Jari
Wogeo · demigod · Wogeo traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
Jari is a Wogeo culture heroine remembered for a myth of extraordinary bodily containment: she took her house apart and carried the whole of it, along with her cooking pots and pans, within her vulva, only reassembling the dwelling after she met another mythic being and married him. Anderson reads the tale within a wider Wogeo imagery in which the female body encloses and generates the domestic and productive order, a counterpoint to the men's appropriation of generative power in the flute cult. Her husband is named in the sources only as another mythic being.
Domains
- generation and domestic life
- womanhood and body
Powers
- carries an entire house within her body
Sources
- In a Wogeo myth the heroine Jari dismantled her house and carried it, with the cooking pots, inside her vulva, until she met another mythic being, married him, and rebuilt the house.: Hogbin, H. Ian. 1970. The Island of Menstruating Men: Religion in Wogeo, New Guinea (Scranton: Chandler), p. 35. (primary); Anderson, Astrid. 2011. Landscapes of Relations and Belonging: Body, Place and Politics in Wogeo, Papua New Guinea (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books). (secondary)