Possible Typology for Psychogeography

Jonathan Z. Smith in Chapter One ("In Search of Place") in To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual quotes Nancy Munn on the notion of ancestral transformations in Walbiri and Pitjantjatjara tribes. She "has provided a precise typology of such transformations, as well as a trenchant statement of their significance"

Three types of transformations are prominent . . . (1) metamorphosis (the body of the ancestor is changed into some material object; (2) imprinting (the ancestor leaves the impression of his body or some tool he uses); (3) externalization (the ancestor takes some object out of his body).

A visit to a local park has me looking for traces of metamorphosis, imprinting and extrusion. The externalized object could be the bench I sit upon; the imprint is left by the flower beds and the fenced-in dog run; the evidence of metamorphosis is present in the public sculpture. All that is missing is an ascription to ancestors.

See "The transformation of subjects into objects in Walbiri and Pitjantjatjara myth" Nancy D. Munn in Australian Aboriginal anthropology : modern studies in the social anthropology of the Australian Aborigines edited by Ronald M. Berndt.

I had drawn upon Munn's work on Walbiri iconography in my dissertation: I was struck by the possibilities of modelling equivalency of objects and events via modes of narration.

As the neologism indicates, narratival structures are not the same as narrative structures. If Argyros [Argyros, Alex. "Narrative and Chaos." New Literary History 23:3 (Summer 1992), 659-673.] had not implicitly embedded narrative in a verbal form of discourse, his paradigm case would not resemble the subject-verb-object formula of Indo-European sentences.

And it is at that point that I appeal to Munn — Walbiri Iconography: Graphic Representation and Cultural Symbolism in a Central Australian Society (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1973).

The narratival structures outlined by Argyros do not provide a model logically powerful enough to explain the equivalency between events and objects. In Australian aborignial visual designs and storytelling, Nancy Munn reports

[T]here is no clear distinction between actor-action and actor-object constructions, and it is convenient to link them both in one overarching figure type with a general meaning that can be stated as "actor (in relation to)-item" ("actor-item"). (Walbiri Iconography 81).

As a category "relationship" opens up more phenomena to narrativity than that of "action".

Storing and Sorting - Note No. 2

And so for day 1706
15.08.2011