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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social institutions > Death & dying
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On the Bones of the Serpent (Paperback, 2nd ed.)
Loot Price: R994
Discovery Miles 9 940
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On the Bones of the Serpent (Paperback, 2nd ed.)
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Sabarl island--created, in myth, from the bones of a serpent--is a
coral atoll in the Louisiade archipelago of Papua New Guinea. The
Sabarl speak of themselves as true islanders: persons separated
from the means of both physical and social survival. The Sabarl
struggle for continuity--of the physical and social person and of
social relations, of cultureal values, of paternal influence in a
matrilineal society--is the subject of Debbora Battaglia's
sensitive ethnography of loss and reconstruction: the first major
work on cultural responses to mortality in the southern Massim
culture area and an important contribution to studies of personhood
in Melanesia. The creative focus of Sabarl cultural life is a
series of mortuary feasts and rituals known as segaiya. In
assembling and disassembling commemorative food and objects in
segaiya exchanges, Sabarl also assemble and disassemble the
critical social relations such objects stand for. These
commemorative acts create a collective memory yet also a collective
experience of forgetting social bonds that are of no future use to
the living. Sabarl anticipate this disaggregation in patterns of
everyday life, which reveal the importance of categorical
distinctions mapped in beliefs about the physical and metaphysical
person. Using remembrance and forgetting as an analytic lens,
Battaglia is able to ask questions critical to understanding
Melanesian social process. One of the new ethnographies addressing
the limits of ethnographic representation and the fragmented nature
of knowledge from an indigenous perspective, her finely wrought
study explores the dynamics of cultural practices in which
decontruction is integral to construction, allowing a new
perspective on the ephermeral nature of sociality in Melanesia and
new insight into the efficacy of cultural images more generally.
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