Kago, Kastom and Kalja

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Publisher : Pacific-Credo Publications
ISBN 13 : 9782953748512
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (485 download)

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Book Synopsis Kago, Kastom and Kalja by : Marc Tabani

Download or read book Kago, Kastom and Kalja written by Marc Tabani and published by Pacific-Credo Publications. This book was released on 2013 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume, bringing together six ethnographic papers and an epilogue first presented at ASAO sessions in 2009 (Santa Cruz) and 2010 Alexandria), includes a wealth of ethnographic and historical information on a topic of enduring interest in Pacific studies and anthropology: cargo cults. These fascinating social phenomena undoubtedly have ongoing relevance for ethnographies of Melanesia. In this collection of papers, we learn about the history of the concept itself as well as how contemporary movements articulate world views, political awareness, material desires and even criticism of the now globalized concept of cargo cult itself. The chapters offer remarkable stories of cult activities and interesting arguments about the entanglement of Western desire for both cargo and cults with these Melanesian visions of how to create a prosperous future for themselves.

Cargo, Cult, and Culture Critique

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Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
ISBN 13 : 9780824828516
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (285 download)

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Book Synopsis Cargo, Cult, and Culture Critique by : Holger Jebens

Download or read book Cargo, Cult, and Culture Critique written by Holger Jebens and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2004-09-30 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cargo cults have long exerted a remarkable attraction on Westerners, and the last decade has seen the publication of much new work on the subject. This collection of original essays is based on fieldwork in Melanesia, Fiji, Australia, and Indonesia by scholars who are influential in the contemporary debate on cargo. Conceived as a reader for undergraduate and graduate courses, the volume offers an up-to-date view of the subject and the debates it arouses among contemporary anthropologists. Some contributors plead for the abolition of "cargo" because of its troublesome implications, but also because, in the authors’ view, cargo cults do not exist as identifiable objects of study. Others argue that it is precisely this troublesome nature that makes the term a useful analytical tool that should be welcomed rather than rejected. By delineating and substantiating key issues and positions in this lively and ongoing debate, this volume underscores and refines the contemporary reevaluation of cargo cults. Scholars of the Pacific region and others interested in new religious movements should find this volume both enlightening and compelling. Contributors: Nils Bubandt, Vincent Crapanzano, Douglas M. Dalton, Elfriede Hermann, Holger Jebens, Martha Kaplan, Karl-Heinz Kohl, Stephen C. Leavitt, Lamont Lindstrom, Ton Otto, Joel Robbins, Jaap Timmer, Robert Tonkinson.

Fast Money Schemes

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Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253035635
Total Pages : 266 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (53 download)

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Book Synopsis Fast Money Schemes by : John Cox

Download or read book Fast Money Schemes written by John Cox and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 1990s and early 2000s a wave of Ponzi schemes swept through Papua New Guinea, Australia, and the Solomon Islands. The most notorious scheme, U-Vistract, attracted many thousands of investors, enticing them with promises of 100 percent interest to be paid monthly. Its founder, Noah Musingku, was a charismatic leader who promoted the scheme as a form of Christian mission and as the basis for establishing an independent kingdom. Fast Money Schemes uses in-depth interviews with investors, newspaper accounts, and participant observation to understand the scheme's appeal from the point of view of those who invested and lost, showing that organizers and investors alike understood the scheme as a way of accessing and participating in a global economy. John Cox delivers a "post-village" ethnography that gives insight into the lives of urban, middle-class Papua New Guineans, a group that is not familiar to US readers and that has seldom been a focus of anthropological interest. The book's concern with understanding the interweaving of morality, finance, and aspirations shared by a global cosmopolitan middle class has wide resonance beyond studies of Papua New Guinea and anthropology.

A New Bislama Dictionary

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Publisher : [email protected]
ISBN 13 : 9789820203624
Total Pages : 460 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (36 download)

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Book Synopsis A New Bislama Dictionary by : Terry Crowley

Download or read book A New Bislama Dictionary written by Terry Crowley and published by [email protected]. This book was released on 2003 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A new Bislama dictionary is a substantially updated version of the first edition, which reflects the ever-changing vocabulary of Bislama, the national language of Vanuatu."--Back cover.

Like Fire

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Publisher : ANU Press
ISBN 13 : 1760464252
Total Pages : 560 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (64 download)

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Book Synopsis Like Fire by : Theodore Schwartz

Download or read book Like Fire written by Theodore Schwartz and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2021-07-01 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like Fire chronicles an indigenous movement for radical change in Papua New Guinea from 1946 to the present. The movement’s founder, Paliau Maloat, promoted a program for step-by-step social change in which many of his followers also found hope for a miraculous millenarian transformation. Drawing on data collected over several decades, Theodore Schwartz and Michael French Smith describe the movement’s history, Paliau’s transformation from secular reformer and politician to Melanesian Jesus, and the development of the current incarnation of the movement as Wind Nation, a fully millenarian endeavour. Their analysis casts doubt on common ways of understanding a characteristically Melanesian form of millenarianism, the cargo cult, and questions widely accepted ways of interpreting millenarianism in general. They show that to understand the human proclivity for millenarianism we must scrutinise more closely two near-universal human tendencies: difficulty accepting the role of chance or impersonal forces in shaping events (that is, the tendency to personify causation), and a tendency to imagine that one or one’s group is the focus of the malign or benign attention of purposeful entities, from the local to the cosmic. Schwartz and Smith discuss the prevalence of millenarianism and warn against romanticising it, because the millenarian mind can subvert rationality and nourish rage and fear even as it seeks transcendence. ‘Like Fire consummates remarkable longitudinal ethnographic research on the Paliau Movement in Papua New Guinea, pursued from the 1950s into the 1990s by Theodore Schwartz, with Michael French Smith as his sometime assistant, and updated by Smith in 2015. The theoretical arguments are highly provocative and the book is well written and fascinating throughout. Like Fire poses important questions about the driving forces and contours of Pacific Island history and the place in it of cargo cults and other millenarian movements.’ —Aletta Biersack, Professor Emerita, University of Oregon ‘Like Fire synthesises old, but inaccessible, and new material on an important and long-lasting indigenous Melanesian movement, while making extensive use of the wider literature on cargo cults and millenarianism. I find the theorising in this book both very original and an important contribution to the debates on Melanesian religion, cargo cults, and millenarianism more generally. As the authors state, the topic of millenarianism has great relevance because of its ubiquity in the contemporary world.’ —Ton Otto, Professor of Anthropology, Aarhus University, Denmark, and James Cook University, Australia

Emergent Masculinities in the Pacific

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351850474
Total Pages : 275 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (518 download)

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Book Synopsis Emergent Masculinities in the Pacific by : Aletta Biersack

Download or read book Emergent Masculinities in the Pacific written by Aletta Biersack and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-11 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emergent Masculinities in the Pacific focuses on the plasticity and contingent nature of Pacific Island masculinities over the course of colonial and postcolonial histories. The several case histories concern the use of sports to recuperate but also refashion past masculinities in the name of contemporary masculine pride; the effects of market participation on younger males; how urbanisation and migration set the stage for experimenting with male gender and sexuality; the impacts of military and labour histories on local masculinities; masculinity and violence in war and gender violence; and structural violence and disruptions in male gender identity. Depicting contemporary Pacific Island societies as a space of gender invention and pluralism as indigenous gender regimes respond to the stimulations of transnational flows, the book asks a key historical question: Do emergent masculinities signal a rupture, or some continuity with, past masculinities? This book was originally published as a special double issue of The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology.

The Melanesian World

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 131552967X
Total Pages : 676 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (155 download)

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Book Synopsis The Melanesian World by : Eric Hirsch

Download or read book The Melanesian World written by Eric Hirsch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-28 with total page 676 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging volume captures the diverse range of societies and experiences that form what has come to be known as Melanesia. It covers prehistoric, historic and contemporary issues, and includes work by art historians, political scientists, geographers and anthropologists. The chapters range from studies of subsistence, ritual and ceremonial exchange to accounts of state violence, new media and climate change. The ‘Melanesian world’ assembled here raises questions that cut to the heart of debates in the human sciences today, with profound implications for the ways in which scholars across disciplines can describe and understand human difference. This impressive collection of essays represents a valuable resource for scholars and students alike.

Fire on the Island

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Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 1800734654
Total Pages : 239 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis Fire on the Island by : Tom Bratrud

Download or read book Fire on the Island written by Tom Bratrud and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2022-04-08 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2014, the island of Ahamb in Vanuatu became the scene of a startling Christian revival movement led by thirty children with ‘spiritual vision’. However, it ended dramatically when two men believed to be sorcerers and responsible for much of the society’s problems were hung by persons fearing for the island’s future security. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork on Ahamb between 2010 and 2017, this book investigates how upheavals like the Ahamb revival can emerge to address and sometimes resolve social problems, but also carry risks of exacerbating the same problems they arise to address.

The Absent Presence of the State in Large-Scale Resource Extraction Projects

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Author :
Publisher : ANU Press
ISBN 13 : 176046449X
Total Pages : 380 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (64 download)

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Book Synopsis The Absent Presence of the State in Large-Scale Resource Extraction Projects by : Nicholas A. Bainton

Download or read book The Absent Presence of the State in Large-Scale Resource Extraction Projects written by Nicholas A. Bainton and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Standing on the broken ground of resource extraction settings, the state is sometimes like a chimera: its appearance and intentions are misleading and, for some actors, it is unknowable and incomprehensible. It may be easily mistaken for someone or something else, like a mining company, for example. With rich ethnographic material, this volume tackles critical questions about the nature of contemporary states, studied from the perspective of resource extraction projects in Papua New Guinea, Australia and beyond. It brings together a sustained focus on the unstable and often dialectical relationship between the presence and the absence of the state in the context of resource extraction. Across the chapters, contributors discuss cases of proposed mining ventures, existing large-scale mining operations and the extraction of natural gas. Together, they illustrate how the concept of absent presence can be brought to life and how it can enhance our understanding of the state as well as relations and processes forming in extractive contexts, thus providing a novel contribution to the anthropology of the state and the anthropology of extraction. ‘The Absent Presence fills a major gap in our knowledge about the relationship between states and companies – at a time when resource extraction seems to be more contested than ever. Bainton and Skrzypek have curated an incredibly impressive volume that should be read by all those interested in exploring corporate and state power, and the ever-present impacts of extraction. A highly recommended read.’ — Professor Deanna Kemp, Director of the Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining, The University of Queensland ‘Countless books have been written on the sovereign state and how it imposes a particular kind of order on economic and social interactions. What is original and compelling about this collection is the portrait of how two very different states converge when it comes to “extractive ventures”. From the presumption of exclusive sovereignty over mineral resources, to the bargains that are struck with major (often global) corporations, and the relative indifference to environmental impacts, there is a remarkable consistency in the patterns that are referred to as “state effects”. These effects are brought from the background to the foreground in this book through the blending of creative and critical thinking with detailed empirical research.’ — Tim Dunne, Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Professor of International Relations, The University of Queensland ‘This brilliant and intriguing title provides a timely contribution to understanding the actual functions and strategies of state (and state-like) institutions in resource arenas. The dialectics of presence-absence and its refractions at different levels and scales of government allow the authors to go beyond stereotypes about the (strong, weak, failed or corrupt) state, highlighting more commonalities than expected between Papua New Guinea and Australia, and even New Caledonia.’ — Dr Pierre-Yves Le Meur, Anthropologist, Senior Researcher, French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development, Joint Research Unit SENS (Knowledge Environment Society)

Cultural Keywords in Discourse

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Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 902726547X
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (272 download)

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Book Synopsis Cultural Keywords in Discourse by : Carsten Levisen

Download or read book Cultural Keywords in Discourse written by Carsten Levisen and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2017-10-15 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultural keywords are words around which whole discourses are organised. They are culturally revealing, difficult to translate and semantically diverse. They capture how speakers have paid attention to the worlds they live in and embody socially recognised ways of thinking and feeling. The book contributes to a global turn in cultural keyword studies by exploring keywords from discourse communities in Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong, Japan, Melanesia, Mexico and Scandinavia. Providing new case studies, the volume showcases the diversity of ways in which cultural logics form and shape discourse. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach is used as a unifying framework for the studies. This approach offers an attractive methodology for doing explorative discourse analysis on emic and culturally-sensitive grounds. Cultural Keywords in Discourse will be of interest to researchers and students of semantics, pragmatics, cultural discourse studies, linguistic ethnography and intercultural communication.

Cargo Cult

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Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
ISBN 13 : 0824878957
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (248 download)

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Book Synopsis Cargo Cult by : Lamont Lindstrom

Download or read book Cargo Cult written by Lamont Lindstrom and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-03-31 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who is not captivated by tales of Islanders earnestly scanning their watery horizons for great fleets of cargo ships bringing rice, radios and refrigerators - ships that will never arrive? Of all the stories spun about the island peoples of Melanesia, tales of cargo cult are among the most fascinating. The term cargo cult, Lamont Lindstrom contends, is one of anthropology's most successful conceptual offspring. Like culture, worldview and ethnicity, its usage has steadily proliferated, migrating into popular culture where today it is used to describe an astonishing roll-call of people. It's history makes for lively and compelling reading. The cargo cult story, Lindstrom shows, is more significant than it at first appears, for it recapitulates in summary form three generations of anthropological theory and Pacific studies. Although anthropologists' enthusiasm for the notion of cargo cult has waned, it now colors outsiders' understanding of Melanesian culture, and even Melanesians' perceptions of themselves. The repercussions for contemporary Islanders are significant: leaders of more than one political movement have felt the need to deny that they are any kind of cargo cultist. Of particular interest to this history is Lindstom's argument that accounts of cargo cult are at heart tragedies of thwarted desire, melancholy anticipation and crazy unrequited love. He makes a convincing case that these stories expose powerful Western scenarios of desire itself—giving cargo cult its combined titillation of the fascinating exotic and the comfortably familiar.

Violence and Religious Change in the Pacific Islands

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1009089021
Total Pages : 160 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (9 download)

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Book Synopsis Violence and Religious Change in the Pacific Islands by : Garry Trompf

Download or read book Violence and Religious Change in the Pacific Islands written by Garry Trompf and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-31 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Element considers patterns of violent behaviour among the inhabitants of the Pacific Islands while their vast region has been undergoing religious change, overwhelmingly toward Christianity. Major topics researched are religion-based violent reactions to early intruders (including missionaries); new religious movements resisting unwanted interference (including 'cargo cults'); anti-colonial rebellions inspired by spiritual impetuses both indigenous and introduced; and the persistence of traditional modes of violence (tribal fighting, sorcery and tough punishments) adapted to altered conditions.

Postcolonial Semantics

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Author :
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 311133743X
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (113 download)

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Book Synopsis Postcolonial Semantics by : Carsten Levisen

Download or read book Postcolonial Semantics written by Carsten Levisen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Neither Cargo Nor Cult

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Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780822315933
Total Pages : 252 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (159 download)

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Book Synopsis Neither Cargo Nor Cult by : Martha Kaplan

Download or read book Neither Cargo Nor Cult written by Martha Kaplan and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1995-06-15 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1880s an oracle priest, Navosavakadua, mobilized Fijians of the hinterlands against the encroachment of both Fijian chiefs and British colonizers. British officials called the movement the Tuka cult, imagining it as a contagious superstition that had to be stopped. Navosavakadua and many of his followers, deemed "dangerous and disaffected natives," were exiled. Scholars have since made Tuka the standard example of the Pacific cargo cult, describing it as a millenarian movement in which dispossessed islanders sought Western goods by magical means. In this study of colonial and postcolonial Fiji, Martha Kaplan examines the effects of narratives made real and traces a complex history that began neither as a search for cargo, nor as a cult. Engaging Fijian oral history and texts as well as colonial records, Kaplan resituates Tuka in the flow of indigenous Fijian history-making and rereads the archives for an ethnography of British colonizing power. Proposing neither unchanging indigenous culture nor the inevitable hegemony of colonial power, she describes the dialogic relationship between plural, contesting, and changing articulations of both Fijian and colonial culture. A remarkable enthnographic account of power and meaning, Neither Cargo nor Cult addresses compelling questions within anthropological theory. It will attract a wide audience among those interested in colonial and postcolonial societies, ritual and religious movements, hegemony and resistance, and the Pacific Islands.

Unequal Lives

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Publisher : ANU Press
ISBN 13 : 1760464112
Total Pages : 580 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (64 download)

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Book Synopsis Unequal Lives by : Nicholas A. Bainton

Download or read book Unequal Lives written by Nicholas A. Bainton and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2021-01-18 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As we move further into the twenty-first century, we are witnessing both the global extensification and local intensification of inequality. Unequal Lives deals with the particular dilemmas of inequality in the Western Pacific. The authors focus on four dimensions of inequality: the familiar triad of gender, race and class, and the often-neglected dimension of generation. Grounded in meticulous long-term ethnographic enquiry and deep awareness of the historical contingency of these configurations of inequality, this volume illustrates the multidimensional, multiscale and epistemic nature of contemporary inequality. This collection is a major contribution to academic and political debates about the perverse effects of inequality, which now ranks among the greatest challenges of our time. The inspiration for this volume derives from the breadth and depth of Martha Macintyre’s remarkable scholarship. The contributors celebrate Macintyre’s groundbreaking work, which exemplifies the explanatory power, ethical force and pragmatism that ensures the relevance of anthropological research to the lives of others and to understanding the global condition. ‘Unequal Lives is an impressive collection by Melanesianist anthropologists with reputations for theoretical sophistication, ethnographic imagination and persuasive writing. It brilliantly illuminates all aspects of the multifaceted scholarship of Martha Macintyre, whose life and teaching are also highlighted in the commentaries, tributes and interview included in the volume.’ — Robert J. Foster, Professor of Anthropology and Visual and Cultural Studies, Richard L. Turner Professor of Humanities, University of Rochester ‘Inspired by Martha Macintyre’s work, the contributors to Unequal Lives show that to theorise inequality is a measured project, one that requires rescaling its exercise over several decades in order to recognise the reality of inequality as it is known in social relations and to document it critically, unravelling their own readiness to misjudge what they see from the lives that are lived by the people with whom they have lived and studied. This fine volume shows how the ordinariness of everyday work and care can be a chimera wherein the apparent reality of inequality might mislead less critical reports to obscure its very account. From reading it, we learn that such unrelenting questioning of what makes lives unequal becomes the very analytic for better understanding lives as they are lived.’ — Karen M. Sykes, Professor of Anthropology, University of Manchester

Tides of Innovation in Oceania

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Publisher : ANU Press
ISBN 13 : 1760460931
Total Pages : 365 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (64 download)

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Book Synopsis Tides of Innovation in Oceania by : Elisabetta Gnecchi-Ruscone

Download or read book Tides of Innovation in Oceania written by Elisabetta Gnecchi-Ruscone and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2017-04-07 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tides of Innovation in Oceania is directly inspired by Epeli Hau‘ofa’s vision of the Pacific as a ‘Sea of Islands’; the image of tides recalls the cyclical movement of waves, with its unpredictable consequences. The authors propose tides of innovation as a fluid concept, unbound and open to many directions. This perspective is explored through ethnographic case studies centred on deeply elaborated analyses of locally inflected agencies involved in different transforming contexts. Three interwoven themes—value, materiality and place—provide a common thread.

Frontier Encounters

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Author :
Publisher : Open Book Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1906924872
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (69 download)

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Book Synopsis Frontier Encounters by : Franck Billé

Download or read book Frontier Encounters written by Franck Billé and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2012-08-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China and Russia are rising economic and political powers that share thousands of miles of border. Despite their proximity, their interactions with each other - and with their third neighbour Mongolia - are rarely discussed. Although the three countries share a boundary, their traditions, languages and worldviews are remarkably different. Frontier Encounters presents a wide range of views on how the borders between these unique countries are enacted, produced, and crossed. It sheds light on global uncertainties: China's search for energy resources and the employment of its huge population, Russia's fear of Chinese migration, and the precarious independence of Mongolia as its neighbours negotiate to extract its plentiful resources. Bringing together anthropologists, sociologists and economists, this timely collection of essays offers new perspectives on an area that is currently of enormous economic, strategic and geo-political relevance.