Author: Eric Hirsch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131552967X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 676
Book Description
This wide-ranging volume captures the diverse range of societies and experiences that form what has come to be known as Melanesia. It covers prehistoric, historic and contemporary issues, and includes work by art historians, political scientists, geographers and anthropologists. The chapters range from studies of subsistence, ritual and ceremonial exchange to accounts of state violence, new media and climate change. The ‘Melanesian world’ assembled here raises questions that cut to the heart of debates in the human sciences today, with profound implications for the ways in which scholars across disciplines can describe and understand human difference. This impressive collection of essays represents a valuable resource for scholars and students alike.
The Melanesian World
Author: Eric Hirsch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131552967X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 676
Book Description
This wide-ranging volume captures the diverse range of societies and experiences that form what has come to be known as Melanesia. It covers prehistoric, historic and contemporary issues, and includes work by art historians, political scientists, geographers and anthropologists. The chapters range from studies of subsistence, ritual and ceremonial exchange to accounts of state violence, new media and climate change. The ‘Melanesian world’ assembled here raises questions that cut to the heart of debates in the human sciences today, with profound implications for the ways in which scholars across disciplines can describe and understand human difference. This impressive collection of essays represents a valuable resource for scholars and students alike.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131552967X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 676
Book Description
This wide-ranging volume captures the diverse range of societies and experiences that form what has come to be known as Melanesia. It covers prehistoric, historic and contemporary issues, and includes work by art historians, political scientists, geographers and anthropologists. The chapters range from studies of subsistence, ritual and ceremonial exchange to accounts of state violence, new media and climate change. The ‘Melanesian world’ assembled here raises questions that cut to the heart of debates in the human sciences today, with profound implications for the ways in which scholars across disciplines can describe and understand human difference. This impressive collection of essays represents a valuable resource for scholars and students alike.
Melanesian Odysseys
Author: Lisette Josephides
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857450557
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
In a series of epic self-narratives ranging from traditional cultural embodiments to picaresque adventures, Christian epiphanies and a host of interactive strategies and techniques for living, Kewa Highlanders (PNG) attempt to shape and control their selves and their relentlessly changing world. This 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.
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857450557
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
In a series of epic self-narratives ranging from traditional cultural embodiments to picaresque adventures, Christian epiphanies and a host of interactive strategies and techniques for living, Kewa Highlanders (PNG) attempt to shape and control their selves and their relentlessly changing world. This 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.
From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesia and Anthropology
Author: Bruce M. Knauft
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472066872
Category : Ethnology
Languages : en
Pages : 350
Book Description
A prominent scholar surveys the special place of Melanesia in our understanding of human cultural variation
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472066872
Category : Ethnology
Languages : en
Pages : 350
Book Description
A prominent scholar surveys the special place of Melanesia in our understanding of human cultural variation
Melanesian Religion
Author: G. W. Trompf
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521383064
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 307
Book Description
Am invariable guide and analysis to pressing issues of religious and Soviet change in the Pacific.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521383064
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 307
Book Description
Am invariable guide and analysis to pressing issues of religious and Soviet change in the Pacific.
An Introduction to the Anthropology of Melanesia
Author: Paul Sillitoe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521588362
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Book Description
This Introduction to the Anthropology of Melanesia is intended for undergraduate anthropology students with some grounding in the issues and ideas that inform the discipline, and for courses in Pacific Studies. Each chapter focuses on a topic common to many cultures in the region, such as the role of so-called Big Men, ancestors, male initiation, and exchange, and these ideas are fleshed out with apt ethnographic examples. Melanesia is a fascinating culture area, and has always been a popular fieldwork site for anthropologists, including W. H. R. Rivers, Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson. Some of the most important theoretical contributions to the subject were also first formulated with reference to Melanesian studies, and students today still learn much of their basic anthropology from Melanesian examples.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521588362
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Book Description
This Introduction to the Anthropology of Melanesia is intended for undergraduate anthropology students with some grounding in the issues and ideas that inform the discipline, and for courses in Pacific Studies. Each chapter focuses on a topic common to many cultures in the region, such as the role of so-called Big Men, ancestors, male initiation, and exchange, and these ideas are fleshed out with apt ethnographic examples. Melanesia is a fascinating culture area, and has always been a popular fieldwork site for anthropologists, including W. H. R. Rivers, Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson. Some of the most important theoretical contributions to the subject were also first formulated with reference to Melanesian studies, and students today still learn much of their basic anthropology from Melanesian examples.
The History of Melanesian Society
Author: William Halse Rivers Rivers
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN:
Category : Anthropology
Languages : en
Pages : 474
Book Description
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN:
Category : Anthropology
Languages : en
Pages : 474
Book Description
Cargo Cult
Author: Lamont Lindstrom
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824878957
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236
Book Description
Who is not captivated by tales of Islanders earnestly scanning their watery horizons for great fleets of cargo ships bringing rice, radios and refrigerators - ships that will never arrive? Of all the stories spun about the island peoples of Melanesia, tales of cargo cult are among the most fascinating. The term cargo cult, Lamont Lindstrom contends, is one of anthropology's most successful conceptual offspring. Like culture, worldview and ethnicity, its usage has steadily proliferated, migrating into popular culture where today it is used to describe an astonishing roll-call of people. It's history makes for lively and compelling reading. The cargo cult story, Lindstrom shows, is more significant than it at first appears, for it recapitulates in summary form three generations of anthropological theory and Pacific studies. Although anthropologists' enthusiasm for the notion of cargo cult has waned, it now colors outsiders' understanding of Melanesian culture, and even Melanesians' perceptions of themselves. The repercussions for contemporary Islanders are significant: leaders of more than one political movement have felt the need to deny that they are any kind of cargo cultist. Of particular interest to this history is Lindstom's argument that accounts of cargo cult are at heart tragedies of thwarted desire, melancholy anticipation and crazy unrequited love. He makes a convincing case that these stories expose powerful Western scenarios of desire itself—giving cargo cult its combined titillation of the fascinating exotic and the comfortably familiar.
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824878957
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236
Book Description
Who is not captivated by tales of Islanders earnestly scanning their watery horizons for great fleets of cargo ships bringing rice, radios and refrigerators - ships that will never arrive? Of all the stories spun about the island peoples of Melanesia, tales of cargo cult are among the most fascinating. The term cargo cult, Lamont Lindstrom contends, is one of anthropology's most successful conceptual offspring. Like culture, worldview and ethnicity, its usage has steadily proliferated, migrating into popular culture where today it is used to describe an astonishing roll-call of people. It's history makes for lively and compelling reading. The cargo cult story, Lindstrom shows, is more significant than it at first appears, for it recapitulates in summary form three generations of anthropological theory and Pacific studies. Although anthropologists' enthusiasm for the notion of cargo cult has waned, it now colors outsiders' understanding of Melanesian culture, and even Melanesians' perceptions of themselves. The repercussions for contemporary Islanders are significant: leaders of more than one political movement have felt the need to deny that they are any kind of cargo cultist. Of particular interest to this history is Lindstom's argument that accounts of cargo cult are at heart tragedies of thwarted desire, melancholy anticipation and crazy unrequited love. He makes a convincing case that these stories expose powerful Western scenarios of desire itself—giving cargo cult its combined titillation of the fascinating exotic and the comfortably familiar.
The Making of Global and Local Modernities in Melanesia
Author: Holly Wardlow
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351886215
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271
Book Description
Authored by well-established and respected scholars, this work examines the kinds of efforts that have been made to adopt Western modernity in Melanesia and explores the reasons for their varied outcomes. The contributors take the work of Professor Marshall Sahlins as a starting point, assessing his theories of cultural change and of the relationship between cultural intensification and globalizing forces. They acknowledge the importance of Sahlins' ideas, while refining, extending, modifying and critiquing them in light of their own first hand knowledge of Pacific island societies. Also presenting one of Sahlins' less widely available original essays for reference, this book is an exciting contribution to serious anthropological engagement with Papua New Guinea.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351886215
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271
Book Description
Authored by well-established and respected scholars, this work examines the kinds of efforts that have been made to adopt Western modernity in Melanesia and explores the reasons for their varied outcomes. The contributors take the work of Professor Marshall Sahlins as a starting point, assessing his theories of cultural change and of the relationship between cultural intensification and globalizing forces. They acknowledge the importance of Sahlins' ideas, while refining, extending, modifying and critiquing them in light of their own first hand knowledge of Pacific island societies. Also presenting one of Sahlins' less widely available original essays for reference, this book is an exciting contribution to serious anthropological engagement with Papua New Guinea.
Christianity and Animism in Melanesia
Author: Kenneth Nehrbass
Publisher: William Carey Library Publishers
ISBN: 9780878084074
Category : Animism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
In this book, Kenneth Nehrbass examines the interaction between traditional or animistic religion (called kastom) and Christianity in Vanuatu. First, he briefly outlines major anthropological theories of animism, then he examines eight aspects of animism on Tanna Island and shows how they present a challenge to Christianity. He traces the history of Christianity on Tanna from 1839 to the present, showing which missiological theories the various missionaries were implementing. Nehrbass wanted to find out what experiences in the lives of the islanders distinguished those who left traditional religion behind from those who held on to it. In the end, he contends that there are twenty factors of gospel response and cultural integration that determine whether an animistic background believer will be a mixer, separator, transplanter, or contextualizer.
Publisher: William Carey Library Publishers
ISBN: 9780878084074
Category : Animism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
In this book, Kenneth Nehrbass examines the interaction between traditional or animistic religion (called kastom) and Christianity in Vanuatu. First, he briefly outlines major anthropological theories of animism, then he examines eight aspects of animism on Tanna Island and shows how they present a challenge to Christianity. He traces the history of Christianity on Tanna from 1839 to the present, showing which missiological theories the various missionaries were implementing. Nehrbass wanted to find out what experiences in the lives of the islanders distinguished those who left traditional religion behind from those who held on to it. In the end, he contends that there are twenty factors of gospel response and cultural integration that determine whether an animistic background believer will be a mixer, separator, transplanter, or contextualizer.
Tanna Times
Author: Lamont Lindstrom
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824886674
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Anthropologists like to tell other people’s stories but local experts tell them even better. This book introduces the vibrant living culture and fascinating history of Tanna, an island in Vanuatu, Melanesia, through the stories of a dozen interconnected Tanna Islanders. Tracing the past 250 years of island experiences that cross the globe, each of these distinctly extraordinary lives tells larger human narratives of cultural continuity and change. In following Tanna’s times, we find that all of us, even those living on seemingly out-of-the-way Pacific Islands, are firmly linked into the world’s networks. Each chapter opens with a telling life story then contextualizes that biography with pertinent ethnographic explanation and archival research. Since 1774, Tanna Islanders have participated in events that have captured global anthropological and popular attention. These include receiving British explorer James Cook; a nineteenth-century voyage to London; troubled relations with early Christian missionaries; overseas emigration for plantation labor; the innovation of the John Frum Movement, a so-called Melanesian “cargo cult”; service in American military labor corps during the Pacific War; agitation in the 1970s for an independent Vanuatu; urban migration to seek work in Port Vila (Vanuatu’s capital); the international kava business; juggling arranged versus love marriages; and modern dealings with social media and swelling numbers of tourists. Yet, partly as a consequence of their experience abroad, Islanders fiercely protect their cultural identity and continue to maintain resilient bonds with their Tanna homes. Drawing on forty years of fieldwork in Vanuatu, author Lamont Lindstrom offers rich insights into the culture of Tanna. His close relationship with the island’s people is reflected in his choice to feature their voices; he celebrates and recounts their stories here in accessible, engaging prose. An ethnographic case study written for students of anthropology, the author has included a concise list of key sources and essential further readings suggestions at the end of each chapter. Tanna Times complements classroom and scholarly interests in kinship and marriage, economics, politics, religion, history, linguistics, gender and personhood, and social transformation in Melanesia and beyond.
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824886674
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Anthropologists like to tell other people’s stories but local experts tell them even better. This book introduces the vibrant living culture and fascinating history of Tanna, an island in Vanuatu, Melanesia, through the stories of a dozen interconnected Tanna Islanders. Tracing the past 250 years of island experiences that cross the globe, each of these distinctly extraordinary lives tells larger human narratives of cultural continuity and change. In following Tanna’s times, we find that all of us, even those living on seemingly out-of-the-way Pacific Islands, are firmly linked into the world’s networks. Each chapter opens with a telling life story then contextualizes that biography with pertinent ethnographic explanation and archival research. Since 1774, Tanna Islanders have participated in events that have captured global anthropological and popular attention. These include receiving British explorer James Cook; a nineteenth-century voyage to London; troubled relations with early Christian missionaries; overseas emigration for plantation labor; the innovation of the John Frum Movement, a so-called Melanesian “cargo cult”; service in American military labor corps during the Pacific War; agitation in the 1970s for an independent Vanuatu; urban migration to seek work in Port Vila (Vanuatu’s capital); the international kava business; juggling arranged versus love marriages; and modern dealings with social media and swelling numbers of tourists. Yet, partly as a consequence of their experience abroad, Islanders fiercely protect their cultural identity and continue to maintain resilient bonds with their Tanna homes. Drawing on forty years of fieldwork in Vanuatu, author Lamont Lindstrom offers rich insights into the culture of Tanna. His close relationship with the island’s people is reflected in his choice to feature their voices; he celebrates and recounts their stories here in accessible, engaging prose. An ethnographic case study written for students of anthropology, the author has included a concise list of key sources and essential further readings suggestions at the end of each chapter. Tanna Times complements classroom and scholarly interests in kinship and marriage, economics, politics, religion, history, linguistics, gender and personhood, and social transformation in Melanesia and beyond.