bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
GUNGARAKAYN WOMEN SPEAK: REPRODUCTION AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF TRADITION
Authors: Lilley Rozanna
Published: February 2015

This paper analyses the instrumental purposes served by representations of female spirituality deployed by Gungaraakayn claimants in the course of the Finniss River Land Claim. I address the problem of how gender is shaped by configurations of power within and between groups and how, in turn, it shapes those configurations. The paper is thus a critique that seeks to understand the political significance of ‘tradition’ in the present, demonstrating how social formations may be transformed by the operations of practice.
SEANCES AND SPIRITS OF THE DEAD: CONTEXT AND IDIOM IN SYMBOLIC HEALING
Authors: Connor Linda H.
Published: February 2015

Ian Hogbin's article, ‘Spirits and the Healing of the Sick in Ontong Java’ (1930), sketches out the relationships that were perceived to exist between the living and the spirits of the dead amongst the inhabitants of a small coral atoll in the Western Pacific. Episodes of illness constituted crises when this relationship was articulated through the institution of spirit mediumship, in order to effect a cure for the patient. The structure of Ontong Javanese seances is compared with spirit mediums' seances in Bali. The seances of both cultural groups are analysed in terms of a model of symbolic healing recently proposed by Dow (1986). Symbolic healing of the clients' specific problem is located within, and dependent upon, a more generalised process of therapy that affects all the participants in the seance. This therapy hinges on the nature of the emotional relationship between the living and the spirits they associate with their dead relatives.
ARE WE ALL BLOW‐INS?
Authors: Rowse Tim
Published: February 2015

Review of Gillian Cowlishaw's Black, White or Brindle: Race in Rural Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1988. Pp. vi + 296 plus index.
REVIEWS
Authors: Tarr Chou Meng
Published: February 2015

In Search of Southeast Asia (Revised Edition). Edited by David Joel Steinberg. Sydney/Wellington: Allen & Unwin. 1987. Pp. xi + 590.
REVIEWS
Authors: Aldrich Robert
Published: February 2015

Iles Tropicales: Insularité, “Insularisme”. By J.P. Doumenge et al. Talence, France: CRET, Université de Bordeaux III. 1987. Pp. 499.
REVIEWS
Authors: Thomas Nicholas
Published: February 2015

Kinship to Kingship: Gender Hierarchy and State Formation in the Tongan Islands By Christine Ward Gailey Austin: University of Texas Press. 1987. Pp. xvii + 326. Price US$28.50 (hardback) — US$12.95 (paperback).
REVIEWS
Authors: Aldrich Robert
Published: February 2015

Tahiti, les Temps et les Pouvoirs: Pour une Anthropologie Historique du Tahiti Post‐Européen. By Jean‐François Baré. Paris: ORSTOM. 1987. Pp. 543. Price 360 FF
REVIEWS
Authors: Gewertz Deborah
Published: February 2015

The Bishop's Progress: A Historical Ethnography of Catholic Missionary Experience on the Sepik Frontier By Mary Taylor Huber Washington, DC.: Smithsonian Institution Press. 1988. Pp. xii + 264. Price US$29.95.
REVIEWS
Authors: Williams Drid
Published: February 2015

Doing Fieldwork: Eight Personal Accounts of Social Research. By J. Perry. Geelong, Victoria: Deakin University Press. 1989. Pp. 155.
REVIEWS
Authors: Crick Malcolm
Published: February 2015

Aborigines, Tourism, and Development: the Northern Territory Experience. By J. C. Altman. Darwin: Australian National University North Australia Research Unit. 1988. Pp. xvi + 345. Price $20. (paper).
REVIEWS
Authors: Tomasetti Friedegard
Published: February 2015

Lia: Das grosse Ritual auf den Mentawai‐Inseln (Indonesien). By R. Schefold. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. 1988. Pp. 694.
REVIEWS
Authors: Aldrich Robert
Published: February 2015

Contribution Française à la Connaissance Géographique des ‘Mers du Sud’: Bibliographie des Principaux Travaux Scientifiques Francais Traitant des Océans Pacifique et Indien, des Mers Australes et de leurs Iles. By François Doumenge, Alain Heutz de Lemps and Odile Chapuis. Talence, France: CEGET/CRET. 1988. Pp. 312
REVIEWS
Authors: Swain Tony
Published: February 2015

Return to Eden: A Journey Through the Promised Landscape of Amagalyuagba. By David H. Turner. Toronto Studies in Religion, vol. 9. New York: Peter Lang. 1989. Pp. 299.
REVIEWS
Authors: Jolly Margaret
Published: February 2015

Cultural Alternatives and a Feminist Anthropology: An Analysis of Culturally Constructed Gender Interests in Papua New Guinea. By Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1987. Pp. xii + 185. Price: $72 (hardcover).
ONE NAME, MANY GROUNDS: LAND, MARRIAGE AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE AMONG THE OROKAIVA OF PAPUA NEW GUINEA
Authors: Lanoue Guy
Published: February 2015

It is proposed, through an examination of published materials on the Orokaiva, that established and even competing models and concepts of ‘kinship’ and marriage (generalized and direct exchange, agnatic descent, clan, balanced reciprocity) have little or no explanatory power since they either do not fit the published facts or they predict the same results, despite published assertions to the contrary. An hypothesis linking relationship terminology, marriage ‘systems’ and land use is proposed. Some features in the ‘system’ of ‘kinship’ terminology appear to be expressive of the ideology of gardening rather than ‘kinship’ and marriage per se.
WOMEN'S FACIAL TATTOOING AMONG THE MAISIN OF ORO PROVINCE, PAPUA NEW GUINEA: THE CHANGING SIGNIFICANCE OF AN ANCIENT CUSTOM
Authors: Barker John , Tietjen Anne Marie
Published: February 2015

The Maisin women of northeastern Papua New Guinea are among the last coastal Papuans to tattoo their faces. This article first describes the techniques and social process of Maisin tattooing. We then examine the resilience of the custom in light of changes in puberty rites and notions of gender. We argue that these contexts have lost their cultural salience as a result of the Maisins' incorporation into the larger Papua New Guinea society. Tattooing has acquired new significance as a marker of cultural identity in a multicultural setting and as a sign of the Maisin people's commercial success as makers of indigenous art.
REVIEW
Authors: Aldrich Robert
Published: February 2015

Nan'yo: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese in Micronesia, 1885–1945. By Mark R. Peattie. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 1988. Pp. xxii + 382. Price $US30.00.
REVIEW
Authors: Tarr Chou Meng
Published: February 2015

In Search of Southeast Asia (Revised Edition). Edited by David Joel Steinberg. Sydney/Wellington: Allen & Unwin. 1987. Pp. xi + 590.
REVIEW
Authors: Aldrich Robert
Published: February 2015

Îles Tropicales: Insularité, “Insularisme”. By J.P. Doumenge, et al. Talence, France: CRET, Université de Bordeaux III. 1987. Pp. 499.
REVIEW
Authors: Ralston Caroline
Published: February 2015

Early Tonga as the Explorers Saw it, 1616–1810. By Edwin N. Ferdon. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. 1987. Pp. xv + 339. Price $US29.95.
A NOT SO PERFECT PEACE: A HISTORY OF CONFLICT ON IFALUK
Authors: Betzig Laura , Wichimai Santus
Published: February 2015

Many accounts of the Caroline Islands have called the people in them non‐violent. This paper uses early ethnographies, more recent ethnohistories, and new recollections on the part of the people of Ifaluk to reconstruct the extent of conflict on Caroline Islands and between them. Culture on Ifaluk in precontact times, and even in recent times, was violent in many respects. The evidence presented here contradicts several earlier arguments, among them: that the balance in the tribute relationship with Yap favoured outer islanders; that the balance in the tribute relationship between Ifaluk chiefs and commoners favoured commoners; and that sorcery and aggression were rare or absent on Ifaluk. Legends of wars between Ifaluk and other islands are also retold.
REVIEW
Authors: Parmentier Richard J.
Published: February 2015

On the Bones of the Serpent: Person, Memory and Mortality in Sabarl Island Society. By Debbora Battaglia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1990. Pp. x + 253.
THE INCEST PASSIONS:AN OUTLINE OF THE LOGIC OF THE IQWAYE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION
Authors: Mimica Jadran
Published: February 2015

In the first part of this paper (Oceania 62(1)) I presented the mythopoeic‐cosmological foundations of incest among the Iqwaye people, a Yagwoia‐Anga group of the West Menyamya Census Division, Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. The core of incest passions derives from the primordial autosexual‐autonutritive, i.e. self‐procreative, cosmic man. Here I am demonstrating how incest as autocreation is realized in the main structural configurations of Iqwaye social organization, specifically the naming system, patrifiliation, matrifiliation, affinity, cross‐sex siblingship and, finally, institutionalized male homosexuality.
REVIEW
Authors: Aldrich Robert
Published: February 2015

Labour in the South Pacific. Edited by Clive Moore, Jacqueline Leckie and Doug Munro. Townsville: James Cook University of Northern Queensland. 1990. Pp. lii +335.
REVIEW
Authors: Lutkehaus Nancy Christine
Published: February 2015

Camilla: C.H. Wedgwood 1901 – 1955, A Life. By D. Wetherell and C. Carr‐Gregg. Kensington: New South Wales University Press. 1990. Pp. xiii + 242. Price $24.95
Skin, personhood and redemption: the double self in West New Britain cargo cults
Authors: Lattas Andrew
Published: February 2015

This paper is about the sorts of spaces and identities created by cargo cult narratives. It explores those placements of identity which emerge in the colonial context, out of the interface of self and Other, where each self can only be a self through determining its relationship to the space occupied by the Other. This is a concern with the topography of colonialism, with that multiplicity of regions and sites which black and white are made to occupy in narratives. Here gender, trickery and masalai sites are employed to create alternative terrains of power and identities to those offered by black male colonised bodies.
The Yali movement in retrospect: rewriting history, redefining ‘cargo cult’
Authors: Hermann Elfriede
Published: February 2015

This paper is concerned with a definition of the term ‘cargo cult’ as formulated by Papua New Guineans from their personal experience of the colonial encounter. An examination of the negative connotations inherent in their interpretative reconstruction of the concept ‘cargo cult’ reveals that these resulted from a dialogue with western cultural constructions of ‘cargo cults’ which effectively discredited these movements. Interpreted in this way, the indigenous definition can also become the starting point for a reconsideration of the anthropological concept of ‘cargo cult’.
REVIEW
Authors: Lichtenberk Frantisek
Published: February 2015

Pacific Island Languages: Essays in Honour of G.B. Milner. Edited by J.H.C.S. Davidson. University of Hawaii Press. 1990. Price US $18.00.
REVIEW
Authors: Beckett Jeremy
Published: February 2015

Dreamtime Politics: Religion, World View and Utopian Thought in Australian Aboriginal Society. By Erich Kolig. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. 1989. Pp. 161.
REVIEW
Authors: Feld Steven
Published: February 2015

On Concepts and Classifications of Musical Instruments. By Margaret J. Kartomi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1990. Pp. xix + 329. Price US$21.95.

Polynesian Sound‐Producing Instruments. By Richard Moyle. Buckinghamshire: Shire Publications. 1990. Pp. 64. Price UK £3.50.
REVIEW
Authors: Glass Patrick
Published: February 2015

Kitawa: A Linguistic and Aesthetic Analysis of Visual Art in Melanesia. By Giancarlo M. G. Scoditti. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter (Approaches to Semiotics 83, Eds. Thomas A. Sebeok, Roland Posner & Alain Rey). 1989. Pp. x +457.
REVIEW
Authors: Gould Richard A.
Published: February 2015

Cash, Commoditisation and Changing Foragers. Edited by Nicolas Peterson and Toshio Matsuyama. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology (Senri Ethnological Studies, No. 30). 1991. Pp. ii +294.
REVIEW
Authors: Thomasetti Friedegard
Published: February 2015

Die dreisten Frauen: Ethnopsychoanalytische Gespraeche in Papua‐Neuguinea. By F. Weiss. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag. 1991. Pp. 288. Price Dm 44.
REVIEW
Authors: Lattas Andrew
Published: February 2015

Entangled objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific. By Nicholas Thomas. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1991. Pp. xiii + 259. Price US$32.50.
The Systematisation of Tradition: Maori Culture as a Strategic Resource
Authors: Sissons Jeffrey
Published: February 2015

In this article I discuss the systematisation of Maori tradition in New Zealand during the 1970s and 1980s. More particularly, my focus is on the politicisation and rationalisation of Maori tradition within the New Zealand state, these processes occurring partly in response to calls by Maori leaders for a dismantling of colonial and monocultural structures in New Zealand and reactive objectifications of Maori tradition which challenged the legitimacy of the post‐colonial state administration. I begin with a consideration of the main objectives towards which the systematisation of tradition has been directed over the past two decades, and I examine the way in which priorities have shifted in response to reactive politicisations of ethnic identity. I then draw upon a number of specific examples to illustrate the ethnicisation and rationalisation of Maori tradition as aspects of the systematisation process within the New Zealand state.
Worlds in Mind: the Experience of an Outside World in a Community of the Finisterre Range of Papua New Guinea
Authors: Wassmann Jürg
Published: February 2015

This paper deals with how the Yupno's mental image of proper settlement patterns has been changed through the experience of an ‘outside world’. The Yupno inhabit a rugged, extremely remote, mountainous region of the Eastern Finisterre Range in the Madang Province of Papua New Guinea. Teptep is the administrative centre. The region is one of the last unexplored areas of Papua New Guinea. The old Yupno grew up in an isolated world, which was bounded both externally (they knew only their own valley) and internally (the fenced‐in dwelling house was the centre of the settlement structure). After the Second World War, however, the valley was ‘opened’: schools were established and some younger Yupno left their valley to visit the cities of Madang and Lae. This experience of the ‘outside world’ changed the mental image of their own settlement territory. When asked to draw their own area, i.e. to externalise their mental image in the sense of Piaget, the Yupno without ‘outside’‐experience (the old men and the children without school education) drew a closed, usually oval world with the Yupno river at its centre (the valley as the ‘world’), whereas those who had ‘outside’‐experience drew an open, rectangular map laden with details.
All things go in pairs, or the sharks will bite: the antithetical nature of Fijian chiefship
Authors: Toren Christina
Published: February 2015

Via an historical‐cum‐ethnographic analysis of the history of chiefship in the vanua (country) of Sawaieke, central Fiji, this essay argues against the prevailing view that Fijian social relations are fundamentally hierarchical. Rather social relations in general and chiefship in particular are predicated on complementary and opposing concepts of equality and hierarchy, such that neither can become, in Dumont's terms, ‘an encompassing value’. This radical opposition between equality and hierarchy, Hegelian in form, is fundamental to Fijian dualism, so it pervades Fijian daily life and informs, for example, sexual relations, kinship, chiefship and notions of the person. ‘The household’ is the basic kinship unit and while relations within households are hierarchical, relations across households are those of balanced reciprocal exchange, epitomised in the relation between cross‐cousins as equals and affines. The analysis shows that Fijian chiefship — past or present — cannot, as ‘value’, encompass the pervasive antithesis between hierarchy and equality. Rather its efficacy and its continuity require that hierarchy and equality remain in tension with one another as opposing, and equally important, concepts of social relations.
REVIEW
Authors: Dwyer Peter D.
Published: February 2015

Of People and Plants: A Botanical Ethnography of Nokopo Village, Madang and Morobe Provinces, Papua New Guinea By Christin Kocher Schmid Basel: AG Verlag, 1991. (Basler Beiträge zur Ethnologie, Band 33.) Pp. 336.
Considerations of ‘Keo’ as an ethnographic category
Authors: Forth Gregory
Published: February 2015

‘Oddly enough, in backward, antiquated Flores there was a district — keo by name — where even now it is allowed for girls to engage in intercourse any man, and the most outstanding among them — outstanding in satisfying men — are in great demand for marriage.’

(Sukarno, in C. Adams 1965: 130)
The Clear Categories of Olive Pink
Authors: McGregor Russell
Published: February 2015

This paper explores Olive Pink's writings of the 1930s, with particular emphasis on her stern moral convictions, and her insistence that persons of mixed Aboriginal and other descent were not Aborigines. It suggests that these two issues were linked, and may best be understood in the context of the contemporary preoccupation with saving a race which had long been regarded as doomed to extinction.
The Dreaming, Human Agency and Inscriptive Practice
Authors: Rumsey Alan
Published: February 2015

The myth/history and orality/literacy oppositions are interrelated ones, through which Aboriginal culture has been stereotyped as the simple inverse of European. The Dreaming has been seen as antithetical to historical consciousness, as it assimilates contingent events to a pre‐existing order which is objectified in natural features of the landscape. I argue that The Dreaming is one instance of a more general mode of orientation through which a good deal of what we call history — the purposeful acts of living persons and their known forebears — is also memorialised in the landscape. What is specific to Aboriginal sociality is not orality or a mythic mentality, but a particular economy of inscriptive and interpretive practices through which ‘country’ becomes ‘story’.
REVIEW
Authors: Harrison Simon
Published: February 2015

The Mundugumor: From the Field Notes of Margaret Mead and Reo Fortune. By Nancy McDowell. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. 1991. Pp. xii + 337. Price US$45.00
REVIEW
Authors: Harris Amanda
Published: February 2015

Iban Shamanism: An Analysis of the Ethnographic Literature. By P. Grahame. An Occasional Paper. Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra, 1994. (1987). Pp. x + 174. Price $A20.00
REVIEW
Authors: Robinson Kathryn
Published: February 2015

In the Realm of the Diamond Queen. By Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Pp xvi + 350. Price US$49.95 (hard) $14.95 (soft).
REVIEW
Authors: Howard Michael C.
Published: February 2015

Anthropology and Third World Development. By Bill Geddes, Jenny Hughes and Joe Remanyi. Geelong, Victoria: Deakin University Press, 1994. Pp. viii + 317.
REVIEW
Authors: Toussaint Sandy
Published: February 2015

Textual Spaces: Aboriginality and Cultural Studies. By Stephen Muecke. Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1992. Pp viii + 214. Price A$29.95 paperback
The Gender of the Cosmos: Totemism, Society and Embodiment in the Sepik River
Authors: Silverman Eric Kline
Published: February 2015

This article contributes to recent research on the foundations of society in Melanesia, both in terms of local representation and actual social practice, as well as body imagery and gender. I have three interrelated objectives. First, I present new data on the symbolism and politics of Eastern Iatmul cosmology and totemism (Sepik River, Papua New Guinea). Second, I engage Harrison's distinction between magical and material, or realist and nominalist, polities in Melanesia. Eastern Iatmul society is represented by totemic names and categories. Yet society also requires human agents to embody named entities: men rarely assert the existence of cosmological categories that are divorced entirely from the realm of human action. This is a key difference between Eastern Iatmul and other Sepik societies such as Manambu. Finally, I argue that there is a symbolic homology between the gendered human body, the body politic and the cosmos, an important perspective that has been lacking in Melanesian comparative studies. Totemism for Eastern Iatmul is largely a realm of male ritual‐politics. Nevertheless, an idiom of maternal fertility and reproduction is salient in the local cosmology. For this reason, the gender of the cosmos, to invoke Marilyn Strathern, is androgynous.
Beyond Bodies: Aspects of the Politicisation of Exchange in the South‐West Highlands of Papua New Guinea
Authors: Nihill Michael
Published: February 2015

Different exchanges offer varying potential for transactors to gain prestige in Anganen, Southern Highlands (PNG). The central argument is that this variation — what I call politicisation — is in part linked with how bodies are variously appropriated as the premise upon which exchange is undertaken. The least prestigious for individual actors are collective prestations in which wealth acts as direct substitution for persons and their bodies. At the other extreme is ceremonial pork distribution where individual prestige is directly measurable in terms of a man's own endeavours. This event is ‘beyond bodies’ and centres the transactor as the sole, focal individual. In between lie warfare compensations where bodies still create debt, but the focus shifts from the female associated body such as the bride to male associated bodies as when allies compensate slain warriors' agnates. The second most prestigious event is ‘moka’ in which the ‘body’ is metaphorised in the Anganen names of its sequence together with aspects of performance. Here wealth does not substitute for the body but rather creates debt. These varying ‘body logics’ can be seen to lie at the heart of the politicisation in their interrelations with other indices of prestige such as individual autonomy or finance for provisioning. I conclude by suggesting the way bodies are variously appropriated may be a useful comparative base for Highlands political economies more generally.
Review
Authors: Petersen Glenn
Published: February 2015

Bountiful Island: A Study of Land Tenure on a Micronesian Atoll. By David Damas. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1994. Pp. xvi +272. Price: $C45.00, $US 55.00.
Warfare, Social Organisation and Resource Access Amongst the Wosera Abelam of Papua New Guinea
Authors: Curry George
Published: February 2015

In the precolonial period warfare was endemic amongst the Wosera Abelam and social organisation was sufficiently flexible to permit the movement of people between villages and groups, and their full incorporation into their host societies. In the contemporary context of increasing population pressure, and in the absence of warfare, a significant response is a general tightening of the rules governing group membership and resource access. This response, it is argued, may represent a shift from a patrifilial system of social organisation to one based on patrilineal‐like principles, resulting in a legacy of marginalised immigrant lineages of three generations or less of village residence.
Anthropology, Self‐determination and Aboriginal Belief in the Christian God
Authors: McIntosh Ian
Published: February 2015

Over the past forty years the Aboriginal people of Galiwin'ku (Elcho Island) in north‐east Arnhem Land have successfully incorporated Christianity into their world view. However, a Uniting Church report characterises members of this same Yolngu (Aboriginal) community as being overwhelmed with feelings of inferiority and powerlessness and unable to function within structures established by Balanda (non‐Aborigines). This paper contrasts the ways in which Christianity has helped break down the separation between cultural groups with its function as a structure for explicit discourse on Aboriginal/non‐Aboriginal relations and inequality. While some Elcho Islanders see anthropologists as people who listen in order to work for Aborigines, Aboriginal Christians see them and other ‘scientists’ as attempting to undermine Aboriginal belief in the Christian God. They are seen as degrading a spiritual movement which has its foundation in the Dreaming and as posing a potential threat to the momentum of Aboriginal directed change in the community.
Being and ‘Non‐Being’ in Ambonwari (Papua New Guinea) Ritual
Authors: Telban Borut
Published: February 2015

By focusing on children involved in the ritual practices in Ambonwari village, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, this essay compares two types of ritual: that of healing and that of male initiation. Like other life crisis rituals both deal with two dimensions of the Ambonwari life‐world, that is with the living and the dead and, in a broader sense, with people and spirits. Though both are based upon the same cosmology there are fundamental differences between them. First, healers in healing ceremonies treat uninitiated children as ‘non‐beings’. From the perspective of Ambonwari ‘selves’ or ‘beings’, children belong to this domain. They exist as extensions of their parents or carers, from whom they cannot be separated conceptually. Second, by examining the Ambonwari concepts of negation I show that healers do not approach the domain of cosmological non‐existence: they are not concerned with the cosmogony of the Ambonwari life‐world. The male initiation rituals do just the opposite, however. It is only in the male initiation ritual, seen as a cosmogonic event, that young boys are cut off from their parents and ‘thrown’ abruptly into a state of becoming. Unlike the healing rites, these rituals treat young boys as both Ambonwari beginnings and Ambonwari beings. I argue that Ambonwari initiation rituals are not concerned with symbolic death followed by rebirth, but with states of being. Initiation means that death becomes possible for a child. The initiated boy will now be able to die as an Ambonwari being.
Seeking Personhood: Anthropological Accounts and Local Concepts in Mount Hagen, Papua New Guinea
Authors: Strathern Andrew , Stewart Pamela J.
Published: February 2015

Terms such as person, self, and individual have been deployed with varying success either as a set or separately to encompass cross‐cultural contexts of human action and experience. The difficulties involved in using these terms as tools of cross‐cultural analysis suggest that a concentration on indigenous terms and their applications is preferable. In the Mount Hagen area of Papua New Guinea the most significant organizing concept in this domain is that of noman, variously glossed as mind, consciousness, intention, will, social sentiment, and understanding. The idea of the noman is thus an ontology in and of action that engages personhood with history and biography in contemporary lives among the Hagen or Melpa people. The noman is seen as in a continuous process of differentiation and change over a lifetime, and it encompasses ideas of process, incompletion/completion, relationality, individuality, character, creativity, and identity. Two different life‐history narratives are used to show how people seek their personhood over time. We interpret their narratives as stories of how they attempt to achieve ‘a strong noman’. They monitor their own successes and failures in contexts of change and turbulence in their lives with reference to their overall wishes and ideals, and this corresponds to an assessment of the state of their noman.
Strange Encounters: Dreams and Nightmares of High School Students in Papua New Guinea1
Authors: Epstein A. L.
Published: February 2015

The material for this paper is drawn from essays written, as part of their ordinary class work, by a group of Papua New Guinea High School students, under the title ‘Recently I had a Dream’. The paper offers a content analysis of this material.

The categories employed to present and analyse the data are rooted in the assumption that a dream may be likened to the performance of a play or a film viewed on the screen. The dream, that is, tends to be a vivid inner visual as well as an affective experience. Focus on the emotional response that the dream evokes yields a simple scheme that enables one to identify and classify the themes and motifs that the dreams reveal: positive affect (i.e. supportive of the dreamer) or negative (i.e. seen as somehow threatening the dreamer). But the picture may also be more complicated as where there are mixed or changing emotions.

Positive affect was reported of those dreams experienced as pleasant or ‘good’; most of these were plainly of the wish‐fulfilment type. But well over half of the students reported experiencing negative affect, emotions ranging in intensity from nervousness through being frightened or scared to terror or being panic stricken. Anxiety indeed was the predominant emotion that found its most frequent expression in strange encounters with grotesque looking creatures which threatened the dreamer's very existence. In what kind of experience(s) was such anxiety rooted? In seeking an answer the data were approached, after the manner of peeling an onion, from a number of perspectives: the sociological (the social situation of the school), the cultural (the relevance of traditional factors, and the psychological (the role of the unconscious). On the last point, the views of the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, set out in his classic study ‘On the Nightmare’, were not found to be helpful. On the other hand, more recent strands in psychoanalytic thinking appear to offer a more promising line of attack.
Ni‐Vanuatu Research and Researchers
Authors: Tryon Darrell
Published: February 2015

The Vanuatu Cultural Centre has played a central role, both in supporting and directing expatriate research in Vanuatu, and in developing a group of ni‐Vanuatu researchers, known as fieldworkers. At annual workshops, the fieldworkers are trained in basic linguistic and anthropological documentation techniques, and discuss ways to maintain and revive local practice in their own areas. The fieldworkers also advise and assist expatriate researchers. This paper outlines the work of the Cultural Centre and the work of ni‐Vanuatu researchers, focusing on the fieldworkers.
The Australian National University—Vanuatu Cultural Centre Archaeology Project, 1994–97: Aims and Results
Authors: Bedford Stuart , Spriggs Matthew , Regenvanu Ralph
Published: February 2015

Despite an intensive period of research in Vanuatu during the 1960s and 1970s, a number of basic questions regarding the archaeology of the islands remained largely unanswered. The Australian National University—Vanuatu Cultural Centre Archaeological Project began in 1994, and was established in an attempt to address some of these questions. Research has been carried out on the islands of Malakula, Efate and Erromango, and has concentrated on establishing cultural sequences for the different islands. The evidence collected thus far overwhelmingly indicates that the islands were initially colonised some 3000 years ago by Lapita settlers. Dentate‐stamped Lapita ceramics arrived with the initial colonisers and the ceramic traditions that followed evolved from the Lapita tradition. A more technical report on the 1994–97 work has recently been published (Bedford et al. 1998) and includes full reporting of radiocarbon dates on which the chronologies presented here are based. The project has also included intensive archaeological field‐training of Cultural Centre staff and fieldworkers. This has proved invaluable where fieldworkers are able to heighten local awareness and understanding of archaeological remains.
Do the Banaro Really Exist? Going Back After Richard Thurnwald
Authors: Juillerat Bernard
Published: February 2015

Between 1913 and 1915, the Austro‐German anthropologist Richard Thurnwald explored the Sepik area with the Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde expedition. In the last months of his stay, he worked with two Banaro informants and later on published his famous study on that society. Eighty five years after, the only anthropological reference on the Banaro is still his own articles. Bernard Juillerat spent four months among the Banaro in 1989, discussing with the people Thurnwald's analyses on the social structure and the mundu partnership. A book was published in French in 1993. This article is a short abstract of the book, where the author discusses Thurnwald's interpretations and gives ethnographic material on men's house ritual and initiation. Some more anthropological information is given on the transformations of Banaro society in the meantime.
Review
Authors: Nihill Michael
Published: February 2015

Modern Papua New Guinea. Edited by Laura Zimmer‐Tamakoshi. Kirksville, Missouri: Thomas Jefferson University Press. 1998. Pp: vi + 424. Price: $40 cloth, $25 paper.
Review
Authors: Davis Richard
Published: February 2015

Customary Marine Tenure in Australia. Edited by Nicolas Peterson and Bruce Rigsby. Sydney: Oceania Publications, University of Sydney, 1998. Oceania Monograph, No. 48. Pp. vi +263 Price $49.50
Review
Authors: Merlan Francesca
Published: February 2015

“… same but different …”: Vom Umgang mit Vergangenheit. Tradition und Geschichte im Alltag einer Nordaustralischen Aborigines‐Kommune. By B. Duelke. Cologne: Rudiger Koppe Verlag 1998 Pp. 1–299.
Review
Authors: Va'A Unasa L. F.
Published: February 2015

The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research By Derek Freeman. Boulder: Westview Press. 1999. Pp. xi + 279. Price: US $24.
An Expanding Aboriginal Domain: Mobility and the Initiation Journey
Authors: Peterson Nicolas
Published: February 2015

Some pre‐circumcision candidates in the Western Desert culture area are taken on a journey to gather people for the final ceremony. Since Aboriginal people started to own cars in the 1960s, these journeys have expanded to such an extent that the outward journey discussed here covered 2250 km. The question of why it is the initiation ceremony, rather than some other ceremonial form, that is becoming the basis for the integration of this expanding Aboriginal domain is addressed and the fragmentary evidence on the historical growth of the journeys presented. Three kinds of ceremonial integration are distinguished and a suggestion made as to why it is the initiation form that is the focus of this expansion.
REVIEWS
Authors: Bottomley Gillian , Friedman Jonathon , Kapferer Bruce , Lattas Andrew , Mackey Eva , Papastergiadis Nikos
Published: February 2015

SIX REVIEWS OF White Nation: Fantasies of White supremacy in a multicultural society by Ghassan Hage. Annandale, Sydney: Pluto Press. Pp. 280. Price: $24.95
Whose Ethics? Which Cultural Contract? Imagining Arrernte Traditions Today
Authors: Austin‐Broos Diane
Published: February 2015

The paper uses an account of ‘tradition’ by the philosopher, Alisdair MacIntyre, to argue for the view that local Aboriginal culture that has been through extensive change is nonetheless still specifying for the Aboriginal people involved. Therefore these local traditions must be taken into account in discussions about ‘contracts’ or ‘policies’ concerning Aboriginal people today. An example is drawn from the Lutheran tradition of Western Arrernte people in Central Australia.
Giving Up Homicide: Korowai Experience of Witches and Police (West Papua)
Authors: Stasch Rupert
Published: February 2015

This paper examines the recent historical conjuncture of two regimes of violence in the lives of Korowai of West Papua: the endogenous violence of witches and witch execution, and the exogenous violence of Indonesian police. I argue that Korowai speakers' witchcraft beliefs and former practices of witch execution followed a culturally distinctive logic of shock and redemptive transaction, according to which violence could be generative of more positive qualities of relationship. By contrast, Indonesian police appear to Korowai as a qualitatively new kind of violent agent, with whom it is impossible to transact in any direct, potentially redemptive manner. In this situation, fear of police is the main reason Korowai say they have stopped executing witches. I also argue, however, that police violence appears to have had an additive local life beyond the scope of direct police involvement in local affairs. Reports, threats, figurative evocations, and emulative enactments of police violence are all now actively taken up by Korowai in their own projects of making a social world. Korowai reception of police violence has been profoundly mediated and shaped by local sociocultural principles. In this respect, the current intercultural dialogue of and about violence is one in which local and state agency have been complexly co‐constitutive.
Of Human Bondage: The Breaking In of Stockmen in Northern Australia
Authors: Strang Veronica
Published: February 2015

This article examines the cultural forms through which the young European‐Australian stockmen who work on the cattle stations of north Queensland are socialised. Exploring their interactions with a social and physical landscape and their rites of passage, as manifested in everyday actions, performance and material culture, it reveals how – and why – they are given little choice in acquiring values which are intensely adversarial to the land and to the indigenous people of Australia. It also explores the relationship between the transmission of particular values to these young men and the wider political and hegemonic role of the pastoral sub‐culture in defining Australian national identity.1
Shadows of Song: Exploring Research and Performance Strategies in Yolngu Women's Crying‐songs
Authors: Magowan Fiona
Published: February 2015

This paper provides an argument that research on women's crying‐songs in north east Arnhem Land can be effectively analysed as a series of shadow‐dances between the researcher, the singer and the performance context. Within this framework, it explores the processes of transmission and reception of a selection of crying‐song texts from one of the most highly regarded female performers in the region. As singing is a powerful force in the making of Yolngu social, spiritual and political life, music making is shown to play a crucial role in authorizing, describing, teaching and controlling social and ancestral knowledge between men and women and by extension the place of the researcher within the community. Through the regulation of knowledge the making and remaking of the singer and researcher is danced out in a web of mutuality, reciprocity and obligation in which processes of ‘strategic formation’ and ‘strategic location’ emerge. Thus, one woman's melodies of mourning are shown to be a musical gift exchange of various shadow‐dances between learning, receiving, performing and mutually engaging in Yolngu ways of knowing and coming‐to‐know.
Totem and Transaction: the Objectification of ‘Tradition’ Among North Mekeo
Authors: Mosko Mark S.
Published: February 2015

Most recent treatments of Melanesian post‐contact change have presumed that objectifications of ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ have intensified and proliferated in response to the forces of colonialism and the penetration of the nation‐state. Harrison (2000) has recently argued, however, that in pre‐colonial times too Melanesians characteristically objectified their cultural practices and identities as ‘possessions’ that could be readily exchanged or transacted. Supposedly, the key difference between the two eras has accorded with different formulations of ‘property’: ‘private property’ and the logic of ‘possessive individualism’ in the post‐contact era; and ‘trading and gift‐exchange systems’ or ‘prestige economies’ in pre‐contact times. In this article I examine Harrison's portrayal of Melanesian cultural practices as ‘possessions’ and the notions of ‘property’ that he sees as key to the cultural objectification in both pre‐ and post‐colonial settings with reference to ethnographic and historical information regarding the North Mekeo peoples of Papua New Guinea. I argue from the perspective of the New Melanesian Ethnography that Harrison's view of pre‐contact prestige economies and trade and gift exchange systems retains several misleading a priori assumptions about ‘commodity exchange’ and, illustrating the potential of the New Melanesian Ethnography for historical applications, that he overemphasizes the extent to which post‐contact changes in cultural objectification have involved individualised and commodified forms of property. Consequently, in the case of North Mekeo, both the continuities and the changes between pre‐ and post‐contact cultural objectifications may have proceeded differently from the ways Harrison has outlined for Melanesia generally.
Leading Lights in the ‘Mother of Darkness’: Perspectives on Leadership and Value in North Ambrym, Vanuatu
Authors: Patterson Mary
Published: February 2015

In comparative political theory in Anthropology, Pacific leadership has had a prominent place, with a long history of debate about typologies and forms. In this paper I eschew such approaches in favour of a demonstration of the complexity of interactions fostered in local communities by interpretations of a protean ‘tradition’, refracted by a history of encounters with modernity and its social imaginary at a particular historical moment. The narratives of three local leaders in Vanuatu's recent history, provide a context for evaluating the relative merits of such typologies when the grounds of leadership itself are contested.
REVIEW
Authors: Panned Sandra
Published: February 2015

The Forest of Taboos: Morality, Hunting and Identity among the Huaulu of the Moluccas By Valerio Valeri. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. 2000. Pp. xxiii +509
REVIEW
Authors: Barrett Robert J
Published: February 2015

Exotic deviance: medicalizing cultural idioms from strangeness to illness. By Robert E. Bartholomew. Colorado: University of Colorado Press. 2000 Pp. xviii + 280 Price: Hardcover, US$59.95, Paperback, US$29.95
Note on the Reincarnation Beliefs of the Gumini People of the Simbu Province of Papua New Guinea
Authors: Johnstone Joan D.
Published: February 2015

This note describes the traditional reincarnation belief system of the Guminis, a small group of people living in the south‐east of the Simbu Province of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. This system embraces the belief that the spirit of some humans is, after death, reincarnated within the body of another living person of similar age and probably of the same sex as the deceased. This person, a stranger, then represents the continuation of the life of the person who died in terms of his/her social and kinship relationships. It is demonstrated that this belief system was functional in traditional Gumini society but may not continue to be so in future due to rapid changes in rural and urban life currently affecting the people of Papua New Guinea.
Review
Authors: Wang Yiyan
Published: February 2015

China Off Center: Mapping the Margins of the Middle Kingdom Edited by Susan D. Blum and Lionel M. Jensen Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. 2002. Pp. xxii + 402 Price: US$24.95
Review
Authors: White J. Peter
Published: February 2015

The Quest for Origins. Who first discovered and settled New Zealand and the Pacific Islands? By K. R. Howe. Auckland: Penguin Books (NZ), 2003. Pp. 235. Price: NZ$29.95.
Review
Authors: Trompf Garry W
Published: February 2015

Christian Missions and the Enlightenment. Edited by Brian Stanley. Studies in the History of Christian Missions (3). Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans and Curzon Press 2001. Pp. xi + 246. Price: US$45 (cloth).
Politicized Ecology: Local Responses to Mining in Papua New Guinea
Authors: Macintyre Martha , Foale Simon
Published: February 2015

Our paper draws on research in two sites where large goldmining projects are located — Misima and Lihir islands in Papua New Guinea. We examine the socio‐economic context in which criticisms of environmental degradation arise. We discuss the social and political meanings embedded in local demands for compensation for environmental damage, drawing attention to the disparities between local Melanesian conceptions of the environment and global, Western ideas that inform international environmentalist criticisms of mining. We dispute the ‘romantic primitivism’ of some environmentalist discourse, using the work of ethno‐ecologists and case studies of specific incidents on these islands, contesting the view that there is a natural conservationist ethic in Melanesia. The image of the ‘noble primitive ecologist’ that some environmentalists appeal to, would in most circumstances be rejected by Melanesians as racist and paternalistic, but is embraced as a strategy in conflicts with mining companies and when making legal claims for compensation. Alliances formed between landowners, environmentalists and western lawyers against mining companies such as BHP and Rio Tinto are based more on shared political ends than on the epistemological consistency of their perceptions of environmental damage from mining. Local Melanesian communities claim sovereignty over all resources and their compensation claims for environmental degradation constitute a new form of resource rent.
The Politico‐Historical construction of the Pintupi Luritja and the Concept of Tribe
Authors: Holcombe Sarah
Published: February 2015

This paper explores the history of the emergence of Pintupi Luritja as the dominant language in the Central Australian community of Amunturrngu (Mt Liebig), traced from the people's first encounters with settlement in the 1940s at Haasts Bluff, through to the present. It is a political history, as movement toward settlement demanded a re‐structuring of social relations within a newly settled polity. To elaborate on this polity I examine the concept of a language community through the construction of Pintupi Luritja as a ‘communilect’. The development of this communilect as a lingua franca in these early settlements signals the value of the original term ‘Luritja’ as a trope. The meaning of this original Indigenous term is not only indicative of the regional history, but also of the flexible potential in group formation. The pattern of contact and settlement in this Pintupi Luritja region has compelled a socio‐linguistic re‐configuration, lending a currency to the label Pintupi Luritja that suggests a modern, firmed up, ‘tribe’. This tribe is a ‘secondary phenomenon’ formed through the manipulation of relatively unstructured populations — stateless societies — by the colonial State (Fried 1975). At issue here is the inter‐cultural aspect of this language formation that is the elemental process in the creation of this ‘new’ social formation.
Western Arrernte Pmere Kwetethe Spirits
Authors: Kenny Anna
Published: February 2015

This article explores the difference between the meaning and use of TGH Strehlow's term pmara kutata (his spelling) and of pmere kwetethe (modern spelling) in contemporary Western Arrernte society. The expression pmara kutata features prominently in TGH Strehlow's oeuvre. He defined pmara kutata, as the ‘centre of a local totemic clan’, ‘sacred site’ and the ‘everlasting home’ where an important local totemic ancestor originated and /or passed to his last rest. Interestingly enough the term pmara kutata or pmere kwetethe seems to have undergone a semantic shift. In contemporary Western Arrernte society pmere kwetethe is used to denote a range of spirit beings with different characters that dwell on and in the landscape. In English the expression pmere kwetethe is sometimes glossed as ‘the spirits of the land’ or ‘the invisible people‘.