The Temporality of Immortality in Lesu: The Historical Anthropology of a New Ireland Society

This article suggests a new reading of the famous wooden sculptures formerly carved in New Ireland to celebrate the dead. It is argued in terms of a holistic approach implying different ontological perspectives and shifting cultural modalities and discusses the available fragments of ethnography stemming from observations made in the early part of the last century. It proposes that in terms of iconic semantics the making and exposition of a malanggan sculpture formed a symbolic imagery telling how recently deceased persons assumed a new but temporary body and were given a brief spell of renewed social life. It is further argued that the essence of the dead was then absorbed into an anonymous non‐structured assembly of deceased contained in some particular named malanggan design. Malanggan designs moved over time between different places, thus transporting sets of accumulated anonymous dead to new places. Thus getting rid of the departed was intuited as a device to negate the possible creation of kinship‐i...