The Waters of Mendangumeli: A Masculine Psychoanalytic Interpretation of a New Guinea Flood Myth—and Women’s Laughter

This article corroborates Alan Dundes’s psychoanalytic interpretation of flood myths as expressing male envy of female fertility and birth. My data consist of two deluge tales collected in a Sepik River society in Papua New Guinea in the 1980s and 1994. But I do more than simply test Dundes’s thesis. I also show that it is possible and, indeed, imperative to embed psychoanalytic analyses of oral tales in the local cultural context. I also update, in a sense, Dundes’s framework with insights from Lacanian and feminist anthropology. Last, I discuss how Iatmul women respond—both to the tale and its psychodynamic innuendo.