Suchergebnisse

Return to the garden : gwed, locating intentions and interpretive puzzles -- The trees : classificatory forms, landscape beacons and basic categories -- The forests and the fire : tasim, inverted landscapes, and tree meanings -- A story of Calophyllum : from ecological to social facts -- Vatul : a life form and a form for life -- Geometries of motion : trees and the boats of the eastern Kula Ring.

From the point of view of a contemporary Kula Ring ethnographer, this paper surveys Malinowski's heritage, sums up the current state of Kula Ring research, and asks of the status of the ethnographic research heritage Malinowski did much to define. All recent Kula Ring anthropologists partly define themselves with respect to Malinowski's tradition. And the resultsof their work over the last 50 years again made the region central to the discipline for part of the recent past. But today Malinowski's Trobriand corpus is being redefined. New lines of inquiry are contributing to our understanding of the area. And Malinowski's methods have fertilized other portions of our social system and branches for self-reflection. As it shouldbe, what Malinowski helped define is very much with us.

Over the past two decades, "chaos theory" - the perception of order previously hidden in phenomena of apparent randomness and disorder - has fundamentally transformed the natural sciences. In recent years, numerous scholars in the social sciences and humanities have attempted to adapt the insights of chaos theory to their studies of human cultural and social systems. Several of the world's leading anthropologists, such as Roy Wagner, Marshall Sahlins, Marilyn Strathern, and Arjun Appadurai - have similarly drawn upon particular elements of chaos theory for their inspiration, but as yet there is no focused, comprehensive treatment of the applicability of chaos theory to anthropology's distinctive ethnographic and cross-cultural materials. This edited volume fills the gap, with both accessible theoretical discussions of chaos theory applications in anthropology and detailed ethnographic and historical illustrations from Africa and Melanesia