From the point of view of anthropology, that we, the subject of history, cannot be presupposed or left implicit. Nor should we let anthropology simply be used as the provider of a convenient Other to the we ." - Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other.

"We never tell everything, we always keep something for the next anthropologist." - Informant to Margaret Mead.

Kobarweng's point of departure was Kaiang Tapior's question: "Where is your helicopter?", which puzzled me on the day of July 6, 1987 as I stood in the village of Pepera. Apparently in June 1959 a scientific crew, including anthropologists, had dropped down from the sky in helicopters; much to the terrified surprise of the villagers who watched in awe at these things from out of the sky, the likes of which they had never seen before [1]. "All the women pissed in fear, when the helicopter circled from the sky", recalls Kaiang Tapior, who still sharply envisioned the first encounter with these outsiders at the time when he was still a kid.

The video project Kobarweng traces the historical moment of a collision between two different cultures: a remote village set in the highlands of the island of New Guinea only dimly aware of the larger beyond, is radically disrupted by an encounter with the outside world—a group of Western scientists exploring unmapped territory only approachable by air.

The first airplanes caused a shock that threw the New Guinean's worldview upside down, forcing them to redefine their known existence according to that outside world's encapsulation of it. The shock is still visible everywhere: the eldest son of Baman Uropmabin was born during the laying out of the Atmisibil airstrip and was named Kobarweng after "the sound of the airplane." The name became the title of the project Kobarweng. Translated literally, it means language (weng) of the airplane (kobar), or in the Sibil tongue: "the sound of the airplane" [2].

This touches on a fundamental difference in the Sibil's approach to identifying, representing and experiencing reality. The rainforest is first of all an experience of sound instead of sight. When anthropologist Steven Feld was collecting the names of all the birds as they are given by the Kaluli people from Papua New Guinea, they would respond: "it sounds like," instead of "it looks like." In front of Feld's tape recorder the Kaluli would imitate over a hundred sounds of birds without giving visual description. While Western ornithological taxonomies are organized by morphological principles based on sight, the Kaluli use a different and broader set of criteria. Families of birds are categorized according to sound to create a metaphorical human society: those that say their names, those that weep, those that speak the Bosavi language, those that whistle, those that make a lot of noise, those that sing Gisalo song, and those that only sound [3].

It would make sense then, that the outside world would emerge through sound: the roar of early airplanes prospecting the area, World War II squadrons swooping low during the 1940s on their way to bomb Japanese basecamps in the South Pacific, or occasionally a distant B-17 crashing into the forest. These initial signs of a different reality from beyond the peripheries of their known world were perceived in a way similar to how the Kaluli approach their daily environment.

The unfamiliar sounds of aircraft were first explained in terms of the indigenous cosmology: "Perhaps it was only the sound of a cassowary? But the noise continued..." [4] - "Some said it was a hornbill (sau) flying in the sky, while others believed it to be the ruru frog, from the forest floor" [5] - "I thought I heard the voice of one of those marsupials that growl as they go along (kui koklom), we chased the noise through the undergrowth; it kept moving in front of us and we couldn't catch it" [6] - "[...] we thought it was our own Mokei spirits returning! We started digging [...] We dug everywhere! We didn't realize the sound was coming from above" [7]. Ancestors and the enigmatic larger political context intermixed. People thought their ancestral dead were returning with their cargo [8].

[...] Nowhere else is it more visible that the 'other' is constructed within a social, cultural, and historical context as when two differing cultural perceptions clash. The anthropological discourse of discovering and objectifying the other often renders mute a differing local voice—a voice claimed by a Western writing of history. Kobarweng critically restages the history of this first encounter told mainly through a native narrative, which reclaims the memory of a colonial past. Switching the roles of observer and observed, it is anthropology—and specifically the desire underlying anthropological representation, that is depicted as an exotic object to be explored and scrutinized. The observer observed. This reversal lays bare the short-circuits and gaps in the dialogue between discoverer and discovered, as well as the power structures within that exchange. "We never tell everything, we always keep something for the next anthropologist"!

[...] Juxtaposing thirty year old documentary footage with the accounts of indigenous people, Kobarweng critically considers the myth of objectivity, the pretense to an epsistemic and scientific detachment maintained not just by the anthropologist, but throughout the discourse of Western science, where the observer finds himself caught in an alienated position of transcendence over his/her object. One particular still out of the documentary material depicts a water kettle—this Western domestic artifact has a mundane function for the expedition members, but embodies for the New Guineans a glossy mysterious presence, an object of fantastic investment. It stands as a metaphor for the incommensurability between two ways of approaching reality— the boundaries between representation and reality, between fiction and documentary fade: later in the tape, the image of the kettle is reshot in the fictionalized environment of my own place in New York; and thus, through the reconstruction and restaging of this archival image in a personal and contemporary environment, becomes a reflection on my own condition as observer and my complicity with the telling of the story.

Johan Grimonprez

[1] Brongersma L. & Venema G.F., To the Mountains of the Stars.

[2] Hykema S., Mannen in het Draagnet.

[3] Feld S.; Sound & Sentiment.

[4] Berndt R.M., A Cargo Movement in the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea, Oceania 23.

[5] Josephides L. & Schiltz M., Through Kewa Country in Schieffelin E.L. & Crittenden R.

[6] Ongka, A Self-account by a New Guinea Big Men.

[7] Kubal Nori in Connolly B. & Anderson R.

[8]. Schieffelin E.L. & Crittenden R., Like People You see in a Dream & Connolly, B. &

Anderson R., First Contact.