In the Mount Hagen area of central New Guinea, warfare has been replaced since the arrival of the Europeans by a vigorous development of moka, a competitive ceremonial exchange of wealth objects. The exchanges of pigs, shells and other valuables are interpreted as acting as a bond between groups, and as a means whereby individuals, notably the big ...
World Conqueror and World Renouncer is the first comprehensive and authoritative work on the relationship between Buddhism and the polity (political organization) in Thailand. The book conveys the historical background necessary for full comprehension of the contemporary structural relationship between Buddhism, the sangha (monastic order), and ...
Dr Tambiah describes the religious practices and beliefs of the people of a remote village in north-east Thailand, relating them to the wider context of the civilization in which they are embedded, and examining the relationship of the religious practices of the villagers to the classical Buddhist tradition. Because they have based their studies ...
The central argument of this book is that the structuralist theory and method developed by British and American anthropologists in the study of kinship and social organization are the direct descendants of the researches of Lewis Henry Morgan. Re-examining Morgan's work, the book demonstrates how a tradition of mis-interpretation has disguised the ...
This work, which involved the collaboration of leading figures in the field of social anthropology, undertakes the comparative study of African political systems, as an example of the wider field of the study of political institutions in traditional societies in general. The book is based upon file studies of eight African societies - the Zulu, ...
Drawing on an ethnographic study of a remote farming community in the Auvergne, Dr Reed-Danahay challenges conventional views about the operation of the French school system. She demonstrates how parents and children subvert and resist the ideological messages of the teachers, and describes the ways in which a sense of local difference is ...
In 1992, there was an explosion of 'stock fever' in Shanghai. 'From the moment I set foot in Shanghai until my last day there, people from all walks of life wanted to talk to me about the market', Ellen Hertz writes. Her study sets the stock market and its players in the context of Shanghai society, and it probes the dominant role played by the ...
In her study of domestic organization in Gonja, a formerly important West African state, now part of Ghana, Esther Goody has concentrated on tracing the interrelationships between political and domestic institutions in a bilateral kinship system, untypical of the area. After outlining the problems which she is seeking to solve and describing the ...
Is a family system that permits freedom to enter, dissolve, and re-enter sexual unions, that tolerates high illegitimacy rates, and allows a large proportion of households to be headed by women, viable, natural and healthy? This is an appropriate question to ask of many modern industrial societies in the 1980s. Yet a system with just those factors ...
Anthropologists, in studying other cultures, are often tempted to offer their own explanations of strange customs when they feel that the people involved have not given a good enough reason for these customs. The question how the anthropologist can justify interpretations of customs which go beyond those offered by the people themselves runs ...
In the last twenty years, immigration has become one of the most contested issues in Western Europe. The arrival of Africans, Asians, Eastern Europeans and others in Italy has reversed earlier trends of emigration. Debate, political activity and violence have raised questions of rejection and integration, of anti-racism and the new racism. Studies ...
Roy Rappaport argues that religion is central to the continuing evolution of life, although it has been been displaced from its original position of intellectual authority by the rise of modern science. His book, which could be construed as in some degree religious as well as about religion, insists that religion can and must be reconciled with ...
Tradition is a central concept in the social sciences, but it is commonly treated as unproblematic. Dr Boyer insists that social anthropology requires a theory of tradition, its constitution and transmission. He treats tradition 'as a type of interaction which results in the repetition which results in the repetition of certain communicative ...
The communities of south coast New Guinea were the subject of classic ethnographies, and fresh studies in recent decades have put these rich and complex cultures at the centre of anthropological debates. Flamboyant sexual practices, such as ritual homosexuality, have attracted particular interest. In the first general book on the region, Dr Knauft ...
This book looks at the rise, during this century, of planned development. Most discussion has stressed differences in the style, content and organization of planning in various countries, but this book focuses on the similarities, arguing that it is done in much the same way everywhere, and for basically the same reasons. It begins by tracing the ...
Bartered Brides is a detailed study of marriage among the Maduzai, a tribal society in Afghan Turkistan. It is the first study of the area which looks in depth at both the domestic aspects of marriage and its relation to the productive and reproductive activities of women, as well as marriage as a means of managing political and economic conflict ...
When it was first published in 1979, this book, together with its companion volume, From the Milk River, by Christine Hugh-Jones, was hailed as setting 'a new standard for South American ethnographers, one to be emulated' (Third World Quarterly). Both are now available for the first time in paperback. The book is an extended study in English of ...
The central actors in this book are some reclusive forest-dwelling ascetic meditation masters who have been acclaimed as 'saints' in contemporary Thailand. These saints originally pursued their salvation quest among the isolated villages of the country's periphery, but once recognized as holy men endowed with charisma, they became the radiating ...
A sophisticated and engaging ethnographic account of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the first since the 1970s, Overlooking Nazareth examines specific situations of friction, conflict and co-operation in Natzerat Illit. This Israeli new town is built on formerly Palestinian land, just outside the biblical town of Nazareth, and has a ...
Hage and Harary present a comprehensive introduction to the use of graph theory in social and cultural anthropology. Using a wide range of empirical examples, the authors illustrate how graph theory can provide a language for expressing in a more exact fashion concepts and notions that can only be imperfectly rendered verbally. They show how ...
Java is famous for its combination of diverse cultural forms and religious beliefs. Andrew Beatty considers Javanese solutions to the problem of cultural difference, and explores the ways in which Javanese villages make sense of their complex and multi-layered culture. Pantheist mystics, supernaturalists, orthodox Muslims and Hindu converts at ...
Recalling how they lived in a single house that was occupied by several Jewish and Muslim families, in the generation before Algerian independence, Joelle Bahloul's informants build up a multivocal micro-history of a way of life which came to an end in the early 1960s. Uprooted and dispersed, these former neighbours constantly refer back to the ...
The subject of Vassos Argyrou's study is modernisation, as reflected in the changing nature of wedding celebrations in Cyprus over two generations from the 1930s to the present day. He argues that modernisation is not a secular, progressive process, that remodels the life of a society, ironing out local differences. Rather, it is a legitimising ...
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