Dreams,Laki, and Mourning: A Psychoanalytic Ethnography of the Yagwoia ‘Inner Feminine’

Abstract

This is a three-part study of dream-experiences and their existential reality in the life-world of the Yagwoia of the Papua New Guinea highlands. The focus is on a single conjugal couple, their life-trajectory, and the articulation of their bond as specifically expressed in their dreams. In the first instalment is presented the general cosmo-ontological background of Yagwoia dreaming and the fundamental dialectics of the contra-sexual self-identity of the couple manifest in their oneiric encounters. The second part explores the intrinsic relationship between dreaming and the practice of gambling which in the Yagwoia life-world is a domain of men's homo-social participation in the self-generative life-death flow of the world-body at large. In this aspect, Yagwoia gambling exhibits its true characteristic as an extension and modification of the male-exclusive domain of hunting, warfare, and the ceaseless in-/ex-corporation of the cosmic life-death flow. The third part continues to explore this cosmic dialectics in the context of the death of the woman and its impact on her man through the period of mourning. The study as a whole presents a cosmo-poetic ethnography of the Yagwoia dream life developed through the systematic long-term field-work grounded in phenomenology and psychoanalysis.