Inscribed Landscapes: Marking and Making Place

Nineteen. The Work of Inscription in Foi Poetry

A volume dedicated to reading the material traces of people left on the Earth might be an odd venue in which to write about a people such as the Foi of Papua New Guinea, who possess no decorative art techniques. Virtually everything they manufacture is made of decomposable bush material that erodes and degrades once its user discards it or is no longer able to continue putting it to use. Those stone implements they did acquire and possess—ax blades, antique stones, and pottery remains that were adjuncts of various preMission religious cults—were traded regularly to neighboring groups, so that unearthing such artifacts might very well have little to say about Foi practices of place making or place marking. How then would such a people create a sense of what we might call monumentality for themselves? And in the absence (until fairly recently) of a written language, how could they maintain any sense of the tension between what is recorded and what is forgotten and newly remembered, or remembered again without realizing it? Let us first accept that the traces of people’s actions left on the earth and in the environment generally 270 nineteen The Work of Inscription in Foi Poetry James F. Weiner Footprints I have made; they are broken Osage Corn-Planting Song (E. LaFlesch, The Osage Rite of Vigil) also leave traces in people’s consciousness. Although there may be no elaborate permanent material scarring or inscribing the earth and its surfaces, there is a complex and well-developed tradition of imaginal marking in the form of the memorial song poetry, or sorohabora, that Foi women compose, and that men recompose in their own style—keeping the content and the imagery the same—to honor the memory of deceased male relatives. The Foi today number about 6,000 and inhabit the shores of Lake Kutubu and the valley of the Mubi River southwest of Mendi and Poroma in the Southern Highlands Province. Their territory is large in relation to their small population and they subsist on a complex mix of sago processing, gardening , tree crop cultivation, gathering, fishing, and hunting. Since 1991, their spatial world has been significantly and dramatically transformed by the discovery of petroleum and gas west of Lake Kutubu, and completion of the Kutubu Access Road, which linked their hitherto isolated valley with the Highlands Highway system. The Foi, in common with other people in different parts of the world, tend to perceive the passage of time in terms of human movement over and through terrain.1 As people move, inhabit places, abandon them and move elsewhere, journey in search of food, and so on, they leave traces of themselves in the houses, gardens, and other intrusions in the environment. The landscape under such conditions becomes iconic of human history. Renato Rosaldo (1980:56), in his eloquent study of Ilongot head-hunting, noted that “the Ilongot sense of history [is] conceived as movement through space in which (and this is the usual analogy drawn) people walk along a trail and stop at a sequence of named resting places.” Bachelard (1969:56) even coined the term topoanalysis for the “systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives.” This notion of human movement as history becomes a dominant trope for artistic and imaginal elaboration. For people such as the Osage, the Ilongot , and the Foi, human history and intention is discursively re-created through the narration of movement between places: discourse delineates this movement and centers the core values of language around moving images. In this chapter I examine the lyric content of Foi song poems.These sung poems are composed by Foi women while they are at work making sago, and in this form are called obedobora. They are always sung to the memory of deceased men; women are never the subject of these songs. Men either overhear their female relatives’ songs or are taught them directly by their wives and other female relatives.The men then arrange them in their own musical convention, which involves groups of pairs of men and a different melody and tempo, and perform them publicly on ceremonial occasions. In this form they are called sorohabora (see Weiner 1991 for more detail on musical and poetic conventions of Foi men and women). Although women claim that they performed their own ceremonial rendition of the songs, I only ever witnessed men’s sorohabora performed on public ceremonial occasions in the 1980s. The most salient and regular feature...