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.


Consequences of Contact

Consequences of Contact

Author: Miki Makihara

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2007-09-27

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 0199724539

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The Pacific is historically an area of enormous linguistic diversity, where talk figures as a central component of social life. Pacific communities also represent diverse contact zones, where between indigenous and introduced institutions and ideas; between local actors and outsiders; and involving different lingua franca, colonial, and local language varieties. Contact between colonial and post-colonial governments, religious institutions, and indigenous communities has spurred profound social change, irrevocably transforming linguistic ideologies and practices. Drawing on ethnographic and linguistic analyses, this edited volume examines situations of intertwined linguistic and cultural change unfolding in specific Pacific locations in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Its overarching concern is with the multiple ways that processes of historical change have shaped and been shaped by linguistic ideologies reflexive sensibilities about languages and language useheld by Pacific peoples and other agents of change. The essays demonstrate that language and linguistic practices are linked to changing consciousness of self and community through notions of agency, morality, affect, authority, and authenticity. In times of cultural contact, communities often experience language change at an accelerated rate. This is particularly so in small-scale communities where innovations and continuity routinely depend on the imagination, creativity, and charisma of fewer individuals. The essays in this volume provide evidence of this potential and a record of their voices, as they document new types of local actors, e.g., pastors, Bible translators, teachers, political activists, spirit mediums, and tour guides, some of whom introduce, innovate, legitimate, or resist new ideas and ways to express them through language. Drawing on and transforming metalinguistic concepts, local actors (re)shape language, reproducing and changing the communicative economy. In the process, they cultivate new cultural conceptions of language, for example, as a medium for communicating religious knowledge and political authority, and for constructing social boundaries and transforming relationships of domination.


Victim Healing and Truth Commissions

Victim Healing and Truth Commissions

Author: Holly L. Guthrey

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-02-23

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 3319124870

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​This book intends to contribute to the growing body of transitional justice literature by providing insight into how truth commissions may be beneficial to victims of mass violence, based on data collected in Timor-Leste and on the Solomon Islands. Drawing on literature in the fields of victim psychology, procedural justice, and transitional justice, this study is guided by the puzzle of why truth-telling in post-conflict settings has been found to be both helpful and harmful to victims of mass violence. Existing studies have identified a range of positive benefits and negative consequences of truth-telling for victims; however, the reasons why some victims experience a sense of healing while others do not after participating in post-conflict truth commission processes continues to remain unclear. Hence, to address one piece of this complex puzzle, this book seeks to begin clarifying how truth-telling may be beneficial for victims by investigating the question: What pathways lead from truth-telling to victim healing in post-conflict settings? Building on the proposition that having voice—a key component of procedural justice—can help individuals to overcome the disempowerment and marginalisation of victimisation, this book investigates voice as a causal mechanism that can create pathways toward healing within truth commission public hearings. Comparative, empirical studies that investigate how truth-telling contributes to victim healing in post-conflict settings are scarce in the field of transitional justice. This book begins to fill an important gap in the existing body of literature. From a practical standpoint, by enhancing understanding of how truth commissions can promote healing, the findings and arguments in this volume provide insight into how the design of transitional justice processes may be improved in the future to better respond to the needs of victims of mass violence.


Language and Social Justice

Language and Social Justice

Author: Kathleen C. Riley

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-02-22

Total Pages: 521

ISBN-13: 1350156264

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Language, whether spoken, written, or signed, is a powerful resource that is used to facilitate social justice or undermine it. The first reference resource to use an explicitly global lens to explore the interface between language and social justice, this volume expands our understanding of how language symbolizes, frames, and expresses political, economic, and psychic problems in society, thus contributing to visions for social justice. Investigating specific case studies in which language is used to instantiate and/or challenge social injustices, each chapter provides a unique perspective on how language carries value and enacts power by presenting the historical contexts and ethnographic background for understanding how language engenders and/or negotiates specific social justice issues. Case studies are drawn from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America and the Pacific Islands, with leading experts tackling a broad range of themes, such as equality, sovereignty, communal well-being, and the recognition of complex intersectional identities and relationships within and beyond the human world. Putting issues of language and social justice on a global stage and casting light on these processes in communities increasingly impacted by ongoing colonial, neoliberal, and neofascist forms of globalization, Language and Social Justice is an essential resource for anyone interested in this area of research.


Transformations of Gender in Melanesia

Transformations of Gender in Melanesia

Author: Martha Macintyre

Publisher: ANU Press

Published: 2017-02-06

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1760460893

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Despite the plethora of research on gender and the many projects designed to improve their status in the Pacific region, women continue to be disadvantaged and marginalised in social, economic and political spheres. How are we to understand this and what does it mean for researchers, policy-makers and development practitioners? This book examines these questions, partly by looking back but also by continuing the effort to explain and understand gender inequities in the Pacific through reference to the concept of societies in transition. The contributors discuss emerging masculinities and femininities in the Pacific in order to chart the development of these in their contexts. Exploring how contemporary Pacific identities are shaped by local contexts and traditions, they focus on how these are remade through interaction with global ideas, images and practices, including new forms of Christianity and economic transformations. Grounded in recent, original research in both the villages and towns of Melanesia, the collection engages with the study of gender in Melanesia as well as scholarship on global modernities. ‘This collection is a welcome addition to the study of gender in Melanesia … Collectively, the essays present complex, locally contextualised and regionally situated case studies of gender transformation occurring alongside, in many instances, the re-codification of hegemonic gendered norms and practices. Gender is not understood as simply code for women in this volume rather, the majority of chapters incorporate men and masculinities in their analysis of gender relations and dynamics. A highlight of the collection is the attention paid to how “the politics of tradition” (and of modernity) are expressed through morally loaded concepts of the “good” or “bad” woman or man and vice versa.’ — Kalissa Alexeyeff, University of Melbourne


Globalization and Health

Globalization and Health

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2004-11-01

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9047414292

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This international collection of essays on globalization and health examines the global health issues associated with the economic, technological, political, social, cultural and environmental effects of globalization—the increasing movement of capital, people, technology, goods, information, environmental pollution, and disease around the globe. These essays analyze the complex linkages between globalization and health, the health effects of globalization at all levels (global, national, and local), and the policy and institutional responses associated with the health consequences of globalization.


Family Violence and Social Change in the Pacific Islands

Family Violence and Social Change in the Pacific Islands

Author: Lois Bastide

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-09-23

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1000683885

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The Pacific Islands have some of the highest rates of family violence in the world. Addressing the contemporary mutations of Pacific Island families and the shifting understandings of violence in the context of rapid social change, this book investigates the conflict dynamics generated by these transformations. The contributors draw from detailed case studies in a range of Pacific territories to examine family violence in relation to the social, economic and political situation of native populations as well as individual, collective and institutional responses to the development of violence within and upon the family. They focus on vernacular understandings, conflicting social norms, the emergence of different types of violent patterns, the impact of violence on individuals and communities, and local attempts at mitigating or combating it. Combining ethnographic expertise with engaged scholarship, this volume offers a vivid account of ongoing social change in Pacific Island societies and a crucial contribution to the understanding of family violence as a social process, cultural construct, and political issue. This book will appeal to scholars with interests in the sociology of violence and the family, Pacific studies, development studies, and the social and cultural anthropology of Oceania.


How the World's Religions are Responding to Climate Change

How the World's Religions are Responding to Climate Change

Author: Robin Globus Veldman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-09-11

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 1136181318

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A growing chorus of voices has suggested that the world’s religions may become critical actors as the climate crisis unfolds, particularly in light of international paralysis on the issue. In recent years, many faiths have begun to address climate change and its consequences for human societies, especially the world’s poor. This is the first volume to use social science to examine how religions are helping to address one of the most significant and far-reaching challenges of our time. While there is a growing literature in theology and ethics about climate change and religion, little research has been previously published about the ways in which religious institutions, groups and individuals are responding to the problem of climate change. Seventeen research-driven chapters are written by sociologists, anthropologists, geographers and other social scientists. This book explores what effects religions are having, what barriers they are running into or creating, and what this means for the global struggle to address climate change.


Pacific Island Women and Contested Sporting Spaces

Pacific Island Women and Contested Sporting Spaces

Author: Yoko Kanemasu

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-06-26

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 1000902862

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This book focuses on the variety of strategies developed by women athletes in the Pacific Islands to claim contested sporting spaces – in particular, rugby union, soccer, beach volleyball, recreational sports and exercise – as a prism to explore grassroots women’s engagement with heavily entrenched postcolonial (hetero)patriarchy. Based on primary research conducted in Fiji, Samoa, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu, the book investigates contested sporting spaces as sites of infrapolitics intersected primarily by gender and also by other markers of inequality, including ethnicity, sexuality, class and geopolitics. Contrary to historical and contemporary representations of Pacific Island women as victims of gender injustice, it explores how these athletes and those who support them actively carve out space for their transformative agency. Pacific IslandWomen and Contested Sporting Spaces: Staking Their Claim focuses on a region underexamined by sport or gender studies researchers and will be of key interest to scholars and students in Gender Studies, Sport Studies, Sociology and Pacific Studies as well as sport practitioners and policymakers.