Abstract
Among the Iatmul of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea, conflicts over the rightful possession of cosmologically significant names are decided by having the opponents and their supporters meet near the ceremonial stool (pabu) in the men’s house for a special debate. The thousands of secret sacred names of persons and places that may be involved are central to the ramified Iatmul mythological system, which is anchored in the landscape and which combines the past and present. Demanding elaborate feats of rhetorical skill and memory facilitated by localized mental representations, such encounters involve mastery of highly complex intellectual activities that draw on comprehensive knowledge of Iatmul myths of origin, clans, totems, migration, and settlement. This chapter first presents excepts from such debate and explains that an anthropologist’s understanding of this complex system requires insights into research on human memory and learning capacities as well as competence in indigenous concepts of local geography.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Anderson, J. R. (1983). Retrieval of information from long-term memory. Science, 220, 25–30.
Assmann, J. (1992). Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen [Cultural memory: Writing, remembering, and political identity in ancient civilizations]. Munich: C. H. Beck.
Baddeley, A. D. (1994). Working memory: The interface between memory and cognition. In D. L. Schacter & E. Tulving (Eds.), Memory systems (pp. 351–367). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Barth, F. (1987). Cosmologies in the making. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Basso, K. (1988). Speaking with names: Language and landscape among the Western Apache. Cultural Anthropology, 3, 99–130.
Craik, F. I. M., & Lockhart, R. (1972). Levels of processing: A framework for memory research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11, 671–684.
Ericsson, K. A., & Kintsch, W. (1995). Long-term working memory. Psychological Review, 102, 211–245.
Ericsson, K. A., & Staszenski, J. J. (1989). Skilled memory and expertise: Mechanisms of exceptional performance. In D. Klahr & K. Kotovsky (Eds.), Complex information processing: The impact of Herbert A. Simon (pp. 235–267). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Farah, M. J. (2001). The neuropsychology of mental imagery. In F. Boller & J. Grafman (Series Eds.) & M. Behrmann (Vol. Ed.), Handbook of neuropsychology, Vol. 4. Disorders of visual behavior (pp. 239–248). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Feld, F., & Basso, K. (Eds.). (1996). Senses of place. Santa Fe, NM: School of America Research Press.
Fox, J. (1997). Genealogy and topogeny: Towards an ethnography of Rotinese ritual place names. In J. Fox (Ed.), The poetic power of place (pp. 92–103). Canberra: Australian National University.
Gow, P. (1995). Land, people and paper in Western Amazonia. In E. Hirsch & M. O’Hanlon (Eds.), The anthropology of landscape (pp. 43–62). Oxford, VA: Clarendon Press.
Harwood, F. (1976). Myth, memory and the oral tradition: Cicero on the Trobriands. American Anthropologist (New Series), 78, 783–796.
Hwang, W.-Y., Chang, C.-B., & Chen, G.-J. (2004). The relationship of learning traits, motivation and performance—Learning response dynamics. Computers and Education, 42, 267–287.
Keesing, R. (1982). Kwaio religion: The living and the dead in a Solomon Island society. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kosslyn, S. M. (1980). Image and mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
LaBar, K. S., & Cabeza, R. (2006). Cognitive neuroscience of emotional memory. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 7, 54–64.
Maguire, E. A., Valentine, E. R., Wilding, J. M., & Kapur, N. (2003). Routes to remembering: The brains behind superior memory. Nature Neuroscience, 6, 90–95.
McGaugh, J. L. (2000). Memory—A century of consolidation. Science, 287, 248–251.
Miller, G. (1956). The magical number seven, plus-or-minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. The Psychological Review, 63, 81–97.
Morphy, H. (1991). Ancestral connections: Art and an Aboriginal system of knowledge. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Morphy, H. (1993). Colonialism, history and the construction of place: The politics of landscape in Northern Australia. In B. Bender (Ed.), Landscape: Politics and perspective (pp. 205–244). Oxford, UK: Berg.
Rose, D. (1996). Nourishing terrains: Australian Aboriginal views of landscape and wilderness. Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission.
Schacter, D. L. (1999). The seven sins of memory: Insights from psychology and cognitive neuroscience. American Psychologist, 54, 182–203.
Squire, L. R. (1987). Memory: Neural organization and behavior. In J. M. Brookhart & V. B. Mountcastle (Eds.), Handbook of physiology: The nervous system, Vol. 5. Higher functions of the nervous system (pp. 295–371). Bethesda, MD: American Physiological Society.
Stanek, M. (1983). Sozialordnung und Mythik in Palimbei. Basel: Wepf.
Strehlow, T. G. H. (1947). Aranda Traditions. Victoria: Melbourne University Press.
Sutton, P. (1995). Atomism versus collectivism: The problem of group definition in Native Title cases. In J. Fingleton & J. Finlayson (Eds.), Research monographs: Vol. 10. Native title: Emerging issues for policy, research and practice (pp. ix–xxii). Canberra: Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research.
Tulving, E. (1995). Organization of memory: Quo Vadis? In M. S. Gazzaniga (Ed.), The cognitive neurosciences (pp. 839–847). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wassmann, J. (1991). The song to the flying fox: The public and esoteric knowledge of the important men of Kandingei about totemic songs, names and knotted cords (Middle Sepik, Papua New Guinea). Port Moresby: Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies.
Wassmann, J. (2001). The politics of religious secrecy. In A. Rumsey & J. Weiner (Eds.), Emplaced myth (pp. 43–72). Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press.
Wassmann, J. (2003). Landscape and memory in Papua New Guinea. In H. Gebhardt & H. Kiesel (Eds.), Heidelberger Jahrbücher: Vol. 47. Weltbilder [Heidelberg annuals: Vol. 47. Images of the world] (pp. 329–346). Berlin: Springer.
Weiner, J. (1991). The empty place: Poetry, space, and being among the Foi of Papua New Guinea. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wassmann, J. (2011). Person, Space, and Memory: Why Anthropology Needs Cognitive Science and Human Geography. In: Meusburger, P., Heffernan, M., Wunder, E. (eds) Cultural Memories. Knowledge and Space, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8945-8_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8945-8_19
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-8944-1
Online ISBN: 978-90-481-8945-8
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)