In 1928 in Tikopia Firth made a collection he saw as a scientific record of a culture. Bonshek revisits the objects' documentation & ethnography to highlight the social relations the collecting process illuminates and to acknowledge Tikopia voices. She charts its later role in museums in the transmission of "cultural heritage" between generations.
Focusing on attempts by elites over three generations to gain distinction in public life in the urban setting of a mid-range town, this book illuminates public debates on education, aspirations of youth, state and citizen, delivery of good government and the place of ethnic and settler minorities in post-apartheid southern Africa.
An acclaimed ethnography of the material culture of the Wola Papua New Guinea, of broad implications to anthropology, museology & archaeology, with numerous illustrations, showing the making of the everyday artefacts by those who will use them in an economy with egalitarian access to resources. The companion volume to Built in Niugini.
In investigating both customary and modern Pacific art, these collected essays present a wide-ranging view across time and space, taking the reader from antiquities to contemporary art and travelling across the region from Australia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, New Zealand to Samoa. Studies of artefacts and traditions, such as self-portraiture, wood carvings, shields, tapa, dance and masks, use a variety of approaches, some deriving from museum studies while others are based on field investigation. Together they reveal the oppositional tensions between tradition and innovation, and the inspiration this provides for contemporary artistic practice, either through conscious implementation or through rejection of past definitions. Engagement with these cultural performances and objects provide new possibilities for the creation of current identities. The drafting of antiquities legislation, the tortuous journeys objects have taken to find a place in galleries, the use of exhibitions in cultural exchange, framed by the architecture of museums, as well as the role of film and photography in appropriating Pacific art culture for emerging nationalisms, all of these are considered here to enhance our understanding of indigenous art's place in the world today. These historical perspectives provide the framework in which to explore contemporary acquisition and outreach work with Pacific communities that seeks to reconnect people with objects taken away from the places and intentions of their makers. Questions of how identity is maintained and expressed through art are considered for both individuals and groups. What role does the transformations of objects play in this process? What impacts have been made by colonialism, modernism and the great migrations of people between Pacific countries, and from rural to urban environments? Ultimately, how is 'Pacific Islander' defined and by whom?In Repositioning Pacific Art, artists, curators and academics, including Maori and other Islanders, bring fresh approaches to Oceanic Art History and raise questions of relevance not only to scholars of indigenous art in the region but also in other parts of world.
Sketches and local legends are interwoven in this travelogue, on the Ethiopian Central Highlands, exploring the Portuguese architectural legacy, near ruins now but with echoes of its lost splendour still remaining in the Amhara oral tradition. This book perfectly illustrates and illuminates how drawing can play a more active part in ethnography.
Essays examine the influence of Levi-Strauss, debates on anthropology's place within French culture, the readiness of French anthropologists to combine an interest in public life and philosophy with anthropology, French approaches to the dilemmas of practising in a globalized world, and the shifting relationship between anthropology and museums.
Offering an alternative to cult-centred accounts, this book looks at the relationships between Afro-Cuban traditions and indeed goes beyond 'traditions' to place the focus on creativity as an embedded logic in everyday religious practice.
In an analysis of the increasing use of copyright law, literary, anthropological & legal experts explore, from a local African point of view, what happens to intangible cultural goods when they are confronted with large-scale commodification, distributed through media, and defined by globalized & divergent judicial systems & cultural norms.
At the centre of this collection are the actors and processes referred to by the distinguished Oceania thinker and visionary Epeli Hau'ofa as 'ordinary people ... who, because of the poor flows of benefits from the top, scepticism about stated policies and the like, tend to plan and make decisions about their lives independently, sometimes with surprising and dramatic results that go unnoticed or ignored at the top'. The contributors explore innovative social, cultural and political responses to global processes as they influence and unfold in a range of Pacific locations - with a major focus on Island Melanesia and a further range of contributions on Palau, Pohnpei, Rotuma and Australia. A multidisciplinary group, including a number of Pacific Islanders, the authorspresent contemporary connections between expanding perceptions of cultural heritage and the emergence of new political forms, in the context of challenges posed by the global political economy. At issue in the volume are viable local Pacific alternatives to the institutions and practices commonly advocated in development discourse, but difficult to implement in Pacific settings.Pacific Alternatives provides fresh perspectives on the ways that cultural heritage serves as a unique source of engaging the modern state and global non-state actors. The volume showcases two of the strongest features of contemporary Pacific Studies scholarship: the ability to find new insights in experience-near analyses of Islander life that have world-enlarging potentials, and the foregrounding of Indigenous voices in the evolving dialogue around land, politics, culture, tradition, custom, and identity. Ty K¿wika Tengan - Professor of Anthropology & Chair of the Dept. of Ethnic Studies,University of Hawai'i
This book takes as its subject 'embedded ethnographies', that is, writings about other cultures that are embedded in works before anthroplogy as a discipline emerged in 19C. These range from the Homeric epic to texts of the Enlightenment and beyond, with a strong focus on the response to the discovery of the Americas in 16C.
This books reflects on sites such as shrines, monasteries or a revered mountain, cave or tree, shared by more than one religion in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Brazil. It explores how their multiple meanings, inherent ambiguity and shared rituals, transcending the confines of orthodoxy, may contribute to their power for the pilgrim.
In this volume Massimo Canevacci draws on ethnographic fieldworkcarried out together with Bororo of the Mato Grosso (Brazil), in particular Kleber Meritororeu, to examine the tensions, conflicts and exchanges between transformation and tradition. The practical as well as political keyword in his approach is self-representation. From this follows the incorporation of Bororo subjectivities into the text, and the focus on the emotional, philosophical and sacred aspects of their famous funeral ritual, in which their status as bothperformers and the interpreters is emphasized by their use of the digital camera.The book takes its name from the line of dust laid down by a mestre dos cantos (master of chants), José Carlos Kuguri, between the anthropologist and himself: both a representation of an immaterial boundary, and a syncretic challenge to understand the transfiguration from a dead individual corpse to a livingancestral skull, an arara. Canevacci's answer is an assemblage of different narratives, in which an 'astonished' methodology of sensorial concepts, emotional photos and innovative logics traverses the entire Bororo funeral. He finds there is no dualism to life and death for the Bororo, but rather a porous, continuous transit and mixing of body and corpse, of humans and animals,of plants and deities; and that their sacred cosmology is time and again created and recreated via their wailing songs and circular dances, skin scarifications and bone painting. Their rituals are no mere repetition of tradition. They are also an attempt to respond to the changes inside and outside their aldeia (village), and to reenact their shifting cultures, subjectivities and identities.Massimo Canevacci is Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Digital Arts and Culture at the University of Rome 'La Sapienza' and Visiting Professor at the Institute of Advanced Study of the University São Paulo (IEA-USP). In 1995 he received 'The National Order of the Cruzeiro do Sul' (Southern Cross) from the President of the Federal Republic of Brazil for his research.
Why has Asmat art, from a remote and small south-coast West Papuan society, had such a significant and prolonged impact on the world stage? This book explores the way major collections were made and examines the motivations of the collectors, their relationships with those from whom they purchased and the circumstances of the exchange. It also considers the involvement of artists and film-makers, anthropologists, representatives of the civil authorities and missionaries. Asmat artists have maintained their unique appeal through constant stylistic innovation and by engagement with new publics, both locally and internationally,as exemplified by the recent displays of women's weaving alongside the men's carved wooden shields, drums and figures. Despite accelerating social changes, Asmat art continues to thrive as a compelling and transformative Melanesian presence in the global art world.'Awe-inspiring works of Asmat art loom large in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and in dozens of other great museums around the world. Nick Stanley's engagingly written study provides the best history to date of the making of Asmat art traditions and of their avid acquisition by successive European and north American collectors. Most importantly, the book foregrounds the creativity and imagination of Asmat artists themselves. This is a book that will be welcomed by everyone interested in the arts of the Pacific.'Nicholas Thomas, University of Cambridge
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.'With a backward glance at earlier predictions of the demise of anthropology, the essays present a confident account of the future of the discipline. Defining in clear terms what it is that anthropologists do, a well-chosen group of distinguished contributors confront the diversity and internal distinctions that characterize the field, weigh the seriousness of the trend toward interdisciplinary studies in the human sciences, and redefine the strengths of the anthropological mode of knowledge production'.(Shirley Lindenbaum, Professor Emerita, City University of New York)
A book of drawings compiled by an anthropologist studying ceremonial canoes of Kitawa, including drawings by Kitawan master carvers, his own sketches from museums and the field, also those of an architect and an artist in Italy who responded to these works with their own drawings of the canoe prowboard and its relations to the Nautilus shell.
A biography of a teacher, charity leader, activist and guardian of extended family who lived through changes from colonialism to independence, socialism to neoliberalism, and local Swahili Islam to a more globalized form. Showing how historical processes impacted on Mikidadi, this counters recent rewritings of Tanzania's post-colonial history.
Occasional Paper No. 44 of the Royal Anthropological InstitutePublished in association with the Anglo-Finnish SocietyWestermarck was a remarkable man, but one who has received little credit for the significant part he played in the creation of modern anthropology. He spanned two worlds: the comparative anthropological endeavours of the nineteenth century, and the establishment of social anthropology at the LSE, in which he played a major role. One of Malinowski's principal teachers, he was himself an outstanding fieldworker. His work on Morocco has, even today, hardly been surpassed. Yet, his theories on the nature of human marriage and the origins of the incest taboo place him firmly in the earlier, generalist camp, and the controversies to which they have given rise have hardly settled down to this day.In this volume, Westermarck's place in anthropology is discussed, along with detailed descriptions of his very active academic life in Finland and in Britain, whilst other chapters consider his equally pioneering writings in morals and ethics. Westermarck's own writings are featured by way of illustration of his ideas, including his LSE inaugural lecture, his Huxley lecture, and a hitherto unpublished paper on ritual and survivals. This volume shows, indeed, that Westermarck is a 'missing link' in today's history of anthropology, and our understanding of that history will be profoundly changed by a better appreciation of his role within it.
In this book, Marcio Goldman provides an interpretation of a 'big' theme - the functioning of a modern political system - based on the ethnographic analysis of a 'small' one - the political involvement of a group of African-Brazilian people living in the town of Ilheus in the north-east of Brazil, and belonging to Afro-Brazilian religions, black movement factions, families and neighbourhoods. By giving a description 'from the native's point of view' he leads us to a truly anthropological perception of modern democracies, showing how we need to take seriously the actions and the reflections of those generally viewed as passive, manipulated, ignorant and not really interested in the political game. Only this can lead us to an 'ethnographic theory of politics' A ground-breaking work of real importance - not only to the anthropology of politics, but to the continuing development of theory and epistemology in anthropology and the social sciences at large. - Prof. Christina Toren, University of St Andrews Goldman has masterfully analysed the terrain of politics in this town, illuminating not only its local specifics.... but what he calls the 'constitutive ambiguities' of democracy in Brazil - and indeed of democracy as a whole. In the process he robustly challenges various accepted wisdoms about poor people's political choices, gives new life to classic anthropological ideas like 'segmentation', and strips away the veil that, for many of us, obscures 'how democracy works'. He achieves this ambitious task with consummate skill, combining fine-grained detail with bold theoretical insight.- Prof. Deborah James, London School of EconomicsIf the intellectual contemplation of collectively instituted irrationality is what got anthropology going in the first place, then it must, at some point, address such entities as politicians, and why people vote for them. Read this book and learn. - Prof. Peter Gow, University of St Andrews
While the cinema of post-revolutionary Iran is internationally acknowledged, the world outside Iran has been ignorant of the Iranian war films that are the subject of this pioneering book. Over 200 Iranian feature films concentrating primarily on fighting and military operations have appeared since the 1980s and the beginning of the war between Iran and Iraq. This book presents a detailed exploration of the 'Sacred Defence cinema' established by Seyed Morteza Avini, a cinema that directly connects this war to the faith and religious belief of volunteer guardians of the revolution. These films remain the primary vehicles of the Islamic state in Iran for the preservation and memorization of the theme of martyrdom. As the distinguished film scholar, Hamid Dabashi writes in his Foreword to the book: 'If national cinemas are predicated on national traumas, in the volume that Pedram Khosronejad has put together we are at the heart of Iranian cinema.' "The eight-year Iran-Iraq war near the end of the 20th century renewed the horrors of the First World War near the start of the century - causing millions of casualties and untold devastation on both sides. It also resulted in a vigorous and dynamic cinematic output in Iran, producing some of the most ardent Islamist political movies, Shii-inflected spiritual films, and original theorization of what constitutes an 'Islamic cinema'. Khosronejad has managed to amass an astute and fascinating anthology - the first in English - that brings together an international roster of scholars to deal with the complexities and varieties of war fiction films, documentaries, television series and auteur directors."Prof. Hamid NaficyNorthwestern University
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, or marginal to, 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 intenselyEurocentric 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.
Medical Anthropology is an important field in anthropology. Serving as a guide to medical anthropology programmes in Europe, this book is designed for students who are looking for suitable training. It provides information on the doctoral research in various parts of Europe, and indicates different directions in medical anthropology.
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.
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