Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures, tables, and maps
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: the problem and the people
- 2 Between village and bush
- 3 Body and cosmos
- 4 Sex, procreation, and menstruation
- 5 Male and female
- 6 Kin, clan, and connubium
- 7 Feasts of death (i): de-conception and re-conception
- 8 Feasts of death (ii): the sons of Akaisa
- 9 Tikopia and the Trobriands
- 10 Conclusions: indigenous categories, cultural wholes, and historical process
- Appendixes
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures, tables, and maps
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: the problem and the people
- 2 Between village and bush
- 3 Body and cosmos
- 4 Sex, procreation, and menstruation
- 5 Male and female
- 6 Kin, clan, and connubium
- 7 Feasts of death (i): de-conception and re-conception
- 8 Feasts of death (ii): the sons of Akaisa
- 9 Tikopia and the Trobriands
- 10 Conclusions: indigenous categories, cultural wholes, and historical process
- Appendixes
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The discursive examination of the indigenous theory of human sexuality and conception contained in the previous chapter revealed a number of significant distinctions between men and women that are relevant to the systematic conceptualization of gender differences and roles in Bush Mekeo culture. In other words, the relative contributions men and women are considered to make to reproduction correspond with certain other activities and transformative capacities that are likewise differentiated according to gender. The purpose of this chapter will be to describe more fully this indigenous division of labor in terms of the categorical oppositions and analogies that characterize male and female adulthood. My argument proceeds as follows. First, I outline the cyclic ritual alternation of adult females between procreative and contraceptive states according to the opening and closing, respectively, of their bodies. I then describe how adult males, like females, alternate between procreatively opening and contraceptively closing their bodies, except that the female pattern reverses the male pattern in certain critical respects. Next, I show that the bisection of the male/female duality is homologous with the distinctions previously elicited from other contexts of the indigenous culture: village versus bush, body-inside versus body-outside, hot versus cold, sweet versus unsweet, and so on. Finally, I demonstrate that the oscillations of men and women between ritual conditions in village life are given further meaningful expression by the counterposition of two myths taken from the Bush Mekeo corpus.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Quadripartite StructuresCategories, Relations and Homologies in Bush Mekeo Culture, pp. 73 - 99Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1985