The third in a series compiling the results of an ethnographical research expedition in the Torres Strait, New Guinea, and Borneo. Written entirely by Sidney H. Ray, a prominent member of the expedition and a renowned scholar of Melanesian languages, the text details a variety of the region's languages.
Describes and analyses the social customs and organization of the Western Torres Strait Islanders; myths and folk-tales, nature myths; genealogies of Mabuiag; social and place related aspects of totemism, Yam, Saibai; magic connected with turtle fishing, initiation and funeral ceremonies at Pulu; initiation at Kiwai, Cape York and Muralug; land tenure and inheritance at Mabuiag; trade between Moa, Yam, Saibai, Pacific Islands; religion in Pacific Islands, Thursday Island, Torres Strait; cult of Kwoiam; warfare between Mabuiag men and the men of Moa; marriage, courtship, in Muralug.
The fifth in a series compiling the results of an ethnographical research expedition in the Torres Strait, New Guinea, and Borneo. Originally published in 1904, it contains information on the societies and belief structures of the indigenous peoples living in the western islands of the Strait.
This classic four-volume series-from a pioneering ethnographer, first published in 1910-remains a foundational work of comparative mythology and religion for scholars and armchair anthropologists alike. Exploring the interconnections between myth and ritual in how and whom we may marry-as group marriage gave way to individual marriage-questions about religion and social structure became intertwined. In any case, this is a fascinating look at the social underpinnings common to all peoples around the globe. Volume II continues Frazer's ethnographic survey of totemism, here covering totemism in the South Pacific, India, and Africa. Scottish anthropologist SIR JAMES GEORGE FRAZER (1854-1941) also wrote the classic The Golden Bough (1890), Man, God, and Immortality (1927), and Creation and Evolution in Primitive Cosmogonies (1935).
Martin Nakata's book, Disciplining the Savages: Savaging the Disciplines represents the most focussed and sustained Indigenous critique of anthropological knowledge yet published. It is impressive, rigorous, and sometimes poignant: a must-read for anyone concerned with the troubled interplay of Indigenous issues and academic institutions in Australia today. The book provides an alternative reading for those struggling at the contradictor and, ambiguous intersections of academia and Indigenous experience. In doing so it moves beyond the usual, criticisms of the disciplines which construct the way we have come to know and understand indigenous peoples. Nakata, a Torres Strait Islander academic, casts a critical gaze on the research conducted by the Cambridge Expedition in the late 1890s. Meticulously analysing the linguistic, physiological, psychological and anthropological testing conducted he offers an astute critique of the researchers' methodologies and interpretations.. He uses these insights to reveal the similar workings of recent knowledge production in Torres Strait education. In systematically deconstructing these knowledges, Nakata draws eloquently on both the Torres Strait Islander struggle and his own personal struggle to break free from imposed definitions, and reminds us that such intellectual journeys are highly personal and political. Nakata argues for the recognition of the complexity of the space Indigenous people now live in -- the cultural interface -- and proposes an alternative theoretical standpoint to account for Indigenous experience of this space.
