Subjectivity, visual technology, and public culture: Watching the ethnographic film, Malanggan Labadama in New Ireland

The study of cultural change requires a dialectical theory of culture that does not reduce vectors of change to extra-cultural forces. Despite changes in expert technology that included the uses of ethnographic film to aid the carvers of Melanesian funerary sculptures, which are named malanggan, the carvers typically present their sculpture to either ritual or secular publics who are incredulous at the brief display, but with a difference in either case. This description of the visual shifts in the making and display of malanggan sculpture can be analyzed as a movement from ontological concerns about how people live in relationships, to epistemological concerns with how to communicate about who they are. These shifts in expert visual technique and its relationship to public culture are wholly cultural processes generating cultural change. © 2007 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review.