The inhabitants of Pororan Island, a small group of 'saltwater people' in Papua New Guinea, are intensely interested in the movements of persons across the island and across the sea, both in their everyday lives as fishing people and on ritual occasions. From their observations of human movements, they take their cues about the current state of social relations. Based on detailed ethnography, this study engages current Melanesian anthropological theory and argues that movements are the Pororans' predominant mode of objectifying relations. Movements on Pororan Island are to its inhabitants what roads are to 'mainlanders' on the nearby larger island, and what material objects and images are to others elsewhere in Melanesia.
In one form or another, water participates in the making and unmaking of people’s lives, practices, and stories. Contributors’ detailed ethnographic work analyzes the union and mutual shaping of water and social lives. This volume discusses current ecological disturbances and engages in a world where unbounded relationalities and unsettled frames of orientation mark the lives of all, anthropologists included. Water emerges as a fluid object in more senses than one, challenging anthropologists to foreground the mutable character of their objects of study and to responsibly engage with the generative role of cultural analysis.
This book develops new ways of thinking beyond the nation as a form of political community by seeking to transcend ethnonational categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Drawing on scholarship and cases spanning Pacific Asia and Europe, it steps outside assumptions linking nation to state. Accessible yet theoretically rich, it explores how to think about nationhood beyond narrow binaries and even broader cosmopolitan ideals. Using cutting-edge critical research, it fundamentally challenges the positive connotations of British patriotism and UK politics’ increasingly shrill anti-immigrant discourse, pointing to how these continue to reproduce vocabularies of belonging that are dependent on ethnonational and racialised categorisations. With a cross-continental focus, this book offers alternative ways of thinking about togetherness and belonging that are premised on mobility rather than rootedness, thereby providing a constructive agenda for critical nationalism studies.
This book explores the idea that small island communities could be regarded as canaries in the coal mine of sustainable development because of scientific and anecdotal evidence of a common link between rapid population growth, degradation of the local resource base, and intensification of disputes over the ownership and use of terrestrial and marine resources. The authors are all anthropologists with a specific interest in the question of whether the economic and social ‘safety valves’ that have previously served to break some of the feedback loops between these trends appear to be losing their efficacy. While much of the debate about economy–society–environment relationships on small islands has been overtaken by a narrow focus on the problem of climate change, the authors show that there are many other factors at work in the transformation of island lives and livelihoods.
Just as climate change and environmental sustainability have become growing concerns in public discourse, so too have they become a persistent focus in business and organization studies. It is increasingly acknowledged that humans and animals do not dwell in separate spheres; rather, they are entangled in a number of commercial or organizational settings, and organization theory needs to respond more comprehensively to this more-than-human shift in outlook. Important questions continue to arise about the nature of contemporary organization and organizing practices: who are these for? Who benefits from the operation of increasingly globalized capital markets? What place is there for the nonhuman animals in all this organization? What place is there for multispecies companionship, solidarity, and mutual value creation today and in the future, if any? This volume brings together interdisciplinary work on human-animal relationships within business, management, and organization for the first time. It maps the contours of an emerging new discipline, here termed 'Animal Organization Studies', touching on the politics, theory, and empirical experience of multispecies life-worlds. Spanning a number of disciplinary approaches including critical geography, critical management studies, social studies of science, and human-animal studies, the volume highlights the contact points as well as the tensions in humanity's relationship with a range of animal species and habitats. It holds relevance for those investigating debates around humanism and its futures; environmental and sustainability matters; the experience of working with and on animals, and the future of animal consumption and production.
For the people of Timor-Leste, independence promised a fundamental transformation from foreign occupation to self-rule, from brutality to respect for basic rights, and from poverty to prosperity. In the eyes of the country’s political leaders, revenue from the country’s oil and gas reserves is the means by which that transformation could be effected. Over the past decade, they have formulated ambitious plans for state-led development projects and rapid economic growth. Paradoxically, these modernist visions are simultaneously informed by and contradict ideas stemming from custom, religion, accountability and responsibility to future generations. This book explores how the promise of prosperity informs policy and how policy debates shape expectations about the future in one of the world’s newest and poorest nation-states.
Human perceptions, decision-making and (pro-) environmental behaviour are closely connected. This Research Topic focuses on bringing together perceptions and behaviour for sustainable coastal and island marine resource use systems. Management and governance of (large and small-scale) coastal marine resource use systems function in highly complex social and ecological environments, which are culturally embedded, economically interest-led and politically biased. Management processes therefore have to integrate multiple perspectives as well as perception-driven standpoints on the individual as well as the decision-makers’ levels. Consequently, the analysis of perceptions has developed not only as part of philosophy and psychology but also of environmental science, anthropology and human geography. It encompasses intuitions, values, attitudes, thoughts, mind-sets, place attachments and sense of place. All of these influence human behavior and action, and are collected or are available within the respective marine resource use system, which may support the livelihood of a large part of the local population. Management and governance are not only about mediating between resource use conflicts or establishing marine protected areas, they deal with people and their ideas and perceptions. Understanding the related decision-making processes on multiple scales and levels hence means much more than economically assessing the available marine resources or existing threats to the associated system. Over the past decade, there has been a growing inter- and transdisciplinary international community becoming interested in research which integrates perceptions of coastal and inland residents, local and regional stakeholder groups, as well as resource and environmental managers and decision-makers. By acknowledging the importance of the individual perspective and interest-led personal views, it became obvious how valuable and important these sources of information are for coastal research. An increase of research effort spent on the link between perceptions and behaviour in marine resource use systems is thus both timely and needed. By offering a diversity of inspiring and comprehensive contributions on the link between perceptions and behaviour, this Research Topic aspires to critically enlighten the discourse and applicability of such research for finding sustainable, locally identified, anchored and integrated marine resource use pathways.
65,000 years ago, modern humans arrived in Australia, having navigated more than 100 km of sea crossing from southeast Asia. Since then, the large continental islands of Australia and New Guinea, together with smaller islands in between, have been connected by land bridges and severed again as sea levels fell and rose. Along with these fluctuations came changes in the terrestrial and marine environments of both land masses. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous Australia and New Guinea reviews and assembles the latest findings and ideas on the archaeology of the Australia-New Guinea region, the world's largest island-continent. In 42 new chapters written by 77 contributors, it presents and explores the archaeological evidence to weave stories of colonisation; megafaunal extinctions; Indigenous architecture; long-distance interactions, sometimes across the seas; eel-based aquaculture and the development of techniques for the mass-trapping of fish; occupation of the High Country, deserts, tropical swamplands and other, diverse land and waterscapes; and rock art and symbolic behaviour. Together with established researchers, a new generation of archaeologists present in this Handbook one, authoritative text where Australia-New Guinea archaeology now lies and where it is heading, promising to shape future directions for years to come.
This book explores postcolonial myths and histories within colonially structured narratives which persist and are carried in culture, language, and history in various parts of the world. It analyzes constructions of identities, stereotypes, and mythical fantasies in postcolonial society. Exploring a wide range of themes including the appropriation and use of language, myths of decolonialization, and nationalism, and the colonial influence on systems of academic knowledge, the book focuses on how these myths reinforce, subvert, and appropriate colonial binaries for the articulation of the postcolonial self. With essays which study narratives of emigrants in Argentina, the colonial mythology in the Dodecanese in Italy, and the mythico-narratives of island insularity in contemporary Sri Lanka among others, this volume emphasizes the role of indigenous studies in building a postcolonial consciousness. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of post-colonial studies, cultural studies, literature, history, political science, and sociology.
