Andrew Strathern

Provides an excellent review of anthropological thought on the body

Body Thoughts

This collection of essays, edited by leading scholars in the field, focuses on how expressive genres such as music, dance and poetry are of enduring significance to social organization. Research from New Guinea, Indonesia and Taiwan is used to assess how historical changes modify these forms of expression to adjust to the social and political needs of the moment. The volume is unique in exploring the significance of expressive genres for the social processes of coping with and adjusting to change, either from outside forces or from internal ones. The contributions detail first-hand fieldwork, often conducted over a period of many years, and with each contributor bringing their experience to bear on both the aesthetic and the analytical aspects of their materials. Comparative in scope, the volume covers Austronesian and non-Austronesian speakers in the wider Indo-Pacific region.

Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Taiwan

Expressive Genres and Historical Change

Pamela J. Stewart

This book fills a current need in Islamic Studies for a perspective on the nuanced investigation of ritual practices rather than a concentration on politicized forms of ideology. The essays in this volume, all written by scholarly specialists with first-hand fieldwork experience, take up a number of questions central to Islamic religion and ritual, focusing on rituals as practices of making identities. Identities are seen as changing in response to historical forces rather than as unchanging and rigid, and the overall vision of Islam is seen as pluralistic rather than monolithic. Several of the essays deal with gender relations, showing that women may in practice gain some prominence in local contexts beyond what might be allowed by reformist "Islamicizing" authorities. This is particularly the case when the focus is on varieties of Sufism. The essays also recognize that elements of conflict and contestation are commonly present in ritual contexts because of struggles over power, hence the title "Contesting Rituals." Politics, gender relations, and conflict between central reformists and local ritual specialists are all involved in these contestations. Overall, the volume aims to show the multiplicity of Islam and to demonstrate how the themes of multiplicity and unity are played out continuously over time. The contributors to the volume are Kelly Pemberton (South Asia), Anna M. Gade (Indonesia), Susan J. Rasmussen (Africa), Alaine S. Hutson (Africa), Shampa Mazumdar and Sanjoy Mazumdar (USA), Sean R. Roberts (Uyghurstan), and Liyakat Takim (Iraq). The editors, Pamela Stewart and Andrew Strathern, provide an introductory overview. This book is part of the Ritual Studies Monograph Series, edited by Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh. "[T]his volume is a useful addition to literature on Islam, ritual, and identity. It successfully investigates the plasticity of Muslim ritual on multiple axes, providing historical perspectives, explorations of spatial transformation, and experience-near ethnographic analyses." -- Journal of Anthropological Research, 2006 "[T]he contributions offer interesting insights into aspects of Muslim religious practice, their situatedness in wider social contexts, and change over time." -- The Journal of Social Anthropology "The reader comes away with an awareness of the complexities of being Muslim in today's world of globalization, mass migration, changing gender roles, and continuing ethno-nationalist struggles." -- The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland

Islam and Practices of Identity-making

Contesting Rituals

Originally published in 1981 by Viking Press. Photographer Kirk made seven trips to New Guinea between 1967 and 1980 taking hundreds of photos. Of these, 62 stunning portrait photos and 31 photos of rarely seen New Guinea masks are presented along with an extended essay by anthropologist Andrew Strathern explaining the context of the elaborate face painting and body decorating depicted in the photos. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

New Guinea

Man as Art

A compelling new book that presents a thoughtful and creative approach to transforming violent discordances, this work examines the intractable issues of revenge and restitution in a conflict context. It argues that in communities where violence must be paid for through compensation, violent conflict can be contained. With primary reference to the Highlands of Papua New Guinea and comparisons to cases from Africa, Pakistan, and other arenas of tribal social formations, the account explores how rituals such as wealth disbursement, oath taking, sacrifice, and formal apologies are often used as a means of averting or transcending acts of vengeance after violence. Through exploration of the balance between revenge and compensation at different junctures in the peace-making process, this compelling text devises a thought-provoking and inventive analysis that would benefit countless communities in conflict around the world.

Papua New Guinea Perspectives

Peace-Making and the Imagination

This volume consists of a number of carefully-selected readings that represent a wide range of discussions and theorizing about ritual. The selection encompasses definitional questions, issues of interpretation, meaning, and function, and a roster of ethnographic and analytical topics, covering classic themes such as ancestor worship and sacrifice, initiation, gender, healing, social change, and shamanic practices, as well as recent critical and reconstructive theorizing on embodiment, performance, and performativity. In their Introduction to the volume, the Editors provide an overall survey and critical consideration of topics, incorporating insights from their own long-term field research and reflections on the readings included. The Introduction and readings together provide a unique research tool for those interested in pursuing the study of ritual processes in depth, with the benefit of both historical and contemporary approaches.

Ritual

A Photographic-textual Exposition of the Female Spirit Cult Performance in Mount Hagen, Papua New Guinea

'The Spirit is Coming!'

A Line of Power

How do people perceive the land around them, and how is that perception changed by history? The contributors explore this question from an anthropological angle, assessing the connections between place, space, identity, nationalism, history and memory in a variety of different settings around the world. Taking historical change and memory as key themes, they offer a broad study that will appeal to a readership across the social sciences. Contributors from North America, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Europe explore a wide variety of case studies that includes seascapes in Jamaica; the Solomon Islands; the forests of Madagascar; Aboriginal and European notions of landscape in Australia; place and identity in 19th century maps and the bogs of Ireland; contemporary concerns over changing landscapes in Papua New Guinea; and representations of landscape and history in the poetry of the Scottish Borders.

Anthropological Perspectives

Landscape, Memory And History

Part of the Ritual Studies Monograph Series Inspired by the research of the French anthropologist Daniel de Coppet on exchange, death, and compensation in the Solomon Islands within the South-West Pacific region, this edited collection highlights the fundamental connections between exchange and sacrifice as ritual practices within cosmological frameworks. The volume builds on both de Coppet's work and that of Marcel Mauss in The Gift and provides new insights from an engaging set of established scholars. The chapters in Exchange and Sacrifice stress the dynamic performativity of exchanges and their deep connections with ideas of sacrifice. This collection of theoretically and ethnographically focused essays will be valuable to those interested in the classic debates in social/cultural anthropology on ritual and religious systems of material and spiritual interaction, and the politics of "the gift."

Exchange and Sacrifice

Drawing on both their own fieldwork from 1991 to 1999 and older written sources, Stewart and Strathern explore how the Duna have remade their rituals and associated myths in response to the outside influences of government, Christianity, and large-scale economic development, specifically mining and oil prospecting. The authors provide in-depth ethnographic materials on the Duna and present many detailed descriptions of ritual practices that have been abandoned. Remaking the World is a timely contribution to the literature on agency and the making of cultural identity by indigenous peoples facing economic, social, and political change.

Myth, Mining, and Ritual Change Among the Duna of Papua New Guinea

Remaking the World

Warfare and Compensation Among the Duna of Papua New Guinea

Speaking for Life and Death

Michael Lambek

Michael Joshua Lambek

Professor of Anthropology Michael Lambek

A comparative analysis of notions of personhood and embodiment in African and Melanesian societies.

Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia

Bodies and Persons

This book demonstrates the role gossip plays in accusations of witchcraft and in widespread social violence.

Andrew Strathern

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