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Exploring adoption in the Pacific, this book goes beyond the commonplace structural-functional analysis of adoption as a positive “transaction in parenthood.” It examines the effects it has on adoptees’ inner sense of self, their conflicted emotional lives, and familial relationships that are affected by a personal sense of rejection and not belonging. This account is theoretically rooted in ethnopsychology, based on field work conducted across multiple research sites in the Chuuk Lagoon, its neighboring Chuukic-speaking atolls, and persons from neighboring Micronesian island communities.
A collection of essays that follows up on "Adoption in Eastern Oceania" by Vern Carroll. Most were presented at a symposium during the First Annual Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO) meeting in 1972.
The cultural and social consequences of uprooting island populations are the principal concerns of the anthropologists contributing to this first comparative study of resettled communities. The ten communities chosen for study include migrant groups like the Rotumans in Fiji as well as relocated ones like the people of Bikini Atoll or the Tikopia in the Russell Islands.
During the early 20th century, a group of ex-slaves established a frontier society in the no-man’s-land of the extreme Southern Highlands of Madagascar. First settlers skilfully deployed a fluid set of Malagasy customs to implant a myth of themselves as tompon-tany or “masters of the land”. Eventually, they created a land monopoly to reinforce their legitimacy and to exclude later migrants. Some of them were labelled andevo (“slave” or “slave descent”). The tompon-tany prohibited the andevo from owning land, and thereby from having tombs. This book focuses on the plight of the tombless andevo, and how their ascribed impurity and association with infertility, illness, death and misfortune made them an essential part of the tompon-tany world-view.
This seminal work in several fields—person-centered anthropology, comparative psychology, and social history—documents the inner life of the Tahitians with sensitivity and insight. At the same time Levy reveals the ways in which private and public worlds interact. Tahitians is an ethnography focused on private but culturally organized behavior resulting in a wealth of material for the understanding of the interaction among historical, cultural, and personal spheres. "This is a unique addition to anthropological literature. . . . No review could substitute for reading it."—Margaret Mead, American Anthropologist
This innovative and theoretically sophisticated book investigates how aesthetic judgment forms the groundwork for understanding political identities. It posits aesthetics as central to conceptions of politics that are based on how people understand the relationship between themselves and larger communities. Kennan Ferguson focuses not only on how different theoretical conceptions of political judgment relate to one another, but also on their historical development and potential meaning for contemporary scholarship across the humanities and social sciences. Drawing on recent contributions to philosophy, economics, cultural studies, feminism, psychology, and anthropology, The Politics of Judgment demonstrates how modern political identities depend upon and are formed by aesthetic judgment. Political theorists, social scientists, philosophers, and cultural critics will find this book especially useful, though general readers will also be attracted by Ferguson's keen insight into contemporary political questions. Book jacket.
In the mid-1970s, David M. Schneider rocked the anthropological world with his announcement that kinship did not exist in any culture known to humankind. This volume provides a critical assessment of Schneider's ideas, focusing particularly on his contributions to kinship studies and the implications of his work for cultural relativism. Schneider's deconstruction of kinship as a cultural system sounded the death knell for a certain kind of kinship study. At the same time, it laid the groundwork for the re-emergence of kinship studies as a centerpiece of anthropological theory and practice. Now a mainstay of cultural studies, Schneider's conception of cultural relativism revolutionized thinki...
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