Sung Tales from the Papua New Guinea Highlands: Studies in Form, Meaning, and Sociocultural Context ed. by Alan Rumsey, Don Niles (review)

Although the highlands of Papua New Guinea only became the subject of anthropological research in the 1930s, researchers have been thick on the ground ever since and the amount of information on the communities in this region is exceptional. But even with all of this work, highlands research has suffered from a number of gaps, including a glaring shortage of linguistic anthropological work and relatively few comparative projects that examine regional practices across ethnolinguistic boundaries. The present volume helps to fill in both of these gaps with a series of articles examining the poetics and musicality of the complex tales chanted or sung by master storyteller bards.

The contributions in this edited volume all focus on this extraordinary performance genre in which mostly male bards extemporaneously compose songs that relate traditional lore. The practice is, or was, an important performance genre among Duna (also known as Yuna), Huli, Enga, Ipili, Angal, Ku Waru, and Melpa speakers, to list only those ethnolinguistic groups represented by articles in this volume. The contexts of performance varied, but in many cases male bards performed sung tales in men’s houses to an audience that sometimes interjected standard exclamations and encouragements. The song topics vary across ethnolinguistic groups, from the interactions between “sky people” and the first humans to the courtship of magical women. The songs are performed by the composer-bard without instrumentation to tunes that follow a standard form (for example, in the Duna-Yuna case, each line has two parts, first descending several notes and then staying on a single note for the rest of the line).

The volume contains thirteen chapters, including an introduction by the editors framing the project as a whole. As the editors note, there has been very little written about this performance genre even though it is practiced across the Highlands region and even though the Highlands region is extremely well studied in other respects. Given this lack, the volume as a whole makes an important contribution by documenting and analyzing examples of these tales from seven different ethnolinguistic groups. One of the most important concepts developed throughout many of the chapters is “parallelism” as defined by Roman Jakobson. Jakobson discussed parallelism—what Rumsey pithily calls “repetition with variation” (p. 252)—as a primary form of poetic structure. The segmentation of text into lines and the overlapping of repeating parallel elements within and across lines are examined in many of these chapters as the key feature of song composition (see especially chapters 1, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 11). Of particular note are the chapters that focus on the ways in which parallelisms are constructed across linguistic and musical forms (chapters 4, 8, and 11). In addition to this focus on poetic form, the chapters in the volume present structural and formal analyses using a number of methodologies from linguistics and ethnomusicology.

Chapters by Kenny Yuwi Kendoli, Kirtsy Gillespie and Lila San Roque, and Michael Sollis discuss Duna-Yuna versions of sung texts from a number of different angles. Kendoli, a Yuna man whose interview is transcribed here, provides an insider’s account of the evaluative criteria audience members and bards use to judge performances, among other topics. Gillespie and San Roque provide a formal analysis of the structure of a song in both linguistic and musicological terms. Sollis discusses the forms of parallelism in Duna sung tales. There are two chapters about sung tales in Huli; Gabe C. J. Lomas focuses on forms of textual and linguistic cohesion across clauses and sentences, and Jacqueline Pugh-Kitingan analyzes the ways in which melody distorts linguistic tone in sung performances. Three chapters focus on Enga and Ipili sung tales. Philip Gibbs moves away from structural considerations to examine how bards evoke their imagined worlds for their audiences through metaphorical speech. Terrance Borchard’s contribution to the chapter...