dialogics of material culture: male and female in Murik outrigger canoes

Our epigraph indicates that contemporary Pacific Island peoples make metaphoric use of canoes, but this is an old phenomenon. Maori tribes were loosely confederated into groups they called "canoes" and named for the vessels on which their mythical ancestors were said to have migrated to New Zealand (Firth 1929:115-116; see also 90). Yapese spoke of marriageable women as "navigators of canoes" in search of ranking men, the immobile "mooring posts" to which they might tie themselves (Labby 1976:16). In this article we develop issues implicit in the metaphoric use of canoe imagery. We take up the general view that material culture gives rise not only to metaphor, or even to polysemy, but also to a contrapuntal dialogue between men and women about agency in the reproduction of society. To apply this perspective, we analyze gender imagery in premodern outrigger canoes of the Murik, a people living in the estuary of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. We begin by situating our view of dialogue expressed through material culture in relation to three sources: the Sepik River ethnography of Gregory Bateson (1958[1936]), symbolic anthropology in Melanesia (Forge 1962; Munn 1977, 1986; Wagner 1986), and the dialogism of Mikhail Bakhtin (1981). First we discuss the role of outrigger canoes in the Murik ceremonial economy as the means by which Murik society reproduces itself. Second, we go on to trace the relationship between male and female views of five phases of the vessel's construction rites. In each phase, Lipset focuses on how, for men, canoe building was understood through metaphors of initiation as jural citizen and cultic warrior. Barlow argues that, for women, canoe production was framed in metaphors of physiological reproduction and nurture, as well as the seductive powers conferred upon female-cult initiates. Subsequently, in a joint exegesis of canoe iconography, we analyze how combined images convey crucial social dilemmas that are animated by voyaging and trade. In conclusion, we propose that the dialogicality of Murik outrigger canoes introduces a new refinement to the semiotic analysis of artifacts and we direct