The Magical Body: Power, Fame and Meaning in a Melanesian Society

by Eves,Richard

• ISBN13: 9789057023057
• ISBN10: 9057023059
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-10-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

An intriguing exploration of the role and significance of the body in the world of a Pacific Islands People, the Lelet of New Ireland (Papua New Guinea). In vivid ethnographic detail, the monograph captures the fluidity and complexity of Lelet conceptions of corporeality and their significance to identity as they encounter the influences of modernity, in the form of colonialism, Christianity and cash-cropping. The author examines the importance of the body to constructions of identity and difference, and its role in the constitution of place and space. The book provides a richly detailed ethnographic study of magical belief and the body whilst paying particular attention to the polyvalent meanings of bodily images and metaphors as they are used in numerous contexts of magic.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
Preface	xi
Acknowledgements	xvii
Language Notes and Conventions	xix
Glossary	xxi
Introduction	1	(2)
Ethnographic emplacements and encounters	3	(5)
The Lelet imagining their world	8	(2)
Magic and the anthropological imagination	10	(6)
The body and the anthropological imagination	16	(3)
The power of movement and the movement of power	19	(2)
Outline of book	21	(4)
Empowering Bodies, Engendering Bodies	25	(44)
Mapping the body	25	(8)
Person, products and the creation of value	33	(7)
Embodiment	40	(5)
Movement, power and the dance	45	(13)
The vulnerable body	58	(11)
From Colonialism to Cash Crops	69	(24)
Colonial governance	70	(7)
From coconuts to cash cropping	77	(8)
Developing roads, developing cash cropping	85	(8)
Christianity, Conversion and Magic	93	(28)
`We are in darkness and many are dying. When is the light coming?'	95	(5)
The culture hero Moroa who became God	100	(7)
From `heathen darkness' to Holy Spirit movement	107	(8)
Magic and the baptism of the Holy Spirit	115	(6)
Embodying Kinship: Shame, Sex and Shell Valuables	121	(30)
Moieties, clans and lineages	121	(5)
Avoidance relationships and bodies in space	126	(5)
Shame, secrecy and sexual revelations	131	(4)
Valuables, desire and movement	135	(7)
Having somewhere to sit	142	(9)
Other Bodies, Other Powers: The World of Non-Human Beings	151	(28)
The multiple bodily forms of larada	152	(3)
Refiguring the human form in lagas	155	(2)
Larada, seating and movement	157	(3)
The movement of lagas to peripheral spaces	160	(3)
Illness, death and vulnerable bodies	163	(9)
Revelatory, magical and innovative powers	172	(7)
The Origins of Taro and the Culture of Famine	179	(22)
Food staples and travelling food	180	(4)
Nirut and the mythic origins of taro	184	(4)
Famine and the flight of food	188	(6)
Countering famine	194	(7)
The Magical World of the Garden	201	(26)
The taro gardening cycle	201	(2)
Garden magic	203	(17)
Lemeravas and seating the place	220	(2)
Regimes of abstinence and bodily regulation	222	(5)
Feasting and Fame: Finishing the Dead and Lifting up the Names of the Living	227	(46)
The feasting cycle	228	(7)
Finishing the head of the deceased	235	(22)
Making power manifest, making the place heavy	257	(6)
Fame, movement, memory	263	(10)
Epilogue	273	(4)
Archival Sources	277	(2)
Bibliography	279	(12)
Index	291