bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Reviews
Authors: Laycock Don 
Published: February 2015

Studies in Pacific Languages & Cultures, in honour of Bruce Biggs.: Edited by Jim Hollyman and Andrew Pawley. Auckland, Linguistic Society of New Zealand. 1981. Pp. 392.Syntax and Semantics in Papua New Guinea Languages.: Edited by Karl J. Franklin. Ukarumpa, Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1981. Pp. 237.
‘WERE YOU EVER SAVAGES?’ ABORIGINAL INSIDERS AND PASTORALISTS' PATRONAGE
Authors: Rowse Tim 
Published: February 2015

AbstractThis paper is a reading of the life story of Jack Sullivan, an Aboriginal stock worker employed by the Durack family in the east Kimberley. It draws upon ethnographic and other writing to suggest the processes of pastoralist hegemony. Durack rule constituted several male Aboriginal workers as trusted intermediaries with those who were more distant from the colonists. Autonomous and skilful, Jack aligned himself with the ‘inside’ world centred on the homestead, against the danger ‘outside’. The ‘inside’ position seems to have had some roots in waves of Aboriginal cultural renewal (from the south and east). The paper uses ethnographic evidence to interpret the local eminence of one agent of this renewal, Boxer, a Queensland Aborigine who helped raise Sullivan.
THICK BEYOND DESCRIPTION ETHNOGRAPHY AND CULTURE AS TROPE
Authors: Foster Robert J. 
Published: February 2015

Asiwinarong: Ethos, Image, and Social Power among the Usen Barok of New Ireland. By Roy Wagner. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Pp. xxiv + 238. Price: US$30.Symbols That Stand For Themselves. By Roy Wagner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Pp. xii + 150.
‘The second coming of the Lord’: early christianization, episodic time, and the cultural construction of continuity in Sibog
Authors: Kempf Wolfgang 
Published: February 2015

ABSTRACTThe conversion to Christianity in Melanesia has often been accompanied by the expectation of an imminent millennium. The expectation of a comprehensive and almost immediate transformation could be read as an expression of a cultural concept which sees real change as an occurrence premised on discontinuity and resulting in the total transformation of society. In reconsidering a millenarian movement among the Ngaing around 1930, I suggest that, in this concept of change, a cultural schema is manifested that has durability over time. Expectations aroused and actions undertaken during early Christianization have been influenced by this concept as have Sibog reflections on these past events, with their stressing of continuity in certain cultural domains.
Introduction: Representing Racial Issues
Authors: Cowlishaw Gillian 
Published: February 2015

ABSTRACTThis paper seeks to show why there is a need to theorise race relations as a feature of white Australia's culture and as the context of Aboriginal lives. The violent drama of racial politics as glimpsed on the public media and as experienced by black communities all over the country, demands analytic attention. Anthropologists were once the experts on race, before the field lost its legitimacy. If we turn our attention to exposing the forms of colonial power that saturate Aboriginal social life, Australian anthropology may be saved from becoming an anachronism.
Nobody asked the mother: women and maternity on Simbo, western Solomon Islands
Authors: Dureau Christine 
Published: February 2015

‘I don't believe you. They say that because they're infertile … The life of a mother on Simbo is very hard but if I have no children, then why am I on this earth? And my life will be empty.1 Look at Zila2 [a woman in an infertile marriage] who has nothing except cats and adopted animals. Will her cats carry her coffin or cry for her? But my children stop me from doing all the things I need and want to do in the church and the UCWF and the lineage. The life of a mother on Simbo is very hard.’Gure, explaining her equivocal reaction to hearing that some Western women are intentionally childless.
Whether Rain or Shine: Weather Regimes from a New Guinea Perspective
Authors: Sillitoe Paul 
Published: February 2015

ABSTRACTThe climate of any region is of interest to those who live there, impinging as it inevitably does on their lives. This paper explores the interest evinced in the weather by some Wola speakers, living in the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea. It is an attempt at an ethno‐meteorology, a scarcely researched but creditable field of enquiry. It compares and contrasts observations of the climate and records of the weather with local people's comments and thoughts on these phenomena. The paper covers both daily weather patterns and annual seasons, with a detailed investigation of rainfall patterns, cloud cover, wind and pressure, and temperature and humidity variations. It concludes on the management of climatic perturbations, notably infrequent frosts.
Ned Kelly Died for our Sins
Authors: Rose Deborah Bird 
Published: February 2015

ABSTRACTFrom time to time scholars have posed the question: why have Australian Aborigines not developed cargo cults with the same intensity and flamboyance as their Melanesian neighbours? This discussion evades the implications that Aborigines may have been negligent in their cultural production of responses to colonisation, and seeks to engage with some of the responses some Aboriginal people actually have made to colonisation. Focussing on stories of Ned Kelly, and contrasting them with stories of Captain Cook, the suggestion here is that Aboriginal people's search for a moral European communicates the challenging and provocative possibility that coloniser and colonised can share a moral history and thus can fashion a just society.
Shit Beautiful: Tambu and Kina Revisited
Authors: Clark Jeffrey 
Published: February 2015

ABSTRACTThe concept of inalienability as discussed by Annette Weiner (1992) seems to privilege Polynesia over Melanesia in terms of a more ‘evolved’ logic of object possession. Two instantiations of material culture from the Wiru and Tolai people, pearlshells and coils of shell‐money respectively, are compared and assessed for their inclusion into the category of “inalienable possessions.” The conclusion argues against fitting Melanesian artefacts into a developmental continuum of inalienability, and signals the need for a more contextual and aesthetic reading of material culture in comparative projects.
Violence, Social Differentiation and the Self
Authors: Robinson Gary 
Published: February 2015

ABSTRACTThe article considers aspects of violence in everyday life among the Tiwi of Melville and Bathurst Islands. It briefly compares the role of violence in bureaucratically and juridically mediated forms with self‐help and social regulation in Aboriginal societies, focussing on the expressive or performative aspects of violence in everyday interaction. Myers' discussion of violence among the Pintubi posits a dialectical polarity of relatedness and differentiation, corresponding with the affective poles of compassion and anger. This is compared with Sansom's account of semi‐ritualized forms of violence in Aboriginal fringe‐camp life, where a point of commonality in Myers' and Sansom's approaches is found: this consists of the attunement of action, of violence, self‐violence and destructiveness to the witnessing public. In Tiwi life too, conflict is dynamically shaped by actors' attempts to impinge upon, to seek to arouse and in some cases to manipulate, compassion or concern in the witnessing group as defence or as a form of moral attack. Open, dramatic ‘appealing’ violence, often in the form of a more or less controlled loss of self‐control, seeks to parry indirect interpersonal tension and antagonism, to reassert or restore social distance and protect or privilege important relationships from intrusive demands. However, these violent appeals in rhetorical threat, in self‐violence, destructiveness or sometimes in dramatic suicidal gestures also invariably indicate extreme personal difficulty displaced into open forms of confrontation. The article proposes that the generative moment of violence for social differentiation be sought in an examination of dynamic interrelationships between individual life‐history, inner group processes and their articulation with external social forms.
‘White Skins‘, ‘Real People’ and ‘Chinese’ in Some Spatial Transformations of the Western Province, PNG1
Authors: Wood Mike 
Published: February 2015

ABSTRACTTo understand more fully contemporary forms of colonialism in PNG I argue we need to move our analysis beyond local narratives of encounters with Europeans to include narratives about non‐Europeans. Through a consideration of Kamula accounts of Europeans, especially missionaries, and Chinese I show how the Kamula model two quite different experiences of colonialism. In one, local people are able to transform Europeans into analogues of themselves and in the other, currently more associated with the Chinese, the emphasis is on difference, rather than on commonalities. These interrelated representations of two distinct kinds of colonialists are, in part, complex signifiers of national, and especially local, concerns about ‘development’ based on logging. I outline how these accounts of Europeans and Chinese express the different forms of power which are currently deployed to transform space in the Western Province. I conclude by speculating that to understand these powers adequately we may need to follow Latour and Callon and extend our analysis of colonialism to include non‐human agents.
Entertaining a Dangerous Guest: Sacrifice and Play in the Ma'pakorong Ritual of the Sa'dan Toraja
Authors: Waterson Roxana 
Published: February 2015

ABSTRACTMa'pakorong is a Toraja ritual performed in honour of the goddess of pox, Puang Ruru‘. She is invited into the village to be entertained with music, cockfighting, and food offerings before being escorted away with the expressed hope that she will not return for seven years. Ludic and sacrificial elements are inextricably interwoven in the rite, particularly in the cockfight, and I analyse these apparently contradictory elements in relation both to recent theoretical writings, and to the Toraja ritual cycle as a whole, drawing parallels with ritual contests in some other Indonesian societies. Besides dealing with illness, conceived as categorical disorder and excessive ‘heat’, the rite is ultimately concerned with the enhancement of fertility, and emphasises community benefits instead of the intense status competition which predominates at mortuary rites.
Village Inventions: Historical Variations Upon a Regional Theme in Uiaku, Papua New Guinea
Authors: Barker John 
Published: February 2015

ABSTRACTAnthropologists have come to realize that even the most ‘traditional’ Melanesian practices and ideologies may be historically shaped by the people's experiences within encompassing regional systems. This article examines the reshaping of local understandings of the village among the Maisin people of Oro Province over the past century. I distinguish three contexts within which Maisin notions of the village have been formed: colonial models of village government imposed before the Second World War; Christian village cooperatives in the post‐war colonial period; and village meetings in the 1980s. The paper shows that the idea of the village has a complex evolution, shaped within overlapping dialogues between villagers and significant outsiders and between elder and younger village leaders who have had differing experiences of the outside world and the place of their own community within it.
Origin Legends and Linguistic Relationships
Authors: Dixon R. M. W. 
Published: February 2015

ABSTRACTThe paper begins by discussing a number of Aboriginal legends, referring to geographical events, that have a clear historical basis, before giving a number of legends about the direction from which ancestors came into contact‐time territory. A final section shows how some origin legends correlate with the direction in which the closest linguistic relationships are found, and speculates that other legends may suggest hypotheses for where to look for genetic relationships between languages.
Review
Authors: Feld Steven 
Published: February 2015

Ecoute le bambou qui pleure: Récits de quatre musiciens mélanésiens ('Aré'aré, Iles Salomon) Recorded and presented by Hugo Zemp. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. Pp. 213 + 51 photographic plates.Iles Salomon: Ensembles de Flutes de Pan ‘Aré'aré/Solomon Islands ‘Aré'aré Panpipe Ensembles. Recordings and text in French and English by Hugo Zemp. Collection Musée de l'Homme‐CNRS, Le Chant du Monde LDX 274961.62, 1994. 2 audio CD recordings, booklet pp. 89, photographs, musical transcriptions.Iles Salomon: Musiques Intimes et rituelles ‘Aré'aré/Solomon Islands ‘Aré'aré Intimate and Ritual music. Recordings and text in French and English by Hugo Zemp. Collection Musée de l'Homme‐CNRS, Le Chant du Monde CNR 274963, 1995. Audio CD recording, booklet pp. 109, photographs, song texts, musical transcriptions.
The Political Order and Corporal Coercion in Kanak Societies of the Past (New Caledonia)
Authors: Bensa Alban , Goromido Antoine , Mellott Noal 
Published: February 2015

ABSTRACTTill the mid‐19th century, in Kanak institutions in north central Grande Terre (New Caledonia), chiefs received their titles from the ‘masters of the land’. To add material and symbolic power to their preeminent position, they received human sacrifices, as one of their kinspeople offered his/her body; and they waged warfare outside the chiefdom. Their fame was proportional to control over human bodies. Based on historical sources and ethnographic information gathered in the field, the effort is made to see how these precolonial cannibalistic practices fit into political systems. A comparison is made between Kanak chiefs and Melanesian big men and great men.
Erasing Culture and Race: Practising ‘self‐determination’1
Authors: Cowlishaw Gillian 
Published: February 2015

ABSTRACTThis paper is an ethnographic exploration of the process heralded by the progressive policies of Aboriginal self‐determination. The discourse of self‐determination was based on anti‐racist ideals and a break with the past. However, state officials did not divest themselves of their cultural baggage, and proceeded by trial and error to implement a program of creating autonomous Aboriginal communities for people of whom they had no knowledge. In attempting to reshape communities there was little recognition of the cultural specificities of the Aboriginal domain let alone the way difference, both as race and as culture, had been constructed and perpetuated in practice. The state erased its own white past. The ordinary practices of state officials became a glass barrier, precluding Aborigines from responding either as expected or as they themselves desired. Neither incompetence, ignorance nor ill‐will is at the root of these failures, but rather the liberal, common sense, anti‐racism which informs the state's refusal to deal with the social realities of history and race. The absence of history and race from anthropology's study of cultural dynamics frames the discussion.
Logging, Women and Submarines: Some Changes in Kamula Men's Access to Transformative Power
Authors: Wood Michael 
Published: February 2015

ABSTRACTIn this paper I describe how, for the Kamula, the productive elicitation of both familiar and modern things often requires access to the transformative capacities of ‘bush spirits’. The Kamula narratives I deal with outline how elements of modernity (such as money, logging, guns) are relocated into the domain of these spirits. By the mediation of these spirits, sometimes disturbing, even dangerous, aspects of modernity are transformed and then productively transferred to Kamula men such that they can apparently more effectively negotiate the new forces that now structure their lives. Through these narrative and magical definitions of agency, Kamula men become complicit in a modernity that is increasingly both the source and negation of their power.
The Traditionalisation of the Maori Meeting House
Authors: Sissons Jeffrey 
Published: February 2015

ABSTRACTBy focusing on two successive phases in the traditionalisation of the Maori meeting house — exhibition and aestheticisation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and standardisation and tribalisation during the 1930s and 1940s — I seek to illustrate how the diverse projects of national identity, tourist marketing, ethnology and state‐directed rural development converged to displace meeting houses out of time. I argue that while the short‐term effect of this displacement was to suppress developing traditions of oppositional Maori agency this was not the case in the longer term, nor was it always the intention of those engaged in the process.
Solicited and Unsolicited History: The Transformation in Ömie Self‐Presentation
Authors: Rohatynskyj Marta Adrianna 
Published: February 2015

ABSTRACTThe history presented by the Ömie in the pre‐Independence research appears fundamentally different from the history presented by the Ömie in more recent research. The basis for considering these two renditions as analytically equivalent is examined. It is proposed that the justification lies not so much in the content of the two representations as in the negotiations of the terms of the ethnographic encounter which elicited them. It is proposed that these renditions of history are actually the terms of the relationship between the researcher and the informants negotiated in the course of their interaction on two separate occasions.
The Sky Came Down: Social Movements and Personhood in Mekeo Society1
Authors: Bergendorff Steen 
Published: February 2015

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that the Mekeo cargo‐cult centered on a young woman named Filo has to be understood in relation to local models of personhood and Mekeo social organization. It is argued that colonization brought a split between these two spheres of social life causing the movement, while the specific form taken by the movement has to be seen in relation to Mekeo models of personhood. Furthermore, the paper traces the social changes brought about by this movement to present day cargo activities that incorporate God, Jesus, The Virgin Mary and the Saints. Lastly it analyses how these beliefs compete for social hegemony with more traditionalist practices centered around the Mekeo sorcery complex.
Land and Sea Tenure at Erub, Torres Strait: Property, Sovereignty and the Adjudication of Cultural Continuity
Authors: Scott Colin , Mulrennan Monica 
Published: February 2015

ABSTRACTApproaching property as social practice, and native title as a confluence of indigenous, ethnographic, and legal discourses, we address two themes: firstly, the ethnocentrism of the state's division of ‘property’ from ‘jurisdiction,’; applied to deny indigenous societies' practice of the latter; and secondly, the contradictions inherent in judicial evaluation of continuity and discontinuity in indigenous law and custom.We explore the relationship of ‘home place’ to tenure at Erub, where island, reef and ocean comprise a cultural and experiential continuum. Rights across a full spectrum of material/symbolic resources involve a dynamic tension between principles of exclusion and incorporative reciprocity. The issue of how to balance more particular against more collective rights is at play with each nesting of more local into more inclusive socio‐territorial identities: from households and lineages, through island communities, sub‐regional island groups, and Torres Strait regionally, to the encapsulating state and evolving international orders.At Erub, an island community long regarded as a vanguard of creolization for Torres Strait, newcomers have by‐and‐large been assimilated to indigenous systems of land‐ and sea‐holding and authority. The connection between people and territory is a complex practice of social identities and interests responding to political opportunity, according to cultural forms that manifest substantial and traceable continuities to indigenous arrangements, as innovation has proceeded. The continuities appear sufficient to satisfy criteria for native title recognition as articulated in the Mabo decision, but the criteria themselves are too narrowly based to accommodate the processual dynamics of evolving culture and tradition. A reordering of territorial jurisdiction, predicated on the principle of Islander consent to development activities in their homelands/seas, would provide more authentic conditions for cultural autonomy.
Mining Workers or ‘Opportunist’ Tribesmen?: a Tribal Workforce in a Papua New Guinea Mine1
Authors: Imbun Benedict Y. 
Published: February 2015

ABSTRACTThis paper looks at the formation and working of a ‘green mining workforce’ in a Papua New Guinea (PNG) mine. It describes and analyses a group of tribesmen whose entry into the modern wage‐earning workforce has resulted from the establishment of a large mining project in their area. The Porgeran tribesmen2, of the Highlands of PNG have embraced the concept of monetary employment and quickly assimilated into the mining work environment. However, their admission into wage employment has been achieved through a series of personal and workplace challenges, as anticipated of any transitory workforce. The paper discusses those challenges and also takes into consideration the views and perceptions of non‐Porgeran mining workers towards them. Hence, one of the major objectives of this paper is to address the transformation of this tribal people into a modern wage‐earning workforce. It concludes by identifying possible avenues for anthropological studies of such groups of people to record their peculiar perceptions of, and attitudes to, an alien but promising new alternative to their subsistence life style.
Torres Strait and Dawdhay: Dimensions of Self and Otherness on Yam Island1
Authors: Fuary Maureen 
Published: February 2015

ABSTRACTWhen Papua New Guinea attained independence two decades ago an absolute distinction was created between Papua New Guinea and the Torres Strait: Papuans were firmly placed in Papua New Guinea territory and Torres Strait Islanders in Australian territory. In constituting themselves as Torres Strait Islanders and more specifically as Australians, Yam Island people's contemporary expressions of their connection to, yet distance from, lowland Papua New Guinea can be best described as ambivalent, pulsing between identification and incorporation, distance and disavowal.I argue that this ambivalence is not an artefact of the establishment of the border per se, but rather it was through the establishment of the border that a new layer was added to Self and Other constructions by Yam Island people in terms of how they see themselves and their Papuan neighbours. The sometimes fraught nature of this relationship can be understood in light of the continuing socio‐political impacts of these international border lines on people who have recently combined a somewhat legalistic and political definition of themselves, and of Papuans, with perennial extra‐legal definitions. I suggest it is in isolating and exploring domains of interaction that we can see the fluidity and dynamism of Self and Other definitions in operation, and in so doing better appreciate their essential imbrication.
Cargo Cult Horror
Authors: Lindstrom Lamont 
Published: February 2015

ABSTRACTAnthropological analyses of cargo cults offer certain plots alongside ethnographic detail. Many such accounts assume one or the other of three common storylines. Cargo cults have been plotted as bildungsroman, as horror story, and as carnival. Bildungsroman cargo narratives suggest that cargo is good but culting is bad. Carnivalesque accounts reverse this polarity to celebrate culting while disparaging the dangers of cargo. The horror storyline laments both cargo and culting. Over the past fifty years, shifting appreciations of modernity, technology, and progress have reshaped the stories in which cargo cults get accounted: Modernity's cargo bildungsroman has given way to postmodern horror.