FIG. 3: Drawing of a Maori ancestor figure seen in situ at Te Ngae Pa, Rotorua District, New Zealand (p. 145). FIGS. 4 and 5 (below): Double 127 pages 188–189 and 298–299 showing, respectively, Sepik cult artwork from Papua New Guinea and malanggan funerary masks from New Ireland. almost sedimentary dimension by the layering of the information as they are compiled. T. A. M.: How did the book come about? N. G.: Motifs d’Océanie was the result of a long gestation and took us more than ten years. I like slow processes: My stays in the field are long, as is the time I spend processing the results. I think that working without urgency provides a better chance of ending up with well-considered results, which is, I believe, a guarantee of quality in research. The project went through several phases. We first thought of structuring it by geographical area, but this approach seemed to me to give too much importance to style and scarcely allowed mention of the issue of social dynamics. We then tried a mixed approach, combining a geographical division with thematic, but this didn’t work either. I felt it was important that the works didn’t appear as isolated objects but rather as a sequence of variation. They fit into a lineage of objects that highlights continuities (permanence of a structure, motifs) and discontinuities (borrowing from the outside, innovation, specific interpretation). I wished to develop the hypotheses of Carl Schuster and Edmund Carpenter, who had looked for an underlying system of genealogical iconogworked on a synthesis and selected the most relevant illustrations from my archives, which consist of more than 10,000 drawings. The results are lively and very graphic pages, where the motifs appear on different media— sculpted wood, engraved stone, and others—or different objects of the same type—see, for example, the pages dedicated to the façades of the ceremonial houses in Abelam. In the end, all of this work pays homage to the richness and vigor of an art deserving a much wider appreciation. raphy. I was also very inspired by the ideas of Nicholas Thomas, who selected groups of works that identified issues which could be representative of the entire region. My work as an author really began then: I chose nine large themes common throughout the Pacific—material, exchange and gifts, and the divine, to name just a few. I decided to tackle each of these through concrete examples such as the staff gods of Polynesia, the malanggan funerals of New Ireland, or the posts of ceremonial houses in the Sepik River region. For each of these subjects, I PILAT WINNERS 2012
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