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Death is an inevitable part of life and central to understanding the cultural themes of people. How do different societies approach death? How does a view of the place of food and feast inform the communal relationships acted out in the context of death? Amongst the Misima community in Papua New Guinea, death facilitates the expression of themes of being-in-the-world through the medium of mortuary rituals, wherein community values and beliefs are reinforced and reconstructed. Kinship relationships are expressed in and through mortuary feasting, and embrace matrilineal and patrilateral obligations and responsibilities, worked out in the context of marriage alliances and intertwined with birth ceremonies. Prestige, status and land rights are integrally a part of the ongoing performance that underpins the strong cord of mortuary ritual, which is foundational to an understanding of Misiman people, their values and interactions. This exploration of cultural themes, values and relationships embodied in mortuary ritual serves to enlighten and expand on the corpus of knowledge relating to societies and their differing attitudes & actions associated with the rite of passage known as death
About the author
Sandra Callister completed a BA and Diploma of Education at Sydney University in 1969. From 1978 to the present (2015) she worked on translation, literacy and linguistics with the Misima people in Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea. Her Masters thesis with Honours (Anthropology) was completed in 2000, through Macquarie University in Sydney.
