Looking Through Ancestors. Eye-Holes. Epistemic, body-mind-spirit and ethical discourse formations among the Lau.um of West Sepik, Papua New Guinea 12+

📕 This book is on epistemology, mind-body-spirit, and social ethical forms of the Lau'um people, West Sepik, Papua New Guinea. The aim of the book is to expose the Lau'um epistemology, mind-body-spirit, and ethical forms of life. The desire for understanding concerns two issues. The first concerns method. What are the best methods to use in reconstructing the Lau'um 'forms' of life? Oral history skills are used in collecting the data. For reconstructing the book, the author adopted a hermeneutic approach. Insights are drawn across various disciplines. Ethnography, history, linguistics, philosophy, and literature forged a dialogic understanding of Lau'um knowledge and values.The study concerns itself on the nature of knowledge in Lau'um. This book embraces the qualitative methodology. It engages the study on Lau'um epistemology, the concept of self, social ethics, spiritual, and aesthetic values. At the theoretical level, paradigms of understandings are engaged from ethnographers, historians, linguists, philosophers, and literary writers. The discussions, however, turn away from "a rational objectivism" and turn "toward the conception of a more relativistic universe and 'poststructuralist' epistemologies" (Rudestam 2001). The views presented belong to 'us' because they are informed by the Lau'um traditions and contexts. The views also engage in a reformulation of the Lau'um people's identity by the autho...