‘Stalked by the Malignant Father's Spirit: A Case of Patricide among the Yagwoia (<scp>PNG</scp>)’ by Jadran Mimica
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Jadran Mimica presents the ‘life‐world’ of Yagwoia people of Papua New Guinea as a unique variant of the Jungian Ouroboric archetype, a primal pattern or symbol derived from the ancient Greek ‘tail devourer’ (the serpent that eats its own tail), found in many cultures and individual unconscious phantasies. Treated in terms of ‘ouroboric dialectics’, relations between Yagwoia father and son are hostile, even patricidal, because the son's very existence derives from the father's ‘continuous and irreversible’ transfer to him of his limited supply of vital substance or ‘paternal bone’. Sons replace fathers in ways that fathers may experience as ‘violent loss of … generative bodily core’, a process that Mimica asserts ‘can only be adequately understood through individual‐biographical life‐situations and trajectories’. In bypassing anthropology's classical terrain, or treating Yagwoia life‐ways as contingent upon the ‘ouroboric cosmic Self’ – a ‘wholly pre‐genital gestalt of self‐generation’ – Mimica distorts the role of collective rites of passage and affinal exchange to counter, inhibit, and redirect the primary narcissism intrinsic to human beings. In a small scale society like the Yagwoia, whose survival and well‐being depend upon the integration of nearly all its members, the main ‘work of culture’ is to recruit socially adept adults from each new crop of infants by helping them to overcome – not to repeat or magnify – existential problems of growing up that afflict everyone but that no one can resolve, or even fully understand, on their own. The ‘ouroboric (self‐copulating^eating) phallus’ is one image or ‘mythologeme’ of infantile narcissism. Based upon my own fieldwork among Gimi‐speakers in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, I suggest that such myths serve as templates for rites of exchange intended to thwart the calamity myths envisage – not to facilitate or intensify it.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".