We came from this: Knowledge, memory, painting and play in the initiation rituals of the Sawiyano of Papua New Guinea.

This is a study, based on fieldwork between 1986-88, of the traditional ritual system of the Sawiyano, population 425, a people of the lowland western Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, whose subsistence is based on sago, hunting, and horticulture. Part One, after general and theoretical introduction, addresses Sawiyano ethnography. The Sawiyano traditionally lived in small hillside hamlets among which people moved freely so as to exploit diverse resources and avoid illness or conflict. Noncorporate ambilineal organization with multiple membership, along with a kinship system emphasizing bilateral ties arising from marriage exchange, enable and reinforce this flexibility. Part Two discusses the ritual system, the study's main focus. This centers on a male initiation cult, for which different ritual houses are built, then abandoned after a ritual cycle's completion. The most important ritual house, the yafi-nu, figures in mythic origin. Awoufaiso, the creator, thought the world, and then a yafi-nu, into being. He then thought ancestral men into being from sago spathe paintings in the yafi-nu. When these men and their wives and children refused to eat of a feast he prepared, because as a playful trick he had placed pig-excrement-like mushrooms above the good food, he cursed them with mortality and sexuality, yet enjoined them periodically to re-create the yafi-nu ritual house, and to paint, as he had done, sago spathe paintings within it. Initiation rituals within this house take place in these paintings' presence. Such rituals also involve ordeals like that Awoufaiso attempted: initiates are led to believe bad things will happen to them, then reassured and feasted. Initiates are grown by older men's magical nurturance, and are separated from women while, as transvestite dancers and subsistence producers, initiates appropriate female roles. Frame analysis deriving from Bateson and Goffman is used to understand ritual structure and ordeals, and Batesonian concepts of metaphor are used to understand the Sawiyano concept of the fully initiated as men of great knowledge/mind. Socially, the cooperative corporateness of ritual is atypical of Sawiyano organization, but possibly fostered cooperative alliances in warfare. The final chapter discusses examples in which ritual cooperation failed.Ph.D.Art historyCommunication and the ArtsCultural anthropologyPhilosophy of ReligionPhilosophy, Religion and TheologySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/128879/2/9226908.pd