Eves, Richard
Description
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...[Show more] 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.
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