Download or read book Cultural Development of Mathematical Ideas written by Geoffrey B. Saxe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-28 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing upon field studies conducted in 1978, 1980 and 2001 with the Oksapmin, a remote Papua New Guinea group, Geoffrey B. Saxe traces the emergence of new forms of numerical representations and ideas in the social history of the community. In traditional life, the Oksapmin used a counting system that makes use of twenty-seven parts of the body; there is no evidence that the group used arithmetic in prehistory. As practices of economic exchange and schooling have shifted, children and adults unwittingly reproduced and altered the system in order to solve new kinds of numerical and arithmetical problems, a process that has led to new forms of collective representations in the community. While Dr Saxe's focus is on the Oksapmin, the insights and general framework he provides are useful for understanding shifting representational forms and emerging cognitive functions in any human community.

Download or read book Bundi written by David Gowran Fitz-Patrick and published by Mitchell Beazley. This book was released on 1983 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Cultural Diversity and the United Papua New Guinea written by Jacob Simet and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 23 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Cassowary s Revenge written by Donald Tuzin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1997-09-02 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Donald Tuzin first studied the New Guinea village of Ilahita in 1972. When he returned many years later, he arrived in the aftermath of a startling event: the village’s men voluntarily destroyed their secret cult that had allowed them to dominate women for generations. The cult’s collapse indicated nothing less than the death of masculinity, and Tuzin examines the labyrinth of motives behind this improbable, self-devastating act. The villagers' mythic tradition provided a basis for this revenge of Woman upon the dominion of Man, and, remarkably, Tuzin himself became a principal figure in its narratives. The return of the magic-bearing "youngest brother" from America had been prophesied, and the villagers believed that Tuzin’s return "from the dead" signified a further need to destroy masculine traditions. The Cassowary's Revenge is an intimate account of how Ilahita’s men and women think, emote, dream, and explain themselves. Tuzin also explores how the death of masculinity in a remote society raises disturbing implications for gender relations in our own society. In this light Tuzin's book is about men and women in search of how to value one another, and in today's world there is no theme more universal or timely.

Download or read book Dispossession and the Environment written by Paige West and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When journalists, developers, surf tourists, and conservation NGOs cast Papua New Guineans as living in a prior nature and prior culture, they devalue their knowledge and practice, facilitating their dispossession. Paige West's searing study reveals how a range of actors produce and reinforce inequalities in today's globalized world. She shows how racist rhetorics of representation underlie all uneven patterns of development and seeks a more robust understanding of the ideological work that capital requires for constant regeneration.

Download or read book Conflict and Resource Development in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea written by Nicole Haley and published by ANU E Press. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Southern Highlands is one of Papua New Guinea's most resource-rich provinces, but for a number of years the province has been riven by conflict. Longstanding inter-group rivalries, briefly set aside during the colonial period, have been compounded by competition for the benefits provided by the modern state and by fighting over the distribution of returns from the several big mining and petroleum projects located within the province or impinging upon it. Deaths from the various conflicts over the past decade number in the hundreds. As a result of inter-group fighting, criminal activity and vandalism, a number of businesses have withdrawn from the province. Roadblocks and ambushes have made travel dangerous in many parts and expatriate missionaries and aid workers have left. Many public servants have abandoned their posts with the result that state services are not provided. Corruption is rife. Police are often reluctant to act because they are outnumbered and outgunned. This volume brings together a number of authors with deep experience of the Southern Highlands to examine the underlying dynamics of resource development and conflict in the province. Its primary purpose is to provide some background to recent events, but the authors also explore possible approaches to limiting the human and economic costs of the ongoing conflict and breakdown of governance.

Download or read book Conservation Is Our Government Now written by Paige West and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2006-05-31 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A significant contribution to political ecology, Conservation Is Our Government Now is an ethnographic examination of the history and social effects of conservation and development efforts in Papua New Guinea. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted over a period of seven years, Paige West focuses on the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area, the site of a biodiversity conservation project implemented between 1994 and 1999. She describes the interactions between those who ran the program—mostly ngo workers—and the Gimi people who live in the forests surrounding Crater Mountain. West shows that throughout the project there was a profound disconnect between the goals of the two groups. The ngo workers thought that they would encourage conservation and cultivate development by teaching Gimi to value biodiversity as an economic resource. The villagers expected that in exchange for the land, labor, food, and friendship they offered the conservation workers, they would receive benefits, such as medicine and technology. In the end, the divergent nature of each group’s expectations led to disappointment for both. West reveals how every aspect of the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area—including ideas of space, place, environment, and society—was socially produced, created by changing configurations of ideas, actions, and material relations not only in Papua New Guinea but also in other locations around the world. Complicating many of the assumptions about nature, culture, and development underlying contemporary conservation efforts, Conservation Is Our Government Now demonstrates the unique capacity of ethnography to illuminate the relationship between the global and the local, between transnational processes and individual lives.

Download or read book Yali s Question written by Frederick Errington and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2004-11-15 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yali's Question is the story of a remarkable physical and social creation—Ramu Sugar Limited (RSL), a sugar plantation created in a remote part of Papua New Guinea. As an embodiment of imported industrial production, RSL's smoke-belching, steam-shrieking factory and vast fields of carefully tended sugar cane contrast sharply with the surrounding grassland. RSL not only dominates the landscape, but also shapes those culturally diverse thousands who left their homes to work there. To understand the creation of such a startling place, Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz explore the perspectives of the diverse participants that had a hand in its creation. In examining these views, they also consider those of Yali, a local Papua New Guinean political leader. Significantly, Yali features not only in the story of RSL, but also in Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize winning world history Guns, Germs, and Steel—a history probed through its contrast with RSL's. The authors' disagreement with Diamond stems, not from the generality of his focus and the specificity of theirs, but from a difference in view about how history is made—and from an insistence that those with power be held accountable for affecting history.

Download or read book Protection of Intellectual Biological and Cultural Property in Papua New Guinea written by Kathy Whimp and published by ANU E Press. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intellectual, biological and cultural property rights are a powerful and debatable topic. They offer the possibility for protection of rights to intangible resources, including the products of knowledge and creativity. The forces of globalisation have made this subject of immediate, international concern. Struggles for ownership of intellectual property occur between and within local and global arenas. This book examines important questions which Papua New Guinea must ask in the development of intellectual property legislation. The chapters are written by specialists in the fields of medicine, law, the environment, music, genetics and traditional cultural knowledge. The wise and creative protection of intellectual, biological and cultural property is important if Papua New Guinea is to successfully define and realise its future.

Download or read book Culture and Cognition written by J. W. Berry and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-04 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1974, studies of cultural influences on cognition, carried out from a variety of theoretical and methodological stances, were collected for the first time in this volume. The editors placed particular emphasis on selecting material by authors from many countries who had been working with people from a wide range of cultures. In a general introduction they provide an historical overview of the major issues, and draw together the most recent attempts to bring methodological sophistication to this difficult area of enquiry. Suggestions for future research on basic problems are to be found in an epilogue, along with a consideration of some possible applications of these studies to problems of education and social change. A comprehensive bibliography with over 600 entries is included in the volume.

Download or read book Culture and Sustainable Development in the Pacific written by Antony Hooper and published by ANU E Press. This book was released on 2005-04-01 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the South Pacific, notions of ‘culture’ and ‘development’ are very much alive—in political debate, the media, sermons, and endless discussions amongst villagers and the urban élites, even in policy reports. Often the terms are counterposed, and development along with ‘economic rationality’, ‘good governance’ and ‘progress’ is set against culture or ‘custom’, ‘tradition’ and ‘identity’. The decay of custom and impoverishment of culture are often seen as wrought by development, while failures of development are haunted by the notion that they are due, somehow, to the darker, irrational influences of culture. The problem is to resolve the contradictions between them so as to achieve the greater good—access to material goods, welfare and amenities, ‘modern life’—without the sacrifice of the ‘traditional’ values and institutions that provide material security and sustain diverse social identities. Resolution is sought in this book by a number of leading writers from the South Pacific including Langi Kavaliku, Epeli Hau’ofa, Marshall Sahlins, Malama Meleisea, Joeli Veitayaki, and Tarcisius Tara Kabutaulaka. The volume is brought together for UNESCO by Antony Hooper, Professor Emeritus at the University of Auckland. UNESCO experts include Richard Engelhardt, Langi Kavaliku, Russell Marshall, Malama Meleisea, Edna Tait and Mali Voi.

Download or read book Sustainable Communities Sustainable Development written by Paul James and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2012-07-31 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Papua New Guinea is going through a crisis: A concentration on conventional approaches to development, including an unsustainable reliance on mining, forestry, and foreign aid, has contributed to the country’s slow decline since independence in 1975. Sustainable Communities, Sustainable Development attempts to address problems and gaps in the literature on development and develop a new qualitative conception of community sustainability informed by substantial and innovative research in Papua New Guinea. In this context, sustainability is conceived in terms that include not just practices tied to economic development. It also informs questions of wellbeing and social integration, community-building, social support, and infrastructure renewal. In short, the concern with sustainability here entails undertaking an analysis of how communities are sustained through time, how they cohere and change, rather than being constrained within discourses and models of development. From another angle, this project presents an account of community sustainability detached from instrumental concerns with economic development. Contributors address questions such as: What are the stories and histories through which people respond to their nation’s development? What is the everyday social environment of groups living in highly diverse areas (migrant settlements, urban villages, remote communities)? They seek to contribute to a creative and dynamic grass-roots response to the demands of everyday life and local-global pressures. While the overdeveloped world faces an intersecting crisis created by global climate change and financial instability, Papua New Guinea, with all its difficulties, still has the basis for responding to this manifold predicament. Its secret lies in what has been seen as its weakness: underdeveloped economies and communities, where people still maintain sustainable relations to each other and the natural world.

Download or read book The Island of Menstruating Men written by Ian Hogbin and published by Waveland Press. This book was released on 1996-02-27 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ian Hogbin belongs to anthropologys heroic age. He was a member of the brilliant between-the-wars generation that included Raymond Firth, Reo Fortune, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Hortense Powdermaker, all of whom pioneered modern field research in the insular South Pacific. The Island of Menstruating Men was a path-breaking exploration of gender in Wogeo when first published. Today it remains an important full-length study of a Melanesian religion, examining it in relation to other facets of culturemythology, beliefs about illness and death, growth and maturity, magic, social structure, and morality. It is an articulate, insightful examination of the meaning of tradition and of the integration of culture. It is also a captivating account of ethnocentrism and the Wogeos justification for it, exemplifying, in miniature, what appears to be one of the great problems of the human species.

Download or read book Culture Kastom Tradition written by Lamont Lindstrom and published by [email protected]. This book was released on 1994 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive written by Paige West and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-10 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: West looks at the process from which coffee is grown, gathered, sorted, shipped, and served from the highlands of Papua New Guinea to coffee shops in far away places. She shows how coffee becomes a commodity, the different forms of labor involved, and the way that coffee shapes the lives and understandings of those who grow, process, export, sell and consume coffee.

Download or read book A Short History of Papua New Guinea written by John Waiko and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1993 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Short History of Papua New Guinea is a concise book describing the quick and steady growth of the many small, isolated and self-sufficient societies that made up the fledgeling British Papua and German New Guinea colonies towards the end of the last century. The book traces how the British and German colonies grew and the effects that each administration had on health, religion, education and trade up to and beyond independence.

Download or read book Gender Analysis in Papua New Guinea written by Elizabeth C. Brouwer and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In October 1996, The East Asia and Pacific Region developed a Regional Gender Action Plan that stressed the importance of country-specific strategies regarding gender issues. This report on gender in Papua New Guinea intends to lay the foundation for such a strategy. The report provides an outline of the key historical, economic, demographic, political, geographic, socio-cultural, legal and institutional issues that are relevant to understanding the status of women in Papua New Guinea today.