The ordinary and extraordinary spheres in Bush Mekeo culture are predicated upon the bisection of the inside bush and the outside village. However, every spatial transfer in either of these spheres involves the bisection of yet another inside/outside duality – the human “body” (kuma). As the world is composed of village and bush, there is an outside to the body and an inside. I suggested twice earlier that the outside and the inside of the body have inverted and everted parts – abdomen and excrement, respectively – that are homologous with the village abdomen and the adjacent bush. Thus, everything transported between village and bush either remains outside the body, goes into the body and stays there, passes to the abdomen, or comes out of the body. Moreover, bodily tissues set apart in holes of the village and bush are extracted from holes of the body. The overall purpose of the present chapter, then, is to delineate the various aspects of this homology between conceptions about space and the body in both the ordinary and extraordinary spheres of Bush Mekeo culture.

My handling of indigenous conceptualizations of bodily processes will be considerably more complex than was the case with village/bush relations. This is unavoidable because every object transfer relating to spatial distinctions also involves a corresponding transformation or change of state, and these transformations cannot be described independent of how they relate to the inside and outside of the body. Also, the body, or rather distinctive aspects of the body, is variously conceived as either the agents of transformation, the objects of transformation, or, in some cases, both.