Download or read book Mothers of Money Daughters of Coffee written by Lorraine Sexton and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Heart of the Pearl Shell written by James F. Weiner and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the Foi people who live on the edge of the central highlands of Papua New Guinea, the flow of pearl shells is the "heart" of their social life. The pearl shell is the exchange item that mediates the creation of their most important sexual and social roles. The Heart of the Pearl Shell analyzes a number of myths of the Foi people, elegantly bringing together significant ethnographic materials in a way that has important implications for the development of social theory in anthropology and in Melanesian studies. Scholars of semiotic-symbolic anthropology and of comparative religion will also share the author's interest in the meaning and role of mythology in Foi culture. Instead of relying on orthodox methods of Freudian or structuralist interpretation, James Weiner assumes there is a dialectical relationship between the images of Foi myth and the images of the Foi's social world. He demonstrates how each set of these images is dependent upon the other for its creation. This innovative study locates Foi social meaning in the re-creation and attempted solution of the moral dilemmas that are crystallized in mythology and other poetic usages. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988.
Download or read book The Enigma of the Gift written by Maurice Godelier and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999-02-03 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When we think of giving gifts, we think of exchanging objects that carry with them economic or symbolic value. But is every valuable thing a potentially exchangeable item, whose value can be transferred? In The Enigma of the Gift, the distinguished French anthropologist Maurice Godelier reassesses the significance of gifts in social life by focusing on sacred objects, which are never exchanged despite the value they possess. Beginning with an analysis of the seminal work of Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strass, and drawing on his own fieldwork in Melanesia, Godelier argues that traditional theories are flawed because they consider only exchangeable gifts. By explaining gift-giving in terms of sacred objects and the authoritative conferral of power associated with them, Godelier challenges both recent and traditional theories of gift-giving, provocatively refreshing a traditional debate. Elegantly translated by Nora Scott, The Enigma of the Gift is at once a major theoretical contribution and an essential guide to the history of the theory of the gift.
Download or read book Collecting Colonialism written by Chris Gosden and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Colonialism has shaped the world we live in today and has often been studied at a global level, but there is less understanding of how colonial relations operated locally. This book takes twentieth-century Papua New Guinea as its focus, and charts the changes in colonial relationships as they were expressed through the flow of material culture. Exploring the links between colonialism and material culture in general, the authors focus on the particular insights that museum collections can provide into social relations. Collections made by anthropologists in New Britain in the first half of the century are compared with recent fieldwork in the area to provide a particularly in-depth picture of historical change. Museum collections can reveal how people dealt with changes in the nature of community, gender relations and notions of power through the shifting use of objects in ritual and exchange. Objects, photographs and archives bring to life both the individual characters of colonial New Britain and the longer-term patterns of history. Drawing on the related disciplines of archaeology, linguistics, history and anthropology, the authors provide fresh insights into the complexities of colonial life. In particular, they show how social relationships among Melanesians, whites and other communities helped to erode distinctions between colonizers and locals, distinctions that have been maintained by scholars of colonialism in the past. This book successfully combines a specific geographical focus with an interest in the broader questions that surround colonial relations, historical change and the history of anthropology.
Download or read book Breaking the Frames written by Pamela J. Stewart and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-23 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that the breaking and re-making of frames of analysis underlie the history of theorizing in anthropology. Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew J. Strathern note that this mode of analysis risks fabricating over-essentialized dichotomies between viewpoints. The authors advocate a mindful, nuanced, people-centered approach to all theorizing-one that avoids total system approaches (-isms) and suggest that theory should relate cogently to ethnography. Mindful anthropology, as this book envisages it, is not a specific theory but a philosophical aspiration for the discipline as a whole.
Download or read book Melanesian Odysseys written by Lisette Josephides and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In a series of epic self-narratives ranging from traditional cultural embodiments to picaresque adventures, Christian epiphanies and a host of interactive strategies and techniques for living, Kewa Highlanders (PNG) attempt to shape and control their selves and their relentlessly changing world. This account transcends ethnographic particularity and offers a wide-reaching perspective on the nature of being human. Inverting the analytic logic of her previous work, which sought to uncover what social structures concealed, Josephides focuses instead on the cultural understandings that people make explicit in their actions and speech. Using approaches from philosophy and anthropology, she examines elicitation (how people create their selves and their worlds in the act of making explicit) and mimesis (how anthropologists produce ethnographies), to arrive at an unexpected conclusion: that knowledge of self and other alike derives from self-externalization rather than self-introspection."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Sung Tales from the Papua New Guinea Highlands written by Alan Rumsey and published by ANU E Press. This book was released on 2011-08-01 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The genres of sung tales that are the subject of this volume are one of the most striking aspects of the cultural scene in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. Composed and performed by specialist bards, they are a highly valued art form. From a comparative viewpoint they are remarkable both for their scale and complexity, and for the range of variation that is found among regional genres and individual styles. Though their existence has previously been noted by researchers working in the Highlands, and some recordings made of them, most of these genres have not been studied in detail until quite recently, mainly because of the challenging range of disciplinary expertise that is required--in anthropology, linguistics, and ethnomusicology. This volume presents a set of interrelated studies by researchers in all of those fields, and by a Papua New Guinea Highlander who has assisted with the research based on his lifelong familiarity with one of the regional genres. The studies presented here (all of them previously unpublished and written especially for this volume) are of groundbreaking significance not only for specialists in Melanesia or the Pacific, but also for readers with a more general interest in comparative poetics, mythology, musicology, or verbal art.
Download or read book The Journal of the Polynesian Society written by Polynesian Society (N.Z.) and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vols. for 1892-1941 contain the transactions and proceedings of the society.
Download or read book From Pig and Pearlshells to Coffee and Cash written by Lorraine Sexton and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Evolution of Highland Papua New Guinea Societies written by D. K. Feil and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1987-12-03 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: D. K. Feil's study focuses on the divergent regions of the eastern and western highland of Papua New Guinea.
Download or read book Social Reproduction and History in Melanesia written by Robert John Foster and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-04-27 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In much of Melanesia, the process of social reproduction unfolds as a lengthy sequence of mortuary rites - feast making and gift giving through which the living publicly define their social relations with each other while at the same time commemorating the deceased. In this study Robert J. Foster constructs an ethnographic account of mortuary rites in the Tanga Islands, Papua New Guinea, placing these large-scale feasts and ceremonial exchanges in their historical context and demonstrating how the effects of participation in an expanding cash economy have allowed Tangans to conceive of the rites as 'customary' in opposition to the new and foreign practices of 'business'. His examination synthesizes two divergent trends in Melanesian anthropology by emphasizing both the radical differences between Melanesian and Western forms of sociality and the conjunction of Melanesian and Western societies brought about by colonialism and capitalism.
Download or read book Accessions List of Unpublished Materials written by University of California, San Diego. Melanesian Studies Resource Center and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Common Worlds and Single Lives written by Verena Keck and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-20 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Pacific societies, local knowledge, which has been accumulated over thousands of years and is irreplaceable, is rapidly disappearing. With the extinction of languages, the ability to observe and interpret the world from varying perspectives is also being lost. At the same time, an enormous body of knowledge about nature, plants and animals is vanishing. However, in parallel with this, the people of the Pacific are confronted with new modes of knowledge and newly introduced technologies through imported educational systems, missions of various denominations, and the media. They do not passively assimilate this knowledge but adopt, adapt, and apply it in a syncretistic way.These changes will have permanent effects on the individual lives of people in the region and their knowledge about themselves and their surrounding 'world'. This stimulating book tracks the course of these developments and offers revealing insights into the complexity of Pacific peoples' responses to the process of globalization.
Download or read book Melanesian Studies Newsletter and Accessions List written by University of California, San Diego. Melanesian Studies Resource Center and published by . This book was released on 1989-12 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ku Waru written by Francesca Merlan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1991-03-29 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The highlanders of New Guinea are renowned for their elaborate systems of ceremonial exchange. Although much has been written about them, previous accounts have concentrated far less on the conduct of exchange events than on the structure of exchange systems. This 1991 book deals centrally with the conduct of particular exchange events, and shows through examination of them how larger social structures are reproduced and transformed. As part of the emphasis on exchange as social action, the book closely examines the oratory that plays a crucial part in the events. Basing their study on original fieldwork carried out in the Nebilyer Valley, Francesca Merlan and Alan Rumsey focus on an inter related set of large-scale compensation payments which arose out of an episode of warfare. This book furthers our understanding of the interaction between social structures and historical events; and particularly of the crucial role of talk. It will be of special interest to anthropologists and linguists.
Download or read book Pathways to Heaven written by Holger Jebens and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based around the case study of a single village in Papua New Guinea, 'Pathways to Heaven' examines the tensions, antagonisms and outright confrontations that can occur within local Christian communities upon the arrival of global versions of fundamentalism.
