The Melanesian World

The Melanesian World PDF Author: Eric Hirsch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131552967X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 740

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Book Description
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.

The Melanesian World

The Melanesian World PDF Author: Eric Hirsch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131552967X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 740

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Person and Myth

Person and Myth PDF Author: James Clifford
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520351126
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Originally published in 1982, James Clifford's analytical biography of Maurice Leenhardt (1878 - 1954)--missionary, anthropologist, founder of French Oceanic studies, historian of religion, and colonial reformer--received wide critical acclaim for its insight into the colonial history of anthropology. Drawing extensively on unpublished letters and journals, Clifford traces Leenhardt's life from his work as a missionary on the island of New Caledonia (1902 - 1926) to his subsequent return to Paris where he became an academic anthropologist at the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes, where he followed Marcel Mauss and was succeeded in 1951 by Claude Levi-Strauss.

Melanesian Odysseys

Melanesian Odysseys PDF Author: Lisette Josephides
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845455255
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
"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.

Selfhood and Recognition

Selfhood and Recognition PDF Author: Anita C. Galuschek
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785336509
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
The disciplines of philosophy and cultural anthropology have one thing in common: human behavior. Yet surprisingly, dialogue between the two fields has remained largely silent until now. Selfhood and Recognition combines philosophical and cultural anthropological accounts of the perception of individual action, exploring the processes through which a person recognizes the self and the other. Touching on humanity as porous, fractal, dividual, and relational, the author sheds new light on the nature of selfhood, recognition, relationality, and human life.

Melanesian Religion

Melanesian Religion PDF Author: G. W. Trompf
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521607483
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
This study surveys systematically the full scope of Melanesian religion, from traditional beliefs and practices to the development of strong indigenous Christian churches and theology. Garry Trompf writes from extensive knowledge of the social and religious aspects and from his own experience living and working in Papua New Guinea. Melanesian Religion provides an invaluable guide and analysis to pressing issues of religious and social change in the Pacific. It provides a useful overview for readers with general interests in the South Pacific region, and in the formulation of indigenous responses to external institutions, beliefs and value systems. The Melanesian peoples of the south-west Pacific form about one-quarter of the world's cultures - cultures in which a deep sense of spiritual consciousness has engendered rich diversity of religious experience. Professor Trompf argues that, to be complete, any interpretation of the social and economic patterns of Melanesian life, past and present, must take proper account of this religious context.

The Making of Global and Local Modernities in Melanesia

The Making of Global and Local Modernities in Melanesia PDF Author: Holly Wardlow
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351886215
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Authored by well-established and respected scholars, this work examines the kinds of efforts that have been made to adopt Western modernity in Melanesia and explores the reasons for their varied outcomes. The contributors take the work of Professor Marshall Sahlins as a starting point, assessing his theories of cultural change and of the relationship between cultural intensification and globalizing forces. They acknowledge the importance of Sahlins' ideas, while refining, extending, modifying and critiquing them in light of their own first hand knowledge of Pacific island societies. Also presenting one of Sahlins' less widely available original essays for reference, this book is an exciting contribution to serious anthropological engagement with Papua New Guinea.

Tracing the Melanesian Person

Tracing the Melanesian Person PDF Author: Susan R. Hemer
Publisher: University of Adelaide Press
ISBN: 1922064440
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
This book explores what it means to be Lihirian through an analysis of everyday life in the Lihir Islands, Papua New Guinea. Atop four volcanic islands in the Pacific Ocean east of New Ireland, Lihirians are living in a world that has rapidly changed in the last century through the work of Christian missions, government administration and the development of a large gold mine (Lihir Gold Ltd). Being Lihirian in the context of these changes is challenging, yet Lihirians retain a strong sense of themselves and their islands as distinctive. This book aims to reconcile what has been termed the 'root metaphor' of Melanesian sociality as based on relational or composite personhood with the strong individualist tendencies and sense of self that are found in everyday practice in Lihir. In looking beyond the ideals of moral conduct to the practice of relations and emotion, it can be seen that the symbolism of Melanesian sociality does not encompass the practical reality of what it means to be Lihirian. Emotion is a ubiquitous part of life in Lihir. Emotions are motivations, reactions and remarks on the state of self and other; in short, emotions are integral to relations and persons in Lihir. This book considers emotions both through their performative contexts as well as the more usual lexical analyses of emotion terms and commentaries. In moving beyond lexical analyses, Hemer argues that the strong focus on the semantics of emotion in anthropology has been at the expense of the embodied practice of emotion that was apparent in Lihir. Through this engaging ethnographic account of connections, conflicts and loss in Lihir, Hemer's own fieldwork journey of making relationships, experiencing disputes and finally leaving the field, is mirrored. Structured into three parts, the book works through the complexities of creating and sustaining relationships, the evaluation of conduct as moral and the practices of conflict, and the experiences and transformations of death and grief. Throughout these parts various emotions are highlighted and interrogated for their relationship to psychological understandings and definitions: love, anger, jealousy, sadness. Emotions are also understood in a historical context and as connected to social changes wrought by interactions with global phenomena such as religion.

Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia

Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia PDF Author: Gilbert H. Herdt
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520341384
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 471

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Book Description
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.

Kanaké

Kanaké PDF Author: Jean-Marie Tjibaou
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ethnology
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description


Transactions and Creations

Transactions and Creations PDF Author: Eric Hirsch
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845450281
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
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!