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OBJECT history From the Baggage of Margaret Mead to That of La Korrigane: The Curious Story of a Large Biwat Painting at the Musée du Quai Branly In June 2006, at the opening of the new Musée du Quai Branly, visitors encountered the presentation of its permanent collection for the first time. At the end of a long, dark hallway, they were greeted by a superb Dogon sculpture, to the right of which was a gigantic painting on a vegetal fiber framework (fig. 1), the shape of which was reminiscent of the Eiffel Tower, which was visible behind 124 it through a window in the newly created edifice by architect Jean Nouvel. These visitors could little have guessed that this painting, like so many other objects in the museum, had experienced a long and complex history since its creation in a small village in Papua New Guinea. It was not until the year 2000, in the course of preparations for the exhibition Le Voyage de La Korrigane dans les Mers du Sud (The Voyage of La Korrigane in the South Seas) at the Musée de l’Homme that the puzzle surrounding this object was pieced together almost entirely. Two photos, taken and published by Margaret Mead and Reo Fortune in 1932 (figs. 2 & 3) made it possible to identify the origin of this unique painting. But the question remained, how did this enormous painting that the two ethnologists had photographed in situ come to be purchased by the French La Korrigane expedition in a Burns Philp store on Rabaul several years later, some 1,000 kilometers from its original home? This article’s author had to make two trips to Papua New Guinea, visit the Margaret Mead archives in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, three times, and spend long hours sifting through the archives of the Musée de l’Homme to shed light on this mystery. Not only was the history of its movements finally reconstructed but, from information gleaned from elders in the villages of Biwat, it also became possible to discuss the work’s function in the By Christian Coiffier cultural context in which it was created. The story begins in 1930, in the small village of Kinakatem on the east bank of the Yuat River, a confluent of the Sepik River, in what was at the time the Territory of Papua and New Guinea—now independent Papua New Guinea. The Australian colonial administration at the time was trying to put an end to the tribal warfare that periodically erupted in the area. In August of 1932, ethnologists Margaret Mead and Reo Fortune, who were married at the time, had just finished a research trip among the Arapesh. After a few weeks of rest at a plantation on the north coast, they decided to go to the restless Biwat area (which they erroneously referred to as Mundugumor) that until that time had been only seldom visited by Europeans. Mead worked for the American Museum of Natural History in New York at the time and was collecting ethnographic objects. On October 20, 1932, she encountered a large painting on a vegetal fiber support in the interior of the house of the luluai1 named Andemi in Kinakatem village. She acquired the piece on November 23 in trade for items such as buttons, fabrics, bush knives, and razor blades. After having documented the piece, she had it set up between two palm trees so that Fortune could photograph it (fig. 3). Typewritten notes dated November 30 furnish precise information about the painting. The two anthropologists spent only ten weeks in this area, but this proved to be enough time for them to collect more than 300 objects, including paintings, shields, flutes, and figures, among other things. On December 6, they had the painting disassembled in order to be able to pack it and have it shipped on a fishing vessel by a certain Robert Overall, a trader who had a shop in the village of Angoram on the Sepik River. A drawing by Mead’s hand in her


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