The Death of a Strong, Great, Bad Man: An Ethnography Of Soul Incorporation.

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 a...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:Oceania Vol. 73; no. 4; pp. 260 - 287
Autor principal: Mimica, Jadran
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Wiley-Blackwell Jun2003
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
Descripción
Sumario: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.