Seeking the Hidden in Female and Secret Images: Learning About Culture as Spiritual Experience

Abstract

This paper describes a spiritual process of learning the most powerful sort of cultural knowledge. This learning is based on creative experience of hidden and feminized images. I describe two field research experiences which illustrate the feminine way of learning meanings, and the differences between hidden and secret, experiential and objective meanings. In the first of these accounts, I learned about the meaning of women's face tattoos by becoming tattooed myself. In the second, I learned what happens at one of the most powerful rituals among the Barok of New Ireland, PNG, by participating in, and ruining, an incestuous "night dance." In describing these rituals, I focus on three issues: the necessity to quietly and fully experience meanings through creating them; the cultural imperatives to do things in the way that women do; and the cultural imperative to do incest. The Barok show that these activities destroy social meaning and create "hidden" or "spiritual power" (lolos). Barok understand that this way of creating lolos is necessary for true learning and is essential to the human process of spiritual empowerment.