Download or read book Fracturing Resemblances written by Simon Harrison and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Western societies draw crucially on concepts of the 'individual' in constructing their images of the ethnic group and nation and define these in terms of difference. This study explores the implications of these constructs for Western understanding of social order and ethnic conflicts. Comparing them with the forms of cultural identity characteristic of Melanesia as they have developed since pre-colonial times, the author arrives at a surprising conclusion: he argues that these kinds of identities are more properly and adequately viewed as forms of disguised or denied resemblance, and that it is these covert commonalities that give rise to, and prolong, social divisions and conflicts between groups.
Download or read book Fracturing Resemblances written by Simon Harrison and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2005-12-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Western societies draw crucially on concepts of the 'individual' in constructing their images of the ethnic group and nation and define these in terms of difference. This study explores the implications of these constructs for Western understanding of social order and ethnic conflicts. Comparing them with the forms of cultural identity characteristic of Melanesia as they have developed since pre-colonial times, the author arrives at a surprising conclusion: he argues that these kinds of identities are more properly and adequately viewed as forms of disguised or denied resemblance, and that it is these covert commonalities that give rise to, and prolong, social divisions and conflicts between groups.
Download or read book Ren Girard and Creative Reconciliation written by Vern Neufeld Redekop and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-01-09 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contribution of this book to the field of reconciliation is both theoretical and practical, recognizing that good theory guides effective practice and practice is the ground for compelling theory. Using a Girardian hermeneutic as a starting point, a new conceptual Gestalt emerges in these essays, one not fully integrated in a formal way but showing a clear understanding of some of the challenges and possibilities for dealing with the deep divisions, enmity, hatred, and other effects of violence. By situating discourse about reconciliation within the context of Girardian thought, it becomes clear that—like Peter who vowed he would never deny Jesus but ended up doing it three times—any of us is susceptible to the siren call of angry resentment and retaliation. It is with a profound awareness of the power of violence that the emergence of mimetic discourse around reconciliation takes on particular urgency.
Download or read book Contested Memories and the Demands of the Past written by Catharina Raudvere and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-19 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together new perspectives on collective memory in the modern Muslim world. It discusses how memory cultures are established and used at national levels – in official history writing, through the erection of monuments, the fashioning of educational curricula and through media strategies – as well as in the interface with both artistic expressions and popular culture in the Muslim world at large. The representations of collective memory have been one of the foremost tools in national identity politics, grass-root mobilization, theological debates over Islam and general discussions on what constitutes ‘the modern in the Middle East’ as well as in Muslim diaspora environments. Few, if any, contemporary conflicts in the region can be understood in depth without a certain focus on various uses of history, memory cultures and religious meta-narratives at all societal levels, and in art and literature. This book will be of use to students and scholars in the fields of Identity Politics, Islamic Studies, Media and Cultural Anthropology.
Download or read book Treasured Possessions written by Haidy Geismar and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-04 with total page 509 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when ritual practitioners from a small Pacific nation make an intellectual property claim to bungee jumping? When a German company successfully sues to defend its trademark of a Māori name? Or when UNESCO deems ephemeral sand drawings to be "intangible cultural heritage"? In Treasured Possessions, Haidy Geismar examines how global forms of cultural and intellectual property are being redefined by everyday people and policymakers in two markedly different Pacific nations. The New Hebrides, a small archipelago in Melanesia managed jointly by Britain and France until 1980, is now the independent nation-state of Vanuatu, with a population that is more than 95 percent indigenous. New Zealand, by contrast, is a settler state and former British colony that engages with its entangled Polynesian and British heritage through an ethos of "biculturalism" that is meant to involve an indigenous population of just 15 percent. Alternative notions of property, resources, and heritage—informed by distinct national histories—are emerging in both countries. These property claims are advanced in national and international settings, but they emanate from specific communities and cultural landscapes, and they are grounded in an awareness of ancestral power and inheritance. They reveal intellectual and cultural property to be not only legal constructs but also powerful ways of asserting indigenous identities and sovereignties.
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 The Wheel of Autonomy written by Felix Girke and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2018-08-17 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do the Kara, a small population residing on the eastern bank of the Omo River in southern Ethiopia, manage to be neither annexed nor exterminated by any of the larger groups that surround them? Through the theoretical lens of rhetoric, this book offers an interactionalist analysis of how the Kara negotiate ethnic and non-ethnic differences among themselves, the relations with their various neighbors, and eventually their integration in the Ethiopian state. The model of the “Wheel of Autonomy” captures the interplay of distinction, agency and autonomy that drives these dynamics and offers an innovative perspective on social relations.
Download or read book Mediating Across Difference written by Morgan J. Brigg and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2011-01-31 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mediating Across Difference is based on a fundamental premise: to deal adequately with conflict—and particularly with conflict stemming from cultural and other differences—requires genuine openness to different cultural practices and dialogue between different ways of knowing and being. Equally essential is a shift away from understanding cultural difference as an inevitable source of conflict, and the development of a more critical attitude toward previously under-examined Western assumptions about conflict and its resolution. To address the ensuing challenges, this book introduces and explores some of the rich insights into conflict resolution emanating from Asia and Oceania. Although often overlooked, these local traditions offer a range of useful ways of thinking about and dealing with difference and conflict in a globalizing world. To bring these traditions into exchange with mainstream Western conflict resolution, the editors present the results of collaborative work between experienced scholars and culturally knowledgeable practitioners from numerous parts of Asia and Oceania. The result is a series of interventions that challenge conventional Western notions of conflict resolution and provide academics, policy makers, diplomats, mediators, and local conflict workers with new possibilities to approach, prevent, and resolve conflict. Contributors: Roland Bleiker; Volker Boege; Morgan Brigg; Stephen Chan; Frans de Jalong, Sr.; Lorraine Garasu; Mary Graham; Hoang Young-ju; Carwyn Jones; Joy Kere; Debra McDougall; Norifumi Namatame; Chengxin Pan; Oliver Richmond; Deborah Bird Rose; Muhadi Sugiono; Tarja Väyrynen; Polly O. Walker; Jacqueline Wasilewski.
Download or read book Kings of Disaster written by Simon Simonse and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the long awaited, revised and illustrated edition of Kings of Disaster, the study of the Rainmakers of the Nilotic Sudan that is in many ways a breakthrough in anthropological thinking on African political systems. Taking his inspiration from René Girard’s theory of consensual scapegoating, the author shows that the longstanding distinction of states and stateless societies as two fundamentally different political types does not hold. Centralized and segmentary systems only differ in the relative emphasis put on the victim role of the king as compared with that of enemy. Kings of Disaster thus proposes an uninvolved solution to the vexed problem of regicide.
Download or read book Skilled Visions written by Cristina Grasseni and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most arguments for a rediscovery of the body & the senses hinge on a critique of 'visualism' in our globalized, technified society. This text raises the issue of the rehabilitation of vision and contextualises vision in the debate on the construction of local knowledge vs. the hegemony of the socio-technical network.
Download or read book States of Imitation written by Patrice Ladwig and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Late Western colonialism often relied on the practice of imitating indigenous forms of rule in order to maintain power; conversely, indigenous polities could imitate Western sociopolitical forms to their own benefit. Drawing on historical ethnographic studies of colonialism in Asia and Africa, States of Imitation examines how the colonial state attempted to administer, control, and integrate its indigenous subjects through mimetic governmentality, as well the ways indigenous states adopted these imitative practices to establish reciprocal ties with, or to resist the presence of, the colonial state.
Download or read book Individually Ourselves written by Sarah Winkler-Reid and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a London high school, Individually Ourselves demonstrates how young people elaborate notions of personhood through their friendships, and pervasive peer ethics, shaped in and through relations of power and inequality. By examining the interplay between individuality and group dynamics during such a formative time of life, the book addresses how our everyday interactions help create the person we become.
Download or read book Being Human Being Migrant written by Anne Sigfrid Grønseth and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Migrant experiences accentuate general aspects of the human condition. Therefore, this volume explores migrant’s movements not only as geographical movements from here to there but also as movements that constitute an embodied, cognitive, and existential experience of living “in between” or on the “borderlands” between differently figured life-worlds. Focusing on memories, nostalgia, the here-and-now social experiences of daily living, and the hopes and dreams for the future, the volume demonstrates how all interact in migrants’ and refugees’ experience of identity and quest for well-being.
Download or read book Mimesis and Pacific Transcultural Encounters written by Jeannette Mageo and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2017-10-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do images circulating in Pacific cultures and exchanged between them and their many visitors transform meanings for all involved? This fascinating collection explores how through mimesis, wayfarers and locales alike borrow images from one another to expand their cultural repertoire of meanings or borrow images from their own past to validate their identities.
Download or read book Grammars of Identity Alterity written by Gerd Baumann† and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2004-12-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Issues of the construction of Self and Other, normally in the context of social exclusion of those perceived as different, have assumed a new urgency. This collection offers a fresh perspective on the ongoing debates on these questions in the social sciences and the humanities by focusing specifically on one theoretical proposition, namely, that the seemingly universal processes of identity formation and exclusion of the 'other' can be differentiated according to three modalities. All contributors directly engage with rigorous empirical testing and theoretical cross-examination of this proposition. Their results have direct implications not only for a more differentiated understanding of collective identities, but also for a better understanding of extreme collective violence and genocide.
Download or read book Culture Wars written by Deborah James and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relationship between anthropologists’ ethnographic investigations and the lived social worlds in which these originate is a fundamental issue for anthropology. Where some claim that only native voices may offer authentic accounts of culture and hence that ethnographers are only ever interpreters of it, others point out that anthropologists are, themselves, implanted within specific cultural contexts which generate particular kinds of theoretical discussions. The contributors to this volume reject the premise that ethnographer and informant occupy different and incommensurable “cultural worlds.” Instead they investigate the relationship between culture, context, and anthropologists’ models and accounts in new ways. In doing so, they offer fresh insights into this key area of anthropological research.
Download or read book The Ethnographic Experiment written by Edvard Hviding and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2014-06-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1908, Arthur Maurice Hocart and William Halse Rivers Rivers conducted fieldwork in the Solomon Islands and elsewhere in Island Melanesia that served as the turning point in the development of modern anthropology. The work of these two anthropological pioneers on the small island of Simbo brought about the development of participant observation as a methodological hallmark of social anthropology. This would have implications for Rivers’ later work in psychiatry and psychology, and Hocart’s work as a comparativist, for which both would largely be remembered despite the novelty of that independent fieldwork on remote Pacific islands in the early years of the 20th Century. Contributors to this volume—who have all carried out fieldwork in those Melanesian locations where Hocart and Rivers worked—give a critical examination of the research that took place in 1908, situating those efforts in the broadest possible contexts of colonial history, imperialism, the history of ideas and scholarly practice within and beyond anthropology.
