bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
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

ABSTRACTThis 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

ABSTRACTVia 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.
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

ABSTRACTThis 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

ABSTRACTThe 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’.
The Gender of the Cosmos: Totemism, Society and Embodiment in the Sepik River
Authors: Silverman Eric Kline 
Published: February 2015

ABSTRACTThis 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

ABSTRACTDifferent 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.
Warfare, Social Organisation and Resource Access Amongst the Wosera Abelam of Papua New Guinea
Authors: Curry George 
Published: February 2015

ABSTRACTIn 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

ABSTRACTOver 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

ABSTRACTBy 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

ABSTRACTTerms 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

ABSTRACTThe 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

ABSTRACTThe 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

ABSTRACTDespite 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

ABSTRACTBetween 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.
An Expanding Aboriginal Domain: Mobility and the Initiation Journey
Authors: Peterson Nicolas 
Published: February 2015

ABSTRACTSome 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.
Whose Ethics? Which Cultural Contract? Imagining Arrernte Traditions Today
Authors: Austin‐Broos Diane 
Published: February 2015

ABSTRACTThe 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

ABSTRACTThis 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

ABSTRACTThis 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

ABSTRACTThis 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.