Masculinity, motherhood, and mockery : psychoanalyzing culture and the Iatmul Naven rite in New Guinea
This book analyzes the relationship between masculinity and motherhood in an Eastern Iatmul village along the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. It focuses on a metaphorical dialogue between two countervailing images of the body, dubbed by literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin as the "moral" and the "grotesque." Eastern Iatmul men in Tambunum village idealize an image of motherhood that is nurturing, sheltering, cleansing, fertile, and chaste--in a word, moral. But men also fear an equally compelling image of motherhood that is defiling, dangerous, orificial, aggressive, and carnal--hence, grotesque. Masculinity in Tambunum is a rejoinder both subtle and strident, both muted and impassioned, to these contrary, embodied images of motherhood. Throughout this work, Eric Silverman details the dialogics of mothering and manhood throughout Eastern Iatmul culture, including in his analysis cosmology and myth food- and childraising architecture and canoes ethnophysiology and sexuality shame and hygiene marriage and kinship and perhaps most significantly, a ceremonial locus classicus in anthropology: the famous Iatmul naven rite. This book provides the first sustained examination of naven since Bateson, presenting new data and interpretations that are based entirely on original, first-hand ethnographic research
Print Book, English, ©2001
University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, ©2001
xiii, 243 pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm
9780472097579, 9780472067572, 0472097571, 0472067575
45820945
1. Introduction: The Grotesque and the Moral
2. Food and Floods
3. Cosmic Bodies and Mythic Genders
4. Human Bodies
5. The Architectural Grotesque
6. A Symbolic Forest of Kin
7. Oedipus in the Sepik
8. The Shame of Masculinity
9. Men and the Maternal Dialogics of Naven
10. Conclusion: Naven and the Pathos of Masculinity
Epilogue: Masculinity beyond the Sepik