Throughout the Pacific, cultural heritage is both a powerful idiom in post-colonial state-making, and a potent mobilizing force in diverse grassroots social movements, many of which have been misunderstood as 'cargo-cults' or 'inventions of tradition' in anthropological analyses. This collection recognizes cultural heritage as a ground for creativity and experimentation with social forms, and pin-points both the conflicting values at play and their potentially subversive power. Describing key social processes in Hawaii, Tahiti, Pohnpei, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea and Australia, it explores alternative ways of configuring authority and organizingthe state, as well as highlighting the potential in local social movements to influence culture and politics at the national level.Taking the pulse of important contemporary social movements in the region, this volume is key for understanding the development of the modern nation-state in the Pacific.
Contributors to this volume draw together ideas emerging from the anthropology of the body, the Western interest in body ornamentation, and the recent revival of specific body arts such as tattooing and piercing. (Archeology/Anthropology)
Decolonisation, modernisation, globalisation, the crisis of representation, and the 'cultural turn' in neighbouring disciplines have unsettled anthropology to such an extent that the field's foundations, the subjects of its study as well as its methods and concepts, appear to be eroded. It is now time to take stock and either abandon anthropology as a fundamentally untenable or superfluous project, or to set it on more solid foundations. In this volume some of the world's leading anthropologists - including Vincent Crapanzano, Maurice Godelier, Ulf Hannerz and Adam Kuper - do just that. Reflecting on how to meet the manifold institutional, theoretical, methodological, and epistemological challenges to the field, as well as on the continued, if not heightened, importance of anthropology in a world where diversity and cultural difference are becoming ever more important economically, politically, and legally, they set upon the task of reconstructing anthropology's foundations and firming up its stance vis-à-vis these challenges.
Despite their ubiquity and cultural prominence, the academic study of arts festivals has long been neglected. The burgeoning festivals industry is, however, firmly embedded in both the arts funding and weekly calendar of European cities, and there is no doubt that festivals are fast becoming a defining feature of urban life in the twenty-first century. An assessment of their nature and impact is more pressing than ever before. The contributors to this volume explore the modern urban festival and the difference it makes to the experience and management of diversity in the city. Their research reveals an unsettling coupling of the celebration of local diversity with institutional amnesia, in which the memory of a festival hardly ever outlasts its funding. This book documents a key phenomenon of our time, the supplanting of community-based remembering with the repetitive structures of events whose historic and interpretative depth is lost amid a spiraling velocity of 'festivalization'.
Focusing on issues of empathy and mutuality, and self and other, as experienced in the everyday challenges of doing participant-observation fieldwork, this volume makes a significant contribution to rethinking the experiential and conceptual construction of the field. The contributors adopt a critical and self reflexive approach that goes beyond issues of voice and representation raised by early postmodern anthropology, to grapple with issues concerning the nature of knowledge transmission that lie at the very heart of the ethnographic effort. They explore how multiple modes of attending, awareness and sense making can shape the ethnographic process. Of note are those unanticipated, less palpable forms of communication that are peripheral to or transcend more formalized and structured research methods and agendas. Among these are empathy, intuition, somatic modes of attention and/or embodied knowledge and identification, as well as, shared sensory experiences and aesthetics. By the elaboration of such concepts the volume as a whole offers a substantial elaboration of a phenomenological approach.
The first anthropological monograph published on the Vula'a people of south-eastern Papua New Guinea, The Shark Warrior of Alewai considers oral histories and Western historical documents that cover a period of more than 200 years in the light of an ethnography of contemporary Christianity. Van Heekeren's phenomenology of Vula'a storytelling reveals how the life of one man, the Shark Warrior, comes to contain the identity of a people. Drawing on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, she goes on to establish the essential continuities that underpin the reproduction of Vula'a identity, and to demonstrate how these give a distinctive form to Vula'a responses to historical change. In an approach that brings together the fields of Anthropology, History and Philosophy, the book questions conventional anthropological categories of exchange, gender and kinship, as well as the problematic dichotomization of myth and history, to argue for an anthropology grounded in ontology.
'Just leave the tree-trunk alone, the beetle is crawling out.'This Bawòng proverb means: surrender to the divine course. Man must not start tugging at this tree, the beetle is already busy cleaning it up.In 1967, Tony van Buren went as a missionary-sponsored anthropologist to the Bawòng of the Congo, neighbours of the Lele made famous by Mary Douglas, initially to investigate her contentions about the 'non-religious' reasons for the mission's success there. Like Douglas, he found his encounter there to be the most important of his life. Stalled by the prospect of presenting beliefs he could not believe to be true, van Buren's outlook was changed by his own authentic 'Bawòng' experience: a dream in which he was visited by the tribal chief and his wife.Simultaneously attempting to do justice to both European and Bawòng points of view, and incorporating stories from over half the inhabitants of his host village, this is a magical-realistic travel story through the land of the Bawòng from a man experiencing overlapping beliefs.
Since Papua New Guinea's Independence in the 1970s, Port Moresby has been transformed from a colonial administrative centre to a distinctively Melanesian city. However visitors often shun the capital, their perceptions coloured by unsympathetic media accounts of violent crime and unchecked corruption. Instead they seek the 'real' Papua New Guinea - traditionally oriented and reassuringly parochial - beyond its boundaries.In this book, experts from the fields of anthropology, ethnomusicology and human ecology seek to represent 'Mosbi' as Papua New Guineans experience it. They augment the urban focus of the book with knowledge of the rural societies from which the contemporary inhabitants come. Considering groups of migrants, long-term residents and the traditional landholders of the territory on which it has grown, the contributors offer intimately informed perspectives on the vibrant, dynamic, exciting, hybrid environment that is 'Mosbi'. They argue that it needs to be recognised as the real Papua New Guinea, and that its inhabitants need to be understood not as caricatures of unemployed criminals on the one hand and as corrupt elites on the other, but as modern Melanesians creatively adapting to the exigencies of urban living.
What happens to national HIV programmes when Science and Religion collide and when both ignore the setting of most infections: in or on the way to marriage?HIV and AIDS are serious social and public-health problems in Papua New Guinea. After long delays, community-, business- and faith-based organizations have launched an impressive multi-sectoral response. But health-service systems are overwhelmed by the need for HIV antibody testing and counselling, and for treatment with antiretrovirals. Foreign notions of epidemiology, such as 'sex worker', 'risk group' and 'rural/urban', have gained traction despite massive empirical evidence as to their inapplicability. Each of these has fuelled, rather than confronted, the gendered contradictions of marriage and sexuality in Papua New Guinea. Quantitative approaches have fetishized numbers at the expense of enabling changes in social-structure.Part One of Sin, Sex and Stigma draws upon ethnography, public discourse and archival data to critique public-health policy and epidemiological modelling. Christian-inflected sex-negativity and anti-condom rhetoric are shown to have stymied prevention initiatives. Part Two enlists experts in antiretroviral therapy, sex work activism and ethnography in dialogues focused on strengthening the national response to HIV and AIDS.'A "hot glow of anger" compelled Lawrence Hammar to write this fiery account of the many factors preventing successful HIV and AIDS interventions in Papua New Guinea. Drawing on his extensive research experience on sexuality and sex work, on cultural and Christian ideologies, and on outrageous stories of denial, abuse, and stigma, Hammar paints a rich and devastating portrait of the history of AIDS in PNG. Read it and weep. Lawrence Hammar is an inspiring reminder for AIDS scholars and activists everywhere of the differences committed social scientists can make to the way things are done.', Leslie Butt, Dept. of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Victoria
A beleaguered indigenous population came to the attention of the world in 1997 by threatening mass suicide in a last-ditch attempt to protect their ancestral lands (overlying possible oil deposits) from invasion by outsiders.The U'wa (formerly known as the Tunebo) - a Chibchan-speaking group living on the eastern slopes of the Andes in NE Colombia - are documented in Ann Osborn's pioneering study, here published in English for the first time. She introduces us to the U'wa on their own terms, enabling us to understand them from their own perspective, to place them squarely within the unique ecological setting that is a fundamental part of their being and to appreciate what might motivate them to contemplate such drastic action in the face of an external threat.The life-sustaining annual round of ceremonies described here were undertaken not only for themselves but also on behalf of outsiders: 'If we did not chant, the world would wear out ... it would come down ... we chant for the Whites as well, so that they can continue living in their world...'The contrast between this philosophy and that of our oil-hungry world provides timely cause for reflection.
What happens to body arts when these aesthetic practices assume fresh significance in the context of modernity? In many parts of the indigenous world, the realm of body arts has become an arena for innovation, debate, revival and repression under the conditions of modernity. Among some groups, formerly suppressed 'traditions' of body arts have recently been revived. Elsewhere, body arts have been the means for creating or renovating identities in response to a developing international tourist market and in the light of novel technologies of representation, such as photography and film. The contributions to this volume draw together ideas emerging from the anthropology of the body, the western interest in body ornamentation of the 'Other', and the recent revival of specific body arts such as tattooing and piercing. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from Amazonia, Indonesia, Africa, Melanesia and Polynesia, this volume shows how bodily presentation plays a fundamental role in contemporary identity politics in tension with encompassing national and global stereotypes, which may in turn both constrain andempower local traditions.
This rich account of potters in a southern Catalan village traces the history of pottery production and marketing and the responses of the potters to changing contexts of consumption. By juxtaposing the local, micro-history of a small group of producers (numbering no more than fifty people) with that of Spain's changing economic and social climate, the author presents a local perspective of producers as affected by and acting upon global developments, ultimately localizing the European transition to one single integrated market economy.Maintaining a dual focus on subject and object, and thereby combining social and material history, this book demonstrates how physical transformations in the pottery resulted from and affected its role in the social relations people formed as they produced, marketed and consumed it.Rob van Veggel obtained his PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago and has since been applying his insights into material culture in product development research, marketing, brand strategy and governmental policies.
The importance and ramifications of saints, sainthood and pilgrimage in contemporary Iran and neighbouring countries are great, yet the academic conceptualizations of them and their entailments are sorely lacking. This book places the saints and their pilgrims in sharper focus, and offers important correctives to all-too-common Western misunderstandings, the foremost of which is the erroneous portrayal of Islam as primarily a body of legal doctrine and corresponding practice, and the associated principle that we can 'know' Islam if we 'know' Islamic law. In an effort to challenge such a limited, and limiting, perspective, this volume suggests that both anthropology, insofar as it can focus on experience and practice, and history, insofar as it can encompass more than an institutional/political 'names and dates' discourse, can reveal something of the dynamism of the faith, as more than the sum of its laws. The approaches demonstrated in this book on Shiite Pilgrimage offer windows into the beliefs and lives of 'ordinary' people, past and present, and thereby bring forth agendas akin to those of 'subaltern studies'. Finally, the memorializing documented in these chapters provides evidence, past and present, of widespread desires for a more concrete, even immanent, relationship that is direct, unmediated and, at least partly, involves forms of intercession - even though such desires for immanence in the Islamic world have previously been considered as limited to devotees of the Sufi saints or the Shi'i Imams or their progeny.
Covers anthropology, Africa, Congo, kinship, kingship, and ritual.
Provides an insight into the effects of mining and other forms of resource extraction upon the indigenous peoples of Australia and Papua New Guinea. The text offers a focus on indigenous cosmologies and their articulation or disjunction with the forces of "development", based on fieldwork with the people concerned,
Gives a vital and unique insight into the effects of mining and other forms of resource extraction upon the indigenous peoples of Australa and Papua New Guinea. Based on extensive fieldwork with the peoples concerned, it offers a comparative focus on indigenous cosmologies and their articulation or disjunction. Authors from RSPAS, ANU.
The state is frequently conceived as a universal, although one apparently extraordinarily difficult to define. It often appears in academic discourse and, especially, in the popular imagination as an abstraction, usually nebulous, grasped as pervasive - a spectre to be feared. In this book, distinguished scholars from around the world take issue with this purported universality, exploring alternative imaginings of the state, of power and of global processes at the margins. Taking an anthropological perspective based in diverse ethnographic contexts outside Europe and North America, if not beyond their controlling influence in globalizing realities, this volume reveals different complexes of power, as well as processes that are external to power and often against it (contra Foucault, and as Pierre Clastres has famously argued). The authors stress not only the different structures of institutional power, but also the persistence or transmutation of local kinds of power and their relevant cosmologies into contemporary globalized settings. They find innovative kinds of modernity, reconfigurations that have effects that cannot be reduced to over-generalized and often intensely Eurocentric concepts of power and the kinds of subjectivities realized by them. In this, the volume opens up the diversity of experiences of the state and offers new directions for its study.
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