Download or read book An Introduction to the Anthropology of Melanesia written by Paul Sillitoe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-10-08 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Introduction to the Anthropology of Melanesia is intended for undergraduate anthropology students with some grounding in the issues and ideas that inform the discipline, and for courses in Pacific Studies. Each chapter focuses on a topic common to many cultures in the region, such as the role of so-called Big Men, ancestors, male initiation, and exchange, and these ideas are fleshed out with apt ethnographic examples. Melanesia is a fascinating culture area, and has always been a popular fieldwork site for anthropologists, including W. H. R. Rivers, Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson. Some of the most important theoretical contributions to the subject were also first formulated with reference to Melanesian studies, and students today still learn much of their basic anthropology from Melanesian examples.
Download or read book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind written by Julian Jaynes and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2000-08-15 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
Download or read book An Introduction to the Peoples and Cultures of Melanesia written by Ann Chowning and published by Nicholson. This book was released on 1977 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia written by Gilbert H. Herdt and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains the work of seven leading anthropologists on the subject of ritualized homosexuality, and it marks the first time that anthropologists have systematically studied cross-cultural variations in homosexual behavior in a non-Western culture area. The book as a whole indicates that contemporary theories of sex and gender development need revision in light of the Melanesian findings.
Download or read book The Anthropology of Morality in Melanesia and Beyond written by John Barker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Anthropology of Morality in Melanesia and Beyond examines how Melanesians experience and deal with moral dilemmas and challenges. Taking Kenelm Burridge’s seminal work as their starting point, the contributors focus upon public situations and types of people that exemplify key ethical contradictions for members of moral communities. While returning to some classical concerns, such as the roles of big men and sorcerers, the book opens new territory with richly textured ethnographic studies and theoretical reviews that explore the interface between the values associated with indigenous village life and the ethical orientations associated with Christianity, the state, the marketplace, and other facets of ’modernity'. A major contribution to the emerging field of the anthropology of morality, the volume includes some of the most prominent scholars working in the discipline today, including Bruce Knauft, Joel Robbins, F.G. Bailey, Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington.
Download or read book Transactions and Creations written by Eric Hirsch and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 21st century, intellectual and cultural resources emerge on all sides as candidates for ownership claims. Members of an anthropological research team investigating emergent economic relations in a part of the world renowned for its innovative approach to resources and transactions, wish to open up the vocabulary. In this unique volume, they bring an unexpected comparative perspective to global debates on intellectual and cultural property rights (IPR and CPR). The contributors bring from Melanesia their collective experience of people initiating, limiting and rationalizing claims through transactions in ways that challenge many of the assumptions behind the international language. In a bold theoretical move, "property" is put alongside two other terms: "transactions" and "creations." The former have a place in the anthropological tradition that now needs to be brought into the foreground. In turn, increasing interest in protecting intellectual and cultural resources means that questions about creativity have suddenly become pertinent to what is or is not being transacted. Yet is creativity a special preoccupation of modernity? How are we to talk about people's creative practices, when innovation becomes the basis for ownership claims? This book is full of surprises!
Download or read book The Gender of the Gift written by Marilyn Strathern and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1988-09-15 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the most original and ambitious synthesis yet undertaken in Melanesian scholarship, Marilyn Strathern argues that gender relations have been a particular casualty of unexamined assumptions held by Western anthropologists and feminist scholars alike. The book treats with equal seriousness—and with equal good humor—the insights of Western social science, feminist politics, and ethnographic reporting, in order to rethink the representation of Melanesian social and cultural life. This makes The Gender of the Gift one of the most sustained critiques of cross-cultural comparison that anthropology has seen, and one of its most spirited vindications.
Download or read book Saltwater Sociality written by Katharina Schneider and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inhabitants of Pororan Island, a small group of ‘saltwater people’ in Papua New Guinea, are intensely interested in the movements of persons across the island and across the sea, both in their everyday lives as fishing people and on ritual occasions. From their observations of human movements, they take their cues about the current state of social relations. Based on detailed ethnography, this study engages current Melanesian anthropological theory and argues that movements are the Pororans’ predominant mode of objectifying relations. Movements on Pororan Island are to its inhabitants what roads are to ‘mainlanders’ on the nearby larger island, and what material objects and images are to others elsewhere in Melanesia.
Download or read book Time and Its Object written by Paolo Fortis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the way objects and images relate to and shape notions of temporality and history. Bringing together ethnographic studies from the Lowlands of Central and South America and Melanesia, it explores the temporality inhering in images and artefacts from a comparative perspective. The chapters focus on how peoples in both regions ‘live in’ and ‘navigate’ time each through their distinctive systems of images and the processes and actions by which these come to be manifest in objects. With original theoretical and ethnographic contributions, the book is valuable reading for scholars interested in visual and material culture and in anthropological approaches to time.
Download or read book Bodies and Persons written by Michael Lambek and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-03-28 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Large-scale comparisons are out of fashion in anthropology, but this book suggests a bold comparative approach to broad cultural differences between Africa and Melanesia. Its theme is personhood, which is understood in terms of what anthropologists call 'embodiment'. These concepts are applied to questions ranging from the meanings of spirit possession, to the logics of witchcraft and kinship relations, the use of rituals to heal the sick, 'electric vampires', and even the impact of capitalism. There are detailed ethnographic analyses, and suggestive comparisons of classic African and Melanesian ethnographic cases, such as the Nuer and the Melpa. The contributors debate alternative strategies for cross-cultural comparison, and demonstrate that there is a surprising range of continuities, putting in question common assumptions about the huge differences between these two parts of the world.
Download or read book The Melanesian World written by Eric Hirsch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-28 with total page 740 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging volume captures the diverse range of societies and experiences that form what has come to be known as Melanesia. It covers prehistoric, historic and contemporary issues, and includes work by art historians, political scientists, geographers and anthropologists. The chapters range from studies of subsistence, ritual and ceremonial exchange to accounts of state violence, new media and climate change. The ‘Melanesian world’ assembled here raises questions that cut to the heart of debates in the human sciences today, with profound implications for the ways in which scholars across disciplines can describe and understand human difference. This impressive collection of essays represents a valuable resource for scholars and students alike.
Download or read book History and Tradition in Melanesian Anthropology written by James G. Carrier and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Social Change in Melanesia written by Paul Sillitoe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-04-13 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, first published in 2000, is a companion volume to An Introduction to the Anthropology of Melanesia (1998). It gives a clear and absorbing account of social change in Melanesia since the arrival of Europeans covering the history of the colonial period and the new postcolonial states. Paul Sillitoe deals with economic and technological change, labour migration and urbanisation, and formation of the modern state, but he also describes the sometimes violent reactions to these dramatic transformations, in the form of cargo cults, secession movements, and insurrections against multinational companies. He discusses development projects but brings out associated policy dilemmas, reviews developments that threaten the environment, and implications for local identity, such as romanticises 'primitive culture'. This fascinating account of social change in the pacific is addressed to students with little or no background in the region's history and development.
Download or read book The Melanesians written by Robert Henry Codrington and published by . This book was released on 1891 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesia and Anthropology written by Bruce M. Knauft and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prominent scholar surveys the special place of Melanesia in our understanding of human cultural variation
Download or read book Population Reproduction and Fertility in Melanesia written by Stanley Ulijaszek and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2005-12-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human biological fertility was considered a important issue to anthropologists and colonial administrators in the first part of the 20th century, as a dramatic decline in population was observed in many regions. However, the total demise of Melanesian populations predicted by some never happened; on the contrary, a rapid population increase took place for the second part of the 20th century. This volume explores relationships between human fertility and reproduction, subsistence systems, the symbolic use of ideas of fertility and reproduction in linking landscape to individuals and populations, in Melanesian societies, past and present. It thus offers an important contribution to our understanding of the implications of social and economic change for reproduction and fertility in the broadest sense.
Download or read book Hunting the Gatherers written by Michael O'Hanlon and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2001-01-30 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the 1870s and the 1930s competing European powers carved out and consolidated colonies in Melanesia, the most culturally diverse region of the world. As part of this process, great assemblages of ethnographic artefacts were made by a range of collectors whose diversity is captured in this volume. The contributors to this tightly-integrated volume take these collectors, and the collecting institutions, as the departure point for accounts that look back at the artefact-producing societies and their interaction with the collectors, but also forward to the fate of the collections in metropolitan museums, as the artefacts have been variously exhibited, neglected, re-conceived as indigenous heritage, or repatriated. In doing this, the contributors raise issues of current interest in anthropology, Pacific history, art history, museology, and material culture.
