Pacific Studies PDF Download

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Islands of the Pacific
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Pan-Pacific relations
Languages : en
Pages : 768

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Author: Iracema Dulley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429854056
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Roy Wagner’s work deals with two fundamental issues in anthropology: how to describe difference, and where to place it in anthropological discourse. His discussion and displacement of anthropological concepts such as ‘group’ and ‘culture’ in the 1970s and 1980s have arguably encouraged a deconstructive undertaking in the discipline. Yet Wagner’s work, although part of the radicalizing move of the 1970s and 1980s in anthropology, was until some years ago not a central reference for anthropological theory. The question Dulley asks throughout her engagement with Wagner’s main essays is whether it is possible for the emic gesture to account for difference within difference without falling into the closure of totalization. Wagner’s work contains this potentiality but is hindered by its very foundation: the emic gesture, in which difference is circumscribed through a name that others. If this gesture is one of the pillars of anthropology, and one that allows for the inscription of difference, the reflection proposed in this book concerns anthropology as a whole: How can one inscribe difference within difference? Dulley argues that this can only be accomplished through an erasure of the emic. Offering a comprehensive discussion of Wagner’s concepts and a detailed reading of his most important work, this book will be of interest to anyone who wishes to reflect on the relationship between ethnography and difference, and especially those who in various ways engage with the ‘ontological turn’. As the book reflects on how Derridean différance can be appropriated by anthropology in its search for subtler and more critical ethnographic accounts, anthropologists interested in post-structuralist theory and methodology will also find it useful.

Author: Roy Wagner
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520925823
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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An Anthropology of the Subject rounds out the theoretical-philosophical cosmos of one of the twentieth century's most intellectually adventurous anthropologists. Roy Wagner, having turned "culture" and "symbols" inside out (in The Invention of Culture and Symbols That Stand for Themselves, respectively), now does the same for the "subject" and subjectivity. In studying the human subject and the way human culture mirrors itself, Wagner has redefined holography as "the exact equivalence, or comprehensive identity, of part and whole in any human contingency."

Author: Charles Piot
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022618983X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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At first glance, the remote villages of the Kabre people of northern Togo appear to have all the trappings of a classic "out of the way" African culture—subsistence farming, straw-roofed houses, and rituals to the spirits and ancestors. Arguing that village life is in fact an effect of the modern and the global, Charles Piot suggests that Kabre culture is shaped as much by colonial and postcolonial history as by anything "indigenous" or local. Through analyses of everyday and ceremonial social practices, Piot illustrates the intertwining of modernity with tradition and of the local with the national and global. In a striking example of the appropriation of tradition by the state, Togo's Kabre president regularly flies to the region in his helicopter to witness male initiation ceremonies. Confounding both anthropological theorizations and the State Department's stereotyped images of African village life, Remotely Global aims to rethink Euroamerican theories that fail to come to terms with the fluidity of everyday relations in a society where persons and things are forever in motion.

Author: Peter Wynn Kirby
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845455385
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Where lived experience of surroundings is shifting, visceral, and immersive, interpretation of social spaces tends to be static and remote. "Space" and "place" are also often analyzed without grappling much (if at all) with the social, political, and historical roots of spatial practice. This volume embarks upon the novel strategy of focusing on movement as a way of understanding social spaces, which offers a means to get beyond biases inherent in the social science of space. Ethnographic studies of social life in settings as varied as nomadic Mongolia and island Melanesia, as distinct as contemporary Tokyo and war-torn Palestine, challenge Western assumptions about the universality of "space" and allow concrete understanding of how life plays out over different socio-cultural topographies. In a world that is becoming increasingly "bounded" in many ways - despite enormous changes wrought by technological, ideological, and other social developments - Boundless Worlds urges a scholarly turn, away from the purely global, toward the human dimension of social lives lived in conditions of conflict, upheaval, remapping, and improvisation through movement.

Author: Alan D. Schrift
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134714777
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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The theme of the gift can be located at the center of current discussions of deconstruction, gender and feminist theory, ethics, philosophy, anthropology, and economics: it is, simply, one of the primary focal points at which contemporary interdisciplinary discourses intersect. Into this context comes a new, indispensable volume. The Logic of the Gift offers several important essays on gifts and gift-giving that are often referred to but seldom read, and adds to them new essays written especially for this collection.

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

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

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

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"In a series of epic self-narratives ranging from traditional cultural embodiments to picaresque adventures, Christian epiphanies and a host of interactive strategies and techniques for living, Kewa Highlanders (PNG) attempt to shape and control their selves and their relentlessly changing world. This account transcends ethnographic particularity and offers a wide-reaching perspective on the nature of being human. Inverting the analytic logic of her previous work, which sought to uncover what social structures concealed, Josephides focuses instead on the cultural understandings that people make explicit in their actions and speech. Using approaches from philosophy and anthropology, she examines elicitation (how people create their selves and their worlds in the act of making explicit) and mimesis (how anthropologists produce ethnographies), to arrive at an unexpected conclusion: that knowledge of self and other alike derives from self-externalization rather than self-introspection."--BOOK JACKET.

Author: Fenella Cannell
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822388154
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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This collection provides vivid ethnographic explorations of particular, local Christianities as they are experienced by different groups around the world. At the same time, the contributors, all anthropologists, rethink the vexed relationship between anthropology and Christianity. As Fenella Cannell contends in her powerful introduction, Christianity is the critical “repressed” of anthropology. To a great extent, anthropology first defined itself as a rational, empirically based enterprise quite different from theology. The theology it repudiated was, for the most part, Christian. Cannell asserts that anthropological theory carries within it ideas profoundly shaped by this rejection. Because of this, anthropology has been less successful in considering Christianity as an ethnographic object than it has in considering other religions. This collection is designed to advance a more subtle and less self-limiting anthropological study of Christianity. The contributors examine the contours of Christianity among diverse groups: Catholics in India, the Philippines, and Bolivia, and Seventh-Day Adventists in Madagascar; the Swedish branch of Word of Life, a charismatic church based in the United States; and Protestants in Amazonia, Melanesia, and Indonesia. Highlighting the wide variation in what it means to be Christian, the contributors reveal vastly different understandings and valuations of conversion, orthodoxy, Scripture, the inspired word, ritual, gifts, and the concept of heaven. In the process they bring to light how local Christian practices and beliefs are affected by encounters with colonialism and modernity, by the opposition between Catholicism and Protestantism, and by the proximity of other religions and belief systems. Together the contributors show that it not sufficient for anthropologists to assume that they know in advance what the Christian experience is; each local variation must be encountered on its own terms. Contributors. Cecilia Busby, Fenella Cannell, Simon Coleman, Peter Gow, Olivia Harris, Webb Keane, Eva Keller, David Mosse, Danilyn Rutherford, Christina Toren, Harvey Whitehouse