Death and Society among the Anggor of New Guinea

Abstract

The central concern of the paper is the relationship between Anggor representations of the natural phenomenon of death, and representations of the autonomous village - a cultural phenomenon. The ideal solidarity of the Anggor village is defined largely through opposition to the hostile and dangerous outside world; this opposition is expressed in Anggor beliefs that death is caused by outsiders, through sorcery, alienating the deceased from the moral community of the village. Relations between Anggor villages, then, are characterized by a constant undercurrent of fear and hostility which is continually renewed by death. Within this context, death and violence are so defined that they are self-generating and sporadically escalate into disruptive large scale episodes of inter-village aggression. Thus death, both as an object of doctrine and a fact of life, is a key feature of the Anggor system of inter-village relations.