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Review Essay on Of Humans, Pigs, and Souls. An Essay on the Yagwoia Womba Complex . By Jadran Mimica. Chicago: Hau Books. 2020. p. xvii + 160, Price: US$17.96

2022; Wiley; Volume: 92; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/ocea.5343

1834-4461

Pierre Lemonnier,

Indigenous Studies and Ecology

In addition to his warm, unforgettable hospitality, I have three salient memories of my meeting with Jadran Mimica on my way to Ankave country in 1985: his perfect command of an Anga language; an endless discussion of G. Devereux's argument on the difficulty of combining psychology and sociology in the analysis of the same phenomenon; and the (very worried) look of the Baruya who had helped me carry my gear whenever our shared enthusiasm led us to shout together. He had also told me something like ‘You will realize the importance of the maternal uncle among the Ankave’. Decades later, the ingredients of that conversation lie at the heart of his latest book. Like each of his publications, Of Humans, Pigs, and Souls is a compelling and informed essay. This time, Mimica explores the womba complex, ‘a malignant condition of the soul’ unique to some Yagwoia of PNG who experience cannibalistic inclinations towards other human beings in dreams or waking visions. I have not lost the enthusiasm engendered by our earlier exchange. On the one hand, the womba are the local version of the cannibalistic ombi' humanoids of the Yagwoia's Ankave neighbours. And on the other hand, every other paragraph of this book has brought Ankave or Baruya images or narratives to my mind, as well as meaningful contrasts. In short, the abundance and precision of the ethnography, the fine-grained analysis of womba cases and the author's comprehensive reference to other forms of invisible attacks among other Anga people launch the anthropological comparison. This is so thorough that, lacking any specific competence to comment in detail on the phenomenological and psychoanalytical analysis of the womba complex proposed by the author, I am going to take the liberty of merely expanding the comparisons proposed in the book. After taking refuge for several decades among the Ankave in the first part of the 20th century and hearing about the cannibalistic ombi' monsters feared by their hosts, some Yagwoia began to dream or have visions of womba offering them pork flesh – quickly identified as human flesh. But while the Ankave's ombi' are relatives or neighbours suspected of collectively feasting on the corpses of those they have killed in an invisible attack, womba persons are a wicked version of one's own soul acting outside of its body and seen only in the dreams or visions of some individuals. These unfortunate persons are quick to speak of their fear of becoming womba themselves and to seek shamanic treatment, which is effective if the affected person really wants to escape his or her cannibal fate. Faced with the damage caused by a fully-fledged womba person, a shaman is helpless. Mimica brings together the cultural background of the womba complex by exposing several aspects of the Yagwoia world. Firstly, the fear of becoming a womba devourer of the flesh of others and the necrophilia it illustrates are part of a vision of the world and practices nourished by a cultural imagery centred on the ‘ouroboros’, the Jungian image of a snake biting its own tail. In this short book the author refers to the set of works supporting this interpretation, relevant elements of which I shall quote rather than risking a paraphrase. The Yagwoia cosmos is a ‘self-created and self-generating macrocosmic androgynous’ that embeds the human microcosmos that is every human being. This goes hand in hand with a ‘ceaseless synergetic interflow of life^death between the macrocosmic world-body and the human microcosmic bodies’ that are part of this cosmos (where ^ stands for a ‘simultaneous relation of conjunction and disjunction’). The intrinsically substantial dimension of the soul is ‘the vital thermal-breath animating energy, in the sense of a generative motility-activity, immanent in the body’. This dimension makes the soul a key-element of that ‘ouroboric cultural imagery’ according to which the vital flows between humans participate in the wider circulation of life and death within the cosmos. As a ‘matrixial structuration’ of that flow, kinship implies a circulation of substances according to a logic of devouring/incorporating which results in a cannibalistic desire on the part of mothers for their children, as well as the risk of destruction of the children by their maternal uncle in the event he has not received the payments owed him because of life substances he has given his nephews. From this incessant flow also stems the necrophagous, endo-cannibalistic dimension of former funeral practices – consumption by the ‘deceased's sister, her small children and other female relatives and their children’ of (cooked) vegetables soaked in cadaveric fluids. Fundamentally the womba complex is part of the ‘tacit and diffuse cannibalistic dynamics that permeate the Yagwoia lifeworld’, while ‘the will to destruction and concomitant murderousness reign supreme within the cosmo-ontological determinants of the Yagwoia lifeworld and its cultural imaginary’. Finally ‘womba is not an “evil” capacity of the soul but an extreme development of the appetitive passion of the soul pivoting on its generative oral nucleus. It clearly relates to Eating, the nuclear oral-cannibalistic constellation of matrifiliation at the core of the Yagwoia kinship self and its life^death circuity’. These considerations on the insertion of the womba complex in the specifically Yagwoia context are preceded by two chapters devoted to what makes the world of the womba tangible, i.e., the words that tell of their ways, and the personal experience of those who have encountered them or suspected them in dreams. Several chapters then contrast the womba complex with other forms of bodily abuse and witchcraft in PNG, including in a world that has become Christian (in its own way). I shall comment mainly on the chapter in which Mimica details the presence among other Anga of an imaginary and practices roughly reminiscent of the womba: these Anga people include the Menya-speaking Pataye, and the Ankave-speaking Yaqauwye (who live in the Suowi valley, directly south of the Yagwoia) and the Baruya, two groups where I investigated similar issues (Lemonnier 2006). The author gives the Yagwoia's own descriptions of the Ankave's ombi' and their ways of acting, which he resituates with respect to my own ethnography, and proposes an interpretation of the place of the ombi' in the Ankave world I can only agree with: the ombi's action is not involuntary and ‘the Ankave ombi’ carry the burden of dissimulation of the fundamental source of the societal cannibalistic desire, which is, as their myths testify, the cannibalistic maternal core of the kinship circuit of life^death that generates and sustains their social body'. The author also mentions several features attributed to the ombi' by the Yagwoia which are unknown to the Ankave (at least to their ethnologists). These he comments on to underline other specificities of the womba complex. The aspects of the ombi' emphasized by the Yagwoia, but unknown to the Ankave, are the presence of a third hand, stolen from a victim, which animates a knife decorated with a European textile ribbon, and the existence of a hierarchy among ombi', whose leaders wear a particular uniform resembling the garb of scientists and doctors. Mimica sees in these details the imaginary attribution to ombi' of characteristics of the medical world observed here and there by the Yagwoia, as well as an interpretation of a variety of witch-hunters (‘bos sanguma’, cannibal-witch hunters) briefly present among the Ankave in the 1980s who claimed to unmask ombi'. The author emphasizes several aspects of Baruya shamanism, among which is the presence of a collective of shamans and their harbouring cannibal spirit familiars active in warfare which may also attack fellow Baruya. Mimica notes that this ‘variant of womba malignancy’ limited to characters whose main functions are positive (healing and war) explains why these ambiguous specialists are never executed. These pieces of the puzzle, analysed by the author, vary and combine among the Anga. I propose that others can be added and, also, that the local combinations present regularities which can be commented on, if not explained. I will start by refining the Ankave picture. There is nothing to change in the author's account of what P. Bonnemère or myself have written about the ombi' (sometimes written as ombo', which sounds more plausibly Ankave to a French ear). I will merely point out some clarifications made here and there in the book I have written about them, which is more complete than the sources we published in English (Lemonnier 2006). Firstly, the similarities between the manners of the womba and those of the Ankave evil figures are remarkable: devouring the victim's organs, including its liver; attraction to rotten things; attacks on corpses during funeral wakes. In accordance with what Mimica explained to me in 1985, the Yagwoia version also shares the inalienable belonging to one's maternal parents of the vital substance that animates a person, as well as the curse that a maternal uncle places on his nephews and nieces if he does not receive sufficient compensation (game) at the time of their birth. The differences are nevertheless notable. Firstly an ombi' is not a person seen in a dream; it may be any neighbour or relative you come across without knowing who you are dealing with (although maternal relatives are particularly feared). Secondly an ombi' does not actually feed on the organs of its living victim, it deteriorates them, cuts them (notably the liver and blood vessels) to kill the person then feasting on its corpse with its cannibal fellows. It is ombi' attacks, not those of the spirits of the dead, that are responsible for most diseases, and if the Yagwoia see the spirits of the maternal dead as particularly dangerous, for the Ankave it is any spirit of a recently deceased person that nibbles on someone's organs. Maternal kin are reputed to be especially numerous among the ombi' who feast collectively on a corpse. Another important difference is that, unlike a potential womba, who makes himself known but is nearly killed in the form of a pig, says the author, the ombi' are by definition beings who hide; they were actually killed – and their bodies torn to pieces – when one was suspected, in this case a woman, because in practice women are the ones who were killed (including, to my knowledge, an instance at the turn of the 1990s). Also, unlike a shaman (kwora', named after the objects they extract from the bodies of the patients) whose auxiliary spirit pidze'menaa' detaches itself to act in the unseen world, an ombi' does not have an extra cannibal soul: his own ordinary spirit is evil by nature and the ombi' person acts of his or her own free will. An ombi' is the child of an ombi' woman, shown to other ombi', who pass it from hand to hand as a foetus that the mother has temporarily taken out of her womb during a cannibalistic meeting deep in the forest. If she wishes her unborn child to become a shaman, she simply places the foetus in a bird's nest while she goes out to feast, which clearly indicates an ambiguity surrounding the person of the shaman. Here I must point out that in addition to their ability to change into animals (notably into fireflies), one of the characteristics of the ombi' is their dismembering while travelling from one place to another. Sometimes an ombi' surprised by humans does not have time to reassemble itself properly – our friends were very worried one day when we opened an egg containing a three-legged embryo (‘ombi!’). One suspects that the third hand noticed by the Yagwoia may refer to this characteristic of the ombi' that served as their model. But the main difference between womba and ombi' is that the latter provided the Ankave with the drums they use night after night as they forever drive away the spirits of the recently dead to the world of the ombi'. While they turn in an endless circle in our world, the ombi' do the same in their own world when they collectively consume a corpse. Along with male initiations, this mortuary ritual is one of the two main institutions of the Ankave, one whose materiality brings together the particulars of the ombi's presence and wordlessly says: ‘those maternal loving kin who gave me life are also cannibalistic monsters who will end up eating my body’ (Lemonnier 2012:63–76). At these gatherings where the only people recognized are said to be red-eyed maternal relatives, the corpse is laid out on a tapa bed and cut up with a bamboo knife wound in a tapa or red cloth reminiscent of the knife mentioned by the Yagwoia, but also of the one used by the Baruya to cut up the enemy warriors they cannibalized (Godelier 1986:106 and my own ethnography). Some Baruya were once victims of the cannibalistic practices of the Yagwoia, but it is for their shamans' (kulaka) participation in a kind of ‘spiritual warfare’ that Mimica extends his comparison to them, as well as to note that a shaman's cannibal entity may turn against his own people, which would make it a kind of womba. This leads me to detail several aspects of Baruya shamanism (Lory 1981–1982). First the fear that a shaman's familiar spirit may escape his control is present mainly at the time of the shamanic initiation of men and women (kulakita), where greatest precautions are taken because the new apprentices are not necessarily able to control their powers. A kulaka may sometimes attack his own people, but the shamans' main activity is to extract diseases from the bodies of the sick and send them to the enemy's territory, to stand guard at the Baruya borders, and to devour the liver of enemy shamans. Their coven of sorts has nothing to do with that of the ombi': the Baruya shamans constitute a perceived collective, that of specialists who heal and wage magical war, but their meeting only lasts for the duration of their initiation. This is a far cry from the case of the ombi' who collectively consume bodies during covens that, in passing, are extraordinarily reminiscent of those of European witches, also mentioned by Mimica, a similarity I have explored as a universally possible production of the human mind rather than as a strictly historical phenomenon (Lemonnier 2006:353–91). A final set of relevant actions on the part of Baruya shamans is their irreplaceable roles in male initiations. At this time, they fabricate a variety of devices, notably the ‘traps’ where the spirits of the novices gather to be put in contact with the power of the Sun, and they constantly watch over the ceremonial sites to prevent magical attacks by enemies. Along with their participation in daytime warfare (they know how to enchant bows and shields and help warriors, for example, by making them invisible), this is one of the major differences between the Baruya and the Ankave. But contexts other than shamanism are undoubtedly part of the ‘regional permutations’ that allow Mimica to emphasize the specificity of the womba (or ombi') complex. Both Mimica's book and the preceding remarks show the extent of the elements to consider for identifying the specificities of a phenomenon such as the presence of cannibal entities acting against their own group. In a non-exhaustive list, and without prioritizing the questions, we need to ask: who are these humans (witch-like beings, shamans, spirits of the dead, pseudo-humans) and what is the nature of the collective they form? To the womba, ombi' and Baruya shamans can therefore be added: the ‘faceless and nameless pool of ghosts, the dreaded cannibalistic shades of Sambia’, whose habits are reminiscent of those of the ombi' (Herdt 1989:110); the great dead warriors (ikeiaaru) who guard the Sambia forests (Herdt 1981:86, 1989:111); or the Ankave pisingen awo', those humanoid cannibals who attacked hunters in a remote past. Other questions to be put: are the targets of the attacks alive or dead?; are the attackers themselves living beings or spirits of the dead?; do they consume rotten human flesh (womba, ombi'), flesh that is fresh and raw (liver of Baruya enemies) or flesh that is fresh and then cooked (flesh of enemies of the Yagwoia or Baruya)?; are any cannibalistic entities acquired (Baruya shaman) or inherited (ombi')?; can these entities get out of the control of their human host? and so on. The comparison between the Baruya and Ankave cases shows that, in one limited case at least, the permutations can be demonstrated. Among the Baruya, cannibalism is (was) practiced by warriors and certain shamans, the gelekulaka who had captured the spirit of the recently dead (gelaye). As mentioned above, they participate in warfare and in male initiations, during which they receive the familiar spirits they will later learn to use during the kulakita. The bodies of the dead were laid on platforms or buried and not harmed by any living or dead being. The Baruya ancient dead did not form a collective, but watched individually over the hunting territories and executed anyone whose face they saw for the first time on their land. Sometimes eager for revenge, sometimes eager to lure their loved ones into the afterlife, the Baruya spirits of the recently dead attack humans, cutting up and often devouring their innards, especially their livers and hearts, just like the Ankave spirits; but that is the only thing the two sets of representations and practices have in common. For the Ankave, the cannibals are, as we know, the ombi', which I interpret as the collective of their ancient dead, filled with the maternal substance recovered from the decaying corpses. People are sometimes nibbled from the inside by the recently dead who prowl the village, and these spirits ‘leave traces like that of a mouse on a sweet potato’ (I was told) on their innards, whereas an ombi' would cut an organ or take pieces away. The humanoid beings guarding the forests have no spiritual or physical connection to humans. As for the shamans who try to repair the damages caused by the ombi', they are not initiated and do not receive their powers during male rituals; these are received from a relative, which makes a notable difference with the Baruya (or Sambia) shamans. They have no cannibal entity within them, do not take part in magical warfare and play no role whatsoever in male initiations. The Ankave say that, in the past, invisible warfare was waged by two specialists: the kwi'ye' were said to dull the enemies on the eve of a fight and make them ‘soft as bananas'; while the toerwa' sped to their enemies in the form of an insect and then killed them in advance by eating their liver with their teeth. It is worth noting that a kwi'ye' or a toerwa drew his magical strength from his father when men frightened the latter's corpse on the way to its funeral platform. These two characters thus have (had) in them something of a dead person. In this respect, they are not different from a kwora' shaman, who receives his last pidze'menaa' helpers from his mentor when the latter leaves this world. It is also said that toerwa' used to eat the corpses of enemies killed in battle – at least two or three centuries ago when the Ankave still lived among the Kapau, an Anga group to the west of their own territory. In other words, some exceptional Ankave warriors behaved exactly like both Baruya shamans and ordinary fighters, whereas Ankave shamans had no connection with war, neither by participating in it or by sending diseases to the enemy, nor by participating in the making of warriors during the initiations. As for the Ankave dead, absorbed by the eternal and faceless ombi' collective, they had no business in the forest, where we already know that another band, entirely foreign to humans, the pisingen awo', kept watch. Finally, it should be noted that the Ankave make the connection between the various beings associated with non-human entities, cannibal or not. According to them, the first man to appear on the surface of the Earth also ‘put into the world’ the fighting spirits kwora' and kwi'ye' as well as the ombi'. At the same time, this same primordial being instituted male initiations while distributing the languages and body decorations of each group, some of whom – the Yagwoia, the Pateye of Menyamya or the Kapau, where known by the Ankave for cannibalizing their enemies in pre-contact times. In other words, by affirming the proximity and ambiguous similarities of these characters, the Ankave themselves also link war, illness and shamanism in their own way, at the same time underscoring the existence of a series of permutations at the heart of the socio-cultural ensemble they are aware of forming with their neighbours ‘who have the same body decorations’, those known to anthropologists as Anga. While incomplete, the above set of examples showing cannibal entities or functions being sometimes added, sometimes subtracted from the ontology of various beings according to the contexts in which they occur confirms the interest of ‘exploring the womba complex in its local cultural-existential determinations and its regional permutations in relation to shamanism’, as Mimica does. How then does this combination of modalities and contexts of aggression change shape and vary with the contrasted situations illustrated by the myths of origin of the cosmos and of humans, the nature of vital substances (blood or semen), or the scenario and foundations of male initiations, to mention only the most central and highly variable aspects of Anga cultures embedded in local life-worlds and individual psycho-dynamics? This dense little book answers some of these questions while providing an update on some of the most original anthropological thinking, a mine of meticulous ethnographic information and a relevant demonstration of what can be achieved through a combination of fine-grained anthropology with Mimica's own ‘existential-phenomenological and psychoanalytic’ approach.