(DOWNLOAD) "Mother's Umbilicus and Father's Spirit: The Dialectics of Selfhood of a Yagwoia Transgendered Person (Essay)" by Oceania " Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Mother's Umbilicus and Father's Spirit: The Dialectics of Selfhood of a Yagwoia Transgendered Person (Essay)
- Author : Oceania
- Release Date : January 01, 2008
- Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 311 KB
Description
PROLOGUE The Yagwoia-Angan people inhabit a rugged mountain region straddling the borderlands of the Eastern Highlands, Morobe, and the Gulf Provinces. Although my focus in this study is on the life-trajectory of a single transgendered Yagwoia, its background is the totality of their life-world which, through his^her (1) predicament, is rendered into a unique configuration and an acute expression of their fundamental values. There is a vital dynamics of every Yagwoia life trajectory, regardless of one's own sexed embodiment, that has to be briefly explicated from the outset since it is present as an unthematised dimension of this person's situation. This is the dynamics of the paternal bone-power and its internalisation, a subject of a long study from which the present paper is an extract. The Yagwoia notion of the paternal bone and its power pertains to the relationship between the father and his children, specifically his sons (see Mimica 2007a: 5-6, 2007b:77-105). 'Bone' condenses the paternal phallic--i.e., semenal-spiritual--power contained, not just in the father's g******s, but in the entire skeleton which in the Yagwoia understanding of the bodily edifice is an arboreal structure and as such, a phallic-ouroboric totality that generates its own animation. Reciprocally, this bodily microcosmos is animated by the macrocosmic metabolism generated by the movements, light and differential temperature of the sun and moon. This means that, like any tree, the bone (metonymically meaning the entire body as a phallic gestalt) is a generative organism whose trunk is rooted in the earth while the branches and leaves extend skyward. In the most expanded terms, the bone, then, is the human embodiment as the microcosmic equivalent of the macrocosmic edifice of the world delimited by the sky and earth (Mimica 2006:33). In terms of this global image (body=tree) the notion of the 'father's bone' means that he is primarily a bigger branch (arm) closer to the trunk (spine = central axis of the body), while his sons at first are the smaller branches (hand-fingers) issuing from it. Later, when they replace him, they--in Yagwoia understanding--extract his bone and, in turn, the sons themselves become incorporated into the branch closer to the trunk from which, qua themselves, issue their own branches (children).