leaves after birth. The mother's role in birth is to feed and grow the child both within her body and when it is born. She feeds it with a variety of liquids - breast-milk, coconut-water, sweated greens - known as polonon, the term for the decomposition fluids from human or animal bodies (Figure 15). In fact there are a number of myths of children prospering by eating the decomposition fluids of their dead mother, and it is not too great a condensation to see these dead mothers as the dead mother, the tubuan. This reinforces the thesis that the child's composition is at the expense of the tubuan's decomposition.

    The mother gives birth in seclusion in a house, accompanied only by mothers already 'initiated' by childbirth - a restriction overtly likened to that of the seclusion of male initiates with the tubuan. The mother and child should stay hidden together for four days after birth - the same time required for the initial disarticulation of the deceased on death. When the child is revealed from the obscured spiritual interior of a woman and a house, its dark pigment has not spread and he or she is white (Figure 16). In this state the child is seen as analogous to the white shell-money lalamar effigy taken into obscurity by the tubuan. Lalamar are not only used in mortuary rituals, but

    FIGURE 15. Decomposition fluids from a breast-like coconut are suit- able sustenance for a child. Photo: S. Kingston.

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    FIGURE 16. The newborn child is white and spiritual, its identity is still to be recognized. Photo: S. Kingston.

    also as substitutes for children, into which an illness-causing spirit may be lured. Like the lalamar, the child is a body that hosts a spirit. Their spirit, known as talngan, is the life and consciousness of the child, without which the inert body is described as 'just wood'. The child's talngan was previously another person, and it is expected that the particular deceased will be recog- nized from the face of the child, or that the child himself will announce or exhibit who it is. This attribution creates bonds between the child and the family and friends of the dead person.

    Thus, while still young, the form of a child, its very appearance and behav- iour, draw attention to who she or he is. People do not know who a child really is until they recognize it, until they are moved to see it in their visage. Is what they see then a memory? In one sense this is form as memory and indeed social relations - all three discerned as one. But the child does not

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    merely evoke a dead spirit, he or she is that spirit; not a memory of a deceased, but the same deceased. As de Coppet (1981) notes, persons are re-formed in many different ways in the course of the transformational chains of ritual; yet still the cycle reproduces the 'same thing'. Memories are virtual, derivatives of the past. The child is instead a refocusing of attention in the present tense. The child is a rearticulation of someone whose social form has previously been disarticulated through the redirection of social attention upon the tubuan. Their individual identity may be achieved only by the de-totalization and fragmentation of the tubuan's collective identity as demonstrated through the spiritual decomposition of dal and birth.

    This is, of course, only the beginning of the process. Once revealed from the inchoate and obscured spiritual zones within women, the child can be seen to become an object of knowledge, a more determinate form. That form becomes more determined and sharply defined through processes of attention. They are thought of through gifts of food and through recognition as a certain person. As children become adults and proceed through their life course, they continue to form themselves and others through the action of reciprocal attention. Without thinking of each other people would have no form; they would be unknown. This social attention is at the very heart of Lak sociality: it is the means by which people know each other and themselves.

    Conclusions

    I have sought in this article to make a number of contributions on issues germane to anthropologists' consideration of form. One is to highlight the need to rescue form from crudely material understandings and approaches, and to propose instead an understanding of form as intentional engagement with the world. I see this engagement as something that can be most satis- factorily characterized in terms of attention. This allows me to join Gell, Ingold, and others who find their inspiration in the school of Bateson in the larger project of destabilizing the categorical distinction between the mental and the material and to locate movements of the mind in transformations of objects (see Ingold 2()00: 18). More specifically, I suggest the usefulness of a more active notion of form forever in tension with the formless, and indeed of focused attention forever tensioned against its dissolution. All societies must have a need for the destruction and creation of form, that is, for its lessening and heightening, and thus must have highly developed mechanisms for the subjective and objective transformations that this entails. Anthropology needs to develop an increased sensitivity to this modality of experience.

    Life cycles of both persons and artefacts are perhaps the most obvious can- didates for analysis in terms of cognitive and perceptual transformation. I have been fortunate in having ethnography to draw on which combines the two. As a result, I have been able to attempt a portrayal of the manner in which persons are formed and unformed as social, material, and cognitive entities with reference to an exceedingly numinous artefact, the tubuan. The tubuan provides a figure to human absence, and the gestalt of human presence waxes and wanes in relation to it. Thus are the primary mortuary sequence and the dal paired as rites simultaneously of decomposition and composition: rotting

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    attenuating human presence in the one and incrementing it in the other; spiritual decoration portending the spiritual heights of the tubuan in the sec- ondary mortuary rites and the disappearance of independent spiritual form in birth. The tubuan and the baby are opposites: the tubuan presents collective humanity in the form of a spirit; the baby presents an individual spirit in the form of a human child. Humans exist only as the absent ground and audi- ence for the image of the tubuan when it appears, which in turn exists only as the ground or support in the appearance of a baby.

    Although both men and spirits die, losing their form, tubuan are also re- created time and time again with great attention to the exact re-creation of the designs. In a paradox reminiscent of Weiner's (1992) 'keeping-while- giving', they both exemplify and deny the flux of form in time. They are inalienable possessions in which an accretion of historical personages and powers are embedded. Through this coalescence of distinct individuals into a figure of sameness, they not only provide a repository of identity for those that connect themselves to them, but at the same time institute hierarchy through people's differential positioning in relation to them (ritual leaders, initiates, potential initiates, women). But the hierarchy of humans is only ephemeral; control over tubuans enables clan-leaders to 'cover' other persons and lineages for only so long. Once they too are dead, they become subsumed within the overarching identity of their tubuan, only for another to take brief custodianship.

    But the tubuan is more than a political or authenticating tool. It is the poetic image produced by and for the ongoing reproduction of the Lak social world. It exemplifies an intersection of contrasting temporal dynamics: ephemerality so that people may live anew, and permanence so that there is identity of form in that renewal. It is an instant of 'pure' form recurrently emerging from the timeless, formless taraiu, and sinking back once more into its oblivion. It gives specificity to a generality of human absences.

    NOTES

    I wish to thank the people of Lak, in particular those of Siar village, for their hospitality, kindness, and patience during my fieldwork of 1994-6, which was undertaken during my period as a postgraduate student at University College London and was funded by the ESRC. I am grateful to Laura Peers for an invitation to present an early version of this article at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. A later draft benefited greatly from Eric Hirsch's kind attention. Marilyn Strathern's, Tim Ingold's, and Graeme Were's comments were also appreciated. 1 Lak is one of New Ireland's largest (just over 1,000km2) and least populated (a little over 2,000 people at the time of my fieldwork) administrative areas, and comprises the eastern half of the mountainous 'bulge' at the southern end of the island. In 1996 most of the population relied on subsistence gardening and lived in small villages and hamlets along the narrow coastal strip. Within New Ireland, they have a reputation, perhaps because of their relative remoteness from towns, for the strength of their kastom ('traditional' beliefs and practices).

    For instance, the authoritative essay on the anthropology of art by Morphy has a single sen- tence defining form - 'I define form broadly to refer to both shape and details of composi- tion and construction that might otherwise be included under technique and substance' (1994: 662) - while expanding at far more length and subtlety on 'the explanation of form ... why the object has the shape, componential structure and material composition that it has, and analysing how these attributes relate to its use in particular contexts' (1994: 662). This weight- ing is representative of the literature as a whole, which tends to take 'form' as a common-sense

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    objective quality. Even titles such as Forni in indigelouts art (Ucko 1977) give relatively little con- sideration to the subjective constitution of the analytic term. One of the best analytic con- siderations of the importance of form across a number of disciplines remains Whyte (1968).

    'See Focillon (1989 [1934]) and Kubler (1962) for seminal discussions of the latter theme within the discourse of art history.

    With regard to directionality, Ingold (2000:()()() 173) contends that 'Life ... is not the revelation of pre-existent form, but the process wherein form is generated and held in place'. With regard to substantiality, he writes, 'in my understanding, form is fundamentally about (relative) invari- ance in the properties of the environment. That is, what we perceive as 'forms' are environ- mental invariants' (personal communication, 2()()3).

    'Crary (1999: chap. 1) also provides an insightful historical survey of the vast philosophical and psychological literature on attention. Serious anthropological writings on the topic are quite sparse. The most important discussion by a social anthropologist is that of Csordas (1993), who is concerned with the theory of embodiment and investigates culturally elaborated ways of attending to and with one's body (and who uses [1993: 138] virtually the same quotation from Merleau-Ponty for his working definition of attention). To my knowledge, the only book- length meditation on the topic within the discipline is Chance and Larsen's (1976) ethologi- cally inspired collection. I do not discuss in this article the possibility and impact of different 'modes' of attention, on which, in addition to ('sordas's exploration of the bodily variety, see Hans (1993: chap. 2).

    6See Bois and Krauss (1997) for many examples and investigations of the manifold poten- tial of the formless within Gestalt, Lacanian, and other theoretical approaches.

    7 Uiii means to hide or cover, and nam1- is a prefix associated with other imemorial terms such as inaIInai (to think of or to renmember) or nambu (nmemorial object).

    8The tubuan are a variety of mask, well known within Papua New Guinea, most associated with the Tolai of northern New Britain. Tubuan are thought by many Tolai, and by many Lak, to have originated il the Siar area of southern New Ireland, where I worked (for the Tolai view, see Simet 1977: 2-3). They are now used, with significant local differences, within a fairly large area of northern New Britain and central/southern New Ireland (see Kingston [1998: 68-92] for discussion of the transmission of cultural complexes in the area; the most detailed published material on tubuan is to be found in Errington [1974] for the Duke ofYork Islands). 'Tubuan' has become a pidgin word and is used both loosely to refer to all the masks used by the male-initiatory masking society (natatka in Lak), and specifically to refer to the 'mother' mask (llnatoi in Lak).

    'This secrecy, also respected to lesser degrees in relation to other 'owned' aspects of Lak culture, means that many aspects of the tubuan must be glossed over or referred to in a less- than-explicit fashion. It is also one reason why a more orthodox formal analysis of them would be inappropriate.

    10The word 'tubuan' is used locally as a collective noun, but for clarity the form 'tubuans' has been used here to indicate plurals.

    "A Christian innovation: in pre-colonial times the body was exposed. '2The host must possess the largest pig, which he exchanges for the first and largest gar pig.

    This gar is only briefly his, as he then exchanges it for the next tonger along. The last and small- est pig, bong, which ends up with the host, is said not actually to belong to him (probably because his role is structured around giving, not receiving) and it is generally used for a small feast the next day, during which the structures are dismantled and the village tidied once lmore.

    '3Contemporary dal seclusions tend to be briefer than those of the past, which could last many months. The conical containers are now rarely used. (See Gash & Whittaker 11975: pl. 2621 and accounts in Brown [1910: 105-7] and Rickard [1892: 7].)

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    Forme, attention et cycle de vie dans le sud de la Nouvelle-Irlande

    I)u point de vue ph&nomenologique, la forme est par essence liee a l'attention. L'auteur explore ici cette relation dans le but de mettre en evidence l'importance potentielle de la perception de la forme pour l'anthropologie. A partir d'une etude de cas en Melan&sie, il suggere que la gestion de l'attention en tant que mecanisme de controle de la forme et vice- versa constitue un vehicule essentiel de la definition sociale et de la transformation des per- sonnes. L'tude de cas concerne les rituels de cycle de vie des Lak, dans le sud de la Nouvelle-Irlande. Chez ceux-ci, l'articulation et la d6sarticulation de la forme des person- nes et de celle des esprits tubuan sont liees non sculement entre elles mais aussi, par un dis- cours de remnemoration et d'oubli, i l'attention sociale.

    57 Orchard [Vay, Wanrtae, Oxon. OX12 8ED. malill,seanking ston.co. uk

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    Article Contentsp. [681]p. 682p. 683p. 684p. 685p. 686p. 687p. 688p. 689p. 690p. 691p. 692p. 693p. 694p. 695p. 696p. 697p. 698p. 699p. 700p. 701p. 702p. 703p. 704p. 705p. 706p. 707p. 708

    Issue Table of ContentsJournal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 9, No. 4, Dec., 2003Volume Information [pp. 833 - 844]Front MatterScooping, Raking, Beckoning Luck: Luck, Agency and the Interdependence of People and Things in Japan [pp. 619 - 638]Animal Bells as Symbols: Sound and Hearing in a Greek Island Village [pp. 639 - 656]Houses and the Ritual Construction of Gendered Homes in South Africa [pp. 657 - 679]Form, Attention and a Southern New Ireland Life Cycle [pp. 681 - 708]Becoming a Christian in Fiji: An Ethnographic Study of Ontogeny [pp. 709 - 727]'Ayyappan Saranam': Masculinity and the Sabarimala Pilgrimage in Kerala [pp. 729 - 754]'Widening the Radius of Trust': Ethnographic Explorations of Trust and Indian Business [pp. 755 - 773]Face to Face: Meaning, Feeling and Perception in Amazonian Welcoming Ceremonies [pp. 775 - 791]Book Reviewsuntitled [pp. 793 - 794]untitled [pp. 794 - 795]untitled [pp. 795 - 796]untitled [pp. 796 - 797]untitled [p. 797]untitled [pp. 797 - 798]untitled [pp. 799 - 800]untitled [pp. 800 - 801]untitled [pp. 801 - 802]untitled [pp. 802 - 803]untitled [pp. 803 - 804]untitled [pp. 804 - 805]untitled [pp. 805 - 806]untitled [pp. 806 - 807]untitled [pp. 807 - 808]untitled [pp. 808 - 809]untitled [p. 809]untitled [pp. 809 - 810]untitled [pp. 810 - 811]untitled [pp. 811 - 812]untitled [pp. 812 - 813]untitled [pp. 813 - 814]untitled [pp. 814 - 815]untitled [pp. 815 - 816]untitled [p. 816]untitled [pp. 817 - 818]untitled [pp. 818 - 819]untitled [pp. 819 - 820]untitled [pp. 820 - 821]untitled [pp. 821 - 822]untitled [pp. 822 - 823]untitled [pp. 823 - 824]untitled [pp. 824 - 825]untitled [pp. 825 - 826]untitled [p. 826]untitled [p. 827]untitled [pp. 827 - 828]

    Books Received [pp. 829 - 831]Back Matter