Carvers in the haus tambaran (spirit house) in Palembei Village, Middle Sepik, PNG. With many families of master carvers and dozens of enthusiastic apprentices, Palembei’s traditional artistic culture is flourishing. Palembei is represented in this exhibition by Teddy Balangu and Otto and Michael Timbin. (Photo: Art Holbrook)

 
Papua New Guinea (PNG) is one of the most culturally diverse places on earth: over 800 cultural groups have their own languages and ways of relating to the world. The land is likewise of enormous biological diversity, with endemic species living within complex ecosystems that include lowland rainforests, montane forests, grasslands, swamps, coastal areas, and islands. The Christensen Fund believes in a world rich in biocultural diversity and recognizes that this diversity is under grave threat from the forces of corporate globalization and mass media homogenization. Given this context, the Fund aims to “back the stewards of biocultural diversity” while recognizing that cultures and environments are adaptive systems.

In PNG, indigenous communities have been stewards of their biocultural heritage for millennia; today, PNG is among the last countries in the world where people who built enduring relationships with the land over many generations still control its use. Eighty per cent of PNG people live in rural areas and practice enduring aspects of their local cultures. Despite this, PNG faces major challenges to retain and feel pride in its biocultural diversity due to a century of humiliating colonial rule. Colonial governments took control of the land and people, forcing them to deny their own ways and take on a worldview that categorized them as “uncivilized” and “heathen savages”. People were made to believe that their own languages, histories, and cultures were inferior to those of the colonizers. A profound legacy of this colonization process is the way Papua New Guineans today have been made to reject and forget their own ways. When local ways are practiced now, it is predominantly within the context of belonging to a past named “tradition” or pasin tambuna (“ways of the ancestors”). In their place, ways of the colonizers are readily accepted. PNG’s economic, political, and sociocultural systems are still dominated by her former colonizers, while foreign companies rush to exploit the natural resources.

Arts and cultural programs that reengage people with artistic expressions linking traditions of the past and present, making them alive and relevant, are integral to reestablishing PNG culture as part of mainstream modern culture – making culture “cool” again. If the measure of a culture is in its integration of art into everyday life, pre-contact societies were highly accomplished: string bags (bilums), baskets, cooking pots, canoes, houses, body adornments, and rich metaphors of language and song were all works of art, where people expressed their creativity and connections between generations. Rapid globalization is diminishing creative cultural diversity as cheap standardized imports are replacing traditional embellished objects and architecture. To counter this trend, The Christensen Fund supports initiatives that are restoring cultural pride and keeping alive local knowledge, self-reliance, and connectedness to artistic creativity.

The Hailans to Ailans project, managed by the University of Goroka in PNG in collaboration with PNG artists, curators Michael Mel and Pamela Rosi, and the Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery, London, and Alcheringa Gallery, Victoria, Canada, is one of the inspirational arts and culture initiatives that the Christensen Fund is supporting. We are hopeful that by providing venues for contemporary PNG artists to exhibit their place-based creativity in the UK, the USA, and Canada, the project will increase appreciation for and pride in PNG art and culture among both the artists and the broader population in PNG, and at the same time, will increase the profile and appreciation for PNG art and culture internationally.

Catherine Sparks
Melanesian Program Officer
The Christensen Fund
July 2009