13
A melpa woman from the Mt. Hagen region, New Guinea. She is adorned with moka shells.
exist in the world. Installation works are not ‘given’ to their gallerists or commissioners in quite the same way. Music exists typically as a relationship between specific persons; a visual artist’s studio, or installation hanging team are not specific in this sense. An installation is not a gift given to the workers and assistants who have to fabricate and transport and install it. Gift-giving and exchange are fundamental to human interaction such that this foregrounding by musical relationships ought to be given a second look. Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern put it with a scintillating bluntness: ‘for “person”, one can write “gift”.’ She elaborates: It is arguable that all Melanesian gift exchanges are ‘reproductive’ . . . Melanesians borrow origin stories, wealth and—as in the area I know best (Mount Hagen)—the expertise by which to organise their religion and their future. One clan takes from another its means of life. Indeed, exchanges surrounding the transfer of reproductive potential are intrinsic to the constitution of identity. . . . Pigs create