SUFFERING KINSHIP AND LIVING EMOTION: EXCHANGE, 'EXCESS' AND EMOTIONAL ENERGY IN GOROKA TOWN, PAPUA NEW GUINEA

Abstract

This thesis discusses the emotions of women and children in Goroka town, Eastern Highlands, Papua New Guinea. I take as my point of departure child maintenance cases heard in Goroka District Court. I consider the emotions (from anger and loss to ambivalence) that women and children involved in these cases experienced in regard to the spousal and parental relationship respectively. In so doing I focus on aspects of kinship that have tended to elude the standard focus for anthropology of the region: the emotions of abandoned wives; children's experience of violent and absent fathers; mothers who have had their children taken away from them as a consequence of bridewealth exchange or adoption; and the emotional dimension to sexual encounters.I argue that the emotions these women and children experience 'exceed' channels of expression and concern that are locally seen as legitimate. Emotional 'excess' is depicted here as emotion that is somehow more than permitted, acknowledged or accounted for in indigenous social life and, as a result, is effaced in our corresponding analyses of it (e.g., Strathern 1988, Wagner 1975). I suggest that emotions instantiate a flow of energy that is transmissible, generative and transducible, and constitutive of social life. Finally, I posit that the concept of energy can integrate existing analyses of Melanesian sociality with the emotional 'excess' that they obscure.

Date of Award	31 Dec 2013
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Karen Sykes (Supervisor) & Penelope Harvey (Supervisor)