Jadran Mimica - The Incest Passions - Part 1

Oceania Publications, University of Sydney
The Incest Passions: An Outline of the Logic of Iqwaye Social Organization

Author(s): Jadran Mimica
Source: Oceania, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Sep., 1991), pp. 34-58
Published by: Wiley on behalf of Oceania Publications, University of Sydney
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THE INCEST PASSIONS: AN OUTLINE OF THE
LOGIC OF IQWAYE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

Jadran Mmica
University of Sydney
Parti
Incest is best elucidated as a plethora of human desires, which are affirmed by their
social regulation rather than negated by it. This contrasts with the received wisdom
of anthropological theory which is focussed on the prohibition of incest rather than
on the incest desires which motivate the logic of their social regulation through
interdictions. The theoretical fixation on prohibition expresses modern Western
bourgeois incesto-phobic sensibilities and morality. The upshot of this study is that
among the Iqwaye, contrary to the classic incesto-phobic formulations whereby the
prohibition of incest is the condition of human sociality, without the positive

fulfilment of incest there is no human kinship or social existence. In Part 1 the
problematics of incest are delineated in the context of Iqwaye mythopoeic
cosmogony. In Part 2 (to appear in the next Oceania issue) I present concrete
articulation of incest passions in the main structural configurations of Iqwaye social

organization (the naming system, patrifiliation, matrifiliation, affinity, cross-sex
siblingship, institutionalized male homosexuality). Thus, the theoretical view of
incest outlined in the first part is ethnographically demonstrated. A special emphasis
is placed on the centrality and irreducibility of radical imagination in the constitution
of human social reality.
1 .Introduction
In this essay I explore one Papua New Guiean society but the results are relevant to
anthropological theorizing about incest and its significance for the human condition in
general. Every human society, as a concrete organization of existence of its members, is
structured through specific existential configurations and categories, created and reproduced
through human activity (praxis) in a concrete ecological environment (JJmwelt) , which is
also a culturally specific and irreducible life-world (Lebenswelt). Irreducibility here means
that the facts of a given ecological situation have to be understood relative to and through the
specificities of its component human life-world. In this sense the ecological situation is
already a human historical and cultural reality, not an absolute realm of nature, to be
understood only as a source of objectively, that is, scientifically definable constraints on
human existence. Any ecological situation is both a realm of affordances and possibilities
as well as limitations of existence.
34 Oceania, 62, 1991
Mmica
The existential configurations and categories constituting human social reality, (e.g.,
language, kinship or clan organization), are the products of human bodily life: the multiple
structures of the human psyche are inalienably the structures of embodied existence.1 In this
view the energic structures of existence and their modes such as metabolism, nurture, and sex
are no less formative of the configurations and categories which constitute human society,
than, say, spoken language and interpersonal communication, which themselves are primarily
bodily phenomena. Intersubjectivity, sociality itself, is rooted in and is the transformation of
the realities of human bodiliness, specifically its primordial structures: instinctual structures,
archetypal constellations and egoic passions (desires), moods and perception (sensibilities),
and the primary creativity of the embodied psyche, imagination and the bodily projective
fusion with and assimilation of the world. Human culture, which characterizes the specificity
of human existence in the world, is the ongoing formation and transformation of this human
bodily immanence in the world which transcends it, and out of which this humanness has
developed as a particular organismic mode of life within the trajectory of global organic
evolution.
Because it is an existence in the open horizon of the world which is always beyond and
on the outside of humanness, the human capacity for culture is structured as a transcendence
of the originally given organismic (bodily) immanence and so in terms of the actualities and
the possibilities of that immanence. The possibilities ensue from the intrinsic openness of the
human organism, its intentional orientation to the world. This intentionality forms the internal,
ontological polarity in the very being of humanness. This internal decentering, whereby
everything human is only conditionally so because of its codetermination by the existential
milieu of the world, is also the basic characteristic of all organismic structures of life (Plessner
1967). Accordingly this intrinsic relationship with the world entails that the originary
structures of humanness, in spite of their higher degree of conservativeness and resistance to
change, do not form an absolute, static finality of the given in human existence. They
themselves form a dynamic and fluctuating configuration which as such is the source of its
own possibilities and therefore of its relative openness and receptiveness to the world.
The human capacity for self-transcendence is therefore simultaneously the capacity for
self-creation. It has many different modes. Those which effect self-creation, that is,
affirmation and transformation, via such modalities of self-transcendence or self-modification
as inhibition and, more radically, self-negation of the given humanness, are of paramount
significance in the formation of human social reality, especially in regard to the incest
passions. I shall come to that later. What has to be grasped as a general characteristic of human
self-transcendence is that, being the synthesis of its temporality - its past, present, and future
- human organismic existence is the origin and the end of its own projection into the world,
that is, its engagement through praxis. In this sense the primary task of human praxis is
self-creation for no other reason than the reasons of its own existence. That is, since humans
exist in the world, being-in-the-world is their primary existential project, their sole raison
d'etre. Thus, the primary ontological project of humanness is the realization of its own mode
of being-in-the world. It is self-creating (autopoetical). Human cultural activities (praxis),
then, are constellated by the vital structures of humanness - not as universal facts to be dealt
with by human biology and physiology, or ecology, but as activities which have to be
understood anthropologically, since they themselves are at the core of humanness, seen as its
own ontological project. Furthermore, since any human society is an organization of

existence, the structures of such a global mode of being-in-the-world are tautegorical.
Obviously, any existence is always and only about existence; the structures of a being-in-
35
The Incest Passions
the- world are about that particular being-in-the world. To understand a human society, then,
is to understand it as an ontological project, a mode of being-in-the world.

The human embodied psyche2 projects into and clings to the world in the experiential
modes of moods and affectivity, perception and cognition, within the constituting framework
of imagination. Indeed, there is no possibility of the human mode of being-in-the-world

without the work of imagination which is the main source of human cultural praxis - the
symbolic transcendence of and through the very possibilities of the immanent and emergent
structures of the human organismic being-in-the-world. Unfortunately, for modern

Westerners, especially the academically trained, human imagination is marred by the long
history of empiricist, rationalistic, and romantic formulations dominated by a schizoid
all-or-nothing attitude, which has thus prejudged their understanding of the reality of this
dimension of the human psyche and its function in the creation and structuring of human
existence. The fact is that through imagination humans create themselves both as their own
reality and their own illusion. They are not in the world in the mode of merely factual
existence. Humans also live themselves and the world as the continuously changing being of
truth and error. Therefore, existence can be that of self-delusion and atrophy. All these
modalities of human being-in-the-world are constituted through the activity of imagination.
The phenomenon of incest and the structures of human sociality can be adequately understood
only in terms of the radical function of imagination in the creation and reproduction of human
social reality. In this introduction I shall not offer even a simple sketch of a theory of
imagination. But I must emphasize that insofar as such a theory would be adequate, it could
not be limited to Western intellectual tradition (philosophy and science) for the simple reason
that in its mainstream this tradition contains a specific cultural bias, namely an epistemology
which pathologically overvalues its own construction of human mind as Reason, currently
imagined as a computational machine and accordingly practised in its technological

simulacra, computers.3
By identifying imagination as the main source of human self-creation I do not intend to
endorse any of the moral, aesthetic, romantic or traditional epistemological valuations (e.g.
idealist ones) which are usually associated with that concept. The same is true of the notion
of self-creation (autopoiesis). What exactly imagination is and what it does in the creation of
human reality has to be shown through concrete investigations of particular societies.

However, I need to comment briefly on two concepts - imaginal and imaginary. The term
imaginal was coined by Henri Corbin (1969, 1972) to designate the work of imagination in
its positive reality, the incessant source of human creative possibilities through which
permanent transformation of human psyche can occur. Corbin has formulated the concept of
the imaginal (Mundus bmginalis) especially due to his work on the doctrine of creative
imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi (Corbin 1969). This mystical appreciation of
imagination understands the radical nature of its creative capacity: \..the imagination has a
noetic value, ... it is an organ of knowledge because it "creates" being' (Corbin 1969:180).
The imaginal, however, must be thought of as the most radical production of imagination
which, beyond knowledge (noetic value), functions in the very creation of human existence
- its social reality. Therefore, the imaginal has to be distinguished from the imaginary, that
more familiar intentional object of imagination (Sartre), which ordinarily subsumes all
creations of imagination and is commonly contrasted to the real. In philosophical and
psychological theorizing the imaginary coincides with fantasy and the fictional, and thus
imagination is primarily defined as derealizing, phantasmatic and in that sense illusory, other
than a reality oriented mode of consciousness. 4
36
Mmica
Occidental popular and scientific notions of reality, including that of social reality,
represent it as 'the Reality out there', 'out' meaning outside of the human psyche, subjectivity
and experience. And, of course, 'out' also immediately implies the taken-for-granted
'Physical Reality' of physics. I emphasize the taken-for-granted attitude towards such a
scientific notion for most people in our culture are not physicists. In this regard they are semiignorant or altogether ignorant of the 'Physical Reality' of physics, so that this notion is indeed
grounded in the imaginary, even phantasmatic modes of consciousness, but not the imaginal.
Yet, this view of reality circumscribed by the 'out there' assumed to have nothing to do with
the experiencing organism (human or non-human) is the main obstacle for an adequate
understanding of reality as well as of imagination or any other modality of experience. For
an adequate interpretation of human social reality, which is the intersubjectively constituted
realm of human existence, it must be clearly understood that the 'out there' pole of experience,
the reality itself, is the historical creation and objectification of embodied psyches of
numerous component human subjects, past and present. The social 'out there' is possible only
on condition of its correlative 'inside here'. Ethnographies from all over the world show how
human social realities are formed and sustained through a myraid of practices, from social
structures, food production, sexuality, toilet training, ... to poetry, scientific thinking, play.
All these activities express and objectify the reality of human imagination in a myriad of its
refractions, from the imaginal to grotesque phantasmagoria such as the latest Government
Budget or, soliciting altogether a different sentiment, the delirium of the insane.
I am not implying that imagination is the sole dimension of the embodied

intersubjectivity which sustains human social reality. But in view of the function of
idealization, representation, projection, imitation, selectivity, inhibition, repression etc., in
the formation of human self-identity and communication and given the ubiquity of human
desires, of passions in all spheres of human endeavour, imagination is undoubtedly all

pervasive. And it is most effective precisely when it ceases to be experienced as imagination.
Instead it infuses existence both in the 'out there' and the 'inside here'. This, in fact, is how
the imagination in its two global modes of the imaginal and the imaginary constitutes social
reality and the identities of its subjects, corporeal human beings.
The understanding of the incest passions and their expression and transformation in
concrete social reality is best developed through the elucidation of the dialectics of the
exteriority and interiority of the embodied psyche, along the cline of the refractions of the
imagination: from its realization in the imaginal as the creation of being in reality, to the
configurations of the imaginary where existence is but the simulacrum of the really impossible
desires (or their atrophy), impossible in the sense of their never becoming fulfilled, although
as desires they are real, and as such are truly constitutive of a particular mode of
being-in-the-world, that is, a social reality. Therefore, these unrealizable yet real modes of
being are always found at the core of human sociality although they vary from society to
society just as much as they vary from person to person. Finally, various imaginary modes
which co-constitute existence or through which existence realizes itself, have different
consequences for the continuation or atrophy of that same existence.
The incest passions and their function in the formation of any concrete, historical
humanness - Iqwaye, Chinese, American, or European - must be approached from the

perspective of the sexual dynamics of human existence. But here sexuality is comprehended,
in contradistinction to the basic premises of psychoanalysis, in non-reductionist terms, that
is, in the total context of a mode of existence. Sexuality is thus immediately made intelligible
in the way it is constellated as a dimension of a human ontological project and articulated into
37
The Incest Passions
a configuration of human self-identity and sociality. These are lived as concrete erotic
experiences involving a greater or lesser degree of socialization. Therefore, sexuality has to
be elucidated as a concrete formation in a specific life-world, and as such coarticulated with
other existential modes - nurture, possession of property, practice of violence and power,
and death. For only this connection truly opens up the realm of passions of human bodily
existence and within it, the complex of incest.
Now it can be asserted without exaggeration that the phenomenon of incest has always
been thought of in terms of its negative circumscription. Incest is prohibited, its desires are
to be inhibited, negated or repressed and on this condition there can be human sociality. Such
is the reality of incest passions in most human cultures. Those few instances where this is not
so are treated as a negative confirmation of the virtually world-wide cultural prohibition of
incest, seen thus as the 'Law' of humanness (Freud 1985; Lvi-Strauss 1969; Lacan 1981).
Yet, my research among the Iqwaye and other Yagwoia groups has shown me that their social
repression of incest desires is really for its positive affirmation, principally at the level of the
global structuring of their social organization. Put in a nutshell, the structures of Iqwaye social
organization are about the positive fulfilment of the passions of incest and not about their
irreversible negation. This particular Iqwaye situation has prompted me to conceive of social
organization as a configuration of a specific mode of being-in-the-world which as such

expresses an ontological project. The passions of incest, and human passions in general,
thereby become intelligible not in terms of a Western psychological and anthropological
framework of understanding which refuses to situate itself in the concrete world of human
subjects. In the process of 'explanation' of their existence this framework also surreptitiously
reproduces the moral values and sensibilities of its creators and practitioners (psychologists,
anthropologists). Still worse, their moral bearing upon the world is thus lent the support of a
normative, scientific rationality. In the present case, however, being situated in the Iqwaye
realities, the interpretive production of understanding participates, if only vicariously, in the
lived meanings of Iqwaye being-in-the-world and its history, and therefore approximates to
their own sensibilities in all spheres of experience.
2. Cosmos, Body, and Society as Coeval

The Yagwoia speaking people belong to the congeries of the Angan (formerly
Kukukuku) tribes. There are approximately 9000 Yagwoia divided into five territorial groups
or tribes. The Iqwaye are one such group, numbering over 1,700 people and located in the
West Menyamya Census Division in the interior of Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea
(Map). The following synopsis of Iqwaye social organization can be generalized to include
four other Central Yagwoia territorial groups, in two of which I have also carried out research
and documented the transformations of their social organization. An offshoot of the Central
Yagwoia in the Tauri Headwaters (North Menyamya Census Division), the Yeghuye, were
studied in the late fifties by a German anthropologist H. Fischer (1968). They seem to have
undergone a radical internal transformation, but the common Yagwoia elements are still
evident, at least as far as I can judge by Fischer's ethnography. I make no comparison in this
essay. All descriptions and analyses are primarily of the Iqwaye situation.
Iqwaye social organization is a formidable expression of human existential possibilities.
The vital and universal biological necessities of human existence - sex, nutrition, and
socio-cultural reproduction in a concrete ecological milieu (Umwelt) - have been formed and
expressed in Iqwaye cosmology, language and the organizational structures of their sociality
such as kinship, marriage, clan structure, material production and initiation ceremonies. In
38
Mi mica
EASTERN /
HIGHLANDS
Ixn \ J^/^^^CsTi morobe

\ j X^V?^ PROVINCE
/ V,^^ ( PROVINCE
^^*-^v j PAPUA ^s
>> ; newguinSk
other words, the vital biological necessities are constituted as a uniquely Iqwaye (Yagwoia)
mode of existence.
Unlike Western civilization, where the obvious necessity of hetcrosexuality for human
reproduction is enshrined in the institutionalized basis of the family and the State, among the
Iqwaye this is not so. Rather, the institutionalized basis of their society rests on a radically
different set of premises about sexual reproduction grounded in their view of the cosmos and
the nature of man and woman (for details, see Mimica 1981, 1988). These premises arc as
follows:
1. The original (mythopoeic) creation of the first man was in the form o self-creation
(autogenesis). The being of man among the Iqwaye is thus determined by the
cosmogony which has ontoiogical significance. Cosmogonically (i.e., ontologically)
39
The Incest Passions
man is a universal being, the genus which incorporates both male and female, and is
autogenic. The first, self-created man created other men in his own image.
2. He did this by modelling them from lumps of ground and then by inseminating them
with his own semen. Thus, the creation of other men was in the homosexual mode.
Furthermore, this first creation was incestuous5 because the creator-father's

progenitive action was directly sexual.
3. The first woman was created through the metamorphosis of one of the first men made
by the original creator, and it was through her creation that the present social order
was finally instituted.
But the determination of the phenomenon of incest in the Iqwaye social reality requires
a closer investigation of the cosmogonic foundations of their world and society than is outlined
above. Iqwaye cosmogony is mythopoeic, which is to say that it is characterized by a specific

intentionality of consciousness whereby the embodied psyche and the world are experienced
as a total unity. They are identical. The emergence and realization of human subjectivity as
a conscious existence is experienced and objectified mythopoetically as the creation and

formation of the world.
j 1 y i i ea|th
Figure 1.
The Iqwaye mythic image of self-creation (autopoiesis) of man and cosmos illustrates
this most cogently (Fig 1). Their creator Omalyce is the primordial cosmic being. The mythic
image reveals him in the originary state of being where he, like a human uroboros (the serpent
that eats its own tail) is closed in upon himself, with his fingers and toes completely
interdigitated, and his penis firmly lodged in his mouth. This is his umbilical cord. In this
(foetus-like) position Omalyce also embodies the cosmos. His vital conjunction holds together
the sky and earth. Throughout this originary bodiliness (the materia prima) of the cosmic man
circulates his semen, which makes him grow. That is, he at once creates himself and the
universe. This parturient process of becoming ends in the birth of man and cosmos. His
umbilical cord ruptures and the first man emerges out of the womb of his own cosmic
bodiliness; simultaneously the sky and earth are cut asunder, and the world is born out of the
darkness of the cosmic womb. The two celestial luminaries, the sun and moon, identified as
Omalyce's eyes in Iqwaye secret mythopoeia, ascend into the sky and thus cosmic temporality
is set in motion as day/night periodicity. The world, then, becomes formed as a realm of
40
Mmica
manifold diffcrcnliations indicated by the couplets sky/earth, sun/moon, dark/light, wet/dry,
male/female... .
And although differentiated the world remains unified in the bounds of the primordial
oneness, the creator Omalyce. In slightly formal terms the Iqwaye cosmos is at once a
manifold (plurality) and oneness. Important in this mythopoeic view of the cosmos is its
constitutive structure. The primordial situation (A) of self-closure, out of which the present
world-situation (-A) came into being, did not therefore cancel itself out of existence. That is,
because -A ensued from A it does not follow that A is no longer, and now only -A exists.
Rather, A remains the continuous condition of -A, and the latter is literally impossible without
the former. To the extent that the existing world is a negation of its own matrix ( for one is
the order of differentiation, the other is the homogenous, universal, self-same identity of the
cosmic being where everything is everything else, or all= all= one), this world does not derive
its own positivity out of its own order, but from its negative, the primordial condition.
This is so because this existing world is not its own creation, its own origin. The order
of differentiations is the product of the creation out of the primal self-same identity (the
non-differentiation), and it alone is self-created (autopoietic), and therefore the source of its
own as well as all other subsequent beings. That is why the primordial matrix, to the extent
that it is not one single thing in the realm of differentiations, is, nevertheless, its absolute
positivity and simultaneously, absolute negativity, since it is the negative of the entire realm
of differentiations. For this reason, -A derives its own self-identity from A. The primordial
being is thus the irreducible truth, the source and the affirmation of the positivity of all other
beings. This is the force of the meaning of Oneness of the world. Only in the unity of its source
the world is, that is, derives its is-ness. In short, the structure of the world is the asymmetrical
unity of A and -A: asymmetrical because the A (primordial condition) is the irreducible source
and the absolute identity of the -A (itself a derived condition).
Omalyce, the cosmic man, is androgynous. This is concordant with his cosmogonic
character as the primordial totality. Because he is the archetypal source of everything his
bodily gender is therefore also the source of human bodily gender in the realm of the
differentiated world. In terms of the image of the autopoietic creation of the man-cosmos, the
separation of male and female sexes6 from within the body of Omalyce is coterminous with
the separation of the sky and earth, and with this, all other binary elements (couplets) of the
world. The secret fragments of Iqwaye mythopoeic knowledge reveal that the identity of the
first woman Nguyipu or Ipi as distinct from Omalyce, is only conditionally so. The truth is
f A.A )=( 4"A H~<> J
V J V V J \ a^ J
primordial present one - many
matrix world structure
Figure 2.
41
The Incest Passions
that she is Omalyce himself, or an aspect of him.7 The same goes for the sexual identity of
the sun and moon. The common knowledge that they are the primordial couple Omalyce and
Nguyipu, the first man and woman, is subtended by another mythopoeic fact, that the two
celestial luminaries are but the creator's two eyes, that is, the two identical components of his
head. Therefore, what is two, separate, and different, in truth participates in the primordial
self-same identity of the one, and as such is one.

Other Iqwaye secret myths form a discernible thematic group separate from the above
discussed bodily image of autopoietic cosmogony. They are separate because they recount
how Omalyce created other human beings. Accordingly I categorize them as the myths about
allogenesis, in contradistinction to the atomic myth of autogenesis. The crucial characteristic
of the mythopoeia of allogenesis is that this process of creation reproduces the original
structure of creation, that is, Omalyce's own self-creation. This follows from the very
structure of Iqwaye mythopoeic intentionality, whereby the originary structure is the

matrix-structure, the archetype, and in that sense is reproduced in all other modes of action
of the same type. So, to the extent that the creation of others is an action of creation
performed by Omalyce, this action by its very nature reproduces its originary structure, which
is that of self-creation. To express it differently, Omalyce created other human beings in the
image of himself (for details see Mimica 1981, 1988). The following is a common version.
Omalyce modelled five men from clay. With the exception of the fifth, to whom he gave
no genitals (but only a mouth), all were complete men with external penes. He then made
them alive, by investing them with sound and, therefore, the ability to speak, by a method
which is still practised by Iqwaye children as a form of play (see Mimica 1981). But to make
them into truly human beings, that is, like himself, they had to be invested with procreative
and nurturing substance - the semen which was his innate endowment. Accordingly, he
inseminated them by fellating his first son who in turn fellated the next brother, who in turn
fellated his younger brother, and so on to the last penisless brother who was the youngest. So,
manifest here is the primordial allocreation which was an entirely male affair unmediated by
a woman. The self-created male creator has created his sons by analogy to his own self-fellatio
except that he in this new situation is doing that to his progeny. We see that here too the flow
of semen is totally closed, just as in the image of self-creation, since the fifth son has no penis,
and his body is thus sealed off. The seminal flow, however, is not circular but unidirectional.
It would be circular had the fifth son had a penis and had he himself fellated his own father.
The flow would thereby become like an uroboros, closed in upon itself, just as in Omalyce's
own self-creation. Instead, it had resulted in the fifth son's pregnancy and violent parturition
since, in order to deliver, his womb was slit open. This detail again renders the allogenesis
equivalent to autogenesis, for in both versions the closed body had to be ruptured (disjoined)
to engender the parturition. And in both versions, too, the sky and earth become separated,
correlative to the cutting of the body. In this way the first woman came into being. Her son
was a red man who first appeared as a marsupial while she also underwent an animal
metamorphosis, first into an eel, then a red python, and finally a cassowary. They both were
killed by other brothers (men). Their bodies were dismembered and partly eaten. Following
this cannibalism Omalyce made his progeny aware that the cassowary (python-eel) they killed
and ate was their brother. Thereupon they felt shame. The thigh-bones of the cassowary
woman were sharpened and used subsequently for the nose-piercing in the first initiation
ceremony or, as the Iqwaye call it, 'the custom of the making of man'. Indeed, the originary
acts of Omalyce's allocreation are regarded by the Iqwaye as the basis of the subsequent
42
Mmica
practice of institutionalized male homosexuality, the organization of bachelorhood, and the

initiation ceremonies.
Just as the mythopoeia of self-creation makes evident that the first woman is Omalyce
himself, the mythopoeia of allogenesis also shows that woman was not an autochthonous and
primordially separate being but was created out of and through the transformation of the
male bodily being. Moreover, since the other men and the woman, and eventually the red
man, are all Omalyce's creation, they as such embody his identity. It was his semen which
literally procreated them and, by implication, made them procreative. This mythopoeic fact
of procreation reproduces the ontological meaning of Iqwaye bodily identity. It is irreducibly
the identity of one's own progenitors. For this reason only Omalyce, the truly autogenic being,
is his own self-identity because he truly did create himself. Nobody created him. Therefore,
he is himself, or A= A. For his progeny, however, this does not hold true. To the extent that
they are bodies other than himself they, nevertheless, came from him, and therefore their
identity is his rather than of their own making. Hence -A (other) = A (self). Just as the world,
the realm of differentiae, has its source and therefore its true identity and positive being in
the self-sameness of the originary closed cosmic being, so the human beings created by
Omalyce also derive from and have their positive being from him. Therefore, the cosmic
man-creator is the ontological determination of the Iqwaye, their existence and by extension,
as they see it, that of the human beings in general, white or black. Given this significance of
Omalyce he is literally the eternal dimension of the Iqwaye cosmos and existence. No
structural aspect of their social world, their bodies or language, is intelligible unless it is
comprehended as a living organization and expression of the formative structures of Iqwaye
mythopoeic creation, which is to say, of the Iqwaye imaginative consciousness which shapes
themselves and their social reality.
The cosmogonic events discussed above have obliquely indicated something of the
nature of Iqwaye bodiliness, specifically its sex and procreativity: a bodily distinction
between male and female sexes has originated in the rupture of Omalyce's umbilical
cord/penis and in allogenesis, with the cutting of the penisless man's womb. The two events
are variants of each other and equivalent within the framework of Iqwaye mythopoeic
understanding. Both indicate that the primordial sexual organ and the receptive orifice are the
penis and mouth. The vagina was merely a contingent creation due to the absence of the
external penis on the body of the man who became pregnant. In the autogenesis, self-birth
ensued following the self-separation of the single body so that the penis was released from
the mouth. In this first creation the woman is nothing else but Omalyce himself, his female
aspect since he is androgynous. In allogenesis the birth of the red man ensues following the
rupturing of the closed male body, and the separation also results in the complete
exteriorization of one body from another. The consequence is that the closed body thereby
became female.
This and other evidence with which I cannot deal here (see Mimica 1981) attest to the
uniqueness of the configuration of the sexed body in Iqwaye culture and experience. Briefly,
both male and female bodies are phallic and that is their irreducible sexual characteristic
because phallus8 is in the Iqwaye culture a generic sex. Maleness and femaleness, that is,
man's and woman's bodies are two species of embodiment of this single bodily genus - the
phallus. To understand this it is important to realize that in Iqwaye culture sex, maleness,
femaleness are not abstract categories but concrete bodily imaginal configurations and
experiences. To the extent that these are also certain kinds of notional representations then
again they are to be thought of not as a scheme - sex: male, female, but as the following:
43
The Incest Passions
man's body: mouth, penis, anus,

interior/exterior, semen, blood
woman's body: mouth, vagina, anus,

interior/exterior, milk, blood
This scheme emphasizes that in order to elucidate sex as an Iqwaye category it is

necessary to understand it as a concrete imaginal configuration of sexed bodiliness formed in
relation to its orifices, the structure of interiority and exteriority, secretions, copulation, and
the procreative functions. Thus, what distinguishes men's and women's bodies is their
respective structures of interiority and exteriority which we saw are the effect of the
cosmogonic rupture, that is, opening up of the body. Man's body is bisexual, or, in terms of
Iqwaye cultural notions really bi-phallic, for phallus, as I emphasized above is generic sex.
Woman's body is mono-phallic, that is, monosexual.
Let me explain this more concretely in reference to the way Iqwaye map out oral, penile,
and vaginal tracts. Briefly, they are mapped out in terms of each other, with focal predicates
being the mouth and the penis (see Mimica 1981:88-93). The vaginal tract has no sui generis
predicates but is the analogue of the penis and the mouth. The latter two are literally envisaged
as the mirror reversals of each other. The mouth chamber is an interiorized penile tract with
the uvula being specifically 'the food penis' which pushes food into the throat and separates
fluids, which are then further processed into intrabodily seminal and blood passages. The
penile tract is the inverse of the mouth chamber. The best way to think about this is to imagine
that one penetrates the mouth with the hand as far as the uvula, takes this organ by its tip, and
then pulls it all out. What one gets is the external penis. Most importantly, both organs are
self-contained, and in that sense auto-progenitive, because each is the mirror-containment of
the other. The mouth is itself, but contains its own 'penis', the uvula. The penis proper contains
its own interior 'mouth' metonymically indicated by the 'lips', which is the Iqwaye label for
the brim of the external urethral passage. The vagina, on the other hand, is like the penile/oral
tract except it lacks a penis. To be exact, in the Iqwaye' s own conception clitoris can be seen
as a kind of vaginal penis but it seems to be neither interiorized nor exteriorized. In Iqwaye
men's thought (possibly also women's) the vaginal tract is somewhat of a fascinating
abomination, subject to men's ribaldry and perplexity; it produces anxiety, inquisitiveness,
disgust, and amusement. In everyday speech the exclamation "kulace* (vagina) is used by
men and women in the sense of our 'shit' or 'fuck' expressing a range of states, such as
amusement surprise, awe, and anger.
The vagina, then, unlike the penis and mouth, lacks its own penile component which
would make it into a self-contained orifice. Accordingly, the vagina figures as a genuine cut
in the phallic bodily gestalt. The other distinct property of the woman's body is its radical
phallic interiority, which differentiates it from man's body. In this regard both bodies are
completely phallic. Both are composed of the skeletal structure with its bone marrow, which
together with the brain is the source of semen (in man) and milk (in woman). The bone marrow
passages called ropes (une) are interconnected by a number of nodal knots called latice which
form a system of vital bodily centres. Semen/bone marrow like the blood are regenerated by
eating food. Darker fluids become blood, lighter semen. Thus, both bodies are equally
progenitive of procreative substances. The difference is in the nature of woman's womb,
44
Mmica
which contains the 'foetal net-bag', which is what the Iqwaye call placentum. I shall here
forego a discussion of their knowledge of intrautero gestation conceived of by analogy to the
relation between tubers, a parasitic fungus called hwalye, and the soil. It will suffice here to
mention that the foetal body is made from semen, which forms skeleton (this is the irreducibly
paternal identity of one's own bodily being), and blood, which forms bodily flesh and
envelope (these bear the irreducibly maternal identity). The foetus is also thought of as a penis.
A common expression for pregnancy is 'woman with the penis in her stomach'. In this sense
the intrauterine situation of gestation can be interpreted as a phallic impregnation from within
the body (which, in a way, it is, since the semen which starts the process originates from the
man's penis). Woman's body is a phallic container which enables the growth of a phallic
foetus into the child. The foetus grows by feeding off the mother's bodily fluids, just as the
tubers or a fungus grow in the garden by becoming infused with moisture and the grease
{pial) which permeates the soil.
An important fact about bodily interiority , then, is that it is the progenitive phallic region
par excellence. Woman is progenitive because she herself is a phallus, and likewise the man.
If we reflect on the image of self-creation we can easily grasp this significance of bodily
interiority, which in the cosmogonic situation was most radical because there the body, via
its penis/umbilical cord was closed in upon itself and grew out of itself. In this situation the
inside was also the outside and thus the penis was both inside and outside. But more
accurately, there really was no inside/outside distinction. The only relation was a complete
self-same identity, A= A.9 Only with the cosmogonic parturition there emerges the distinction
inside/outside and all other fundamental distinctions. This world-forming cut or disjunction
is clearly imprinted in the very structure of the above outlined Iqwaye configuration of bodily
sex, now intelligible as an intra-cultural anatomical fact, though not that of Western medical
and biological science.

Man's and woman's bodies are fully complementary yet asymmetrical. Man is bi-phallic
and therefore nearly identical to the originary bodiliness of the autogenic creator, both in
terms of interiority and exteriority, yet man is primarily the exteriorized mode of the creator's
progenitivity. Hence man alone cannot procreate the child out of his own body, as Omalyce
did to himself, despite the fact that a man can, potentially, inseminate himself. But like
Omalyce, man can inseminate other men and women. In this sense Iqwaye men always act
in full accordance with Omalyce's allogenesis. Hence their irreducible ontological identity
with the creator. Woman, on the other hand, is monophallic, and as such embodies the radical
progenitive interiority of the creator. She can bear a child through and out of her very body,
but unlike man, she can inseminate neither men nor other women because, as the Iqwaye say:
'only man has the stick' to do so. In addition, her breast-feeding capacity was replicated and
assimilated into the exclusively male practice of fellatio. In this way, too, breast-feeding, like
woman's entire bodily being is eminently phallic. Like her cosmogonic archetype, the last
penisless man in the allogenesis, who could not close the seminal flow for his fundamental
external lack, woman thus remains at once most radically identical with and different from
the creator's autogenic being. Like him, she contains, internally procreates, and delivers the
progeny out of herself, but she cannot effect either her own or another person's internal
progenitivity. That comes from outside, and so from another, male, body. Therefore,
woman's body has no potential for self-closure because it lacks the exterior analogue of its
interiority. Thus, although she is phallic the autogenic determination of her sex is one exterior
step further from man's precisely because it is wholly contained within her body. Man is
45
The Incest Passions
closer to the primordial autogenic being than woman because he has the real penis on the
outside of his body, and is phallic inside.
Formally, man's and woman's bodily sex are asymmetrical negations of the autogenic
bodily sex, hence A = -A (cf), -A (9). But relative to each other, man is A, woman -A. That
is, in relation to itself, man's body is: inside -A, outside A. Woman's is the reverse. This
shows their complete yet asymmetrical complementarity. Such is the meaning of Iqwaye
bodily sex. The diagram below shows its mythopoeic logic. I have modified the standard Mars
and Venus symbols in order to amplify the uroboric nature of the Iqwaye sex configuration.
(a) (9)
autogenic allogenic
being being
Figure 3.
Having outlined the cosmogonic foundations of Iqwaye bodiliness and its sexual
procreative structure, I must still touch on one more preliminary issue before I outline the
ontological meanings of incest passions which shape the logic of Iqwaye social organization.
The issue is the determination of the Iqwaye social realm as a totality. I shall deal with their
group structure in a separate work. Here I wish to elucidate the Iqwaye social totality in terms
of their own cultural self-representation.
The mythopoeic image of self-creation clearly shows that the human realm is identical
with the cosmos and that they form an autogenic totality. In this way the human sociality
which had originated in allogenesis (creation of others) is itself founded upon and ensues from
the primordial anthropocentric totality. The plurality of human beings which at any one time
constitutes the Iqwaye and other Yagwoia territorial groups is sorted out into a number of
sociocentric groups, the patrilineal descent groups (PDG). In this mode of organization the
Iqwaye are nothing but the descendants of the primordial men whom Omalyce created from
lumps of ground and whose bodily identity has been thereafter transmitted through their
descendants down to the present generations of Iqwaye and other Yagwoia population.
Therefore the PDGs are not an ontologically different order of human sociality. They are
incarnated in individual bodies of their members, and as such replicate the structure of
bodiliness at a more inclusive level (the group).
Inclusion in a PDG is determined by the bodily patri-identity of each member, that is,
the seminal pedigree of his/her bones. This pedigree is identical to the totality of ancestral
bones and semen of the group which originated from Omalyce's body, the maker of the apical
ancestors of all human beings. In this sense all PDGs participate in the common substantial,
bodily identity of their common creator who is at the apex of all PDG genealogies. These
commonly start with the sun and moon, that is, Omalyce and Nguyipu. But as we saw, they
are two aspects of the single androgynous creator. The PDGs are mutually differentiated
through their names which Omalyce bestowed upon those first men, his progeny. That
primordial act of naming was itself yet another act of creation in the sphere of allogenesis.
46
Mmica
Speaking, like all other oral activities is a creative act in Iqwaye mythopoeia, on a par with
sexual creation, which, as we saw, was also oral (for details see, Mimica 1981). Naming had
created new bodily identities of the primordial men in the sense that having been named A,
B, C, D, E, ... they became different. Their former, first identity was the mirror reflection and
refraction of their creator Omalyce who, having himself created them, that is their bodies,
had fully invested them with his own substantial identity, his semen. However, having named
them by different names Omalyce had thus created a new coating upon their originary identity
(in Iqwaye mythopoeia speaking/naming has the significance of a material creativity; it is not
'merely' speaking). Their different names had set them apart from each other - made them
different and thus made their descendants available for sexual intercourse, the main vehicle
of Iqwaye sociality.
naming f *
y^" I bodily creation
/-Al -A2 -A3 -A4 -A5
\\
IIII
ABCDE
111n
Figure 4.
The above diagram shows that although the allogenetic order of sociality operates on
the condition of different PDGs' identities, the structure of this condition is polymorphic due
to its genesis. It must be clear that the structures of Iqwaye sociality cannot be understood
independently of their genesis. Rather, these structures exist in the form of their genetic
interrelationships. And that is how Iqwaye sociality functions, since the primary stratum, the
autogenesis, is vitally operative in the very bosom of the allogenetic strata which themselves
were formed out of and by that primordial stratum. Thus, the structure of the identity of the
PDGs is the interrelation of all genetic strata into a single configuration:
{A=A = [-A=(A,B,QD,..)]}
autogenesis allogenesis
Furthermore, this structure is not static but processual since, as we shall see later, the
autogenetic stratum is realized through the practice within the stratum of sociality formed in
allogenesis. Iqwaye society thus genuinely exists as a totality of its entire genesis, and that is
what makes the Iqwaye the reproducers of their society as an autopoietic totality (i.e., as
themselves).
This ontological determination of Iqwaye sociality as the autopoietic unity of the

plurality of human beings organized into PDGs, and the cosmic creator, is expressed
iconically in the architecture of the ritual house called inekiye. It is described and analysed
47
The Incest Passions
in detail in Mmica 1981. Here I briefly outline its significance. By its structure this icon is
literally a transformation of the mythopoeic image of autogenesis. The house is the cosmos.
The inner tree-effigy expresses and further articulates the Iqwaye image of the cosmos. It
belongs to the type of quite widespread mythopoeic images known as the cosmic tree or the
tree of life. The tree-effigy comprises a massive central post surrounded by a number of
thinner posts. The central post is the creator Omalyce whose corporeality is transfigured into
its essential part, the phallus. The same is true of all the surrounding posts which represent
all PDGs. These too are individual corporeal phalli for that is what human beings are. They
are all intertwined with the canopy ensuing from the top of the central post which holds the
sky and earth in conjunction. (Incidently, the Iqwaye regard themselves the people who own
the celestial post.) On the circular wall there are deployed a few branches representing the
roots of the tree. The idea is that the roots and branches completely intertwine, just like the
bodily icon of the autopoiesis where the sky and earth are held by Omalyce's interlocked
fingers and toes. So, what is up is also down.
The autogenic creator-cosmos and society of individual human beings, his progeny,
organized into PDGs, together form a truly organic totality which can be aptly characterized
as the totality of organismic life. The Iqwaye cosmos is a biomass. It is the universe of ongoing
life fuelled by its immanent progenitivity. In this sense the mythopoeic icon of the sexed body
is a tautegorical or self-referential symbol in Iqwaye cosmology. It is a symbol of itself for,

prior to any symbolization, sex and nurture are the irreducible and vital dimension of life.
They simply are life. Therefore, the sexed body as a symbol is transcendent of itself by the
very fact that it is about itself. This is not accidental. An autopoietic organization can be
constructed solely in terms of itself. Hence its symbolic constitution is also self-referential,
that is, it symbolizes in terms of itself and its own categories, and is therefore tautegorical.
Likewise, all other Iqwaye imagery derives from the real organismic life as the cosmic
phenomenon. This keeps the imagery in the closest proximity to its irreducible referent, the
human body. Hence the power and the universal truth of Iqwaye mythopoeic cosmogony and
of their existence. (For a discussion of self-referential symbols, see Wagner 1986.)

3. The Problematics of Incest
I shall now delimit the problematics of incest passions in the logic of Iqwaye social
organization. I shall not deal with actual cases of the consummated incest and their passions,
and the structurally linked cases of parricide and fratricide. They can be properly presented
through dense existential (Dasein) analyses which I reserve for another work. The scope of
the present discussion aims to make intelligible the work of incest passions in the very
constitution of Iqwaye social organization. In this constitutive function it will become evident
that the passions of incest can be successfully consummated by means which are not limited
to direct intercourse with the father, mother, daughter, son, sister, brother, or with oneself
(note that in the Iqwaye universe we have to consider all three modes of sexual orientation:
heterosexual, homosexual, and autosexual). Rather, it will be shown that the full
consummation of these passions is also achievable indirectly through mediations, or to use
Roy Wagner's term, obviations.
As a first approximation, the logic of Iqwaye social organization can be said to function
as the obviation of incest passions, but in order to have them affirmed rather than totally
negated or repressed. This assertion will be concretely demonstrated below. First I will
formulate the problems of the phenomenon of incest in the Iqwaye world, on two interrelated
levels. One is the problem of incest in terms of its negation, that is, prohibition. This entails
48
Mmica
the elucidation of how such a fundamental prohibition is formed in Iqwaye sociality

understood as a polymorphic totality. The other is the problem of understanding incest in the
concrete imagery of the Iqwaye's own ideas and representations. I shall broach the first, more
abstract problem through a brief discussion of the second.
My first experience of incest among the Iqwaye occurred while conducting my first
census survey. My assistant and I were descending along a slope overlooking a small hamlet
when a woman started yelling from her house that we need not bother to go further since the
local tultul (a goverment appointed village official) took a local man to Menyamya station to
report him to the kiap (resident patrol officer) for having had regular sex with his true daughter
for a long time. She was newly married but was made pregnant by her father rather than the
husband. My companion immediately crowed that such a practice was proper to dogs and
pigs, not men (i.e., human beings). Sometime later he recollected that this man acquired
notoriety for not wanting to have his daughter married to any man. So that's what it was! He
wanted her for himself. And indeed, much later I learned that the father apparently used to
tell his daughter that she was the spitting image of her mother when the latter was much
younger. Therefore, he wanted her to be the substitute for her mother. The father was
imprisoned for about 6 - 12 months in Lae. Upon return home he paid a compensatory
payment in meat and cowrie shells to his daughter's maternal uncle (I do not know whether
there was any money paid).
The reference to pigs and dogs that my companion made emphasizes only that these
animals copulate indiscriminately among themselves. But as verbal abuse for incest this has
not much emotional and conceptual force. The most powerful image that Iqwaye can and do
invoke in verbal abuse for incest and incestuous orientations is wokiye yalyce kuyekutnye,
'dog tongue licking'. Here too reference is to a dog's behaviour, though not its indiscriminate
allosexual copulation but to its ability to lick its own penis. To be incestuous, then, is to
become autosexual, and in that determination a human is like a dog with its saliva-dripping
tongue busying itself in between its two hind legs. We shall later see that other situations
envisaged by the Iqwaye as being incestuous are cast in the imagery of autocannibalism
(self-eating) or autosexuality. Eating and sex are two analogous processes and metaphorically
identical. Furthermore, in the historical practice of fellatio, eating (i.e., swallowing) of semen
was thus fully identical to having sex.
The Iqwaye's formidable formulation of incest spells out its significance as an

autosexual orientation. I will show that that is not only its significance but, also, its inner
determination. Incest, thus, is an activity which corresponds to the autogenesis of the creator
Omalyce, who is the primordial source of Iqwaye sociality. Although allosexually incest
involves persons within the inner circle of kinship relatedness it nevertheless is equivalent to
autosexual behaviour, and in this determination is prohibited. More strongly formulated,

incest between a related pair of a self and an other equals self-copulation. Incest, as it were,
converts other-orientation into self-orientation. This is the problematic of incest as revealed
by the concrete imagery pertaining to the structure of social relations grounded in

allosexuality, both homo and hetero.
Given this conception of incest as autosexuality the next problem is to elucidate its
prohibition within the global structure of Iqwaye sociality, which is, as shown earlier, a
polymorphic totality whose source is precisely the autosexual mode of creation. We could
already see that incest interdiction is cast as a certain kind of negation of the primordial mode
of being. I say negation because the effect of such an interdiction, whereby one cannot exercise
certain modes of sexual orientation and, correlatively cannot also give, receive, and consume
49
The Incest Passions
food and valuables (see Pt 2), is a negation of this orientation and its emotionality which
motivates and makes it into an experiential reality. But here I am not suggesting a social 'rule'
or 'law', for in my view no society exists in terms of rules. That is, no rules are the conditions
of social existence, or for that matter, no existence is produced by any rules. Rules, like any
legal system and, of course, the dominant Western sociological and linguistic theories which
believe in a rule-governed existence, are the post factum abstractions and stipulations of an
already constituted, lived social and lingual reality. But these rules had no constituting
function in the formation and maintainance of that reality.
As a certain kind of negation, interdiction of incest is a constellation and the maintenance
of attitudes toward a fundamental condition of existence which for that very reason is the
source of its own negation. Its genesis is not external to that negation. Thus, by understanding
the condition one will come to understand the reasons for its modification through an
interdiction. As a component of such a condition incest is thus primordially already an
existential situation of sociality. And it is so not solely for a child, but for human society at
large, for it too, in fact, is founded and founds itself upon its infantile as well as adult and old
age structures of existence. In this understanding every human society is structured as a

totality of its psycho-organismic developmental cycle in a concrete Umwelt. The human
condition engendered by this cycle is as such also historical, and it defines the total structure
of the society at large. The logic of its organization, then, is a specific attempt at the solution
of the polymorphic nature of the primordial structures of human being-in-the-situation, that
is, being-a-child-born-of-woman, being-a-sexed/libidinal-body, being-a-desirous-body,

being-an-old-body, and having-to-die. For the society at large, like for the human being, the
coming into being means coming into being as the child. In this sense Wordsworth's stanza
The child is father of the man' holds true for both.
The poverty of anthropological as well as psychoanalytic theorizing about the

foundational structures of incest and sociality is that this theorizing, trapped in the adult
rationality of Western consciousness, could never properly admit to the facticity of human
existence as the product of the total cycle of development, where the infant's mode of
existence is just as constitutive as that of the adult and the aged. The Western bourgeois moral
self-image and its scientific rationality lubricated by Christianity simply cannot encompass
this totality. This is why, with the exception of J. Layard (1944, 1945, 1959, 1960) and G.
Devereux (1978) who did focus on homosexuality, no anthropological, psychoanalytic or

ethological theory of incest has ever entertained the constitutive role of both autosexuality
and homosexuality in the formation of incest passions. Margaret Mead (1968: 1 18) observes:
'...the prevailing emphasis on incest taboos as they are related to the regulation of marriage
has resulted in an almost total neglect of homosexual incesL..'. The preponderant concern
was always with heterosexuality and with incest qua prohibition, without much thought
devoted to the meanings of incest passions themselves regardless of the prohibitions. For
anthropologists rules and regulations were the lure of incest. As for its passions, an ubiquitous
assumption was that incest is, as it were, universally experienced with horror, hence 'the
horror of incest' made famous by Freud (1985) and many years later repeated by Murdock
(1949:288): '...the sense of grisly horror with which most peoples invest the very idea of
incest'. The horror, however, was stirred primarily in the Western bourgeois sensibilities.
Even when the concern is self-avowedly with the child's mode of being (and the infantile
stratum of humanness) as in psychoanalysis, what is presented is the child as constructed by

the Western theorizing adult rather than a view of the child as a being-in-the- situation (e.g.,
Merleau-Ponty 1964, 1973). In the latter perspective the child (and the infantile being) is seen
50
Mmica
as truly the co-creator of itself and of its milieu, and correspondingly the infantile core of
humanness and social existence is comprehended ontologically and existentially as their

irreducible dimension, coeval with and interpenetrating the adult and the aged. Societies,
being the organization of existence, differ very much with regard to the values placed upon
each of these modes of humanness and their historical calibrations. These calibrations,
specifically when narrowed to the scope of incest passions are involved in the very formation
of social structures and they have to be understood in terms of their historical and cultural
specificities. This is why the Iqwaye cannot be readily understood as an Oedipus who is both
a mythic king from Greece, and a theoretical construct. They can only be understood as
Omalyce.
My point is that cultural specificities of Occidental mythopoeia are serious limitations
intrinsic to Western psychoanalysis which has incorporated it, notwithstanding the undoubted
importance of the theory of Oedipal dynamics. Omalyce and the Iqwaye articulate for
themselves far more forcefully and independently an existential project which requires its
own theoretical explication, as does Oedipus. Just because the latter has been theorized it
does not follow that it can assimilate all other existential projects and designs into itself, as
has commonly been the practice in anthropology (hence * African Oedipus', 'Oedipus and Job
in West African Religion', and more recently a new version of 'Oedipus in the Trobriands').
If anything, it is evident that the psychodynamics of existence objectified and articulated in
Omalyce mythopoeia and Iqwaye social practice, is radically more primordial and original
than the psychodynamics of Oedipus mythopoeia, which it presupposes but does not express.
For this reason alone, Omalyce, once theorized, explains Oedipus, but it is quite unlikely that
Oedipus by himself would explain Omalyce.10 The development of psychoanalysis indeed

shows that this is so, hence its theoretical supplementation of the Oedipus condition in the
form of the theories of 'pre-Oedipal' or 'early Oedipal' stages, as well as the theorizing of
the centrality of narcissism in the development of the psychic being (e.g. Kohut 1966, 1968,
1972, 1977; Grunberger 1979; Lacan 1977, 1981).

But even within this expanded framework the view of the incestuous desire remains
essentially incesto-phobic, evidently determined by Western bourgeois values. On the other
hand, by drawing on a vastly more complex and cross-culturally and historically more
complete my thopoeic disclosure of the psychic being, the Jungian analytics and the correlative
interpretation of the structure of incestous desire (Jung 1956; Neumann 1954; Layard 1945,
1960) appear more accurate in the light of Iqwaye mythopoeia. This signal characteristic of
Jungian thought is also reflected in the therapeutic handling of incest (e.g. Adler 1959; Stein
1974, 1986; Samuels 1980).

I have defined the phenomenon of incest interdiction in a preliminary fashion (i.e.,
without a detailed phenomenological and existential investigation) as a constellation and
maintenance of negating attitudes towards the primordial being-in-the-situation, itself
encompassed by the total horizon of existential modalities of being-in-the- world. The Iqwaye
negating attitudes, as we saw from that formidable image of canine self-closure, are directed
towards the self, and yet in that very determination they interdict incestuous, meaning
autosexual, orientations towards others. This is also evident in regard to the practice of male
homosexuality, where self-centred negation was expressed quite straightforwardly. The
Iqwaye men, while bachelors, seem to have been discouraged from practicing masturbation.
One man expressed this as follows: 'No, my penis belonged to somebody else, and somebody
else's penis belonged to me'. Hence no erotic practice on oneself.
51
The Incest Passions
The negating attitudes, then are clearly just as much self-orientations as are the
other-orientations. But for the Iqvvaye incest is irreducibly always autosexuality, be it with
oneself (as in masturbation) or with another relative. And these attitudes pertain just as much
to sexuality as to eating and exchange of goods, for Iqwaye sociality is structured in terms of
both sexual and nutritive giving and taking. To the extent that the incest interdiction is a
constellation of self-orientations countering the fundamental self-orientation, namely
incest itself, epitomized by the notion of self-copulation, these attitudes form a single
dynamic scheme of the intentionality which structures Iqwaye sociality, and have already
been charted in their mythopoeic cosmogony. Let me elaborate on this.
Briefly, it will be remembered that the sexual foundations of Iqwaye social order are
polymorphic and form a genetically calibrated system of relations. In terms of their genesis,
these relations were derived from each other in the following order:
(A) autosexuality - [> (B) homosexuality - ^ (C) heterosexuality

But in terms of their internal structure they form two groups. On the one hand is A, because
it is a unique self-creation of the first cosmic man. On the other hand are B and C because
both are just the subspecies of a single mode of creation, namely the creation of other human
beings (allogenesis) characterized by a distinction between the created and the creator. In A
there is no such distinction. But since Omalyce had created other men and the first woman in
the image of himself, allogenesis (both homo and hetero) is a variation of the autogenesis,
and correspondingly, homo and hetero-sexuality are variations on autosexuality.

Consequently, the genetic order of relations between the three sexual modes, that is, the order
of differentiation via derivation of one mode from another, has a logical correlative which
amplifies their essential identity rather than difference.
A
B C A =B =C
CT-Cf Cf-0
Figure 5.
For the Iqwaye the internal structure of A, B, and C is the same. Indeed, we can readily
appreciate the analogical transfer from B and C to A by saying that to have sex with oneself
is the same as to be oriented towards oneself as if it were another person. In allosexuality,

regardless of whether it is the homo or hetero variant, this is patently so. But for the Iqwaye
the analogy primarily proceeds from A to B and C, so having sex with another person who
is a relative and who therefore shares the same bodily identity is equivalent to having sex with
oneself. And this, from an analytical perspective can be seen as the analogical (metaphorical)
'reasoning' behind the Iqwaye envisioning of incestas self-copulation. However, mythopoeia

cannot be reduced to a formalized ana-logic because it is not a propositional reasoning but
the work of the imaginative articulation of the experience of embodied psyche energized by
its primordial, 'uroboric' (Neumann 1954) passions.
The foregoing has reamplified the primacy of the mythopoeic self as the horizon in
terms of which Iqwaye sociality as a whole has to be conceptualized. The dynamics of the
52
Mimica
Iqwaye scheme of incest interdiction can be now clearly formulated. It is constituted as the
tension between autosexuality and allosexuality which, as two orientations, are alternate
modalities of the same self. The tension originates in the very interdiction of incest, which is
a negation incurred by the self upon itself, in order to counter its own autosexual strivings,
with regards to both itself and others, that is, relatives.
Now this negation was not instituted in the Iqwaye world as some kind of authoritarian
proclamation by some vicious deity such as is given us in Judaic mythopoeia. There, Yahweh,
a bodyless god of abominable temper (he operates on ultra-short fuses only) engraves (he is
literate) the ten Commandaments for Moses to deliver them upon the people of Israel as a
sine qua non of their existence: 'Thou shall not this' and 'Thou shall that'.
The Iqwaye mythopoeic self-constitution, founded entirely upon the facticity of

bodiliness (there is here no spirit/body distinction, let alone a burning bush that does not
incinerate) represents a completely different ontological situation. Here, the negation as the
instituting function of the Iqwaye social reality is a non-verbal effect of an inner necessity,
the necessity to be born, to come into existence. For the origin of negation was the very
rupture of Omalyce's umbilical cord -penis whereby he himself, as the cosmos, had
transfigured from the self-same in-existence into the veritable existence. Here there is no
'Thou shall not7 or 'Thou shall'. Only in a culture which blots out the organismic rootedness
of its existence is it likely that society is created by a piece of transcendental legislation. But
the social anthropological theory of sociality, trapped in its cultural myopia for the lived body,
never did emancipate itself from the legalistic view of social existence, perpetrating in the
process the Judeo-Christian complex that humans through culture (spirit) are in opposition to
nature (body) and can be human solely through the obedience of the Law.
Within the Iqwaye ontological horizon there is only a spontaneous unfolding of the
primordial bodiliness, which is its own condition, its own being, and its own non-being, at
once its own affirmation and negation. Because we are dealing here with the organismic
totality making itself into its own otherness, the originary negation does not have the schizoid
quality of an all or nothing injunction, and remains grounded in its ontological positivity
where all is all. Therefore, the originary structure of negation in Iqwaye sociality does not
have an absolutely non-negotiable, repressive function in relation to that primordial

permissive, all-encompassing, self-affirmative, autosexual mode of being which created its
own negation out of itself (i.e., the interdiction of incest-as-autosexuality). The incest
interdiction does not work in such a way that autosexuality, the primordial stratum of sociality
and the cosmos, would forever remain unaffirmed and unaccomplished in the stratum of
sociality structured through allocentric relations. As we shall now come to see, the incest
interdiction works entirely in the service of the primordial positivity and permissiveness of
the autosexual being which, thus, never renounces itself and its passions. Rather, the
autosexual being simultaneously accepts the allocentric orientations as the vital condition of
sociality because it is also its own condition of existence. For this reason the incest
interdiction, the negation of the original being (i.e., incest as self-creation) functions to
transform this mode of being into its equivalent in the sphere of allocentric existence. The
generative matrix of Iqwaye society, then, is seemingly paradoxical. Incest through its
interdiction, that is allosexuality through negation of autosexuality, thereby becomes the
affirmation of the passions of incest - autosexuality. The logic of Iqwaye social organization
becomes intelligible as a dialectic of the passions of incest which as such are also the passions
of the primordial androgynous being Omalyce, the cosmic man. In the 2nd part of this essay
53
The Incest Passions
(to appear in the next issue of Oceania ) I will survey their realizations in the concrete
structures of Iqwaye society.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This paper was written in its final form in 1989 while I was teaching at the University College
London. It derives from three years of fieldwork (1977-78, 1979, 1983, 1984-86) among the
Iqwaye and other Yagwoia speaking groups of the Menyamya District, Morobe Province,
PNG. Coming to know the Iqwaye and my own radical self-reflections over a dozen years
changed forever my understanding of the depths of human passions and the meanings of
incest. Psychoanalysis and Jungian psychology, together with phenomenology and

existentialism became fundamental to my anthropological investigations of Iqwaye existence
and through them, the meaning of humanness. I am most grateful to these formidable people,
and to the provincial and the PNG national authorities for facilitating my research over the
years. I am also grateful to the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies for research affiliation.
My research was originally financed by the Commonwealth of Australia Department of
Education, the Australian National University, and subsequently by a grant from the
Australian Research Grant Scheme. I thank these institutions for support. For their comments
on this paper I am especially grateful to Roy Wagner and Marilyn Strathern. Many years ago
while still a student two studies of incest had predisposed me to pay attention to my own
intuitions of the meaning of incest: Lvi-Strauss' classic work and Wagner's original
reflections on incest and identity (1972). Preliminary versions of this study were presented
in the departmental seminars at the UCL, LSE, University of Leiden, University of Sydney
and the ANU. I am grateful to those attending these for their critical comments. I especially
wish to mention Lucy Auty, Bruce Kapferer, Christine Toren, Michael Jackson, Alan
Abramson, Mike Rawlands, Roland Littlewood, Rohan Bastin, Peter Flugel, Alfred Gell,
Jimmy Weiner, Don Gardner, Chris Gregory, Andrew Lattas, Neil Maclean and Vivienne
Kondos. Also, special thanks to Tom Ernst and Kerry Zubrinich. I am also grateful to the
editors of Oceania for accepting this lengthy paper for publication, presumably in
remembrance of the old days when ethnographers were welcome to publish at length, not just
in two but in several consecutive issues.
NOTES
1 . By 'humanness ' or 'human being ' I mean human organismic life or bodily existence. Humans and all other
organisms exist through and as their bodies. Yet this is virtually overlooked in anthropological thinking
about human life. Humanness is either approached as Mind or, in so far as bodiliness is treated, it is in
reductionist terms via mechanistic concepts of physiology, psychology and biology, and more recently,
semiotics. This fails to comprehend the existential structures of bodiliness as elucidated by Merleau-Ponty
(1962, 1963), Buytendijk (1974), Goldstein (1939), Plessner (1969). Also relevant here are such authors
as Schilder (1950) in psychoanalysis, von Uexkull (1926, 1957) and Portmann (1967) in biology. Equally
insufficient is the current fascination with the body and power instigated among social scientists and
philosophers by M. Foucault. By limiting existence to dominant representation/discourses, he too has failed
to account adequately for the reality of human bodiliness. However, N. Elias* work The Civilizing Process
which in many respects has prefigured Foucault's, illuminates the interrelation of bodiliness and the
historical sociogenesis of specific, namely Western European, structures of sociality with a theoretical
orientation relevant to my own interpretation of Iqwaye sociality.
2. I am using the term embodied psyche not to imply a mind/body duality but simply to emphasize the human
totality despite the established tradition of Cartesian dualism. I use psyche especially to emphasize the
54
Mimica
concrete body -person -world structures of human experience, in opposition to the abstract,
rationalistic-mechanistic conception of the mind, the mind without the body and the world, therefore having
no body-person-world reality. A society of disembodied and worldless minds, without character and
personality, would have no concern with incest, kinship, sexuality, nor would it manifest all the ugliness,
grandeur, petulance, and follies of human existence. Yet it is exactly such a sterile conception of the mind,
an activity of pure combinatorics, or in the current parlance computation, that dominates much scientific
theorizing about the mind, which reduces it to a single modality - cognition, conceived, by and large, as
computer processing.
3. Given this situation, an adequate theory of imagination has to draw not only on the great modem explorers
of imagination such as Jung, Bachelarad, Corbin, Durand, or Sartre; it must draw as well on various mystical
traditions (e.g. Alchemy), and other philosophical traditions, for example, Islamic, Indian, Chinese,
Japanese. From within this comparative perspective the current research on 'imagery* (i.e., imagination)
exemplified especially by such Cognitive revolutionaries' as Kosslyn, Pylyshyn, and to some extent by
Shepard, appears narrow, simple-minded and conservative. Although not without interest, this research
suffers from the above discussed epistemological parochialism and its culturally specific cognitive
pathology - the bigotry of Reason and the assumption of the derivative and secondary place of imagination
within the human mind, itself predominantly approached in terms of the overprivileged experiental modes
- perception and language, and the computer based conceptualization of the mind, brain and the body.
Anthropology suffers from the same malady. For a theory of imagination anthropology would have to
supply the vital evidence, different cultural modes of being -in-the- world as the veritable products of human
creative imagination and different modalities of imaginative activities in general. Alas, anthropology too
is deeply stuck in the cultural epistemological parochialism. And in a sense this is inexcusable because
anthropologists, unlike psychologists and philosophers, do go out of their own villages to explore other
cultures. Yet, most of them have reproduced the 'truths' of the prevailing academic doctrines, thereby
forfeiting the possibility of using the realities of other cultures to subject Western rationality and its bigotry
to a constructive critique and inner transformation. The result is the polarization of anthropological thought
around the barren controversy between Universalism and Relativism - barren because both are the creation
of the same epistemological tradition, and therefore are only intelligible in terms of each other.
4. For this reason Castoriadis (1987:3) had to emphasize: 'The imaginary of which I am speaking is not an
image of. It is the unceasing and essentially undetermined (socio-historical and psychical) creation of
figures/forms/images, on the basis of which alone there can ever be a question of "something". What we
call "reality" and "rationality" are its works'.
5. Incest here specifies the character of sexual procreation in the cosmogonic situation. It does not imply any
Iqwaye moral injunctions which would be projected by a contemporary Iqwaye myth-teller into the
cosmogonic situation. Incest, then is only a matter-of-fact descriptive notion.
6. I use interchangeably sex and gender since I find this distinction developed by the researchers on gender
identity ill -conceived. It is based on the false premises that the anatomical sex can be defined as a purely
anatomical objectivity of the body in relation to which gender, as it were, is a subjective, psychological,
and therefore non-bodily construction. The point is that any gender construction is about bodily sex
understood as a non -scientific anatomical facticity of self -experience. For this reason, no matter how
fantasmatic, schizoid or even disembodied a 'gender' identity may be, it is always about the bodily sex, for
that is the irreducible matrix of self -identity as a sexed being. The most cursory phenomenological reflection
on the experience of 'gender' will show that there is always a corporeal aspect of every intrapsychic 'gender'
identity, or for that matter, any 'culturally' constructed gender. Gender, then, is always a certain
construction of sexed embodiment.
7. For details see Mimica 1981, 1988.
8. I use penis/phallus interchangeably since this Western analytical distinction corresponds to nothing in
non -scientific human experience. It is tenable solely within a critical framework of analytical
conceptualization. But no such conceptualization had created Iqwaye realities or formed their bodies into
meaningful experiental gestalts and representations. Accordingly, my conceptual synthesis is guided by
the demands of phenomenological fidelity to Iqwaye reality and mythopoeic consciousnesss, not a
55
The Incest Passions
framework of analytical concepts external to them. Within this framework the penis is anatomical fact,
phallus is a symbolic complex of meanings. But in fact every 'anatomical fact' as a concept is a symbolic
construct, a product of human understanding rather than a brute fact. In all cultures humans constitute their
bodies first as lived bodies then as anatomical facts, and in both the imaginal- symbolic function is operative.
Consequently the 'facts' qua constitutive meanings vary relative to the structure of understanding through
which facts are constituted as facts.
9. By way of further clarification, Iqwaye imagery and metaphorical usages show that the body is fused with
the tree and the house (see Mimica 1981). These images articulate the two aspects of the body - its phallic
exteriority (tree) and its equally phallic interiority (house), especially the womb. They relate to each other
as the container and the contained and together form the autogenic unity which was the original bodiliness
of the creator.
The Iqwaye body as a whole is implicitly a homogenous configuration since the area around the genitals,
that is, the mid-section of the trunk, is also labelled 'head'. It can be seen, then, that the Iqwaye body is
reducible to a simple scheme of two equivalent hollow sub spaces, head and trunk, both of which contain
progenitive organs (mouth and genitals) which stand in a mirror relationship to each other and which form
an imaginary central axis - the phallus - at once inside and outside. Internally these subspaces are totally
interconnected by the system of seminal and blood passages. Externally they are perfectly connectable by
means of what can be technically called a 'plug' since the penis fits into the vagina/mouth as a key into the
key-hole. Thereby all surfaces are fusable into a single surface. This clearly shows that the structure of
Iqwaye bodiliness is the expression of that primordial bodily image of cosmogonic closure.
I visualize and thus conceptualize this primordial phallic structure of the body topologically as a kind
of configuration which is neither a Kleinean bottle, nor torus, nor even a sphere, yet it is similar to all three.
All of them have no boundary, only one side. But in the case of Omalyce's self -closure it makes little sense
to speak of sides where all spatiality is absolutely in-side. As to connectivity, this topological relation is
also cancelled out, for in the autogenic body all regions are equally connectable, which is to say all is all.
Although impressionistic this topological adumbration, I think, brings into a sharper relief the tacit
bodily self-representation as total homogeneity. This primordial mythopoeic image subtends the more
differentiated configuration evinced by Iqwaye lexical-metaphorical and iconic representations. This inner
bodily self -representation brought out into the open solely by the icon of the uroboric, autogenic cosmogony,
is a manifestation of a genetically primary level of consciousness which, perhaps in the psychoanalytic

situations of deep regression, surfaces more readily.
10. The same is true of other mythopoeic figures which objectify the dynamics of the self in psychoanalytic
theory. One can see correctly in the mythic image of Omalyce's self-creation an acute expression of the
deepest 'narcissistic' strivings, a radically monadic 'primary" and 'cosmic narcissism'. But Narcissus here
is at once a revealing analogy and a profound limitation. The Greek mythopoeic Narcissus has to be seen
in the perspective of the specifically Greek understanding of the tension between self-knowledge and life
without it 'The seerTeiresias told Leiriope [Narcissus' mother - J.M.] ... "Narcissus will live to a ripe old
age, provided that he never knows himself ' (Graves 1980:286). This was Narcissus' ontological
life-situation, the determination of his destiny. His final self-occlusion in the specular surface of a spring
is the outcome of this predicament, which also accounts for his 'stubborn pride in his own beauty' (ibid.).
That pride was indeed due to the lack of self-knowledge which led through the mediation of Artemis, into
his demise at the spring. Here only specular self-recognition (self-knowledge) occurred and Narcissus,
unable to consummate himself in his, now recognized, self-love while alive chooses to do so in death at his
own hand. Suicide became the way into self-consummation. Even so there was also a self -transcendence:
a white narcissus flower grew out of the earth soaked by his blood. But in Omalyce mythopoeia,
self-occlusion was the condition of the creation of himself and the world, and the two eternally mirror each
other. Obviously, the intrapsychic world opened up by Omalyce myth, as well as its existential possibilities
and realities, have to be understood in the cultural and historical realities of Iqwaye existence, where self,
knowledge and life are calibrated differently from the ancient Greek or Occidental.
56
Mmica
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4:153-59.
BUYTENDUK, FJ.J. 1974(1966]. Prolegomena to an AntJiropological Physiology. Pittsburgh: Duquesne

UniversityPress.
CASTORIADIS, C. 1987(1974]. Vie Imaginary Institution of Society. London: Polity Press.

CORBIN, H. 1969. Creative Imagination in the Sufism of IbnArabi. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
1972. Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal. Spring: An Annual o] Archetypal
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DEVEREUX,G. 1978(1965]. Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Elementary Structures of Kinship. In his

Ethnopsychoanalysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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EREUD, S. 1985 [1913]. Totem and Tabu. In Pelican Freud Library, vol. 11. Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books.
GOLDSTEIN, K. 1939. Vie Organism. New York: American Book Company.
GRAVES, R 1980(1950]. Greek Myths. London: Cassel.

GRUNBERGER,B. 1979. Narcissism Psychoanalytic Essays. New York: International Universities Press.
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JUNG, C.G. 1956(1913/1952]. Symbols of Transformation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
KOHUT, R 1966. Forms and Transformations of Narcissism. Journal of American Psychoanalytic

Association 14:243-72.
1968. The Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders. Vie Psychoanalytic study oj
tlie Child 23:86-113.
1972. Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage. Vie Psychoanalytic Study oj me uiua
27:360-400.
1977. Vie Restoration of the Self . New York: International Universities Press.
LACAN, J. 1977. Ecrits: A Selection. London: Tavistock.

1981. The Oedipus Complex. Seimotext (e) 4:190-200.
LAYARD, J. 1944. Primitive Kinship as Mirrored in the Psychological Structure of Modem Man. British
Journal of Medical Psycholo 20:118-134.

1945. The Incest Taboo and the Virgin Archetype. Eranos-Jahrbuch 12:253-307.
1959. Homo-eroticism in Primitive Society as a Function oi the belt. Journal oj Analytical rsytnuiugy
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1960. On Psychic Consciousness. Eranos-Jahrbuch 28: 277-344.

LVI-STRAUSS, C. 1969 [1949]. Vie Elementary Structures of Kinship. London: Tavistock.
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MERLEAU-PONTY M. 1962. Vie Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
1963. Tlie Structure of Behavior. Boston: Beacon Press.
1964. The Child s Relations with Others, lnhis me rnmacy oj rercepuonunavuicr l^>uy. ^ouiwu.
NorthwesternUniversityPress.
1973. Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, hvanston: iNorthwesiern university rrcs^.
MMICA, J. 1981. Omalyce: An Ethnography of the Iqwaye View of the Cosmos, Unpublished Ph.D. thesis,
AustralianNationalUniversity.
1988. Intimations oj 'Infinity: Vie Mythopoeiaoj the Iqwaye Lounting system ana i\unwer. uxiuiaucig
Publishers.
MURDOCK, G.P. 1949. Social Structure. New York: Macmi 11 an/Free Press.
NtUMANN, h. 1VO4. I he Origin and History oj consciousness, rnncciun. nm^iun ^^..il; x.^,o.
PLESSNER, R 1967. A Newton of A Blade of Grass? In M. Grene (ed), toward a Unity oj Knowledge,
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PORTMANN, A. 1969. Animal Form and Pattern. New York: Schocken Books.
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The Incest Passions
SAMUELS, A. 1980. Incest and Omnipotence in the Internal Family. TJie Journal of Analytical Psychology
25:37-57.
SCHELDER,P. 1950. The linage and Appear anee of the Hitman Body. New York: International Universities
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STEIN, R.M. 1974. Incest and Human Love. Baltimore: Penguin Books Inc.
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Jung and Soul Psychology, pp.171-187. New York: The Haworth Press.
von UEXKULL, J. 1926. Tlteoretical Biology . London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
1957. A Stroll Through the World of Animals and Man. In C.R Schiller (ed), Instinctive Behavior,
pp.5-80. London: Methuen.
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Prohibition. Man 7:601-61 \
1986. Symbols Tliat Stand for Jliemselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
fh I The Empty Place
fh ^ I Poetry, Space, and Being among the Foi
Ul of Papua New Guinea
Q I James F. Weiner
!T^ H Weiner analyzes the poetic imagery of songs
M H composed by Foi women and performed by Foi
. I men of the Mubi River Valley. These poems
^fl recreate Foi geography and employ image and
+J H metaphor to express their most encompassing

J^B existential and social contrasts. Weiner's use of
2V philosophy in the aid of ethnography to study Foi
H I poetic imagery will appeal to anthropologists
M and philosophers alike.

[jj 240 pages, 1 5 b & w photos
cloth $39.95 US paper $14.95 US
^ H At bookstores or from
L I INDIANA University Press
fc H 601 N. Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404 USA
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Oceania Publications, University of Sydney

The Incest Passions: An Outline of the Logic of Iqwaye Social Organization

THE INCEST PASSIONS: AN OUTLINE OF THE

LOGIC OF IQWAYE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

prohibition of incest is the condition of human sociality, without the positive

articulation of incest passions in the main structural configurations of Iqwaye social

34 Oceania, 62, 1991

own ontological project. Furthermore, since any human society is an organization of

The Incest Passions

is to understand it as an ontological project, a mode of being-in-the world.

of imagination. Indeed, there is no possibility of the human mode of being-in-the-world

structures of the human organismic being-in-the-world. Unfortunately, for modern

imagined as a computational machine and accordingly practised in its technological

human reality has to be shown through concrete investigations of particular societies.

I am not implying that imagination is the sole dimension of the embodied

desires, of passions in all spheres of human endeavour, imagination is undoubtedly all

humanness - Iqwaye, Chinese, American, or European - must be approached from the

The Incest Passions

so are treated as a negative confirmation of the virtually world-wide cultural prohibition of

organization as a configuration of a specific mode of being-in-the-world which as such

2. Cosmos, Body, and Society as Coeval

Ixn \ J^/^^^CsTi morobe

The Incest Passions

Furthermore, this first creation was incestuous5 because the creator-father's

above. Iqwaye cosmogony is mythopoeic, which is to say that it is characterized by a specific

a conscious existence is experienced and objectified mythopoetically as the creation and

manifold diffcrcnliations indicated by the couplets sky/earth, sun/moon, dark/light, wet/dry,

and the absolute identity of the -A (itself a derived condition).

f A.A )=( 4"A H~<> J

The Incest Passions

self-same identity of the one, and as such is one.

structure of Iqwaye mythopoeic intentionality, whereby the originary structure is the

practice of institutionalized male homosexuality, the organization of bachelorhood, and the

The Incest Passions

man's body: mouth, penis, anus,

woman's body: mouth, vagina, anus,

This scheme emphasizes that in order to elucidate sex as an Iqwaye category it is

and biological science.

The Incest Passions

y^" I bodily creation

/-Al -A2 -A3 -A4 -A5

This ontological determination of Iqwaye sociality as the autopoietic unity of the

The Incest Passions

is a tautegorical or self-referential symbol in Iqwaye cosmology. It is a symbol of itself for,

of their existence. (For a discussion of self-referential symbols, see Wagner 1986.)

the elucidation of how such a fundamental prohibition is formed in Iqwaye sociality

The Iqwaye's formidable formulation of incest spells out its significance as an

autosexual behaviour, and in this determination is prohibited. More strongly formulated,

by the concrete imagery pertaining to the structure of social relations grounded in

The Incest Passions

age structures of existence. In this understanding every human society is structured as a

is, being-a-child-born-of-woman, being-a-sexed/libidinal-body, being-a-desirous-body,

The poverty of anthropological as well as psychoanalytic theorizing about the

Devereux (1978) who did focus on homosexuality, no anthropological, psychoanalytic or

stratum of humanness) as in psychoanalysis, what is presented is the child as constructed by

humanness and social existence is comprehended ontologically and existentially as their

Oedipus by himself would explain Omalyce.10 The development of psychoanalysis indeed

1972, 1977; Grunberger 1979; Lacan 1977, 1981).

1974, 1986; Samuels 1980).

The Incest Passions

(A) autosexuality - [> (B) homosexuality - ^ (C) heterosexuality

and correspondingly, homo and hetero-sexuality are variations on autosexuality.

is the same as to be oriented towards oneself as if it were another person. In allosexuality,