Premium
The Death of a Strong, Great, Bad Man: An Ethnography Of Soul Incorporation
Author(s) -
Mimica Jadran
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
oceania
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.356
H-Index - 25
eISSN - 1834-4461
pISSN - 0029-8077
DOI - 10.1002/j.1834-4461.2003.tb02824.x
Subject(s) - soul , existentialism , phenomenology (philosophy) , interpretation (philosophy) , originality , perversion , epistemology , theme (computing) , philosophy , ethnography , self , sociology , psychoanalysis , aesthetics , anthropology , psychology , qualitative research , linguistics , computer science , operating system
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.