Suchergebnisse

Breaking the Frames -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- About the Authors -- 1 Framing History -- 2 Change -- 3 Processes -- 4 Individuals -- 5 Nature Versus Culture: A Mistaken Conundrum -- 6 Retreat of the Social? Where to? -- 7 Religion and Cognition -- 8 Language and Culture -- 9 Against -Isms -- 10 For a Mindful Anthropology -- References -- Note -- Books -- Articles -- Index

Ritual has emerged as a major focus of academic interest. As a concept, the idea of ritual integrates the study of behavior both within and beyond the domain of religion. Ritual can be both secular and religious in character. There is renewed interest in questions such as: Why do rituals exist at all? What has been, and continues to be, their place in society? How do they change over time? Such questions exist against a backdrop of assumptions about development, modernization, and disenchantment of the world. Written with the specific needs of students of religious studies in mind, Ritual: Key Concepts in Religion surveys the field of ritual studies, looking at it both historically within anthropology and in terms of its contemporary relevance to world events.

"How are ethnographic knowledge and anthropological theory created out of field experiences? Working in the Field explores emplacement and experience-centered narratives as the modes in working in places brings anthropology to life. Stewart and Strathern show how first impressions of an area carry depths of meanings which can gradually be unpacked in later analysis and how the fieldworker's memories may become blended with those of the people studied as a result of long-term engagement with them. Spanning Papua New Guinea, Taiwan, and Scotland, and Ireland, Stewart and Strathern show how fieldwork in apparently different areas can lead to unexpected comparisons and discoveries of similarities in human cross-cultural patterns of behavior"--

"Scholars study heritage from many different perspectives, as an aspect of history, as the production of memory, and as subject to political processes of rivalry over its content and value. In this book we extend those perspectives by looking at heritage as a form of ritualization in the sense pioneered by Catherine Bell (Bell 1997, see also Stewart and Strathern 2014a, 2016). 'Ritualization' refers to the processes by means of which action is turned into ritual through giving it incremental value over time. In these terms what starts out as a spontaneous form of action may over time crystallize into a more standardized and self-conscious performance, designed to display message about identity, legitimacy, and social power. This emergent pattern, developing through more or less staged performances, can be seen as the performance of heritage. What makes such performances compelling is that they can knit together peoples' senses of their identity, shaping these senses in an imagistic form encapsulating senses of value and allegiance. Aspects of culture that are often highlighted in this way are readily recognizable in forms of ritual. However, more everyday actions and patterns of action also feed into formalized performances. Heritage can be something quotidian, such as a particular way of planting or harvesting a crop, as well as extraordinary in form, such as in a public parade or orchestrated dance pattern"--

By examining how small communities have dealt with forces of change and have sought to maintain themselves over time, this book offers pointers and lessons for conservation practices at all levels of society. "Sustainability" has become an increasingly popular term as a signal of concerns with long-term environmental consequences of human actions. Sustainability as a goal has started to replace "development" as a way of describing policies that go beyond the concept of increasing commercial production or making monetary profits from enterprises. By focusing on topical case histories on agricultural activity, stock-keeping, cash cropping, mining, and renewable energy, the authors highlight how ethnographic studies can and should inform policy decisions at both local and global levels. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of applied anthropology, sociology, and development studies

"In this book, Andrew J. Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart delineate the relationship between "Blanguage in particular" and "Bculture in general" by focusing on language as both social practice and a means of classifying and interpreting the world. A traditional linguistic approach to a focus on language is illuminated by their anthropological emphasis on the embodiment of relationships and experience. In the book, the body is placed in the foreground for understanding language in culture, which helps in turn to understand how it enables us to adapt to the world of lived material experience. Written in an accessible style and drawing on an extensive corpus of primary field research from Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Japan, Taiwan, Scotland, and Ireland, Strathern and Stewart present a world anthropology which links together European, North American, and Asia-Pacific approaches to the topic. Students and scholars alike of sociocultual anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and linguistics will benefit from this engaging work on how the various components of our culture are informed and shaped through language."--Bloomsbury Publishing

A compelling new book that presents a thoughtful and creative approach to transforming violent discordances, this work examines the intractable issues of revenge and restitution in a conflict context. It argues that in communities where violence must be paid for through compensation, violent conflict can be contained. With primary reference to the Highlands of Papua New Guinea and comparisons to cases from Africa, Pakistan, and other arenas of tribal social formations, the account explores how rituals such as wealth disbursement, oath taking, sa

Introduction / Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern -- Iconic images: landscape and history in the local poetry of the Scottish borders / John Gray -- Céide Fields: natural histories of a buried landscape / Stuart McLean -- Landscape representation: place and identity in nineteenth-century ordnance survey maps of Ireland / Angèle Smith -- Memories of ancestry in the forests of Madagasacar / Janice Harper -- Moon shadows: aboriginal and European heroes in an Australian landscape / Veronica Strang -- History, mobility and land use interests of aborigines and farmers in the East Kimberly in North-West Australia / Ruth Lane -- Co-present landscapes: routes and rootedness as sources of identity in highlands New Guinea / Michael O'Hanlon and Linda Frankland -- 'Island builders': landscape and historicity among the Langalanga, Solomon Islands / Pei-yi Guo -- Biography, ecology, political economy: seascape and conflict in Jamaica / James G. Carrier