«In my preliminary account of the culture I stated that while “the morphology of the social system” is patrilineal, the “sentiment” of the people is preponderantly matrilineal.» (Bateson, 1958[1936]: 234)
This paper is about objects and visual knowledge revealed by things in several instances of Iatmul ceremonial context. Its aim is to reconstruct from the ethnographical record knowledge partly lost – this in itself might be a problematic approach, which, however, seems to me at least worth trying. In concentrating on non-secret knowledge, this approach aims at respecting the intention of present-day communities (or «collections») of initiated Iatmul men, to preserve these fragile distinctions (Moutu, 2007: 102-105).
I shall start from an approach that Bernard Juillerat developed in the mid 1990s and published in 1999. In a close reading of Gregory Bateson’s groundbreaking book on naven ceremonies, he was able to develop a comprehensive view of his own findings from the analysis of or...