Description: A pathbreaking study of Yagwoia cosmological concepts.
In Imacoqwa's Arrow, Jadran Mimica draws on decades of field research to bring us a rich ethnographic account of myth and meaning in the lifeworlds of the Yagwoia of Papua New Guinea. He focuses especially on the relations of the sun and the moon in Yagwoia understandings of the universe and their own place within it. This is classic terrain in Melanesian ethnography, but Mimica does much more than add to the archive of anthropological accounts of the significance of the sun and the moon for peoples of this part of the world. With extraordinary rigor and reflexivity, he grounds his understanding of Yagwoia concepts in psychoanalytic and phenomenological methods that afford a radically new and revealing translation of these seminal themes in Melanesian mythology and its poetics. This is a major contribution to the hermeneutics of ethnographic translation and theorization.Brief description: 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.
Review Quotes: "Imacoqwa's Arrow offers a major contribution to philosophy, ethnolinguistics, psychoanalysis, comparative religion, and anthropology. A lifetime of ethnographic study of the Yagwoia reveals the generative mythopoetic structures underpinning a full range of human practices. Mimica's previous analysis of indigenous mathematical systems is expanded to the procreative conjugations of language. Turning away from the formalization of phonology and grammar, Mimica analyses how the sun and the moon, male and female, hot and cold, inhabit the combinatory creative practices of existence. The cosmos and the landscape are shown to be embodied--procreative sexual--realities that inhabit and generate human bodies. The equilibrium, disequilibrium, and combinatory possibilities of sexualized binary realities engender the illnesses and well-being of the body just as much as they engender plenitude, loss, and creation within language and mathematics."-- "Andrew Lattas, author of "Cultures of Secrecy and Dreams, Madness, and Fairy Tales in New Britain""