Suchergebnisse

Engendering objects explores social and cultural dynamics among Maisin people in Collingwood Bay (Papua New Guinea) through the lens of material culture. Focusing upon the visually stimulating decorated barkcloths that are used as male and female garments, gifts, and commodities, it explores the relationships between these cloths and Maisin people. The main question is how barkcloth, as an object made by women, engenders people's identities, such as gender, personhood, clan and tribe, through its manufacturing and use.This book describes in detail how barkcloth (tapa) not only visualizes and expresses, but also materializes and defines, people's multiple identities. By 'following the object' and how it is made and used in the performance of life-cycle rituals, in exchanges and in church festivities, this interaction between people and things, and how they are mutually constituted, becomes visible. How are women's bodies and minds linked with the production of barkcloth? How do cloths produced by women both establish and contest clan identity? In what ways is the commodification of barkcloth related to gender dynamics? Barkcloth and its associated designs show how gender ideologies and the socio-material constructions of identity are performed and, as such, developed, established and contested.The narratives of both men and women reveal the ways in which barkcloth provides a link with the past and dreams for the future. The author argues that the cloths and their designs embody dynamics of Maisin culture and in particular of Maisin gender relations. In contributing to the current debates on the anthropology of 'art', this study offers an alternative way of understanding the significance of an object, like decorated barkcloth, in shaping and defining people's identities within a local colonial and postcolonial setting of Papua New

Engendering objects explores social and cultural dynamics among Maisin people in Collingwood Bay (Papua New Guinea) through the lens of material culture. Focusing upon the visually stimulating decorated barkcloths that are used as male and female garments, gifts, and commodities, it explores the relationships between these cloths and Maisin people. The main question is how barkcloth, as an object made by women, engenders people's identities, such as gender, personhood, clan and tribe, through its manufacturing and use. This book describes in detail how barkcloth (tapa) not only visualizes and expresses, but also materializes and defines, people's multiple identities. By 'following the object' and how it is made and used in the performance of life-cycle rituals, in exchanges and in church festivities, this interaction between people and things, and how they are mutually constituted, becomes visible. How are women's bodies and minds linked with the production of barkcloth? How do cloths produced by women both establish and contest clan identity? In what ways is the commodification of barkcloth related to gender dynamics? Barkcloth and its associated designs show how gender ideologies and the socio-material constructions of identity are performed and, as such, developed, established and contested. The narratives of both men and women reveal the ways in which barkcloth provides a link with the past and dreams for the future. The author argues that the cloths and their designs embody dynamics of Maisin culture and in particular of Maisin gender relations. In contributing to the current debates on the anthropology of 'art', this study offers an alternative way of understanding the significance of an object, like decorated barkcloth, in shaping and defining people's identities within a local colonial and postcolonial setting of Papua New Guinea.

In this review essay, I consider two recent works on climate change in the Pacific, one monograph ( Engaging Environments in Tonga ) by an anthropologist and keeper of Oceanic collections in Oslo, and one edited volume ( Managing Climate Change Adaptation in the Pacific Region
) by a sustainability and climate change management specialist from Hamburg. I situate these two very divergent studies in relation to broader debates and trends in studies and narratives about climate change in the Pacific, focusing in particular on "adaptation" as a priority for research
and policy, and on tensions between portrayals of Pacific peoples as respectively creative and resilient, versus as vulnerable and in need of rescue by Western science. In doing so, the divergent epistemologies that are at the core of the relations between indigenous and exogenous knowledge
are highlighted, at the same time questioning enduring power dynamics and whether indigeneity and climate change research can actually contribute to knowledge production.

This article investigates yafuni ('witchcraft' or female sorcery) accusations among the Maisin people living in Collingwood Bay, Oro Province, Papua New Guinea. It takes as its primary case a public meeting at which two women were accused of killing a

This article investigates yafuni ('witchcraft' or female sorcery) accusations among the Maisin people living in Collingwood Bay, Oro Province, Papua New Guinea. It takes as its primary case a public meeting at which two women were accused of killing a

"Illustrations" -- "Acknowledgements" -- "Abbreviations and Glossary" -- "Contributors" -- "Introduction: Revaluing women's wealth in the contemporary Pacific" -- "1. Doba and Ephemeral Durability: The Enduring Material Value of Women's Work in the Trobriand Regenerative Economy" -- "2. Doing away with Doba? Women's Wealth and Shifting Values in Trobriand Mortuary Distributions" -- "Poem: Doba—Trobriand Skirts" -- "3. Women's Wealth and Moral Economies among the Maisin in Collingwood Bay, Papua New Guinea" -- "4. Revaluing Pots: Wanigela Women and Regional Exchange" -- "5. The Extraordinary Values of Ordinary Objects: String Bags and Pandanus Mats as Korafe Women's Wealth?" -- "Poem: Making the Mark" -- "6. Capturing the 'Female Essence'? Textile Wealth in Tonga" -- "7. Passing on, and Passing on Wealth: Compelling Values in Tongan Exchange" -- "8. Cook Islands Tivaivai and the Haircutting Ceremony in Auckland: Ritual Action, Money and the Parameters of Value" -- "Poem: urohs language

Some 40 years ago, Pacific anthropology was dominated by debates about 'women's wealth'. These exchanges were generated by Annette Weiner's (1976) critical reappraisal of Bronisław Malinowski's classic work on the Trobriand Islands, and her observations that women's production of 'wealth' (banana leaf bundles and skirts) for elaborate transactions in mortuary rituals occupied a central role in Trobriand matrilineal cosmology and social organisation. This volume brings the debates about women's wealth back to the fore by critically revisiting and engaging with ideas about gender and materiality, value, relationality and the social life and agency of things. The chapters, interspersed by three poems, evoke the sinuous materiality of the different objects made by women across the Pacific, and the intimate relationship between these objects of value and sensuous, gendered bodies. In the Epilogue, Professor Margaret Jolly observes how the volume also 'trace[s] a more abstract sinuosity in the movement of these things through time and place, as they coil through different regimes of value … The eight chapters … trace winding paths across the contemporary Pacific, from the Trobriands in Milne Bay, to Maisin, Wanigela and Korafe in Oro Province, Papua New Guinea, through the islands of Tonga to diasporic Tongan and Cook Islander communities in New Zealand'. This comparative perspective elucidates how women's wealth is defined, valued and contested in current exchanges, bride-price debates, church settings, development projects and the challenges of living in diaspora. Importantly, this reveals how women themselves preserve the different values and meanings in gift-giving and exchanges, despite processes of commodification that have resulted in the decline or replacement of 'women's wealth'.