79

TAJA 1993 4:2

Review Article
The Foi and Heidegger: Western Philosophical
Poetics and a New Guinea Life-World

James F. Weiner. The Empty Place. Poetry, Space and Being Among the Foi of P a p a
New Guinea. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991. xiv,
218pp., plates, illust., maps, bibliog., index. $30 (Pb.). ISBN 0-253-36382-9.

Jadran Mirnica
Anthropology, University of Sydney

Introduction
I shall start with a contradiction. This is an excellent book with regard both to its
strengths and to its weaknesses. This seemingly incompatible conjunction leads me into
a series of focused reflections because of the very character of the work a dense
ethnography of a New Guinea life-worlds self-poeticisation interpreted within a
framework of cultural semiotics and Heideggers philosophical poetics. There is
nowadays only a handful of anthropologists who do long-term fieldwork and make the
comprehension of an alien experience of existence their own intellectual quest. There
are even fewer who have the necessary depth of knowledge of another culture and
language to undertake such a quest. Without doubt Weiner is one of them. His
knowledge of the Foi life-world has already been detailed in his earlier books and
papers. These need to be read to gain a true critical and constructive appreciation of
his latest ethnographic marvel.
The Foi, who speak a Papuan language, live in the south-eastern region of Lake
Kutubu in the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea. Within the
perimeters of their environment a major oil field is currently operating but, to the best
of my knowledge, neither this nor Christianisation has as yet severed the Foi life-world
80 THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY

from its rootedness in their innermost psychic being or, reciprocally, severed the Foi
self from its embodiment and rootedness in the exteriority of their world (see Weiner
n.d.). In this kind of human world interiority is exteriority. Worldhood and reality as
lived by the inhabitants of such a life-world suggest the need for a radical reflection on
the role of the imaginal (Corbm 1972) sphere of the human mind in its constitution.
For instance, in the Foi world marsupials, rodents and other game animals spend every
dry season (November to February) in the sky and then, at the onset of the rainy
season (March), come down onto the ground to eat the tree fruits which become
available at that time (Weiner 1984581). This is neither a supernatural, nor a
magical, nor an enchantedworld; but neither is it a mythic or poetic image of the
world, something that is categorically not real or not true, although it may be
misconceived as such by a Westerner or some other foreigner. This is because
Westerners come from another life-world distinguished by its own specific cultural-
existential project.
In the course of their transformations over the last two thousand or so years,
Westerners developed a unique constellation of modes of self-understanding and
existential projects, all of which hinged on the problematics of human salvation in
relation to an omnipotent god. But with the post-Enlightenment bourgeois project of
the liberation of Man (and Woman), a certain dialectical price had to be paid, namely,
the death of God. Yet, without god there was no longer a measure for Man, no longer
a raison &Stre. However, through poets, artists in general and their critics, the civic
consciousness set out to reclaim the rapidly evaporating coherence of the enchanted
world - often via an acute critique of science, religion and, indeed, of all existence. In
addition, with the rise of bourgeois nationalism, poets and artists could consummate
their urge to sing the world in the figure of the nation state and its primal
elementality: patriotism squares well with poetic geopiety (Tuan 1976). At the same
time, these crises of the Occidental human condition gave a new impetus to critical
philosophical questioning of two seemingly irreconcilable mentalities - science and
poetry - and their relation to experience, truth and world. Hence the question: What
are poets for?
This, then, is the inheritance of the modern and post-modern Western poetics. A
succession of several New Physics and scientific revolutions, a succession of new
world-pictures; a succession of social revolutions, colonial expansion and nationalist
projects. Poetry itself, now reduced to the intrinsic objectivity of language, has
experienced a revolution in poetic language. But no revolution in gods. All gods and
goddesses are the divinities of tradition. The neo-paganism, neo-shamanism and neo-
anything of the New Age ideology only underscore this bankruptcy of the numenal
imagination of the Western Geist.

Heidegger and Ethnographys Project

But in Papua New Guinea, a few kilometres inland from the shores of Lake Kutubu
in the area of the upper Mubi River, the people are dead-pan about the fact that
during every rainy season the animals come down onto the ground. The Foi at this
THE FOI A N D HEIDEGGER: W R N PHILOSOPHICAL POEIlCS .. . 81

time leave their long-house communities and go up to these game-infested territories

to hunt. They call their long-house settlement territory the empty place or the dry
place, because there is no meat here (p.22). And in their songs, Weiner says the Foi
ultimately make of this a tragic image: that the male quest for meat, the exemplary
activity of men, isolates them from other members of the community as effectively as
death (p.22; emphasis mine).
From a strictly local perspective, everything in the Foi world is intelligible, their life
no less than their death and their self-poeticisation. Weiners detailed ethnography
facilitates that kind of understanding: the comprehension of the Foi world for and by
themselves. There are problems with such non-local characterisations as the one just
emphasised - tragic - but the Foi world as truly the product of their own experience
and self-articulation is conspicuously present in the book, its presence reinforced by
the selection of beautiful black-and-white photographs. The discussion of their naming
practices, dream interpretations, the intrinsic dynamism and iconicity of Foi language
and its poetic use, the relationship between womens and mens poetical creativity -
these are the truly priceless achievements of Weiners ethnography and analysis. A
critical reader will get the sense of an original relation with the world in which human
existence needs no salvation from itself because there is nothing else but existence,
nothing but life-and-death. In the Foi world there are no gods, and the Foi have never
been involved in such projects as the Death of God, the Death of Man, or the
twilight of the idols. Likewise, there is abundant evidence in Weiners ethnography
that they do not problematise their own relation to death in such a way as to warrant,
without some strong intracultural evidence, its characterisation as either authentic or
inauthentic (on this more later).
Yet, it is exactly these vintage European cultural icons of assailed human existence
which define the cultural grounding of Heideggers philosophical project - the
overcoming of Western metaphysics - and accordingly determine his poetics. This
also circumscribes the blind spot in Weiners book: his uncritical acceptance of
Heideggers poetics. Weiners hermeneutic of Foi self-poeticisation receives its
grounding not from a radical self-reflection on and self-appropriation within the
existential framework of Foi being-in-the-world, but rather from the unquestioned
assumption of the transcultural validity of Heideggers philosophical poetics or poetical
ontology.
Heidegger failed to recognise what every ethnographer must: viz, that different
cultural life-worlds are different modes of humanness and, as such, are different
modes of being-in-the-world in their totality. By contrast, Heideggers teacher Husserl
had realised, upon reading Levy-Bruhls Primitive Mythology, that even in the freedom
of his/her imagination, the Western thinker is limited by situatedness in his/her own
cultural-historical world1 Hence the radicality and significance of ethnographic
fieldwork. Every phenomenologically-oriented ethnography must achieve its
hermeneutic grounding in the life-world of its inquiry. In this sense there is no a priori
fundamental ontology, poetical or not, that can be adhered to. This philosophical
1. On Husscrl, Le -Bruhl and the philosophical significance of primitive life-worlds, see
Merleau-Ponty 1!%:90-91.
82 THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF AHR0POLOGY

attitude, in conjunction with phenomenology and psychoanalysis, can facilitate for the
ethnographer the practice of uncompromising and ongoing self-transformation - an
intrapsychic open surgery without anaesthetic. In this way the ethnographer makes
another life-world and its self-understanding increasingly his/her own.
In 1928 Heidegger reviewed Cassirers second volume of Philosophy of the Symbolic
Forms on mythic thought2 Critical of the latters neo-Kantian intellectualist position,
Heidegger says: [tlhe interpretation of the essence of myth as a possibility of human
Dasein remains accidental and directionless as long as it is not founded on a radical
ontology of Dasein in the light of the problem of Being in general (1976a:41). This
problem is the same one that Heidegger formulated in Being and Time (1%2;
originally 1927). Soon he was to problematise its grounding, within the cultural-
historical horizon of Western thinking, as the overcoming of Western metaphysics.
His unveilings of its origins in the ancient Greek poetical-philosophical thought were
to have singular import for present-day philosophy. But in his encounter with a
philosophical appraisal of mythopoeic thought, Heidegger is immediately concerned
with the validation of his fundamental (Western) philosophical project - the problem
of Being in general. Reflecting on Cassirers delineation of manu as the primordial
object of mythic consciousness, Heidegger writes:
In the mana-representation there is disclosed nothing other than that understanding of Being
which belon to Dasein as such but which is specifically modified according to the basic mode
- -
of being of Basein in this case mythic Dasein and which anticipatingly illuminates thought
and intuition (197k43).
He decides that if the
.. .basic constitution of Dasein . . . is found in care, understood ontologically (see my Sein und
;ze, pp.180-230) then it becomes clear that mythic Dasein is pnmanly determined by
thrownness. . . . fn thrownness m hic Dasein, in its manner of being-in-the-world is delwered
u to the world in such a way tKat it is overwhelmed by that to which it is delivered u .
&erwhelmingness can disclose itself as overwhelmingness only in the case of a being-delivereg-
up to. . . . In such a case of bein delivered u to that which is overwhelming, Dasein is
captivated and can experience itsel only as beknging to and related with this reality. In
thrownness, accordingly, all disclosed beings have the ontological feature of overwhelmingness
mana). Indeed, if the ontological interpretation is pursued to the specific temporali which
iounds throwmess, then it can be made ontologically understandable why and how thegeal, in
the form of mana .. . discloses itself in a specific present moment of vision (AugenblicWichkeit).
In thrownness there is a unique case of being-driven in which there is an o nness for whatever
may be surprisingly extraordinary. Thus the specific cate ories of mytEc thought must be
deduced wth the mana-representation serving as the guide tbid).
Here overwhelmingness also seems to imply a sense of fascination. In Krells
(1992183-84) discussion the meaning of the key words translated above as
overwhelmingness- Benommenkeit and Benommensein - range from bedazzlement,
stupefaction to bedazzled and benumbed. These significations are brought into a
sharper relief in Kaufmanns synopsis (19492333-34):
A fundamental conce t like that of mana betrays as its ultimate motive mans perplexi in the
face of his tasks andsi!l feelings of being overwhelmed by the world around him. Man 2-
extricate himself from such a predicament by acknowledging it in this fashion. The myths thus
not
testify to his resigning himself to the domination of uncontrollable powers as well as exhibit his
constructive capacities. The world of the myth, though being in one sense the work of his
-
creative imagination, may still fail to be mans proper world the world in which he feels at
home. The needy man, the man dependent on mercy and subject to renunciation, disappears

2. An English translation and excellent clarificatory notes b James Hart and John Maraldo are in
Heidegger 1976a:324$ 176-181.I also used Kaufmanns tl949833-34) and Krells (199218384)
synopses of this review.
THE FOI AND HEIDEGGER: WESTERN PHILOSOPHICAL POETICS. .. 83

(here as well as elsewhere in Cassirers writings) behind the screen of his specious cultural
achievements.
As elsewhere, Heideggers thinking here about Dasein (primitive or modern) is
limited and distorted by a repressive attitude towards the lived body and its projection
into the world. The effect of this is a rarefied hermeneutic unveilingof experience and
Being, which suspends the context of the human primordial origin in the womb and
the acts which precede it: sexual intercourse of two other beings followed by birth
pangs, palpitations and spasms, blood, occasionally some shit and the cutting of the
umbilical cord. And this is just one aspect of the human beginning. This mode of
thro~llllessdelivers into the world a bodily being gifted with polymorphic perversity,
primordial omnipotence, cosmic appetites, symbiotic dependence on the maternal
being and so on, all of which world mythopoeia opulently attests to. A reflection on the
trickster figure or on numerous cosmological myths will alert the philosopher to the
fact that those experiential modalities philosophically rendered as mana
bedazzlement, overwhelmingness and primordial power, belong to a polymorphic
embodiment whose mighty appetites, orifices and genitals are there not just to brave
and comport to the world, but to create and shape it. Significantly, Heidegger objects
to Cassirers conception of the primordial power as the first energy whose origin is in
the human bodily being, in its desires. Here Cassirer is close to Freud. Heidegger
writes:
But why is it first? It is a question of showin how this desire is rooted in thrownness and of
pointin out how mere desire, on the basis of a unique survey of possibilities which does not
over loo^any of them, can have this power to be efficacious in this way. On1 when desire itself is
..
antecedently understood within the context of mana . can it disclose itselras such an efficacy.
But if desire is to constitute the confrontation belween world and I, then one must also
consider that such comportments of mythic Dasein are always on1 ways in which the
transcendence of Dasein to its world is uncovered and never ways in whicl transcendence is first
produced. The confrontation is founded in the transcendence of Dasein. And mythic Dasein
itself with objects only because it, as a being-in-the-world, comports itself to a
Sri$&!iu).
I believe that Heideggers focal emphasis on overwhelmingness or bedazzlement
to characterise primitive Dasein, which also has an implicit sense of a dominant
existential mood, is conditioned by the cultural-historical context of the Western
world-mood (Stimmung) - attunement with the world (see Spitzer 1945) - within which
his thinking is taking place. Heidegger seems to be projecting onto the primitive
Dasein the incessant reverberations of the enraptured Christian Dasein poeticised, for
instance, by John D o M ~ : ~
And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out;
The sun is lost, and thearth, and no mans wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this worlds spent,
When in the planets, and the firmament
They seek so many new; then see that this
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
Ti all in pieces, all coherence gone;

3. John Donne An Anatom o the Wonk? Th Fim A (1611 , lines 205-18. Taken from
Friedman and Donley l !d 3 0.These authors cite= a n o t k r pertinent passage from
Shakespeares Zkoilus and cnsdda (1602): Act I, Scene 111, lines 85-103.
84 THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY

All just supply, and all relation:

Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a phoenix, and that then can be
None of that kind, of which he is, but he.
Some 250 years later, echoing Donne, Nietzsche poeticised the same mood of
existential collapse of the world and disorientation, which he saw as experienced by the
human terrestrial self in the face of the infinity of the isotropic cosmos. The sublunar
earth and the sun are equally directionless points of reference in a decentred, godless
space. And the project of modernity is accomplished: God is dead (Nietzsche
1974:181).
The mood of mans perplexity and the overwhelming sense of the world - dependent
men like the tragic or guilty man, the man overcome by nature, this time godless
and isotropic, and so on - all these are the vintage chords of the Western existential
blues, with their roots in the Judaeo-Christian tradition of the human and cosmic fall.
When, following Galileo, the New Science announced that the great book of nature
was written in the language of mathematics, this immediately rendered 99.9% of the
literate population inadequate and overwhelmed a mathematician god is as good as a
dead god. All of a sudden the god qua the world ceased to mirror - that is, to speak to -
the innumerate citisens. And that which used to be thought of as the music of the
celestial spheres, moved by angels, could now, at the very most, be solely echoed as a
yodel made by mortals in some Bavarian sublunar Heimat.
With the moderns, in other words, the specific cultural melancholy of mathophobic
Weltschmertz has become yet another modality of the sensibilities which articulate the
world-mood of Occidental humanity.4 But not everything is lost so long as there are
poets. Here Heideggers turn towards a more original philosophical style of
questioning of the very grounds of metaphysics becomes relevant. Already, in his
review of Cassirer, Heidegger had argued that in so far as the mana-representation . .
.is the howof all the mythic real, i.e. as the Being of beings (1976a:42), then it has to
be elucidated in terms of the fundamental ontology. However, as is the case with his
Dasein version, Heideggers subsequent poetical ontology is a dismal failure (although
philosophically and anthropologically important). It is a failure precisely because it
insists on being an unveiling of a primordial structure of human existence, yet it is
conducted within the limited horizon of the modern Western world and its cultural-
historical matrix, which Heidegger had selectively reappropriated and distorted, yet
deemed inexhaustible. For Heidegger, the absence of gods in the modern world
. . . is not nothing; rather it is precisely the presencing, which must first be appropriated, of the
hidden fullness and wealth of what has been and what, thus gathered, is presencing, of the divine
in the world of the Greeks, in pro hetic Judaism, in the preaching of Jesus. This no-longer is in
itself a not-yet of the veiled amva?of its inexhaustible nature (Heidegger 1971:184).
In this piece of Heideggers pastoral unveiling, the presencing of the original
plenitude of being occurs via a pious hermeneutic of the Graeco-Judaeo-Christian
tradition. This nostalgia for origins conceals a deeper, archetypal phantasy of the
4. A good exam le of this is Walt Whitmans When I Heard the Learnd Astronomer (quoted in
Fnedman a n f Donley op.cik36-37).
THE FOI AM) HEIDEGGER: m R N PHILOSOPHICAL POLTICS. .. 85

primordial plenitude of being projected into the era of the presocratics. By means of
his own unveilings of Anaximanders, Heraclituss and Parmenidess utterances,
Heidegger eventually fully formulated the origins of the groundsof metaphysics as an
irreducibly autonomous mode of poetical-philosophical presencing of Being, but as
one which was also a forgetting of Being3
It is symptomatic that in Heidegger the unconscious has no signrfcance (Richardson
1%5). Those existential psychiatrists whom he originally inspired (e.g. Binswanger
1963, Boss 1%3, 1990) were opposed to Freuds unconscious and libidinal body. All
those orifices and protrusions - mouth, anus, penis, breasts, vagina - and the materia
prima of urine, shit, semen, vaginal fluids, blood, milk, odours and vapours are too
demeaning for the Christian-bourgeois sense of Dasein, whose clear-ing and light-
ing qualities are preferred as the primary existential characteristics. In Being and Zime
(1%2), as in other of Heideggers works, there is no body. The body is present solely
through its absences and displacements, displayed by instrumental complexes, tools,
spatiality, moods and so on, which structure Daseins Umwelt. The dignifying-edifying
care-concern is Daseins essential Being towards the worldP For Heidegger, the
differential libidinal bodily self-investmentsand adhesions to the world (Schilder 1951)
would not qualify for inclusion into the Dasein analytic because psychoanalysis, like all
empirical science, is thoroughlyquestionable and needs be attacked in new ways which
must have their source in ontological problematics (ibid71). Never mind that these
problematics are as thoroughly steeped in the same cultural-historical life-world with
its coagulated tradition of sensibilities and thinking as the science they criticise, and are
thus subject to the same self-distortions which Heideggers project of the fundamental
ontology seeks to overcome. With the correct mixture of pastoral unveiling,
presencing, etymologising inside the house of being7 and, for good measure, patriotic
geopiety, the Western metaphysics can surely be overcome.

The Religious, the Tragic and the Foi

In his elucidation of Foi existence Weiner uses most productively Merleau-Pontys
interpretation of human embodiment, but he never questions its implicit dissonance
with Heideggers poetical ontology - an ontology in which the libidinal body is glaringly

5. In this movement there is a progressive reassessment of the relation between mythic,

hilosophical thinking. The relevant passa es in Heide ers works are; 1975394q 1 g ? ! $
f968AO;see also Hart and Maraldo in Heiiegger 1976a%-80.
6. Daseins facticity is such that its Bein in-the-world has always dispersed fzmtreuf) itself or
even split itself up into definite ways OI-Being-in. The multiplicity o these IS indicated by the
folloann exam les: having to do wth somethinp;,producing something, attending to something
and lmhng after it, making use of something, giving something up and letting it
.
undertaking, accomplishing, ewncing, intern, ting, considering, discussing, determining. . %i
.
these ways of Eking-in have concern as their End of Beink. +,Being of Dasein is.itself is to
..
be made visible as cure. Dasein, when understood onto gic IS care. Because Being-in-the-
world belongs essential1 to Dasein, its Being towards the word (Sein ZUT Welt) is essentially
concern (Heidegger 1%b34).
7. What gives this development its entire meanin is that Western grammar spran from the
reflection of the Greeks on the Greek Ian age. bor along with German the Greek fangua is
(in regard to the passibilities for thought& once the most powerful and most spiritual o$eall
languages (Heidegger 1%1:47).
86 THE AU!XFtALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY

absent. This is facilitated by the fact that even in Merleau-Ponty the body which enters
into communion with the world is too clean and rarefied. Accordingly, Weiner does
not elaborate in this book on the fact that for the Foi mouth, eyes - the organs of
ingestion are associated with the west while the anus, the organ of elimination is
associated with death and with east or south-east; these points are made elsewhere
(Weiner 1984). Thus Weiner does not reflect on the implication that one of the tacit
senses of the Foi life-world is the bodys digestive-reproductiveinteriority.
I emphasise this because in his interpretation Weiner is swayed by Heideggers
concept of the fourfold (Heidegger 1971), and this unwittingly confers upon the Foi
lie-world a physiognomy resembling Heideggers vision of the Black Forests peasant
jug (ibid:165-82), in that it is solidly and cosmically attuned to the Schwartzwaldian
Heimat. The fourfold - the oneness of the sky and earth, gods and mortals - is a
sanitised version of the mythic images of the world-totality. For further poetical
presencing of this philosophically-edified mythopoeic Weltbild, Heidegger chooses
Holderlin, his favourite Romantic poet of the German Heimat. And in this kind of
world [tlhe godhead is the measure with which man measures out his dwelling, his
stay on the earth beneath the sky (ibid:221). What may have come down from this sky?
Heidegger selects, in his unveiling and presencing, an angel and Lucifer. The latter was
ejected in the aftermath of a more serious power struggle in the celestial sphere.
Indeed, as he changed his nature from an ambivalent and vicious creator to an
omnipotent, all-mighty and all-good, refined geometer, the Judaeo-Christian god
cleared his celestial abode of all his less palatable aspects and deposited them
underground.
Heidegger chooses this purified sky from the tradition and renders it, with
Holderlids assistance, the measure of man.
The measure consists in the way in which the god who remains unknown is revealed as such by
the sk . Gods appearance through the sky consists in a disclosing that lets us see what conceals
itself, )6ut lets us see it not by seeking to wrest what is concealed out of its concealedness, but
only by guarding the concealed in its self-concealment. Thus the unknown god appears as the
unknown by wa of the s s manifestness. This appearence is the measure against which man
measures himserf (ibid:22v
A tinge of Gnosticism can be detected in this incantation, but what matters is a
comparison with the Foi lie-world in which the celestial, subterranean, and submarine
realms . . . are identical to the surface world of their daily habitat (Weiner 1984581).
Weiner does not elaborate on this in his book, yet it is crucial for an understanding of
the Foi life-world, not to mention for an understanding of the unveiled significance of
the annual descent of marsupials, rodents, cassowaries, all of them juicy, edible, sexual.
Weiner writes:
We would interpret statements such as Deities are what man measures himself against as
belonging to the province of the theologian, not the scientist. And yet Heide ers statement
preserves more of the ontology of the religious life than does, for examFe, Durkheims
ormulation (p.202).
But why should the ethnographer have to make such a restricted choice, especially
when he is profoundly knowledgeable of the Foi life-world (having done no less than
four years of fieldwork) and speaks Foi fluently? Science, theology, Heidegger,
Durkheim - all are locked in one and the same orbit, viz the Western cultural world. In
THE FOI AND HEIDEGGER: WESIERN PHILOSOPHICAL POEIlCS . .. 87

addition, the latter two never ventured beyond, respectively, their Heimat and
civilisation Franpise - neither ever experienced a radically different Dasein or fait
sociale. While it may not be readily evident to philosophers and scientists, an
ethnographer is in a prime position to recognise that Western theology articulates the
same ontological problematics of Western culture as does science. Didnt critical
theology demythologise Christ? Heidegger and Durkheim will create equivalent
distortions of the life-world of the Foi unless their intellectual projects are appreciated
critically in reference to their cultural-ontological determinations.
I argue, in fact, that just as the Foi world is not religious neither is Foi poetry an
expression of a disenchanted world-mood. For me it is important to emphasise that all
those familiar Western categories - religion, magic, supernature, poetic, morality,
authentic, mortal, tragic, dramatic, metaphysics and so on - carry within
themselves a cultural-ontological ballast which cannot be left unaccounted for in a
phenomenologically-grounded ethnography (see Mimica n.d.). I remarked earlier that
there are problems with Weiners characterisation of the Foi sense of existence as
tragic. Nowhere in his book does he attempt to describe the different moods and
affectivities which constellate the attunement of Foi being-in-the-world. Yet I know
from personal communication with Weiner that he has a deep insight into this difficult-
to-penetrate dimension of a cultural existence. For instance, in response to my
descriptions of the Iqwaye world-attunement, he has told me about similar moody
appreciations of life by the Foi. On various occasions when he and his companions
lapsed into silence after a conversation and simply attuned to the tranquility that
permeated the entire landscape, sometimes marvelling at the sunset, somebody would
suddenly make a pronouncement: I think well get fucked up now! Commonly, there
would be no laughter in response to such a remark, only a mute endorsement but
without any admixture of sullenness or gloom. According to Weiner, this is the Fois
mood of their existence as ultimately sustained by an immanent exposure to suffering.
This mood of suffering is not appreciated as an outrageous negativity, but rather is an
assimilable, even pleasurable factuality: a givenness of human life. How this mood is
consolidated within Foi attitudes towards separation, loneliness, and death can be
understood solely through unravelling the culturally specilk existentials of the Foi liife-
world.
There is no more a tragic sense of life among the Foi than there is among the
Kaluli, in spite of all the sorrow of the lonely (E. Schieffelin 1976; Feld 1982; B.
Schieffelin 1990). Clearly we have here the ethnographic-hermeneutic problem of the
need to ground interpretation of local cosmic self-moralisations and self-
aestheticisations in local configurations of the human condition. The Foi world is not
the world of the good citisens from the Greek polis or of twentieth-century urban
dwellers. Foi women and men have always had to do their own violence. There are no
specialised agencies to do dirty work on behalf of those who, averse to violence,
practise the piety of non-violence. In order to understand better the existential milieu
of Foi self-poeticisation and Foi moods of the human condition, it would be important
to know what the Foi violence of existence is in its concrete diversity and how it is
articulated into their sense of themselves.
88 THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY

But, more important than this, for an ethnography of self-poeticisation which

purports to interpret the existential-ontological meanings of the Foi world, is the vital
nexus of life and death. The two are entirely interdependent within the matrix of
sexuality, at the core of which is the problematics of incest desire. Incest desire is a
fundamental motivating force of human Dasein, but one which Heideggers analytic
fails to unveil. It would not occur to Heidegger that the original determination of the
human Being-towards-the-beginningis not simply birth but incest. There is plenty of
Being-towards-death in his analysis of the authentic potentiality-for-Being-a-whole
(Heidegger 1962424), yet as this potentiality - no less than as an ordinary social
existent - a human Dasein cannot be adequately understood without the unveiling of
the fundamental titillations of the incest desire.
The Foi existential quandary seems to be that for any man, as a potential father, no
amount of sex will deliver a patrifilially certified offspring. Women, and through them
men as maternal uncles, are the possessors of procreation. As fathers, men incessantly
have to make their children their own by means of payments, since the maternal matrix
of procreation is inalienably the dominant one. Men as fathers do not have, so to
speak, their own original progenitivity to equal the feminine power of procreativity. In
this sense it would appear that with regard to their Being-towards-the-beginning, Foi
men cannot take themselves for granted; they have to ardently apply themselves to the
task of self-reproduction through children. It seems that as brothers of their sisters
they render themselves coeval with women, but the inner, cultural dynamics of Foi
incest passions and their regulation are not entirely clear to me. Such passions would
have to be elucidated as a crucial pre-condition for the interpretation of the local
temporality of Foi existence.
Weiner, on the other hand, commits himself to a Heideggerian appreciation of
human being according to which
.
. . [i]t is precisel the temporal nature of bein which is its core feature, while striving, the
attainment of oars, brin continuity to an e n 4 it signals a turning away from a concernful
attitude towanf the w o r l f In the Foi world of s ace and time, it is men who strive to bnng
temporal continuity to a halt. They seek to artigially harness it and channel it for their own
inauthentic urposes. By inauthentic Heidegger meant, among other things, all those acts that
are impellecf by reference to an authoritative they, a contrived and artificially transcendent
moral authority which is deferred to for the purposes of construin oak of action. In
Heide ers terms, Foi mens cutting of spatial and temporal flows emlogies a turning away
from %at he called bein towarddeath: the authentic, concernful being which encompasses its
own finality as an integrafiart of its temporality (pp.117-18).

Now these are lofty claims, and I am not clear as to the ways in which Foi men are
inauthentic, for there is ample evidence to attest to the fact that in the Foi existential
matrix of incest-birth-life-death, their temporality is incommensurable with
Heideggers idea of authenticity in relation to Daseins temporality and the Being-
towards-death. The latter can be adequately understood solely in relation to
Heideggers cultural situation, and this in turn conditions his thinking about the
structures of Dasein. Dasein thus becomes the Western secular life-world in which
both god and salvation are in doubt and within which one (Das Man) is left with
nothing but his/her temporality and the possibility of his/her whole-ness - that is,
salvation - via his/her own actions and his/her own death. It took Westerners around
two thousand years to construct this sense of self-realisation, and even then they got it
THE FOI AND HEIDEGGER: WESIERN PHILOSOPHICALPOETICS. .. 89

wrong. One of the reasons for this, it seems to me, is the incestophobic repression of
the Being-towards-the-beghhg.Heideggers own disregard for Freudian or Jungian
formulations of the unconscious exemplifies my view. Fundamentally that disregard
hinges on the character of his own, concrete intrapsychic self-regard.

Death and Sex

Commenting on the difference between Heideggers and Landsbergs (1966)
interpretations of death, Plessner (1957:258) observes: Heideggers philosophy reveals
the signature of Protestantism secularised and formalised; in Landsberg we hear the
voice of Catholic piety. But there is more in this comparison that is worth reflecting
upon. Landsberg had no say in the choice of his death. He perished in a concentration
camp. Heidegger, on the other hand, could afford to tune himself up for his own
authentic death well into old age. Whether, in fact, he did so is an open question3 But
this can be approached by asking whether he tried to retune himself vis-A-vis his
creators, his mother and father. No concrete Dasein is a pure temporality. Thus a
properly authentic preparation for ones own in-dividuating and whole-some death
does, in fact, presuppose a decisive, concernful self-regard in relation to ones own
creators, if only retrospectively. If you could not choose them beforehand, you can at
least do something about them post facto, perhaps even by attempting to repossess
your own intrapsychic being, with or without the help of a psychoanalyst.
In this respect, dealing with the father is dead easy. It is the mother who holds the
Being-towards-beginning and therefore the Being-towards-death. Everywhere in
New Guinea this primordial truth of Being is understood only too well. This is why
there are in these cultures various ways of being not just man and father but also
maternal uncle, often envisaged as phallic, male mother.9
Psychoanalysis erred to the extent that it privileged the failed project of a Greek
king, Oedipus, who got completely stuck on his mother. And so he ended, as they say
in New Guinea, bugurup olgetu (buggered up completely). In this received Western
mythopoeia the son blinds himself when he realises what he has done. As a bonus this
tragedy offers a deep moral edification. But in some cultures the mother-son
mythopoeic incest effects the complete opposite: it restores the sight of the
congenitally blind son who has sex with his mother without knowing who she is.10
8. The posthumously ublished interview with Der Spiegel, (originally ven in 1966 but which
Heidegger stipulateacould only be unveiled after his death) su ests tfat he did. The interview
gives some insight into Heidegger as a p , c i t i s e n , well verse& self-deception. In this re ard
it can be said that he never emancipate his inner being from the determinants of Das Manfsee
Heidegger 1976b).
9. Among the Y a r i a , a dream in which the dreamer, a p i n g boy, is fighting with and
demolishing the ody of his father shows that he is definitely incorporating his fathers spirit and
bone-strength. His fathers death during his life-time is the unrepressed destiny of every
Yagwoia man. He is the source of his childrens paternal embodiment. As such, he is also the
irreversible loser of his bodil self. But as the maternal uncle, he replenishes his own body with
the payments obtained from xis sisters child. He eats this progeny of his down to the last gulp
(Mimica 1991).
10. This is treated in a recent French film Denko, directed by Mohamed Camara Movimento
I
Productions 1992).A maturing, congenitally blind man, realising that no woman wil ever marry
him because of his deficiency, tells his mother that the only wsh he has is to make love to a
woman before he dies. The mother, having unsuccessfully tned to get a villa e woman for him,
consults a hombly ugly healer and decides to offer herself to her son. She bkts out her mouth
90 THE A U W I A N JOURNAL OF ANIWROPOLOGY

Incest passions are polymorphic, and any Dasein analysis worth its name has to
radicalise itself by going beyond the parochialism, prudishness and repressive bad faith
inherited from the Western tradition. Therefore, the possibility of an intrapsychic,
authentic self-repossession is to deal decisively with the maternal and paternal imagos
in the sphere of ones own archaic, pre-Oedipal conscience and being. A conjunctive
disjunction has to be effected here. You first fuck both father and mother, one at a
time, and then you kill them. This wholesome deed, which excises and transmutes the
primordial otherness at the roots of ones own being, has to be exacted upon oneself by
ones own hand. No cheating here. Only this will effect Daseins fundamental self-
transcendence both in respect of its beginning and its end. There is a double bonus in
the aftermath: the ego has experienced both his/her imaginal, in-dividuating death and
in-dividuating self-birth. Thereby she/he becomes authentically ready for the Being-
towards-death. With all its veils unveiled, be that as a cosmogony), tragedy), or
family romance, the bondage to the originary beginning is thus destroyed in its core,
since the creators themselves also lived their own beginnings in the being of their
creation. In this turn towards origins the forgotten is not just remembered but truly
self-born. The clearinghas now become a new possibility for Being.
In his analysis of conscience Heidegger clearly evinces the fact that he was
bedazzledby the voice, or perhaps voices, of this primal otherness. In his Daseins
clearing there is no incest barrier, imagos, introjects, not even as mediators; there is
only the voice of Being,
. . . a mode of discourse. [It] has the character of an appeal to Dasein by calling it to its ownmost
potentiality-for-Bein its Selc and this is done by way of summoning it to its ownmost Being-
guilty (Heidegger 1&23b).
And
In its Lwho, the caller is definable in a worldly wa by nothing at all. The caller is Dasein in its
uncanniness: primordial, thrown Being-in-the-word as the not-at-home - the bare that-it-is in
the nothing of the world. The caller IS unfamiliar to the everyday they-self; it is something like
an olien voice (ibid:321).
Voice, discourse, guilt, silence, indefiniteness, uncanniness, nothing,
anxiety, care; such are the manifestations of Heideggers unveiling of conscience. No
mother, no father, no manifestations of any more particularised Being-with-othersY
This kind of bedazzlementby the voice of Being, in the grip of the primordial care,
which possess[es] (Dasein) as long as it lives (ibid242), can indeed lead into a project
of self-individuation, although not without a mortal struggle. But a bedazzling and
enchanting conscience can also lead into egos self-inflation and pseudo self-
totalisation in the social womb of the family, class, Heimat, the nation, civilisation.
Everything about Heideggers early and later work suggests that whatever was his
actual death, in regard to his Being-towards-his-beginninghe lived and died a wholly
borrowed life, the one which his mother and father delivered. In this he was as
inauthentic or authentic as any human neonate can be, relative to its parents self-
odours so that her blind son will not recognise her. The following morning the son wakes with
his eye-sight restored, and he goes hap ily to embrace the world and the woman who will
become his wife. I am grateful to Lise Stegnoff for this information.
11. Yet the vey Roman fable which Heide er chose to confirm his own inte retation of care via
the pre-ontolo cal wa of Daseins selfinterpretation (Heidegger 19622%) shows clearly the
maternal, pre-8edipalYsoumof care and conscience.
THE FOI AND HEIDEGGER: W E S E R N PHILOSOPHICAL POETlCS ... 91

investments, their pre-ontological care. His own subsequent choices, including his
very style of the poetic onto-theology, clearly attest to the fact that he remained
irrevocably enchanted by this primal throwmess: he chose to remain self-forgotten
and thus unborn. From this stems Heideggers inauthenticity. Likewise, in his
philosphical presencing of the original Being, as it supposedly was prior to the
originary forgetting at the inception of Western metaphysics, he made sure that all
unveilings, even the most pagan ones (Jonas 1982248-9) remained well-grounded in
the Stimmung of the Western bourgeois sense of human dignity and presentability.

Foi Originality
In the Foi life-world the facts of life are culturally different. The matters of
procreation are neither handled in silence nor left unacknowledged. Unless men create
a vital blockage through intercourse and the flow of wealth, not only would there be no
fatherhood of husbands, but I suspect that there would also be no motherhood of
wives. There would be nothing more than the motherhood of sisters and the co-
motherhood of brothers. As for the voice of conscience, one of its chief manifestations
is maternal and somatic. When payments are not forthcoming from the chids father
the maternal relatives get angry; this anger in turn activates the ghosts of the maternal
clan who make the chid sick. This will exact the payments - the principal means, it
seems, whereby every Foi individuates and makes the paternal being his/her own.
Weiner (p.204) says that the following statement from Heideggers On the Way to
Language can be taken as an introduction to the anthropological study of poetry, the
language of dwelling in the world:
Mortals are the who can experience death as death. Animals cannot do so.But animals cannot
speak either. &e essential relation between death and language flashes up before us, but
remains still unthought.

From the perspective of the Foi life-world, this is questionable. The Foi, I believe, are
not mortals in an unqualified universal sense, since it does not follow that death
experienced as death invariably makes mortals mortal in all life-worlds. Traditionally
the Foi were not Christians, and many still are not. Their existence is not the
consequence of the original fall, and in their death there is no choice between heaven
and hell. As ghosts they remain in the company of the living, whom they may empower
and/or make sick. In the Foi existential milieu there is a plenitude of being whereby
death and life are truly a part of one and the same wheel of existence. There is no
tragedy here, neither Graecian nor Christian, nor is there either redemption or
salvation. In the Foi life-world the humans are neither in nor out of grace. This is
why their world-attunements should have received some treatment in this book. In
addition (pace Uvi-Straw 198050244), among the Foi, as among many other New
Guinea peoples, the link between sky and earth has not been absolutely severed. As
already emphasised, here the marsupials, rodents and cassowaries annually go to the
sky and then come down to the ground, where men hunt them9

12. I cannot elaborate here on the crucial significance of this generic structure which indicates a
critical difference in the mythopoeic imagmation which constitutes numerous New Guinea life-
worlds. The point I am making is that this, and numerous similar mythopoeic images, indicate
92 THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY

In common with many other New Guinea cultures, the Fois singing of the world -
and their cultural existence as a whole - articulate an ouroboric plenitude of being-in-
the-world, where being mortal is a poiesis of a third kind. A reflection on the Kaluli
mode of self-poeticisation - whereby language and music come to articulate into a
unified intelligibility the total acoustic-sonic environment and its creatures, avian and
aquatic - makes me think that in the above quote Heidegger at once both greatly over-
and greatly under-estimates the scope and nature of humanness in the human
language. He seems to assume that everywhere humans believe that their language
excludes mutual intelligibility with other life forms. But then, he was a European
philosopher for whom the understanding of human, mortal, language, animal,no
less than of vegetable, mineral, spiritual, mythical and poetical, was intrinsically
determined by the history of Western metaphysics.l3 For Heidegger, language is a
house of being, an unduly domestic restriction, even from the perspective of Western
metaphysicsJ4 On the other hand, the iconicity of the Foi language, and the imaginal,
bodily physiognomy (male and female) of their long-house, clearly show that language
= body = world. In their pre-ontological existence, neither language nor Being
houses or sheltersthe other. If anything, it could be said that language and the world
are in a somatic relation where all actions depend on sex, eating, digestion, defecation
and decomposition - all of which are vital parameters of Daseins self-world
intertwining, co-articulation and intelligibility. For a European philosopher it is only
natural that Languageand Being are the privileged figures of thinking - poetically or
in prose - since his project is a fundamental ontology carried out in a cultural life-
world in which both city-centered states and the soteriological project (via an
the operation of an internall oscillating self-regeneration and self-closure in these societies,
whereby all existential difzrentiae - up/down, inside/outside, male/female, life/death,
incest/affinity - are continuously unified in the imperishable flow of life and articulated a s such
in social practice. I use the mythic image of ouroboros to specify the ontolo cal profile common
to myriad social-existential schemata evinced by New Guinea societies t o r , an example,, see
Mimica 1991). One of their most significant implications is absence of sotenologcal stnwngs.
Yet, anthropological inte retations of Melanesian cargo cults were often formulated through a
tacit projection of the Juzeo-Christian soteriological sense of existence, both in religious and
secular-emancipatory variants. The cultures historically dominated by a salvational orientation
towards existence, especially of the Judaeo-Christian genealogy, internally exclude or, better,
repress the ouroboric dimension of being because such exclusion is the critical condition of the
soteriological project itself.
13. A reflection by Uvi-Strauss is pertinent to this issue. With a characteristic blend of brilliant
t into and misa prehension of ontological differences between human cultures and the
$f&xic modes of geholdin of existence, Uvi-Strauss says: If you were t o ask an American
Indian, he would most likely tefi you that it (myth) is a sto of the time before men and animals
became distinct beings. This definition seems very profounvto me. For despite the ink spilled by
the Judaeo-Christian tradition to conceal it, no situation seems more traec, more offensive to
heart and mind, than that of a humanity cwxistin and sharing the joys of a planet with other
living species yet being unable to communicate wit! them. One understands why myths refuse to
consider this an original flaw in the creation and see in its ap arance the event that inaugurated
the human condition and its weakness (Uvi-Strauss and E r i E n 1991:139). Evident in this quote
is the Judaeo-Christian ontological prejudice of the Nature/Culture difference, which
determines in advance Uvi-Strausss interpretation of other life-worlds. Furthermore, implicit
here is his assumption of an ontological definiteness to the human/non-human (animal)
difference in all human cultures. Ethnogra hies show that this is far from being so. An excellent
discussion of this is found in Luckmann 19%.
14. Heideggers etymologies are based on a restrictive choice of the experiential horizon within
which he unveils the original meanings of the Greek, Latin or German words. By contrast,
Onians (1951) and Thass-Thienemanns 1973) e lorations show that the Indo-European
l a n p a es have been historically motivated by t h e x n d of human somatic-world experiences
which i a v e many parallels in the New Guinea life-worlds, and which their ethnographers can
readily relate to a more concrete context of human existence.
THE FOI AND HEIDEGGER: WETIERN PHILOSOPHICAL POEIlCS . . . 93

omnipotent god) for millenia have mediated both the human body and its relation with
the world at large. Even in its most radical reflection on body, language and world
(Merleau-Ponty 1%2), Western philosophical thought can only selectively appreciate
the full reality of the facts so clearly articulated by Foi existence: an existence in which
language, house and being live a life always borrowed from a concrete cultural
Dasein. This is a-body-polymorphic-psyche-a-concrete-world.15 Being as Being is
always post facto, abstracted and derivative, and so is time as Time.
Therefore, Heideggers essential relation between language and death is
restrictively essentialised, since so many of the vital relations between life, incest and
death - breathing, eating, fucking, farting, craving, vomiting, singing, imagining,
thinking, saying, crying, laughing, hating, raging, destroying - were unthought of by
Heidegger (and remain so by the phalanxes of contemporary Western philosophers).
Still, the question remains: what is a poetic mode of being-in-the-world? For this to be
adequately answered, a prior and more important question must be asked: What are
ethnographers for?l6 My answer: to get to know every human mode of existence
through, over, against and beyond their own concrete biases, bedazzlements and
limitations. Every ethnography stands or falls in relation to the originality of the
ethnographers own engagement with a specific people, with the intersubjective world
and with her/his concrete self. Weiners ethnography accomplishes exactly this task in
an exemplary way. As such, it is a fine testimony to both the originality of Foi existence
and Weiners own creative, scholarly and dedicated pursuit of New Guinea
ethnography.

Contra Heidegger: Ethnographys Project

Following on from this, it can be said that the project of ethnography offers a radical
threshold for the reconstruction of anthropology and, through anthropology (contra
Heidegger), of the grounds for any fundamental ontology undistorted by Western
metaphysics, poetics, theology, and science. Always exercised anew, the ethnographic
project can free itself from the fetters of human dignity and its powers of
bedazzlement, as each ethnographer makes hislher way beyond this or that side of
happinessand tragedy, making sure always to keep within sight the concrete horizon
of the pleromatic source of human modes of being-in-the-world.

15. I have purposefully included psyche or psychic being into the Dasein constellation. This is to
indicate the radical originality and reali of that being which Freudian, Kleinian, and Jungian
analytics have charted out but which Heia(eggers Dasein-analyses have disregarded.
16. I say ethnographers, and not anthropolo sts,because there are too many of those who write
about anthropolo but d o hafdly any /%Idmark. Many do not know any other languages,
produce no detailsethnographies and thus have specifically nothing of themselves, of their own
egos, at stake in their claims to the knowledge of any concrete other. Yet, under the guise of
postmodernist sensibilities, they cast themselves as decisive arbitrators in the critique of
anthropology, with a special emphasis on ethical issues concerning the knowled e of the other.
Their celebration of polyphonic truths seems to me to be a strategy of re& to commit
themselves to their own concrete, ego-bound knowledge for fear that they may be outside the
truth, that is, that they ma be politically and ideologically unsound. Otherwise, why would they
be so reoccupied w t h t i e moral purity of their claims to truth? For such critics, Sartres
(1988:g)observation will suffice: A fart in a soap bubble doesnt offend the nose immediately;
but at some point the bubble has to burst.
94 THE AUSTRALlAN JOURNAL O F ANTHROPOLOGY

Finally, as a closing reflection on Heidegger's poetics, so profoundly deprived of a

sense of the libidinal body and its formative function in the human world, I reproduce
a little gem of Asmat self-poeticisation which offers a glimpse into their head-hunting
Dasein, here articulated in a mode of anal-sexual attunement (Stimmung)to the world
(Voerhoove 1977:31):17
The Red-Parrot Woman
Here he is! at the mouth of the Ay river
the sun is rising. Hi! I am the red-parrot woman,
I have come to defecate, as I always do. For you, sun,
who is shiniig above I have opened my dress,
here I am!
Here he is! at the mouth of the Yici river
the morning star is rising. Hi! I am the fire woman,
I have come to relieve soft mud, as I always do. For you,
morning star, who is shining above, I have opened my
young-sago-leavesskirt, here I am!
Here he is! at the mouth of the Powkaw river
the moon is rising. Hi! I am theyewar-parrot woman,
I have come to relieve a hard lump of clay, as I always do.
For you, moon, who is shining above, I have opened my
sago-rope-skirt, here I am!

Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the following colleagues and friends for their comments on an earlier
version of this paper: Tom Ernst, Andrew Lattas, Kerry Zubrinich, Christina Toren
and Bruce Kapferer. I also thank the TAJA editors, especially Christine Helliwell, for
their constructive critique and editorial suggestions. I am wholeheartedly grateful to
Jimmy Weiner for writing a reply to my review. For all remaining shortcomings of this
paper, I am solely responsible.

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