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.

No abstract

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 paper is' a detailed description and interpretation of the death of a Yagwoia-Angan great killer-warrior and of two soul-incorporation rites performed in the period preceding the interment of the corpse. The interpretive framework is a synthesis of existential phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and archetypal psychology articulated through the cosmo-ontological specificities of the Yagwoia life-world. The paper elucidates the dynamics and originality of the Yagwoia sense of the world as a self-generative bodily totality (world-body) which incessantly reproduces itself through its internal constitutive parts, individual humans and their group-containers. This dynamic is simultaneously self-devouring and self-copulating. Its most apposite characterisation is the archetypal image of ouroboros, the serpent that eats its own tail. Following the ontological clarifications of the Yagwoia-Angan life-world the main theme of the paper unfolds as a hermeneutic synthesis of concrete ethnographic descriptions and critical interpretations of the Yagwoia existential process made manifest in concrete experiences and practices of the living and the dead. PROLOGUEMy discussion will unfold in reference to the inner horizons of the Yagwoia life-world. Their territory is the manifest 'physical' spread of an umwelt (environment) which, as an ecological envelopement (container), is intrinsically bound to its constitutive content (contained). The latter is the realm of intersubjectivity, a collectivity of human beings for whom this, strictly local, fraction of enveloping world is irreducibly and inescapably their lifeworld in relation to which all other world-horizons can become accessible. In this abode humans are born, live, and die primarily as themselves, ie., as the embodiments of the irreducibly local realities of humanness and the human condition. Situated between the local perimeters of the sky and earth, this collectivity of some 10.000 individuals, is divided into five territorial groups or tribes, in the sense that they are the most inclusive traditional political-territorial social ensembles comprised of constitutive individual human beings who are organized into several dozen latice (lit., penis root-knot). I will gloss them as patrilineal descent groups.' Here my focus will be primarily on two of these groups: Iwolaqa-Malyce and the Iqwaye, separated by a mountain range the height of which averages approximately ISOO-I900 m. On both sides of the divide, the settlements and gardens occupy the altitude range between ISOO and l200 m.Right here in-between and within these ranges the independent nation State of PNG has a somewhat fluid and slippery incarnation. So much so that in the last elections (mid-2002) a part of this region found itself in a so-called 'boundary gap' because of which the local candidates were not allowed to register their nominations on the pretext that their home territory didn't belong to either of the two administrative divisions (Merewaka/East- 260Oceania 73, 2003

No abstract