The Anthropology of Morality in Melanesia and Beyond

The Anthropology of Morality in Melanesia and Beyond PDF Author: John Barker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317044975
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Get Book

Book Description
The Anthropology of Morality in Melanesia and Beyond examines how Melanesians experience and deal with moral dilemmas and challenges. Taking Kenelm Burridge’s seminal work as their starting point, the contributors focus upon public situations and types of people that exemplify key ethical contradictions for members of moral communities. While returning to some classical concerns, such as the roles of big men and sorcerers, the book opens new territory with richly textured ethnographic studies and theoretical reviews that explore the interface between the values associated with indigenous village life and the ethical orientations associated with Christianity, the state, the marketplace, and other facets of ’modernity'. A major contribution to the emerging field of the anthropology of morality, the volume includes some of the most prominent scholars working in the discipline today, including Bruce Knauft, Joel Robbins, F.G. Bailey, Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington.

The Anthropology of Morality in Melanesia and Beyond

The Anthropology of Morality in Melanesia and Beyond PDF Author: John Barker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317044975
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Get Book

Book Description
The Anthropology of Morality in Melanesia and Beyond examines how Melanesians experience and deal with moral dilemmas and challenges. Taking Kenelm Burridge’s seminal work as their starting point, the contributors focus upon public situations and types of people that exemplify key ethical contradictions for members of moral communities. While returning to some classical concerns, such as the roles of big men and sorcerers, the book opens new territory with richly textured ethnographic studies and theoretical reviews that explore the interface between the values associated with indigenous village life and the ethical orientations associated with Christianity, the state, the marketplace, and other facets of ’modernity'. A major contribution to the emerging field of the anthropology of morality, the volume includes some of the most prominent scholars working in the discipline today, including Bruce Knauft, Joel Robbins, F.G. Bailey, Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington.

The Anthropology of Morality in Melanesia and Beyond

The Anthropology of Morality in Melanesia and Beyond PDF Author: John Barker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317044983
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Get Book

Book Description
The Anthropology of Morality in Melanesia and Beyond examines how Melanesians experience and deal with moral dilemmas and challenges. Taking Kenelm Burridge’s seminal work as their starting point, the contributors focus upon public situations and types of people that exemplify key ethical contradictions for members of moral communities. While returning to some classical concerns, such as the roles of big men and sorcerers, the book opens new territory with richly textured ethnographic studies and theoretical reviews that explore the interface between the values associated with indigenous village life and the ethical orientations associated with Christianity, the state, the marketplace, and other facets of ’modernity'. A major contribution to the emerging field of the anthropology of morality, the volume includes some of the most prominent scholars working in the discipline today, including Bruce Knauft, Joel Robbins, F.G. Bailey, Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington.

Fast Money Schemes

Fast Money Schemes PDF Author: John Cox
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253035643
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Get Book

Book Description
A history and anthropological analysis of one of Papua New Guinea’s worst Ponzi schemes in the late 1990s. In the late 1990s and early 2000s a wave of Ponzi schemes swept through Papua New Guinea, Australia, and the Solomon Islands. The most notorious scheme, U-Vistract, attracted many thousands of investors, enticing them with promises of one percent interest to be paid monthly. Its founder, Noah Musingku, was a charismatic leader who promoted the scheme as a form of Christian mission and as the basis for establishing an independent kingdom. Fast Money Schemes uses in-depth interviews with investors, newspaper accounts, and participant observation to understand the scheme’s appeal from the point of view of those who invested and lost, showing that organizers and investors alike understood the scheme as a way of accessing and participating in a global economy. John Cox delivers a “post-village” ethnography that gives insight into the lives of urban, middle-class Papua New Guineans, a group that is not familiar to US readers and that has seldom been a focus of anthropological interest. The book’s concern with understanding the interweaving of morality, finance, and aspirations shared by a global cosmopolitan middle class has wide resonance beyond studies of Papua New Guinea and anthropology.

The Anthropology of Moralities

The Anthropology of Moralities PDF Author: Monica Heintz
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845455927
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book

Book Description
Anthropologists have been keenly aware of the tension between cultural relativism and absolute norms, and nowhere has this been more acute than with regards to moral values. Can we study the Other's morality without applying our own normative judgments? How do social anthropologists keep both the distance required by science and the empathy required for the analysis of lived experiences? The plurality of moralities has not received an explicit and focused attention until recently, when accelerated globalization often resulted in the collision of different value systems. Observing, describing and assessing values cross-culturally, the authors propose various methodological approaches to the study of moralities, illustrated with rich ethnographic accounts, thus offering a valuable guide for students of anthropology, sociology and cultural studies and for professionals concerned with the empirical and cross-cultural study of values.

Tracing the Melanesian Person

Tracing the Melanesian Person PDF Author: Susan R. Hemer
Publisher: University of Adelaide Press
ISBN: 1922064440
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Get Book

Book Description
Through this engaging ethnographic account of connections, conflicts and loss in Lihir, Hemer’s own fieldwork journey of making relationships, experiencing disputes and finally leaving the field, is mirrored. Structured into three parts, the book works through the complexities of creating and sustaining relationships, the evaluation of conduct as moral and the practices of conflict, and the experiences and transformations of death and grief. Throughout these parts various emotions are highlighted and interrogated for their relationship to psychological understandings and definitions: love, anger, jealousy, sadness. Emotions are also understood in a historical context and as connected to social changes wrought by interactions with global phenomena such as religion.

Knowledge and Ethics in Anthropology

Knowledge and Ethics in Anthropology PDF Author: Lisette Josephides
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000189643
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Get Book

Book Description
Inspired by the work of world-renowned anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, this collection of essays features contributions from a range of internationally recognized scholars – including Strathern herself – which examine a range of methodologies and approaches to the anthropology of knowledge.The book investigates the production of knowledge through a variety of themes, centered on the question of the researcher’s obligations and the requirements of knowledge. These range from the obligation to connect with local culture and existing anthropological knowledge, to the need to draw conclusions and circulate what has been learned. Taking up themes that are relevant for anthropology as a whole – particularly the topic of knowledge and the ethics of knowing others, as well as the notion of the local in a global world – Knowledge and Ethics in Anthropology is key reading for students and scholars alike. A thorough introduction to the key concepts and terms used in Strathern’s work is provided, making this a fantastic resource for anyone encountering her work for the first time.

Cargo Cult

Cargo Cult PDF Author: Lamont Lindstrom
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824878957
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book

Book Description
Who is not captivated by tales of Islanders earnestly scanning their watery horizons for great fleets of cargo ships bringing rice, radios and refrigerators - ships that will never arrive? Of all the stories spun about the island peoples of Melanesia, tales of cargo cult are among the most fascinating. The term cargo cult, Lamont Lindstrom contends, is one of anthropology's most successful conceptual offspring. Like culture, worldview and ethnicity, its usage has steadily proliferated, migrating into popular culture where today it is used to describe an astonishing roll-call of people. It's history makes for lively and compelling reading. The cargo cult story, Lindstrom shows, is more significant than it at first appears, for it recapitulates in summary form three generations of anthropological theory and Pacific studies. Although anthropologists' enthusiasm for the notion of cargo cult has waned, it now colors outsiders' understanding of Melanesian culture, and even Melanesians' perceptions of themselves. The repercussions for contemporary Islanders are significant: leaders of more than one political movement have felt the need to deny that they are any kind of cargo cultist. Of particular interest to this history is Lindstom's argument that accounts of cargo cult are at heart tragedies of thwarted desire, melancholy anticipation and crazy unrequited love. He makes a convincing case that these stories expose powerful Western scenarios of desire itself—giving cargo cult its combined titillation of the fascinating exotic and the comfortably familiar.

The Ethnography of Moralities

The Ethnography of Moralities PDF Author: Signe Howell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134785011
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book

Book Description
Focusing on the social construction of morality, The Ethnography of Moralities discusses a topic which is complex but central to the study and nature of anthropology. With the recent shift towards an interest in indigenous notions of self and personhood, questions pertaining to the moral and ethical origins of beliefs relating to human rights become increasingly relevant. Some of the questions that the contributors address are: * How is the ethical knowledge grounded? * Which social domains most profoundly articulate moral values and which are most affected? * Who defines and who enforces what is right and wrong? * What constitutes an ethical breach? Suggested answers are made with reference to empirical material so that the complexities and varieties of theoretical and methodological issues are highlighted. They are also discussed with reference to a wide array of ethnographic studies from Argentina, Mongolia, Melanesia, Yemen, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Britain and The Old Testament.

From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesia and Anthropology

From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesia and Anthropology PDF Author: Bruce M. Knauft
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472066872
Category : Ethnology
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Get Book

Book Description
A prominent scholar surveys the special place of Melanesia in our understanding of human cultural variation

Dobu

Dobu PDF Author: Susanne Kuehling
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824893875
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Get Book

Book Description
This is an ethnography of Dobu, a Massim society of Papua New Guinea, which has been renowned in social anthropology since Reo Fortune's Sorcerers of Dobu (1932). Focusing on exchange and its underlying ethics, this book explores the concept of the person in the Dobu world view. The book examines major aspects of exchange such as labor, mutual support, apologetic gifts, revenge and punishment, kula exchange, and mortuary gifts. It discusses in detail the characteristics of small gifts (such as betel nuts), big gifts (kula valuables, pigs, and large yams) and money as they appear in exchange contexts. The ethnography begins with an analysis of the construct of the Dobu person, and sets out to examine everyday practices and values. The belief system (incorporating witches, sorcerers, and a Christian God) is shown to have a powerful influence on individual conduct due to its panoptic character. The institutions that link Dobu with the outside world are examined in terms of the ideology concerning money: the Church receives offerings for God; the difficulties faced by trade-store owners evince conflicting notions concerning monetary wealth. The last two chapters delve into lived experience in two major domains of Dobu exchange: kula and the sagali feast.