Caroline Mytinger’s Portraits Recorded Melanesian Ethnic Groups
In 1926 two young American women undertook a journey to Melanesia, seeking lands untouched by the outside world. They ended up creating a priceless ethnographic resource.
Artist’s supplies, a few clothes, a ukulele, and $600 cash was all they carried. The women were Caroline Mytinger -- a portrait painter and amateur ethnographer, and her companion Margaret Warner – owner of the ukulele and the expedition’s technician-cum-secretary.
Mytinger and Warner spent the next four years making their way from island to island living with the Melanesians, They lived in the grass huts of their hosts, ate sago, sweet potatoes and roasted wild boar. They paddled in dugout canoes and climbed muddy jungle paths. They suffered local infirmities including the ulcerous “fish mouth.” Everything the women experienced was documented in prose and on canvas.
The term “Headhunting,” used in the title of both of her books, is a typical example of the artist’s earthy humor. Mytinger referred to the process of securing a sitter and capturing their likeness as “taking a head.” Warner played hostess during these sessions; She sang, strummed her ukulele, or simply kept up a happy banter -- entertaining the guest-sitter while Mytinger concentrated on painting.
Mytinger and Warner held a different view of the Melanesians than many of their generation. Their attitude was that preindustrial societies and their populations should be protected and studied, rather than evangelized, urbanized and industrialized. Mytinger and Warner took particular care to understand the Islanders’ knowledge of the natural world, their views on honor, morality and civil society, and their attitudes toward humanity’s place in the universe. Their own mistakes of etiquette -- the unintentional gaffs of which all travelers are guilty -- are recorded with self-deprecating humor in Mytinger’s witty prose.
Upon returning to the United States in 1930, Mytinger displayed her Melanesian portraits at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, under the guidance of anthropologist Margaret Mead. Later the collection went on the road, exhibiting at a number of venues. Mytinger eventually bequeathed 23 of her Melanesian portraits, as well as over 40 sketches, to the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology in Berkeley, California. A great number of them can be viewed online at the museum’s website.
Anyone interested in the history of the South Pacific should seek out a copy of Mytinger’s Headhunting in the Solomon Islands around the Coral Sea or New Guinea Headhunt. Originally published in 1942 and 1946 respectively, the two books remain a key source for information on the various peoples, cultures, and locales of Melanesia.
Luckily, The Narrative Press brought Headhunting in the Solomon Islands around the Coral Sea back to print in 2001, with a trade paper edition. As of this writing New Guinea Headhunt is still out of print, but since Mytinger’s books sold briskly during her lifetime, many are still available today used.
More information can be found at:
Sources:
Mytinger, Caroline, Headhunting in the Solomon Islands around the Coral Sea, The MacMillan Company, 1942.
Mytinger, Caroline, New Guinea Headhunt, The MacMillan Company, 1946.
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