The Tuma Underworld of Love

Erotic and other narrative songs of the Trobriand Islanders and their spirits of the dead

Gunter Senft | Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027202871 | EUR 90.00 | USD 135.00

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ISBN 9789027284693

The Trobriand Islanders' eschatological belief system explains what happens when someone dies. Bronislaw Malinowski described essentials of this eschatology in his articles "Baloma: the Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands" and "Myth in Primitive Psychology". There he also presented the Trobrianders' belief that a "baloma" can be reborn; he claimed that Trobrianders are unaware of the father's role as genitor. This volume presents a critical review of Malinowski's ethnography of Trobriand eschatology – finally settling the "virgin birth" controversy. It also documents the ritualized and highly poetic "wosi milamala" – the harvest festival songs. They are sung in an archaic variety of Kilivila called "biga baloma" – the baloma language. Malinowski briefly refers to these songs but does not mention that they codify many aspects of Trobriand eschatology. The songs are still sung at specific occasions; however, they are now moribund. With these songs Trobriand eschatology will vanish.

[Culture and Language Use, 5] 2011. xvii, 138 pp.

Publishing status: Available

Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

https://doi.org/10.1075/clu.5

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments | pp. ix–xii

Introduction | pp. xiii–xvii

Chapter 1. Death on the Trobriand Islands and the Trobriand Islanders’ belief in a “baloma” spirit | pp. 1–14

Chapter 2. The spirits of the dead and their underworld life on Tuma Island: Trobriand eschatology | pp. 15–42

Chapter 3. The wosi milamala | pp. 43–100

Chapter 4. The moribund language of the spirits of the dead and its consequences for the Trobriand Islanders’ culture | pp. 101–110

Appendix I | pp. 111–116

Appendix II | pp. 117–126

References | pp. 127–134

Index | pp. 135–138

Cited by (7)

Cited by seven other publications

Order by:

Senft, Gunter

2016. “Masawa—bogeokwa si tuta!”: Cultural and Cognitive Implications of the Trobriand Islanders’ Gradual Loss of Their Knowledge of How to Make a Masawa Canoe. In Ethnic and Cultural Dimensions of Knowledge [Knowledge and Space, 8], ► pp. 229 ff.

Senft, Gunter

2018. Rituelle Kommunikation. In Handbuch Pragmatik, ► pp. 423 ff.

Senft, Gunter

2023. Chapter 2. The system of classifiers in Kilivila. In Nominal Classification in Asia and Oceania [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 362], ► pp. 10 ff.

Shapiro, Warren

2014. Contesting Marshall Sahlins on Kinship. Oceania 84:1 ► pp. 19 ff.

[no author supplied]

2012. Books and Films Received. Current Anthropology 53:2 ► pp. 252 ff.

[no author supplied]

2015. Tales from the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea [Culture and Language Use, 16],

[no author supplied]

2018. Growing up on the Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea [Culture and Language Use, 21],

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 18 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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