Metamorphosis of the Cassowaries PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Metamorphosis of the Cassowaries PDF full book. Access full book title Metamorphosis of the Cassowaries by Alfred Gell. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Alfred Gell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000320944
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 386
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this substantial book, Gell guides the reader systematically through an analysis of the social structure, language and ritual of the Umedia-Punda connubium of the West Sepik district. One of the central areas explored is the ida fertitility ritual and the decipherment and the unravelling of symbolic relationships between words of similar construction. One one side is the anaylsis on the temporal sequence of events (or ritual roles) metamorphosing the casswary (nature) into the 'new man' (culture) and the on other side, the associated 'harmonic levels' which allude to body painting, choreography and social status. His approach substantiates the view that the ritual is not so much about the establishing of linear causality in the relationship between a society and its environment, but with the 'an act of poetic legislation over the course of nature'.
Author: Alfred Gell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000320944
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 386
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this substantial book, Gell guides the reader systematically through an analysis of the social structure, language and ritual of the Umedia-Punda connubium of the West Sepik district. One of the central areas explored is the ida fertitility ritual and the decipherment and the unravelling of symbolic relationships between words of similar construction. One one side is the anaylsis on the temporal sequence of events (or ritual roles) metamorphosing the casswary (nature) into the 'new man' (culture) and the on other side, the associated 'harmonic levels' which allude to body painting, choreography and social status. His approach substantiates the view that the ritual is not so much about the establishing of linear causality in the relationship between a society and its environment, but with the 'an act of poetic legislation over the course of nature'.
Author: Paul Spencer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521315500
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 244
Get Book Here
Book Description
Presenting seven examples from Africa, Southeast Asia, Melanesia and Oceania, this study attempts to further the anthropological understanding of dance's social significance and critical relevance by exploring it as a reflection of social forces.
Author: Donald Tuzin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226819501
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284
Get Book Here
Book Description
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.
Author: Maurice Godelier
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 184467746X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 657
Get Book Here
Book Description
With marriage in decline, divorce on the rise, the demise of the nuclear family, and the increase in marriages and adoptions among same-sex partners, it is clear that the structures of kinship in the modern West are in a state of flux. In The Metamorphoses of Kinship, the world-renowned anthropologist Maurice Godelier contextualizes these developments, surveying the accumulated experience of humanity with regard to such phenomena as the organization of lines of descent, sexuality and sexual prohibitions. In parallel, Godelier studies the evolution of Western conjugal and familial traditions from their roots in the nineteenth century to the present. The conclusion he draws is that it is never the case that a man and a woman are sufficient on their own to raise a child, and nowhere are relations of kinship or the family the keystone of society. Godelier argues that the changes of the last thirty years do not herald the disappearance or death agony of kinship, but rather its remarkable metamorphosis—one that, ironically, is bringing us closer to the “traditional” societies studied by ethnologists.
Author: Alfred Gell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000323285
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 243
Get Book Here
Book Description
Time - relentless, ever-present but intangible and the single element over which human beings have no absolute control - has long proved a puzzle. The author examines the phenomenon of time and asks such fascinating questions as how time impinges on people, to what extent our awareness of time is culturally conditioned, how societies deal with temporal problems and whether time can be considered a `resource' to be economized. More specifically, he provides a consistent and detailed analysis of theories put forward by a number of thinkers such as Durkheim, Evans-Pritchard, Lévi-Strauss, Geertz, Piaget, Husserl and Bourdieu. His discussion encompasses four main approaches in time research, namely developmental psychology, symbolic anthropology (covering the bulk of post-Durkheimian social anthropology) `economic' theories of time in social geography and, finally, phenomenological theories. The author concludes by presenting his own model of social/cognitive time, in the light of these critical discussions of the literature.
Author: Alfred Gell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100032446X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Art of Anthropology collects together the most influential of Gell's writings, which span the past two decades, with a new introductory chapter written by Gell. The essays vividly demonstrate Gell's theoretical and empirical interests and his distinctive contribution to several key areas of current anthropological enquiry. A central theme of the essays is Gel's highly original exploration of diagrammatic imagery as the site where social relations and cognitive processes converge and crystallise. Gell tracks this imagery across studies of tribal market transactions, dance forms, the iconicity of language and his most recent and groundbreaking analyses of artworks.Written with Gell's characteristic fluidity and grace and generously illustrated with Gell's original drawings and diagrams, the book will interest art historians, sociologists and geographers no less than anthropologists, challenging, as it does, established ideas about exchange, representation, aesthetics, cognition and spatial and temporal processes.
Author: Jeremy Coote
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198279457
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Get Book Here
Book Description
The anthropology of art is a fast-developing area of intellectual debate and academic study. This beautifully illustrated volume is a unique survey of the current state of anthropological thinking on art and aesthetics. The distinguished contributors draw on contemporary anthropological theory and on classic anthropological topics such as myth and ritual to deepen our understanding of particular aesthetic traditions in their socio-cultural and historical contexts. Many of the essays present new findings based on recent field research in Australia, New Guinea, Indonesia, and Mexico; while others draw on classical anthropological accounts of the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia and the Nuer of the Southern Sudan to form new arguments and conclusions. The introductory overview of the history of the anthropology of art, by Sir Raymond Firth, makes this volume especially useful for those interested in learning what anthropology has to contribute to our understanding of art and aesthetics in general.
Author: Maurice Godelier
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784787078
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 561
Get Book Here
Book Description
One of the world’s leading anthropologists assesses the work of the founder of structural anthropology As a young man, Maurice Godelier was Claude Lévi-Strauss’s assistant. Since then, Godelier has drawn on this experience to develop a profound and intimate grasp on the writings of his former teacher, one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Meticulously researched, Lévi-Strauss: A Critical Study of His Thought will prove indispensable to students of Lévi-Strauss and to structural anthropologists more generally. It is a compelling and comprehensive study destined to become the definitive work on the evolution of Lévi-Strauss’s ideas, at the heart of which lies his analysis of kinship and myth.
Author: Richard P. Werbner
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719019296
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 418
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Henrietta Moore
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000322998
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 229
Get Book Here
Book Description
Whether initiating girls or healing cattle, bringing rain or protesting taxation, many in Africa share a vision of a world where the cultural, symbolic and cosmic categories of 'male' and 'female' serve, through ritual, to both reimagine and transform the world. Those Who Play With Fire introduces recent gender theory to the analysis of African ethnography, exploring the ways in which ideational gender categories permeate African systems of thought and ritual practices. Thus, the book provides a powerful framework with which to evaluate previous ethnographic material on Africa. In addition, Those Who Play With Fire presents a broad range of new case studies - of hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists and pastoralists - revealing the varied and complex ways in which African ideas and ideals of what it means to be 'male' and 'female' broadly inform and give meaning to a wide range of transformative rituals.
