DREAMS,LAKI, AND MOURNING: A Psychoanalytic Ethnography of the Yagwoia ‘Inner Feminine’

In the first part of this study (Oceania, 76/1) I presented the general cosmo‐ontological background of Yagwoia (Papua New Guinea) dreaming and the fundamental dialectics of the contra‐sexual self‐identity of a conjugal couple (Tilm and QANG) manifest in their oneiric encounters. The second part (Oceania, 76/2) was focused on the man, QANG, and the vicissitudes of his soul's power to affect gambling outcomes. I showed that Yagwoia gambling exhibits its true characteristic as an extension and modification of the male‐exclusive domain of hunting, warfare, and the ceaseless in‐/ex‐corporation of the cosmic life‐death flow. In this third and Final part I deal with the vicissitudes of his favourite wife's presence in his life following her death whereby she became a spirit of the dead. Here my focus is on the practice and intersubjective dynamics of mourning, a process which with singular force realises the Yagwoia life‐world as an indissoluble socius of the living and the dead. It is in this context that the ethnographer also comes to experience and appreciate the palpability of spirits as the real denizens of the Yagwoia world.     

Mother's Umbilicus and Father's Spirit: The Dialectics of Selfhood of a Yagwoia Transgendered Person

ABSTRACT This is an ethnographic exploration of a Yagwoia transgendered person and his‐her life‐situation within the specificities of libidinal dynamics and economy of intersubjective relationships that constitute Yagwoia matrix of kinship and affinal relatedness. Developed within a framework of psychoanalysis and existential phenomenology, and forged through a long‐term field research, this study offers an in‐depth perspective on concrete realities of gender experience and social existence in an Angan life‐world of east Papua New Guinea.     

Reviews

The Kukukuku of the Upper Watut. By Beatrice Blackwood. Edited from her published articles and unpublished field-notes, and with an Introduction By C. R. Hallpike. 218 pages, 38 plates, 16 figures, 3 maps. Pitt Rivers Museum, Monograph Series No. 2, University of Oxford, 1978.     

On Academic Foucauldian‐dramaturgy and Modernity in Melanesia

This short paper offers a critical reflection on the uses of Michel Foucault's ideas and the notion of ‘modernity’ which mark a current trend among so many ethnographers of Melanesian life‐worlds. Through the examination of several ethnographic cases I show the limitations of these usages and, correlatively, advocate a more mindful epistemic regard for the cultural realities and the processes of transformations of Melanesian life‐worlds in the present‐day world‐historical context.     

Dreams,Laki, and Mourning: A Psychoanalytic Ethnography of the Yagwoia “Inner Feminine”

In the first part of this study (Oceania, 76/1) I presented the general cosmo‐ontological background of Yagwoia dreaming and the fundamental dialectics of the contra‐sexual self‐identity of a conjugal couple (Tilm and QANG) manifest in their oneiric encounters. The second part focuses on the man, QANG, and the vicissitudes of his soul's power to affect gambling outcomes. I explore the intrinsic relationship between dreaming and the practice of gambling which in the Yagwoia life‐world is a domain of men's homo‐social participation in the self‐generative life‐death flow of the world‐body at large. In this aspect, Yagwoia gambling exhibits its true characteristic as an extension and modification of the male‐exclusive domain of hunting, warfare, and the ceaseless in‐/ex‐corporation of the cosmic life‐death flow. The pursuit of gambling is a fully libidinized field of male interaction. Through cards and dice men screw and drain each other of their bodily sexual potency which flows in the world‐body as a whole.     

THE INCEST PASSIONS: AN OUTLINE OF THE LOGIC OF IQWAYE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

Incest is best elucidated as a plethora of human desires, which are affirmed by their social regulation rather than negated by it This contrasts with the received wisdom of anthropological theory which is focussed on the prohibition of incest rather man on the incest desires which motivate the logic of their social regulation through interdictions. The theoretical fixation on prohibition expresses modern Western bourgeois incesto-phobic sensibilities and morality. The upshot of this study is that among the Iqwaye, contrary to the classic incesto-phobic formulations whereby the prohibition of incest is the condition of human sociality, without the positive fulfilment of incest there is no human kinship or social existence. In Part 1 the problematics of incest are delineated in the context of Iqwaye mythopoeic cosmogony. In Part 2 (to appear in the next Oceania issue) I present concrete articulation of incest passions in the main structural configurations of Iqwaye social organization (the naming system, patrifiliation, matrifiliation, affinity, cross-sex siblingship, institutionalized male homosexuality). Thus, the theoretical view of incest outlined in the first part is ethnographically demonstrated. A special emphasis is placed on the centrality and irreducibility of radical imagination in the constitution of human social reality.     

THE INCEST PASSIONS:AN OUTLINE OF THE LOGIC OF THE IQWAYE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

In the first part of this paper (Oceania 62(1)) I presented the mythopoeic-cosmological foundations of incest among the Iqwaye people, a Yagwoia-Anga group of the West Menyamya Census Division, Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. The core of incest passions derives from the primordial autosexual-autonutritive, i.e. self-procreative, cosmic man. Here I am demonstrating how incest as autocreation is realized in the main structural configurations of Iqwaye social organization, specifically the naming system, patrifiliation, matrifiliation, affinity, cross-sex siblingship and, finally, institutionalized male homosexuality.