Notes and Quotes Concerning the Further Collaboration of Ian Saem Majnep and Ralph Bulmer: Saem Becomes a Writer

NOTES AND QUOTES CONCERNING THE FURTHER COLLABORATION OF IAN SAEM MAJNEP AND RALPH BULMER: SAEM BECOMES A WRITER George E. Marcus Rice University, Houston In 1982,1 published a late review ofBirds of My Kalam Country (Majnep and Bulmer 1977), explicitly appreciating for the first time both it and the collaboration on which it was based as an ethnographic experiment in line with the self-conscious rupture in modes of ethnographic authority and representation that I, among other colleagues, have been documenting in contemporary anthropology (Marcus 1982:313-15; and see, for example, Clifford 1983; Clifford and Marcus 1986; and Marcus and Cushman 1982). Following Ralph Bulmer’s death, Andrew Pawley kindly sent me drafts of the several working papers in Kalam and English, which are eventually to constitute the second volume,Animals the Ancestors H untedin the planned Majnep/Bulmer trilogy (the third beingKalam Plant Lore), along with notes from seminars Ralph gave in Paris in 1980-81 on the production of Animalsthe texts during the long gestation of this writing project.2 I intend this essay to be a further appreciation of the collaboration between Saem and Ralph, based on my reading of the working papers I have in hand. My comments will parallel perhaps the fragmentary form that the texts now take, and I am of course a reader who has probed the manuscripts, not so much for any knowledge of Kalam game and hunting practices, which are indeed their explicit object of representation, as for insights into the collaboration that has created them revealed on their margins, so to speak, in asides, and in decisions about their form and style of presentation. I have constructed my commentary around selected long quotations, especially from Ralph’s reflections on the project, and from Saem’s “finishing touches” to both the Birds volume and theAnimals working papers.3 The risk I am taking is reading traces or signs of intention and purpose into the texts without benefit of conversation with the authors, especially Saem, whose emergence as a literal writer in the Animals project is of central interest to me. With characteristic modesty, Ralph in one of his Paris lectures minimises the novel character of the way his long-term collaboration with Saem is manifested in the making of ethnographic texts: I must say that I do not regard what Saem and I have been doing as particularly original, except perhaps in the narrow field of ethnobiology. Many of the classic texts of an earlier epoch in North American ethnography were of this genre. There is that entrancing book,Turi’s Book of Lapland, extracted and translated by the Danish ethnologist Elsie Demant Hatt, in the second decade of this century. There are also the works of Professor Griaule and his colleagues on the Dogon. Of course this is true: the freshness of Ralph’s and Saem’s collaboration is very old indeed in the history of fieldwork. Ethnographers have always wanted texts from their informants’ speech acts and oral consultations, but the literal and collaborative textualising of essentially dialogic encounters has rarely been problematised in the production of the published ethnographic account itself. The decades-long relationship of Franz Boas to his collaborator, George Hunt, who often functioned, not unlike Saem, as an independent fieldworker (both as a source and as an investigator), is perhaps the key historical example. The fact of collaboration was repeatedly made clear in Boas’ published accounts, but it in no way changed the form his ethnography took for its professional readers. In the very different ethical environment in which ethnographic fieldwork and analysis are conducted in the second half of the twentieth century, the Majnep-Bulmer relationship stands out from the history of sustained collaborations, particularly characteristic of early twentieth century “salvage” anthropology when the theoretically unadorned collection of “native texts” was in fashion, in the extent of Ralph’s willingness to compromise his own authority and authorship by introducing Saem professionalinto the presentation of their research. While Ralph downplayed any experimental claims or ends, the decision to bring Saem so far into his academic world of discursive practices and intentions, which for the latter must be as strange as any that Euroamerican anthropologists have encountered, was bound to have led to the production of texts that would radically depart from the conventions of ethnographic writing. While the Birds book was produced over a very short period of time of daily collaboration,Animals the book has taken several years to produce, with breaks in collaborative activity and more uncertainty as to the form it should eventually take.4 Unlike Birdsthe project, there is to be a Kalam published version of the Animals book that is, at least in principle, to have equal status with the English version. Most importantly, the 37 38 George E. Marcus Animals book represents the work of textualisation over that of dialogue, from whichBirds the book primarily derives. And further, in this regard, theAnimals book seems to me to mark an evolution in the role of Saem in the collaboration. Although in theBirds book, Saem was a full partner in determining the arrangement of materials - was even deferred to by Ralph - and his voice/words were a prominent and typographically marked part of the text, it was still Ralph who held the pen, so to speak, and materially made the text from interviews and dialogues. Thus, even thoughBirds the book was a radical departure from the recent tradition of ethnoscientific ethnography, it was still shaped and crafted by professional authority and purposes. In the Animals book, it is Saem who primarily holds the pen, and Ralph moves into a secondary role in a much more substantive way. The making of the text is more in Saem’s control, and even though the project is still conducted under the rationale of scholarly classification and description (this remains resolutely the primary commitment of Ralph and his ethnozoological colleagues), there is now more of a potential for the articulation in the process of textualisation of an alternative, or at least a variant, intention or purpose on Saem’s part than in the Birds book. In short, I would argue that by Saem becoming the major and literal writer in this project, he has gained considerable substantive authority in their joint authorship to pursue his own purposes while also pursuing Ralph’s. In his Paris seminars, Ralph provides a good description of the scribe-like nature of Saem’s role as writer in the Animals project, in which his own and other Kalam oral performances are the object of recording, copying, and transcription. Here we have a recapitulation in one instance of the more global and historic movement from orality to literacy in which writing most basically takes a scriptural form in the presence of a world of predominant oral communication (interestingly in this regard, the texts of the working papers even assume a “chapter and verse” format - twenty chapters or separate working papers, each on a particular variety of game mammal, and each of these composed of 50 to 100-plus numbered short paragraphs or single statements that range from simple declarations of fact, to complex observations, to reflections and speculation about the animals in question and Kalam beliefs about them). A further specific problem, which is more exclusively one of style, rather than both style and semantics, relates to the fact that Kalam has no literary tradition. Note further that Saem talks first, then transcribes what he has said, rather than think through his hands and pen, straight onto the paper. Thus what he provides in his texts is a transcript of an oral statement And like any experienced public speaker (and virtually all adult male New Guineans are experienced public speakers) he tends to repeat each point three times, to make sure his audience gets the message. Some whole long passages are also repeated, almost verbatim, in two or three or four different chapters. Some abbreviation is thus quite necessary in the English version; as also some reordering of paragraphs, where, for example, five minutes of tape or three pages later, he remembers some point that should have been inserted earlier in the same chapter. But fortunately I do not regard these problems of abbreviation and editorial re-alignment as too serious, as I have Saem’s explicit and spontaneous request to edit out repetitions, and reorder paragraphs where this is obviously necessary. Ralph himself thus performed the role of secondary scribe. As Andrew Pawley says in his editor’s notes to the working papers: Saem spent several months in Auckland in the summer of 1977-78 and the book began to take clear shape. Saem recorded the first drafts of all of the Kalam chapters then and by 1979 or early 1980 he had completed transcriptions of all 20 or so chapters, and had made Pidgin translations of some of them on tape or paper. In 1980 RB spent three or four months in the Kaironk Valley and did first draft English translations of all the chapters, including an Introduction and an Epilogue that Saem had added. Bulmer’s translation method was as follows. First, rewrite Saem’s Kalam text in a notebook, leaving two or three blank lines with a literal, word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase translation. Finally, write in a free translation on the third lines (or sometimes on separate leaves). In the process, there was a constant dialogue with Saem, clarifying meanings, making small changes to the text, etc. Just how secondary Ralph permitted himself to become in the actual textualisationAnimals of the book is captured in the following remarks from his Paris seminars.

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