“He's not a White Man, He's A Small Bird Like You and Me”: Learning to Dance and Becoming Human in Southern New Ireland

Abstract

In the Lak region of southern New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, music and dance performance is not a discreet element of society; it is in performances that communities show others who they are, what they consist of and how powerful they can be. It is also in a performance that “individuals” (in the Lak sense of the term) display their identity and reveal their spiritual capacity. In addition it is in performance that the visible reality of humans meets the invisible realm of the spirits. The movement and costume elements of performance are the visual poetic representation of the spirit and human worlds as cast by the local imagination. Unlike many Highlands Papua New Guinea societies, where dance movements are kept to a minimum in order to accommodate elaborate costumes (Strathern 1979:244), among the Lak, dance movement is vigorous, powerful, and essential to a community's successful existence. Dance movements, which predominantly occur on the vertical plane (see Kaeppler and Niles 1998:482), differ significantly in style between the sexes; as Eves has recognized (1998:54), these movements are a definitive aspect of “gender conceptualisations” in the region. For male performers (and this article mainly focuses on men's dances), performance is a physical and spiritual display that transforms participants into something more than human. This article begins by introducing several key Lak notions. Local concepts concerning the individual, relationships, community, and male and female are explored. The mythical foundation of society is introduced as a basis for comprehending some of the aesthetics and emotions that underpin performance. And Lak notions surrounding the relationships between space, gender, and power are examined to reveal the invisible boundaries that divide the physical landscape.