Jadran Mimica presents the ‘life-world’ of Yagwoia people of Papua New Guinea as a unique variant of the Jungian Ouroboric archetype, a primal pattern or symbol derived from the ancient Greek ‘tail devourer’ (the serpent that eats its own tail), found in many cultures and individual unconscious phantasies. Treated in terms of ‘ouroboric dialectics’, relations between Yagwoia father and son are hostile, even patricidal, because the son's very existence derives from the father's ‘continuous and irreversible’ transfer to him of his limited supply of vital substance or ‘paternal bone’. Sons replace fathers in ways that fathers may experience as ‘violent loss of … generative bodily core’, a process that Mimica asserts ‘can only be adequately understood through individual-biographical life-situations and trajectories’. In bypassing anthropology's classical terrain, or treating Yagwoia life-ways as contingent upon the ‘ouroboric cosmic Self’ – a ‘wholly pre-genital gestalt of self-generation’ – Mimica distorts the role of collective rites of passage and affinal exchange to counter, inhibit, and redirect the primary narcissism intrinsic to human beings. In a small scale society like the Yagwoia, whose survival and well-being depend upon the integration of nearly all its members, the main ‘work of culture’ is to recruit socially adept adults from each new crop of infants by helping them to overcome – not to repeat or magnify – existential problems of growing up that afflict everyone but that no one can resolve, or even fully understand, on their own. The ‘ouroboric (self-copulating^eating) phallus’ is one image or ‘mythologeme’ of infantile narcissism. Based upon my own fieldwork among Gimi-speakers in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, I suggest that such myths serve as templates for rites of exchange intended to thwart the calamity myths envisage – not to facilitate or intensify it.

中文翻译：

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贾德兰·米米卡 (Jadran Mimica) 的《被恶毒父亲的灵魂跟踪：雅格沃亚人 (PNG) 中的弑父事件》

贾德兰·米米卡 (Jadran Mimica) 将巴布亚新几内亚雅格沃亚人的“生活世界”呈现为荣格衔尾蛇原型的独特变体，这​​是一种源自古希腊“尾巴吞噬者”（吃自己尾巴的蛇）的原始图案或符号，在许多文化和个人无意识幻想中都有发现。从“衔尾蛇辩证法”的角度来看，亚格沃亚父子之间的关系是敌对的，甚至是弑父的关系，因为儿子的存在源于父亲“持续且不可逆转地”将其有限的生命物质或“父骨”转移给他。儿子取代父亲的方式，父亲可能会经历“暴力丧失……生成身体核心”，米米卡断言，这一过程“只能通过个人传记的生活情境和轨迹才能充分理解”。自我生成的前生殖器完形”——米米卡扭曲了集体仪式和亲缘交换的作用，以对抗、抑制和重定向人类固有的原始自恋。在像雅格沃亚这样的小规模社会中，其生存和福祉取决于几乎所有成员的融合，主要的“文化工作”是从每一批新生婴儿中招募善于社交的成年人，帮助他们克服——而不是重复或放大——成长过程中存在的问题困扰着每个人，但没有人能够独自解决，甚至完全理解。“ouroboric（自交^吃）阴茎”是婴儿自恋的一种形象或“神话基因”。根据我自己对巴布亚新几内亚东部高地吉米语使用者的实地调查，我认为这些神话可以作为交换仪式的模板，旨在阻止神话所设想的灾难，而不是促进或加剧灾难。