This review serves to welcome two new arrivals, an exhibition of objects from the Wahgi valley (Central Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea) and a book accompanying the exhibition, by Michael O'Hanlon, who was responsible for making the collection for the Museum of Mankind, London. There has not been an exhibition of the material culture of the New Guinea Highlands in this country before. This fact alone might be sufficient to encourage one to take a positive attitude towards `Paradise', simply to reward the Museum for taking the initiative in difficult times. But in fact, it is not hard to find plenty to admire, at a number of levels.

For a start, it is colourful and lively, and it contains a number of memorable objects which have not been seen before in any museum, here or abroad, certainly not in such quantity. Particularly striking are the war shields which the Wahgi people have produced in considerable numbers in recent years as a by-product of the resurgence in inter-group warfare. And for those whose preferences do not run to gaily-painted shields with real bullet-holes in them, there is a panoply of splendid netbags, displayed with all the skill of an expert window-dresser. There is also a fully-stocked trade-store, a coffee-husker, quantities of (fake) money, and certain ritual structures, re-created with great skill and versilitude by the museum's technical staff. The lighting is effective and the plan is simple and logical. There are not a great many objects in the exhibition - a marked contrast to the decorative overkill in the Mexican `Day of the Dead' exhibition in the adjoining Gallery - but I found the slightly spartan approach soothing.

Above: Making the collection shown in the exhibition prompted Wahgi to demonstrate discontinued cultural practices. Here Waiang dons the chains of cane loops, charcoal and netbags formerly worn by widows. Lina. On the left, occupies a double ritual role, impersonating one of the `girl widows' who traditionally accompanied a mourning woman, while also being `named after' (a relationship referred to in Wahgi as jimbem) Linda Frankland, Michael O'Hanlon's co-worker (Photo: Michael O'Hanlon).

The intention of `Paradise' is, of course, to do something to extricate Papua New Guinea from the anachronistic image which besets the country, i.e. the primordial `Savage Island' stereotype. Things have moved on in Wahgi. Or rather, there has never been a time when things stood still there, since the very plumes and shell-ornaments which constituted `primitive' finery were traded in from outside. And the biggest finery-traders were the colonial intruders themselves, since the avidity with which Highlanders accepted shells airlifted in from the coast, in exchange for goods and services, was at one time the basis of the colonial economy.

We get to see some of these old, patinated, shells, but only to emphasize the smoothness of the transition (from the Wahgi point of view) of the shift from shells to printed money, which is displayed, at bridewealth transactions, in just the same way, on a lofty framework. We can also trace the development of the main contemporary art-forms - the aforementioned shields and net-bags - as a process of spontaneous assimilation rather than deculturation or vulgarization. Shield designs now are often based on the labels found on beer-bottles (`South Pacific' lager). But the scale of the shields and the vigour with which the designs have been pirated mean that truly artistic creations result: indeed, as O'Hanlon points out, because of the associations of (introduced) beer with fighting, pork-fat, masculinity and competitive exchange, Wahgi shield-designs are now more `meaningful' iconographically than ever in the past, when simple geometric designs served a purely decorative and identificatory function.

Similarly, the net-bags which define New Guinean autochthony as perhaps no other single artefact does - Maureen Mackenzie (1991) rightly calls them collectively a `net-bag dependent' culture - have assumed a modern from which owes everything and nothing to the past. Modern trade has supplied Wahgi women with brilliant acrylic yarns which they deploy with taste and élan, while the much greater degree of inter-district communication within the country has meant that design innovations emanating from particular regions are now taken up and developed in Wahgi, while, presumably, Wahgi ideas are exported elsewhere.

How successful will this exhibition be in changing the image of Papua New Guinea and in communicating the specific form which modernity has taken there? Good as it is, his exhibition is too modest in scope to have much chance of making a very deep impression on the wider public. If the museum had ten times its budget, and ten times as much exhibition space, perhaps things might be otherwise. Then I am sure certain obvious deficiencies of this exhibition would have been made good. Besides the trade store, we would have complete contemporary dwellings. With their contents, plus, I would hope, various vehicles in characteristic livery and states of decrepitude. And there would be video-screens, many more photographs and various things to smell, touch and taste, as well as see and hear. But as O'Hanlon has occasion to remark in his account of the planning of this exhibition, in the absence of large-scale outside sponsorship - and it is not easy to see what fraction of the global plutocracy would be interested in sponsoring an exhibition with the aims of this one - `exhibitions cannot adequately be assessed without reference to the particular [practical, budgetary] context in which they take place' (1993:79).

Below left: Contemporary shield. The design is inspired by a lager advertisement (`South Pacific, No. 1 Beer), while the protective boss is made from a vehicle number plate upon which the war between two tribes is represented as a rugby match.

Below right: Another contemporary Wahgi shield. overtly based on a beer advertisement bt modified to refer to local political concerns. With the recent breakdown in parts of the Waghi of the taboo against using guns in warfare, the significance of using shields has also changed. Where taking up shields traditionally marked the transition to serious fighting , the use of shields today signifies instead the persistences of ritual restraints against the bloodier gun warfare. (Photos © British Museum).

This brings me to the second component of this exhibition: the book published alongside it, which partly serves as a conventional catalogue, and partly as an independent treatment of the same theme. O'Hanlon's excellently illustrated 85 page monograph is valuable n a number of different aspects. `Paradise' is an ethnohistorical exhibition with a clear narrative thread, rather than a display of `art'. It is difficult to convey a sense of history visually, except in rather bland `before and after' terms. To convey historical ideas properly, there is no substitute for prose. Fortunately, O'Hanlon has hit on a brilliant solution to the problem of conveying Wahgi history economically, but it is one which cannot be exhibited, only analytically narrated. The first chapter is an analysis of the marriage-politics of one Wahgi clan, Kekanem, among whom he lived during his original fieldwork in the 1970s. He shows how the experience of this clan, which has included periods of both misery and prosperity, can serve as a mirror for the political and social evolution of contemporary highlands New Guinea. I shall certainly be using this chapter in teaching Melanesian ethnography, since it is highly accessible and pertinent. It also directs the reader towards some very interesting new work on `first contact' by Schieffelin and Crittenden (1991) and some other recent highlands ethnography which has got rather swamped recently because of the overwhelming preoccupation with the symbolic interpretation of exchange. I shall be returning to highlands ethnography with added zest after reading O'Hanlon, though perhaps he is going to get into trouble for speaking of the `purchase' of wives by Kekanem clan, as he does here in a way hardly consistent with the notion that gift - and commodity-transactions belong to totally different species.

If he gets criticized for commoditizing marriage prestations, he will redeem his reputation among the enthusiasts of the gift by his treatment of the process of collecting, which is described in detail in terms which emphasize the extent to which the Wahgi providers of objects came to imagine the entire exercise as an international extension of Maussian gift exchange. The contents of the `Paradise' exhibition are prestations on the basis of which some kind of long-term relationship is anticipated, although O'Hanlon paid cash on the nail for everything. I believe the solution to this puzzle is not that the Wahgi people live in a `gift' economy and that we live in a `commodity' economy; rather, that they merge categories which we prefer to keep separate.

Contemporary netbags, made from acrylic yarns into which marsupial fur has been spun, blend with a T-shirt worn by a spectator at a marriage ceremony. (Detail of photo by Michael O'Hanlon).

This chapter provides a powerful defence of collecting as an intellectually significant activity, an experiment in social relations. Furthermore, O'Hanlon underlines the extent to which New Guineans themselves are beginning to evolve a concept of `heritage' just as entangled and pitfall-ridden as our own. If these objects were not destined for the Museum of Mankind, many of them would still be, or be about to become, `museum pieces' in their original setting. The exotic image which this exhibition is partly designed to supersede is an image which the New Guineans themselves have received from the expatriate media and which has been re-valued as national heritage. This is a grass-roots development, not something imposed by well-meaning but distant cultural experts. As O'Hanlon left for London with his crates of objects, Wahgi people were talking about assembling a similar collection for themselves. They ought to.

Paradise: portraying the New Guinea Highlands, a book by Michael O'Hanlon accompanying the exhibition, is published by British Museum Publications at £10.95. The exhibition itself will remain open till the end of 1994, and is one of a series of changing displays planned by the Museum of Mankind before its move back to the main British Museum. whose timing is dependent on that of the move of the British Library from the Bloomsbury site.

Exhibitions on Navajo Textiles and Great Benin are about to open at the Museum of Mankind as we go to press.

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