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Article Excerpt
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 genitals, 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).
Daughters too are the branch-issues, but their destiny is to be like the leaves (fingernails) that detach from the trunk because they marry outside of their own paternal 'trunk' (latice group) and enable other trunks and their branches to internally reproduce themselves, i.e., that the fathers become replaced by their progeny of which the sons continue the process of (endo-) generation of the trunk via the incorporation into its branches which in turn are being incorporated into the trunk. The process is one of self-reciprocal incorporation, i.e., ouroboric (Mimica 1991, 2006). Moreover, every part of this self-totalising totality is identical to the whole (i.e., is hologramic) concretely imagined as a tree closed in on itself, i.e., its branches and roots intertwining. This is the archetypal, cosmic tree of life whose structural determination is ouroboric because, like the serpent that eats its own tail, this tree grows in-through-and-out-of-itself, ad infinitum. Thus, the trunk = branches = leaves = whole tree = trunk = roots = branches =and-so-on. Apart from their cosmology and its diverse forms of actualisation, this scheme is fully objectified in the Yagwoia naming system (Mimica 1988, 1991).
Finally, the reality of the soul and spirit that this notion encapsulates is best conveyed through a notion of generative energy whose macrocosmic source are the sun and moon replicated in the human body by the differential flow and interchange of blood and semenal (bone-marrow) flow in the blood-ropes (veins, arteries) and skeletal passages which in Yagwoia understanding comprise a system of intra-bodily channels. Accordingly, the notion of the 'extraction-incorporation of the father's bone' entails also the incorporation of the paternal spirit-power (energy). (2) Now, Ulaqayi, as I will call the protagonist of this ethnography, exemplifies a person who, overtly at least, from his birth onward has never desired to seize the phallic bone-power from his father, let alone to wrench it out of him as Yagwoia boys, in the course of their young life, are expected to accomplish in experientially diverse ways. Needless to say, he wasn't nose-pierced either.
IN THE SEMBLANCE OF HIS SOUL
Ulaqayi was born with the male body but in his self-identity and every mode of countenance he is a woman. Thus he is a kwol-aapale (man-woman), the only one of his kind in the living memory of the Yagwoia. (3) I knew nothing specifically about him (4) before I first saw him (in December 1995) with a group of women squatted at my hut-door. His age would have been 18-23. I noticed an incongruity. His countenance was feminine in every detail but his face was discernibly male, full of thin hair that seemed to have never been shaved. His voice was male and his speech mannerism was without any noticeably accentuated feminine modulation. Nevertheless, he reverberated with feminine luminance. Then a week or so later a pell-mell fight broke out among a group of boys and young men during a card-game which created a huge racket and enticed the people to run down from all sides to see what was happening. Again, there he was standing among women and watching the melee from some distance. I had already learned that he was a boy who knew no other behaviour (hyiuwye) (5) but that of woman. People from all sides of the Yagwoia lands (territorial groups) know of this boy who became aapalo-qwapa (6) (like-a-woman), behaves like one, and does everything and exclusively what only women do. This is exactly how he was described to me time and again: that everything about his behaviour and activity is what women--not men--do. The emphasis is on the characteristic female behavioural repertoire (hyiuwye), which has impressed upon his kune umpne (thought-soul component) from the earliest childhood and that is the reason why he became (imanatenye) and does everything like a woman. In Yagwoia understanding, his womanliness is due to the semblance of the generic woman which encapsulates the characteristic behavioural concentrate (hyiuwye) and that is what Ulaqayi's soul took into his self. In that determination he is as his soul makes him to be. It is precisely because the soul develops through differentiation and develops its characteristics and powers by being imprinted by semblances (often in visionary experiences) that this hyiuwye complex is often rendered into Tok Pisin as sain (shine), sta (star), piksa (picture) all of which emphasise that the quality of the critical experience is light and luminosity. By the same token, it points to the ideal nature of such. semblances (see Mimica 2003a, 2006). Thus, Ulaqayi's soul took into him the 'shine' of all women (their generic characteristics).
He not only refuses to but cannot do men's activities, including the most basic ones such as climbing up a tree. He also doesn't associate with men as a man, no matter how much they have coaxed, begged and pressured him to do that. (7) But as a man-woman he engages within a rather narrower range of interaction than ordinary women precisely because no man would want to take him as his woman (i.e. wife) for the simple reason that he cannot bear a child. As one younger man said, no matter how good he is in doing hard work, and Ulaqayi excels in this domain better than any regular woman, in so far as you would want him as your woman (i.e. wife) you would lose money. Why? He has no place for making a baby. When I asked some men and a young woman about what Ulaqayi's future prospects as a woman were, they agreed that with him there is no itaale (replacement, i.e. child). This was his fundamental deficiency. From 1995 until 2000, when his still lingering adolescent youthfulness was transforming into a full bodily maturity, I got to know and watch Ulaqayi reaching the limits of his viability as a man-woman in a life-world like the Yagwoia. (8)
THE BIRTH MATRIX: HIS MOTHER'S ACCOUNT
His father (Lamwa) had two wives: the first bore him four sons and three daughters, the second two sons and four daughters. Ulaqayi was the second wife's penultimate child and her second son. All tour sisters eventually got married but their bride-price was 'eaten' by the elder brother, the alimentary fact that, as we shall see, eventually brought their younger man-woman brother into a pitiful quandary. According to his mother's account, at the time of delivery he 'came with a tail' (hveuwye-pupu nimotaqali), that is, he had a penis. The reduplicated female gender marker (-pupu) (9) generates an intricate metaphorical tension. In her phrasing the penis is imaged as a tail while the female gender-suffix--qua femaleness--indicates its smallness and simultaneously both feminises and projects it as umbilicus, to which she refers in the next statement solely as 'his little (ff)-one' (kiGa'/t/nye pupu). This particular underspecification is motivated by the fact that she was talking in the presence of two men about child-birth which invokes birth blood. By omitting peyule (umbilical cord) she minimised the explicitness of the thematic context. If it wasn't for Qang who immediately asked her if she meant the umbilicus I would have assumed that she was referring to the 'tail'.
1. hyeuwye-pupu = tail-ff (small = penis)
2. kiGa'/t/nye-pupu = 3S-Poss (his)-ff (little one = umbilicus)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
She said that having cut it she put it away with the intention of depositing it in the forest, i.e. in a tree or inside a water-fall. But when she wanted to do so the cut-off umbilicus cord had vanished. She stated that although he was born with the 'tail' (= penis), the disappearance of his umbilicus translated into the boy becoming woman-like (aapala-qwapapu). Although in her account this was stated as a causal relationship, one should rather understand that the events concerning the umbilicus at birth became intelligible when the boy grew up and it transpired that he was like-a-woman.
Although there was no explication, the detail of the missing umbilicus has in the Yagwoia understanding a sense of a foreboding whose evident actualisation is Ulaqayi's womanliness. From the different but complementary vantage point, of the intelligence of his mother's un/conscious, (10) the source of her remarkable construction, I must refer to the genuine ambiguity of the Yagwoia archetypal imago of the phallo-umbilicus (11) which in this particular instance is rendered through the pregnant condensation of tail=umbilicus. It both displaces and retains the reference to the external penis, Ulaqayi's manifest genital maleness. In the event of his birth, however, the severance of the umbilicus went somewhat awry; his mother cut it and displaced it, as it were, since this pre-natal connection between this boy and his mother disappeared along with his maleness. To put it slightly differently: the umbilicus had gone but the maternal connection reappeared incarnated in full guise as her son's exclusive female self-identity. Thus, although the penis lost its significance in Ulaqayi's psycho-sexual development from its inception, the (maternal) phallus (12) took possession of her son's soul in toto. Indeed, it can be said that for the rest of his life, Ulaqayi's masculinity qua the penis remained exactly as his mother named and displaced it, just a 'little-tail-she'. I will take up further issues of this phallic dialectics of castration in Ulaqayi's sexual identity at a later stage.
HIS SELF-ACCOUNT: OF MATERNAL DOMESTICITY AND PORCINE FECUNDITY
In his own self-account Ulaqayi gave a most definitive formulation as to how and when he realised that he was a woman rather than a man. In his wording, the period in which his critical experience unfolded follows immediately after he 'came from his mother's net bag' (womb) which is to be understood as demarcating the early years of childhood. During that period, as it is the case with Yagwoia children of both sexes, he was primarily in the orbit of his mother's bodily presence and care. He was thus participating in the milieu of women's daily domestic chores and work around the house, in the garden, and in the pandanus groves distributed throughout the fringe-forest zone. This is a rhythmic flow of diverse activities involving intense engagement with earthly, vegetal, and animal substances all of which transmute into edible foodstuff and, most significantly through pigs, into wealth. The pigs copulate, multiply, and translate into shells and money, and furthermore, enable for humans to obtain more wealth and all sorts of goods, and through brideprice they become conjoined in sex, make babies, and every so often they tear each other apart on the account of all these things--principally wealth and sex. Here, in the facticity of demanding work one experiences oneself as a potent source of and the conduit for the generativity of the world substance and its diverse life-forms. Many of these literally teed back into the human bodily self. The maternal sphere of daily domestic work, then, is driven by and intensely infused with the fundamental libidinal-appetitive desires and demands. Here, the desire and appetitive cravings of adults converge with the desires and demands of babies and children, which, however, are more narrowly and directly focussed on the maternal bodily provisioning.
This realm centred upon and vitally sustained by women's work generates and sustains their self-valuation and self-esteem. It is primarily in the activity of food preparation, planting, digging, peeling of tubers, cooking in earth ovens and/or open fire, pig growing, firewood fetching, cleaning, and so on, that Yagwoia children come to experience and appreciate the way their mothers, as valuing and judgmental adults, apprise each other, their husbands, and most fundamentally, sustain and articulate their self-esteem and narcissistic self-modulation. Here the child comes to sense that his/her mother is valued, judged, and praised by others (eg. co-wives or more distant people) as desirable, good, hard-working, or lazy, bad, good-for-nothing, etc. She lives herself within an intersubjective field of affectivity and evaluations in which she just as much gauges, endears, praises, and disparages others as they do it to her. By the same token, she continuously upholds the value of herself, her children, and her own kin. This, then, is the interhuman field of the primary matrix of incorporative-identificatory dynamics through which the egoic self of infancy experiences and shapes his/her self mediated by the working and feeding adult women: the mothers, father's sisters, grandmothers, sisters. And amidst these, there are brothers, fathers, grandfathers, maternal uncles and every other kind of men.
Such is the Yagwoia domestic milieu within which humanness is articulated through the interaction with the worked-upon earth substance and life-forms. Pigs, dogs, and game are of particular importance and in that order. Dogs intrinsically relate to hunting and game. In this regard, long before a child, especially male, will be able to effectively relate to a dog as a fellow hunter, notwithstanding such childhood practices as lizard and rat catching, taking part in pig raising is an activity in which every child can participate more akin to an adult. And precisely as such s/he can experience the power of their own bodily work and-indeed--generativity, more so than in the case of such activity as helping the mother to plant new tubers or digging them out for daily feed. This is the critical context in which Ulaqayi's self-recognition had emerged and crystallised.
Thus, in his sell-account he said that while still a young child (probably 5-8 years old) he was given two piglets to raise. I am choosing this verbal phrasing because it most acutely expresses the character of involvement with pigs. One feeds them in order to grow them, and when they have become big s/he can delight not just in their size but also, when the sows have a litter, in the multiplicity of the squealing and suckling piglets. They are the concrete produce of pig owner's generative activity. The two piglets that Ulaqayi grew became big and produced piglets. Eventually his two sows ended up being killed and eaten which is the proper destiny of all pigs. By being eaten they would have also been transmuted into shells. But what impressed the child Ulaqayi so profoundly was exactly this fact that his two piglets grew up through his endeavour and gave birth to baby piglets. With this a dim realisation began to insinuate itself namely that he had effectively accomplished the same feat as adult women. This porcine plenitude came into being, as he put it, 'through my hand right-here' (ngalye hwolye qapatepa namalda), yet he was only a little child.
Then the experience was repeated. He got another piglet which he eagerly took into his care and before long it also grew up, had a litter, and finally was killed. Feeding, growing, pregnancy, squealing plenitude of piglets, and death caused by insatiable human appetite--the porcine existential cycle is short and definite. It would also enable for a child to feel a tacit sense of omnipotent mastery of life-and-death of the creatures grown in entirety by and, as it were, out of his hand. Ulaqayi used the same image with regard to his other generative activity--garden work, fire-wood fetching, and just about every other female work that he devoted himself to. He surmised that having accomplished all this work a thought came to him that he was not a boy but a girl. (13) Here it should be emphasised that for the Yagwoia, thinking is the activity of one's thought-soul. B acts upon oneself rather than the ego being the agency that directly does the thinking. What is implicit here is that Ulaqayi's soul was affected by the woman's characteristic hviuwye which now dawns (14) upon him in an act of self-revelation. He reiterated it by saying that he thereby realised that he was not a man but a woman. (15) The indubitable grounds of his self-recognition were the pigs that he grew and which, reciprocally, actualised and affirmed his female generativity, which is the motive force of his self-identification and self-certitude. In another account of the same experience he said that he himself grew up with the pigs he grew.
This is the centrepiece of Ulaqayi's self-account from which he didn't deviate. When I asked him again some four years after the first account how he realised that he was a woman, he referred to the previous recording reiterating in the process the experience of pig-raising.
Several comments are in order. Overtly the maternal presence in this self elaboration is not mentioned, apart from the reference to his origination from 'my mother's net-bag' (16) which posits his-becoming-woman in the period of early childhood. Furthermore, there is no overt indication of who gave him the piglets or whether his mother or other people praised him in his early efforts at pig raising and his prolific success. The stress is on all-by-himself and his handiwork. This singular Yagwoia image of the procreative hand confers upon his self-centeredness a phallic determination that characterises the generative intra-bodily powers of adults (male and female). This self-picturing just as much appositely conveys the narcissistic strength of his adult egoity as it echoes the kind of intense libidinal projection that must have enveloped him when he, as a little boy, in the wake of his pigs' first litter, became smitten by the power of his procreativity.
Although not overtly verbalised, his own choice of this experience as the reason for becoming a woman indicates quite clearly that the sows, which he grew, and their babies had the significance of being his progeny, and reciprocally, that he grew up through them. To be sure, this is nothing more but an intensification of the actual fact that the owners, especially when they themselves grow their pigs, are their parents. Furthermore, pigs (and dogs) bear the patri-names (17) of their owners signifying that they as such are of the same bone-identity as their owners. In this regard, Ulaqayi's self-experience actualises the common reality of intense empathy and identifications that exist between humans and their pigs in the Yagwoia life-world (and elsewhere in New Guinea). Also evident here is that common desire in children (of both sexes) to produce babies. But in Ulaqayi's case his earliest feminine self-insinuations blossomed uninhibited if for no other reason but for the fact that he pursued female work on a par to other women within his domestic milieu. And the principal among them was his mother. In this regard, to the extent that she doesn't figure explicitly in his self-account, this can be taken as a good index of her omnipresence, or better, omni-intra-presence in his soul which, as the Yagwoia see it, took no other 'shine' but that of the woman.
The whole tenor of his self-account makes clear that in his adhesion to his mother and, thus, in the pursuit of woman's generativity, he at the same time vied to excel her, although not overtly but in the guise of women-in-general. Here is the core-determination of his omni/m/potence which, to the extent that he could sustain it throughout his young life in the omni-potent mode, this eventually,...
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