If the Yagwoia were the Gimi…: A Reply to Gillison's Critical Appraisal of ‘Stalked by the Malignant Spirit…’

Abstract

In the abstract of her 'critical appraisal' Gillison (2023) foregrounds the topic of my paper as a presentation of '"the life-world" of Yagwoia people (…) a unique variant of the Jungian Ouroboric archetype…'. Among other statements, she says '[i]n bypassing anthropology's classical terrain, or treating Yagwoia lifeways as contingent upon the "ouroboric cosmic Self"a "wholly pre-genital gestalt of self-generation" -Mimica distorts the role of collective rites of passage and affinal exchange to counter, inhibit, and redirect the primary narcissism intrinsic to human beings' (ibid.:165, emphasis added).Two pages later, in the main text, Gillison further expands on this 'distortion' stating: 'Not included in the list of main processes by which a father transmits "paternal bone" to his offspring unstoppably and irretrievably is a description of exactly what happens during erection, coitus, ejaculation, detumescence, conception, gestation, and parturition, microcosmic events that transpire during coitus and in utero that serve as the model for, and source of the "ouroboric monadic world-body (macrocosmos), which contains and generates all other beings" (138). Also unmentioned among the primary means of "bone-transfer" from father to son is the "homosexual fellatio and subsequent regular insemination" practiced as part of "the old initiatory regime" (150). 'From Mimica's many richly-detailed ethnographies, and from ethnographies of other Eastern Highlands and Papua New Guinea peoples Mimica does not cite, we may suspect that the Yagwoia initiates' fellators/inseminators do not stand in the relation of fathers. Nevertheless, in a reproductive system ostensibly based upon the "incorporative-devouring dynamics of planting and eating" (142), encapsulated in the androgynous image of a snake biting its tail, "including digestion, hencesucking, eating, swallowing (self-injection, self-incorporation) and spitting, vomiting, ejaculation, speaking, i.e., phallo-oral self-ex-corporation" (138), the relationships of fellators to male initiates cannot be ignored' (167).Given the thematic scope of this paper, a case of patricide, I have provided only a few essentials concerning the Yagwoia life-world (Mimica 2023). In the first two sections (ibid.:138-42) I give a brief outline of the 'ouroboric structure of Yagwoia micro-^macrocosmos' (137-9) and the most basic lineaments of Yagwoia kinship with the focus on the notion of the 'paternal bone' (139-42). In the framework of anthropological discourse, this notion can be rendered as 'patrifiliation'. The rest of the paper, which is a detailed single-case study, is more than 11,000 words. Thus, this paper is not concerned with 'collective rites of passage', of the Yagwoia's or of any other New Guinea people, nor do I offer any arguments about whether such rites in conjunction with 'affinal exchange' may or may not 'counter, inhibit, and redirect the primary narcissism intrinsic to human beings '. That Gillison (2023:173) has framed it so has to do with her prioritization of the Gimi lif...