Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Melanesia
Melanesia is one of the most culturally diverse and artistically fertile regions of the world. This book is an exporation of one of the richest collections of Melanesian art, that of the British Museum. It is the product of sustained dialogue with people from Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, West Papua, and New Caledonia, who are authors or co-authors of many of its chapters. Melanesia: Art and Encounter is a companion to this outstanding collection. The book ranges over an extraordinary variety of historic and modern art forms, from striking masks and shell valuables to intricately woven fabrics, string bags, and paintings on canvas. It investigates histories of exploration and exchange, conversion to Christianity and cultural revival, drawing upon a wealth of new information gleaned from archives, photographs, oral histories, and dialogue with Melanesians. The book is a revelation, not only of the arts of Melanesia, but also of the challenges and possibilities of collaborative research today.
Ownership of Knowledge
A framework for knowledge ownership that challenges the mechanisms of inequality in modern society. Scholars of science, technology, medicine, and law have all tended to emphasize knowledge as the sum of human understanding, and its ownership as possession by law. Breaking with traditional discourse on knowledge property as something that concerns mainly words and intellectual history, or science and law, Dagmar Schäfer, Annapurna Mamidipudi, and Marius Buning propose technology as a central heuristic for studying the many implications of knowledge ownership. Toward this end, they focus on the notions of knowledge and ownership in courtrooms, workshops, policy, and research practices, while...
The Art of Clothing: A Pacific Experience
The Art of Clothing: A Pacific Experience is a collection of richly textured and tremendously engaging empirical studies of cloth and clothing in colonial and post-colonial Pacific contexts. By challenging readers to reconsider the very nature of the materiality of clothing, the editors productively situate this volume at the intersection of a number of ongoing interdisciplinary projects that are coalescing around an interest in cloth and clothing. The book as a whole speaks lucidly to issues of current concern in a wide range of academic fields - including cultural studies, material culture, Pacific history, art history, history of religions, and museum studies.
Emplaced Myth
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.
Museums and Source Communities
This volume combines some of the most influential published research in this emerging field with newly commissioned essays on the issues, problems and lessons involved in collaborating museums and source communities. Focusing on museums in the UK, North America and the Pacific, the book highlights three areas which demonstrate the new developments most clearly: the museum as field site or 'contact zone' - a place which source community members enter for purposes of consultation and collaboration visual repatriation - the use of photography to return images of ancestors, historical moments and material heritage to source communities exhibition case studies - these are discussed to reveal the implications of cross-cultural and collaborative research for museums, and how such projects have challenged established attitudes and practices. As the first overview of its kind, this collection will be essential reading for museum staff working with source communities, for community members involved with museum programmes, and for students and academics in museum studies and social anthropology.
Making Representations
Drawing upon material from Britain, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, Making Representations explores the ways in which museums and anthropologists are responding to pressures in the field by developing new policies and practices, and forging new relationships with communities. Simpson examines the increasing number of museums and cultural centres being established by indigenous and immigrant communities as they take control of the interpretive process and challenge the traditional role of the museum. Museum studies students and museum professionals will all find this a stimulating and valuable read.
Remembrance of Pacific Pasts
How does one describe the Pacific's pasts? The easy confidence historians once had in writing about the region has disappeared in the turmoil surrounding today's politics of representation. Earlier narratives that focused on what happened when are now accused of encouraging myths of progress. Remembrance of Pacific Pasts takes a different course. It acknowledges history's multiplicity and selectivity, its inability to represent the past in its entirety "as it really was" and instead offers points of reference for thinking with and about the region's pasts. It encourages readers to participate in the historical process by constructing alternative histories that draw on the volume's chapters. ...
Saltwater Sociality
The inhabitants of Pororan Island, a small group of 'saltwater people' in Papua New Guinea, are intensely interested in the movements of persons across the island and across the sea, both in their everyday lives as fishing people and on ritual occasions. From their observations of human movements, they take their cues about the current state of social relations. Based on detailed ethnography, this study engages current Melanesian anthropological theory and argues that movements are the Pororans' predominant mode of objectifying relations. Movements on Pororan Island are to its inhabitants what roads are to 'mainlanders' on the nearby larger island, and what material objects and images are to others elsewhere in Melanesia.
Voyaging Through the Contemporary Pacific
The Pacific has long been a site for debates over disciplinary approaches and the ethics and politics of research within neocolonial and postcolonial contexts. This volume makes a significant contribution to these debates and to the related and ongoing exchanges concerning area studies, the globalization of capitalism, and its attendant cultural, social, and political effects. In so doing, the authors link work from the Pacific with theoretical and methodological issues raised in other areas of the globe. This collection of the best from Contemporary Pacific will prove invaluable to scholars, students and all interested in the study of history, culture, and identity in the Pacific and in (post) colonial societies everywhere.
Museums and Their Communities
Using case studies drawn from all areas of museum studies, Museums and their Communities explores the museums as a site of representation, identity and memory, and considers how it can influence its community. Focusing on the museum as an institution, and its social and cultural setting, Sheila Watson examines how museums use their roles as informers and educators to empower, or to ignore, communities. Looking at the current debates about the role of the museum, she considers contested values in museum functions and examines provision, power, ownership, responsibility, and institutional issues. This book is of great relevance for all disciplines as it explores and questions the role of the museum in modern society.
