The Gender of the Cosmos: Totemism,Society and Embodiment in the Sepik River

This article contributes to recent research on the foundations of society in Melanesia, both in terms of local representation and actual social practice, as well as body imagery and gender. I have three interrelated objectives. First, I present new data on the symbolism and politics of Eastern Iatmul cosmology and totemism (Sepik River, Papua New Guinea). Second, I engage Harrison's distinction between magical and material, or realist and nominalist, polities in Melanesia. Eastern Iatmul society is represented by totemic names and categories. Yet society also requires human agents to embody named entities: men rarely assert the existence of cosmological categories that are divorced entirely from the realm of human action. This is a key difference between Eastern Iatmul and other Sepik societies such as Manambu. Finally, I argue that there is a symbolic homology between the gendered human body, the body politic and the cosmos, an important perspective that has been lacking in Melanesian comparative studies. Totemism for Eastern Iatmul is largely a realm of male ritual-politics. Nevertheless, an idiom of maternal fertility and reproduction is salient in the local cosmology. For this reason, the gender of the cosmos, to invoke Marilyn Strathern, is androgynous.     

Marijuana,Guns, Crocodiles and Submarines: Economies of Desire in the Purari Delta

Traded down the Purari River by male youth through a network of friends, kuku dipi, as marijuana is known in the Purari Delta, is consumed locally, and traded for guns it is rumoured that the American Mafia bring in submarines. The movement of kuku dipi is part of a constellation of informal trade that has emerged alongside the large‐scale logging and oil projects in the Gulf Province. These networks involve the exchange of alcohol, pornography and radios by logging ship crews for live birds, crocodile skins and other local flora and fauna. Numerous sets of speculations have arisen about the seen and unseen transactions that these exchanges are felt to entail. Focusing on aspects of kuku dipi's use and movement in the Delta, I examine some of the explanations and anxieties around this illicit commodity. Doing so provides insight into kuku dipi's social impact and illuminates how the Purari's engagement in this trade is an attempt to transcend and cope with the economic and political disparities caused by the current resource extraction projects.     

Art and Procreative Illusion in the Sepik: Comparing the Abelam and the Arapesh

This essay extends Anthony Forge's ideas about the ‘unspoken meanings’ of Abelam ritual art, by testing them against cognate forms among the neighboring Ilahita Arapesh, and by invoking L.R. Hiatt's insights into ‘pseudo-procreation rites’ among Australian Aborigines. It is argued that the meanings of Abelam visual art and Arapesh myth are comparably ineffable, and that in both cases this non-verbal quality conduces to the expression of ideas that are cognitively, socially, or emotionally unacceptable to consciousness. The conclusions are, first, that veiled, ritual and aesthetic expressions of ‘procreation’ permit the men to enact a fantasy of male parthenogenesis; and, secondly, that the cult-sponsored tricks and illusions surrounding these expressions have the effect of surreptitiously appropriating female procreative power to the concealed goals of male ritual.     

War Shields of the Torricelli Mountains,West Sepik Province,Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT The usefulness of the term ‘ethnolinguistic group’, as a construct suggesting that ‘differences in language automatically translate into differences in culture’, has been questioned by Welsch, Terrel and Nadolski (1992). Not many researchers would insist on the term ‘automatically’, but would nevertheless support an argument for a strong correlation between material culture and language. As a contribution to this debate, we discuss two types of wood shields of the Torricelli Mountains (one of which is being identified for the first time) and pigskin shields to the south of the Torricellis, their use, and the details of the carved designs of the wood shields. The results of our analysis provide limited support for the correlation of material culture and language but highlight the need for analysis of material culture based on reliable data for a large number and wide range of artefacts, from defined regions, presently held in museums and private collections worldwide.     

“The Good,the Bad,and the Ugly”: evaluating the radiocarbon chronology of the middle and late Upper Paleolithic in the Enisei River valley,south-central Siberia

The ¹⁴C record for the Upper Paleolithic in Siberia has remained largely unevaluated and includes good, bad, and ugly dates. Too often researchers accept either all published dates or only those dates that tend to support proposed chronological hypotheses, regardless of sample quality and association. This article systematically evaluates all published ¹⁴C dates (including several newly obtained AMS dates) from middle and late Upper Paleolithic sites in the Enisei River valley of south-central Siberia to establish a reliable chronology for the region and address the tempo of modern human dispersals in Siberia during late Pleistocene times. The revised chronology indicates humans were present before and after the Last Glacial Maximum, but absent during this climatic event. Results also suggest that human population in the region may have increased during the Oldest Dryas.     

The Return of the Ambush: ‘Raskolism’ in Rural Yangoru,East Sepik Province

Over the last 15 years or so, ‘raskols’ have become a prominent feature of the cultural scene in Papua New Guinea and have prompted a number of academic studies, focussed mostly on urban crime. This paper documents and analyses a dramatic rise of raskolism in a rural setting, the Yangoru Subdistrict of the East Sepik Province. It seeks to describe how interactions between raskols and the population they exploit evolved, and it focusses on why Yangoru raskolism emerged when it did. Although a conjunction of rising material aspirations, failed economic programs, and the erosion of traditional and modern sanctions probably are important explanations, what seems critical to understanding this sudden rise in crime is the experience some young Yangoru men gained in raskol gangs in urban environments, experience that facilitated their recognition and exploitation of pre-existing but hitherto unacknowledged weaknesses in the systems of control back home.     

Bad apples,dead souls: understanding Abu Ghraib

This review article centres on Abu Ghraib, and in particular the images of Abu Ghraib as deployed in Standard operating procedure (2008), the film by Errol Morris and the book by Philip Gourevitch. The article probes the meaning of the images and the circumstances of their creation. It asks, inter alia, what do we know of the soldier‐photographers (or photographer‐perpetrators) who took them? What do we know of Abu Ghraib? And how are we to understand what happened there?     

Bad blood: poverty, psychopathy and the politics of transgression in Kenya Colony, 1939-59

This article examines the inter-relationship between psychiatry and sex, both fertile fields within the recent historiography of colonialism and empire. Using a series of case files pertaining to European patients admitted to the Mathari Mental Hospital in Nairobi during the 1940s and 1950s, this article shows how sexual transgression among colonial Europeans precipitated, and was combined with, mental distress. Considering psychiatric treatment as a form of social control, the article investigates a number of cases in which a European patient had been perceived to have transgressed the normative sexual behaviour codes of settler society in Kenya. What these files suggest is that transgressive sexuality in Kenya was itself framed by indices, as insistent as they were uncertain, of gender, race and class. While psychiatry as social control has some degree of purchase here, more valuable is an attempt to discern the particular ways in which certain forms of sexual behaviour were understood in diagnostic terms. Men who had sex with Africans, we see, tended to be diagnosed as 'depressed' on arrival at the hospital but were judged to be mentally normal consequently. Women, by contrast, were liable to be diagnosed as psychopathic, a diagnosis, I argue, that helped to explain the uniquely transgressive status of impoverished European women living alone in the margins of white society. Unlike white men, moreover, women did not have to have sex with non-Europeans to transgress sexual codes: this is because female poverty was a sexual problem in a way that male poverty decidedly was not. Poor white women were marked by uncertainty over their sexual behaviour—and dubious racial identity in its turn—and the problem of social contamination was described by reference both to the polluted racial ancestry of an individual and to the prospective contamination of healthy racial stocks. This article aims to address current historical debates around sex and empire, 'white subalternity' and the social history of psychiatry and mental health. All names have been changed to protect patient anonymity.     

Dead Monks and Bad Debts: Some Provisions of a Buddhist Monastic Inheritance Law

Indo-Iranian Journal -     

Bridewealth a Pardon: New Relationships and Restoration of Good Daughters

Bridewealth is recognized as vital in the reproduction and reconfiguration of Pacific environments and women play an integral role in this process. In contemporary Papua New Guinea (PNG), bridewealth is reconfigured by kin to acknowledge the considered actions of women as they enter into relationships with men. This paper will explore how women's choices impact and influence their experience of these exchanges and determine the role of women and their kin as they undertake these practices. Here I aim to understand how the social relatedness that frames bridewealth exchanges enables the practices of bridewealth to be used as a tool for recognition of women's choices, autonomy and personhood. Although women enter into relationships without initial kin approval, bridewealth practices converge ultimately with a women's autonomous choice of husband. Wardlow suggests (2006:86) 'bridewealth confers value and dignity on female gender', and going beyond her observation, I show that bridewealth has been useful in achieving this in regard to managing and supporting social, kin and affinal relationships. This article will explore two cases, to identify what each tells us about women's ability to act in ways that are beneficial to them and important to kin. I show how moral evaluations frame (pasin) and recognize (luksave) kin and social relationships that ultimately constitute their personhood.