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4 The Coral Gardens are Losing Their Magic. The Social and Cultural Impact of Climate Change and Overpopulation for the Trobriand Islanders. GUNTER SENFT -- 5 Group Dialogues, Videos and Multilocality in Researching Rituals. ANTJE DENNER -- 6 "I didn't know that there were other worlds out there". Inside a Multi-Sited Ethnography. STEPHANIE WALDA-MANDEL -- 7 "Houses Jumbled Everywhere"? Visions of a "Village" in Papua New Guinea. ANITA VON POSER -- 8 The Chase for Archival Material and Biographical Information in the "Field" of Archives. Remarks about a Research Project, carried out in Chile, Rapanui and Other Places. HERMANN MÜCKLER -- 9 References to Time and Space in Melanesian Music. RA...
Wogeo Island is well-known to anthropologists of Papua New Guinea through the work of Ian Hogbin. Based on substantial fieldwork, the author builds on and expands previous research by showing how Wogeos establish and maintain social relationships and identities connected to place and movement in the physical landscape. This innovative study demonstrates how Wogeo worldviews and social organization can be described in relation to terms of movements, flows and placements in the landscape while, in turn, the landscape is constituted and made meaningful through people’s activities and buildings. The author not only addresses some of the key issues in contemporary anthropology concerning place, gender, kinship, knowledge and power but also fills an important gap in Melanesian ethnography.
This new Companion traces the development of cognitive anthropology from its beginnings in the late 1950s to the present, and evaluates future directions of research in the field. In 29 contributions from leading anthropologists, there is an overview of cognitive and cultural structures, insights into how cognition works in everyday life and interacts with culture, and examples of contemporary research. A Companion to Cognitive Anthropology is essential for anyone interested in the questions of how culture shapes cognitive processes.
Australia and Papua New Guinea share a number of important social, cultural, and historical features, making a sustained comparison between the two especially productive. This situates the ethnography of the two areas within a comparative framework and examines the relationship between indigenous systems of knowledge and place - an issue of growing concern to anthropologists. The essays demonstrate the manner in which regimes of restricted knowledge serve to protect and augment cultural property and the proprietorship over sites and territory; how myths evolve to explain and culturally appropriate important events pertaining to contact between indigenous and Western societies; how graphic designs and other culturally important iconic and iconographic processes provide conduits of cross-cultural appropriation between indigenous and non-indigenous societies in today's multicultural nation states.
Through the sharing of food, people feel entitled to inquire into one another’s lives and ponder one another’s states in relation to their foodways. This in-depth study focuses on the Bosmun of Daiden, a Ramu River people in an under-represented area in the ethnography of Papua New Guinea, uncovering the conceptual convergence of local notions of relatedness, foodways, and empathy. In weaving together discussions about paramount values as passed on through myth, the expression of feelings in daily life, and the bodily experience of social and physical environs, a life-world unfolds in which moral, emotional, and embodied foodways contribute notably to the creation of relationships. Concerned with unique processes of “making kin,” the book adds a distinct case to recent debates about relatedness and empathy and sheds new light onto the conventional anthropological themes of food production, sharing, and exchange.
Making the Modern Primitive provides an anthropological analysis of the encounter between local residents and tourists in the Trobriand Islands, a place renowned in anthropology and represented in various media as "culturally authentic." In such a place, how are ideas about authenticity implicated in creating and representing the self and cultural Others in the context of cultural tourism? Michelle MacCarthy addresses this question by examining four arenas of interaction between Trobriand Islanders and tourists: formal performances, informal village visits, souvenir shopping, and tourist photography. Drawing on both symbolic/interpretive approaches and concepts drawn from economic anthropolo...
The book offers a glimpse back in time to a Middle Sepik society, the Iatmul, first investigated by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson in the late 1920s while the feminist anthropologist Margaret Mead worked on sex roles among the neighbouring Tchambuli (Chambri) people. The author lived in the Iatmul village of Kararau in 1972/3 where she studied women’s lives, works, and knowledge in detail. She revisited the Sepik in 2015 and 2017. The book, the translation of a 1977 publication in German, is complemented by two chapters dealing with the life of the Iatmul in the 2010s. It presents rich quantitative and qualitative data on subsistence economy, marriage, and women’s knowledge concernin...
Double flute, shoulder flute, and large standing slit drums with carved decorations are only a few of the unique musical instruments used in the islands of Vanuatu. In many ways, the people of this South Pacific archipelago live according to their traditional cultures and conduct their rituals and ceremonies as their great-grandfathers had. This book deals comprehensively with traditional musical instruments and their role and function in ceremonies on Vanuatu. Music, dance, and musical instruments are not only means to highlight certain moments in ceremonies, but help to set up an entire network of secrets. The field notes, personal opinions, and ideas that are documented in this book are the result of an intensive study of over 20 years on music in south Melanesia. This is the first reference book on the music of Vanuatu that constitutes an invaluable source for musicologists and anthropologists alike, and it will surprise general readers with its interesting and lively accounts. (Series: SoundCultureStudies / KlangKulturStudien - Vol. 7)
The fields of cross-cultural and cultural psychology both acknowledge the role of `culture' for the constitution of a meaningful practice. There are notable differences as well as remarkable commonalities between nomologically oriented cross-cultural psychology on the one hand and interpretive cultural psychology on the other. Contributions to this book discuss recent theoretical and methodological approaches from both fields in order to explore their joint potential for an advancement of the concept of culture, for the theoretical conceptualization and methodical completion of comparative cultural studies and the scientific understanding of cultural difference. This volume includes contributions by Ernest E. Boesch, Kenneth J. Gergen, Rom Harré, Gustav Jahoda and Jaan Valsiner.
It is commonly agreed by linguists and anthropologists that the majority of languages spoken now around the globe will likely disappear within our lifetime. The phenomenon known as language death has started to accelerate as the world has grown smaller. This extinction of languages, and the knowledge therein, has no parallel in human history. K. David Harrison's book is the first to focus on the essential question, what is lost when a language dies? What forms of knowledge are embedded in a language's structure and vocabulary? And how harmful is it to humanity that such knowledge is lost forever? Harrison spans the globe from Siberia, to North America, to the Himalayas and elsewhere, to look...