Böcker av Ross Bowden

This ground-breaking and beautifully illustrated ethnography of the Kaunga-speaking Yalaku provides the first detailed history of any of the 200 language groups in the Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea. The story of this society, recorded by Ross Bowden at their request, is told by the people themselves, and contains by far the most complete account of traditional warfare in this region.The history begins around 1800, the limit of Yalaku cultural memory. It describes the flashpoints that ignited tribal fighting (from the theft of a hunting dog to accusations of sorcery), the strategic thinking of warriors, the use of alliances, the building of structural defences, and even the actual blows of notable battles. It includes songs recounting the reversals of fortunes a warrior can experience and the laments of women over their loved ones, relaying the perspectives of both war-parties and attacked communities. This gripping narrative, performed in a men's house with both men and women present, is both a feat of memory and a communal endeavour.Bowden's deft ethnographic analyses of the social structure and myths of the Yalaku provide the essential context to understand this society once locked into warfare with their neighbours, adversaries who knew each other's names, spoke each other's languages, intermarried, and during peacetime took part together in rituals at which their shared history was sung.

The Kwoma, the subject of this book, are one of a number of peoples in the Sepik River region of northern Papua New Guinea who have created some of the most distinctive visual art in the Pacific. Through case studies of their painting, sculpture, architecture and ritual this book examines in detail how people in this society understand their art as a cultural phenomenon. This includes how they understand its origins in the spirit world, how they judge quality in art and how they understand artistic creativity. The book contrasts Kwoma beliefs with the radically different approach to art found in the modern West. The modern Western concept of art first emerged not in the eighteenth century in the Enlightenment, or even later, as anthropologists and art historians often assume, but several centuries earlier in the Renaissance. The book gives an account of radical changes that took place culturally in Europe between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries in the way human intellectual creativity was understood, and how this gave rise to a new concept of art, one that remains unchanged in the modern West today.