Kingston Paul S., 1998, Focal images, transformed memories: The poetics of life and death in Siar, New Ireland, Papua New Guinea
Item
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Full designation (Familyname Name, date, title)
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Kingston Paul S., 1998, Focal images, transformed memories: The poetics of life and death in Siar, New Ireland, Papua New Guinea
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Creator
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Sean P. Kingston
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Date
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sept 1998
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Title
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Focal images, transformed memories: The poetics of life and death in Siar, New Ireland, Papua New Guinea
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Abstract
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In the Siar area of New Ireland, imagery and memory are particularly important to socio-cultural reproduction. Memories are elevated to a central role in the ongoing and mutually forming interrelationship of persons and their social and material milieu. Visual images are the prime instrument for manipulating memory and reformulating relationally conceived personhood in life-cycle rites. The thesis has three divisions: 1) examines why imagery and memory are important in Siar, and how these complex concepts might be fitted into social theory. 2) describes the local ecology of forms which memorial imagery contribute to. This is done first in the social realm, and then in terms of material and spatial structures. The interlinkage of cognitive, social and material aspects of these phenomena are highlighted and the Melanesian relational conception of them likened to wave theory. 3) is an ethnography of the transformational life-cycle rites. First, it examines birth and female initiation, particularly the nature of the gendered contributions to children and menstruation. Linkages between these processes of imagining persons and of those involved in the two part process of 'forgetting' them in mortuary ritual are highlighted. Then the funerary series itself is analysed. Primary rites are shown to involve the identification of mourning taboos with debt and painful remembrance. Exchanges and exchange good effigies are used in consolidating that debt\remembrance and transforming it into a positive relationship with the ritual host. Secondary rites entail the use of both masking and feasting to transforming the host into an all powerful, dead spirit, who finally incorporates the identity of the deceased into clan masks by removing the last material reminders of their lives to the spiritual realm. The thesis concludes by considering the life-cycle as a formal and memorial cycle which oscillates between humans remembered as spirits and spirits remembered as humans.
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Alternative Title
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ISBN: 9781339487137
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Language
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English
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Subject
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(UMI)AAI10014729
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Papua New Guinea
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Social sciences
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Spatial Coverage
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England
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number of pages
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394
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short title
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Focal images, transformed memories
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Source
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ProQuest
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Rights
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Database copyright ProQuest LLC; ProQuest does not claim copyright in the individual underlying works.