Pacific Answers to Western Hegemony
Pacific Answers to Western Hegemony

Author: Jürg Wassmann

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-09-02

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1000323889

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The destruction of local identity through the relentless encroachment of a 'McDonald-ized' cultural imperialism is a global phenomenon. Yet the reactions of Pacific peoples to this Western hegemony are diverse and encourage the creation of independent cultural identities through sports and games, political mediations, tourism, media and filmmaking, and the struggles for land rights and titles, particularly in Australia.This book, based on extensive fieldwork, addresses a subject of great immediacy to peoples of the Pacific Island nations. It fills an important gap in existing ethnographic literature on the region and confidently navigates what had previously been considered uncharted, even unchartable, waters -- that wide sea between the classic ethnography of Oceania and contemporary anthropology's theoretical concerns with global relations and transnational cultures. Its breadth, rigour, and timely contribution to post-colonial politics in Oceania are certain to ensure that this book will provide an enduring contribution to the field.

Cultural Keywords in Discourse
Cultural Keywords in Discourse

Author: Carsten Levisen

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2017-10-15

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 902726547X

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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.

Religions of Melanesia
Religions of Melanesia

Author: Garry Trompf

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2006-09-30

Total Pages: 721

ISBN-13: 1567206662

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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.

The Genius of Kinship
The Genius of Kinship

Author: German Valentinovich Dziebel

Publisher: Cambria Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 568

ISBN-13: 1934043656

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Dziebel has doctorates in both history and anthropology and is currently both advisor to the Great Russian Encyclopedia and senior anthropologist at Crispin Porter + Bogusky advertising agency. His extremely dense work is actually three books in one. The first is a history of kinship studies from the early 19th century to the present. The second is a comparative study of kinship terminology among non-Indo-European languages, for which he has also prepared a data base published on the internet. The third section, highly controversial, as he admits, uses anthropology, mitochondrial studies and linguistics to suggest that the "out of Africa" model of human origins may be in error and that the first humans actually came from the Americas and spread from there to the rest of the world.

Trade before Civilization
Trade before Civilization

Author: Johan Ling

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-09-15

Total Pages: 447

ISBN-13: 1316514684

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Trade before Civilization explores the role that long-distance exchange played in the establishment and/or maintenance of social complexity, and its role in the transformation of societies from egalitarian to non-egalitarian. Bringing together research by an international and methodologically diverse team of scholars, it analyses the relationship between long-distance trade and the rise of inequality. The volume illustrates how elites used exotic prestige goods to enhance and maintain their elevated social positions in society. Global in scope, it offers case studies of early societies and sites in Europe, Asia, Oceania, North America, and Mesoamerica. Deploying a range of inter-disciplinary and cutting-edge theoretical approaches from a cross-cultural framework, the volume offers new insights and enhances our understanding of socio-political evolution. It will appeal to archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, conflict theorists, and ethnohistorians, as well as economists seeking to understand the nexus between imported luxury items and cultural evolution.

Women in Kararau
Women in Kararau

Author: Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin

Publisher: Göttingen University Press

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 386395422X

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The book offers a glimpse back in time to a Middle Sepik society, the Iatmul, first investigated by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson in the late 1920s while the feminist anthropologist Margaret Mead worked on sex roles among the neighbouring Tchambuli (Chambri) people. The author lived in the Iatmul village of Kararau in 1972/3 where she studied women’s lives, works, and knowledge in detail. She revisited the Sepik in 2015 and 2017. The book, the translation of a 1977 publication in German, is complemented by two chapters dealing with the life of the Iatmul in the 2010s. It presents rich quantitative and qualitative data on subsistence economy, marriage, and women’s knowledge concerning myths and rituals. Besides, life histories and in-depth interviews convey deep insights into women’s experiences and feelings, especially regarding their varied relationships with men in the early 1970s. Since then, Iatmul culture has changed in many respects, especially as far as the economy, religion, knowledge, and the relationship between men and women are concerned. In her afterword, the anthropologist Christiane Falck highlights some of the major topics raised in the book from a 2018 perspective, based on her own fieldwork which she commenced in 2012. Thus, the book provides the reader with detailed information about gendered lives in this riverine village of the 1970s and an understanding of the cultural processes and dynamics that have taken place since.

Fire on the Island
Fire on the Island

Author: Tom Bratrud

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2022-04-08

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1800734654

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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.