新作坊 Humanity Innovation and Social Practice

Songs, Places, and Pathways of Change: Themes from the Highlands of Papua New Guinea

摘要：

      Songs and dances often function as markers of identity for both their performers and those who attend the performances. In the Mount Hagen area among speakers of the Melpa language in the Western Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea the imagery of songs often reflects or expresses an intimate relationship with the landscape. In addition songs mirror and create notions of historical change, such as those which came to the Melpa area with the development of government roads and the advent of vehicles from the 1950s onwards. In this paper, we explore the implications of the relationship between songs, landscape, and history by focusing our attention on a set of photographic images and on how these intermesh symbolically with the Melpa cosmos. Our presentation follows sequentially these images and their linkages with prevailing themes in songs. First, we deal with trees, hills, water, and clouds. A tall forest tree may stand for a leader, and its fall for his death. Hills, rain, and clouds are seen as impediments standing between a singer and a courting partner. Courting parties took place in the past in the night-time, after ceremonial dances for occasions of wealth transfer known as ”moka.” The dancers at these ”moka” occasions often lamented the loss through death of kinsfolk, evoking sympathy and grief on the part of the spectators; while at the same time they expressed pride in their displays of wealth and bodily decorations. The ethos of many songs contains a strong element of pathos (”kond” or ”kaemb” in the Melpa language). Funeral songs and laments for the dead express this most openly; but the same sentiment finds its way also into courting songs. We make a brief comparison at the end of our paper with songs and dances from the repertoires of the indigenous Austronesian peoples of Taiwan, among whom songs and dances have become markers of cultural revival and of their recovery of identity in the context of local and national-level historical changes.