Returned not Remade: Visuality, Authority and Potentiality of Digital Objects in a Melanesian Society

This chapter explores the politics of visuality in the context of the lives of the Nalik people of northern New Ireland, Papua New Guinea that is sympathetic to the ‘complexity and reality of people’s lives and thoughts’. It investigates how ubiquitous technologies such as the internet and digital heritage technologies impact visual systems in a Melanesian society, a region where traditional image-making itself is considered under threat of loss and where there have been widespread revival movements since the 1950s to protect cultural practices from global forces of homogenisation in the aftermath of colonisation and mission Christianity. Anthropology has been a productive field for documenting and analysing Melanesian visual systems. The chapter explores the ways in which digital technologies innovate cultural expressions and ritual polities. It reveals ways in which creative engagements with digital heritage tools and images re-orders the social by transmitting visually political authority.