Seating the place : magic and embodiment on the Lelet Plateau, New Ireland (Papua New Guinea)

Abstract

This thesis explores and describes the lived world of the people inhabiting the Lelet Plateau in central New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. Its particular focus is embodiment and the forms of corporeal imagery in magical belief, interpreted from a perspective that draws on Bakhtin's dialogism and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. Bakhtin argues that dialogic relations extend far beyond dialogic speech in the narrow sense and are imbued in the entire realm of living thought. For him there is no unitary or self-constituting subject who exists in and by him or herself. I argue similarly for a relational or dialogical theory of personhood which sees the person as constituted in the social world, in relations with others. Among the Lelet sociality is crucial in defining humanness. I follow Merleau-Ponty in seeing the subject as embodied, and suggest that the consciousness of the Lelet person is not radically separated from bodily being, as it is in modem western thought, but is integrally bound up with it. The Lelet person is very much a body-subject whose consciousness of self as acting subject is integrally connected to the corporeal component of his or her being. I draw on the insights of Merleau-Ponty to elaborate a theory of the body which points to the significance of movement and action as the basis of intentionality. I argue that the movement of the body in action is central to the Lelet imagination because it is integral to the constitution of the person. The immobile state of the sitting body is opposed to the more mobile state of movement in numerous contexts. Throughout, I explore the polyvalent meanings of such bodily images and the ways in which they are reconfigured in different contexts. The body, thus, is the medium through which the Lelet construct personhood and identity. Because of this, power relations are often concerned with the body. The renown of a person is dependent on the processes of value creation in which bodily power or bodily movement are transformed into products which are then circulated and exchanged with others. Because the body is central to the constitution of the person and the creation of value it is the target for those who seek to attack or control others.