Imacoqwa`s Arrow - On the Biunity of the Sun and Moon in a Papuan Lifeworld

A pathbreaking study of Yagwoia cosmological concepts.

In Imacoqwa’s Arrow, Jadran Mimica draws on decades of field research to bring us a rich ethnographic account of myth and meaning in the lifeworlds of the Yagwoia of Papua New Guinea. He focuses especially on the relations of the sun and the moon in Yagwoia understandings of the universe and their own place within it. This is classic terrain in Melanesian ethnography, but Mimica does much more than add to the archive of anthropological accounts of the significance of the sun and the moon for peoples of this part of the world. With extraordinary rigor and reflexivity, he grounds his understanding of Yagwoia concepts in psychoanalytic and phenomenological methods that afford a radically new and revealing translation of these seminal themes in Melanesian mythology and its poetics. This is a major contribution to the hermeneutics of ethnographic translation and theorization.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
A Note on Orthography
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Yagwoia life-world and its Mythopoeia
Chapter 2. Narrative Accounts
Chapter 3. The Qualities of the Sun^Moon
Chapter 4. The Scabies Spell
Chapter 5. Elucidation of the luno-solar liquidity
Appendix: On Imacoqwa, Imacipu, and Omalyce

About the Author :
Jadran Mimica is a senior lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, Of Humans, Pigs, and Souls: An Essay on the Yagwoia "Womba" Complex, also published by HAU.

Review :
"Imacoqwa’s Arrow offers a major contribution to philosophy, ethnolinguistics, psychoanalysis, comparative religion, and anthropology. A lifetime of ethnographic study of the Yagwoia reveals the generative mythopoetic structures underpinning a full range of human practices. Mimica’s previous analysis of indigenous mathematical systems is expanded to the procreative conjugations of language. Turning away from the formalization of phonology and grammar, Mimica analyses how the sun and the moon, male and female, hot and cold, inhabit the combinatory creative practices of existence. The cosmos and the landscape are shown to be embodied—procreative sexual—realities that inhabit and generate human bodies. The equilibrium, disequilibrium, and combinatory possibilities of sexualized binary realities engender the illnesses and well-being of the body just as much as they engender plenitude, loss, and creation within language and mathematics." “Jadran Mimica is an unorthodox voice in Melanesian anthropology. The specificity of his (psycho)analytical language and the abundance of unconventional Yagwoia terms make Imacoqwa’s Arrow a challenging book. However, it will reward those who are willing to engage with its multilayered ethnographic content and take the time to break with the complacent Western style of ratiocination. By meticulously working his way through the mythopoeia of the Yagwoia ouroboric cosmology, Mimica shows that the usual binary thinking (sun and moon, sky and earth, male and female) is inadequate when it comes to uncovering the un/conscious peculiarities of this Papuan lifeworld.” “Mimica is neither bewildered nor confused by the Yagwoia or their language, having done the lengthy and often tedious fieldwork that underpins his elaborate theoretical excursions. Carefully situating the Yagwoia within their geographic, cultural, and colonial contexts, he invites readers into a layered journey of imagination—both theirs and his own—to explore the sun and moon myths and a healing spell for scabies (a common disfiguring skin disease) that is believed to be caused by emanations from the sun.”