Project Spirit Structures

The book “Spirit Structures of Papua New Guinea” by Michael Hirschbichler investigates the art and architecture of Papua New Guinean spirit structures, with a multi-perspectival approach that combines cultural and social sciences with building, architectural and spatial research. It offers the first comprehensive study of the spirit houses of New Guinea that exists to date. The book’s aim is twofold: First, it aims is to investigate the spirit structures and their associated cultural cosmos in detail. For this purpose, a representative selection of traditional buildings and art works from different regions of Papua New Guinea is documented and analyzed, and theories for their understanding are formulated. In this course, the author develops a spatial theory of anthropological concepts – such as myths, signs, persons, and rituals. Secondly, this analysis is then situated in the broader context of the Anthropocene. Transforming the historical spirit structures into models for future-oriented cultural imagination, consequences for contemporary productions of space and ways of worldmaking in light of existential challenges are traced. The book thus offers more-than-human and more-than-secular concepts for building and art and worldmaking that are of critical importance in the ongoing Anthropocene.