James Leach's contribution to the ESFO 2025 conference

« Food taboos and reproduction on the Rai Coast of PNG. »

Abstract :

On the Rai Coast of Madang, PNG, all ancestral foods come from somewhere and someone. Many foods are ‘heavy’ with knowledge and obligation. These items are integral to creating the forms of gendered human life that Reite people value. Young Reite women at menarche undergo strict food taboos, and taken with the other restrictions placed upon them, this analysis points to the mutual responsibility people on the Rai Coast have for one another’s capacities in a specifically intergenerational frame. Feminist anthropology established the necessity of understanding gender as part of kinship and vice versa. Lutkehaus and Roscoe’s volume on Female Initiation in Melanesia further showed the significance of lifecycle rites to understanding menarche and other initiation rituals. Rai Coast material illustrates further how a woman’s knowledge and capacity achieved through the rites are geared towards longer processes of social and cosmic reproduction. Knowledge, far from being a common adult property, is highlighted as gendered, ancestral, specific, and substantive. The emphasis, through the taboos, is on individual position, specificity of knowledge and capacity, and on particular obligations. The analysis thus points to an explanatory approach: attention to the specific elements that shape intergenerational processes.