Dreams,Laki, and Mourning: A Psychoanalytic Ethnography of the Yagwoia “Inner Feminine”

In the first part of this study (Oceania, 76/1) I presented the general cosmo-ontological background of Yagwoia dreaming and the fundamental dialectics of the contra-sexual self-identity of a conjugal couple (Tilm and QANG) manifest in their oneiric encounters. The second part focuses on the man, QANG, and the vicissitudes of his soul's power to affect gambling outcomes. I explore the intrinsic relationship between dreaming and the practice of gambling which in the Yagwoia life-world is a domain of men's homo-social participation in the self-generative life-death flow of the world-body at large. In this aspect, Yagwoia gambling exhibits its true characteristic as an extension and modification of the male-exclusive domain of hunting, warfare, and the ceaseless in-/ex-corporation of the cosmic life-death flow. The pursuit of gambling is a fully libidinized field of male interaction. Through cards and dice men screw and drain each other of their bodily sexual potency which flows in the world-body as a whole.