Jim Mason was a student at Stanford University. He was studying how humans live on a far away island called Papua New Guinea.  

TO  THE  BEAT  OF    THE  GARAMUT  DRUM  

Written by Christie YoungSmith Illustrated by Alison Amberg

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At that time, many people in America thought that people from Papua New Guinea were strange. On the island, they celebrated by dancing around in masks. They also wore costumes made of feathers and shells.

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Jim wanted to learn more. In 1989, he traveled a long way to the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. He discovered that the people there live in separate tribes. He stayed with the Kwoma and Iatmul tribes. He also learned that, on the island, people speak more than 852 different languages! In fact, Papua New Guinea is one of the most diverse countries in the world. This means that Papua New Guineans live in many, many different ways.  

While living with the Iatmul tribe, Jim met two artists named Naui Saunambui and Yai Latai. They were master carvers. They were very good at carving large poles for Iatmul spirit houses. These are special houses where the men of the Iatmul tribe can rest, gather, and celebrate the spirits.   The artists could also carve wooden garamut drums. The Iatmul use these drums to speak in a musical language to spirits and villages far away.   Both the Iatmul and Kwoma tribes believe that everything in nature has a spirit. To them, animals, plants, and rocks all have spirits, and so they use art and music to communicate with the spirit world.  

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Originally, Jim had come to Papua New Guinea to study the people there. But after learning so much about Naui Saunambui and Yai Latai’s lives, he realized that they weren’t just something to study. They were his friends! Another artist, Kowspi Marek, said to Jim: “You saw us and you thought we were from a wild area – the jungle. You didn’t know us and we didn’t know you. But now we know each other and we are brothers. Now we are friends.”    

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Before leaving, Jim wanted to thank his friends for letting him visit. So the artists asked if they could do an art project in America. They wanted to share some of their traditions with the people at Stanford.   To make the project possible, Jim returned to Stanford to raise money. He used this money to fly back to Papua New Guinea, to bring a group of ten master artists together, and to accompany them back to the U.S.A.   When they arrived in the U.S.A., the master artists thought the people there were also strange and wild. They wondered why Americans celebrate by dressing up in gowns, high heels and tuxedos.    

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At Stanford, the master artists visited an art museum to learn about how Western people make art. They saw the work of August Rodin, who is an artist from France. They were inspired by the stories behind Rodin’s sculptures. So they decided to use their art to tell similar stories from Papua New Guinea.   The Kwoma and Iatmul artists came up with a plan to carve a drum, and over 20 wooden poles and stone sculptures. Usually, the Iatmul carve their wooden poles and the Kwoma paint theirs with natural materials. However, the artists did not have Papua New Guinea materials to make their red, yellow and black paint. Instead, they decided to use American materials such as volcanic rock and paint from the Home Depot!  

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During the day, the master artists worked hard carving sculptures of crocodiles, birds, and human or spirit figures. Their sculptures tell traditional stories from Papua New Guinea.   One wooden pole shows the Iatmul story of Kura, a woman saved by a crocodile. After being saved, the woman married the crocodile. She decided to live in his underwater home and created two children. However, her children were not human – one was born an eagle and the other was born a crocodile. The eagle made sure that the village had enough berries and nuts, and the crocodile made sure they had enough fish to eat. So the Papua New Guinea people celebrate the eagle and the crocodile to bring good food to their families.  

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On Friday nights, Jim and the artists celebrated like they do in Papua New Guinea. Naui Saunambui and Yai Latai played music, drummed, sang, and painted visitor’s faces. Jim also held a delicious barbeque for the artists and the Stanford community.   Everyone wore jeans and t-shirts, which are clothing items found in both America and Papua New Guinea. But the artists wore some masks, feathers, and shells too.  

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Sometimes, visitors still beat on the crocodile garamut drum. Thump thump thump! Deep sounds of Papua New Guinea fill the sculpture garden. Today, images and sounds that used to seem so far away and so strange feel closer and more familiar.   The joyful spirits of Naui Saunambui, Yai Latai, and the eight other master artists inhabit the Stanford campus.  

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Left to right, top to bottom: master artists in Las Vegas; four of the artists banging the crocodile garamut drum; Kwoma artist carving wooden totem with a metal scalpel

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Left to right, top to bottom: Iatmul wooden carving representing the story of Kora, who had a crocodile son and an eagle son

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Left to right, top to bottom: Iatmul spirit house; Iatmul garamut wooden drums23  

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Left to right, top to bottom: Papua New Guinea master artists visiting the Cantor Arts Center to see Rodin’s Thinker; Iatmul representation of the Thinker

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Map showing the home locations of the Iatmul and Kwoma artists working on the collaborative art project at Stanford

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Authors’ Statement Our primary purpose in writing this text is to convey the main events of anthropologist Jim Mason’s collaborative work with master artists from Papua New Guinea, to create Stanford’s Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden. We strive to highlight the events and motivations that brought Jim and the artists together, as well as some of the artists’ local techniques and stories depicted in the garden. Ultimately the narrative form of the book provokes some historical inaccuracies, as history is not always linear. We hope, however, that young readers will walk away from the book with a better sense of Iatmul culture, and the implied effects of Jim and the artists’ collaboration. In an effort to provide some transparency about our creative process, we shall highlight some of the decisions we made when drafting the text. We emphasized the ways in which the Iatmul and Kwoma artists incorporated Western narratives and techniques, in order to reinforce the idea of cultural mixing. For example, the Iatmul artists created their own Thinker statue, in response to the Rodin’s Thinker statue at the Cantor (Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden). The Kwoma artists also used non-traditional paint colors from Home Depot because of their novelty, even though the artists traditionally created their own paints from natural resources (Midlock, 2016). Furthermore, the artists experimented with a new carving medium in their stone works, one of which is a reinterpretation of Rodin’s Gates of Hell (Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden). In many ways, according to our research, this cultural “mixing” was the main objective of the art project for both Jim Mason and the Papua New Guinean artists. We also made some deliberate choices to exclude information from the text. Most obviously, we chose to exclude in-depth information about the Kwoma artists participating in the project. They produced the painted, wooden totems in the garden. We chose to focus on the Iatmul carvers’ contributions because Mason originally made the connection with Naui Saunambui and Yai Latai, Iatmul carvers, and the garamut drums they carved were so emblematic of the spirit of the garden’s creation (Silverman, 2003). Additionally, we excluded information about the stone sculptures in the garden made from Californian, volcanic rock. These omissions enabled us to better focus our narrative. While these decisions may stifle some of the voices not included, we did explain that Papua New Guinea is a place with many villages such as the Iatmul and Kwoma, to try and validate the true breadth of diversity in the country.

 

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To reflect on the bias implicit in our text, we included specific sentences to guide readers towards a more expansive understanding of “tribal art.” In particular, we wrote that Americans found Papua New Guinean clothing to be strange, and Papua New Guineans found American clothing to be strange. This exchange of perception was hinted at on the curatorial signs marking the sculpture garden. The curator wrote: “For the artists, it was an unforgettable journey into the jungles of Americana – an expedition that put them face-to-face with the strange rituals and the esoteric ways of the Americans” (Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden). As authors, we decided to highlight this irony of judgment in order to make the statement that perceiving groups of people as “exotic” works in two ways. Sources Cited Lam, M., Mason, J., Niemeyer, G., & Stanford University. (1994). In Papua New Guinea and America. Stanford, Calif.: Lam/Niemeyer. Midlock, P. (2016, April 17). Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden Tour. Lecture presented at Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden Tour, Stanford. Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden display. Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden. Stanford, CA. Peters, M. The New Guinea Sculpture Garden at Stanford. (n.d.). Retrieved April 19, 2016, from http://web.stanford.edu/~mjpeters/png/   Silverman, E. K.. (2003). High Art as Tourist Art, Tourist Art as High Art: Comparing the New Guinea Sculpture Garden at Stanford University and Sepik River Tourist Art. International Journal of Anthropology, 18(4), 219–230. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25123039

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