SPECIAL ISSUE: INTIMACY

Winter 1998
Volume 24, Number 2

This is about the experience of stories, about how they layer, conjoin, and linger. The stories I'll speak of are both my own and those of Bosavi people who live in the rain forests of the Great Papuan Plateau, in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Some were first heard in the Bosavi region, others are an overlapping accumulation of later tellings and retellings. Biographically intertextual and intervocal, these stories are positioned in two distinct languages, in a variety of monologic and dialogic moods. They travel through twenty years of changing locations and through frequent shifts of speaker authority.

Of the intertwined strands of Bosavi stories and my own that I could explore, it is the stylized, coarse texture of male evocation that concerns me here. Listening to how some male voices across lifeworlds and locales perform their gendered intersubjectivities, I mean to question ways culture making is revealed in storied intimacies. Above all, I want to attend to momentary collisions of male voices, voices that are typically situated in radically distinct historical space-times, and to explore the ironies of those collisions, the spaces of what they absorb, deflect, and exchange about bodies and desires.

To do this is to question the place of storied intimacies in cultural poetics and politics, to question the workings of narrative allegory. I ask how a story's temporal patterning, its sequential revelation of events, can create a figure and ground of deeper and shallower slippages in everyday meanings. How, in short, do stories live lives of reinvention? How, as recyclable goods, are they always in the process of expansion and contraction? Figuring and refiguring in relation to the interpretive desires of both their immediate tellers and hearers, and the larger social fields through which they reverberate, today's narratives becomes tomorrow's anecdotes, next month's punch lines, next year's memory cues. This way, stories always seem to relocate and replace earlier locations and placements, thereby making a "claim to a place in the memory of the listener." And, as stories make that claim, they track, or articulate, or disrupt the unfolding of naturalized, taken-for-granted embodiments and socialities, the "lexicon of corporeality in general."

Steven Feld is professor of anthropology at New York University. He is the author of Sound and Sentiment (1990), Voices of the Rainforest (1991), with Charles Keil, Music Grooves (1994), and editor, with Keith Basso, of Senses of Place (1996).