Matters of life and death

WHEN we look at an apparently simpler and more rudimentary culture, we discover it uncomfortably mirrors fundamentals within our own lives.

Metaniele

THE National Gallery of Australia first began to exhibit its considerable collection of South Pacific artefacts in a 2008 overview titled Gods, Ghosts and Men. It was an introduction to the animistic cultures and magical beliefs of the Polynesian and Melanesian people who live both close to and far from Australia and whose ways of thinking have much in common with the Australian Aborigines.

But whereas discussions and presentations of indigenous culture in this country often can be obfuscated by various combinations of guilt, blame and denial, the culture of the South Pacific can be considered with dispassionate but sympathetic interest.

The survey of animistic belief was extended in the NGA's Life, Death and Magic, in 2010, to the tribal cultures that dominated Southeast Asia before the coming of the more sophisticated religious systems of Hinduism and Buddhism, and one of the interests of this exhibition was to reveal the tenacity of the earlier and simpler beliefs, and the way that they tended to persist even after the coming of civilisation.

The animistic world, as both these exhibition titles suggest, is one in which life and death are closely interwoven, the dead are always disconcertingly close to the living, and above all the supernatural is an ever-present reality. Or, more accurately, we should say the boundary between natural and supernatural has not yet been drawn. It was the pre-Socratic philosophers who defined the concept of physis, or nature, as a self-contained domain governed by its own laws, laying the foundations for the evolution of science; and, conversely, it was only on the basis of such a concept of nature that it was possible to define phenomena that interfered with such laws as supernatural.

The separation of natural and supernatural is thus the product of the discipline of rational thinking, but it is in these animistic cultures that we can recognise the more spontaneous tendencies of the mind - the instincts and habits whose survival is dismissed as superstition by reason, but that can be hard to relinquish entirely.

We may feel uneasy if someone speaks ill of us or calls down imprecations upon our heads, but in a culture pervaded by magic the threat is far more literal.

A word - curse, blessing, wish - is not just a sound that dissipates in the wind but an event, an action, a fact added to nature as one may throw a stone into a pool, and that has consequences in exactly the same way that a physical blow has an effect. It is naturally more potent if the words are spoken by a witchdoctor or someone held to possess power or authority. Aborigines have been known to die after being the object of a curse, or when an enemy has pointed the bone at them. But even an unspoken thought can be a poisonous reality: people across the world believe in variations on the evil eye, which is nothing more than a metaphorical way of thinking of the malicious or envious feelings others - living humans, ghosts or nature spirits - may feel about us.

Even thoughts and feelings are facts in the pre-rational world: the anger, envy and resentment of others, however secret, are powerful forces unleashed into the world, like toxic substances capable of destroying us or our families or possessions unless we take prophylactic measures against them. It is no wonder that psychoanalysts, anthropologists and the surrealists were so interested in cultures where the unconscious mind seemed so much closer to the conscious than in the modern West.

But what is even more striking is that today, with so-called social media, modern civilisation has produced a technological means for giving the hostility of others an objective and sometimes fatal form.

Social media offers the illusion of sociability, but there is no sociability without the conventions of civility and the boundaries of privacy; in reality, it is a post-social environment in which people willingly expose themselves to the malice of others, given concrete and wounding form in words and images, amplified by the eyes of third parties and strangers; in which a person's life dissolves into hysterical self-parading in the face of ubiquitous envy and ridicule. It is a world in which the word friend has become a verb, yet where every friend is, potentially at least, an enemy.

A third exhibition, Varilaku: Pacific Arts from the Solomon Islands, in 2011, considered the case of a particular cultural group in the South Pacific that had the peculiarity of being built around the practice of headhunting. The case was interesting because it was so unambiguous: this was a culture in which a youth could not become a man without killing another and collecting his head. The whole of the social fabric was based on this priority, and people lived in terror of raiding parties from a neighbouring community landing with the express aim of killing.

Yet this culture also produced some finely crafted objects and had its own cult of beauty, typically focused on the young male warrior rather than the women, whose role was more utilitarian. It was an exhibition that made one ponder the relation of violence and beauty, again holding up to us an image in which we could recognise, even in extreme form, something of ourselves. And it forced one to consider, too, another theme that is of urgent relevance across the world: at what point do particular cultures and belief systems overstep the bounds of universal principles of justice and human rights? Will a culture collapse entirely if a central but morally unacceptable element of it is excised, and does that matter?

Now a fourth exhibition is devoted to another South Pacific people: Kastom: Art of Vanuatu deals with a much less violent culture, but one that again is focused on the status of the male, and in which the object is to gain access to successively higher status levels throughout one's life. Perhaps the thing that strikes us spontaneously about this system is the absolute lack of freedom or individuality it implies. There is not a choice of ways to live a meaningful or socially recognised life: there is only one path, a single way to social eminence.

But once again, whenever we look at an apparently simpler and more rudimentary culture with an attempt at sympathy rather than a self-assured conviction of our own superiority, we discover that it uncomfortably mirrors fundamental realities within our own lives. The simpler culture, in which certain features are more nakedly visible, can be like a fable revealing patterns that, in our own lives, we try to hide from ourselves.

How many of us in contemporary consumer society pursue a predetermined status path without considering whether we are sacrificing more important priorities?

In Vanuatu, the acquisition of higher status grades seems to be largely a matter of wealth, and of the amount of wealth that one is able to spend or, we may say, conspicuously consume in the pursuit of status. Again, we may think this confusion of spiritual and material status odd, but in the context of a culture in which there is no boundary between nature and supernature, matter and spirit, status is a matter of a man's power and substance in a way that does not differentiate between material and spiritual: this is nothing like the world of Indian spirituality, for example, in which the ascetic sannyasi can be spiritually superior to the merely rich and powerful.

But how is wealth measured in a society that does not have money? Here it seems to be principally quantified in pigs, but more particularly in tusked pigs or boars that are specially reared: the upper canine is removed in the young animal so that the lower tooth or tusk is able to grow unimpeded; as it gets bigger it begins to curve, then pierces the upper cheek - a painful process for the animal, of course - as it continues to grow into the full circle that is the most highly prized.

The animals are slaughtered on the occasion of the ceremonies of status-taking, as it is known, and the number of tusked pigs that a man has been able to rear and can afford to slaughter on these occasions, periodically throughout his life, determines the rate of his ascent through the established grades of status within the social fabric.

The instruments used in important ceremonies in any culture tend to be the objects of special care: they often have a distinctive form that is codified by tradition, are made of valuable materials and are adorned with particularly skilful and elaborate decorations. The instrument used for the slaying of the pigs is no exception: it is a special kind of hammer, one of which is included in the exhibition, and there would be a particular skill in wielding it correctly, presumably with a view to killing the animal with a single powerful blow.

It is clearly chiefs and those who are already community leaders and prosperous men who have the best chance of rising to the upper levels of the status ladder.

There are cult objects that record a man's latest status-taking while also recording the previous levels attained. But the highest level of all takes a man to the boundary between the living and the dead, the world of humans and the world of spirits that animates the natural environment and regulates the life of the tribe.

At this highest level, a man reaches the status of an ancestor spirit and becomes one of the figures we encounter in the final section of the exhibition.

These are strange forms of roughly human shape, sometimes with the erect phallus of fertility, and always with heads poised uncannily between naturalism and mask-like distortion. The secret of these strange figures is that their heads are built up around a skull - not the skull of a slain enemy, as in the Solomon Islands but that of the dead man himself.

These awkward but compelling effigies, literally containing the dead man, are set up in the men's meeting house, where we can finally understand not only their real purpose but that of the whole status-grade system.

In virtually all human cultures there is a fear of the dead; the rituals of funerary ceremonies are as much a matter of ensuring the safe departure of the deceased as of honouring his memory, for unless he is duly propitiated and safely sent away he may return as a maleficent ghost.

Exceptions may be made, however, for those who have reached the highest level of social rank and thus gained the privilege of remaining present as members of the community, participants and leaders even after death.

 Kastom: Art of Vanuatu, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, until June 16