Overview

Taking a novel approach that adapts Freud’s theory of the Primal Crime, this book examines a wealth of ethnographic data on the Gimi of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, focusing on women’s lives, myths, and rituals.  Women’s and men’s separate myths and rites may be ‘read’ as a cycle of blame about which sex caused the ills of human existence and is still at fault.  However, the author demonstrates that in public rites of exchange in which both sexes participate, men appropriate and subvert women’s usages as a ritual strategy to ‘undo’ motherhood and confiscate children at puberty. In doing so, she reveals how Gimi women both rebel against the male-dominated social order and express understanding of why they also acquiesce.  The result of decades of fieldwork, writing and reflection, this book offers an analysis of Gimi women’s complex understanding of their situation and presents a nuanced picture of women in a society dominated by men. It represents an important contribution to New Guinea ethnography that will appeal to students and scholars of psychoanalysis, gender studies, and cultural, social and psychoanalytic anthropology.

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9783030493547

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Reviews

“This great book was a pleasure to read because it explores how the violent aspect of humanity exists alongside its loving aspects. It would interest anthropologists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts but also those studying and teaching on gender, sexuality, power, and philosophies of embodiment.” (Andrew Lattas, Psychology of Women Quarterly, Vol. 46 (2), June, 2022)

“Gillian Gillison’s new monograph is based on her long-term field research among the Gimi people of the Eastern Highlands Province in Papua New Guinea. … Gillison produced an outstanding empirical ethnographic corpus in publications that combine superb ethnographic information and a systematic psychoanalytic interpretive framework pivoting on Freud’s foundational texts and seminal insights. Without doubt, She Speaks Her Anger represents a new threshold of Gillison’s ethnographic and theoretical research and thought.” (Jadran Mimica, Ethos, Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, Vol. 51 (1), March, 2023) “This great book was a pleasure to read because it explores how the violent aspect of humanity exists alongside its loving aspects. It would interest anthropologists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts but also those studying and teaching on gender, sexuality, power, and philosophies of embodiment.” (Andrew Lattas, Psychology of Women Quarterly, Vol. 46 (2), June, 2022)

Author Information

Gillian Gillison is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Canada.

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