What makes us different is what makes us human..
Curing and Healing
In the past, after a corpse had been exposed for the requisite number of days on a platform, the remains (bones) of the corpse would be removed and placed in a cave which would serve as the burial vault and permanent repository for them. This site was considered to be the home for the spirit, tini, of the dead person and had to be taken care of by the kin of the deceased.
Strathern, Andrew and Pamela Stewart1999 Curing and Healing: Medical Anthropology in Global Perspective. Carolina Academic Press, p. 53.
Female mourner among the Ndika people near Mount Hagen, early 1970s. Her hair, face, and body are plastered with white mourning clay, and she carries a cordyline switch. Earth paints are used to mark the body in particular ways (for healing, grief, or celebration, for example), and act to produce a kind of second skin on the person that intimately connects the human body to the ground.
Stewart, Pamela J. and Andrew Strathern, with contributions by Ien Courtens and Dianne van Oosterhout.2001 Humors and Substances. Ideas of the Body in New Guinea. Bergin and Garvey, Westport.
Andrew Strathern
Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart are a husband and wife research team that have published many books and articles on their fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, Taiwan, Ireland and Scotland.
They are the Series Co-editors for Ethnographic Studies in Medical Anthropology, Carolina Academic Press.
More information about their research and publications can be found at http://www.pitt.edu/~strather/
strather@pitt.edu
Selected Publications
Stewart, Pamela J. and Andrew Strathern (2005) Cosmology, Resources, and Landscape: Agencies of the Dead and the Living in Duna, Papua New Guinea. Ethnology 44(1): 35-47.
Stewart, Pamela J. and Andrew Strathern (2005) Ethnographic Studies in Medical Anthropology Series Editors' Preface, pp xi-xvi. In Social Discord and Bodily Disorders: Healing Among the Yupno of Papua New Guinea. Verena Keck. Durham N.C.: Carolina Academic Press.
Stewart, Pamela J. and Andrew Strathern (2002) Power and placement in blood practices. In "Blood Mysteries: Beyond Menstruation as Pollution", Janet Hoskins (ed.). Ethnology 41(4): 349-363.
Stewart, Pamela J. and A. Strathern (2001) Humors and Substances: Ideas of the Body in New Guinea. Bergin and Garvey, Greenwood Publishing Group
Strathern, Andrew and Pamela J. Stewart (2001) Pulse, muscle, blood, breath, and colour. Metascience 10(3):333-336.
Strathern, Andrew and Pamela Stewart (1999) Curing and Healing: Medical Anthropology in Global Perspective. Carolina Academic Press.
Strathern, A. and Pamela J. Stewart (1998) It's in the blood: images of collectivity, renewal, and entropy in a narrative of transfusion. JCU, Centre for Pacific Studies Discussion Papers Series 3:1-15.