Making Skins: Malangan and the Idiom of Kinship in Northern New Ireland

Abstract

Abstract This essay discusses the art objects produced as gifts for final mortuary exchanges in the northern part of New Ireland. Northern New Ireland art is known under the generic name malangan and comprises carved and painted sculptures, as well as others woven from fibre or moulded from clay, of astonishing visual and conceptual complexity and variety of design. Malangan sculptures exemplify one of the few flourishing art traditions in contemporary Papua New Guinea. Not only are sculptures still carved from wood for the society’s mortuary ceremonies, but, collected over a period of a hundred years, they also form one of the largest collections of a single art tradition held in Western ethnographic museums. From the indigenous perspective, however, it is not the sculptures as seemingly unique and identifiable objects which are of importance, but the engraved images which serve as renewable, relocatable and memorable entities in their own right.

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