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On the Bones of the Serpent Debbora Battaglia

On the Bones of the Serpent By Debbora Battaglia

On the Bones of the Serpent by Debbora Battaglia


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On the Bones of the Serpent Summary

On the Bones of the Serpent by Debbora Battaglia

Sabarl island-created, in myth, from the bones of a serpent-is a coral atoll in the Louisiade archipelago of Papua New Guinea. The Sabarl speak of themselves as true islanders: persons separated from the means of both physical and social survival. The Sabarl struggle for continuity-of the physical and social person and of social relations, of cultureal values, of paternal influence in a matrilineal society-is the subject of Debbora Battaglia's sensitive ethnography of loss and reconstruction: the first major work on cultural responses to mortality in the southern Massim culture area and an important contribution to studies of personhood in Melanesia.

The creative focus of Sabarl cultural life is a series of mortuary feasts and rituals known as segaiya. In assembling and disassembling commemorative food and objects in segaiya exchanges, Sabarl also assemble and disassemble the critical social relations such objects stand for. These commemorative acts create a collective memory yet also a collective experience of forgetting social bonds that are of no future use to the living. Sabarl anticipate this disaggregation in patterns of everyday life, which reveal the importance of categorical distinctions mapped in beliefs about the physical and metaphysical person.

Using remembrance and forgetting as an analytic lens, Battaglia is able to ask questions critical to understanding Melanesian social process. One of the new ethnographies addressing the limits of ethnographic representation and the fragmented nature of knowledge from an indigenous perspective, her finely wrought study explores the dynamics of cultural practices in which decontruction is integral to construction, allowing a new perspective on the ephermeral nature of sociality in Melanesia and new insight into the efficacy of cultural images more generally.

Additional information

CIN0226038890VG
9780226038896
0226038890
On the Bones of the Serpent by Debbora Battaglia
Used - Very Good
Paperback
The University of Chicago Press
1990-03-01
248
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in very good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

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