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Volume 2 of a 2 volume set. For individual volumes in the set seeCIHM nos. 66018 - 66019.
This volume examines the way objects and images relate to and shape notions of temporality and history. Bringing together ethnographic studies from the Lowlands of Central and South America and Melanesia, it explores the temporality inhering in images and artefacts from a comparative perspective. The chapters focus on how peoples in both regions ‘live in’ and ‘navigate’ time each through their distinctive systems of images and the processes and actions by which these come to be manifest in objects. With original theoretical and ethnographic contributions, the book is valuable reading for scholars interested in visual and material culture and in anthropological approaches to time.
This two-volume work from 1914 presents William Halse Rivers' theory of the diffusion of culture in the south-west Pacific. Volume Two details the many similarities and differences among the societies of Melanesia and the possible ways in which these contrasts could have arisen.
David Hilliard's God's Gentlemen, originally published in 1978, remains the only detached and detailed historical analysis of the work of the Melanesian Mission. Starting with its New Zealand beginnings and its Norfolk Island years (1867-1920), the work follows the Mission's shift of headquarters to the Solomon Islands and on until the beginning of the Second World War. The Mission, which grew out of the personal vision of the first Church of England Bishop of New Zealand, George Selwyn, formally defined its field of work as 'the Islands of Melanesia' although its activities were confined almo.
In the most original and ambitious synthesis yet undertaken in Melanesian scholarship, Marilyn Strathern argues that gender relations have been a particular casualty of unexamined assumptions held by Western anthropologists and feminist scholars alike. The book treats with equal seriousness—and with equal good humor—the insights of Western social science, feminist politics, and ethnographic reporting, in order to rethink the representation of Melanesian social and cultural life. This makes The Gender of the Gift one of the most sustained critiques of cross-cultural comparison that anthropology has seen, and one of its most spirited vindications.
The Wamira people of Papua New Guinea display what outsiders would describe as an obsession with food. Who owns how many pigs, how much taro grows in whose garden, and who contributes what food at a feast, are all questions uppermost in their thoughts. Wamirans account for this preoccupation by saying that they suffer from perpetual famine. They explain this by means of an elaborate and colorful myth about Tamodukorokoro, a monster who would have brought them abundant food, but whom, in typical Wamiran style of fearing what they desire, they chased away. In this carefully crafted and beautifully evocative book, Kahn, who lived with the Wamira people for two and a half years, argues that Wamirans famine has in fact little to do with the belly. For Wamirans, concepts of food and hunger are cultural constructs. By means of food, they objectify emotions, balance relations between men and women, communicate rivalries among men, and ultimately, control the ambivalent desires that they fear would otherwise control them. Effectively combining analyses of myths and symbols with analytical accounts of subsistence and ritual behavior, Kahn writes with a degree of nuance that takes the reader beyond academic analyses into the experience of the ethnographer and the daily lives of the people with whom she resided.