GABLE SCULPTURES OF THE SEPIK
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“guardian” of the ceremonial house. He is on
the lookout for the arrival of potential enemies,
and if they should approach, he will fl y off to
alert the warriors to their presence. There is no
doubt that these sculptures were emblems associated
with the virility and aggressiveness of
the men who occupied these ceremonial houses.
THE GABLE SCULPTURES OF THE WOLIMBIT
HOUSE IN KANGANAMAN
The great ngekau ceremonial houses, and especially
their roofs, had an average life expectancy
of about twenty to thirty years. The
Wolimbit house in the village of Kanganaman,
built after 1945, was declared National Cultural
Property in 1967. It has repeatedly undergone
restoration and is now the only remaining
edifi ce truly comparable to the ngekau of
yore. It has no exterior walls, making it easy
to see its structural framework (fi g. 19). The
house that was in the same location in 1932
and was photographed by Bateson (1971: pl.
VII) had palm frond walls all around the perimeter
of its frame. The sculpted birds on the
gables of the Wolimbit house have their wings
folded rather than spread, as the majority of
other gable birds on Sepik ceremonial houses
do. Some of these are now in museums, like the
one called Woliyangengawi that was acquired
by French ethnologist Jean Guiart during his
1965–1966 expedition to the area (fi g. 20). According
to Mark Ruff (1981: 13), a new bird
sculpture named Kuadimi and belonging to the
Yapu clan was created in 1978 for placement
on the building’s front gable. The sculpture for
the rear gable belonged to the Miembi clan and
was called Bapadui at the time. These replaced
the older sculptures produced in 1962 by a
man named Yanaui. His carving on the front
of the house belonged to the Miembi clan and
was called Kraujawa, while the one at the rear
belonged to the Sui clan and was called Waliyagonaru.
These two works were acquired by
the Port Moresby Museum and Art Gallery in
1981 (Craig, 2010: 63). The front part of the
house was destroyed in 1980 by a violent earthquake,
and a new bird was then made (fi g. 21).
While we were there in 1988, the sculpture at
the front was identifi ed to us as Ngawidjawa
and the one at the rear was Woliyangengawi.
We thus observe that the sculptures of each generation
appear to have different names. Indeed,
among the Iatmul, every important object has
dozens of ancestral names, just like people do.
It is likely that these different names constitute
a genealogy of the various sculptures created by
preceding generations.
As has been noted above, the gable sculptures
on each end of the building are connected
FIG. 29 (above): Gable
sculpture from the Iatmul
village of Malingeï, Papua
New Guinea.
Museum der Weltkulturen, Frankfurtam
Main.
to posts, the bases of which are a
sculptural rendering of a woman
with her legs spread and resting on
beams. The orientation of the surfaces
of these various sculptures is of particular
importance. At the top, the fi gure and
the bird look in the same direction, away
from the house and either upriver or downriver,
depending on the side of the house they are on.
At the bottom of the two posts the female fi gures
each look toward the exterior of the building,
and behind and opposite them male fi gures
face the inside of it. The gable sculptures thus
point upward toward the sky and the light (in
the daytime, of course) and are visible to all of
the members of the community, while in most
houses the lower sculptures are located in the
shadows of the structure’s “belly” and are hidden
from view in such a way that only the initiated
men can see them. The exception to this
is the Wolimbit house because of its open walls.
GABLE SCULPTURES IN PRIVATE
AND PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Before the Second World War in the Pacifi c
(1942–1945), there were dozens of these giant
edifi ces in the Sepik River Valley. Each of the
ceremonial houses had a pair of the gable sculptures,
and we can thus estimate that well over
a hundred of them were made over the course
of a century. It appears that after use these ob-