Chicago: HAU Books [an imprint of the University of Chicago Press], 2020. xvii, 160 pp. (Map, B&W photo.) US$20.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-912808-31-1.
With an introduction, six chapters and a “concluding reflection” on Christianity in contemporary Papua New Guinea, Jadran Mimica produces an uncanny, suggestive essay. Its central subject, cannibalistic cravings, puts it into play with “witchcraft” and witchcraft studies, not only its rise in Melanesia, but eventually across the world. This is appropriate. As his Introduction makes clear, the current world-system now incorporates the book’s subjects, the Yagwoia-Angan people in Papua New Guinea. It is equally apparent that “witchcraft” is not “our primitive past,” but rather a sign-post of the contemporary. Yet Mimica pulls back from this possibility because this complex is different. Whereas nearby and distant activity lead to accusations and sometimes violence, Mimica presents the Yagwoia Womba Complex as a matter of self-reflective cravings of an interior life. This leads directly to the phenomenological and psycho-analytic thrust that defines Mimica’s contribution, close to Jung’s ouroboric architypes (9): one recalls the meme that people get the anthropologists they deserve. Yet the book’s final chapter and “Concluding reflections” spread to neighboring groups of people and today’s Papua New Guinea. All of a sudden Europe and the Bible’s world come on stage. Complex spatial and temporal settings define this creative work.
The Yagwoia-Angan people sit at the intersection of Papua New Guinea’s Eastern Highlands, Gulf and Morobe Provinces. This is the location of extensive research and writing by, among others, Maurice Godelier, Gillian Gillison, Gilbert Herdt, Pierre Lemonier, and Pascale Bonnemère. Among this group, 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. The first chapter’s presentation of “soul” is a good example. The indigenous words are umpne or umdinye, “vital thermal-breath animating energy…” (17). Such facts put the text in a dialogue with other perspectives, for the region stands out for its intensification of feeding themes, principally senior males feeding junior males’ semen, thus a variation on the overt problem of making people that defines life-purposes throughout Melanesia. These are featured in various ways by Chris Gregory’s reworking of the idea of “consumptive production” in Gifts and Commodities (London: Academic Press, 1982), Marilyn Strathern’s reworking of that in The Gender of the Gift (Berkeley: University of California Press), and much subsequent work, by Mark Mosko among others. Perhaps the most erudite anthropologist alive, Mimica eschews ties to such work (e.g., 97–98).
Mimica’s erudition rises on every page. Some mathematical, topological terms are richly suggestive. The expression ^, which means “to the power of,” suffuses the text. “Life^Death” undoubtedly conveys something important in an ouroboric society like this one. “Ouroboric?” The idea conveys “self-referring,” “self-reflection”—like a snake eating its own tail. Mimica gives weight to a Yagwoia-Angan self-consciousness about circularity in their productive schemes, perhaps a sense of identity that derives from the commensurability of differences. Other terms need checking: “talionic,” a punishment that exacts a penalty corresponding in kind to the crime, and “quiddity”—“inherent nature,” “essence.” With this writing Mimica’s subjectivity becomes the topic of his book. When Mimica tells us that since childhood he has been a lucid dreamer (92) one might wonder if the book is Mimica’s dream. Its ethnographic snippets are too suggestive for that. So why the language-stretching experience?
A promise of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thought was that it would reveal the unapparent import of the immediate givens of consciousness. Behind that consciousness were other determinants, revealed by Marx, or Freud, or linguistic-like structures. When those constructs were taken to the field, they generated new understandings. Yet we learned that the subjects knew what they were doing, if investigated with care. And this book could be read to support that assertion. Often when Mimica uses the word “conscious,” invoking a Freudian notion of an “unconscious”: Mimica writes “(un)conscious” (e.g., 101). Yet Freud’s hand is too heavy here.
“Freud,” along with the book’s biblical references, enjoin the temporal orders this scholar brings to his essay. They begin with the arrival of humans to Melanesia, perhaps 60,000 years ago, and a presumption as to the state of the Yagwoia-Angan people’s collective consciousnesses: “Here, human selfhood incorporates no Kantian ‘categorical moral imperative’” (97); then comes Axial Age revolutions (ca. 2500 BP) that now surround these people; and thus, a picture of contemporary Papua New Guinea mindfulness, focused on politicians’ declaration in 2007 that PNG is a Christian nation. The book’s last sentence invokes Christianity’s, “lethal goodness” (144). Many sentences end with great footnotes (e.g., 87–88, note 11 on a foreman’s thoughts on true love demonstrated by a woman wanting to eat her brother). The book’s last footnote casts an image derived from Exodus (32:27): “…And he said unto them, Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor” (144–145, note 9).
Mimica’s dark ending and unconvincing analytics do not take away from the ethnographic interpretation at the heart of the essay. Melanesian ethnography, unwritten and written, is full of data we have left unexplored. Michael Young closes an essay about Goodenough culture this way: “The burial of tubuga [a sister’s child] confirms the right to ‘eat’ him. The imagery of cannibalism may seem fanciful or fortuitous, but it is consistent with an embarrassing ethnographic secret of Bwadioka. They believe that before Europeans came, and indeed before pigs were in general use, mother’s brothers used to kill, cook, and eat their sister’s firstborn child as brideprice” (Michael Young, “‘Eating the Dead’: Mortuary Transactions in Bwaidoka, Goodenough Island,” in Frederick H. Damon and Roy Wagner, eds., Death Rituals and Life in the Societies of the Kula, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989, 198).
Frederick H. Damon
University of Virginia, Charlottesville