The Culture-Hero of the Empty Places
Foi · demigod · Foi traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
Foi country is read as the residue of ancestral journeys. Named creeks, sago stands, and the 'empty places' — abandoned longhouse and garden sites — mark where culture-heroes and first ancestors once acted. Their travels are said to have instituted the arts of living, from sago processing and the longhouse to hunting and trapping, and to have left the web of places through which the living move and which the women's memorial poetry recalls. The Foi preserve this heroic matter as a body of distinct myths rather than as the biography of a single named creator.
Domains
- culture hero
- landscape and place
Powers
- leaves named places along a journey
- institutes sago-making and the longhouse
Sources
- Foi landscape is understood as the residue of ancestral journeys; culture-heroes and first ancestors instituted the arts of living and left the network of named and 'empty' places recalled in memorial poetry.: J. F. Weiner, The Empty Place: Poetry, Space, and Being among the Foi of Papua New Guinea (Indiana University Press, 1991). (secondary); J. F. Weiner, The Heart of the Pearl Shell (University of California Press, 1988). (secondary)