77 Arts of Papua New Guinea By Philippe Peltier pected materials, are made for these rituals and display a seemingly infi nite variety of types. This wealth of material makes the Sepik a particularly fascinating area. In order to offer insight into this world between water and sky, an exhibition coming to the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris (fi rst shown at the Gropius Bau in Berlin and currently in an abridged version at the Rietberg Museum in Zurich) seeks to offer its visitors the opportunity to understand the nature of the close relationships that the valley’s inhabitants maintain with the world of the spirits and ancestors. The exhibition’s scope does not include the entire river, but rather focuses on the Lower Sepik (including the Ramu River delta and Murik Lakes regions) and the Middle Sepik areas. The dense populations of the groups that inhabit these zones share a number of cultural traits. HISTORY While the Sepik has been inhabited for several thousand years by groups that appear to have arrived there at different times, for the West its history begins in 1886, the year New Guinea was annexed by Germany, with the discovery of the river’s mouth by explorer Eduard Dallmann and naturalist Otto Finsch. Numerous expeditions followed this fi rst incursion. Only three of the most important ones, which resulted in the acquisition of exceptional collections of objects and documentation by German museums, will be discussed here. The Hamburg expedition spent thirteen days on the river in May of 1909, and one of its members, Otto Reche,2 published a study in 1913, which remains a cornerstone reference work today. The collection is now in the Hamburg Museum of Ethnography. The second, put together by Otto Schlaginhaufen,3 is in the collection of the Dresden Museum of Ethnography. The third expedition was sponsored by the Berlin Museum in 1912–1913. Chemist and anthropologist Adolf Roesicke, geographer Walter Behrmann4 (whose extraordinary map is reproduced in the exhibition catalog), and ethnologist and attorney Richard Thurnwald5 were among the participants in this expedition. Unfortunately, Roesicke died shortly after the Second World War and never published his fi eld notes, but for this exhibition, his journals have now been published by Markus Schindlbeck.6 The most precise information we have on Sepik societies was obtained by fi eld researchers who worked in the region in the period between the wars. Of these, Gregory Bateson’s remarkable work on a sexual role reversal ceremony called Naven,7 practiced by the Iatmul, a large group located on the Middle Sepik, remains less well known than work that was done at the same time by Margaret Mead in the same area.8 The Second World War put a stop to these fi eld studies for a time. This tragic and dramatic episode was an important time, because it was then that the transformation of traditional societies began to accelerate. Research began again after the war. Among the most important work was that done by Anthony Forge9 and Alfred Bühler.10 The latter put together a collection that includes some of the Basel Museum’s fi nest works. All of this research, and particularly that done by the Basel Museum, resulted in increasingly more accurate mapping of stylistic areas. The most recent of these maps was published by Christian Kaufmann.11
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