Gender, Song, and Sensibility: Folktales and Folksongs in the Highlands of New Guinea (review)

Pamela J Stewart and Andrew Strathern dedicate this remarkable volume to the "humanity of expression that sits in the quiet corners of imagination." And, indeed, the expression of longing, loss, desire, and pleasure infuses this book's rich and textured examination of the complex relationships between men and women in a range of Highland New Guinea societies. The book draws our attention quite effectively to a number of key interpretive issues. Stewart and Strathern provide a compelling, ethnographically grounded challenge to what has become a recurrent theme in the regional literature on gender in the New Guinea Highlands, that is, male domination, male-female antagonism, fear of menstrual pollution, and a downplaying of interest in sexual activity. The authors set their goal as "reexamin[ing] the terms of this stereotype and . . . build[ing] up a rather different overall picture, one that gives room for what we may recognize as a more positive view of gendered relations in these societies and tak[ing] into fuller consideration the nuanced expressiveness and ingenuity of the New Guinea Highlands people"(1 ). Questions of embodiment, its expression, and its representation are central to their argument. How somatic experience and desire are conveyed, remembered, anticipated, and actively pursued are critical issues. The notion of "sensibility," "mediat[ing] between the worlds of the mental and the sensory"(5 ), and, further, between individual actors and sociocultural framework, is pivotal to their discussion. It also allows a particularly revelatory perspective on questions of imagination, agency, and efficacy, and the ambit for action that the sensory can afford.

Taking sensibility seriously provides a compelling framework within which Stewart and Strathern consider a wide range of materials from a diverse sample of Highland societies. The central chapters of the book provide a principled, systematic, and magisterial account of various genres of expression in the Highlands; the discussion draws on the authors' own research and their insightful and imaginative readings of the work of others. Much of the material examined is textual. The two chapters considering courting song lyrics are particularly interesting, as the song texts are clearly intended not only to be about desire and affection but also, through performance, to catalyze and inflame them. Here evocation figures centrally as a powerful and necessary complement to expression, and the descriptions of the events in which these songs figure are particularly tantalizing. Other chapters on tales, ballads, and other narrative forms are more focused on the representation of sexual sensibility—on how it is conventionally assumed to take shape in human relationships, and, reciprocally, on the consequences it engenders. These discussions are primarily thematic, but, as with the courting songs, the texts provide rich accounts of the sensory modalities—sight, smell, sound, movement, and taste among them—through which sensibility is assumed to work. A particularly stimulating chapter is concerned with body decoration. Drawing on a long anthropological tradition in the Highlands, the authors provide a complex account of the meanings associated with different decorative elements. They also move beyond solely semantic interpretations to consider the other forms of semiosis at play here, and especially how decoration and self-presentation can index more complex and global phenomena: somatic health and fullness, desire and desirability, and the integration of mind and body. As with the chapters on courting songs, this discussion points to the ways in which sensibility is more than a matter of meaning—and in which ethnographic interpretation benefits from moving beyond those materials that lend themselves easily to textual and thematic analysis. A final—and particularly interesting —ethnographic chapter is concerned with female spirits and initiation. Institutionally and ritually defined relationships between men and female spirits provide, in many of the communities under discussion, an especially rich nexus for teasing out powerful forms of gender interdependence and complementarity. While these relationships rarely directly model those among human men and women, Stewart...