Product Description: Drawing on both their own fieldwork from 1991 to 1999 and older written sources, Stewart and Strathern explore how the Duna have remade their rituals and associated myths in response to the outside influences of government, Christianity, and large-scale economic development, specifically mining and oil prospecting...read more

Product Description: This popular book draws on a rich array of ethnographic cases from around the world to demonstrate the complexities of ideas and practices that surround the health of the human body, and how health is impacted by the beliefs and practices of the community...read more

Product Description: The topic of religious and ritual change, including conversion from one modality of practices to another, has emerged in recent years as a prime focus of scholarly attention in anthropology and related disciplines, such as history, sociology, political science and religious studies...read more

Product Description: Part of the Ritual Studies Monograph SeriesInspired by the research of the French anthropologist Daniel de Coppet on exchange, death, and compensation in the Solomon Islands within the South-West Pacific region, this edited collection highlights the fundamental connections between exchange and sacrifice as ritual practices within cosmological frameworks...read more

Product Description: Part of the Ritual Studies Monograph Series. This unique set of essays explores the multiple ways in which ritual practices have responded to, or have been a part of, historical and political changes. Particular chapters on China deal with the revival of festivals in Pucheng, Zhejiang Province (Paul Katz); the Emperor Huizong's musical insignia (Joseph Lam); music and rituals for Hong Kong's reunion with the Mainland (Yu Siu Wah); Christianity in nineteenth century South China (Joseph Tse-Hei Lee); and refusal by Buddhists and Christians to bow to the Emperor (Eric Reinders)...read more

Product Description: This is a uniquely dramatic account of life in the Papua New Guinea Highlands as told by a well-known leader of the Kawelka people of Mount Hagen. Set into context with a contemporary introduction that discusses the usefulness of biography in anthropology, the case study presents the already well-known autobiography of Ongka, a leader who witnessed the arrival of the first outsiders to the Highlands of New Guinea in the 1930s...read more

Product Description: This is a uniquely dramatic account of life in the Papua New Guinea Highlands as told by a well-known leader of the Kawelka people of Mount Hagen. Set into context with a contemporary introduction that discusses the usefulness of biography in anthropology, the case study presents the already well-known autobiography of Ongka, a leader who witnessed the arrival of the first outsiders to the Highlands of New Guinea in the 1930s...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Offers an anthropological insight into the ways in which acts of terror - and reactions to those acts - impact on the lives of virtually everyone in the world today, as perpetrators, victims or observers. This collection brings together new ways of thinking about violence and terror in a coherent analysis that encourages fresh insights.

Product Description: This book fills a current need in Islamic Studies for a perspective on the nuanced investigation of ritual practices rather than a concentration on politicized forms of ideology. The essays in this volume, all written by scholarly specialists with first-hand fieldwork experience, take up a number of questions central to Islamic religion and ritual, focusing on rituals as practices of making identities...read more

Product Description: More and more, anthropologists are recruited as consultants by government departments, companies or as observers of development processes in their field areas generally. Although these roles can be very gratifying, they can create ambiguous situations for the anthropologists who find that new pressures and responsibilities are placed upon them for which their training did not prepare them...read more

Product Description: How have the Aluni Valley Duna people of Papua New Guinea responded to the challenges of colonial and post-colonial changes that have entered their lifeworld since the middle of the Twentieth-Century? Living in a corner of the world influenced by mining companies but relatively neglected in terms of government-sponsored development, these people have dealt creatively with forces of change by redeploying their own mythological themes about the cosmos in order to make claims on outside corporations and by subtly combining features of their customary practices with forms of Christianity, attempting to empower their past as a means of confronting the future...read more

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Product Description: This book provides a wide ranging introduction to the meaning and context of violence. The authors build upon David Riches's concept of "the triangle of violence" which examines the relationship between performers, victims and witnesses and his proposition that violence is marked by contests regarding its legitimacy as a social act...read more

Product Description: The authors present a historical picture of gender relations in Highlands New Guinea by exploring domains of imagination as revealed in courting songs, ballads, and folktales from across the Highlands but with particular reference to field areas in the western Highlands...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: Strathern and Stewart are a husband and wife team who have written a number of books on anthropological subjects. This book explores the historical expression of identity in Scotland, based on fieldwork in the Lowlands of Scotland carried out during 1996-2000...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This book considers in depth the emergent theme of concerns over bodily fluids in health and wellness through an examination of a rich set of ethnographic materials from the Pacific islands of New Guinea. The particular structure of the book draws together otherwise disparate observations made by ethnographers on ideas of the body...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Traditionally, life-story narratives have held a significant place in anthropological writings. Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern strive to broaden and deepen this tradition by explicitly linking biography, history, and the concepts of personhood...read more

Product Description: Building on an incipient tendency to make comparisons between Indonesian and Melanesian cultural themes, this study makes a fresh comparison of themes that interrelate ethnographies of eastern Indonesia (for example, Sumba, Flores), Irian Jaya (the Bird's Head), and the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (Melpa, Duna)...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Arrow Talk makes a significant contribution to the understanding of Melanesian culture and contemporary sociopolitical issues in Papua New Guinea.  In a post modern era in which culture has been dismissed by many anthropologists as a reification, this book makes a cogent argument for cultural holism by showing how symbolic, psychological, religious and linguistic factors have combined to shape Melpa responses to the political and economic crises they have had to face in the waning years of the millennium...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)