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Taking a novel approach that adapts Freud's theory of the Primal
Crime, this book examines a wealth of ethnographic data on the Gimi
of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, focusing on women's
lives, myths, and rituals. Women's and men's separate myths and
rites may be 'read' as a cycle of blame about which sex caused the
ills of human existence and is still at fault. However, the author
demonstrates that in public rites of exchange in which both sexes
participate, men appropriate and subvert women's usages as a ritual
strategy to 'undo' motherhood and confiscate children at puberty.
In doing so, she reveals how Gimi women both rebel against the
male-dominated social order and express understanding of why they
also acquiesce. The result of decades of fieldwork, writing and
reflection, this book offers an analysis of Gimi women's complex
understanding of their situation and presents a nuanced picture of
women in a society dominated by men. It represents an important
contribution to New Guinea ethnography that will appeal to students
and scholars of psychoanalysis, gender studies, and cultural,
social and psychoanalytic anthropology.
The myths of the Gimi, a people of the Eastern Highlands of Papua
New Guinea, attribute the origin of death and misery to the
incestuous desires of the first woman or man, as if one sex or the
other were guilty of the very first misdeed. Working for years
among the Gimi, speaking their language, anthropologist Gillian
Gillison gained rare insight into these myths and their pervasive
influence in the organization of social life. Hers is a fascinating
account of relations between the sexes and the role of myth in the
transition between unconscious fantasy and cultural forms.
Gillison shows how the themes expressed in Gimi myths--especially
sexual hostility and an obsession with menstrual blood--are
dramatized in the elaborate public rituals that accompany marriage,
death, and other life crises. The separate myths of Gimi women and
men seem to speak to one another, to protest, alter, and enlarge
upon myths of the other sex. The sexes cast blame in the veiled
imagery of myth and then play out their debate in joint rituals,
cooperating in shows of conflict and resolution that leave men
undefeated and accord women the greater blame for misfortune.
Taking a novel approach that adapts Freud's theory of the Primal
Crime, this book examines a wealth of ethnographic data on the Gimi
of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, focusing on women's
lives, myths, and rituals. Women's and men's separate myths and
rites may be 'read' as a cycle of blame about which sex caused the
ills of human existence and is still at fault. However, the author
demonstrates that in public rites of exchange in which both sexes
participate, men appropriate and subvert women's usages as a ritual
strategy to 'undo' motherhood and confiscate children at puberty.
In doing so, she reveals how Gimi women both rebel against the
male-dominated social order and express understanding of why they
also acquiesce. The result of decades of fieldwork, writing and
reflection, this book offers an analysis of Gimi women's complex
understanding of their situation and presents a nuanced picture of
women in a society dominated by men. It represents an important
contribution to New Guinea ethnography that will appeal to students
and scholars of psychoanalysis, gender studies, and cultural,
social and psychoanalytic anthropology.
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