Painful Places: Ritual Encounters with One's Homelands

Abstract

This article explores the role of pain in a number of ritual performances entailing the construction of characteristic connections between people and their homelands: the English custom of Perambulation or Beating of the Bounds, the gisaro ceremony of the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea and the initiation rites of the Australian Aranda. By focusing on the distinctive relational forms acted out in these performances, the author shows how the ritual infliction of suffering at once imbues pre-existing links with land with the immediacy of new, incontestable bodily experiences, and embeds these experiences within a wider network of ties, namely, those presupposed by the pain-inducing relationship enacted in the rituals themselves. Through such recontexualisations, the participants' attachments to the places they live on are renewed and transformed.

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