String Figures String Figures A Cultural Practice between Art, Anthropology, and Theory Edited by Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül DIAPHANES Table of Contents 7 An Introduction to String Figures between Art, Anthropology, and Theory Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül I. Essays Anthropology 47 Recollections of the String Figures of Yirrkala Robyn McKenzie 69 Exhibiting Colonial Entanglements: String Figures and Material Metaphors Paul Basu  93 Who Owns the Films, Who Shows the Films? Films of String Figures in a Web of Relationships Sarine Waltenspül 123 Ajarorpoq and TseLtse’no: On the Trail of Franz Boas’s Cross-Cultural Fascination with Cat’s Cradle Rainer Hatoum 137 Ethnomathematics of String Figure-Making Practices Eric Vandendriessche 151 Hesitant Hands on Similar Loops: Some Reflections on the Embodiedness of String Figures Mareile Flitsch Art and Theory 169 Shall We Rather Do String Figures Than Think in Networks? Donna Haraway’s SF Method Mario Schulze 191 From Buffalo Skin to Intertwined Snakes: The String Figures of Harry Smith Rani Singh 209 The Pliability of Form: Remediation in the String Figure Works of Jean-Paul Riopelle and Vera Frenkel Henry Adam Svec 223 SF: String Figures as Hexenspiele, “Witches’ Games”: Mattering Figurations for Relational Aesthetics Ines Kleesattel 245 For an Aesthetic of Relating Seraina Dür and Jonas Gillmann II. Exhibition 259 String Figures: A Research Exhibition 265 Room 1 Static Figures, Ephemeral Stories 265 Room 2 Situating Universals 295 Room 3 Taking off, Passing on, Letting go III. Exhibits in Focus Static Figures, Ephemeral Stories 303 A Reflection on String Figures and That One Time They Went Viral: On My TikTok Channel David Ket’acik Nicolai 309 Powered by Indigenous Life and Grit: On Caroline Monnet’s Mobilize Adam Piron 313 Strings, Relations, Associations: On Figures from the Upper Rio Negro Andrea Scholz and Diana Guzmán Mirigõ 317 A Door to the Imagination: On Andy Warhol’s Screen Test: Harry Smith Andres Pardey  321 Members on All Continents: On the History of the International String Figure Association since 1994 Mark Sherman 325 The Disappearance of a Female Ethnographer: On Dina Dreyfus Ellen Spielmann Situating Universals 331 Entangling Forms of Knowledge Production: On Vilma Chiara, Harald Schultz, and the String Figures of the Krahô People Maria Julia Fernandes Vicentin  341 Reconfiguring the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica: On the E-EC Interfaces Moritz Greiner-Petter  349 Connections in Time and Space: On Katrien Vermeire’s and Rudolf Haefelfinger’s String Figure Films Stephan Claassen Taking off, Passing on, Letting go 353 Te whai waewae a Maui: On Maureen Lander’s String Games Moya Lawson  359 Multispecies Obscenity: On My Poster Multispecies Cat’s Cradle Nasser Mufti  365 Cinema and String Figures: On Maya Deren’s Witch’s Cradle Ute Holl 373 Against Immediacy: On Toby Christian’s Stringer Lynton Talbot  379 Authors and Artists 393 Image Credits - 7 Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül An Introduction to String Figures between Art, Anthropology, and Theory Prologue on Administration Staffs The string figures of the Pacific island of Nauru are among the most complex in the world. Many of the string figures, which are called kawada, go back to the contests of the young men on the island, who—especially in pre-colonial times—competed annu- Fig. 1.1: Simon Quanijo, who co- invented the figure Administration Staffs with Ijauwe in 1937. The pho- tograph is the frontispiece in Honor Maude’s book on Nauruan string figures and is the only photograph of a person in it. Fig. 1.2: The archival description of the photo reads “Honor Maude dem- onstrating a Nauruan string figure, ‘Administration staff’ no. 135, about 1960.” However, the figure Maude holds in her hands is not the pattern Administration Staffs. Fig. 1.3: Pattern Administration Staffs pinned on wood. 8 Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül An Introduction to String Figures between Art, Anthropology, and Theory ally in creating new figures and imitating the newly-invented ones as quickly as possible. Of intriguing complexity is the fig- ure Administration Staffs, the final stage of which is shown above as mounted on wood. Conceived in 1937 by Simon Quanijo, the Native Medical Superintendent on Nauru (fig. 1.1),1 and Ijauwe, about whom we could not find out more, it depicts the then- Administrator (i.e. the colonial governor) of Nauru, Rupert Clare Garsia, flanked by members of his staff (fig. 1.3).2 The string of the mounted figure is made of human hair because it slips more easily over the fingers, which makes it more convenient to create such complex figures with numerous intermediate steps.3 Quanijo and Ijauwe created this figure after Honor Maude had visited Nauru. Maude, who in the photo above proudly presents a figure that she developed herself based on Nauruan techniques (fig. 1.2), was one of the most dedicated experts on string figures in the twentieth century.4 She had visited the island for six weeks in 1937 because she knew of the beauty and complexity of the Nau- ruan string figures, but was unable to reproduce the patterns her- self. Maude had learned about the figures from the most impor- tant work on string figures to date, Caroline Furness Jayne’s book A Study of Cat’s-Cradle in Many Lands, published in 1906, which contained some Nauruan figures as mounted patterns, but gave no information on their making.5 When Honor Maude returned to 1 See Henry E. Maude to P.L. Ryan, September 9, 1970, University of Adelaide, Part I, Series D: Honor Maude Papers, Correspondence re Nauru String Figures 1965–1970. 2 Honor Maude, The String Figures of Nauru Island (Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia, 1971), pp. 135–137. Unlike all the other figures, Administration Staffs does not have a Nauruan name. 3 Furthermore, the Nauruan strings were considerably longer than the conven- tional ones (more than 4.5 meters instead of 1.8 meters), which is necessary to make such complex figures. 4 See fig. 24 in Joseph D’Antoni, “Variation on Nauru Island String Figures,” Bul- letin of the International String Figure Association 1 (1994), pp. 27–68. According to the archival information on the photo, it is the figure “Administration Staff no. 135.” However, the pattern in Maude’s hands is another one. We thank Mark Sherman, director of the International String Figures Association, for his help in identifying the figure Maude is holding in her hands. On Maude, see Mark Sherman, “Honor C. Maude: A Tribute to the World’s Foremost Authority on Pacific Island String Fig- ures,” Bulletin of the International String Figure Association 5 (1998), pp. 1–38. 5 Furness Jayne had never visited Nauru, but had received fifteen Nauruan string figures mounted on paper from her brother William Henry Furness III (a physician turned anthropologist). Caroline Furness Jayne, String Figures: A Study of Cat’s-Cra- 9 the island of Nauru a year after her first visit—for just a few hours— she learned that the men on the island had invented sixteen new figures. Some of them, including Administration Staffs, referred to the presence of the whites, the colonizers like Garsia or Maude and her husband Henry Evans (known as Harry). Harry Maude served as a British colonial administrator for the British colony neighbor- ing Nauru, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, which are as well known for their string figure proficiency. He later became a professor of South Pacific studies in Canberra. More than thirty years after her second visit to Nauru, Maude wrote a book about the Nauruan string figures, in which she gath- ered well over a hundred figures. The foreword to the book, writ- ten by Maude’s husband Harry, draws a remarkable line from the mounted figures in Caroline Furness Jayne’s book to the tragic history of the island: “She [Furness Jayne] published her book in 1906 and the following year Nauru became well known: not, however, for its string figures but for exporting its first cargo of phosphate.”6 “Cargo” is a euphemistic term in this case. Nauru gained sad notoriety because large parts of the island were turned into wasteland by decades of phosphate mining, phosphate being an important fertilizer for industrial agriculture. Furthermore, Harry Maude writes in his preface that all string figure infor- mants—including Simon Quanijo and Ijauwe—died of starvation or privation during the Japanese occupation in the Second World War and the associated deportations.7 The story of the island is, in a nutshell, one of the most horrific tales in the history of extrac- tivist colonialism. Since 2001 it has been home to an Australian offshore migrant detention center, building on the infrastructure and the mindset that was established during the phosphate years. In her recently-published ethnography of Nauru’s offshore asy- lum arrangement and migration industry, Julia Morris describes dle in Many Lands (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), pp. 366–370; Robyn McKenzie, “One continuous loop: making and meaning in the string figures of Yirrkala,” (Ph.D. diss., The Australian National University, 2016), p. 99. 6 Henry E. Maude, “Preface. The Cultural Setting,” in Honor Maude, The String Figures of Nauru Island, pp. 11–16, here p. 11. 7 Ibid., p. 16. See also Henry E. Maude to P.L. Ryan, University of Adelaide, Honor Maude Papers. 10 Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül An Introduction to String Figures between Art, Anthropology, and Theory the role that string figures play on the island today:8 “At industry events like today, the coconut-bra mannequin and string-figure collection are always brought out from the dusty vaults of Nauru’s Culture Department, along with the group of young Nauruan girls [wearing hula skirts and bikini tops].”9 Challenging Patterns Administration Staffs is challenging for many reasons. The story that this pattern unfolds leads into the history of twentieth-cen- tury colonial violence and cannot be told independently of it. At the same time, Administration Staffs symbolizes the beauty, play- fulness and complexity of a proud cultural technique that has been and continues to be marginalized. Our hope with this book is that the power of string figures to connect people, to bridge past and present, to be hybrid and ephemeral, can help to imag- ine an alternate present and future that build on and acknowl- edge the wounds of the past without dwelling on them. In our work on string figures, we kept asking ourselves: how can we simultaneously acknowledge the past—in all its complexity and cruelty—and yet turn towards a present that allows for “decolo- nial” relations, for example through cultural/artistic practices. For this book, we have made various attempts at contact and col- laboration with string figure players, with string figure creator societies and with heritage institutions holding string figure col- lections, as well as reaching out to artists and researchers who have already established such collaborations. Although not all of these attempts have been successful, we are happy to be able to include a range of texts, artworks, and perspectives from at least 8 On the historical connection of extraction and asylum on Nauru Island, see Julia Morris, Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2023). Morris manages to explain “the expanding reach of capi- tal into domains of human resources that depend on prior civilizational projects of discovery and plunder,” p. 17. Essential reading on the phosphate trade in the Pacific is Katerina Martina Teaiwa’s book Consuming Ocean Island: Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2015), which focuses on the other prominent phosphate island in the Pacific, Banaba, where string figures have been well developed as well. 9 Morris, Asylum and Extraction, p. 192. 11 some of the places where string figures have been, or continue to be, a proud cultural practice. The figure Administration Staffs introduces at least some of the topics dealt with in this book. Firstly, there is the often neglected complexity and breadth of the subject of string figures, not only in Nauru but in many parts of the world. The pattern shows how finely chiseled string figures can be, and how much manual and intellectual skill is required to perform them. Secondly, the pat- tern Administration Staffs exemplifies two of the many possible functions or meanings that string figures can have. On Nauru, they were a way to compete with others or a (cathartic) way to deal with the colonial reality. Elsewhere, string figures can be a game, an origin story, a pastime, a mythological tale or a death ritual. They are often something deeply embedded in the “way of being” of a culture. Thirdly, Honor Maude represents the development of string figure studies into a distinct sub-discipline within anthro- pology. Even though some prominent, discipline-building male anthropologists worked on string figures, their studies remained largely marginalized. This was mainly because of the status of those who pursued it more intensively and shaped its content, the “sisters [Furness Jayne], daughters, and wives [Maude]”10 of more or less well-known anthropologists, who, as women, stood and worked at the margins of their field. It was also because of the subject matter, which is considered a trivial children’s game in Europe, with far less complex figures than in Nauru or other regions of the world. In their marginalization, string figure stud- ies reflect the history of anthropology: the search for universal- isms in the vernacular, the idea of “saving” cultures (“salvage anthropology”) or at least their objects and practices from disap- pearing, and the non-innocent practices of collecting Indigenous artefacts, aesthetics and practices. Fourthly—and we would like to discuss this point in more detail—, Administration Staffs takes us into the “coloniality” with which the exploration of string figures on Nauru and elsewhere was associated. String figures can seldom be separated from what Rolando Vázquez calls the “colonial wound”: a wound caused by the erasure of lifeworlds, 10 McKenzie, “One continuous loop,” p. 93. 12 Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül An Introduction to String Figures between Art, Anthropology, and Theory people and knowledge that the European project of modernity brought with it globally; a wound that those striving to decolo- nize need to engage with in order to create a ground for healing and repair. String figures will not break the cycle of exploitation that removes resources from poor countries in order to benefit wealthy ones, but might offer ways to think through the possibili- ties of epistemic and aesthetic restitution.11 Administration Staffs can be placed in a series of other examples that mimic coloniz- ers in Indigenous art forms.12 This does not necessarily mean that the figure should be seen as an “embodied opposition to colonial rule” that makes us aware of the colonizers’ role,13 of the global project of colonialism of which the Maudes themselves were a part. It remains an open and probably unanswerable ques- tion whether the figure describes, captures, uses or subverts the locally-conceived power dynamics between colonizers and Nau- ruans. In any case, the encounter between Maude and the Nau- ruan string figure artists Simon Quanijo and Ijauwe does not signify a one-sided appropriation of Indigenous knowledge by a white amateur anthropologist, nor does a primary interpreta- tion of the pattern as resistance to the colonial order seem plau- sible. Rather, the invention of new patterns amounts to a gesture of relationality in which the coloniality of contact is negotiated. The figure would not exist without the collaboration of the “‘sci- ence’ of Western anthropology on the one hand and Indigenous culture on the other,”14 nor would it have been preserved to this day. While the string figures pinned to cardboard or wood reveal the logics of collecting, ownership, preservation, uprooting and systematization along geographical and sometimes racial catego- ries that dominate ethnological collections, the concrete string figures invented and performed by people tell “of earthhood, of 11 Rolando Vázquez, “Aesthesic and Epistemic Restitution for the Joy of Life. Recalling Earth, Overcoming the Contemporary, Knowing Otherwise,” Errant Jour- nal 5 (2023), pp. 51–62, here p. 53. 12 For example the colon statues of the Baoulé or the Mbari houses of the Owerri- Igbo. Prominent anthropologists like James Clifford, Michael Taussig and Paul Stoller have offered different, partly controversial interpretations of these artifacts. For an overview of these debates, see Paul Stoller, Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power and the Hauka in West Africa (New York: Routledge, 1995). 13 Ibid., p. 90. 14 McKenzie, “One continuous loop,” p. 11. 13 communalhood, of ancestralhood,”15 they tell us of the weaving of relations between Indigenous culture and anthropology. In recent years, string figures have experienced a boom as a metaphor, figure of thought and tangible practice in both art and theory. Apparently, string figures are a suitable form that lends itself to thinking and acting. In avant-garde art—and ergo mostly, but by no means only, Western art—, a multitude of references to string figures can be found. Artists were fascinated by the fact that string figures subvert traditional distinctions (such as medium/ form or sign/signifier), that they make relationalities conceivable, or that they are an expression of Indigenous knowledges and novel aesthetics. The history of museum art dealing with string figures includes the names of frequently exhibited, genre- and school- forming, male, white, metropolitan artists such as Marcel Duch- amp, Andy Warhol and Fred Sandback. Alongside them, however, are the names of fringe, female or Indigenous artists who have worked intensively with the ambiguity, ephemerality and/or his- torical complexity of string figures, such as Harry Smith, Maya Deren and Maureen Lander. This volume explores some of these better- and lesser-known positions in the context of their emer- gence and aims to add narratives to art history that strategically transcend ethnographic and art historical categorizations, ques- tion ideas of center and periphery, and make positions beyond the heroically overcharged Franco-American modernism tangible. At the intersection of art and theory string figures have gained even more prominence: Donna Haraway promotes string fig- ures as a method of interdisciplinary and interspecies thinking and collaboration. Unlike the technicist metaphor of the net- work, Haraway’s string figures provide a playful, process-ori- ented, embodied (and non-Western) way of thinking, emphasiz- ing responsibility. In Haraway’s work, not only the distinctions between disciplines implode, but also those between practice and metaphor. For her, string figures are not only the figures that can be created with strings on hands, but a way of thinking, of signify- ing and of being together. Many artists have taken up Haraway’s SF method and used it in their work. 15 Vázquez, “Aesthesic and Epistemic Restitution,” p. 62. 14 Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül An Introduction to String Figures between Art, Anthropology, and Theory This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition String Figures / Fadenspiele: A Research Exhibition, curated by us, Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül, and co-curated by Andres Pardey, at the Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland. The exhibi- tion takes place in an art museum and juxtaposes historical and contemporary pieces of art with objects from ethnographic collec- tions in order to re:search, re:define, and re:signify both past and present string figure practices. In preparation for the exhibition and the book the workshop “String Figures: An Interdisciplinary Workshop” took place on June 8 and 9, 2023, at the Ethnographic Museum in Zurich, organized together with Mareile Flitsch. This book is the first (as far as we know) to approach string figures from so many different fields of thought and action. In addition to a variety of disciplines and voices from different regions of the world, the volume brings together people from all academic levels and from different research institutions and traditions, including universities, museums, archives, art schools, film festivals and others. It brings together two types of texts: peer-reviewed essays on the broader topic of string figures, and shorter texts focusing on specific exhibits. The following introduction to the history and presence of string figures in anthropology and art serves also as an introduction to the various contributions and the works pre- sented in the exhibition—authors and participating artists are in bold. A Brief History of String Figures in Anthropology The study of string figures—in the sense of turning string figure practices into an object of knowledge—has always been closely linked to the history of anthropology. The elusive ontological sta- tus of string figures between object, game, amusement, embodied practice, storytelling and performance kept on both fascinating anthropologists and at the same time challenging the concepts of their discipline. Accordingly, research into string figures was not only linked to the respective anthropological Zeitgeist (and its paradigms), but also to the changing media possibilities and recording systems (pen and paper, photo or film camera, audio 15 recorder, etc.), and the publication methods and locations of the research (museums, film collections, journals, etc.). In the follow- ing brief history of string figure studies, we are guided above all by the writings of the cultural anthropologist Robyn McKenzie, who has also contributed to this volume. The historiography of European-American string figures research begins with the observations of “travelers” (i.e. trad- ers, missionaries or adventurers) in the middle of the nineteenth century, who were fascinated to discover, firstly, that Indigenous string figures were far more complex, varied and beautiful than the “real cat’s cradle twentieth century art” they were familiar with, and secondly, that the string figures appeared to be repre- sentations of things, animals or people.16 The systematic anthro- pological study of string figures, which began at the end of the nineteenth century, was then primarily undertaken with the intention of salvaging. This “salvage anthropology” was based on the assumption that string figures would soon disappear due to increasing contact with Europeans, including anthropologists— along with the entire way of life of the Indigenous communities being studied. Presumably due to the collecting-orientated char- acter of early anthropology, the traveler-researchers mostly tried to turn the string figures into objects. The challenge was to make collectible something that was comparatively difficult to buy, exchange or steal. The ephemeral, processual, narrative string figures were taken from the fingers, hands and bodies of their makers, to which they were actually connected, and stapled or sewn onto wood or cardboard. Preserved in this way, the string figures were transported to the places of ethnological research, often the metropoles, and—sooner or later—found their way into numerous collections and museums in Europe, North America and Australia (fig. 2.1 and 2.2).17 McKenzie associates this practice 16 McKenzie, “One continuous loop,” p. 91. The captain of the Bounty, William Bligh, already mentioned string figures on Tahiti in 1790, without going into more detail. See Honor Maude, “Cradles of Civilisation,” Rain, no. 16 (1976), p. 6. 17 Martin Probert writes about over 1,200 mounted figures in over twenty muse- ums. We believe that there are actually much more because his list of collections is far from complete. See Martin Probert, “The Torres Strait String Figures in the British Museum A. C. Haddon Collection,” Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 16 (2004), pp. 140–156, here p. 141. 16 Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül An Introduction to String Figures between Art, Anthropology, and Theory with the “methods of collecting animal and plant specimens in the biological sciences,” from which many early anthropologists had emerged.18 It was Franz Boas who first published instructions on ajaror- poq (string figures of the Inuit of Cumberland Sound in Baffin Land) in 1888, thus countering the loss of methods of making associated with the fixation of patterns. Boas also learned some of the figures himself.19 In his essay for this book, Rainer Hatoum contextualizes Franz Boas’ contributions to the study of string fig- ures among the Inuit and the Kwakwaka’wakw and delves into the legacy of his early interests in the game. He also provides further material, like the songs that Boas recorded along with the string figures. Around 1900, interest in how to make string figures grew and finally culminated in the development of nomenclatures for recording the method of making string figures by the two Cam- bridge scholars Alfred Cort Haddon and William Halse Rivers Rivers.20 Like Boas, Haddon and Rivers are regarded as influen- tial pioneers of fieldwork, especially through their expedition to the Torres Strait (the channel between northern Australia and New Guinea), on which they collected wame (as string figures are called there) as a sequence of manual operations. The trained zoologist Haddon had already collected mounted figures during his first visit to the Torres Strait in 1888, which he made to study coral reefs. The method developed on his second expedition to describe the string figures developed into a standard and Haddon became a central figure in string figure research. In this way, Had- don and Rivers’ nomenclature became “part of the anthropolo- gist’s tool kit, equipping them for the field.”21 Subsequently, many anthropologists researched string fig- ures, including some who would go down in history as defining the discipline—alongside Boas, for example, Claude Lévi-Strauss 18 McKenzie, “One continuous loop,” p. 95. 19 Franz Boas, “The Game of Cat’s Cradle,” Internationales Archiv für Ethnogra- phie 1 (1888), pp. 229–230. 20 W.H.R. Rivers and A. C. Haddon, “A Method of Recording String Figures and Tricks,” Man 2 (1902), pp. 146–153. 21 McKenzie, “One continuous loop,” p. 103. 17 Fig. 2.1 and 2.2: Two of the many mounted string figures in the depot of the Ethnological Museum of Berlin with information about the collector but no information about the creator of the figure. 18 Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül An Introduction to String Figures between Art, Anthropology, and Theory and Bronisław Malinowski.22 The documentation of the finished figures, on wood or cardboard or in drawings and photographs, remained a central practice. In some cases, the mounted figures and photos were combined with film in order to do justice to the processuality. Among the earliest of such films are recordings of the Taulipang made by the German ethnologist Theodor Koch- Grünberg in Guyana in 1911.23 Based on Haddon’s nomenclature, numerous reports of a similar structure were published until the 1940s, documenting the string figure repertoire of individual communities: they consisted of the instructions for creating the figures with illustrations of the finished patterns, their local names and their English/German/French translations and, where appropriate, the songs, chants and stories associated with them. The focus was on the Pacific region, from the Pacific Northwest to the Oceanic islands and Australia.24 Theoretically, these studies were motivated by diffusionist or, more rarely, evolutionary para- digms. Either comparisons of as many different string figures as possible from more or less neighboring communities were intended to provide information about contacts, influences or migration routes, i.e. cultural diffusion. Or the string figures were seen as independent interventions of non-literate cultures that were on a universal, cross-cultural path of human development towards modernity, i.e. cultural evolution. Arguably the most important contributions to the systematic analysis of string figures, however, were made by the aforemen- tioned sisters, daughters and wives of anthropologists. In the field of string figures, women could be the experts, as Robyn McKenzie 22 Bronislaw Malinowski, The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia: An Ethnographic Account of Courtship, Marriage, and Family Life among the Natives of the Trobriand Islands (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1929), pp. 396–402. For more on Lévi-Strauss’ and Dina Dreyfus’ collections of string figures, see David Jabin, “Fixer l’éphémère: les jeux de ficelle caduveo,” Carnets de Terrain (November 10, 2020), https://doi.org/10.58079/m2nq (accessed November 18, 2024). 23 Life among the Taulipang of Guiana—Film Documents from the Year 1911 (1962, Theodor Koch-Grünberg, IWF Göttingen, TIB). 24 McKenzie, “One continuous loop,” p. 110. For Papua New Guinea alone, there were reports from Thilenius (Yule Island), Barton (Southeast Papua), Eschlimann (Kuni), Haddon (Torres Strait), Landtman (Kiwai) and Jenness (Goodenough Island). List of studies taken from Georg Höltker, “Zum Problem der Fadenspiele, speziell in Neuguinea,” Bulletin der Schweizerischen Gesellschaft für Anthropologie und Ethnologie XIX (1942/43), pp. 23–43. https://doi.org/10.58079/m2nq 19 points out.25 The case of Dina Dreyfus, the first wife of Claude Lévi-Strauss, is exemplary, since it was probably Dreyfus who first became interested in string figures. In her short contribution for this volume, Ellen Spielmann describes Dreyfus as an influential but forgotten anthropologist between Brazil and France. It is not easy to answer to what this female expert role can be attributed and it probably varies from case to case.26 It certainly has a lot to do with the European-American gender norms of the twentieth century and with the structure of universities, which mostly excluded women. Concrete reasons may be found in the fact that textile practices were feminized; that women in their marginalized position were more likely to succeed in the sup- posedly marginal subjects; that learning and notating not only meant a lot of manual dexterity, but also a lot of diligent work, which suited the purported “female virtues”; and also that the string figures required an embodied ethnography—an interest in learning the figures with your own hands and body. This interest in the body as a site and subject of knowledge corresponds to the usual identification of women with the body within the “deeply somatophobic tradition of [Western] thought.”27 It is worth inves- tigating the ways in which these female experts researched string figures, because they developed new relationships between the researcher and the researched. 1906 saw the publication of the aforementioned book String Figures: A Study of Cat’s-Cradle in Many Lands by Caroline Furness Jayne, probably one of the most relevant works of string figure studies. Furness Jayne was not primarily interested in collecting new figures, but in sharing ways that enabled an interested pub- lic to learn the figures. Most importantly, she shifted the focus from a comparative study of the final patterns to an analytical study of the methods of making the figures. She organized the written instructions for the creation of a figure into sequentially 25 McKenzie, “One continuous loop,” p. 93. 26 See for example Bettina Beer, Frauen in der deutschsprachigen Ethnologie. Ein Handbuch (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2007). 27 Shatema Threadcraft, “Embodiment,” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist The- ory, ed. Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 207–226, here. p. 207. 20 Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül An Introduction to String Figures between Art, Anthropology, and Theory numbered movements, paired with corresponding illustrations. Thus, string figures became a series of permutations and combi- nations, and variations with shared movement sequences.28 This analytical approach shaped her book: It was organized by simi- lar “openings,” the starting position of the string around the fin- gers, rather than by race or tribe. Jaynes’ method simplified and homogenized the collection of string figures and, hence, added to the approaches of comparative analysis and furthered diffusion- ist hopes that cultural relationship might be better understood through comparing and systematizing string figure techniques. Furness Jayne was never “in the field,”—or rather her field was the colonial exhibitions and world fairs—yet she revealed more of the relationships that were the prerequisite for her knowledge of string figures than many of her fellow anthropologists, simply by being one of the first to name her informants. Unlike Furness Jayne, Kathleen Haddon proved to be a pas- sionate field researcher. She accompanied her father, the Haddon who established the first nomenclature for string figures, on his expeditions and became another important exponent of string figure studies. Her tool kit simply consisted of two strings—one for herself and one for the Indigenous string-playing person, her informant. Haddon learned the figure by participating and sub- sequently notated how it was made. String figures were her way of accessing Indigenous groups, of making contact: “And by con- tact, [she meant] not mere acquaintance and observation, but the more subtle contact of mind and sympathy.”29 A contact that she, as a woman playing the string, sometimes managed better than her father or other white men. Malinowski, who later did field work in the same regions, even noted in a caustic comment in his diary: “In the village Haddon and his daughter loafed about; he (with) boats, she—cat’s cradle.”30 Her method went hand in hand with a different involvement based on the reciprocal rela- tionship between learning and teaching. According to McKenzie, the location and role of the researcher changed: from the deck 28 McKenzie, “One continuous loop,” pp. 99–100. 29 Kathleen Haddon, Artists in String (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1930), p. 7. For more on Haddon, see McKenzie, “One continuous loop.” 30 Malinowski, Sexual Life of Savages, p. 36. 21 of the mission ship to the middle of the village, from questioner to participant with the inclusion of the researcher’s “embodied subjectivity.”31 This was accompanied not only by an experiential immersion in the area of research, which was to become typical of field research, but also to a certain extent by a relationality based on embodied knowledge—possibly a less violent form of contact. While W. W. Rouse Ball—ethnomathematician avant la lettre— had given the advice in 1920 that “no self-respecting anthropolo- gist ought to travel” without a piece of string in his pocket, string figures largely disappeared as an accepted subject of mainstream anthropology in the course of the 1950s to the 1970s.32 Paul Sillitoe in 1976 judged harshly: “The study of string figures is an oddity, if not something of a joke, to present day anthropologists.”33 Diffu- sionism and evolutionism were regarded as untenable theoretical positions, as naive paradigms of a discipline in its infancy, and had been superseded by functionalism and structuralism as central theoretical paradigms. As a result, string figures could only thrive at the margins of the discipline—in ethnomathematics, for example, and in some countries longer than in others, such as in German ethnology—or in self-created refuges: for example, in the world of children’s literature or in art, to which we will return. These refuges also include the International String Figures Association, ISFA, which was founded around 1979 on the initiative of the Japanese mathematician Hiroshi Noguchi and the Scottish missionary and mathematician Philip Noble. Noble contributed his expert knowl- edge to this volume and made interactive videos of selected figures for the exhibition, for which we are very grateful to him.34 The cur- rent director of the ISFA, Mark Sherman, has outlined the history of the ISFA over the last thirty years in a short text for this volume. Honor Maude herself was one of the first seven members of the 31 McKenzie, “One continuous loop,” p. 105. For a development of this argu- ment, see Robyn McKenzie, “‘Such intimate relations’: On the process of collecting string figures and the paradigm of participant observation fieldwork,” Anthropology and Art online pamphlet series 4 (2022). 32 Rouse Ball (1920) quoted in Paul Sillitoe, “Why String Figures?,” The Cam- bridge Journal of Anthropology 3, no. 1 (1976), pp. 13–26, here p. 20. 33 Ibid., p. 13. 34 Hiroshi Noguchi and Philip Noble, “The Cradle’s First Cats: A History of the International String Figure Association,” Bulletin of the International String Figure Association 3 (1996), pp. 1–7. 22 Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül An Introduction to String Figures between Art, Anthropology, and Theory ISFA and can be seen as a bridge between early diffusionist string figures research, attempts to systematize the nomenclature, and more recent approaches to the study of string figures. Contemporary String Figures Anthropology: Reconnecting Collections and Collaborative Research with Creator Societies String figures have returned to the center of anthropological attention in the last two decades. This has coincided with the rise of various theoretical strands within contemporary anthropology and beyond, such as sensory ethnography, critical museology or archive studies, new approaches to Indigenous knowledges, the performative turn across many humanities disciplines, and the relational approach to cultural artifacts. All these powerful reori- entations have allowed for new approaches to string figures and their representation in museums—which are again challenged by but also drawn to the ontological status of string figures between knowledge, performance, craft and object. A large part of these more recent engagements with string figures and their history can be encountered in this volume. The foremost example is the research of Robyn McKenzie and her collaborative work with the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre of the Yolngu community at Yirrkala (Northern Territory of Aus- tralia), among them Mulkun Wirrpanda and others whose soft ground etchings of maitka-uma (Yolngu term for string figures) are presented in the exhibition. The starting point for McKenzie’s research was the world’s largest collection of mounted figures from one place, now held by the Australian Museum in Sydney. By reconnecting the museum collection with the source commu- nity in a reciprocal dialogic way, she further developed the path of embodied encounter and re-engagement begun by Honor Maude, and by conducting in-depth provenance research, she created “new layers of significance for the collection.”35 Perhaps more 35 McKenzie, “One continuous loop,” pp. 10–11; Robyn McKenzie, “The String Figures of Yirrkala: Examination of a Legacy,” in Exploring the Legacy of the 1948 23 importantly, by collaborating, the Yolngu were able to generate discussions about the value of their knowledge and material cul- ture which then extended to exhibitions and into the art market. In her contribution to the catalog, McKenzie recounts the legacy of their collaboration (fig. 3). Mareile Flitsch adds the perspective of an anthropology of skilled practice, formulating a call to research string figures as skilled practice, skilled vision, and skilled hands, in order to find and acknowledge Indigenous knowledges. She calls for the sharing of string figures in collections in new ways, to create new agendas of Arnhem Land Expedition, ed. Martin Thomas and Margo Neale (Canberra: ANU Press, 2011), pp. 191–212. Fig. 3: Mulkun Wirrpanda, Minhala/Long-necked tortoise, 2013. 24 Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül An Introduction to String Figures between Art, Anthropology, and Theory collaborative research with creator societies. She also introduces the idea of “string figure literacy,” a concept that (at least implic- itly) follows the path laid out by Kathleen Haddon, suggesting a shared, embodied knowledge of string figures that can transcend cultural boundaries, while also highlighting the specificities of different societies. Rather than focusing on universality, Flitsch urges us to look for the “hesitant hand” moments when indi- viduals encounter unfamiliar string figures. These moments can reveal deeper layers of social meaning and skill, and can provide insights into the broader socio-material and cultural contexts of string figures. Paul Basu presents his exhibition project [Re:]Entanglements: Colonial Collections in Decolonial Times, which “explored the affordances of the colonial anthropological archive to interro- gate the coloniality of the archive itself” and asked “whether such archives also afford the possibility of ‘thinking decoloniality.’”36 The starting point for his reflections are not mounted figures, but fifteen photographs of Okp�kpa (Igbo term for string figures), taken by the British anthropologist Northcote Whitridge Thomas in his role as a so-called “government anthropologist” during a survey in Southern Nigeria in 1911. With support from the texts of Donna Haraway, Basu discusses the extent to which the string fig- ures could be a material metaphor to think entanglements with colonial history and its epistemic violence. Reengagement and reconnection are also key in this case. A central design motif of the exhibition was developed by the Nigerian artist and designer Alafuro Sikoki-Coleman enlarging and extending the patterns from Thomas’s photographs. Sarine Waltenspül’s point of departure is neither mounted figures nor photos, but the film of the string figure performance by Ailima (daughter of) Saipele, which the German ethnologist Gerd Koch made on Niutao, Ellice Islands (today Tuvalu), in 1963. In her text, Waltenspül delves into the ethical complexities sur- rounding the display and ownership of anthropological films. She advocates for a shift towards a feminist “ethics of care,” which 36 Paul Basu, “Exhibiting Colonial Entanglements: String Figures and Material Metaphors,” in this volume, p. 70. . 25 ideally implies an engagement with the communities represented in these films. By following the different actors involved in mak- ing or circulating the film, she raises questions about consent, anthropological representation, and the colonial gaze embedded in such archival material. Waltenspül critiques how anthropolog- ical films like the one with Ailima Saipele, stripped of context and Indigenous agency, continue to be controlled by institutions in the Global North. The article also examines the challenges of ethi- cal restitution and the responsibility of curators to contextualize these materials sensitively. In their co-authored text, Andrea Scholz and Diana Guzmán Mirigõ reconnect the mounted figures collected by the ethnolo- gist Theodor Koch-Grünberg in the Upper Rio Negro (north-west Amazonia), which are now in the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, with the stories that are related to these figures. Guzmán Mirigõ, who runs different Indigenous heritage projects in Colombia, tells the story of the being Bede-riyo, in whose memory string games were made for a long time, but are now no longer practiced. Scholz, who is the curator for transcultural relations at the Ethno- logical Museum of Berlin, points at the relationship between the museum and Indigenous communities, which now goes beyond the preservation of knowledge and the purely material presence of objects to an understanding of artifacts as the materialized result of practices. Eric Vandendriessche follows the long line of mathemati- cians interested in string figures for the operations that they entail. He discusses the further development (following Had- don, Ball, Noble and Noguchi) of modeling tools to better under- stand and compare string figures, showing how they function as both cultural expressions and complex mathematical activities. Through his ethnomathematical lens, Vandendriessche explains the underlying mathematical concepts like algorithms, trans- formations, and spatial configurations. More generally, he high- lights the potential of string figure research to offer new insights into the relationship between culture and mathematics. 26 Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül An Introduction to String Figures between Art, Anthropology, and Theory A Brief History of String Figures in the Avant-garde When interest in string figures slowly began to wane in anthro- pology in the 1940s and 1950s (which does not mean that some ethnologists and researchers from other disciplines did not con- tinue to work on string figures), they were given a new lease of life in the Western art world. Avant-garde artists engaged with string figures inspired by anthropological studies. The complex expe- riential qualities of string figures between performance, object, non-linguistic sign, song and narrative served the avant-gardes as an aesthetic resource, a resource for the production of one of their central values: novelty, the advancement that is inscribed in the term avant-garde. This appropriation of string figures for the gallery space or the cinema always fluctuated between references to foreign and “other” aesthetics and an engagement with the respective artist’s “own” string game tradition. In both cases, new levels of meaning were created for the string figures that revolved around their relationality. In 1942, Marcel Duchamp, who had again emigrated to the USA, wove miles of string through the exhibition space at 551 Madison Avenue in New York. The installation, which became known as Fig. 4: Installation shot of Marcel Duchamp’s Sixteen Miles of String or His Twine, 1942. 27 Sixteen Miles of String or His Twine, was part of the First Papers of Surrealism show organized by him and André Breton (fig. 4).37 These strings interrupted or obstructed the view of the artworks, playing with the usual reception situation of art. Although they did not represent a string figure in the strict sense (however, the installation was called a “cat’s cradle” in the press), it is very likely that Duchamp was inspired by string figures, an aspect that has not yet been analyzed in the extensive literature on the work. As can be seen in Maya Deren’s film The Witch’s Cradle from 1943, Duchamp himself was able to make string figures that are more complex than cat’s cradle. Furthermore, he had probably seen the string figures collected by Dina Dreyfus and Claude Lévi-Strauss in Paris. Dreyfus and Lévi-Strauss had bequeathed the objects they had “‘collected’, not to say looted (exchanged or bought for derisory sums),” on their expedition to the Matto Grosso, includ- ing a string figure of the Kadiwéu on wood and the films of its making, to the soon-to-be Musée de l’Homme.38 In 1937 they set up an exhibition based on this collection at the Gazette des Beaux-Arts gallery. Exactly one year later, the Exposition Interna- tionale du Surréalisme organized by Breton took place at the same location, also featuring scenographies by Duchamp. Breton and Duchamp, who had become friends with Lévi-Strauss during their emigration—all lived within a few blocks of each other in New York—were to expand on these curatorial works with First Papers of Surrealism in 1942. There is increasing literature on the role of native and Indige- nous art in Duchamp’s work. Duchamp is not one of the usual sus- pects of “primitivist” modernism, such as Pablo Picasso or Paul Gauguin. Nevertheless, as Susan Power and Thomas Folland have elaborated, his work, right down to his ready-mades, is imbued with numerous connections to the concept with which artists in the twentieth century sought to escape hegemonic Western cul- 37 Brian O’Doherty, “Inside the White Cube Part III: Context as Content,” Art- forum 15, no. 3 (1973); Elena Filipovic, The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2016). 38 See Paola Berenstein Jacques, Pensamentos selvagens: montagem de uma outra herança (Salvador: EDUFBA, 2021), p. 303. Translated from Portuguese to English with deepl. 28 Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül An Introduction to String Figures between Art, Anthropology, and Theory ture, while at the same time reproducing ideas of cultural superi- ority.39 For example, the texts of the First Papers of Surrealism show were saturated with references to so-called “primitive art,” among them references to the collections of Lévi-Strauss.40 The politics of these references were contradictory, “at once opposing and uncon- sciously perpetuating the colonialist discourse of their day”; they also had “far-reaching implications for destabilizing and expos- ing racial constructs.”41 While in one reading, Indigenous art was degraded to a mere inspiration for an art that asserts sovereignty over the civilizing process and declares Europe/North America to be the (itself not positioned) center of history and geography, in another reading Duchamp’s work also reveals the profound shock that contact with Indigenous cultural forms triggered in the aes- thetic sensibilities of the time. In this sense, the string figures are particularly interesting because, unlike masks or pictorial works, they do not merely allow the adoption of forms and materials, but have dissolved the boundaries between performance and object— and in this they coincide with Duchamp’s Sixteen Miles of String. From Duchamp and his Sixteen Miles of String, a cat’s cra- dle—this time in a figurative sense—subsequently unfolded that extends to the present day. In 1943, experimental film pioneer Maya Deren, who had fled from the Ukraine to the USA in 1922, shot scenes for her first solo, but unfinished, film The Witch’s Cradle.42 In the title of the film, the Cat’s has become the Witch’s Cradle, which is reminiscent of the term for string figures that is common in German-speaking countries: Hexenspiele (witches’ games). In some of the footage, string figures can be seen, made by Marcel Duchamp, sitting in front of the Café Brevoort in New York (fig. 5). 39 Thomas Folland, “Readymade Primitivism: Marcel Duchamp, Dada, and Afri- can Art,” Art History 43, no. 4 (2020), pp. 802–826. 40 Susan Power, “Bound Objects and Blurry Boundaries: Surrealist Display and (Anti)Nationalism,” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 2, no. 1 (2008), pp. 95–113, here p. 100–101. 41 Ibid., p. 103. Power refers to Amanda Stansell, “Surrealist Racial Politics at the Borders of ‘Reason’: Whiteness, Primitivism and Négritude,” in Surrealism, Politics and Culture, ed. Raymond Spiteri and Donald LaCoss (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 111–126. 42 Sarah Keller, Maya Deren: Incomplete Control (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), pp. 56–79. 29 In other sequences, the film’s lead actress Anne Matta Clark— mother of Gordon, who was born in the same year—wanders through Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery, pass- ing by works that are now part of the canon of so-called modern- ism, including a version of Marcel Duchamp’s portable museum Boîte en valise. Another actor in the film is the “Alive String,”43 a (“bewitched”) thread that seems to glide by itself over naked and dressed body parts and finally strangles Marcel Duchamp, who is doing string figures (fig. 6.1–6.3). Deren’s investigation of “magic, symbols, and modern art within the context of a formal cinematic language”44 culminates in the film’s reckoning with the male-dominated art world, embodied by Duchamp himself. The camera techniques that bring the thread to life execute the reckoning. Pronounced interests in anthropology and several ref- erences to anthropology can also be identified in Deren’s work. In the years before making the film, she had worked as a secre- tary for Katherine Dunham, dancer, anthropologist and activist of the New Negro Movement. Subsequently Deren became involved 43 This notion comes from Deren’s brief notes on the film, see ibid., p. 59. 44 Ibid. Fig. 5: Marcel Duchamp doing string figures in Maya Deren’s Witch’s Cradle, 1943. 30 Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül An Introduction to String Figures between Art, Anthropology, and Theory with Haitian voodoo.45 Ute Holl deals with Maya Deren’s film in a more detailed way in this volume and reflects on the inner con- nections of the two media, film and string figures. In the work of Harry Everett Smith, a frequently homeless polymath (meaning bohemian, experimental filmmaker, painter, occultist, lay anthropologist, folklorist, etc.) who considered him- self a foremost authority on string figures, the strands of experi- mental film, conceptual art, surrealism and primitivism come together (fig. 7). Smith also belonged to the close-knit avant-garde scene in New York, between Greenwich and the East Village, which has repeatedly been described as a web and sometimes even as a string figure.46 The story goes like this: In 1951, Smith supposedly only moved to New York to meet Marcel Duchamp. In New York, Smith also made the acquaintance of Peggy Guggenheim, whom he asked for money and support. Finally, in 1964, Andy Warhol included a string game-playing Harry Smith in his series of 16mm Screen Tests, which brought together famous and unknown per- sons from the New York scene. Andres Pardey dedicates a text in this volume to this encounter and the resulting three minutes of film. 45 Elliot Evans has pointed out the diversity of primitivisms in the avant-garde and in particular distinguished Deren’s from the primitivisms of Gauguin and oth- ers. Elliot Evans, “THE ‘WHITE DARKNESS’: Considering Modernist Investments in the ‘Primitive’ through Maya Deren’s Work in Haiti (1947–53),” Angelaki 27, no. 3–4 (2022), pp. 143–162. 46 Kevin Dann, Enchanted New York: A Journey along Broadway through Manhat- tan’s Magical Past (New York: NYU Press, 2022), p. 257. On Smith’s biography, see John Szwed, Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023). Fig. 6.1–6.3: In Maya Deren’s Witch’s Cradle, the living thread winds around the neck and throat of Marcel Duch- amp, who holds a barely recognizable string figure in his hands. 31 Smith’s involvement with string figures goes back to his youth. Growing up in the immediate vicinity of the reservations of Coast Salish-speaking Indigenous people in the Pacific Northwest, he developed a fascination for anthropology at the age of fifteen and used a phonograph and camera to document the lives of the Lummi, Swinomish and Coast Salish. In this volume, Rani Singh, director of the Harry Smith Archive, outlines Smith’s mul- tifaceted engagements with string figures: his delicate mounted figures that speak of symmetry and abstraction; his films, that combine string figures with animation, Kurt Weill’s operas and New York City life through multiscreen imagery; and his constant drive to collect new figures wherever he could. Singh describes Smith’s “lifelong search for and pursuit of the universal, ancient and infinite,” in which string figures “related to his other cross- cultural comparisons, whether they be folk songs, Seminole patchwork fabrics, Ukrainian Easter eggs, tarot cards or any of his other interests.”47 While Smith seems to follow a classic primitiv- 47 Rani Singh, “From Buffalo Skin to Intertwined Snakes: The String Figures of Harry Smith,” in this volume, p. 192, p. 207. Fig. 7: Harry Smith with string figure, photographed by John Palmer. 32 Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül An Introduction to String Figures between Art, Anthropology, and Theory ist pattern here, to use non-Western art in a quest for the timeless and universal, his engagement with string figures was also driven by a genuine interest in and knowledge of these cultures and art forms, rather than just a means to reinvigorate his art or Western art in general. It is precisely this latent or explicit fascination of the avant- garde for what Duchamp, Smith and others called the “primitive” that the artist Maureen Lander challenges with her site-specific multimedia installation String Games from 1998 (fig. 8). The work was commissioned for the opening of the Te Papa Tongarewa Fig. 8: Installation shot of Maureen Lander's String Games, 1998, photo- graphed by Haru Sameshima. 33 Museum of New Zealand/Aotearoa, a merging of the National Museum of New Zealand and the National Art Gallery. Lander— of Ng�puhi, Te Hikut� and P�keh� descent—brings together vari- ous elements in her work, including sixty-four neon-colored whai (M�ori string games) on the wall that glow under black light and a giant whare kēhua (or house of spirits) pattern that encompasses a fluorescent green replica of Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte en valise, that museum in the form of a briefcase with miniaturized pho- tographic reproductions of his own works. Lander also produced two videos, one of which combines anthropological footage from the Te Papa collection with contemporary whai, while the other shows how Duchamp’s Boîte (also from the Te Papa collection) is first unpacked and then repacked with whai and a mussel shell. Lander’s work encapsulates a decolonization of the museum col- lection that is exemplary of the path that museums around the world must take with their collections; while the continuation of the cat’s cradle in the figurative sense with Duchamp and his work is representative of the new narratives that are needed in the his- toriography of twentieth-century art, narratives that provincialize the European avant-garde. By producing herself an artwork for the gallery context, Lander resignified the notion of modern art and reappropriated Duchamp’s appropriation of non-Western aes- thetics.48 For more on Lander’s String Games, see Moya Lawson’s text in this volume. Sophisticated artistic explorations of string figures took place in the twentieth century not only in the USA and Aotearoa, but above all in Canada—which is surely related to the string figures cultures of the different Inuit groups. Henry Adam Svec dedicates his article to this Canadian lineage and begins with Ishu Patel’s Oscar-winning animation film Bead Game (1977) that tells the story of the universe from the first atom to the atom bomb. In its final sequence we see a cat’s cradle with an atom in the middle. Svec then focuses on the Montreal-based artists Jean-Paul Riopelle and Vera Frenkel, whom we were unable to include in the exhibition 48 Te Papa has become instrumental in the development of Indigenous museum practices, pioneering a specific Maori museology and Maori co-leadership. Conal McCarthy, Museums and Maori: Heritage Professionals, Indigenous Collections, Cur- rent Practice (New York: Routledge, 2011). 34 Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül An Introduction to String Figures between Art, Anthropology, and Theory due to a lack of space and funding. Both of their aesthetic engage- ments with string figures were exhibited internationally in the 1970s. Riopelle followed a mystical and universalist approach and painted string figures in thick acrylic brushstrokes on paper made of discarded lithographs. He took some of the patterns directly from the survey of the string figures of the Arviligjuarmiut Inuit (Central Canadian Arctic) by the anthropologist and missionary priest Guy Mary-Rousselière.49 Frenkel, in turn, reimagined string figures within the context of contemporary telecommunication technology by engaging two groups in a long-distance remote cat’s cradle. With her complex installation String Games: Improvisations for Inter-City Video from 1974 she pioneered telematic art. Based on the media-theoretical concept of remediation, which reflects on the processes by which old media are translated into other/new media, Svec suggests that these works prompt a reconsideration of media evolution, questioning whether older forms might offer solutions to contemporary technological challenges. Contemporary String Figures Art, Film and Theory: Exhibiting String Figures The museum usually stands for stasis, it is filled with objects that have been decontextualized, appropriated, systematized, and prepared for exhibition. Performativity, ephemerality and rela- tionality had for a long time no place in the ontology and prax- eology of the museum. In a sense, those string figure patterns that are mounted on cardboard or wood typify how the museum usually operates: They come from lived practices such as playing, storytelling, competing, or ritualizing, and they originate from contact and interaction. But when they enter the museum they are successively immobilized and musealized as frozen objects representing a group of people or for a culture. However, instead of shelving the plan to organize a museum exhibition on string figures because of these contradictions, we asked ourselves how 49 Guy Mary-Rousselière, Les Jeux de ficelle des Arviligjuarmiut (Ottawa: Musées nationaux du Canada, 1969). 35 a string figure exhibition might address these tensions between stasis and circulation, representation and practice, culture and art. Inspired by the manifold curatorial strategies that have ques- tioned and transcended the borders of art and anthropology in the last forty years, we would like to highlight three different cura- torial decisions:50 First, we seek to challenge or bypass the “persistent and modernist paradigms of art and artefact.”51 We do this not by leveling out the differences between objects from anthropologi- cal collections and works from art collections, but through vari- ous strategies that aim to complicate or collapse the distinction. This includes exhibiting works that are the result of processes involving Indigenous communities and anthropologists as well as art galleries, such as the works of the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre described above. By bringing these works together in the same space with the avant-garde works of Harry Smith, which have only an indirect connection to the creator societies, as well as the mounted string figure patterns that are usually overlooked in the depots of ethnological museums, the categorizations and the usual value hierarchies of these objects are not only chal- lenged, but their different histories can be addressed. Following 50 For a comprehensive overview of these positions, and interviews with their most prominent curators such as Clémentine Deliss, Wayne Modest and Bonaven- ture Ndikung, see Margareta von Oswald and Jonas Tinius, eds., Across Anthropol- ogy: Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial (Leuven: Leuven Uni- versity Press, 2020). See also Philipp Schorch, Conal McCarthy and Eveline Dürr, “Introduction,” in Curatopia: Museums and the Future of Curatorship, ed. Philipp Schorch and Conal McCarthy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019). Furthermore, the idea of the “para-museum” developed by the Vienna network for exhibition theory schnittpunkt guided us; see Martina Griesser-Stermscheg, Chris- tine Haupt-Stummer, Renate Höllwart, Beatrice Jaschke, Monika Sommer, Nora Sternfeld and Luisa Ziaja, “Das Museum der Zukunft,” in Das Museum der Zukunft: 43 neue Beiträge zur Diskussion über die Zukunft des Museums, ed. schnittpunkt and Joachim Baur (Bielefeld: transcript, 2020), pp. 17–31, here p. 29. These decisions probably stem also from our position as researchers funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, working as independent curators with no or very limited access to the institutional policies and agenda of the museum where the exhibi- tion is held. This museum is a cultural engagement of the pharmaceutical company Roche and is dedicated to the avant-garde artist Jean Tinguely. 51 Ruth Phillips, “Exhibiting Africa after Modernism: Globalization, Pluralism, and the Persistent Paradigms of Art and Artifact,” in Museums After Modernism, ed. Griselda Pollock and Joyce Zemans (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 80–103, here p. 98. Quoted from Oswald and Tinius, Across Anthropology, p. 19. 36 Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül An Introduction to String Figures between Art, Anthropology, and Theory a similar logic but from the side of the art object, the exhibition presents various artistic approaches that question the status of the art object in a gallery space. Some of these have already been mentioned: Duchamp’s strings that creep into the art connois- seur’s field of vision, Deren’s film techniques that bewitch the Art of This Century gallery, and Maureen Lander’s repackaging of the suitcase museum with a string figure collection that inverts ideas of the modernist canon. Second, we attempt to circumvent the dichotomy of practices and representations. We are not interested in replacing cultural representations that stand for cultural entities with staged and performed culture, but in both their histories and their specifici- ties. For this reason, the exhibition strategically juxtaposes various media that represent, document or further explore string figures: mounted figures next to TikTok videos, multiscreen imagery next to photos, string figure survey books next to soft ground etchings, installation views next to 16mm films. With this media diversity, we hope to contribute to a reflection on the status of the object in a museum exhibition, the “nature” of string figures and the pos- sibilities and limitations of particular media. Third, the exhibition seeks to open up a cross-cultural space that is not based on universalism but on the reconnection of dif- ferent localities. It is about patterns like Administration Staffs or whare kēhua as witnesses of colonization and/or as aesthetic pro- posals for decolonizing our knowledge. It is about ways of cen- tering Indigenous forms of knowledge in order to (re)appropri- ate them from Western modernity. But it is also about patterns prominent in Basel like Häxebäse (witch’s broom) and Glettibrätt (ironing board). It is about presenting very differently localized stories of reconnecting museum collections to their creators. Whenever possible, we took the exhibition as a starting point to initiate cat’s cradles in the metaphorical sense of handovers, of playing together, in order to weave a convivial world. In the follow- ing we will briefly portray some of these cat’s cradles. 37 String Figures as a Metaphor and Method of Thinking and Working Together Donna Haraway’s proposal of cat’s cradle and later of string fig- ures or SF as a method of transdisciplinary and trans-species thinking is both the subject of the exhibition and one of its cen- tral inspirations. Donna Haraway is a zoologist by training, but her home ground has always been the history of science and gender studies. She pioneered the transdisciplinary thinking of —in her 1994 words—multicultural, anti-racist cultural studies, and has become a ubiquitous reference in the global exhibition system of contemporary art at least since her participation in dOCUMENTA (13) in Germany in 2012.52 Haraway conceptualizes the practice of cat’s cradle as an intra-action of thinking, mak- ing, worlding and patterning between many different players/ critters. Haraway’s SF concept has a history that goes back long before her contribution to dOCUMENTA. In his article for this volume, Mario Schulze focuses on the history of SF in Haraway’s writings. He traces Haraway’s use of textile metaphors since the 1980s, examines the acronym SF and shows how Haraway initially positioned cat’s cradle as a counter-concept to the network and actor-network-theory. It was only later that Haraway’s interest in na’atl’o’ (as string figures are called in the Navaho language) and her increased engagement with Indigenous knowledges led her away from cat’s cradles and towards string figures. Haraway’s cat’s cradle method also gained prominence through the visual forms it was given. On Nasser Mufti’s poster design Playing Cat’s Cradle with Companion Species from 2011, which he created for a lecture by Haraway (fig. 9), threads are stretched between claws, paws, flippers and fingers. The design congenially illustrates Haraway’s claim to always consider the co- agency of the various species that co-constitute our world. In his short contribution for this volume, Mufti tells the surprising story of his poster between a personal account of what happened and an historical materialist analysis of his work—without making any 52 Donna Haraway, SF: Speculative Fabulation and String Figures (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011). 38 Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül An Introduction to String Figures between Art, Anthropology, and Theory reference to other species. Nasser Mufti’s design was an inspira- tion for many artists and designers. In Isabel McLeish’s Aquacul- ture Cradle from 2021–2022, for example, the claws and paws are exchanged for corals and shells—both natural shells and Shell’s corporate logo. With Aquaculture Cradle McLeish points to the impact of the current intensive fishing industry, to climate change and to demands for “regenerative and respectful methods of food production and connection to place and ecology.”53 String figures were and are in widespread use not only as a model for multispecies agency, but also as a method for feminist, trans- disciplinary collaboration. In her article Ines Kleesattel takes up Haraway’s threads, and relates them to a selection of transdis- ciplinary and process-oriented artistic practices that she calls Hexenspiele (Witches’ Games). She describes how artists like Maya Deren, Lygia Clark, Doris Stauffer, and Chantal Küng devel- oped practices that embody relational aesthetics and challenge 53 Isabel McLeish, Aquaculture Cradle, 2021–2022, https://www.isabelmcleish.com/ art/aquaculture-cradle (accessed September 9, 2024). Fig. 9: Nasser Mufti, Playing Cat’s Cradle with Companion Species, 2011. https://www.isabelmcleish.com/art/aquaculture-cradle https://www.isabelmcleish.com/art/aquaculture-cradle 39 traditional disciplinary boundaries. By emphasizing the critical and speculative potentials of queer-feminist witchery, she pro- motes relational and affective aesthetics that allow for the ongo- ing creation and re-creation of meaning through collaborative, non-linear processes. We also invited artists to play a part in the exhibition’s cat’s cradle. Toby Christian’s Stringer—an artificial intelligence that generates images in dialogue with the speech and text it hears— contributed to the exhibition. Stringer, which produces a kind of string images, made a new piece fed with the input of names of string figures that are or were common in Basel, the location of the exhibition. For more on Christian’s Stringer, see Lynton Talbot’s contribution in this volume. Seraina Dür and Jonas Gill- mann explore their concept of “modes of relationships” in art education and creative producing, arguing that art should center on the ways it relates to its context and participants. They advo- cate for recognizing the relational processes that underpin artis- tic endeavors and suggest that these relational practices gener- ate unique, context-specific experiences that might even lead to societal transformation. Together with the graphic designer and comic artist Jan Bachmann, they transferred their ideas into a visual web of relationships that took Mufti’s Multispecies Cat’s Cradle as inspiration. Film, Photography and String Figures: Reconnecting, Appropriating, Performing Film has a special place within string figure art. Film and string figures formed a connection early on: from the oldest known film footage of a string game from 1903, in which a couple use the string as a make-out aid in the typical vaudeville style of early film, to the countless anthropological films, to tutorials and performances on Tiktok. The combination of film or video and string figures is not only a successful one, but also an entertain- ing and often aesthetically convincing one. Kathleen Haddon went so far as to describe string figures as a cinematographic form in general. 40 Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül An Introduction to String Figures between Art, Anthropology, and Theory In her film Mobilize from 2015, the multidisciplinary artist Caroline Monnet remixes films from the archives of the National Film Board of Canada. Part of Mobilize is the string figure foot- age from the anthropological classic Cree Hunters of Mistassini (1974, Boyce Richardson and Tony Ianzelo). Monnet transforms the serene ethnological recordings into a powerful and fast-paced visual pull, underscoring them with Inuk throat singing by Tanya Tagaq. By this visual and acoustical appropriation she transforms the string figures into a “prismatic celebration of Indigeneity.”54 In this volume, film curator Adam Piron engages with Mobilize. String figures are prominent on social media. David Ket’acik Nicolai alias Yup’ik Dave learned airraq from his father and grand- mother. For several years he performed them for audiences at the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he began sharing his string figures online on TikTok and YouTube. With his videos Nicolai hopes to put a smile on peo- ple’s faces and encourage them to learn more about string figures; he writes in his brief account of his one video that went viral. A rich source for films of string figures is the historical col- lection of scientific and anthropological films Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (EC).55 Many artists have explored this fasci- nating and intimidating collection.56 The exhibition presents positions that deal specifically with the string figure films. Bel- gian artist Katrien Vermeire’s 16mm black-and-white film Touw figuren (Dutch for string figures) shows two unnamed children standing on a rooftop in the middle of Brussels, playing string fig- ures. Vermeire was inspired by Hans-Rudolf Haefelfinger’s EC film Mitteleuropa, Basel-Land – Fadenspiele, made almost fifty years ear- lier, which shows the two young sisters Ruth and Gertrud Beriger playing string figures on the roof of the Natural History Museum 54 Adam Piron, “Powered by Indigenous Life and Grit: On Caroline Monnet’s Mobilize,” in this volume, p. 310. 55 See Moritz Greiner-Petter, “Reconfigurating the Encyclopaedia Cinematograph- ica: On the E-EC Interfaces,” and Sarine Waltenspül, “Who Owns the Films? Who Shows the Films? A Film of String Figures in a Web of Relationships,” in this volume. 56 See for example the installation Encyclopaedia Cinematographica from 2001 by Christoph Keller, the play Blackbox IWF from 2019 by Ute Sengebusch and Michael Westrich, and Creatively Utilising the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica Film Project: Visual Repatriation of the Masakin from 2020 by Isao Murahashi. 41 in Basel. In her film, Vermeire adapts the folkloristic and ethno- logical gaze that characterizes the EC films to her own surround- ings: (not so) distant Basel becomes Brussels, the museum roof becomes the roof terrace of the house she lives in, the children from the 1960s become the neighbor’s children from her pres- ent. For this volume, the foremost authority on European string figures, Stephan Claassen, has analyzed Vermeire’s film from the perspective of the string figure repertoires shown in the two films. Self-designated “halfie anthropologist” Maria Julia Fernandes Vicentin and artist Edgar Calel also turn the EC’s historical- ethnological gaze to the present. In their photographic essay Ru setelen chaj (a large circle of ashes in Mayan Kaqchikel lan- guage) from 2022 they playfully reappropriate the EC film by the Brazilian ethnologists Vilma Chiara and Harald Schultz, which shows Krahô people doing string figures in the outskirts of São Paulo (fig. 10.1 and 10.2). With their work, they invite us to imag- ine with them “ways to ‘critically fabulate’ anthropological knowl- edge production through these images.”57 As Vicentin points out, in her text for the volume on Chiara and Schultz, string figures might “challenge not only [...] divisions between art and science, subjectivity and objectivity, but also the affections, and therefore, the effects that they engender in aesthetics and politics.”58 We—Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül—have also ventured into a cinematic appropriation as part of our research on scien tific films and the EC. The essay film Unlearning Flow (2019), which we made together with the artist Christoph Oeschger, traces the history of the EC and of the Institute for Scientific Film Göttingen that hosted the EC collection. In the course of its mak- ing, about six years ago, we came across the string figure films in the EC, which eventually led us to engage more closely with the subject. We probably never dreamed that this nerdy interest would lead to an exhibition, to this volume, and to the research project that provides the framework for our work. For the exhibi- 57 Maria Julia Fernandes Vicentin, “Entangling Forms of Knowledge Production: On Vilma Chiara, Harald Schultz, and the String Figures of the Krahô People,” in this volume, p. 339. 58 Ibid. 42 Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül An Introduction to String Figures between Art, Anthropology, and Theory tion, design researcher Moritz Greiner-Petter developed two inter- faces entitled E-EC—“E” for electronic, expanded or entangled EC, indicating the reconfiguration of the collection under digital conditions, or “E” for encountering, examining or enquiring to highlight the research character of the interfaces. The interfaces are tools for critical encounters with the EC collection in all its fas- cinating and monstrous ambivalence. Accompanying the E-EC are Fig. 10.1 and 10.2: Two photos from the series Ru setelen chaj by Maria Julia Fernandes Vicentin and Edgar Calel, 2024. 43 two vitrines, in which we—Mario and Sarine—present the stories of three of the films from the EC in more detail—two from Kiribati and one from Switzerland. We collaborated with the string figure players from the film and with the heritage institutions from the creator’s societies, to add their contemporary perspectives to the historical material. It was also, but not only, in this context that we could expe- rience the quality of string figures that is so often invoked in literature: In contact with players, researchers and heritage institutions, we encountered a great passion for string figures, gratitude for the attention given to this rather marginal topic and a lot of willingness to collaborate. It was probably no less exciting for Ruth Altenbach and Dunia (formerly Gertrud) Lingner—the two sisters from the Swiss string figure film, which was shot on the roof of the Natural History Museum in Basel (fig. 11.1)—to do an interview about string figures and their experience than it was for us (fig. 11.2 and 11.3). The Basel connection was important to us, not only because the exhibition takes place in Basel, but also because it allows Sarine to connect with the city of her birth and both of us with the cat’s cradles we grew up playing with our siblings or friends on boring car rides or at family gatherings. Fig. 11.1: Screenshot from Hans-Rudolf Haefelfinger’s Mitteleuropa, Basel- Land—Fadenspiele (IWF 1975). Ruth and Gertrud Beriger playing Cat’s Cradle in 1969. 44 Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül An Introduction to String Figures between Art, Anthropology, and Theory We were also confronted with unpredictable outcomes: String figures have always been the starting point, but not always the end point of our research and our collaborations. Based on the films of string figures that were made on the islands of Onotoa and Tabiteuea (formerly part of the Gilbert Islands, now Kiribati), by the German ethnologist Gerd Koch, we got in touch with Meere Kenana and Kirikara Koraua, the curators of the Te Umanibong, which is the Culture and Museum Department of Kiribati and the only heritage institution of the state that is neighbor to Nauru. In our video call, in which we talked about a possible contribution to the exhibition on their part, they asked us about the “old songs.” Gerd Koch had not only collected objects and made films of string Fig. 11.2 and 11.3: Interview with Ruth Altenbach and Dunia (formerly Gertrud) Lingner in 2024, filmed by Piet Esch, Point de Vue. 45 figures, but also recorded songs. It was the songs they were inter- ested in and wanted to have their copies of. Dorothea Deterts, curator of the Oceania Collection of the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, responded immediately to our request and sent the rel- evant files digitally. For the time being, this restitution of digital files of the old songs is as far as we have got, but we like to think of it as the beginning of a cat’s cradle. Acknowledgements The research for this exhibition was funded by the SNSF (Swiss National Science Foundation) and originated in the project Visu- alpedia. “Atlas Encyclopaedia Cinematographica” and the Visual Science and Technology Studies (201759, 09.2022–08.2026, Sarine Waltenspül). We would like to thank the Freiwillige Akademische Gesellschaft Basel, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Research Commission of the University of Lucerne, and the SNSF for supporting the production of this book. We would also like to thank the UZH Faculty of Humanities and the Ethno- graphic Museum UZH for co-funding the workshop, the Depart- ment of Media Studies of the University of Basel and the Flem- ish Arts and Heritage fund. In addition, we would like to thank Estelle Blaschke, Kris Decker, Mareile Flitsch, Verena Halsmayer, Christoph Hoffmann, Eric Hounshell, Florian Huber, Hyo Yoon Kang, Robyn McKenzie, and Christian Vogel for their valuable feedback on this text, as well as the Museum Tinguely and espe- cially Roland Wetzel and Andres Pardey for their great support with the exhibition. Lastly, we would like to thank all the authors, artists and institutions who have contributed to this book and exhibition, to Catherine Lupton for her precise editorial work on the texts, and to Diaphanes and Michael Heitz who skillfully real- ized this book. I. Essays Anthropology 49 Robyn McKenzie Recollections of the String Figures of Yirrkala In the Australian Museum in Sydney are 193 mounted string fig- ures, collected in 1948 in Yirrkala in North-East Arnhem Land by Museum anthropologist Frederick McCarthy (fig. 1). One of the largest museum collections of its kind,1 it was made when McCar- thy was seconded to work on the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, an eight month long multi-disciplin- ary research venture, jointly sponsored by the National Geographic Society, the Smithsonian Institute and the Commonwealth Gov- ernment of Australia.2 In addition to the mounted figures, in the Museum archives are McCarthy’s notebooks recording the instructions for making the figures and a series of photographs of his principal collaborator Ngarrawu Mununggurr, displaying the final designs (fig. 2).3 As objects—both strange and beautiful— the mounted string figures declare their status as hybrid artefacts of cross-cultural encounter and exchange. 1 Martin Probert, “Museums and Other Institutions with String Figure Arte- facts—an inventory of string figures mounted on card, string figures on film, string figure photographs, and recordings of string figure songs,” https://math-sf. guineaflower.org/archives.html (accessed June 9, 2024). This inventory was com- piled 1999–2003. There are collections missing from Probert’s list. In Europe, for example, the mounted figures in the Ethnological Museum Berlin, Germany and the Museum of World Culture, Gothenburg, Sweden. 2 See Martin Thomas, “A short history of the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition,” Aboriginal History 34 (2010), pp. 143–170. 3 The instructions were recorded in two dedicated notebooks. One of these is held by the Australian Museum: F. D. McCarthy, 1948, Arnhem Land Expedition Diary No. 6, String-figure techniques, Yirrkalla and Oenpelli, AMS515, Australian Museum Archives, Sydney. The original of the other is held at AIATSIS with the larger part of McCarthy’s personal papers: F. D. McCarthy, 1948, Arnhem Land Expedition Diary No. 7, String-figure techniques Yirrkala, Papers of Frederick D. McCarthy, MS3513/14/6, AIATSIS. https://math-sf.guineaflower.org/archives.html https://math-sf.guineaflower.org/archives.html 50 Robyn McKenzie Recollections of the String Figures of Yirrkala String figures are patterns made with a loop of string (in McCarthy’s words) “by the co-ordinated movements of the fingers of both hands, assisted by the teeth, neck, elbows, knees and toes when necessary.”4 Completed designs are usually displayed on the hands, sometimes using other body parts as supports. Com- monly executed by a single person, some require two or more par- ticipants. String figures are understood in mathematical typology as “unknots.” They always undo, come apart, unravel, to return to where you began—ready to begin again—with the simple loop of string. They are process and performance. Their ontological iden- tity is in the transformation of the string through manipulation and movement. Even once the final figure is reached string figures are rarely still. At the very least the hands need to move (even slightly) to keep the figure tensioned; and they are often animated by the maker with actions appropriate to the subject being represented. The mounted figures collected at Yirrkala are all made from industrially manufactured string, which—like the card on which they are mounted—McCarthy took with him for the purpose. Once the figure was made, slipped off the maker’s hands and affixed to card, the support was annotated with the name of the maker, the name of the subject in English, and its Yolngu matha name (Yolngu language name). Relevant finger positions were marked in, and sometimes the general position of the hands was sketched. In many of the mounted figures, especially those relat- 4 Frederick D. McCarthy, “String figures of Australia,” The Australian Museum Magazine 12, no. 9 (1958), pp. 279–283, here p. 279. Fig. 1: Devil Devil/Morkoi made by Ngarrawu Mununggurr, Yirrkala, 1948. 51 ing to animals, parts of the design are identified as representing specific features, such as head, tail, belly, and so on. Each figure was numbered in the field and is now annotated with the Muse- um’s accession number. At the same time the loopings, crossings and twists of the string inscribe movement, inferring the process of their physical making. The scale of the figures and their com- mon bilateral symmetry imply the presence of the body that made them. The collection is in this way melancholic, perhaps mourn- ful. The variety of designs catalogued refer to a body of Indige- nous knowledge, here mute and stilled. Between 2008 and 2012 I visited Yirrkala on a regular if intermit- tent basis, as part of my doctoral research exploring the story of this collection, why and how it was made, and, on the other side of the equation, wanting to find out more about the practice of string figure making and its role and meaning in Yolngu culture. The Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre at Yirrkala was my first point of contact with the community, and continued to play an important role in the research project. The town of Yirrkala is situated on the mainland coast of the Gove Peninsula: looking at a map of Austra- lia, tracking to the right of Darwin, it is the most easterly outcrop of land facing Cape York on the other side of the Gulf of Carpen- taria. It is one of four main population centers in North-East Arn- Fig. 2: Ngarrawu Mununggurr making Devil Devil/Morkoi, Fred McCarthy Field Trip Photographs, September 1948. 52 Robyn McKenzie Recollections of the String Figures of Yirrkala hem Land, the homeland of Yolngu speaking clans. Yirrkala was established as a Methodist mission in 1934. Now, as a “protected” Aboriginal community, outsiders require permission to visit (a permit). Yirrkala, at the time I was working there, had a seasonally variable population of between 600 and 1000 people. A Comparative Study As anthropology was emerging as a discipline in the later nine- teenth century, one of its founding fathers, E.B. Tylor, in a lecture of 1879, suggested that the comparative study of string figure designs—as they were complex enough to preclude “independent invention”— could be a valuable tool for tracking cultural trans- mission.5 Anthropological interest in string figures grew with the dominance of diffusionist theory and reached a peak in the 1920s and 1930s. Through the comparative analysis of culture traits or complexes diffusionists attempted to map the development and spread of culture (origins, influences, migration, change) through time and across geographic area. If the same string figure design was found to occur in different places, the presumption was that there had to have been contact between the populations in these places. As more repertoires were documented it became appar- ent, however, that the same design could be made in different ways. For making comparative analyses therefore, a record of the method of making figures came to be deemed essential. Alfred C. Haddon collected eight mounted specimens from Torres Strait Islanders (between mainland Australia and what is now Papua New Guinea) in 1888. On his return home he deposited them with the British Museum.6 That same year Franz Boas pub- 5 Edward B. Tylor, “Remarks on the Geographical Distribution of Games” (Paper Delivered at the Royal Institution, March 14, 1879), Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 9 (1880), pp. 23–30, here p. 26. 6 See Martin Probert, “The Torres Strait String Figures in the British Museum A. C. Haddon Collection,” Journal of Museum Ethnography 16 (2004), pp. 140–156; Dinah Eastop, “Playing with Haddon’s String Figures,” Textile 5, no. 2 (2007), pp.  190–205; Robyn McKenzie, “Strange and complicated feats with string,” in Ancestors, artefacts, empire: Indigenous Australia in British and Irish museums, ed. Gaye Sculthorpe, Maria Nugent and Howard Morphy (London: The British Museum, 2021), pp. 216–223. 53 lished instructions for making two designs he had collected from Inuit in Cumberland Sound, Baffinland, in the Arctic north of the American continent, in 1883–1884.7 When Haddon returned to the Torres Strait in 1898 (on the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait), he and his colleague W.H.R. Riv- ers devised a standard form of language for recording string fig- ure techniques. They designated terms to specify fingers, differ- ent loops on the same finger (upper and lower, near or far strings), different starting positions or openings and final forms of exten- sion, and common manipulations or movements—making it possible to “describe any operation in comparatively few words.” Rivers and Haddon published “A Method of Recording String Fig- ures and Tricks” in the Royal Anthropological Institute’s journal Man in 1902 (accompanied by instructions for twelve designs col- lected on the Expedition).8 A simplified version of their descrip- tive system and terminology remains in use today. To record the method of making a design it was necessary for researchers to learn how to make the designs themselves. Writing the instructions for making—clearly and precisely, without leav- ing anything open to being misconstrued—is no easy task. Being able to make the figure allowed the collector to test and refine their observations of method recorded in the field. The publication of Rivers and Haddon’s article encouraged the study and collection of repertoire. Graduates from the first university courses in anthro- pology, established in the early years of the twentieth century, com- monly collected string figures when undertaking fieldwork place- ments: “knowledge of a few types and the ability to record others” became a standard part of the anthropologists’ tool kit.9 7 Franz Boas, “The Game of Cat’s Cradle,” Internationales Archiv für Ethnogra- phie I (1888), pp. 229–230. 8 W. H. R. Rivers and A. C. Haddon, “A Method of Recording String Figures and Tricks,” Man 2 (1902), pp. 146–153, here pp. 146–147. 9 A. Hingston, “‘String Figures: A Study of Cat’s-Cradle in Many Lands.’ By Caro- line Furness Jayne. With an Ethnological Introduction by A.C. Haddon. New York: Scribners, 1906,” (Review) Man 6 (1906), pp. 155–156, here p. 156. See Robyn McK- enzie, “‘Such intimate relations’: on the process of collecting string figures and the paradigm of participant observation fieldwork,” Royal Anthropological Institute, Art and Anthropology online pamphlet series, March 2022, https://therai.org.uk/ publications/anthropology-art/anthropology-art-volume-4/ https://therai.org.uk/publications/anthropology-art/anthropology-art-volume-4/ https://therai.org.uk/publications/anthropology-art/anthropology-art-volume-4/ 54 Robyn McKenzie Recollections of the String Figures of Yirrkala Thought to have been common to most cultures at some point in their history, the prevalence of string figures makes them a near universal trait. This universality feeds the impulse to find in them shared ground. This was certainly the focus of diffusionist studies, on a technical level at least. There are parallels between cultures in the relationship of string figures to storytelling, as a form of mathematics, a pedagogical tool, a memory practice, and in their use in socio-magical regulation. These parallels are less compelling, however, than the way in which each group instanti- ates these relationships: developing them differently in line with their overall cultural style. From early in the study of string figures collectors began to identify characteristic regional and local traits. Differences in style, not just of finished designs, but of characteristic openings, movements and extensions of figures were noted, some identi- fied through the specific names given to them by local commu- nities themselves. In the early 1930s, ethnomusicologist Erich von Hornbostel elaborated the relationship between string figure method and styles of kinaesthetic movement: Even more than by statistics, experts will be convinced when they themselves making Kwakiutl string figures will feel their characteristic Eskimoan style. For style in string figure making, as in dancing and singing, is deeply rooted in motor behaviour. (For the same reason tribes, or indivi- duals, chiefly differ not in what they make but in how they make it.)10 Making the Collection in 1948 The Arnhem Land Expedition was the first opportunity McCarthy (then in his early forties) had to undertake research with living peoples, and it was the first and only time he collected string fig- ures. In a letter to the Expedition’s leader C.P. Mountford written in February 1948 (a month before departure), McCarthy reported that he had been “reading up the string figures” but found “the 10 Erich M. von Hornbostel and Mark Sherman, “Kwakiutl String Figures: A Pref- ace,” Bulletin of String Figures Association 16 (1989), pp. 25–48, here pp. 32–35 (italics in the original). 55 technique extremely difficult to follow.”11 Mountford reassured McCarthy: “If you have not time to learn the string games, we could collect the completed examples and mount them on sheets of cardboard. Even if the techniques are not recorded, it will be some sort of a record.”12 At Yirrkala, McCarthy’s diaries and notebooks recording what he did when, where and with whom, reveal that indeed he started by collecting mounted figures alone. It was only after he met and started working with Ngarrawu Mununggurr that McCarthy began to collect the instructions for making the figures. Ngarrawu was a young Djapu clan woman in her twenties (married with one child at the time). Ngarrawu had a wide knowledge of designs, but it was her skill in making that became indispensable to McCarthy. Ngarrawu had a remarkable ability to execute the figures “in slow motion,” “step by step,” allowing McCarthy time to write down the instructions for one movement before she continued on with the next.13 This allowed McCarthy to record the methods of mak- ing from observation. Regardless of who made the mounted fig- ure that had been collected, Ngarrawu provided the instructions for all, with few exceptions. McCarthy’s activities on the Expedition included excavating archaeological sites, documenting rock art, and collecting eth- nographic artefacts including bark paintings. With competing demands for his attention, he had limited time to spend on col- lecting the string figures. Yirrkala was the second of three base camps where the Expedition party set up for an extended period. During their stay, with others in the party McCarthy spent three weeks at Milingimbi, a small island further along the coast. On his return he learnt that they had less than two weeks before the Expedition was due to depart for their third base camp at Gunbulanya (Oenpelli). After a spate of concentrated work with 11 Frederick D. McCarthy to C.P. Mountford, 4 February 1947 (sic). Papers of Frederick D. McCarthy: MS3513/14/8. AIATSIS. 12 C.P. Mountford to Frederick D. McCarthy, 4 February 1948. Papers of Frederick D. McCarthy: MS3513/14/8. AIATSIS. 13 F. D. McCarthy, “The String Figures of Yirrkalla,” in Records of the American- Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, vol. 2: Anthropology and Nutrition, ed. C. P. Mountford (Parkville, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1960), pp. 415–511, here p. 415. 56 Robyn McKenzie Recollections of the String Figures of Yirrkala Ngarrawu, McCarthy had recorded the instructions for sixty five of the ninety mounted figures he had collected. When the party was advised that the boat coming to transport their gear to Oen- pelli was delayed, the three activities of collecting, recording and writing up