Browse

By Area: Asia-Pacific

View: By Date | Alphabetical

• April 2010

  After the Cult

  Perceptions of Other and Self in West New Britain (Papua New Guinea)

  Jebens, H.

  In many parts of the world the “white man” is perceived to be an instigator of globalization and an embodiment of modernity. However, so far anthropologists have paid little attention to the actual heterogeneity and complexity of “whiteness” in specific ethnographic contexts. This study examines cultural perceptions of other and self as expressed in cargo cults and masked dances in Papua New Guinea. Indigenous terms, images, and concepts are being contrasted with their western counterparts, the latter partly deriving from the publications and field notes of Charles Valentine. After having done his first fieldwork more than fifty years ago, this “anthropological ancestor” has now become part of the local tradition and has thus turned into a kind of mythical figure. Based on anthropological fieldwork as well as on archival studies, this book addresses the relation between western and indigenous perceptions of self and other, between “tradition” and “modernity,” and between anthropological “ancestors” and “descendants.” In this way the work contributes to the study of “whiteness,” “cargo cults” and masked dances in Papua New Guinea.

  Subjects: Religion General Anthropology

• August 2011

  The Anthropology of Empathy

  Experiencing the Lives of Others in Pacific Societies

  Hollan, D. W. & Throop, C. J. (eds)

  Exploring the role of empathy in a variety of Pacific societies, this book is at the forefront of the latest anthropological research on empathy. It presents distinct articulations of many assumptions of contemporary philosophical, neurobiological, and social scientific treatments of the topic. The variations described in this book do not necessarily preclude the possibility of shared existential, biological, and social influences that give empathy a distinctly human cast, but they do provide an important ethnographic lens through which to examine the possibilities and limits of empathy in any given community of practice.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Sociology

• August 2004

  Anthropology and Consultancy

  Issues and Debates

  Stewart, P. & Strathern, A. (eds)

  More and more, anthropologists are recruited as consultants by government departments, companies or as observers of development processes in their field areas generally. Although these roles can be very gratifying, they can create ambiguous situations for the anthropologists who find that new pressures and responsibilities are placed upon them for which their training did not prepare them. This volume explores some of the problems, opportunities, issues, debates, and dilemmas surrounding these roles. The geographic focus of the studies is Papua New Guinea, but the topic and its importance apply widely through the world, for example, Africa, South America, Australia, and the Pacific in general, as well as in relation to indigenous groups in Canada and elsewhere. All the authors have first-hand experience and they address these new pressures and responsibilities of anthropological research. The book's chapters are written in a way that combines scholarship with a style accessible to general readers.

  Subject: Applied Anthropology

• January 2006

  Anthropology and Sexual Morality

  A Theoretical Investigation

  Salazar, C.

  The history of sexual morality in Ireland has been traditionally associated with repression. In the last two decades, however, repression seems to have given way to its exact opposite. But where did this “repression” originate? And how can we account for this sudden and sweeping transformation in sexual mores? Based on solid ethnographic and historical analysis of sexual morality in rural Ireland, augmented by comparative data from Papua New Guinea, and being informed by from Freud’s emblematic concept of repression, the author draws new conclusions that not only apply to the specific case of his Irish material but shed new light on the specific nature of an anthropological approach to the study of human societies.

  Subjects: Theory & Methodology in Anthropology Gender Studies

• November 2018

  Artifak

  Cultural Revival, Tourism, and the Recrafting of History in Vanuatu

  DeBlock, H.

  In Vanuatu, commoditization and revitalization of culture and the arts do not necessarily work against each other; both revolve around value formation and the authentication of things. This book investigates the meaning and value of (art) objects as commodities in differing states of transit and transition: in the local place, on the market, in the museum. It provides an ethnographic account of commoditization in a context of revitalization of culture and the arts in Vanuatu, and the issues this generates, such as authentication of actions and things, indigenized copyright, and kastom disputes over ownership and the nature of kastom itself.

  Subjects: General Anthropology General Cultural Studies Museum Studies

• July 2018

  An Australian Indigenous Diaspora

  Warlpiri Matriarchs and the Refashioning of Tradition

  Burke, P.

  Some indigenous people, while remaining attached to their traditional homelands, leave them to make a new life for themselves in white towns and cities, thus constituting an “indigenous diaspora”. This innovative book is the first ethnographic account of one such indigenous diaspora, the Warlpiri, whose traditional hunter-gatherer life has been transformed through their dispossession and involvement with ranchers, missionaries, and successive government projects of recognition. By following several Warlpiri matriarchs into their new locations, far from their home settlements, this book explores how they sustained their independent lives, and examines their changing relationship with the traditional culture they represent.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Refugee & Migration Studies

• May 2016

  Being and Becoming

  Embodiment and Experience among the Orang Rimba of Sumatra

  Elkholy, R.

  For the Orang Rimba of Sumatra – and tropical foragers in general – life in the forest engenders a kind of “connectedness” that is contingent not only on harmonious relations between people, but also between people and the non-human environment, including those supernatural agencies of the forest that people depend on for their spiritual and emotional wellbeing. Exploring this world, anthropologist Ramsey Elkholy treats embodied action and perception as the basis of shared experience and shows how various forms of embodied experience constitute the very foundations of human culture. In a unique methodological contribution, Elkholy adopts a set of body-centered approaches that reflect and capture the day-to-day, moment-to-moment ways in which people engage with the world. Being and Becoming is an important contribution to phenomenological anthropology, hunter-gatherer studies, and to Southeast Asian ethnography more generally.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Theory & Methodology in Anthropology

• September 2014

  Belonging in Oceania

  Movement, Place-Making and Multiple Identifications

  Hermann, E., Kempf, W. & Meijl, T. van (eds)

  Ethnographic case studies explore what it means to “belong” in Oceania, as contributors consider ongoing formations of place, self and community in connection with travelling, internal and international migration. The chapters apply the multi-dimensional concepts of movement, place-making and cultural identifications to explain contemporary life in Oceanic societies. The volume closes by suggesting that constructions of multiple belongings—and, with these, the relevant forms of mobility, place-making and identifications—are being recontextualized and modified by emerging discourses of climate change and sea-level rise.
   

  Subjects: Refugee & Migration Studies General Mobility Studies General Cultural Studies

• October 2016

  Biomedical Entanglements

  Conceptions of Personhood in a Papua New Guinea Society

  Herbst, F. A.

  Biomedical Entanglements is an ethnographic study of the Giri people of Papua New Guinea, focusing on the indigenous population’s interaction with modern medicine. In her fieldwork, Franziska A. Herbst follows the Giri people as they circulate within and around ethnographic sites that include a rural health center and an urban hospital. The study bridges medical anthropology and global health, exploring how the ‘biomedical’ is imbued with social meaning and how biomedicine affects Giri ways of life.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Medical Anthropology

• December 2006

  Challenge and Transformation

  Museums in Cape Town and Sydney

  Goodnow, K.

  Focusing on how change takes place in museums, Challenge and Transformation: Museums in Cape Town and Sydney is built around a series of case studies outlining the way museums have come to terms with issues of diversity and change - within ethnographic museums, historic sites and art galleries. The case studies are complemented by an introduction by Jack Lohman and an epilogue by the current CEO at Iziko Museums, Jatti Bredekamp.

  Subject: Museum Studies

• November 2012

  Christian Politics in Oceania

  Tomlinson, M. & McDougall, D. (eds)

  The phrase “Christian politics” evokes two meanings: political relations between denominations in one direction, and the contributions of Christian churches to debates about the governing of society. The contributors to this volume address Christian politics in both senses and argue that Christianity is always and inevitably political in the Pacific Islands. Drawing on ethnographic and historical research in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Fiji, the authors argue that Christianity and politics have redefined each other in much of Oceania in ways that make the two categories inseparable at any level of analysis. The individual chapters vividly illuminate the ways in which Christian politics operate across a wide scale, from interpersonal relations to national and global interconnections.

  Subjects: Religion General Anthropology

• June 2013

  Creating a Nation with Cloth

  Women, Wealth, and Tradition in the Tongan Diaspora

  Addo, P.-A.

  Tongan women living outside of their island homeland create and use hand-made, sometimes hybridized, textiles to maintain and rework their cultural traditions in diaspora. Central to these traditions is an ancient concept of homeland or nation— fonua—which Tongans retain as an anchor for modern nation-building. Utilizing the concept of the “multi-territorial nation,” the author questions the notion that living in diaspora is mutually exclusive with authentic cultural production and identity. The globalized nation the women build through gifting their barkcloth and fine mats, challenges the normative idea that nations are always geographically bounded or spatially contiguous. The work suggests that, contrary to prevalent understandings of globalization, global resource flows do not always primarily involve commodities. Focusing on first-generation Tongans in New Zealand and the relationships they forge across generations and throughout the diaspora, the book examines how these communities centralize the diaspora by innovating and adapting traditional cultural forms in unprecedented ways.

  Subjects: Gender Studies Refugee & Migration Studies General Anthropology

• July 2003

  Creative Land

  Place and Procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea

  Leach, J.

  What is creative in kinship? How are people connected to places? James Leach answers these questions through formulating “creativity” as an integral part of kinship on the north coast of Papua New Guinea. The book contains a new critique of the genealogical model of kinship, suggesting that this model prevents us from grasping the way generative relations, including those to land and place, constitute persons on the Rai Coast. Analytic attention is focused upon the life cycle, marriage, exchange and artistic production as the activities in which substantial connection is generated. The argument, made in relation to detailed ethnography, yields a fresh perspective on the connections people trace to each other.

  Subject: General Anthropology

• October 2017

  Culture Change and Ex-Change

  Syncretism and Anti-Syncretism in Bena, Eastern Highlands, Papua New Guinea

  Knapp, R.

  How is cultural change perceived and performed by members of the Bena Bena language group, who live in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea? In her analysis, Knapp draws upon existing bodies of work on ‘culture change’, ‘exchange’ and ‘person’ in Melanesia but brings them together in a new way by conjoining traditional models with theoretical approaches of the new Melanesian ethnography and with collaborative, reflexive and reverse anthropology.

  Subjects: General Anthropology General Cultural Studies Religion

• March 2016

  Cutting and Connecting

  'Afrinesian' Perspectives on Networks, Relationality, and Exchange

  Myhre, K. C. (ed)

  Questions regarding the origins, mobility, and effects of analytical concepts continue to emerge as anthropology endeavors to describe similarities and differences in social life around the world. Cutting and Connecting rethinks this comparative enterprise by calling in a conceptual debt that theoretical innovations from Melanesian anthropology owe to network analysis originally developed in African contexts. On this basis, the contributors adopt and employ concepts from recent studies of Melanesia to analyze contemporary life on the African continent and to explore how this exchange influences the borrowed anthropological perspectives. By focusing on ways in which networks are cut and connections are made, these empirical investigations show how particular relationships are created in today’s Africa. In addition, the volume aims for an approach that recasts relationships between theory and place and concepts and ethnography, in a manner that destabilizes the distinction between fieldwork and writing.

  Subjects: General Anthropology General Cultural Studies

• April 2018

  Cutting Cosmos

  Masculinity and Spectacular Events among the Bugkalot

  Mikkelsen, H. H.

  For the first time in over 30 years, a new ethnographic study emerges on the Bugkalot tribe, more widely known as the Ilongot of the northern Philippines. Exploring the notion of masculinity among the Bugkalot, Cutting Cosmos is not only an experimental, anthropological study of the paradoxes around which Bugkalot society revolves, but also a reflection on anthropological theory and writing. Focusing on the transgressive acts through which masculinity is performed, this book explores the idea of the cosmic cut, the ritual act that enables the Bugkalot man to momentarily hold still the chaotic flows of his world.

  Subjects: Theory & Methodology in Anthropology Gender Studies Sociology

• March 2013

  Cyberidentities At War

  The Moluccan Conflict on the Internet

  Bräuchler, B.

  Conflicting parties worldwide increasingly use the Internet in a strategic way, and struggles carried out on a local level achieve a new dimension. This new kind of medialization results in a conflict’s expansion into global cyberspace. Based on ethnographic research on the online activities of Christian and Muslim actors in the Moluccan conflict (1999–2003), this study investigates processes of identity construction, community building and evolving conflict dynamics on the Internet. In contributing to conflict and Internet research, this study paves the way for a new cyberanthropology. A newly added epilogue outlines the directions in which the situation in the Moluccas has continued and discusses the advances and developments of theoretical and methodological concerns presented in the 2005 German edition.

  Subjects: Media Studies General Anthropology Peace & Conflict Studies

• March 2013

  The Death of the Big Men and the Rise of the Big Shots

  Custom and Conflict in East New Britain

  Martin, K.

  In 1994, the Pacific island village of Matupit was partially destroyed by a volcanic eruption. This study focuses on the subsequent reconstruction and contests over the morality of exchanges that are generative of new forms of social stratification. Such new dynamics of stratification are central to contemporary processes of globalization in the Pacific, and more widely. Through detailed ethnography of the transactions that a displaced people entered into in seeking to rebuild their lives, this book analyses how people re-make sociality in an era of post-colonial neoliberalism without taking either the transformative power of globalization or the resilience of indigenous culture as its starting point. It also contributes to the understanding of the problems of post-disaster reconstruction and development projects.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Development Studies

• May 2017

  Death of the Public University?

  Uncertain Futures for Higher Education in the Knowledge Economy

  Wright, S. & Shore, C. (eds)

  Universities have been subjected to continuous government reforms since the 1980s, to make them ‘entrepreneurial’, ‘efficient’ and aligned to the predicted needs and challenges of a global knowledge economy. Under increasing pressure to pursue ‘excellence’ and ‘innovation’, many universities are struggling to maintain their traditional mission to be inclusive, improve social mobility and equality and act as the ‘critic and conscience’ of society. Drawing on a multi-disciplinary research project, University Reform, Globalisation and Europeanisation (URGE), this collection analyses the new landscapes of public universities emerging across Europe and the Asia-Pacific, and the different ways that academics are engaging with them.

  Subjects: Educational Studies General Anthropology

• May 2018

  Dreams Made Small

  The Education of Papuan Highlanders in Indonesia

  Munro, J.

  For the last five decades, the Dani of the central highlands of West Papua, along with other Papuans, have struggled with the oppressive conditions of Indonesian rule. Formal education holds the promise of escape from stigmatization and violence. Dreams Made Small offers an in-depth, ethnographic look at journeys of education among young Dani men and women, asking us to think differently about education as a trajectory for transformation and belonging, and ultimately revealing how dreams of equality are shaped and reshaped in the face of multiple constraints.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Educational Studies General Cultural Studies

• January 2016

  Engaging with Strangers

  Love and Violence in the Rural Solomon Islands

  McDougall, D.

  The civil conflict in Solomon Islands (1998-2003) is often blamed on the failure of the nation-state to encompass culturally diverse and politically fragmented communities. Writing of Ranongga Island, the author tracks engagements with strangers across many realms of life—pre-colonial warfare, Christian conversion, logging and conservation, even post-conflict state building. She describes startling reversals in which strangers become attached to local places, even as kinspeople are estranged from one another and from their homes. Against stereotypes of rural insularity, she argues that a distinctive cosmopolitan openness to others is evident in the rural Solomons in times of war and peace.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Peace & Conflict Studies

• June 2014

  The Ethnographic Experiment

  A.M. Hocart and W.H.R. Rivers in Island Melanesia, 1908

  Hviding, E. & Berg, C. (eds)

  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.

  Subjects: General Anthropology General History

• November 2007

  Experiencing New Worlds

  Wassmann, J. & Stockhaus, K. (eds)

  The many different localities of the Pacific region have a long history of transformation, under both pre- and post-colonial conditions. More recently, rates of local transformation have increased tremendously under post-colonial regimes. The forces of globalization, which rapidly distribute commodities, images, and political and moral concepts across the region, have presented Pacific populations with an unprecedented need and opportunity to fashion new and expanded understandings of their cultural and individual identities.

  This volume, the first in a new series, examines the forces of globalization at different levels, as they manifest themselves and operate across cultural, cognitive and biographical dimensions of human life in the Pacific. While posing familiar questions, it offers new answers through the integration of cultural and psychological methods. The contributors draw on practice theory, cognitive science and the anthropology of space and place while exploring the key analytical rubrics of human agency, memory and landscape.

  Subjects: Development Studies General Anthropology

• November 2018

  Explorations and Entanglements

  Germans in Pacific Worlds from the Early Modern Period to World War I

  Berghoff, H., Biess, F., & Strasser, U. (eds)

  Traditionally, Germany has been considered a minor player in Pacific history: its presence there was more limited than that of other European nations, and whereas its European rivals established themselves as imperial forces beginning in the early modern era, Germany did not seriously pursue colonialism until the nineteenth century. Yet thanks to recent advances in the field emphasizing transoceanic networks and cultural encounters, it is now possible to develop a more nuanced understanding of the history of Germans in the Pacific. The studies gathered here offer fascinating case studies of German missionary, commercial, scientific, and imperial activity against the backdrop of the Pacific’s overlapping cultural circuits and complex oceanic transits.

  Subjects: 18th/19th Century History 20th Century History Colonialism

• July 2013

  Foodways and Empathy

  Relatedness in a Ramu River Society, Papua New Guinea

  Poser, A. von

  Through the sharing of food, people feel entitled to inquire into one another’s lives and ponder one another’s states in relation to their foodways. This in-depth study focuses on the Bosmun of Daiden, a Ramu River people in an under-represented area in the ethnography of Papua New Guinea, uncovering the conceptual convergence of local notions of relatedness, foodways, and empathy. In weaving together discussions about paramount values as passed on through myth, the expression of feelings in daily life, and the bodily experience of social and physical environs, a life-world unfolds in which moral, emotional, and embodied foodways contribute notably to the creation of relationships. Concerned with unique processes of “making kin,” the book adds a distinct case to recent debates about relatedness and empathy and sheds new light onto the conventional anthropological themes of food production, sharing, and exchange.

  Subjects: Food & Nutrition General Anthropology

• June 2017

  Footprints in Paradise

  Ecotourism, Local Knowledge, and Nature Therapies in Okinawa

  Murray, A. E.

  The economic imperative of sustainable tourism development frequently shapes life on small subtropical islands. In Okinawa, ecotourism promises to provide employment for a dwindling population of rural youth while preserving the natural environment and bolstering regional pride. Footprints in Paradise explores the transformation in community and sense of place as Okinawans come to view themselves through the lens of the visiting tourist consumer, and as their language, landscapes, and wildlife are reconstituted as treasured and vulnerable resources. The rediscovery and revaluing of local ecological knowledge strengthens Okinawan or Uchinaa cultural heritage, despite the controversial presence of US military bases amidst a hegemonic Japanese state.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Travel & Tourism Environmental Studies

• December 2005

  Fracturing Resemblances

  Identity and Mimetic Conflict in Melanesia and the West

  Harrison, S.

  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.

  Subject: General Anthropology

• June 2007

  The Future of Indigenous Museums

  Perspectives from the Southwest Pacific

  Stanley, N. (ed)

  Indigenous museums and cultural centres have sprung up across the developing world, and particularly in the Southwest Pacific. They derive from a number of motives, ranging from the commercial to the cultural political (and many combine both). A close study of this phenomenon is not only valuable for museological practice but, as has been argued, it may challenge our current bedrock assumptions about the very nature and purpose of the museum. This book looks to the future of museum practice through examining how museums have evolved particularly in the non-western world to incorporate the present and the future in the display of culture. Of particular concern is the uses to which historic records are put in the service of community development and cultural renaissance.

  Subjects: Museum Studies General Anthropology

• August 2009

  Gardening the World

  Agency, Identity and the Ownership of Water

  Strang, V.

  Around the world, intensifying development and human demands for fresh water are placing unsustainable pressures on finite resources. Countries are waging war over transboundary rivers, and rural and urban communities are increasingly divided as irrigation demands compete with domestic desires. Marginal groups are losing access to water as powerful elites protect their own interests, and entire ecosystems are being severely degraded. These problems are particularly evident in Australia, with its industrialised economy and arid climate. Yet there have been relatively few attempts to examine the social and cultural complexities that underlie people's engagements with water. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in two major Australian river catchments (the Mitchell River in Cape York, and the Brisbane River in southeast Queensland), this book examines their major water using and managing groups: indigenous communities, farmers, industries, recreational and domestic water users, and environmental organisations. It explores the issues that shape their different beliefs, values and practices in relation to water, and considers the specifically cultural or sub-cultural meanings that they encode in their material surroundings. Through an analysis of each group's diverse efforts to 'garden the world', it provides insights into the complexities of human-environmental relationships.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies Development Studies

• October 2004

  Genocide and Settler Society

  Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History

  Moses, A. D. (ed)

  Colonial Genocide has been seen increasingly as a stepping-stone to the European genocides of the twentieth century, yet it remains an under-researched phenomenon. This volume reconstructs instances of Australian genocide and for the first time places them in a global context. Beginning with the arrival of the British in 1788 and extending to the 1960s, the authors identify the moments of radicalization and the escalation of British violence and ethnic engineering aimed at the Indigenous populations, while carefully distinguishing between local massacres, cultural genocide, and genocide itself. These essays reflect a growing concern with the nature of settler society in Australia and in particular with the fate of the tens of thousands of children who were forcibly taken away from their Aboriginal families by state agencies. Long considered a relatively peaceful settlement, Australian society contained many of the pathologies that led to the exterminatory and eugenic policies of twentieth century Europe.

  Subjects: Genocide Studies Colonialism

• February 2019

  Going to Pentecost

  An Experimental Approach to Studies in Pentecostalism

  Eriksen, A. Blanes, R. L., MacCarthy, M.

  Co-authored by three anthropologists with long–term expertise studying Pentecostalism in Vanuatu, Angola, and Papua New Guinea/the Trobriand Islands respectively, Going to Pentecost offers a comparative study of Pentecostalism in Africa and Melanesia, focusing on key issues as economy, urban sociality, and healing. More than an ordinary comparative book, it recognizes the changing nature of religion in the contemporary world – in particular the emergence of “non-territorial” religion (which is no longer specific to places or cultures) – and represents an experimental approach to the study of global religious movements in general and Pentecostalism in particular.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Religion

• August 2013

  Growing Artefacts, Displaying Relationships

  Yams, Art and Technology amongst the Nyamikum Abelam of Papua New Guinea

  Coupaye, L.

  What gives artefacts their power and beauty? This ethnographic study of the decorated long yams made by the Nyamikum Abelam in Papua New Guinea examines how these artefacts acquire their specific properties through processes that mobilise and recruit diverse entities, substances and domains. All come together to form the ‘finished product’ that is displayed, representing what could be an indigenous form of non-verbal ‘sociology’. Engaging with several contemporary anthropological topics (material culture, techniques, arts, aesthetics, rituals, botany, cosmology, Melanesian ethnography), the text also discusses in depth the complex position of the study of ‘technology’ within anthropology.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Sociology

• June 2011

  Growing Up in Central Australia

  New Anthropological Studies of Aboriginal Childhood and Adolescence

  Eickelkamp, U. (ed)

  Surprisingly little research has been carried out about how Australian Aboriginal children and teenagers experience life, shape their social world and imagine the future. This volume presents recent and original studies of life experiences outside the institutional settings of childcare and education, of those growing up in contemporary Central Australia or with strong links to the region. Focusing on the remote communities – roughly 1,200 across the continent – the volume includes case studies of language and family life in small country towns and urban contexts. These studies expertly show that forms of consciousness have changed enormously over the last hundred years for Indigenous societies more so than for the rest of Australia, yet equally notable are the continuities across generations.

  Subject: General Anthropology

• December 2008

  Hierarchy

  Persistence and Transformation in Social Formations

  Rio, K. & Smedal, O. H. (eds)

  Louis Dumont's concept of hierarchy continues to inspire social scientists. Using it as their starting point, the contributors to this volume introduce both fresh empirical material and new theoretical considerations. On the basis of diverse ethnographic contexts in Oceania, Asia, and the Middle East they challenge some current conceptions of hierarchical formations and reassess former debates - of post-colonial and neo-colonial agendas, ideas of "democratization" and "globalization," and expanding market economies - both with regard to new theoretical issues and the new world situation.

  Subjects: Theory & Methodology in Anthropology Sociology

• March 2019

  How Materials Matter

  Design, Innovation and Materiality in the Pacific

  Were, G.

  How does design and innovation shape people’s lives in the Pacific? Focusing on plant materials from the region, How Materials Matter reveals ways in which a variety of people – from craftswomen and scientists to architects and politicians – work with materials to transform worlds. Recognizing the fragile and ephemeral nature of plant fibres, this work delves into how the biophysical properties of certain leaves and their aesthetic appearance are utilized to communicate information and manage different forms of relations. It breaks new ground by situating plant materials at the centre of innovation in a region.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Sociology General Cultural Studies

• September 2015

  In the Absence of the Gift

  New Forms of Value and Personhood in a Papua New Guinea Community

  Rasmussen, A. E.

  By adopting ideas like “development,” members of a Papua New Guinean community find themselves continuously negotiating what can be expected of a relative or a community member. Nearly half the people born on the remote Mbuke Islands become teachers, businessmen, or bureaucrats in urban centers, while those who stay at home ask migrant relatives “What about me?” This detailed ethnography sheds light on remittance motivations and documents how terms like “community” can be useful in places otherwise permeated by kinship. As the state withdraws, Mbuke people explore what social ends might be reached through involvement with the cash economy.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Development Studies

• December 1993

  Islands in the Interior

  The Dynamics of Prehistoric Adaptations Within the Arid Zone of Australia

  Veth, P. M.

  In this book, Veth develops a model of settlement and subsistence in the Western Desert of Australia, drawing on his own archaeological investigations, as well as ethnographic and environmental data. Building on this model, he concludes with a plausible reconstruction of the colonization of the harsh, arid interior of this continent.

  Subject: Archaeology

• March 2009

  Kinship and Beyond

  The Genealogical Model Reconsidered

  Bamford, S. & Leach, J. (eds)

  The genealogical model has a long-standing history in Western thought. The contributors to this volume consider the ways in which assumptions about the genealogical model—in particular, ideas concerning sequence, essence, and transmission—structure other modes of practice and knowledge-making in domains well beyond what is normally labeled “kinship.” The detailed ethnographic work and analysis included in this text explores how these assumptions have been built into our understandings of race, personhood, ethnicity, property relations, and the relationship between human beings and non-human species. The authors explore the influences of the genealogical model of kinship in wider social theory and examine anthropology’s ability to provide a unique framework capable of bridging the “social” and “natural” sciences. In doing so, this volume brings fresh new perspectives to bear on contemporary theories concerning biotechnology and its effect upon social life.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• April 2011

  Landscapes of Relations and Belonging

  Body, Place and Politics in Wogeo, Papua New Guinea

  Anderson, A.

  Wogeo Island is well-known to anthropologists of Papua New Guinea through the work of Ian Hogbin. Based on substantial fieldwork, the author builds on and expands previous research by showing how Wogeos establish and maintain social relationships and identities connected to place and movement in the physical landscape. This innovative study demonstrates how Wogeo worldviews and social organization can be described in relation to terms of movements, flows and placements in the landscape while, in turn, the landscape is constituted and made meaningful through people’s activities and buildings. The author not only addresses some of the key issues in contemporary anthropology concerning place, gender, kinship, knowledge and power but also fills an important gap in Melanesian ethnography.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Gender Studies

• September 2013

  The Legacies of a Hawaiian Generation

  From Territorial Subject to American Citizen

  Schachter, J.

  Through the voices and perspectives of the members of an extended Hawaiian family, or `ohana, this book tells the story of North American imperialism in Hawai`i from the Great Depression to the new millennium. The family members offer their versions of being “Native Hawaiian” in an American state, detailing the ways in which US laws, policies, and institutions made, and continue to make, an impact on their daily lives. The book traces the ways that Hawaiian values adapted to changing conditions under a Territorial regime and then after statehood. These conditions involved claims for land for Native Hawaiian Homesteads, education in American public schools, military service, and participation in the Hawaiian cultural renaissance. Based on fieldwork observations, kitchen table conversations, and talk-stories, or mo`olelo, this book is a unique blend of biography, history, and anthropological analysis.

  Subjects: General Anthropology General Cultural Studies 20th Century History

• December 2016

  Legacies of Violence

  Rendering the Unspeakable Past in Modern Australia

  Mason, R. (ed)

  Whether in the form of warfare, dispossession, forced migration, or social prejudice, Australia’s sense of nationhood was born from—and continues to be defined by—experiences of violence. Legacies of Violence probes this brutal legacy through case studies that range from the colonial frontier to modern domestic spaces, exploring themes of empathy, isolation, and Australians’ imagined place in the world. Moving beyond the primacy that is typically accorded white accounts of violence, contributors place particular emphasis on the experiences of those perceived to be on the social periphery, repositioning them at the center of Australia’s relationship to global events and debates.

  Subjects: 20th Century History 18th/19th Century History Colonialism

• July 2015

  Legal Dissonance

  The Interaction of Criminal Law and Customary Law in Papua New Guinea

  Larcom, S.

  Papua New Guinea’s two most powerful legal orders — customary law and state law —undermine one another in criminal matters. This phenomenon, called legal dissonance, partly explains the low level of personal security found in many parts of the country. This book demonstrates that a lack of coordination in the punishing of wrong behavior is both problematic for legal orders themselves and for those who are subject to such legal phenomena Legal dissonance can lead to behavior being simultaneously promoted by one legal order and punished by the other, leading to injustice, and, perhaps more importantly, undermining the ability of both legal orders to deter wrongdoing.

  Subject: General Anthropology

• December 2011

  Legends of People, Myths of State

  Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia

  Kapferer, B.

  The civil war in Sri Lanka and the part that nationalism seemed to play in it inspired the writing of this book some twenty-three years ago. The argument was developed through a comparative analysis of nationalism in Sri Lanka with the author’s native Australia. At the time this constituted an innovative approach to comparison in anthropology, as well as to nationalism and its possibilities. It was not based on differences but on the way in which perspectives from within the two nationalisms, when seen side-by-side, could present an understanding of their implication in producing the violence of war, racism, and social exclusion. The book has lost none of its importance and urgency as proven by the chapters in the Appendix, written by top scholars working in Sri Lanka and in Australia. These contributions bring together new material and critically explore the book’s themes and their continued relevance to the various trajectories in nationalist processes since the first publication of the book.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Peace & Conflict Studies

• April 2015

  Living Kinship in the Pacific

  Toren, C. & Pauwels, S. (eds)

  Unaisi Nabobo-Baba observed that for the various peoples of the Pacific, kinship is generally understood as “knowledge that counts.” It is with this observation that this volume begins, and it continues with a straightforward objective to provide case studies of Pacific kinship. In doing so, contributors share an understanding of kinship as a lived and living dimension of contemporary human lives, in an area where deep historical links provide for close and useful comparison. The ethnographic focus is on transformation and continuity over time in Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa with the addition of three instructive cases from Tokelau, Papua New Guinea, and Taiwan. The book ends with an account of how kinship is constituted in day-to-day ritual and ritualized behavior.

  Subject: General Anthropology

• July 2009

  Meaningful Inconsistencies

  Bicultural Nationhood, the Free Market, and Schooling in Aotearoa/New Zealand

  Doerr, N. M.

  School differentiates students-and provides differential access to various human and material resources-along a range of axes: from elected subjects and academic "achievement" to ethnicity, age, gender, or the language they speak. These categorizations, affected throughout the world by neoliberal reforms that prioritize market forces in transforming educational institutions, are especially stark in societies that recognize their bi- or multicultural makeup through bilingual education. A small town in Aotearoa/New Zealand, with its contemporary shift toward official biculturalism and extensive free-marketization of schooling, is a prime example. Set in the microcosm of a secondary school with a bilingual program, this important volume closely examines not only the implications of categorizing individuals in ethnic terms in their everyday life but also the shapes and meaning of education within the discourse of academic achievement. It is an essential resource for those interested in bilingual education and its effects on the formations of subjectivities, ethnic relations, and nationhood.

  Subjects: Educational Studies General Anthropology

• May 2006

  Media and Nation Building

  How the Iban became Malaysian

  Postill, J.

  With the end of the Cold War and the proliferation of civil wars and "regime changes," the question of nation building has acquired great practical and theoretical urgency. From Eastern Europe to East Timor, Afghanistan and recently Iraq, the United States and its allies have often been accused of shirking their nation-building responsibilities as their attention — and that of the media -- turned to yet another regional crisis. While much has been written about the growing influence of television and the Internet on modern warfare, little is known about the relationship between media and nation building. This book explores, for the first time, this relationship by means of a paradigmatic case of successful nation building: Malaysia. Based on extended fieldwork and historical research, the author follows the diffusion, adoption, and social uses of media among the Iban of Sarawak, in Malaysian Borneo and demonstrates the wide-ranging process of nation building that has accompanied the Iban adoption of radio, clocks, print media, and television. In less than four decades, Iban longhouses ('villages under one roof') have become media organizations shaped by the official ideology of Malaysia, a country hastily formed in 1963 by conjoining four disparate territories.

  Subjects: Media Studies General Anthropology

• July 2008

  Melanesian Odysseys

  Negotiating the Self, Narrative, and Modernity

  Josephides, L.

  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 lively 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.

  Subject: General Anthropology

• October 2017

  Mimesis and Pacific Transcultural Encounters

  Making Likenesses in Time, Trade, and Ritual Reconfigurations

  Mageo, J. & Hermann, E. (eds)

  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.

  Subjects: General Anthropology General Cultural Studies

• June 2016

  Mortuary Dialogues

  Death Ritual and the Reproduction of Moral Community in Pacific Modernities

  Lipset, D. & Silverman, E. K. (eds)

  Mortuary Dialogues presents fresh perspectives on death and mourning across the Pacific Islands. Through a set of rich ethnographies, the book examines how funerals and death rituals give rise to discourse and debate about sustaining moral personhood and community amid modernity and its enormous transformations. The book’s key concept, “mortuary dialogue,” describes the different genres of talk and expressive culture through which people struggle to restore individual and collective order in the aftermath of death in the contemporary Pacific.

  Subject: General Anthropology

• March 2008

  Museums, the Media and Refugees

  Stories of Crisis, Control and Compassion

  Goodnow, K, Lohman, J. & Marfleet, P. (eds)

  Across countries and time, asylum-seekers and refugees have been represented in a variety of ways. In some representations they appear negatively, as dangers threatening to ‘over-run’ a country or a region with ‘floods’ of incompatible strangers. In others, the same people are portrayed positively, with compassion, and pictured as desperately in need of assistance. How these competing perceptions are received has significant consequences for determining public policy, human rights, international agreements, and the realization of cultural diversity, and so it is imperative to understand how these images are perpetuated. To this end, this volume reflects on museum practice and the contexts, stories, and images of asylum seekers and refugees prevalent in our mass media.

  Based on case studies from Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, the overall findings are illustrative of narratives and images common to museums and the media throughout the world. They aim to challenge political rhetoric and populist media imagery and consider what forms of dissent are likely to be sustained and what narratives ultimately break through and can lead to empathy and positive political change.

  Subjects: Museum Studies Refugee & Migration Studies

• May 2005

  Nameless Relations

  Anonymity, Melanesia and Reproductive Gift Exchange between British Ova Donors and Recipients

  Konrad, M.

  Based on the author's fieldwork at assisted conception clinics in England in the mid-1990s, this is the first ethnographic study of the new procreative practices of anonymous ova and embryo donation. Giving voice to both groups of women participating in the demanding donation experience – the donors on the one side and the ever-hopeful IVF recipients on the other – Konrad shows how one dimension of the new reproductive technologies involves an unfamiliar relatedness between nameless and untraceable procreative strangers. Offsetting informants’ local narratives against traditional Western folk models of the ‘sexed’ reproductive body, the book challenges some of the basic assumptions underlying conventional biomedical discourse of altruistic donation that clinicians and others promote as “gifts of life.” It brings together a wide variety of literatures from social anthropology, social theory, cultural studies of science and technology, and feminist bioethics to discuss the relationship between recent developments in biotechnology and changing conceptions of personal origins, genealogy, kinship, biological ownership and notions of bodily integrity.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies

• August 2017

  The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-1938

  Complicating the Picture

  Wakabayashi, B. T. (ed)

  First published in 2007, The Nanking Atrocity remains an essential resource for understanding the massacre committed by Japanese soldiers in Nanking, China during the winter of 1937-38. Through a series of deeply considered and empirically rigorous essays, it provides a far more complex and nuanced perspective than that found in works like Iris Chang’s bestselling The Rape of Nanking. It systematically reveals the flaws and exaggerations in Chang’s book while deflating the self-exculpatory narratives that persist in Japan even today. This second edition includes an extensive new introduction by the editor reflecting on the historiographical developments of the last decade, in advance of the 80th anniversary of the massacre.

  Subjects: Genocide Studies 20th Century History

• November 2014

  Navigating Colonial Orders

  Norwegian Entrepreneurship in Africa and Oceania

  Kjerland, K. A. & Bertelsen, B. E. (eds)

  Norwegians in colonial Africa and Oceania had varying aspirations and adapted in different ways to changing social, political and geographical circumstances in foreign, colonial settings. They included Norwegian shipowners, captains, and diplomats; traders and whalers along the African coast and in Antarctica; large-scale plantation owners in Mozambique and Hawai’i; big business men in South Africa; jacks of all trades in the Solomon Islands; timber merchants on Zanzibar’ coffee farmers in Kenya; and King Leopold’s footmen in Congo. This collection reveals narratives of the colonial era that are often ignored or obscured by the national histories of former colonial powers. It charts the entrepreneurial routes chosen by various Norwegians and the places they ventured, while demonstrating the importance of recognizing the complicity of such “non-colonial colonials” for understanding the complexity of colonial history.

  Subject: Colonialism

• February 2003

  Oceanic Socialities and Cultural Forms

  Ethnographies of Experience

  Hoëm, I. & Roalkvam, S. (eds)

  In anthropology, theoretical approaches attempting to come to terms with experiences of social interaction, often inspired by phenomenology, have come to the fore in opposition to the previously favored emphasis on symbolic and social structures. These essays attempt a new kind of ethnographic description of social life that treats structure and practice as aspects of the same reality. This is achieved through attention to indigenous conceptualizations of the way society itself is generated.

  With Jonathan Friedman and Fredrik Barth providing overviews, this series of innovative ethnographies highlights ways of forming social relations specific to Oceania as a cultural area, exemplifying a new kind of comparative approach and making a major contribution to general social theory.

  Subject: General Anthropology

• April 2011

  Out of Place

  Madness in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea

  Goddard, M.

  The Kakoli of the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG), the focus of this study, did not traditionally have a concept of mental illness. They classified madness according to social behaviour, not mental pathology. Moreover, their conception of the person did not recognise the same physical and mental categories that inform Western medical science, and psychiatry in particular was not officially introduced to PNG until the late 1950s. Its practitioners claimed that it could adequately accommodate the cultural variation among Melanesian societies. This book compares the intent and practice of transcultural psychiatry with Kakoli interpretations of, and responses to, madness, showing the reasons for their occasional recourse to psychiatric services. Episodes involving madness, as defined by the Kakoli themselves, are described in order to offer a context for the historical lifeworld and praxis of the community and raise fundamental questions about whether a culturally sensitive psychiatry is possible in the Melanesian context.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology

• July 2014

  Pacific Futures

  Projects, Politics and Interests

  Rollason, W. (ed)

  The Pacific region presents a huge diversity of cultural forms, which have fuelled some of the most challenging ethnographic work undertaken in the discipline. But this challenge has come at a cost. Culture, often reconfigured as ‘custom’, has often served to trap the people of the Pacific in the past of cultural reproduction, where everything is what it has always been, or worse—outdated, outmoded and destined for modernization.

  Pacific Futures asks how our understanding of social life in the Pacific would be different if we approached it from the perspective of the futures which Pacific people dream of, predict or struggle to achieve, not the reproduction of cultural tradition. From Christianity to gambling, marriage to cargo cult, military coups to reflections on childhood fishing trips, the contributors to this volume show how Pacific people are actively shaping their lives with the future in mind.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Development Studies

• November 2018

  Pacific Realities

  Changing Perspectives on Resilience and Resistance

  Dousset, L. & Nayral, M. (eds)

  Throughout the Pacific region, people are faced with dramatic changes, often described as processes of “glocalization”; individuals and groups espouse multilayered forms of identity, in which global modes of thinking and doing are embedded in renewed perceptions of local or regional specificities. Consequently, new forms of resistance and resilience – the processes by which communities attempt to regain their original social, political, and economic status and structure after disruption or displacement – emerge. Through case studies from across the Pacific which transcend the conventional “local-global” dichotomy, this volume aims to explore these complex and interwoven phenomena from a new perspective.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Development Studies General Geography

• July 2003

  Papua New Guinea's Last Place

  Experiences of Constraint in a Postcolonial Prison

  Reed, A.

  What kind of experience is incarceration? How should one define its constraints? The author, who conducted extensive fieldwork in a maximum-security jail in Papua New Guinea, seeks to address these questions through a vivid and sympathetic account of inmates' lives.

  Prison Studies is a growing field of interest for social scientists. As one of the first ethnographic studies of a prison outside western societies and Japan, this book contributes to a reinterpretation of the field's scope and assumptions. It challenges notions of what is punitive about imprisonment by exploring the creative as well as negative outcomes of detention, separation and loss. Instead of just coping, the prisoners in Papua New Guinea's Last Place find themselves drawing fresh critiques and new approaches to contemporary living.

  Subject: General Anthropology

• July 2005

  Pathways to Heaven

  Contesting Mainline and Fundamentalist Christianity in Papua New Guinea

  Jebens, H.

  How does global Christianity relate to processes of globalisation and modernization and what form does it take in different local settings? These questions have lately proved to be of increasing interest to many scholars in the social sciences and humanities. This study examines the tensions, antagonisms and outright confrontations that can occur within local Christian communities upon the arrival of global versions of fundamentalism and it does so through a rich and in-depth ethnographic study of a single case: that of Pairundu, a small and remote Papua New Guinean village whose population accepted Catholicism, after first being contacted in the late 1950s, and subsequently participated in a charismatic movement, before more and more members of the younger generation started to separate themselves from their respective catholic families and to convert to one of the most radical and fastest growing religious groups not only in contemporary Papua New Guinea but world-wide: the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. This case study of local Christianity as a lived religion contributes to an understanding of the social and cultural dynamics that increasingly incite and shape religious conflicts on a global scale.

  Subjects: Religion General Anthropology

• September 2012

  Performing Place, Practising Memories

  Aboriginal Australians, Hippies and the State

  Henry, R.

  During the 1970s a wave of ‘counter-culture’ people moved into rural communities in many parts of Australia. This study focuses in particular on the town of Kuranda in North Queensland and the relationship between the settlers and the local Aboriginal population, concentrating on a number of linked social dramas that portrayed the use of both public and private space. Through their public performances and in their everyday spatial encounters, these people resisted the bureaucratic state but, in the process, they also contributed to the cultivation and propagation of state effects.

  Subjects: Performance Studies General Anthropology

• March 2019

  Persistently Postwar

  Media and the Politics of Memory in Japan

  Guarné, B., Lozano-Méndez, A., & Martinez, D. P. (eds)

  From melodramas to experimental documentaries to anime, mass media in Japan constitute a key site in which the nation’s social memory is articulated, disseminated, and contested. Through a series of stimulating case studies, this volume examines the political and cultural representations of Japan’s past, showing how they have reinforced personal and collective narratives while also formulating new cultural meanings, both on a local scale and in the context of transnational media production and consumption. Drawing upon diverse disciplinary insights and methodologies, these studies collectively offer a nuanced account in which mass media functions as much more than a simple ideological tool.

  Subjects: Media Studies Film Studies General Cultural Studies

• August 2009

  Person and Place

  Ideas, Ideals and Practice of Sociality on Vanua Lava, Vanuatu

  Hess, S. C.

  Concerned with contemporary notions of personhood and the relationship between persons and places, this book, presents a detailed insight into the Vanua Lavan’s engagement with modernity, and examines how they relate to the past, make sense of the present and anticipate the future. Marilyn Strathern's claim that the Melanesian person is a dividual by and large holds for the Vanua Lavan person. But Vanua Lavans have also been exposed to, and creatively engaged with, what can be summarised under the term ‘Western individualism’. The author draws together several themes, discourses and conversations which concern Vanuatu specifically, the Pacific as a wider geographic area but also theoretical fields in anthropology: the relevance and expressions of sociality through kinship, concepts of person, issues about land and cosmology, the kastom debate, and questions about continuity and change. In doing so she provides a snapshot of contemporary notions of personhood.

  Subject: General Anthropology

• September 2013

  A Policy Travelogue

  Tracing Welfare Reform in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Canada

  Kingfisher, C.

  An ethnography of the development and travel of the New Zealand model of neoliberal welfare reform, this study explores the social life of policy, which is one of process, motion, and change. Different actors, including not only policy élites but also providers and recipients, engage with it in light of their own resources and knowledge. Drawing on two analytic frameworks of the contemporary anthropology of policy—translation and assemblage—Kingfisher situates policy as an artifact and architect of cultural meaning, as well as a site of power struggles. All points of engagement with policy are approached as sites of policy production that serve to transform it as well as reproduce it. As such, A Policy Travelogue provides an antidote to theorizations of policy as a-cultural, rational, and straightforwardly technical.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Sociology

• June 2008

  Political Theory and Australian Multiculturalism

  Levey, G. B. (ed)

  Multiculturalism has been one of the dominant concerns in political theory over the last decade. To date, this inquiry has been mostly informed by, or applied to, the Canadian, American, and increasingly, the European contexts. This volume explores for the first time how the Australian experience both relates and contributes to political thought on multiculturalism. Focusing on whether a multicultural regime undermines political integration, social solidarity, and national identity, the authors draw on the Australian case to critically examine the challenges, possibilities, and limits of multiculturalism as a governing idea in liberal democracies. These essays by distinguished Australian scholars variously treat the relation between liberalism and diversity, democracy and diversity, culture and rights, and evaluate whether Australia’s thirty-year experiment in liberal multiculturalism should be viewed as a successful model.

  Subject: Refugee & Migration Studies

• September 2014

  The Polynesian Iconoclasm

  Religious Revolution and the Seasonality of Power

  Sissons, J.

  Within little more than ten years in the early nineteenth century, inhabitants of Tahiti, Hawaii and fifteen other closely related societies destroyed or desecrated all of their temples and most of their god-images. In the aftermath of the explosive event, which Sissons terms the Polynesian Iconoclasm, hundreds of architecturally innovative churches — one the size of two football fields — were constructed. At the same time, Christian leaders introduced oppressive laws and courts, which the youth resisted through seasonal displays of revelry and tattooing. Seeking an answer to why this event occurred in the way that it did, this book introduces and demonstrates an alternative “practice history” that draws on the work of Marshall Sahlins and employs Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, improvisation and practical logic.

  Subjects: Religion General Anthropology

• December 2005

  Population, Reproduction and Fertility in Melanesia

  Ulijaszek, S.J. (ed)

  Human biological fertility was considered a important issue to anthropologists and colonial administrators in the first part of the 20th century, as a dramatic decline in population was observed in many regions. However, the total demise of Melanesian populations predicted by some never happened; on the contrary, a rapid population increase took place for the second part of the 20th century. This volume explores relationships between human fertility and reproduction, subsistence systems, the symbolic use of ideas of fertility and reproduction in linking landscape to individuals and populations, in Melanesian societies, past and present. It thus offers an important contribution to our understanding of the implications of social and economic change for reproduction and fertility in the broadest sense.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies

• May 2007

  The Power of Perspective

  Social Ontology and Agency on Ambrym Island, Vanuatu

  Rio, K, M.

  Focusing on different forms of agency in North Ambrym social life, the author demonstrates the potency of outsiders at different times and in different situations in Ambrym society. This model challenges the premises of much Western thinking about reciprocity, and suggests new directions in the analysis of Melanesian societies

  Subject: General Anthropology

• December 2014

  Protests, Land Rights, and Riots

  Postcolonial Struggles in Australia in the 1980s

  Morris, B.

  The 1970s saw the Aboriginal people of Australia struggle for recognition of their postcolonial rights. Rural communities, where large Aboriginal populations lived, were provoked as a consequence of social fragmentation, unparalleled unemployment, and other major economic and political changes. The ensuing riots, protests, and law-and-order campaigns in New South Wales captured the tense relations that existed between indigenous people, the police, and the criminal justice system. In Protests, Land Rights, and Riots, Barry Morris shows how neoliberal policies in Australia targeted those who were least integrated socially and culturally, and who enjoyed fewer legitimate economic opportunities. Amidst intense political debate, struggle, and conflict, new forces were unleashed as a post-settler colonial state grappled with its past. Morris provides a social analysis of the ensuing effects of neoliberal policy and the way indigenous rights were subsequently undermined by this emerging new political orthodoxy in the 1990s.
   

  Subject: General Anthropology

• March 2015

  Ritual Retellings

  Luangan Healing Performances through Practice

  Herrmans, I.

  Belian is an exceptionally lively tradition of shamanistic curing rituals performed by the Luangans, a politically marginalized population of Indonesian Borneo. This volume explores the significance of these rituals in practice and asks what belian rituals do – socially, politically, and existentially – for particular people in particular circumstances. Departing from the conception that rituals exist as ethereal, liminal or insulated traditional domains, this volume demonstrates the importance of understanding rituals as emergent within their specific historical and social settings. It offers an analysis of a number of concrete ritual performances, exemplifying a diversity of ritual genres, stylistic modalities and sensual ambiences, from low-key, habitual affairs to drawn-out, crowd-seizing community rituals and innovative, montage-like cultural experiments.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Religion

• April 2005

  Rock of Contention

  Free French and Americans at War in New Caledonia, 1940-1945

  Munholland, K.

  What went wrong in Free French relations with Americans during World War Two? Two peoples, presumably sharing a common cause in a war to defeat the axis powers, often found themselves locked in bitter disputes that exposed fundamental differences in outlook and intentions, creating a profound misunderstanding or mésentente that was a major source of Franco-American conflict during the war and has persisted since then. The site for this dispute was the South Pacific colony of New Caledonia. By documenting carefully French policy toward the American presence in New Caledonia during the war, the author demonstrates the existence of a deep-seated suspicion, fear, even paranoia about the Americans that colored almost every phase of Free French policy. Revising traditional views, the author lays bare the roots of the antagonism, which stem from perceptions and biases.

  Subjects: WWII History Colonialism

• February 2012

  Saltwater Sociality

  A Melanesian Island Ethnography

  Schneider, K.

  The inhabitants of Pororan Island, a small group of ‘saltwater people’ in Papua New Guinea, are intensely interested in the movements of persons across the island and across the sea, both in their everyday lives as fishing people and on ritual occasions. From their observations of human movements, they take their cues about the current state of social relations. Based on detailed ethnography, this study engages current Melanesian anthropological theory and argues that movements are the Pororans’ predominant mode of objectifying relations. Movements on Pororan Island are to its inhabitants what roads are to ‘mainlanders’ on the nearby larger island, and what material objects and images are to others elsewhere in Melanesia.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies General Anthropology

• April 2012

  The Scope of Anthropology

  Maurice Godelier’s Work in Context

  Dousset, L. & Tcherkézoff, S. (eds)

  Some of the most prominent social and cultural anthropologists have come together in this volume to discuss Maurice Godelier’s work. They explore and revisit some of the highly complex practices and structures social scientists encounter in their fieldwork. From the nature–culture debate to the fabrication of hereditary political systems, from transforming gender relations to the problems of the Christianization of indigenous peoples, these chapters demonstrate both the diversity of anthropological topics and the opportunity for constructive dialogue around shared methodological and theoretical models.

  Subject: Theory & Methodology in Anthropology

• November 2017

  Selfhood and Recognition

  Melanesian and Western Accounts of Relationality

  Galuschek, A. C.

  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.

  Subjects: General Anthropology General Cultural Studies Theory & Methodology in Anthropology

• March 2015

  Sex and Control

  Venereal Disease, Colonial Physicians, and Indigenous Agency in German Colonialism, 1884-1914

  Walther, D. J.

  In responding to the perceived threat posed by venereal diseases in Germany’s colonies, doctors took a biopolitical approach that employed medical and bourgeois discourses of modernization, health, productivity, and morality. Their goal was to change the behavior of targeted groups, or at least to isolate infected individuals from the healthy population. However, the Africans, Pacific Islanders, and Asians they administered to were not passive recipients of these strategies. Rather, their behavior strongly influenced the efficacy and nature of these public health measures. While an apparent degree of compliance was achieved, over time physicians increasingly relied on disciplinary measures beyond what was possible in Germany in order to enforce their policies. Ultimately, through their discourses and actions they contributed to the justification for and the maintenance of German colonialism.

  Subject: Colonialism

• March 2018

  The Southeast Asia Connection

  Trade and Polities in the Eurasian World Economy, 500 BC–AD 500

  Chew, S. C.

  The contribution of Southeast Asia to the world economy (during the late prehistoric and early historic periods) has not received much attention. It has often been viewed as a region of peripheral entrepôts, especially in the early centuries of the current era. Recent archaeological evidence revealed the existence of established and productive polities in Southeast Asia in the early parts of the historic period and earlier. This book recalibrates these interactions of Southeast Asia with other parts of the world economy, and gives the region its due instead of treating it as little more than of marginal interest.

  Subjects: Archaeology General History

• January 2001

  Subsistence-Settlement Systems of the Early Jomon Period of Japan

  Habu, J.

  This book examines the settlement patterns and intersite variability in lithic assemblages of Early Jomon (ca. 5000 BP) hunter-gatherers in Japan. A model is proposed that links regional settlement patterns and intersite lithic assemblage variability to residential mobility. The results of this study suggest that the Early Jomon people were not sedentary, as previously assumed, but instead moved their residential basis seasonally. The implications of this result are discussed in the context of the development of hunter-gatherer cultural complexity in general and the course of Japanese prehistory in particular.

  Subject: Archaeology

• July 2009

  Substantial Justice

  An Anthropology of Village Courts in Papua New Guinea

  Goddard, M.

  Papua New Guinea's village court system was introduced in 1974, partly in an effort to overcome the legal, geographical, and social distance between village societies and the country's formal courts. There are now more than 1100 village courts all over PNG, hearing thousands of cases each week. This anthropological study is grounded in ethnographic research on three different village courts and the communities they serve. It also explores the colonial historical background to the establishment of the village court system, and the local and global processes influencing the efforts of village courts to deal with everyday disputes among grassroots Melanesians.

  Subjects: General Anthropology

• October 2004

  Theater and Political Process

  Staging Identities in Tokelau and New Zealand

  Hoëm, I.

  The Argonauts in the Pacific, famous through Malinowski's work, have not been exempt from general historical developments in the world around them. By focusing on two plays performed by the Tokelau Te Ata, a theater group, the author reveals the self-perceptions of the Tokelau and highlights the dynamic relationship between issues of representation and political processes such as nation building, infrastructural changes and increased regional migration. It is through an analysis of communicative practices, which the author carried out in the home atolls and in the diasporic communities in New Zealand, that we arrive at a proper understanding of how global processes affect local institutions and everyday interaction.

  Subjects: Performance Studies General Anthropology

• November 2004

  Transactions and Creations

  Property Debates and The Stimulus of Melanesia

  Hirsch, E. & Strathern, M. (eds)

  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 conomic 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!

  Subject: General Anthropology

• February 2015

  Trapped in the Gap

  Doing Good in Indigenous Australia

  Kowal, E.

  In Australia, a ‘tribe’ of white, middle-class, progressive professionals is actively working to improve the lives of Indigenous people. This book explores what happens when well-meaning people, supported by the state, attempt to help without harming. ‘White anti-racists’ find themselves trapped by endless ambiguities, contradictions, and double binds — a microcosm of the broader dilemmas of postcolonial societies. These dilemmas are fueled by tension between the twin desires of equality and difference: to make Indigenous people statistically the same as non-Indigenous people (to 'close the gap') while simultaneously maintaining their ‘cultural’ distinctiveness. This tension lies at the heart of failed development efforts in Indigenous communities, ethnic minority populations and the global South. This book explains why doing good is so hard, and how it could be done differently. 

  Subjects: General Anthropology Development Studies

• October 2016

  Trees, Knots, and Outriggers

  Environmental Knowledge in the Northeast Kula Ring

  Damon, F. H.

  Trees, Knots and Outriggers (Kaynen Muyuw) is the culmination of twenty-five years of work by Frederick H. Damon and his attention to cultural adaptations to the environment in Melanesia. Damon details the intricacies of indigenous knowledge and practice in his sweeping synthesis of symbolic and structuralist anthropology with recent developments in historical ecology. This book is a long conversation between the author’s many Papua New Guinea informants, teachers and friends, and scientists in Australia, Europe and the United States, in which a spirit of adventure and discovery is palpable.

  Subjects: General Anthropology Environmental Studies

• November 2009

  Virtualism, Governance and Practice

  Vision and Execution in Environmental Conservation

  Carrier, J. C. & West, P. (eds)

  Many people investigating the operation of large-scale environmentalist organizations see signs of power, knowledge and governance in their policies and projects. This collection indicates that such an analysis appears to be justified from one perspective, but not from another. The chapters in this collection show that the critics, concerned with the power of these organizations to impose their policies in different parts of the world, appear justified when we look at environmentalist visions and at organizational policies and programs. However, they are much less justified when we look at the practical operation of such organizations and their ability to generate and carry out projects intended to reshape the world.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies Development Studies General Anthropology

• March 2018

  World Heritage Craze in China

  Universal Discourse, National Culture, and Local Memory

  Yan, H.

  There is a World Heritage Craze in China. China claims to have the longest continuous civilization in the world and is seeking recognition from UNESCO. This book explores three dimensions of the UNESCO World Heritage initiative with particular relevance for China: the universal agenda, the national practices, and the local responses. With a sociological lens, this book offers comprehensive insights into World Heritage, as well as China’s deep social, cultural, and political structures.

  Subjects: Archaeology Sociology General Cultural Studies