Suchergebnisse

Lying between the Huli and Paiela peoples of the Papua New Guinea highlands, Mt. Kare, the site of a gold rush from 1988 to 1990, presently inspires millenarian speculations about an imminent cosmic revolution. Mt. Kare was traditionally a ritual site where pigs were sacrificed to Taiyundika, a totemic python, to promote the fertility of plant, animal, and human species. Today it is where gold is mined in pursuit of unprecedented riches and millenarian transformations. Although sacrifices are no longer conducted at Mt. Kare, the python still has some salience for Paielas, who consider the gold to be the flesh of the totemic python. Blending Christianity with traditional cosmology, Paielas interpret the finding of the gold as a millenarian sign. As an ancestral figure who guarantees the continuing fertility of the earth in exchange for pork sacrifices, the python stands at the core of Paiela constructions of nature and humanity's position within it. Paiela totemism is explored for what it can teach us about an indigenous symbolic ecology and how "local knowledge" or a "cognized model" can inflect capital‐intensive resource development at a time of ostensible globalization. The ecology of Mt. Kare gold mining must be sensitive to intercultural processes and how global flows (of ideologies, technologies, and capital) are mediated by vernacular constructions. [Papua New Guinea, mining, totemism, symbolic ecology, place]

An earlier ecological anthropology defined its project within the compass of the idealism v. materialism debate. Culture was an adaptive tool, instrumental rather than formal; it was intelligible with respect to its material effects, not—as the idealists would maintain—in terms of itself, as an autonomous, self‐determining order of reality. This argument was mounted with respect to bounded, stable, self‐regulating, local, or at best regional entities and the environment they inhabited. All of the premises of the earlier ecology have since been challenged, and today's ecologies—symbolic, historical, and political—radically depart from the reductions and elisions of the ecological anthropology of the past. In particular, the new ecologies override the dichotomies that informed and enlivened the debates of the past—nature/culture, idealism/materialism—and they are informed by the literature on transnationalist flows and local‐global articulations. This introduction positions Rappaport's work within this historical shift from a polarized field of mutually exclusive frameworks to today's synthetic new ecologies and their antireductive materialism. Rappaport's work, produced over three decades, serves, in and through its own transformations, as a bridge between the reductive materialism of the past and a new‐materialist ecology. [Rappaport, ecological anthropology, materialism v. idealism, the new materialism]

The paper has two goals: to demonstrate ethnographically the connection between "structure" and communication, which Lévi‐Strauss has consistently alleged to exist, and to challenge the thesis of Hallpike's book, The Foundations of Primitive Thought, that primitive thought reflects an "incomplete," unsophisticated logic.The paper focuses on the counting system of the Paiela, a highland Papua New Guinea group. It argues that Paiela counting behavior is best analyzed as an element in a complex communication process. The logic of Paiela counting behavior is then the logic of the encompassing process: a communicational logic founded on concepts such as information and pattern. According to some theorists, the relationship between this logic and the logic that informs Western science is metalogical and dualistic. Paiela thought is thus revealed to be based on a complete and sophisticated alternative logic, a science among sciences. [Papua New Guinea, counting behavior, communication]