The specific North Mekeo designations of the village and bush as outside and inside, respectively, may seem peculiar and counter-intuitive to many English speakers. For example, people live ‘in town’, and when they go to the countryside for holiday they get ‘out of town’. However, the sense of North Mekeo inside and outside territorial designations and their inversions and eversions becomes perhaps more apparent in respect of analogous discriminations of the human body. This is implied strongly by the Mekeo word for outside, fangai, as applied to the world is a distinctively bodily metaphor meaning literally ‘on the skin’. And similarly, as already noted, the term for the central village abdomen, inaenga, is also the word for bodily abdomen or womb. ^[4]

More importantly for present purposes, the human body, like the territorial world, contains unambiguously inside and outside regions and their ambiguous eversions and inversions resulting from temporal ingestion and excretion of resources and wastes, respectively. To North Mekeo villagers, the human body (kumau) is divided into inside (aongai) and outside (fangai) regions. The skin or fanga is the essential boundary between the two primary zones, just as the world has a category of ‘skin’ termed fangapu or fanga apu (or ‘skin place’) which demarcates the village from the bush—i.e. the fence or hedge of crotons mentioned above. And just as human life is dependent on regular transfers and transformations of things across the skin dividing village and bush, the life of the human body requires the movement of resources and wastes between its outside and inside regions.

Villagers are extremely diligent as regards the precise regulation of these flows, and with good reason. For if the appropriate sort of things are properly transferred from outside to inside and inside to outside, human life will continue. If inappropriate things from the outside are ingested or inappropriate parts of the inside are ejected, however, then the opposite of life, or death, is the result. Thus it is vital significance to every human being that the transfers and transformations between the inside and outside of his/her body are properly regulated. And in many ways it is possible to envision the entirety of Mekeo culture and social organisation as extenuations of these bodily ins and outs—from the processes of cooking, ingestion, digestion, excretion, sexuality and reproduction, generally, to ceremonial gift exchange, mortuary feasting, sorcery practice and the wielding of chiefly agency (Mosko 1983, 1985, 2001a). In this paper, I will have the opportunity to touch lightly on only a few of these embodied contexts of territoriality and sociality.

For present purposes, the regulated movements of things between the outsides and insides of human bodies result in an analogous classification of the body initially itself into four basic zones: unambiguous inside and outside regions, and ambiguously inverted and everted bisections of these. Much of the world at large consists of materials or things that have never been part of a human being (or human-like being; see below) and are hence unambiguously outside of the body, or part of the ‘body outside’. Interestingly, these are predominantly things that originate from the unambiguously inside portion of the remote bush—wild animals and plants, the ground or soil of bush lands, waters flowing in the rivers and creeks, etc.—which are transported and transformed by human ingenuity or cleverness (etsifa; see below) for use in human life concentrated at the outside village. In contrast with the sector of the world that is external to the body is the body’s own interior space, comprised of the bloody, fleshy parts, which, in a healthy state, remain inside and are never excreted. This includes the body’s various organs, the bones, and in general all the bloody internal parts. Ordinarily in the course of life these bloody parts of the inside of human bodies remain there. They do not come out. Human life, however, is dependent on the transfers of different sorts of things, first from outside to inside and later from inside to outside, which result in ambiguously outside parts of the space inside bodies (i.e. outside inverted) and ambiguously inside parts of the space outside bodies (i.e. inside everted). On the one hand, ingested cooked foods can be taken to typify the former category. On ingestion, foods are transported to the abdomen whereon certain elements they contain (ngaka; see below) are assimilated into the inside of the body proper in the form of blood and tissues. The remaining wastes (faeces, urine), containing neither blood nor the constituents of blood, accumulate in the abdomen for eventual externalisation. Once excreted, they can be seen to occupy inside bodily space that has been everted, analogous with the waste deposit area of the bush surrounding the village. And it is no coincidence that it is in this same zone of the bush that the body’s non-bloody wastes are normally deposited.

In trying to comprehend the patterning of these distinctions, I have developed an illustration (Figure 2) that has been inspired by Leach’s (1961) famous discussions of topography. Think of a balloon, the skin of which demarcates an unambiguous boundary between inside and outside regions. Now with your thumb on the outside, push or fold the skin of the balloon inwards and then pinch it off at the point where it diverges from the balloon’s spherical outline. The outside space occupied by your thumb would nonetheless appear to be inside, that is, outside space contained within a folding of the balloon’s skin, thus analogous to an abdomen or womb—a portion of the space outside the body folded on itself. Now conceive as well of the reverse operation; that is, from the interior of the balloon extend the skin with your finger so that it protrudes beyond the otherwise spherical boundary of the balloon’s skin, and fold or tie it off also. The result is a portion of inside space that is nonetheless outside the ordinary sphere of the balloon, analogous to excreted bodily wastes. Thus the duality of inside and outside spaces is stretched and twisted to produce four discernible spaces: simple inside, simple outside, inside everted, and outside inverted.

At a very broad level of generalisation, this interpretation of North Mekeo spatial categorisations is consistent with broader patterns of cultural integration. The Central Mekeo ethnographer Hau’ofa (1981) noted, for example, a consistent ‘ambiguity’ of indigenous Mekeo conceptual dualisms, such as senior and junior, male and female, as well as inside and outside, which I have elsewhere refined and formalised in terms of ‘bisected dualities’ (1985, 1991b). But this interpretation of North Mekeo spatial categorisations of the body is also useful for explaining an enormous range of specific ethnographic imponderabilia which otherwise appear to be inconsistent and/or inexplicable. For instance, human blood in all of its manifestations, including sexual fluids, is regarded as ‘dirty’ and ‘hot’ or dangerous when it is transferred from the inside of one body, where it ordinarily safely resides, to the inside of another human’s body. If a human being should inadvertently ingest the blood of another human, especially a dead human, the ingested blood and the soul or spirit it embodies would act like a poison and lead to their death. Men’s ejaculated semen, however, although it is dirty, hot and dangerous if orally ingested, does not cause sickness or death even though it appears to be deposited inside a woman’s body during copulation. This is because a woman’s womb is not technically inside her body; rather, her womb is outside space folded inside, a process known in topography as invagination. So even though a man’s semen would sicken a woman if she took it into her body orally, when deposited into her womb it remains contained within the inverted, invaginated outside space of her body. ^[5]

Thus the human body, like the territorial world, consists in an initial distinction of unambiguous inside and outside spaces, which, as a result of temporal transfers between the two zones, results in an analogous fourfold totality of inside, outside, inverted outside and everted inside spaces:

It is interesting that this particular classification of bodily space and process is not unique to North Mekeo among Austronesian speakers, for again it seems that the same pattern or structure is widespread in Polynesia, on the evidence of Gell’s analysis of the logic of tattooing in the region: ‘The basic schema of tattooing is thus definable as the exteriorisation of the interior which is simultaneously the interiorisation of the exterior’ (1993: 39).