In a series of epic self-narratives ranging from traditional cultural
embodiments to picaresque adventures, Christian epiphanies and a host of
interactive strategies and techniques for living, Kewa Highlanders (PNG)
attempt to shape and control their selves and their relentlessly
changing world. This lively account transcends ethnographic
particularity and offers a wide-reaching perspective on the nature of
being human. Inverting the analytic logic of her previous work, which
sought to uncover what social structures concealed, Josephides focuses
instead on the cultural understandings that people make explicit in
their actions and speech. Using approaches from philosophy and
anthropology, she examines elicitation (how people create their selves
and their worlds in the act of making explicit) and mimesis (how
anthropologists produce ethnographies), to arrive at an unexpected
conclusion: that knowledge of self and other alike derives from
self-externalization rather than self-introspection.