In addition to his warm, unforgettable hospitality, I have three salient memories of my meeting with Jadran Mimica on my way to Ankave country in 1985: his perfect command of an Anga language; an endless discussion of G. Devereux's argument on the difficulty of combining psychology and sociology in the analysis of the same phenomenon; and the (very worried) look of the Baruya who had helped me carry my gear whenever our shared enthusiasm led us to shout together. He had also told me something like ‘You will realize the importance of the maternal uncle among the Ankave’. Decades later, the ingredients of that conversation lie at the heart of his latest book. Like each of his publications, Of Humans, Pigs, and Souls is a compelling and informed essay. This time, Mimica explores the womba complex, ‘a malignant condition of the soul’ unique to some Yagwoia of PNG who experience cannibalistic inclinations towards other human beings in dreams or waking visions.

I have not lost the enthusiasm engendered by our earlier exchange. On the one hand, the womba are the local version of the cannibalistic ombi' humanoids of the Yagwoia's Ankave neighbours. And on the other hand, every other paragraph of this book has brought Ankave or Baruya images or narratives to my mind, as well as meaningful contrasts. In short, the abundance and precision of the ethnography, the fine-grained analysis of womba cases and the author's comprehensive reference to other forms of invisible attacks among other Anga people launch the anthropological comparison. This is so thorough that, lacking any specific competence to comment in detail on the phenomenological and psychoanalytical analysis of the womba complex proposed by the author, I am going to take the liberty of merely expanding the comparisons proposed in the book.

除了他热情、令人难忘的款待之外，我在 1985 年去安卡维国家的路上与 Jadran Mimica 会面还有三个重要的回忆：他对安加语的完美掌握；对 G. Devereux 关于难以将心理学和社会学结合起来分析同一现象的论点进行了无休止的讨论；每当我们共同的热情让我们一起大喊大叫时，帮助我携带装备的巴鲁亚（非常担心）的表情。他还告诉我类似“你会意识到舅舅在 Ankave 中的重要性”之类的话。几十年后，那次谈话的内容是他最新著作的核心。像他的每一篇出版物一样，《人、猪和灵魂》是一篇引人入胜且内容丰富的文章。这一次，Mimica 探索了womba复杂的，“灵魂的恶性状况”，巴布亚新几内亚的一些 Yagwoia 独有，他们在梦中或醒着的幻觉中对其他人有自相残杀的倾向。

我并没有失去我们之前交流所产生的热情。一方面，womba是Yagwoia 的 Ankave 邻居的食人ombi类人动物的本地版本。另一方面，这本书的每一段都让我想起了 Ankave 或 Baruya 的图像或叙述，以及有意义的对比。简而言之，民族志的丰富性和准确性，对womba案例的细粒度分析以及作者对其他安加人其他形式的无形攻击的全面参考，展开了人类学比较。这是如此彻底，以至于缺乏任何具体的能力来详细评论womba的现象学和精神分析分析由于作者提出的复杂性，我将冒昧地仅扩展书中提出的比较。