The Digitizing Family

The Digitizing Family

Author: Geoffrey Hobbis

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-02-07

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 3030349292

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At once a digital ethnography of smartphones and a classically conceived village-based ethnography, this book relocates the study of digital technologies to rural Melanesia, with a focus on the Lau of Malaita, Soloman Islands. In this ‘technography’, Geoffrey Hobbis studies the materiality and functional attributes of smartphones and their object biographies—modes of acquisition, maintenance, uses, limitations and the problems specific to this region in adopting and adapting smartphones in everyday life. As he examines the various uses of smartphones, as both telephone and multimedia device, Hobbis also explores the social and cultural transformations, the hopes and uncertainties, with which they are associated. Ultimately, in bringing together a study of digital technologies with classical anthropological theory, The Digitizing Family develops a theory of smartphones as kinship technologies and supercompositional objects.


Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia

Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia

Author: Gilbert H. Herdt

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-04-28

Total Pages: 471

ISBN-13: 0520341384

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This book contains the work of seven leading anthropologists on the subject of ritualized homosexuality, and it marks the first time that anthropologists have systematically studied cross-cultural variations in homosexual behavior in a non-Western culture area. The book as a whole indicates that contemporary theories of sex and gender development need revision in light of the Melanesian findings. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984. This book contains the work of seven leading anthropologists on the subject of ritualized homosexuality, and it marks the first time that anthropologists have systematically studied cross-cultural variations in homosexual behavior in a non-Western culture


The Melanesian World

The Melanesian World

Author: Eric Hirsch

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-03-28

Total Pages: 676

ISBN-13: 131552967X

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This wide-ranging volume captures the diverse range of societies and experiences that form what has come to be known as Melanesia. It covers prehistoric, historic and contemporary issues, and includes work by art historians, political scientists, geographers and anthropologists. The chapters range from studies of subsistence, ritual and ceremonial exchange to accounts of state violence, new media and climate change. The ‘Melanesian world’ assembled here raises questions that cut to the heart of debates in the human sciences today, with profound implications for the ways in which scholars across disciplines can describe and understand human difference. This impressive collection of essays represents a valuable resource for scholars and students alike.


The Anthropology of Morality in Melanesia and Beyond

The Anthropology of Morality in Melanesia and Beyond

Author: John Barker

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-01

Total Pages: 429

ISBN-13: 1317044975

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The Anthropology of Morality in Melanesia and Beyond examines how Melanesians experience and deal with moral dilemmas and challenges. Taking Kenelm Burridge’s seminal work as their starting point, the contributors focus upon public situations and types of people that exemplify key ethical contradictions for members of moral communities. While returning to some classical concerns, such as the roles of big men and sorcerers, the book opens new territory with richly textured ethnographic studies and theoretical reviews that explore the interface between the values associated with indigenous village life and the ethical orientations associated with Christianity, the state, the marketplace, and other facets of ’modernity'. A major contribution to the emerging field of the anthropology of morality, the volume includes some of the most prominent scholars working in the discipline today, including Bruce Knauft, Joel Robbins, F.G. Bailey, Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington.


Population, Reproduction, and Fertility in Melanesia

Population, Reproduction, and Fertility in Melanesia

Author: Stanley J. Ulijaszek

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9781571816443

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Human biological fertility was considered a important issue to anthropologists and colonial administrators in the first part of the 20th century, as a dramatic decline in population was observed in many regions. However, the total demise of Melanesian populations predicted by some never happened; on the contrary, a rapid population increase took place for the second part of the 20th century. This volume explores relationships between human fertility and reproduction, subsistence systems, the symbolic use of ideas of fertility and reproduction in linking landscape to individuals and populations, in Melanesian societies, past and present. It thus offers an important contribution to our understanding of the implications of social and economic change for reproduction and fertility in the broadest sense.


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


Transactions and Creations

Transactions and Creations

Author: Eric Hirsch

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9781845450281

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In the early 21st century, intellectual and cultural resources emerge on all sides as candidates for ownership claims. Members of an anthropological research team investigating emergent economic relations in a part of the world renowned for its innovative approach to resources and transactions, wish to open up the vocabulary. In this unique volume, they bring an unexpected comparative perspective to global debates on intellectual and cultural property rights (IPR and CPR). The contributors bring from Melanesia their collective experience of people initiating, limiting and rationalizing claims through transactions in ways that challenge many of the assumptions behind the international language. In a bold theoretical move, "property" is put alongside two other terms: "transactions" and "creations." The former have a place in the anthropological tradition that now needs to be brought into the foreground. In turn, increasing interest in protecting intellectual and cultural resources means that questions about creativity have suddenly become pertinent to what is or is not being transacted. Yet is creativity a special preoccupation of modernity? How are we to talk about people's creative practices, when innovation becomes the basis for ownership claims? This book is full of surprises!


Melanesian Odysseys

Melanesian Odysseys

Author: Lisette Josephides

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2008-07-01

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0857450557

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In a series of epic self-narratives ranging from traditional cultural embodiments to picaresque adventures, Christian epiphanies and a host of interactive strategies and techniques for living, Kewa Highlanders (PNG) attempt to shape and control their selves and their relentlessly changing world. This lively account transcends ethnographic particularity and offers a wide-reaching perspective on the nature of being human. Inverting the analytic logic of her previous work, which sought to uncover what social structures concealed, Josephides focuses instead on the cultural understandings that people make explicit in their actions and speech. Using approaches from philosophy and anthropology, she examines elicitation (how people create their selves and their worlds in the act of making explicit) and mimesis (how anthropologists produce ethnographies), to arrive at an unexpected conclusion: that knowledge of self and other alike derives from self-externalization rather than self-introspection.