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Metamorphosis Of The Cassowaries
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Book Synopsis Metamorphosis of the Cassowaries by : Alfred Gell
Download or read book Metamorphosis of the Cassowaries written by Alfred Gell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-09 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this substantial book, Gell guides the reader systematically through an analysis of the social structure, language and ritual of the Umedia-Punda connubium of the West Sepik district. One of the central areas explored is the ida fertitility ritual and the decipherment and the unravelling of symbolic relationships between words of similar construction. One one side is the anaylsis on the temporal sequence of events (or ritual roles) metamorphosing the casswary (nature) into the 'new man' (culture) and the on other side, the associated 'harmonic levels' which allude to body painting, choreography and social status. His approach substantiates the view that the ritual is not so much about the establishing of linear causality in the relationship between a society and its environment, but with the 'an act of poetic legislation over the course of nature'.
Book Synopsis Society and the Dance by : Paul Spencer
Download or read book Society and the Dance written by Paul Spencer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting seven examples from Africa, Southeast Asia, Melanesia and Oceania, this study attempts to further the anthropological understanding of dance's social significance and critical relevance by exploring it as a reflection of social forces.
Book Synopsis The Cassowary's Revenge by : Donald Tuzin
Download or read book The Cassowary's Revenge written by Donald Tuzin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1997-09-02 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Donald Tuzin first studied the New Guinea village of Ilahita in 1972. When he returned many years later, he arrived in the aftermath of a startling event: the village’s men voluntarily destroyed their secret cult that had allowed them to dominate women for generations. The cult’s collapse indicated nothing less than the death of masculinity, and Tuzin examines the labyrinth of motives behind this improbable, self-devastating act. The villagers' mythic tradition provided a basis for this revenge of Woman upon the dominion of Man, and, remarkably, Tuzin himself became a principal figure in its narratives. The return of the magic-bearing "youngest brother" from America had been prophesied, and the villagers believed that Tuzin’s return "from the dead" signified a further need to destroy masculine traditions. The Cassowary's Revenge is an intimate account of how Ilahita’s men and women think, emote, dream, and explain themselves. Tuzin also explores how the death of masculinity in a remote society raises disturbing implications for gender relations in our own society. In this light Tuzin's book is about men and women in search of how to value one another, and in today's world there is no theme more universal or timely.
Book Synopsis The Metamorphoses of Kinship by : Maurice Godelier
Download or read book The Metamorphoses of Kinship written by Maurice Godelier and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2012-03-03 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With marriage in decline, divorce on the rise, the demise of the nuclear family, and the increase in marriages and adoptions among same-sex partners, it is clear that the structures of kinship in the modern West are in a state of flux. In The Metamorphoses of Kinship, the world-renowned anthropologist Maurice Godelier contextualizes these developments, surveying the accumulated experience of humanity with regard to such phenomena as the organization of lines of descent, sexuality and sexual prohibitions. In parallel, Godelier studies the evolution of Western conjugal and familial traditions from their roots in the nineteenth century to the present. The conclusion he draws is that it is never the case that a man and a woman are sufficient on their own to raise a child, and nowhere are relations of kinship or the family the keystone of society. Godelier argues that the changes of the last thirty years do not herald the disappearance or death agony of kinship, but rather its remarkable metamorphosis—one that, ironically, is bringing us closer to the “traditional” societies studied by ethnologists.
Book Synopsis The Anthropology of Time by : Alfred Gell
Download or read book The Anthropology of Time written by Alfred Gell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-10 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time - relentless, ever-present but intangible and the single element over which human beings have no absolute control - has long proved a puzzle. The author examines the phenomenon of time and asks such fascinating questions as how time impinges on people, to what extent our awareness of time is culturally conditioned, how societies deal with temporal problems and whether time can be considered a `resource' to be economized. More specifically, he provides a consistent and detailed analysis of theories put forward by a number of thinkers such as Durkheim, Evans-Pritchard, Lévi-Strauss, Geertz, Piaget, Husserl and Bourdieu. His discussion encompasses four main approaches in time research, namely developmental psychology, symbolic anthropology (covering the bulk of post-Durkheimian social anthropology) `economic' theories of time in social geography and, finally, phenomenological theories. The author concludes by presenting his own model of social/cognitive time, in the light of these critical discussions of the literature.
Book Synopsis The Art of Anthropology by : Alfred Gell
Download or read book The Art of Anthropology written by Alfred Gell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-20 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Art of Anthropology collects together the most influential of Gell's writings, which span the past two decades, with a new introductory chapter written by Gell. The essays vividly demonstrate Gell's theoretical and empirical interests and his distinctive contribution to several key areas of current anthropological enquiry. A central theme of the essays is Gel's highly original exploration of diagrammatic imagery as the site where social relations and cognitive processes converge and crystallise. Gell tracks this imagery across studies of tribal market transactions, dance forms, the iconicity of language and his most recent and groundbreaking analyses of artworks.Written with Gell's characteristic fluidity and grace and generously illustrated with Gell's original drawings and diagrams, the book will interest art historians, sociologists and geographers no less than anthropologists, challenging, as it does, established ideas about exchange, representation, aesthetics, cognition and spatial and temporal processes.
Book Synopsis Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics by : Jeremy Coote
Download or read book Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics written by Jeremy Coote and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The anthropology of art is a fast-developing area of intellectual debate and academic study. This beautifully illustrated volume is a unique survey of the current state of anthropological thinking on art and aesthetics. The distinguished contributors draw on contemporary anthropological theory and on classic anthropological topics such as myth and ritual to deepen our understanding of particular aesthetic traditions in their socio-cultural and historical contexts. Many of the essays present new findings based on recent field research in Australia, New Guinea, Indonesia, and Mexico; while others draw on classical anthropological accounts of the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia and the Nuer of the Southern Sudan to form new arguments and conclusions. The introductory overview of the history of the anthropology of art, by Sir Raymond Firth, makes this volume especially useful for those interested in learning what anthropology has to contribute to our understanding of art and aesthetics in general.
Book Synopsis Claude Lévi-Strauss by : Maurice Godelier
Download or read book Claude Lévi-Strauss written by Maurice Godelier and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the world’s leading anthropologists assesses the work of the founder of structural anthropology As a young man, Maurice Godelier was Claude Lévi-Strauss’s assistant. Since then, Godelier has drawn on this experience to develop a profound and intimate grasp on the writings of his former teacher, one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Meticulously researched, Lévi-Strauss: A Critical Study of His Thought will prove indispensable to students of Lévi-Strauss and to structural anthropologists more generally. It is a compelling and comprehensive study destined to become the definitive work on the evolution of Lévi-Strauss’s ideas, at the heart of which lies his analysis of kinship and myth.
Book Synopsis Ritual Passage, Sacred Journey by : Richard P. Werbner
Download or read book Ritual Passage, Sacred Journey written by Richard P. Werbner and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Those Who Play With Fire by : Henrietta Moore
Download or read book Those Who Play With Fire written by Henrietta Moore and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-20 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether initiating girls or healing cattle, bringing rain or protesting taxation, many in Africa share a vision of a world where the cultural, symbolic and cosmic categories of 'male' and 'female' serve, through ritual, to both reimagine and transform the world. Those Who Play With Fire introduces recent gender theory to the analysis of African ethnography, exploring the ways in which ideational gender categories permeate African systems of thought and ritual practices. Thus, the book provides a powerful framework with which to evaluate previous ethnographic material on Africa. In addition, Those Who Play With Fire presents a broad range of new case studies - of hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists and pastoralists - revealing the varied and complex ways in which African ideas and ideals of what it means to be 'male' and 'female' broadly inform and give meaning to a wide range of transformative rituals.
Book Synopsis On the Bones of the Serpent by : Debbora Battaglia
Download or read book On the Bones of the Serpent written by Debbora Battaglia and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1990-03 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sabarl island—created, in myth, from the bones of a serpent—is a coral atoll in the Louisiade archipelago of Papua New Guinea. The Sabarl speak of themselves as true "islanders": persons separated from the means of both physical and social survival. The Sabarl struggle for continuity—of the physical and social person and of social relations, of cultureal values, of paternal influence in a matrilineal society—is the subject of Debbora Battaglia's sensitive ethnography of loss and reconstruction: the first major work on cultural responses to mortality in the southern Massim culture area and an important contribution to studies of personhood in Melanesia. The creative focus of Sabarl cultural life is a series of mortuary feasts and rituals known as segaiya. In assembling and disassembling commemorative food and objects in segaiya exchanges, Sabarl also assemble and disassemble the critical social relations such objects stand for. These commemorative acts create a collective memory yet also a collective experience of forgetting social bonds that are of no future use to the living. Sabarl anticipate this disaggregation in patterns of everyday life, which reveal the importance of categorical distinctions mapped in beliefs about the physical and metaphysical person. Using remembrance and forgetting as an analytic lens, Battaglia is able to ask questions critical to understanding Melanesian social process. One of the "new ethnographies" addressing the limits of ethnographic representation and the fragmented nature of knowledge from an indigenous perspective, her finely wrought study explores the dynamics of cultural practices in which decontruction is integral to construction, allowing a new perspective on the ephermeral nature of sociality in Melanesia and new insight into the efficacy of cultural images more generally.
Book Synopsis Culture and History in the Pacific by : Jukka Siikala
Download or read book Culture and History in the Pacific written by Jukka Siikala and published by Helsinki University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-29 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Culture and History in the Pacific is a collection of essays originally published in 1990. The texts explore from different perspectives the question of culture as a repository of historical information. They also address broader questions of anthropological writing at the time, such as the relationship between anthropologists’ representations and local conceptions. This republication aims to make the book accessible to a wider audience, and in the region it discusses, Oceania. A new introductory essay has been included to contextualize the volume in relation to its historical setting, the end of the Cold War era, and to the present study of the Pacific and indigenous scholarship. The authors of Culture and History in the Pacific include prominent anthropologists of the Pacific, some of whom – Roger Keesing and Marilyn Strathern, to name but two – have also been influential in the anthropology of the late 20th and early 21st century in general.
Book Synopsis From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesia and Anthropology by : Bruce M. Knauft
Download or read book From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesia and Anthropology written by Bruce M. Knauft and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prominent scholar surveys the special place of Melanesia in our understanding of human cultural variation
Book Synopsis Religions of Melanesia by : Garry Trompf
Download or read book Religions of Melanesia written by Garry Trompf and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2006-09-30 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Melansia boasts over one-quarter of the world's distinct religions and presents the most complex religious panorama on earth. The region is famous for its unusual new religious movements that have adapted traditional beliefs to modernity in surprising ways. As the first bibliographical survey to comprehensively cover the entire region, Religions of Melanesia is an invaluable research aid for anyone interested in this growing field. Trompf's work is a complete listing of scholarly publications and provides readable and concise descriptions that will clearly guide the researcher toward the most relevant sources. This survey covers 2188 entries organized topically and regionally. Trompf covers such subjects as traditional and modern belief systems and the emergent indigenous Christianity that has taken root. Regional coverage includes Irian Jaya, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and Fiji.
Book Synopsis Time and Its Object by : Paolo Fortis
Download or read book Time and Its Object written by Paolo Fortis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the way objects and images relate to and shape notions of temporality and history. Bringing together ethnographic studies from the Lowlands of Central and South America and Melanesia, it explores the temporality inhering in images and artefacts from a comparative perspective. The chapters focus on how peoples in both regions ‘live in’ and ‘navigate’ time each through their distinctive systems of images and the processes and actions by which these come to be manifest in objects. With original theoretical and ethnographic contributions, the book is valuable reading for scholars interested in visual and material culture and in anthropological approaches to time.
Book Synopsis In the Shadow of the Palms by : Sophie Chao
Download or read book In the Shadow of the Palms written by Sophie Chao and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-02 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sophie Chao examines the multispecies entanglements of oil palm plantations in West Papua, Indonesia, showing how Indigenous Marind communities understand and navigate the social, political, and environmental demands of the oil palm plant.
Book Synopsis An Anthropology of Deep Time by : Richard D. G. Irvine
Download or read book An Anthropology of Deep Time written by Richard D. G. Irvine and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-28 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the face of debates about the Anthropocene - a geological epoch of our own making - and contemporary concerns about ecological crisis and the Sixth Mass Extinction, it is more important than ever to locate the timeframe of human activity within the deep time of planetary history. This path-breaking book is a timely critical review of the anthropology of time, exploring our human relationship with the timescale of geological formation. Richard D. G. Irvine shows how the time-horizons of social life are a matter of crucial concern, and lays bare the ways in which human activity becomes severed from the long-term geological and ecological rhythms on which it depends.
