Totemism, tourism, and trucks. The changing meanings of paint and colors in a Sepik River society

Abstract

Iatmul art from the middle Sepik River in Papua New Guinea is well-known worldwide, but little understood. This article therefore offers an ethnographically-grounded, long-term study of the changing meanings of artistic paint and colors as used and seen by the Eastern Iatmul people of Tambunum village, whom I have studied since the late-1980s. I analyze how colors and paint evoke the landscape in terms of mythic history, totemism, the aesthetic value of movement, an irreducible dialogue about cosmic generativity, and the ontological principle of watery change. I also interpret touristic paintings and how Eastern Iatmul see recent decorations on passenger trucks and vans, drawing on the outlook of landscape realism in the Western tradition. The traditional worldview still infuses paint and colors with ancestral meanings. But Eastern Iatmul today also color their art with aspirations for development, romantic views of nature, and anxieties over globalization.