3.12 Why were children and local guides better at seeing cave art than expert prehistorians before 1902? Part 3: Learning to See Nggwalndu and Paintings with the Abelam of Papua New Guinea

“The plain fact is that a picture, to represent an object, must be a symbol for it, stand for it, refer to it; and that no degree of resemblance is sufficient to establish the requisite relationship of reference. Nor is resemblance necessary for reference; almost anything may stand for anything else….The eye comes always ancient to its work, obsessed by its own past and by old and new insinuations of the ear, nose, tongue, fingers, heart and brain. It functions not as an instrument self-powered and alone, but as a dutiful member of a complex and capricious organism. Not only how but what it sees is regulated by need and prejudice. It selects, rejects, discriminates, associates, classifies, analyzes, constructs. It does not so much mirror as take or make; and what it takes and makes it sees not bare, as items without attributes, but as things, as food, as people, as enemies, as stars, as weapons. Nothing is seen nakedly or naked.”

-Nelson Goodman

“…the Abelam do not ask what a painting means. The design elements all have names and they are assembled into harmonious compositions, which appear to act directly on the beholder without having to be named. Abelam art is about relationships, not about things. One of its functions is to relate and unite disparate things in terms of their place in the ritual and cosmological order. It does this, I would suggest, directly and not as an illustration to some text based in another symbolic system such as language. One of the main functions of the initiation system with its repetetive exposure of initiates to quantities of art is, I would suggest, to teach the young men to see the art, not so that he may consciously interpret it but so that he is directly affected by it.”

-Anthony Forge