Carlo Severi

Naven or the Other Self: a Relational Approach to Ritual Action (Studies in the History of Religions) Carlo Severi

This text proposes a theory of ritual action founded on an in-depth study of the wide variety of behaviours that the Iatmul of Papua New Guinea identify as naven, a transvestism rite studied by Gregory Bateson in the 1930s and documented by other anthropologists since. Ritual performance is shown to involve the construction of complex relational networks entailing the condensation of contradictory modes of relationship in accordance with over-arching interactive forms. The first part of the book examines Bateson's and others' understandings of naven, the second offers a reinterpretation of this ritual in the light of modern ethnographic data, and the third proposes a general approach to the analysis of ritual and suggests how this perspective may be applied elsewhere.