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At Home and in the Field
Crossing disciplinary boundaries, At Home and in the Field is an anthology of twenty-first century ethnographic research and writing about the global worlds of home and disjuncture in Asia and the Pacific Islands. These stories reveal novel insights into the serendipitous nature of fieldwork. Unique in its inclusion of "homework"—ethnography that directly engages with issues and identities in which the ethnographer finds political solidarity and belonging in fields at home—the anthology contributes to growing trends that complicate the distinction between "insiders" and "outsiders." The obligations that fieldwork engenders among researchers and local communities are exemplified by contri...
The Custodians of the Gift
Emerging from more than two decades of research in the field and in the archives, the essays collected here explore the multifaceted topic of the Fijian firewalking ceremony, the vilavilairevo. The collection examines the intersection of the intertwined topics of cultural property, reproduction of tradition, and change with issues of (post)colonial representation, authenticity, and ethnic identity. The essays advance new insights on the tourist gaze and the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage and pose serious questions regarding the role of digital and social media as tools for preserving cultural legacies and extending traditional cultural worlds into new domains. Focusing on the response of the Sawau tribe of the island of Beqa to the commodification of the vilavilairevo as their iconic practice, this essay collection ultimately illuminates how the Christian cultural dynamics and unprecedented dogmatic schism surrounding the vilavilairevo spectacle are reshaping local notions of heritage, social sentiment, and social capital.
Tides of Innovation in Oceania
Tides of Innovation in Oceania is directly inspired by Epeli Hau‘ofa’s vision of the Pacific as a ‘Sea of Islands’; the image of tides recalls the cyclical movement of waves, with its unpredictable consequences. The authors propose tides of innovation as a fluid concept, unbound and open to many directions. This perspective is explored through ethnographic case studies centred on deeply elaborated analyses of locally inflected agencies involved in different transforming contexts. Three interwoven themes—value, materiality and place—provide a common thread.
Balancing the Tides
Balancing the Tides highlights the influence of marine practices and policies in the unincorporated territory of American Sāmoa on the local indigenous group, the American fishing industry, international seafood consumption, U.S. environmental programs, as well as global ecological and native concerns. Poblete explains how U.S. federal fishing programs in the post–World War II period encouraged labor based out of American Sāmoa to catch and can one-third of all tuna for United States consumption until 2009. Labeled "Made in the USA," this commodity was sometimes caught by non-U.S. regulated ships, produced under labor standards far below continental U.S. minimum wage and maximum work hou...
Rethinking Geographical Explorations in Extreme Environments
Focusing on extreme environments, from Umberto Nobile’s expedition to the Arctic to the commercialization of Mt Everest, this volume examines global environmental margins, how they are conceived and how perceptions have changed. Mountaintops and Arctic environments are the settings of social encounters, political strategies, individual enterprises, geopolitical tensions, decolonial practises, and scientific experiments. Concentrating on mountaineering and Arctic exploration between 1880 – 1960, contributors to this volume show how environmental marginalisation has been discursively implemented and materially generated by foreign and local actors. It examines to what extent the status and...
Reciprocity Rules
Reciprocity Rules explores the rich and complicated relationships that develop between anthropologists and research participants over time. Focusing on compensation and the creation of friendship and “family” relationships, contributors discuss what, when, and how researchers and the people with whom they work give to each other in and beyond fieldwork. Through reflexivity and narrative, the contributors to this edited collection, who are in various stages in their professional careers and whose research spans three continents and eight countries, reflect on the ways in which they have compensated their research participants and given back to host communities, as well as the varied respo...
Breaking the Shell
On the atoll of Rongelap in the northern seas of the Marshall Islands, apprentice navigators once learned to find their way across the ocean by remotely sensing how islands transform the patterning of swell and currents. Renowned for their instructional stick charts that model and map the interplay of islands and waves, these students of wave piloting techniques embarked on trial voyages to ruprup jo̧kur, a Marshallese expression roughly translated as “breaking the shell” of the turtle, which would confer their status as navigators. These traditional practices, already in decline with imposing colonial occupations, came to an abrupt halt with the Cold War–era nuclear weapons testing p...
Monsters in Society: An Interdisciplinary Perspective
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2014. Are monsters and the monstrous phenomena that transition time and space? If monsters were a part of our past and are a part of our present, will they be a part of our future? This volume demonstrates the universality of monsters and the ubiquitous nature of monsterisation from different perspectives and shows that the creation of monsters and our ongoing confrontation with them is bound by human sociality; so much so that the monsters we have been surrounded by and will encounter in the future bear characteristics that mirror inherently human modes of identity construction, for example via age, gender and visual appearance. This process can differ across life stages, such as childhood versus adulthood. Monsters, or what a society identifies as monstrous, are not simply cultural artefacts communicated via literature, historical accounts or modern media productions such as films or series. They are integral components of the human psyche. Therefore, they have existed in symbiosis with the homo socius, and will probably continue to do so in his future.
Touring Pacific Cultures
Tourism is vital to the economies of most Pacific nations and as such is an important site for the meaningful production of shared and disputed cultural values and practices. This is especially the case when tourism intersects with other important arenas for cultural production, both directly and indirectly. Touring Pacific Cultures captures the central importance of tourism to the visual, material and performed cultures of the Pacific region. In this volume, we propose to explore new directions in understanding how culture is defined, produced, experienced and sustained through tourism-related practices across that region. We ask, how is cultural value, ownership, performance and commodific...
Dance with Me
Rumba music starts and a floor full of dancers alternate clinging to one another and turning away. Here, Julia Ericksen, a competitive ballroom dancer herself, takes the reader onto the competition floor exploring the allure of this hyper-competitive, difficult, and often expensive activity.
