Of Humans, Pigs, and Souls: An Essay on the Yagwoia "Womba" Complex (9781912808311): Jadran Mimica

ABOUT THIS BOOK

For the Yagwoia-Angan people of Papua New Guinea, womba is a malignant power with the potential to afflict any soul with cravings for pig meat and human flesh. Drawing on long-term research among the Yagwoia, and in an analysis informed by phenomenology and psychoanalysis, Jadran Mimica explores the womba complex in its local cultural-existential determinations and regional permutations. He attends to the lived experience of this complex in relation to the wider context of mortuary practices, feasting, historical cannibalism, and sorcery. His account of womba illuminates the moral meanings of Yagwoia selfhood and associated senses of subjectivity and agency. Mimica concludes by reflecting on the recent escalation of concerns with witchcraft and sorcery in Papua New Guinea, specifically in relation to a new wave of Christian evangelism occurring in partnership with the state.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Jadran Mimica is a senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Intimations of Infinity: The Cultural Meanings of the Iqwaye Counting and Number Systems and of many contributions to psychoanalytic anthropology and Melanesian ethnography.

REVIEWS

"This book is an embarrassment of riches both ethnographic and theoretical. The depth and scope of Mimica's ambition are rare. His inimitable writing style carries the reader forward headlong, at times breathlessly. His choice and treatment of topics—Christianity, shamanism, mind, personhood, and subjectivity—are very much of the moment. The presentation and analysis of Yagwoia men's dreams demonstrates why psychoanalysis, skilfully deployed, remains indispensable in ethnography, especially the notion that the outsider, self-aware, steeped in knowledge of and sympathy for the other, is often well-equipped to represent the other's subjectivity. Mimica's fine-grained portraits of individual Yagwoia and their milieux, created over many years, add to the authority of his insights into the Yagwoia life-world."

— Gillian Gillison, author of Between culture and fantasy: A New Guinea Highlands mythology

"This is a remarkable text. It is evident that we are in the hands of both a major intellect and a masterful ethnographer. The work is a powerful one."

— Michael Lambek, author of The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person, and Value

"Complex spatial and temporal settings define this creative work. . . . Mimica stands out for his linguistic competence and his intense focus on subjectivity. His close reading will likely gain in stature as the region becomes subject to comparative, transformational analysis, a circumstance Mimica’s intense description facilitates. . . . Mimica’s erudition rises on every page."

— Pacific Affairs

"This book is original in its subject matter and provides rich and detailed analyses of how morality and selfhood are actualized in the Yagwoia lifeworld."

— Anthropos

“For Jadran Mimica, a lecturer at the University of Sydney, womba affliction has its origin in local ideas of kinship, which involve people consuming one another’s bodies and energies to make other bodies and energies. Pork offers a substitute for human flesh, but womba can also be seen in infancy, when the baby is parasitic on its mother in the womb and then at her breast. This ‘appetitive passion’ used to take many forms in Yagwoia culture, including endo and exocannibalism, necrophagy, seminal nurture (institutionalised homosexuality) and the consumption of raw or putrid flesh, both human and pig. Eating and being eaten is what makes the world go round.”

— London Review of Books

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1. The womba condition of the soul

The causes and attributes of womba soul affliction and shamanistic treatment
The case of Qang
The desire for pig-meat

Chapter 2. Men and women as womba

The case of Qwoqwoldate
The case of WoGaye
A specifically female aspect of the womba complex
Womba killing

Chapter 3. Womba self-experience

The case of OMitane
The case of OAp

Chapter 4. The spectrum of Yagwoia cannibalism

An inside perspective
Exo- and endo- modes
Experience of necrophagy

Chapter 5. On ki’nye (sorcery) and the mother’s breast’s malediction

The mirror-circuit of the mother’s breast’s malediction
Sorcery in hindsight

Chapter 6. The womba complex in regional perspective

The non-Angan outsiders
Reverberations of the complex among neighboring Angan groups
A comparative amplification
Ankavi ombi’ and the Yagwoia womba
The womba imaginary and the body: closure and opening

Chapter 7. Concluding reflections: A new wave of Christianization

A Melanesian berit (covenant)
Metamorphosis of the imago Dei and the spirit of the global Evangelion