To Remember the Faces of the Dead: The Plenitude of Memory in Southwestern New Britain

To Remember the Faces of the Dead: The Plenitude of Memory in Southwestern New Britain
ISBN-10
0299140946
ISBN-13
9780299140946
Category
Social Science
Pages
245
Language
English
Published
1994
Publisher
Univ of Wisconsin Press
Author
Thomas Maschio

Description

As he challenges classical semiological accounts of cultural representation in this ethnography of Melanesian religious phenomenology, Thomas Maschio shows that ritual and poetic performance are about the enactment, expression, and invention of the self. Maschio demonstrates how such emotions as nostalgia, anger, sadness, and grief are creatively transformed during the course of religious performance and expression into a form of cultural memory--one that juxtaposes a pattern of cultural meaning with the emotional feeling of plenitude the Melanesian Rauto call makai. Evoked during initiation, mourning, and agricultural rites, and figuring prominently in Rauto discourse about the self, makai joins personal memory to patterned sets of images and meanings that Westerners would call culture.

Other editions

Similar books