Cherry Lowman Cherry Lowman 1934–2019Andi Vaida I grew up surrounded by and interacting with the artifacts my anthropologist parents, Cherry Lowman and Andrew “Pete” Vayda, collected on their two trips to New Guinea in the 1960s. An early playmate was a two-and-a-half-foot wooden woman I recently learned is from the Sepik River area, and her shell eyes fixate on me now as I write these words. Most striking in my family’s collection, based on the reaction of others, were the five-feet-tall shields in bold patterns that hung on the walls of our apartment near Columbia University, where my parents received their PhDs and where my father was a professor. Guests would ooh and ahh at the four shields, which were displayed alongside spears, axes, and arrows. They said visiting us was like being in a museum. To me, the artifacts were a natural and essential part of my environment and psyche. The author places a just-plucked feather in the hair of her mother, Cherry Lowman, as Marings observe, New Guinea, 1966. When my parents parted ways in the early 1970s, each kept two shields, connecting them to each other and their time with the Maring people of New Guinea’s Bismarck Mountains region. While they maintained a cordial relationship, they never revisited their extensive New Guinea work, at least not with each other. My mother used the research for her PhD (on community growth and decline) and for her articles, and my father used it to extend his studies of intergroup fighting through articles. The field work was carried out among groups contacted by outsiders only a few years earlier. Lowman died in November 2019 and Vayda about two years later in January 2022. For many decades, neither had gone through their dozens of boxes holding New Guinea field work, maps, sketches, and photographs—that task fell to me, their only child. I have learned through sorting and sending both of my parents’ research to the National Smithsonian Anthropological Archives the extent to which their field work was completely intertwined. I have also discovered that my mother’s work was absolutely essential not only for her own and my father’s research, but also for the work of the entire team of the 1962-63 expedition funded by a National Science Foundation Grant to Columbia University to study “The Human Ecology of the New Guinea Rainforest.” The team consisted of three couples: Columbia anthropology professor and lead investigator Vayda; Columbia graduate students Lowman, Roy (“Skip”) and Ann Rappaport, and Allison Jablonko; and Allison’s husband Marek Jablonko. Lowman was an excellent ethnographer whose research and publications were about the sources and exercise of leadership and power among the Maring; the ecological and health bases of community growth and decline; and the interrelations of Maring art and war as expressed in shield designs. She worked tirelessly in New Guinea while living completely on her own for months at a time—first as a just-married 27-year-old in the Simbai Valley in 1962–63, and next as mother to a toddler (me) she brought with her to the Jimi Valley in 1966. What a badass! Because Lowman completed her PhD in 1980, when it was difficult to get work as an anthropology professor, her talents and passion for anthropology were never fully realized or appreciated. She did have a productive career as a health-scientist administrator at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, a division of the National Institutes of Health. The author (holding a cassowary egg) with her mother Cherry Lowman and locals preparing a meal of roasted caterpillars, Maring area, New Guinea, 1966. In her later years, Lowman talked about plans to return to New Guinea to undertake new studies after she retired. Unfortunately, failing health prevented her from doing so. When she was ill, one of Lowman’s favorite activities was pulling out the massive collection of black-and-white photographs she had taken in New Guinea and showing them to family members and visitors at her home in Ithaca, New York. My mother’s time in New Guinea was clearly a highlight of her life. It was a long way to New Guinea from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Lowman was born to a syndicated health-and-wellness-columnist mother and a petroleum-geologist father. She grew up in Houston, Texas, and moved as a teen with her family to Eastern New York state near Albany. Lowman’s changing undergraduate institutions (Barnard, University of Kentucky, Russell Sage, Columbia) and interests (forestry, fashion design, sociology) ultimately led her to graduate school in anthropology at Columbia. She met my father, a professor in the department, in that milieu (though she was never his student). At the start of my parents’ romance, my father’s expedition to New Guinea was already in motion, and it was the impetus for their marriage just a few months after meeting. Hence his research destination became hers. They joked that the 1962 trip was their honeymoon. While Lowman didn’t choose to go to New Guinea, she embraced the opportunity to use her mind and time in ways that deeply challenged her. Her letters to my father and her family are filled with enthusiastic reports on lessons learned, discoveries made, growth experienced and goals accomplished. The files, photos, and correspondence my mother left reveal multiple projects she was pursuing in addition to the funded New Guinea research, and they provide insight into her range of interests. “The Life Cycle of the Bilum” was a proposed display showing the various functions of woven bags known as “bilums” about which Margaret Mead, one of Lowman’s mentors, was enthusiastic; a photo book called “Andi Visits New Guinea” would teach about universality and difference through photos of me as a toddler in different situations and events in an environment unfamiliar to most readers. These two did not come to fruition. A Maring warrior demonstrates one of the stances assumed in ritual displays. Photograph by Andrew P. Vayda. There were also many boxes of folders, photos, sketches and paintings relating to shields used in war, and the art displayed on them. Lowman’s skills as an artist are evidenced in the shields and designs she sketched with astonishing precision and realism. She identified patterns, interviewed Marings on their meanings, and solicited drawings and paintings from local artists. Lowman researched, tracked down, and obtained permission to ship to the U.S. ten shields she collected while doing field work with the Kauwatyi people. The shields were exhibited in the now closed Museum of Primitive Art in New York City in 1968-1969. Lowman’s fascination with and knowledge about New Guinea war shields also resulted in the book Displays of Power, published by that museum (Lowman and Alland, 1973). It’s still available on Amazon! In an early description of the shields, Lowman stated: “The designs themselves are very bold … and the colors (various colored dyes are used to paint them) are brilliant (the object of the designs is to reproduce the brilliance of the sun and frighten the enemy away) and usually in primary colors.” She explained that there were few shields available because the Australian government “instructed the people to burn them all when they were first contacted” (in 1958). They had been used in fights, she noted, with arrow marks to prove it, and were subsequently used “as doors to their small houses or hung on the roof …” (Lowman, 1966). Maring repainting a war shield, the Jimi Valley, 1967 After my mother’s death, my father assisted me with the New Guinea portion of her obituary and answered research questions as I went through her archive. It reignited his interest in their joint research, and this led to his renewed admiration for her anthropological work, which he wished he had expressed more when she was doing it or at least while she was alive. Known to be a tough critic, he wrote to me in a 2021 email: “I’m rethinking our New Guinea research and am impressed by Cherry's work there under conditions that her previous experiences in life had given her little preparation for.” I think all those familiar with Lowman’s New Guinea work, many of whom benefited from it, would agree that she deserved considerably more credit for it than she received. On their behalf and mine, I say: “Cherry Lowman, you were a great anthropologist!” References Lowman, C. (1966, September 15.) [Letter to Pete Vayda]. Andi Vaida Family Archive. Lowman, C. (1971). Maring Big Men. Politics in New Guinea; Traditional and in the Context of Change, Some Anthropological Perspectives, 217–261. Lowman, C. (1980). Environment, Society and Health: Ecological Bases of Community Growth and Decline in the Maring Region of Papua New Guinea. [Doctoral dissertation, Columbia University]. https://www.proquest.com/openview/bb9457d1c289f6eb1efb0327dd54d331/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y2 Lowman, C., & Alland, A. (1973). Displays of Power: Art and War among the Marings of New Guinea. http://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BB01758585 Vayda, A. (1989). Explaining Why Marings Fought. Journal of anthropological research, 45. 159–177. 10.1086/jar.45.2.3630332.
