Rituals are analyzed in anthropology as non-personal cultural structures, embedded in the overall behavioral patterns and semantic networks that are typical for a particular cultural group. This article focuses on the Iatmul people of Papua New Guinea and their ritual, naven, which features transvestite behavior and ritualized social roles. The authors discuss the ethno-psychoanalytic approach, which focuses on the psychodynamics of the relationship between two persons, the foreign researcher and his or her local counterpart, that develops in the course of a series of conversations. The narrative shifts to a case study involving Weiss and an Iatmul woman, Magendaua, which took place over three months. Their conversations particularly illuminate the meanings of the naven ritual. The use Magendaua made of the naven can be characterized as a transformation of the tensions in the relationship with her Swiss ethnographic-interlocutor and interpreted as a general feature of the rituals of this type.
Aspects of the Naven Ritual
Conversations with an Iatmul Woman of Papua New Guinea
Florence Weiss and Milan Stanek
Marcus B. Weaver-Hightower
, and social practices that create hegemonic and other masculinities. Connell deftly connected the personal lives of the three men's educations, families, peers, activities, sexuality, emotion ( cathexis ), money, relations to their bodies, and
India Halstead
polymorphous sexuality and in a decline of genital supremacy. The body in its entirety would become an object of cathexis, a thing to be enjoyed—an instrument of pleasure” (1974: 201). By intimating that the body as a whole could be eroticized, Horn and her
In Journal of Bodies, Sexualities, and Masculinities
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2020
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 31–59
Dearly Departed
Communicating with the Dead in the Digital Age
Jennifer Huberman
deceased is not so much experienced as lost, but rather is transformed into an immortal digital presence. “Loss,” he writes, “is neither the focus, nor is letting go the task of cybermourning … cyberspace recharges the libidinal cathexis to the object
Pınar Melis Yelsalı Parmaksız
gender regime can be derived from the three main structures of the general gender order: the gender division of labor, the structure of power, and the structure of cathexis. 5 I use the concept of gender regime to refer to the domain of political power
