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Creative Land: Place and Procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea

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Creative Land

Place and Procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea

James Leach

258 pages, 3 maps, 7 figs, 4 tables, 16 halftones

ISBN  978-1-57181-556-9 $135.00/£104.00 / Hb / Published (July 2003)

ISBN  978-1-57181-693-1 $34.95/£27.95 / Pb / Published (August 2004)

eISBN 978-1-78920-583-1 eBook

https://doi.org/10.3167/9781571815569


View CartYour country: - edit Buy the eBook from these vendorsRequest a Review or Examination Copy (in Digital Format)Recommend to your LibraryAvailable in GOBI®

Reviews

"What is new in Leach’s account is the emphasis Nekgini speakers put on land. His attention to this emphasis makes his ethnography in many ways a powerful development... the book as a whole is consistently stimulating and theoretically sophisticated throughout."  ·  Joel Robbins, Contemporary Pacific

"The ethnography itself is full of interesting observations and novel information, and repays a close reading with a vivid sense of the distinctiveness of Reite social life…Creative Land is itself ‘creative’ and will attain its own ‘place’ in the historical ‘landscape’ of studies of kinship in New Guinea and elsewhere.  ·  Andrew Strathern, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

Description

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.

James Leach is Research Fellow in Anthropology, King's College, Cambridge, and Affiliated Lecturer in the Dept. of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.

Field research: Madang Province, Papua New Guinea 1994-5, 1999, 2000-2001, 2003. Published works on kinship and place, creativity, artistic production, ownership and cultural/intellectual property. (Creative Land. Place and Procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea. 2003 Berghahn Books, Rationales of Ownership. Transactions and Claims to Ownership in Contemporary Papua New Guinea, (ed with Lawrence Kalinoe), 2004 Sean Kingston Publishing.) Field Research U.K.: 2002 to present, as 'Attached Observer' with artists placements in Industry and Science. Also directing research on constructions of gender among Open Source software programmers, and on artist’s relation with the law in the UK. Awarded the Royal Anthropological Institute JB Donne Prize in the Anthropology of Art for 1999, and The Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2004.

Subject: Anthropology (General)
Area: Asia-Pacific


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