Suchergebnisse

The tropical forests of Oceania are an enduring source of concern for indigenous communities, for the migrants who move to them, for the states that encompass them within their borders, for the multilateral institutions and aid agencies, and for the non-governmental organisations that focus on their conservation. Grounded in the perspective of political ecology, contributors to this volume approach forests as socially alive spaces produced by a confluence of local histories and global circulations. In doing so, they collectively explore the multiple ways in which these forests come into view and therefore into being. Exploring the local dynamics within and around these forests provides an insight into regional issues that have global resonance. Intertwined as they are with cosmological beliefs and livelihoods, as sites of biodiversity and Western desire, these forests have been and are still being transformed by the interaction of foreign and local entities. Focusing on case studies from Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and the Gambier Islands, this volume brings new perspectives on how Pacific Islanders continue to creatively engage with the various processes at play in and around their forests

"Recreating First Contact explores the proliferation of adventure travel that emerged during the early twentieth century plus the themes legitimized by their associations with popular views of anthropology. During that time, new transport and recording technologies--particularly airplanes, automobiles, and small portable, still and motion-picture cameras--were used by many expeditions to document the last untouched places of the globe and bring them home to eager audiences. These expeditions were frequently presented as first contact encounters, and they enchanted popular imagination. The various narratives in the articles, books, films, exhibitions, and lecture tours that the expeditions generated fed into pre-existing stereotypes about racial and technological difference, and helped to create them anew in popular culture. Through review of several expeditions and their popular wakes, these essays (foreword, introduction + 12 additional chapters, afterward) trace complex but obscured relationships between anthropology, adventure travel, and cinematic imagination that the 1920s and 1930s engendered and how their myths have endured. The book further explores the effects - both positive and negative - of such expeditions on the discipline of anthropology itself. In doing so, however, this volume examines these impacts from a variety of national perspectives, and thus through these different vantage points creates a more nuanced perspective on how expeditions were at once a global phenomenon but also culturally ordered"--

How do images circulating in Pacific cultures and exchanged between them and their many visitors transform meanings for all involved? This fascinating collection explores how through mimesis, wayfarers and locales alike borrow images from one another to expand their cultural repertoire of meanings or borrow images from their own past to validate their identities

Mortuary Dialogues presents fresh perspectives on death and mourning across the Pacific Islands. Through a set of rich ethnographies, the book examines how funerals and death rituals give rise to discourse and debate about sustaining moral personhood and community amid modernity and its enormous transformations. The book's key concept, "mortuary dialogue," describes the different genres of talk and expressive culture through which people struggle to restore individual and collective order in the aftermath of death in the contemporary Pacific