More than a record of culture

Books

Ethnology of Vanuatu, by Felix Speiser, published 1991 by Crawford House Press, PO Box 143, Bathurst, NSW 2795, Australia. SAI29.

Acquirer of one of the world’s finest Melanesian ethnological collec tions, Felix Speiser lamented that “no island will be* represented by the whole range of its cultural possessions, for the traveller cannot rely on the initiative of the natives but will, as a rule, manage to see only what he wants to see, and will therefore be able to acquire only what he has actually set his eyes on, either through chance or through systematic research.”

For all his doubts, the author of this classic text on Vanuatu art and culture has produced an extraordinary master

piece of anthropological inquiry.

Enthnographische Materjalen aus den Neuen Hebriden und den Banks-Inseln, first pub lished in 1923, is now translated into English, thanks to the support of the Pro Helvetia Foundation in Zurich and the Swiss Academy of Humanities.

Speiser saw himself chiefly as the mere recorder of the complex world he found: his accounts of the mental realm of his subjects are filled with a sense of wonder and enthusiasm. Both summary of the work of earlier anthropological investi gators and overarching account of the intricacies of grade-economies, magic and life-cycle rituals, Speiser’s survey leaves little hidden.

It is studded with more than 1600 of

Speiser’s own delicate photographs.

Thorough, sometimes ghoulish accounts of poisons and hunting techniques mingle with recondite ideas about Vanuatu religion: “It is clear that the notion which the natives have of the soul is not very different from those of the European except perhaps that it is even a little more vague ... the soul can leave the body without necessarily entailing death.”

Speiser was clearly an intriguing combination of artist and scientific inves tigator. He was both fired by the excitement of the New Hebrides, which he described in a Mills and Boon volume,

and appalled by the demographic

collapse under colonial rule, which he recorded in a scientific paper, Decadence

and preservation.

After establishing the pioneering Basel Ethnographic Museum New Hebrides collection, largely based on his stay in the Vanuatu archipelago from May 1910 to July 1912, he continued his Melanesian field trips, devoting special attention to the lower Sepik. During his later years, he developed an intriguing interpret ation of Vanuatu art, which is briefly sketched in an essay in this volume by

Christian Kaufmann of the Basel Ml seum: “It was Speiser’s contention ths deeply linked as it was with religion an ritual, art always started from images a form close to nature, representing tl: apparent shape of the being to which referred ... art forms that were meanim ful would degenerate into those that we meaningless and evolve no further, unle the society to which their authc belonged regained its creativity an invented new links between its religioi ideas and new images.”

Speiser emerged as one of the prirr European scholars in the field Melanesian art, codifying and doc; menting its achievements against tl more accessible, better known works neighbouring Polynesia. Yet I Kaufmann reminds his readers that til technical specialism was balanced I Speiser’s vivid humanity, a “commi ment of mind to the peoples of tl Pacific”, which breathes still from H pages, for “in their more recent histo* he had seen too many of them desperate throes when the very roots their existence had been destroyed in tl clash with the colonial system”.

Speiser saw his work primarily as document, a tribute to cultures slippii into the shelter of memory, rather ths part of the living tradition that sprang u once more in the independent Republ of Vanuatu. He would doubtless 1 surprised if he learned that the Ambry\ and Pentecost slit drums he describes ai once more part of social life. Speiser sketches of upright hollow drums froc the Banks Islands served as the basis fl a project by the Vanuatu Cultun Centre to restore the making and use these Timiat Wos on Vanua Lava an Mota Lava in the Banks group durii 1987.

Speiser, by virtue of his work in Bas»: stands as one of the chief initiators modern Europe’s encounter with Pacif culture. Each of the pieces Speiss collected in Basel are displayed in settim that communicate their spiritual charg the piece illustrated on the cover Ethnology , a southern Malekulla sku statue, remains a deeply potent imago The Swiss Government remember* its New Hebrides connection, and in tl year of Vanuatu’s independence, 19® funded the present translation. With i reports and legends, its careful descrii tions of tree-ferns and tapa mats, dancing grounds and pig sacrifices, rock drawings and painted tree, the boo* is a testament to its author’s painstakin effort and to the universe of traditions I

helped preserve. !