The Korowai of Irian Jaya

The Korowai of Irian Jaya PDF Author: Gerrit J. van Enk
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195355636
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Irian Jaya is the official name of the western half of New Guinea, a province of Indonesia since the 1960s. Its inhabitants are generally untouched by civilization, and most of their hundreds of native languages and cultures remain unstudied. Van Enk and de Vries gained access to one of the most isolated parts of Irian Jaya in order to study the Korowai, a tribe in southern Irian Jaya. The Korowai still use stone tools, live in tree-houses, and have no knowledge of the outside world. Van Enk and de Vries provide the first study of the Korowai language and culture. They reproduce oral texts that show patterns of grammar, discourse, and culture, and discuss the phonological, morphological, and syntactical aspects of the language. In the process, van Enk and de Vries reveal a number of key semantic fields and conceptual patterns such as kinship, counting, the role of lunar phases, and Korowai cosmology.

The Korowai of Irian Jaya

The Korowai of Irian Jaya PDF Author: Gerrit J. van Enk
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195355636
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Irian Jaya is the official name of the western half of New Guinea, a province of Indonesia since the 1960s. Its inhabitants are generally untouched by civilization, and most of their hundreds of native languages and cultures remain unstudied. Van Enk and de Vries gained access to one of the most isolated parts of Irian Jaya in order to study the Korowai, a tribe in southern Irian Jaya. The Korowai still use stone tools, live in tree-houses, and have no knowledge of the outside world. Van Enk and de Vries provide the first study of the Korowai language and culture. They reproduce oral texts that show patterns of grammar, discourse, and culture, and discuss the phonological, morphological, and syntactical aspects of the language. In the process, van Enk and de Vries reveal a number of key semantic fields and conceptual patterns such as kinship, counting, the role of lunar phases, and Korowai cosmology.

Perspectives on the Bird's Head of Irian Jaya, Indonesia

Perspectives on the Bird's Head of Irian Jaya, Indonesia PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004652647
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 998

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Book Description
The Bird's Head Peninsula of Irian Jaya has long been an area neglected by New Guinea Studies. Only in the late seventies, interest began to focus more intensively on this scientifically important border area between Austronesian and Papuan languages and cultures. In the early nineties, this led to the creation in The Netherlands of the Irian Jaya Studies programme ISIR, which organizes and coordinates multi-disciplinary research on the Bird's Head Peninsula. Within this framework, study of the peninsula has reached a peak, with research being conducted in the area by scientists from different disciplines: anthropology, archaeology, (ethno)botany, demography, development administration, geology and linguistics. The diverse perspectives of these disciplines are subject to constant internal debate. Through ISIR and other research initiatives, there is a growing body of data on and insights into the various disciplines concerned with this fascinating area, with each discipline developing its own specific perspectives on the Bird's Head. These perspectives were presented during the First International Conference Perspectives on the Bird's Head of Irian Jaya, Indonesia, organized by ISIR in cooperation with the Indonesian Institute of Sciences LIPI (Jakarta) and the International Institute for Asian Studies ILAS (Leiden) and held at Leiden University, 13-17 October 1997. Researchers were informed on current perspectives in many disciplines to facilitate integration of findings into wider, interdisciplinary frameworks and to stimulate international debate within and between disciplines. As a result of the Conference, the forty-two contributions in these Proceedings present a wealth of recent developments from various disciplines in New Guinea Studies.

Society of Others

Society of Others PDF Author: Rupert Stasch
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520256859
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
"In this timely commentary on the ideas of difference, strangeness, and Western contact, Stasch weaves ethnographic materials together with theoretical framing in an exceptionally clear and compelling way. A highly original, important and, in fact, astonishing piece of scholarship."--Bambi Schieffelin, author of The Give and Take of Everyday Life "In this remarkable ethnography, Rupert Stasch takes us to the lowlands of West Papua and into the lives of people who have built a social world out of their relationships with strange and potentially dangerous others. The Korowai are classic inhabitants of the "savage slot," still dogged by their designation as Stone Age primitives. Instead of flipping the script and arguing that the Korowai are just like everyone else, Stasch draws far-reaching lessons from the particularities of Korowai life. Stasch writes with grace and clarity on the ambivalent ways in which the Korowai confront, evade, and embrace an otherness that resides not just in words, food, places, and human bodies, but also in the pasts and futures brought to mind by these material signs. Analyzing Korowai sign use as a concrete, historical process, he charts the passage between intimacy and alterity that Korowai undergo in their encounters not only with spirits and Indonesian soldiers, but also with children, husbands, and wives. Some of what Stasch describes may seem strange and even disturbing. But in pondering Stasch's findings, one gradually comes to see the making of persons and relationships in an entirely new light. Gone is the old debate between biological determination and cultural freedom; in its place is an approach that affirms the multiple histories that converge in and flow from a life. Erudite, empathetic, and unremittingly smart, Society of Others recasts the very meaning of kinship--and makes a case for the power of what anthropologists do."--Danilyn Rutherford, author of Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier

Number – Constructions and Semantics

Number – Constructions and Semantics PDF Author: Anne Storch
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027270635
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
This book is the outcome of several decades of research experience, with contributions by leading scholars based on long-term field research. It combines approaches from descriptive linguistics, anthropological linguistics, socio-historical studies, areal linguistics, and social anthropology. The key concern of this ground-breaking volume is to investigate the linguistic means of expressing number and countable amounts, which differ greatly in the world’s languages. It provides insights into common number-marking devices and their not-so-common usages, but also into phenomena such as the absence of plurals, or transnumeral forms. The different contributions to the volume show that number is of considerable semantic complexity in many languages worldwide, expressing all kinds of extendedness, multiplicity, salience, size, and so on. This raises a number of challenging questions regarding what exactly is described under the slightly monolithic label of ‘number’ in most descriptive approaches to the languages of the world.

Pass the Butterworms

Pass the Butterworms PDF Author: Tim Cahill
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307778401
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
In Pass the Butterworms Cahill takes us to the steppes of Mongolia, where he spends weeks on horseback alongside the descendants of Genghis Khan and masters the "Mongolian death trot"; to the North Pole, where he goes for a pleasure dip in 36-degree water; to Irian Jaya New Guinea, where he spends a companionable evening with members of one of the last head-hunting tribes. Whether observing family values among the Stone Age Dani people, or sampling delicacies like sautéed sago beetle and premasticated manioc beer, Cahill is a fount of arcane information and a master of self-deprecating humor.

Forty Years in the South Seas

Forty Years in the South Seas PDF Author: Anne Ford
Publisher: ANU Press
ISBN: 1760466441
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
“This edited volume of invited chapters honours the four decades of fundamental research by archaeologist Glenn Summerhayes into the human prehistory of the islands of the western Pacific, especially New Guinea and its offshore islands. This area helped to shape and direct many ancient dispersal events associated with Homo sapiens, initially from Africa more than 50,000 years ago, through the lower latitudes of Asia, into Australia, New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and possibly the Solomon Islands. Around 3000 years ago, coastal regions of northern and eastern New Guinea, and the islands of Melanesia beyond, played a major role in the Oceanic migrations of Austronesian-speaking peoples from southern China and Southeast Asia, migrations that have recently attained new levels of genetic complexity through the analysis of ancient DNA from human remains. For the first time, humans of both Southeast Asian and New Guinea/Bismarck genetic origin reached the islands of Remote Oceania, beyond the Solomons. Many of the chapters in this book deal with archaeological aspects of this Austronesian maritime expansion (which never seriously impacted the populations of the New Guinea Highlands), especially as revealed through the analysis of Lapita pottery and associated artefacts. Other chapters offer archaeological perspectives on trade and exchange, and on related topics that extend into the ethnographic era. The research of Glenn Summerhayes stands centrally amongst all these offerings, ranging from the discovery of some of the oldest traces of Pleistocene human settlement in Papua New Guinea to documentation of the remarkable phenomenon of Lapita expansion through Melanesia into western Polynesia around 3000 years ago. This volume is a fitting celebration of a remarkable career in western Pacific archaeology and population history.” ­— Emeritus Professor Peter Bellwood, The Australian National University

Dynamics of Language Changes

Dynamics of Language Changes PDF Author: Keith Allan
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811564302
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This book explores the dynamics of language changes from sociolinguistic and historical linguistic perspectives. With in-depth case studies from all around the world, it uses diverse approaches across sociolinguistics and historical linguistics to answer questions such as: How and why do language changes begin?; how do language changes spread?; and how can they ultimately be explained? Each chapter explores a different component of language change, including typology, syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics, lexicology, discourse strategies, diachronic change, synchronic change, how the deafblind modify sign language, and the accommodation of language to song. This book presents a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics of language change over time, simultaneously advancing current research and suggesting new directions in sociolinguistic and historical linguistic approaches.

Society of Others

Society of Others PDF Author: Rupert Stasch
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520943325
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
This important study upsets the popular assumption that human relations in small-scale societies are based on shared experience. In a theoretically innovative account of the lives of the Korowai of West Papua, Indonesia, Rupert Stasch shows that in this society, people organize their connections to each another around otherness. Analyzing the Korowai people's famous "tree house" dwellings, their patterns of living far apart, and their practices of kinship, marriage, and childbearing and rearing, Stasch argues that the Korowai actively make relations not out of what they have in common, but out of what divides them. Society of Others, the first anthropological book about the Korowai, offers a picture of Korowai lives sharply at odds with stereotypes of "tribal" societies.

Engaged Anthropology

Engaged Anthropology PDF Author: Stuart Kirsch
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520297946
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Does anthropology have more to offer than just its texts? In this timely and remarkable book, Stuart Kirsch shows how anthropology can—and why it should—become more engaged with the problems of the world. Engaged Anthropology draws on the author’s experiences working with indigenous peoples fighting for their environment, land rights, and political sovereignty. Including both short interventions and collaborations spanning decades, it recounts interactions with lawyers and courts, nongovernmental organizations, scientific experts, and transnational corporations. This unflinchingly honest account addresses the unexamined “backstage” of engaged anthropology. Coming at a time when some question the viability of the discipline, the message of this powerful and original work is especially welcome, as it not only promotes a new way of doing anthropology, but also compellingly articulates a new rationale for why anthropology matters.

Contextual Frames of Reference in Translation

Contextual Frames of Reference in Translation PDF Author: Ernst Wendland
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317640292
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Bible translation theory and practice rightly tend to focus on the actual text of Scripture. But many diverse, yet interrelated contextual factors also play an important part in the implementation of a successful translation program. The aim of this coursebook is to explore, in varying degrees of detail, a wide range of these crucial situational variables and potential influences, using a multidisciplinary approach to the task. Thus, in order to expand and enrich the field of vision, a progressive study of this complex process of intercultural, interlinguistic communication is carried out according to a set of overlapping sociocultural, organizational and situational cognitive orientations. These contextual factors provide a broader frame of reference for analyzing, interpreting and communicating the original Scriptures in a completely new, contemporary setting of transmission and reception. The three dimensions are then applied in a practical way to explore the dramatic "throne-room" vision of the Apostle John (Revelation 4-5) with reference to both the original Greek text and also a modern dynamic translation in Chewa, a southeastern Bantu language of Africa. A variety of exercises and assignments to stimulate critical and creative reflection as well as to illustrate the theoretical development of Contextual Frames of Reference is provided every step of the way. Not only is translation per se discussed, but the teaching and evaluation of translated texts and versions are also considered from several points of view in the final three chapters. An Appendix offers a foundational essay by Professor Lourens de Vries on the subject of primary orality and the influence of this vital factor in the crosscultural communication of the Bible.