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The communities of south coast New Guinea were the subject of classic ethnographies, and fresh studies in recent decades have put these rich and complex cultures at the centre of anthropological debates. Flamboyant sexual practices, such as ritual homosexuality, have attracted particular interest. In the first general book on the region, Dr Knauft reaches striking new comparative conclusions through a careful ethnographic analysis of sexuality, the status of women, ritual and cosmology, political economy, and violence among the region's seven major language-culture areas. The findings suggest new Melanesian regional contrasts and provide for a general critique of the way regional comparisons are constructed in anthropology. Theories of practice and political economy as well as post-modern insights are drawn upon to provide a generative theory of indigenous social and symbolic development.
This is a study of the Young Maori Party, led by Peter Buck, Apirana Ngata, and Maui Pomare and its remarkable success in halting the decline of the Maori population and improving Maori health at grass roots level.
W. H. Oliver, a writer, editor, professor, and central figure in New Zealand's intellectual landscape, reflects here on the decades of his own life and the history that has shaped him. A warm portrait is painted of his Cornish parents, whose experiences with immigration, rural work, the depression, and Labour activism are recounted. Oliver shares how he avidly absorbed education and progressed from rural schools to Oxford University. This wide-ranging account tells of ancestry and early childhood, the influences of feminism, friendship, marriage, and family, while acknowledging the broader scope of history and the development of New Zealand. This is a poet writing about history, and an historian writing an autobiography--perceptive, wry, and sometimes painfully honest.
This is the story of a sport told through its communities. Rugby League in New Zealand: A People’s History unveils the compelling journey of a game flourishing against the odds. Beginning with the game’s introduction to the country in 1907, Ryan Bodman reveals the deep-rooted connections between rugby league’s development and the evolving cultural fabric of New Zealand. By questioning the mythic status of rugby union in the nation’s identity, this history highlights how power, politics and people have collectively shaped the country’s sporting scene. Drawing on first-hand interviews and a wide range of illustrations and archival material, Bodman locates rugby league history in working-class suburbs, and among Kiingitanga Māori, Pasifika migrants, and clubs and communities across the country. The people behind the game share accounts of change, triumph and resilience, while emphasising rugby league’s lasting influence on New Zealanders’ lives.
The Bird's Head Peninsula of Irian Jaya has long been an area neglected by New Guinea Studies. Only in the late seventies, interest began to focus more intensively on this scientifically important border area between Austronesian and Papuan languages and cultures. In the early nineties, this led to the creation in The Netherlands of the Irian Jaya Studies programme ISIR, which organizes and coordinates multi-disciplinary research on the Bird's Head Peninsula. Within this framework, study of the peninsula has reached a peak, with research being conducted in the area by scientists from different disciplines: anthropology, archaeology, (ethno)botany, demography, development administration, geol...
This book examines a range of contexts in which people (including anthropologists) make different orders of knowledge for themselves as a prelude to questioning assumptions about the 'size' of knowledge implied in the contrast between global and local perspectives. Shifting Contexts will appeal to anthropologists and all those working in areas such as the philosophy of social science, cultural studies and comparative sociology.
"Deryck Scarr examines the Pacific Islands' indigenous social, economic and political systems and then places in context the post-sixteenth-century European 'discovery' of the Pacific. Cultural, political, trading, social and personal exchanges in Island worlds are described and analysed, from 1767 to the year 2000. Throughout the book, the Island world and its people on land and on the sea are held firmly in the foreground." -- from the dust jacket.
Entangled Objects threatens to dislodge the cornerstone of Western anthropology by rendering permanently problematic the idea of reciprocity. All traffic, and commerce, whether economic or intellectual, between Western anthropologists and the rest of the world, is predicated upon the possibility of establishing reciprocal relations between the West and the indigenous peoples it has colonized for centuries.