CULTURE AS TRANSFORMED DISORDER: COSMOLOGICAL EVOCATIONS AMONG THE MARING

Melanesian cosmologies typically lack clearly articulated formulation and an explicit exergetical tradition. Symbolic relations often remain implicit, with indeterminate, rather than fixed or static relations between categories. Through the use of ethnographic data on the Maring of the Papua New Guinea Highlands the paper argues that ‘cosmology’ should be analysed in terms of essentially subjective and contextually variable evocations, rather than in terms of definitive propositions. Further, it is argued that cosmologies are not revealed exclusively in the religious or ritual domain. Accordingly, data employed in the analysis are drawn from the interconnected Maring realms of knowledge of mythology, zoological lore and taxonomy, and conceptions of the spirit world. Highly general and multivocal concepts dealing with nature and culture provide pervasive themes in Maring and other Melanesian cosmologies. Analysis centres on the interplay between these concepts, arguing against any fixed and hierarchical relationship. Rather, the paper advocates an analytic approach which conceives a set of relationships between nature and culture being generative of others, such that the relationship between elements of a cosmology may be viewed contextually as being in harmony or antiphony, transcending structuralist idioms of correspondence and opposition.