The Aesthetic Mediation of Cultural Memory: Two Case Studies from Papua New Guinea and Kimberley, Australia

ABSTRACT

I offer an analysis of the role of aesthetic value in the formation of cultural memory. More specifically, I examine how cultural memory is formed through cultural artifacts that embody a connection to the past via aesthetic means. My approach is motivated by artifacts from small-scale preindustrial societies, which make it apparent that aesthetic values, rather than being pursued for their own sake alone, enhance other functions, such as maintaining cultural identity and bringing the past into the present. I focus on rock art painting from the Kimberley, Australia, and effigies animated during rituals in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea to argue that, to play a significant role in the formation of cultural memory, aesthetic value must be aligned with implicit conceptions of time which inform the production of artifacts mediating cultural memory. This argument has implications for understanding differences in apprehending memory values and aesthetic values across cultural domains.

I. INTRODUCTION

In a recent paper, Robert Hopkins has revived a time-honored discussion about the role that culturally specific artifacts such as architectural structures play “as repositories of cultural memory” (Hopkins 2023, 153). Taking further this question famously addressed by John Ruskin and developed by Anthony Savile, Hopkins compellingly argues that rather than merely accidentally enabling an experience through which the past is revived for us, “architecture is itself the vehicle of cultural memory. We collectively remember our past through the buildings that come down to us. As we remember our individual past through memory images, so we remember our shared cultural past through its architecture” (Hopkins 2023, 153). This claim is watered down later on in the paper: strictly speaking, Hopkins clarifies, it is our experience of buildings that constitutes the memory and not buildings as such (160). Despite this reservation, architecture is given here a central (and potentially exclusive) place as an essential component of cultural memory, a view that Hopkins seems to endorse when he sustains that “in general, architecture is the only artefact of previous ethnic domains that enables us to remember them” (171). I will argue, in contrast, that there is no need to restrict to architecture the repositories of cultural memory.

Furthermore, an aspect entirely neglected in Hopkins’s argument by analogy between individual and cultural memory is the place of aesthetic values in the formation and transmission of cultural memory. The relevance of aesthetic value for understanding cultural memory was foregrounded in Savile’s comment on Ruskin as well as, earlier on, in Alois Riegl’s “Modern Cult of Monuments”:

It can be found puzzling why I should say that our aesthetic experience is especially liable to contribute to the maintenance of our cultural identity by carrying the past through to the present. Why should that be so when there are many other ways in which that can be done? For one thing, its specifically architectural focus helps to determine which cultural identity is ours. This buildings do in part by their very location. Being tied to a place, they keep alive the past of the very place where we actually live. Among buildings of other societies we would be disposed to acquire a sense of another cultural identity and different social manners. (Savile 2000, 104)

There must be another kind of interest in an old work of art besides historical interest, something that can be found in specifically artistic properties, such as concept, form, and color. […] Has this artistic value been just as objectively present as historical value, in the past, so that it may be said to represent, independent of the historical, an essential part of the definition of the monument? Or is it subjective, invented by a modern viewing subject in whose will it is formed and according to whose will it changes? If this were the case, would artistic value have no place in the definition of a monument as a work of commemorative value? (Riegl 1996, 71).

For both Riegl and Savile, keeping a common history alive through culturally specific artifacts such as buildings and monuments reposes on representations of aesthetic relevance of some sort. Moreover, they both work toward modeling the values from which artifacts source their power to evoke a shared past, such as commemorative, historical, or aesthetic values but without giving a full account of how these values relate to each other or how they function together.

In this paper, I depart dramatically from the domains on which Hopkins builds his case: first, in considering the potential of cultural artifacts other than architectural structures to enable cultural memory; second, in addressing small-scale preindustrial societies rather than Western cultures; and third, in considering the mediating role of aesthetic values in cultural memory. Given the scarcity of philosophical analyses addressing cultural memory in non-European contexts, probing the discussion initiated by Riegl, Savile, and Hopkins in such contexts is a welcome endeavor. Amending and expanding Hopkins’s argument, I examine how cultural memory is formed in two Oceanic societies through culturally significant artifacts that embody a connection to the past via aesthetic means. More specifically, I focus on rock art painting from Kimberley, Australia, and effigies animated during rituals in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. I argue that both make a compelling case for the fact that aesthetic values, rather than being pursued for their own sake alone, enhance other functions, including maintaining “cultural identity by carrying the past through to the present,” as observed by Savile (2000, 104). I argue that, to play a significant role in the formation of cultural memory, aesthetic value must be aligned with implicit conceptions of time, which inform the production of artifacts mediating cultural memory. This argument has implications for understanding differences in accessing memory values and aesthetic values across cultural domains.

II. CULTURAL MEMORY

Let’s begin with a definition of cultural memory. What goes under the name of cultural memory is related to processes of forming representations of a shared past for the purpose of keeping a common legacy alive, perpetuating cultural traditions, celebrating, or paying tribute to honorable deeds or persons. Here’s a working conception of cultural memory proposed by Jan Assmann, who explicitly develops this concept together with Aleida Assmann:

Cultural memory is […] exteriorized, objectified, and stored away in symbolic forms that, unlike the sounds of words or the sight of gestures, are stable and situation-transcendent: They may be transferred from one situation to another and transmitted from one generation to another. External objects as carriers of memory play a role already on the level of personal memory. Our memory, which we possess as beings equipped with a human mind, exists only in constant interaction not only with other human memories but also with “things,” outward symbols. (Assmann 2008, 110–11)

Starting from Assmann’s definition (while leaving aside his distinctions between cultural and communicative memory) and drawing on some recent studies in philosophy and anthropology of memory, I will retain the following core characteristics of cultural memory.

First, cultural memory is carried through externalized vehicles; namely, it is formalized through cultural artifacts and practices that are transmitted over generations (Assmann 2008, 112; Casey 2000, 218–219; Hopkins 2023, 160). Two examples of artifacts that illustrate this process will be presented in section III. Second, cultural memory preserves a set of shared values (such as identitary, aesthetic, or commemorative values) that are of collective importance (Casey 2000, 221, 251). I will develop this point in section IV. Third, cultural memory points to specific forms of temporality; it has a “temporal horizon,” as Assmann calls it (2008, 113). It perdures through generations, all the while undergoing transformation and renewal. Cultural memory can cast the reminiscers into the past, bring the past in the present or send them forward in time; the perceived distance between past and present depends, as we shall see in section V, on implicit conceptions of time within each culture. Finally, cultural memory is interpersonal and communal, it is shared by a number of people in a community, connecting experiences and representations of the past beyond individual life (Casey 2000, 216–7; Hopkins 2023, 161). Just how far beyond individual life cultural memory can be transmitted is a question that will be addressed in section V.

In addition to these core characteristics, for cultural memory to count as memory at all, there are certain conditions that need to be met. These conditions are drawn directly from Hopkins’s treatment of memory; they do not play any role in work on memory studies derived from Assmann. According to Hopkins, we can model the conditions of cultural memory on the conditions that govern personal memory. I will briefly summarize them as (1) the representational condition, (2) the experience condition, and (3) the derivation condition.

1. The representational condition: since cultures don’t have memories of their own, to form cultural memory, it takes an individual mind being able to form representations about the past and a symbol beyond the mind, which enables such representations (Hopkins 2023, 159–61). More specifically, to meet the requirement of representation, cultural memory must be immediately caused by the experience of a symbol representing a cultural phenomenon, or “an ethnic domain” (Hopkins 2023, 165), where the ethnic domain names, according to Langer’s definition, a self-contained, humanly created functional realm, made visible, tangible, or more generally sensible through artifacts embodying actions, emotions, patterns, and rhythms of life of a culture (Langer 1953, 95ff).

2. The experience condition: any form of memory is a memory of something that was earlier undergone by someone. Cultural memory represents actions, events, and rhythms of life experienced by earlier members of a culture (Hopkins 2023, 166–7), where experience is to be understood in a broad sense, as a way of being in the world (Hopkins 2023, 161–2). In the next sections, we will get a sense of just how broadly experience can be understood with respect to some examples of rituals from small-scale societies, which re-embody such rhythms of existence. Departing from Hopkins, I consider the potential of indigenous memory practices to retain knowledge of the past that is of value not necessarily in virtue of its temporal or historical accuracy but also in virtue of its pragmatic and spiritual significance (Kelly 2015, 16–7, 52). I say more about this in section IV.

3. The derivation condition: there is a distinctive way in which we bring about internal representations of past experiences of collective import (Hopkins 2023, 161–2). Such representations must be derived from the past via relevant artifactual mediation, that is, via artifacts or practices which clearly embody an ethnic domain. As we shall see, it also takes specific conceptions of time and about the world and one’s place in it to intensify cultural remembering. This is something that hasn’t received much attention in the literature on cultural memory. I will articulate this point in section V.

While capturing most of the core characteristics of cultural memory, the above-mentioned conditions don’t provide us with an explanation of how a set of shared values within a community support cultural memory. In this paper I complete this picture by proposing a model of art-mediated cultural memory that integrates aesthetic and commemorative values. Before addressing the question of values frontally, it will help to have some specific case studies in mind.

III. TWO CASE STUDIES

Two forms of art produced by small-scale societies from Aboriginal Australia and New Ireland, Papua New Guinea will serve to help us to examine the role of aesthetic value in the formation of cultural memory. The examples I will be referring to are Wandjina rock painting—a form of Australian rock art estimated to date back four thousand years—and Malanggan funerary effigies from northern New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, which have been accompanying commemorative rituals for at least hundreds of years. The focus on Aboriginal and Melanesian local artistic traditions will allow us to put in perspective the core characteristics of cultural memory mentioned above, namely its mediated, value-laden, temporal, and interpersonal character, as well as present the challenges that arise when we place the discussion of the aesthetic ways of keeping a common legacy alive outside the development of art in a European frame. One such challenge, as we shall see later in the paper, is to align aesthetic values with implicit conceptions of time informing the production of cultural artifacts in order to access the cultural memory of communities remote from our own, to form representations about their ethnic domain or rhythms of existence.

The first case study, Wandjina rock painting, is a tradition of art in the Kimberley on the northern coastal region of Western Australia, which keeps alive notable deeds of mythical beings, called Wandjina. Such deeds include the creation of features of the landscape, actions that secure the fertility of the land, or the reproduction of natural species (Blundell and Woolagoodja 2012, 474; Crawford 1968, 33–4).

Wandjina rock painting has a peculiar “temporal horizon”; it is dated at several thousands of years and continues, to this day, playing an important role in the life of indigenous Australian communities of the region of Kimberley (Morphy 1998, 19–21, 55–6). Wandjina is thus a living form of rock art, both prehistoric and contemporary (Morphy 2012, 296), which brings the ancestral past into the present of Aboriginal people. According to the anthropologist Howard Morphy, Wandjina rock art serves as a “memorial archival resource” (Morphy 2012, 298, 303–4), helping reveal knowledge of the ancestral past to future generations.

Regarding the qualities of this art form, the Wandjina style of rock paintings has its own distinctive characteristics: it consists of imposing figures drawn mostly in red ochre on a white ground, representing cloud-like ancestral beings in quasi human form, with eyes and noses and in general without a mouth (Blundell and Woolagoodja 2012, 473; Crawford 1968, 28). The paintings are believed to have been initially produced by the Wandjina ancestral beings themselves, who transformed before dying into the pictorial images now visible on the walls of rock shelters (Blundell and Woolagoodja 2012, 475; Crawford 1968, 31). The paintings count as manifestations of these ancestral beings.

Moreover, the practice of painting the Wandjina continues beyond the moment of their original production through a complex process of “retouching,” through which paintings are renewed when they start to fade (Morphy 2012, 295). Repainting is performed frequently during ritual ceremonies by professional craftsmen of the Aboriginal community, who have a connection to the land and who act as custodians of the ancestral past (Crawford 1968, 21, 37; Morphy 2012, 301). Securing the permanence of the pictorial traces left by the Wandjina through constant renewal prevents them fading from memory.

The second case study to which I will be referring, and which offers a nice contrast with Wandjina rock art, is the Malanggan art tradition. Malanggan (also spelled as Malagan or Malangan) is a generic name for ritual artifacts and commemorative ceremonies in northern New Ireland, Papua New Guinea (Strathern 2001, 263), which is part of the cultural area known today as Melanesia. Most often, the term Malanggan is used to refer to funerary effigies that accompany these rites.

In terms of medium specificity, the Malanggan style of ritual artifacts also has its own distinctive characteristics. The carved sculptures are composite structures made of a wooden framework, fiber, and shells. Many of the Malanggan are based upon human form, but also have other features that are inspired from the natural world such as figures of birds, fish, snakes, and so on. The effigies have enclosed intricate, composite images, with motifs and designs brightly painted in red, white, yellow, or black, associated with clan symbols (Küchler 2002, 3, 11).

As with the repainting of the Wandjina, Malanggan ceremonial practices also have a peculiar temporal horizon, sustaining mourning episodes over long stretches of time, and “building-up chains of memory” (Gunn and Peltier 2006, 74) in the process. More specifically, Malanggan are tied both to initial funerary rites that are performed when a person dies, and to so-called “secondary” funerary rites, which take place over several years after a death, marking the final stage of mourning and the passage of the soul of the deceased to the ancestral realm (Bolton 2012, 199; Kjellgren 2007, 159–61). Unlike the Wandjina though, it is not established that the motifs and designs are tied to mythological figures. What accounts for the iconography of Malanggan designs is clan identity rather than mythology (Le Fur 2009, 252). The wooden sculptures serve as “containers” that capture the spirit or inner life force of the deceased person (Küchler 1997, 51; 2002, 113) and ultimately as containers for ancestral power.

Unlike the Wandjina, which are cast in durable materials, being constantly renewed through repainting, Malanggan are intended to be transient objects. While the effigies are at the center of the final memorial ceremony, having the purpose to create a powerful visual impact, they are not deemed to last, but are ultimately destroyed or “killed” symbolically through being burnt, being left to rot in the forest, or through being sold to collectors, thus releasing the contained inner life force (Küchler 2002, 38; Strathern 2001, 260). In the process, they are transformed into memory images or so-called “named images of remembrance” (Küchler 2002, 83). Malanggan must lose their visibility to transform exclusively into memory images. Their ritual effectiveness that amounts to releasing the life force of the deceased resides precisely in their being transformed exclusively into memory images, in surviving only in acts of remembrance (Bolton 2012, 201; Küchler 1997, 39–41, 43, 47–48; 2002, 61, 63). Images of designs become mental resources retained in memory, or even revivified in dreams (Fortis, Küchler 2021, 138–9; Küchler 2002, 168); moreover, memory images of Malanggan designs have strong ties to knowledge ownership and intellectual property (Küchler 1997, 40–1).

Malanggan ceremonies and Wandjina rock art exemplify two contrasting procedures through which a common legacy is kept alive via aesthetic means. More specifically, these practices exemplify two ways in which cultural memory is transmitted both through the maintenance and destruction of material images. The two practices provide us with pieces of exquisite craftsmanship that creatively use a shared canon of inherited forms and motifs. Apart from their commemorative value, Malanggan and Wandjina have an acknowledged aesthetic quality, they are valued for their beauty, creating a common legacy in virtue of their aesthetic merit, leaving behind a significant “aesthetic inheritance” (Morphy 1998, 19–21). We can now generalize from these cases to model the relations between memory value and aesthetic value from which artifacts source their power to evoke a shared past.

IV. MEMORY VALUE AND AESTHETIC VALUE

I mentioned in the introductory sections that one of the core characteristics of cultural memory is that it preserves a set of shared values (e.g., identitary, aesthetic, or commemorative values) that are of collective importance, and I claimed that aesthetic value, more specifically, plays, under certain conditions, a significant role in the formation of cultural memory. To specify these conditions, we need to know how we can model the relations between memory value and aesthetic value.

I use the term “memory value” as a further development of Riegl’s commemorative value (Riegl 1996, 77–8) to point to the quality that certain artifacts have to recall significant moments or chains of events from the past by virtue of their artistic properties. I depart from Riegl and join Hopkins and Savile in holding that representing the past must meet the derivation condition: representations must be derived from the past via relevant, non-arbitrary, artifactual mediation (Hopkins 2023, 170; Savile 2000, 93). I will further develop the distinction between memory value and commemorative value toward the end of this section.

Regarding the memory value of case studies like the ones that occupy us here, there is an extensive literature on the topic. Malanggan and Wandjina belong to a large body of anthropological and archeological research that produced significant theoretical work on the mediating role of artifacts in cultural memory (Bradley 2020; Kelly 2015; Severi 2015; Taylor 2003; Whitley 2013). For instance, pursuing a cross-cultural comparison within small-scale oral cultures, Lynn Kelly examines an impressive range of artifacts, landscapes, ceremonial centers, performance spaces, rituals involving songs and dances and argues that they help encode and preserve culturally significant information, while acting as “artificial memory systems” or “mnemonic technologies” that are crucial for the sustainability of oral cultures (Kelly 2015, 2, 37, 40–1). Importantly for our purposes here, genealogies embodied in artifacts (Malanggan) or paintings preserved in rock shelters referencing mythological stories or ancestors (Wandjina) would serve, according to Kelly, to aid or shape the memory and communication of spiritual, pragmatic and historical knowledge, which are most of the time entwined in an integrated system comprising, for instance, knowledge of traditional beliefs (such as Dreamtime creation stories of Ancestral Beings), family ties, laws that need to be passed on (e.g., property rights, social rights, land ownership), or norms of behavior (such as attitudes toward death) (Kelly 2015, 21, 35, 63).

Generally, in such studies, the focus is on non-aesthetic values embodied in artifacts, sites, and performances. Moreover, their memory value or purpose is foregrounded over their presumed aesthetic value: that art in small-scale cultures should be considered primarily in a non-aesthetic context seems to be an imperative rather than a mere methodological choice, as we can read in the following comment recorded by Kelly from her own personal communication with a Warlpiri colleague: “‘For Australian Aboriginal people, art is never primarily for aesthetics. It is always to help remember Country, the stories and the knowledge’ (Nungarrayi 2010, pers. comm., 29 November)” (Kelly 2015, 72–3, 235). This raises the question of which conception of aesthetics is exactly cast into doubt and whether we can nonetheless reconcile memory value with aesthetic value. Before we examine the way memory value and aesthetic value relate to each other, we need to clarify what the term “aesthetic” qualifies.

IV.A. The Aesthetic Realm

There is no royal road to demarcating the boundaries of the realm of the aesthetic. For our purposes, I will retain an account that holds that experiencing something aesthetically amounts to perceiving or cognizing an object’s aesthetic properties, where the vehicle that bears these properties has an essential character. Aestheticians working in the Anglo-American analytic tradition call this a content-oriented approach to aesthetic experience. It appears most notably in works by Noël Carroll, who claims that an aesthetic experience is identified in terms of what it is an experience of, that is, in terms of the object it takes and its content. On Carroll’s account, the aesthetically relevant content is made of formal properties (e.g., unity, complexity), expressive properties (e.g., enchantment, serenity), and aesthetic properties other than formal and expressive properties (e.g., brittleness, garishness) emerging from or depending on the base properties of the object, that is, on its low-level perceptual features. Aesthetic experiencing entails taking note of this emergence as well as of the interplay between formal, expressive, and aesthetic properties (Carroll 2006, 89, 91).

There is a debate about whether this mode of engagement with the objects of the experience entails valuing and what kind of valuing that is. Carroll holds that there is no special valuing, such as valuing an experience exclusively for its own sake, for its intrinsic value—a view endorsed, for instance, by proponents of axiological approaches to aesthetic experience, which focus on the evaluative and affective responses conceived in non-instrumental terms (Levinson 2016, 35, 39). Carroll remains non-committal with respect to affects that may be involved in such experiences. Rather, the locus of the value of aesthetic experience lies in its cognitive dimension (Carroll 2006, 97).

Moreover, on the content-oriented view, aesthetic experience is compatible with valuing for instrumental reasons, for getting some advantage from the experience (Carroll 2005, 6). Important for our purpose here, which is to address the aesthetic value of works in relation to their memory function, memory consolidation can be one such advantage. Indeed, Carroll notes that “much art traditionally has had a memorial function, or, at least, a significant commemorative dimension” (Carroll 2005, 2).

The emphasis on the compatibility between aesthetic and instrumental values challenges a well-entrenched conception of the aesthetic, privileging autonomy, and self-sufficiency, which is tied to the modern discourse of fine art in its European development. Such compatibility between aesthetic and instrumental values becomes especially conspicuous when considering the art of small-scale pre-industrial societies, most of which “is entirely functional,” as Steven Davies rightfully remarks (Davies 2006, 224).

Aesthetic values exceed the framework of fine arts and are manifested in all sorts of cultural forms (Davies 2015, 377; Morphy 1994, 260), including the artistic practices of Oceanic small-scale societies occupying us here. To better capture the cross-cultural diversity of aesthetic values, it would help to complement the content-oriented approach to aesthetics with a more inclusive view from anthropology, which does not restrict aesthetic experience to its cognitive dimension but also considers its affective aspects; we may thus relax the broad content-oriented and instrumentalist approaches to allow for some affective permeation of aesthetic experience. Howard Morphy proposes, for instance, a composite approach to the aesthetic—both objectual and axiological, entailing perceptual, evaluative and affective responses: “I define aesthetics as the effect of the physical properties of objects on the senses and the qualitative evaluation of those properties [for example, physical properties such as softness and brilliance, formal criteria such as balance and harmony, or abstract qualities such as efficiency and aptness]” (Morphy 1994, 258). On this definition, the aesthetic qualifies both properties of the object (such as brilliance, harmony, or efficiency) and a mode of engagement with these properties, possibly associated with pleasure but interpreted as something that exceeds, or even in some cases collides with the pure gratification of the senses, for instance, in our examples, something like being in touch with the ancestral past. As an illustration, the aesthetic response triggered by Malanggan is said to be “at once emotional – when it involves the shock of revelation during a ceremony and is therefore associated with death – and intellectual when it focuses on logic and the narration of history” (Gunn and Peltier 2006, 79). As regards our second case study, for the Aboriginal community, valuing the brilliance of the freshly painted Wandjina has beneficial consequences for preserving the bonds with an ancestral tradition and securing the fertility of the land. In both cases, local aesthetic norms are compatible with yielding instrumental value. Of course, this is not to say that yielding instrumental value (securing a spiritual connection to the ancestral past and land) is sufficient for valuing aesthetically works or features of indigenous works (Coleman 2004, 236–8); as mentioned above, to be aesthetically relevant, values must emerge from the base properties of works.

More specifically, aesthetic value is sourced from formal or stylistic properties such as the shimmering brilliance of surfaces (Morphy 1998, 172ff), and semantic properties, for instance clan motifs (Malanggan) or totemic designs that mark ancestorhood (Wandjina). The aesthetic impact of formal and stylistic aspects of surfaces such as brilliance is felt as the presence and manifestation of ancestral power (Appel 2022, 20; Gunn and Peltier 2006, 86; Morphy 2006, 303). Brilliance is a dynamic visual effect, associated with a quality of light, that shimmers or sparkles. Repainting the Wandjina rock figures in bright colors precisely generates this effect, which is associated with a spiritual act of looking after the land (Blundell and Woolagoodja 2012, 474; Morphy 2012, 301). In this case, an aesthetic effect—the freshness of the paintings—mediates not only the cultural remembrance of Creation acts but also spiritual power: it secures the fertility of the land and an ongoing spiritual relation to the ancestral past (Blundell and Woolagoodja 2012, 479–80). Along the same lines, the brilliance and colorfulness of the painting on Malanggan is believed to give life to ancestral figures and bring them into the present (Kjellgren 2007, 159–61).

IV.B. The Relation Between Memory Value and Aesthetic Value

We can now specify the way memory value and aesthetic value relate to each other. The two case studies considered above make it apparent that aesthetic values, rather than being pursued for their own sake alone, enhance other functions, such as spiritual and memory functions. Aesthetic value, rather than being merely incidental to the realization of the function of keeping a common legacy alive, may contribute to the success of a practice as an appropriate vehicle for cultural memory; failing aesthetically would amount to failing as a practice endowed with a memory function (Davies 2015, 378; Young 2020, 37–8). Instead of acting as external cues that trigger specific cognitive and affective states (e.g., nostalgia of a mythological past), numerous indigenous artifacts stand artistically on their own, compelling aesthetic attention while inviting cultural memory of the ancestral past. The aesthetic features of memory practices may be related, as we have seen, to form or form relations, style, compositional harmony, display of virtuosity and technical skill growing out of craftsmanship.

The close relation between aesthetic value and memory value is particularly important for our purposes since it casts new light on the derivation condition mentioned above (section II), which constrains the way current internal representations of past experiences of collective import derive from the experiences of earlier members of a culture. Remember that the argument is that such representations are mediated by appropriate artifacts or practices that clearly embody an ethnic domain. What exactly are these artifacts and what does it take for them to transparently embody an ethnic domain?

We can draw here a distinction between memory and commemorative functions, which may prove useful for better discerning what counts as appropriate vehicles for cultural memory. Commemoration, as the prehistorian Richard Bradley points out, refers to “human activity undertaken in response to a past” (Bradley 2020, 10), where the critical factor is not necessarily historical accuracy but the social relevance of the commemoration act in the present. On the other hand, remembering information that maintains its importance over long periods of time and that needs to be preserved accurately is a process of a different order (Bradley 2020, 10; Casey 2000, 216–7; Kelly 2015, 18–9, 27). In practice, in many situations it is difficult to tell these two processes apart and to gauge exactly the amount of accuracy or truth value, or of social and “emotional value” (Campbell 2006, 364) at play: perpetuating foundational origin stories through creative acts of repainting (Wandjina) is just as valued within indigenous communities as accurately retaining genealogies astutely coded into sculptural designs (Malanggan); both activities entail accessing the past while retaining culturally significant aspects of spiritual and historical knowledge. But, to return to Savile’s and Hopkins’s arguments, while many things can do the conjuring up or evoking of the past (Hopkins 2023, 169; Savile 2000, 93), not any artifact or practice that acts as mnemonic to bring to mind the past can serve as a vehicle for cultural memory; the artifact must wear its past on its sleeve, so to speak; it must embody patterns or rhythms of life of the producing culture and enable an experience of the cultural past, rather than being arbitrarily associated with it. Whether experiencing the actual presence of the past requires collapsing one’s temporal coordinates or a different temporal cognition altogether is open to debate. As far as our examples are concerned, the assumption is that aesthetic effects enable this experiential involvement with the past. Wandjina figures, through the continuous process of repainting, act as powerful visible traces of ancestral Creation acts. Malanggan images, in their turn, even when they survive only in memory, serve as a peculiar, controlled, mnemonic technique for recalling ancestral names associated with specific designs all the while embodying the ethos of a clan and social hierarchies within it (Küchler 1997, 50–1; 2002, 38, 60, 114; Strathern 2001, 264). In both cases, the past that is recalled is set within the materiality of the perceived artifacts. Both are cases of memory vehicles that rest on an aesthetic premise: in order to be successful in keeping the past alive, the vehicles have to have aesthetic merit; their aesthetic properties work toward their effectiveness as vehicles for cultural memory, more specifically as reminders of ancestry. Moreover, the mediation through art is what makes recollection experiential rather than a mere inferential act of retrieving a set of beliefs about the past. We now need to further specify how exactly the mediation through art shapes the way that cultural memory operates in different communities.

V. ART-MEDIATED CULTURAL MEMORY

We have seen that one of the core characteristics of cultural memory is that it is formalized or carried through externalized vehicles such as cultural artifacts and practices that are transmitted over generations. In other words, cultural memory can be mediated through art; it doesn’t necessarily have to be rooted in one’s personal experiences. If, in a weak sense, almost any artifact or perceptual object is liable to remind us of cultural past experiences (Carroll 2005, 2), there are artifacts that give us reasons for recalling the past in some directed way, via aesthetic means. Some artifacts serve to preserve and transmit cultural memories through intrinsically valuable perceptual means or sensory imagery. Hence the claim that cultural memory is formed under certain conditions though processes of creating aesthetic values. However, such aesthetic values don’t function in a vacuum. To substantiate this claim, I suggest that, to play a significant role in the formation of cultural memory, aesthetic value must be aligned with an implicit temporal awareness, which informs the production of artifacts mediating cultural memory.

We have seen that that cultural memory has a temporal horizon, pointing to specific forms of temporality (section II), but what time is summoned, exactly, in cultural memory? Savile maintains that while memory “draws its substance from the past […], it serves the future” (2000, 104) and Hopkins observes that “what represents the present to the society that creates [a building] can represent the past to those still to come” (2023, 168). The novelty brought by the focus on the art practices of indigenous small-scale societies is that it invites us to pay close attention to the forms of temporal cognition we are working with when conceptualizing memory. By temporal cognition, I understand a non-conceptual, implicit awareness of being in time as participants in a form of life, which animates interpersonal and artifactual interactions. A working assumption is that cultural artifacts embody such distinctive ways of being in time. Arguably, within the same group, in different contexts (e.g., in mundane interactions, ritual or artistic contexts), several conceptions of time might be operational: “all cultures use at least two, if not three, of the common concepts of time: cyclical when thinking in terms of the seasons, sun and moon cycles; linear when thinking of the recent past; and a timeless eternity when considering the creation stories and the time of the ancestors” (Vansina as cited in Kelly 2015, 113).

Oceanic artistic practices generally operate in a framework in which the boundaries between the ancestral time and the present moment are blurred. One such framework is what is called the “Dreaming,” an Indigenous Australian conception of time, which effaces temporal boundaries between the deep past and the present. Wandjina figures that appear in rock art depictions are Dreamtime beings (Morphy 2012, 294, 298), which keep the Kimberley culture alive; they do not age with time but have an enduring effect in the present when reanimated through repainting (Morphy 1998, 56, 59). According to Morphy, the relationship between past and present embodied in Aboriginal art is sanctioned by a spiritual system of beliefs; rather than representing the past as past, the past is restored in virtue of its felt effects in the present (Morphy 1998, 4–5, 100; 184–5, 218). The role of rock art is precisely to bring the past into the present.

Malanggan carvings equally point to ways of bringing the past into the present or, more precisely, collapsing past, present, and future (Küchler 2002, 65). In this case, the past becomes the future through a complex process of acquisition and transmission of designs, evocatively described by Marylin Strathern in terms of a “technology of enchantment,” an expression that she borrows from Alfred Gell’s seminal work on the enchanting power of technical processes embodied in artifacts (Gell 2006, 163–4; Strathern 2001, 264–5). Malanggan motifs are retained in memory before reappearing years after their acquisition in newly carved Malanggan. Designs circulate, anticipating future owners or alliances between clans, but also future formal compositions. In other words, one has to “own the right to remember” (Bolton 2012, 199; Fortis and Küchler 2021, 144; Kjellgren 2007, 161). What is peculiar here is that the reproduction of designs or part of them is made from memory. Memory or memory images and their reproduction become thus tied to a matter of intellectual ownership (Strathern 2001, 270–1).

Indigenous artifacts and ceremonies such as Wandjina and Malanggan therefore manifest a peculiar relation to temporality, channeling ancestral authority over time. The privileging of cyclical or “eternal” timeframes in indigenous memory practices has led certain anthropologists and art theorists to consider these practices as repetitive, compulsive, scripted or rigid (compare Boyer 2009, 301; Rampley 1999, 110–1, 2001, 317), serving the purpose of blindly reiterating a fixed set of values deeply ingrained in ancestral memory, as a means for securing a minimal sense of collective identity. But art-mediated memory practices in small-scale societies are neither basic, primitive, nor compulsory. Rather, they foreground a core characteristic of memory more broadly, namely its constructive or transformative rather than archival nature (Bartlett 1995, 205–8; Rampley 2001, 322). Remembering or memorializing via art is not a matter of passively (and dispassionately) inheriting the affections of the past. If certain indigenous artifacts or ceremonial practices appear to have a conventionalized nature, this does not prevent them from establishing a creative interplay between past and present, as we saw earlier.

On this constructive view, cultural remembrance goes along with partaking in a tradition rather than representing the past as past (Campbell 2006, 365–6). Wandjina and Malanggan do not embody a pastness of ethos but a continuous participation in a form of life, reinforcing “diachronic identity” (Assmann 2008, 109, 113–4), or a sense of belonging to an ancestral tradition. The performativity that is at play in the acts of repainting and, respectively, carving from memory acquired designs is tied to a process of shaping and probing memory in search of cultural identity; through these performative acts one becomes part of an ancestral lineage. The way the ethnic domain is made visible—or more generally, sensible—therefore evolves, it cannot be retrieved as fixed in time once and for all. In many cases, the representations retained in cultural memory may be more or less fine-grained, depending on the situation in which they are experienced and on who experiences them. The fineness of grain and fittingness of representations of an ethnic domain—what is allowed as cultural shared past, is constantly redefined (Wolterstorff 2015, 125, 136, 139). This is the case, for instance, with Wandjina figures, which celebrate the ancestral origins of an ever-changing ethnic domain. As an illustration, across time, Wandjina took on new significance, becoming an iconic image for Australia. Evocatively, a Wandjina figure featured as the “Awakening Spirit” at the opening ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympics (Blundell and Woolagoodja 2012, 474).

VI. CONCLUSION

This paper has offered a picture of the role that aesthetic value plays in the formation of cultural memory, looking beyond European cultures. Drawing on Hopkins’s treatment of cultural memory, while departing from it in significant respects, I considered the potential of aesthetic values embedded in cultural artifacts from small-scale preindustrial societies to play a mediating role in cultural memory. While I focused on the formation of cultural memory in the unique context of Oceanic societies, the model proposed here of art-mediated cultural memory that integrates aesthetic and commemorative values can be productively probed in Western contexts as well. One of the upshots of the approach favored here is that we cannot fully generalize about cultural memory in relation to aesthetic value because of the diversity of implicit conceptions of time informing the production and appreciation of cultural artifacts, with which aesthetic value needs to be aligned. The way aesthetic value channels a shared past varies from one culture to another. Notwithstanding the differences, some bridging between cultures remains to be considered and elaborated upon in further studies.¹

REFERENCES

Footnotes