著者

諏訪 淳一郎

出版者

島根県立大学

雑誌

総合政策論叢 (ISSN:13463829)

巻号頁・発行日

no.2, pp.181-197, 2001-12

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Most Papua New Guineans consider singsing tumbuna, or "songs of ancestors," as representative traditional dance from of community. Despite such a widely accepted notion, many of indigenous dance style did not survive form colonization and the missions. In fact, what we see as singsing tumbuna today is an invention rearranged and resurrected from old dances in most cases; it was designed so in order to accommodate with cultural events and public inaugurations organized by the authorities, as well as to promote tourism. In Yabob, a local community near the Madang town, a singsing tumbuna named daik was a group of short songs from indigenous courtship songs sung by the youth in hidden nightly courtship parties held in the bush, which often led to premarital intercourses. As the mission prohibited the courtship for moral reasons, the original songs ceased to be sung, only to be remembered. When the ban on traditional dancing was lifted by the Australian administration after the 1920s, Yabob people rearranged daik for public performance. Today, Yabob has two singsing tumbuna pieces, daik and maimai, the latter of which was derived from a part of the former. Yabob's case demands a conceptual paradigm that renders neither cultural essentialism nor a simple theory of cultural invention that takes production of culture as being a false consciousness or a result of manipulation. In this paper, singsing tumbuna in today's cultural context is scrutinized as a cultural practice interplaying with corporeality and the configuration of "neighborhood" (life world in context) and "locality" (the relational or the contextual), as Arjun Appadurai conceptualized. The corporeality of singsing tumbuna is a "groove," or a participation consciousness cultivated through dancing and musical performance. The groove of singsing tumbuna sets up locality as a neighborhood where cultural interactions are felt as a lived world. The locality of singsing tumbuna often involves foreigners and outsiders, and even a part of words of the songs and costume are arranged for pop music concerts known as powerband; these alterations are also part of a PNG way of sensing reality, here and now, of locality, which is felt as communality-like, by means of groove that incessantly localizes neighborhoods with flexibility.