WOMEN'S BODIES AS BEARERS OF COMMUNAL GRIEF MEMORY: AN ASIAN POSTCOLONIAL FEMINIST HERMENEUTIC OF IKI PALEG AND THE WAILING WOMEN IN JEREMIAH 9:17–22
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Abstract
Women’s bodies can become sites through which communities mark and transmit memories of death, yet this memorial function contains a tension between women’s authority as agents of remembrance and the burdening of grief upon their bodies. This article analyses that tension through a critical dialogue between the tradition of Iki Paleg in several Dani communities and the wailing women in Jeremiah 9:17–22. The study employs qualitative library research informed by Asian postcolonial feminist hermeneutics and contextual-intercultural dialogue. The analysis focuses on the interrelations among body, memory, voice, power relations, and intergenerational transmission. The findings show that Iki Paleg materialises loss through permanent bodily alteration, whereas Jeremiah 9:17–22 locates memory in lament, the hearing of the divine word, and teaching. Both contexts present women as subjects of knowledge, yet their authority remains ambivalent because the labour of remembering is also distributed along gendered lines. The article proposes the concept of “women’s memory work” to account for the relationship among epistemic authority, relational agency, and memorial burden. As a constructive implication, a “pneumatology of remembering” understands the work of the Spirit as a presence that preserves testimony to woundedness, opens space for women’s voices, and guides communities to remember without reproducing violence upon the body.
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