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Articles 1 - 15 of 15
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Language And Living Things, Terence Hays
Language And Living Things, Terence Hays
Terence Hays
Ethnobiology is often regarded as a quaint and excessively particularistic specialty, as its modern practitioners trace the complexities and subtleties of specific systems of folk classification and nomenclature. Their finegrained descriptions and elegant analyses are at once too “thick” and too “thin” for most nonspecialists, who, in any event, await syntheses of what has been learned from such inquiries, preferably in the form of comparative studies in the tradition of anthropology’s concern with generalizations that illuminate the wider human condition. Rising to this challenge, Cecil Brown has long pursued, in numerous papers and now in this book, crosscultural “uniformities” as …
The Huli Response To Illness / Book Review, Terence Hays
The Huli Response To Illness / Book Review, Terence Hays
Terence Hays
What diseases afRict the Huli people of the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea? How are these conceptualized by them as illness experiences? How do their behavioral responses, including the utilization of both traditional and Western health services, flow from and affect these conceptualizations? And how are these processes grounded in the broader ecological, historical, social, and cultural contexts within which individual Huli make their decisions regarding illness?
Sorcery And Social Change In Melanesia / Book Review, Terence Hays
Sorcery And Social Change In Melanesia / Book Review, Terence Hays
Terence Hays
In some ways, this collection of papers is a typical symposium volume. Organizationally, it consists of a core ethnographic case studies (originally presented at the 1979 and 1980 annual meetings for the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania) bracketed with an introductory essay and concluding discussion by the editors, Marty Zelenietz and Shirley Lindenbaum, respectively. It is atypical, however, in that it largely succeeds in avoiding the most common shortcomings of such collections.
Ndumba Folk Biology And General Principles Of Ethnobotanical Classification And Nomenclature, Terence Hays
Ndumba Folk Biology And General Principles Of Ethnobotanical Classification And Nomenclature, Terence Hays
Terence Hays
Brent Berlin's proposed "general principles of classification and nomenclature" are examined as they apply to folk biology in Ndumba, a Papua New Guinea hzghlands society. Focusing on Ndumba folk zoology, supplemented with a previous analysis of their folk botany, Berlin's analytical schema for ethnobiological classification is supported, but principles of nomenclature in ethnobiology appear to be in need of reconsideration.
"The New Guinea Highlands" Region, Culture Area, Or Fuzzy Set?, Terence Hays
"The New Guinea Highlands" Region, Culture Area, Or Fuzzy Set?, Terence Hays
Terence Hays
The criteria for delineating "the New Guinea Highlands," a fundamental category in Melanesian anthropology, are variable, vague, and inconsistently applied, with the result that there is little clarity or agreement with regard to its characteristics and its membership. So far as the literature is concerned, "the New Guinea Highlands" is a fuzzy set. The common resort to notions of "cores," "margins," or "fringes" is an attempt to preserve an essentialist approach but inevitably leads to the same confusion. The continued use of "the Highlands" as an analytic or theoretical construct carries the costs of misleadingly implied homogeneity, with marginalization of …
Cognitive Foundations Of Natural History, Terence Hays
Cognitive Foundations Of Natural History, Terence Hays
Terence Hays
Since the 1960s, ethnobiology has gone beyond the documentation of plants and animals deemed “useful” in specific societies’ economies, or those that are “good to think” in their cosmological systems, to a nomothetic investigation of folk conceptualizations of the natural world as organizations of cultural knowledge. “General principles” and “universals” in the classification and naming of living things have been proposed that now play a major role in our growing understanding of human cognition.
Failure Of Treatment / Book Review, Terence Hays
Failure Of Treatment / Book Review, Terence Hays
Terence Hays
This is an extraordinary book, and one that I believe is unique in the literature of medical anthropology. Inspired by Victor Turner's "social drama, the extended case method" (p. 3), Gilbert Lewis presents "the ethnography of an illness" (p. 1), a detailed—sometimes day-by-day—account of a protracted illness suffered by Dauwaras, a Gnau-speaking man of the upper Sepik River in Papua New Guinea.
The Sweet Potato And Oceania, Terence Hays
The Sweet Potato And Oceania, Terence Hays
Terence Hays
Debates about the introduction and diffusion of Ipomoea batatas in the Pacific have gone on for a century although largely without the benefit of a thorough botanical understanding of the plant. That is now provided in Yen’s monograph, which synthesizes the results and implications of his own two decades of research with the now massive literature on the subject.
Language And Cultural Description, Terence Hays
Language And Cultural Description, Terence Hays
Terence Hays
Beginning in the late 1950s, Charles Frake was among those (including Harold Conklin and Ward Goodenough) who founded the blend of cognitive psychology, descriptive linguistics, and cultural anthropology which came to be known as “the New Ethnography” or “cognitive anthropology.”
Exchanging The Past, Terence Hays
Exchanging The Past, Terence Hays
Terence Hays
In 1980-1982, Bruce Knauft and Eileen Cantrell conducted fieldwork among the Gebusi people of the remote Nomad region of Western Province, Papua New Guinea. Then, "indigenous customs seemed robust as well as profound" (p.13), including one of the highest homocide rates in the world, rooted sorcery accusations derived from spirit medium seances.
Tzeltal Folk Zoology, Terence Hays
Tzeltal Folk Zoology, Terence Hays
Terence Hays
In some respects, this volume might be viewed as a companion piece to Berlin et al.’s Principles of Tzeltal Plant Classification. It deals with the same people of highland Chiapas, Mexico, and an earlier version was Hunn’s doctoral thesis, supervised by Berlin. Nevertheless, it can also clearly stand on its own as a significant contribution to ethnology, with additional relevance to biosystematists, ecologists, linguists, and psychologists.
Auyana, Terence Hays
Auyana, Terence Hays
Terence Hays
Sterling Robbins was one of four ethnographers who conducted fieldwork in the early 1960s as part of James B. Watson’s New Guinea Micro-evolution Project. As such he was unavoidably caught in the turmoil over how to deal with the “loose structure” of New Guinea highland societies.
Classifications In Their Social Context / Book Review, Terence Hays
Classifications In Their Social Context / Book Review, Terence Hays
Terence Hays
Since Durkheim and Mauss, the study of folk classification has developed along two main lines: the predominantly British and French "soocial constructionist" tradition, and the largely American "ethnoscience" approach, to use Roy Ellen's designations (p. 4). Ellen is referring to the continuing contrast in the anthropological literature between analyses of folk classification systems which view them as primarily reflecting structural, sociological, cosmological, or symbolic concerns, and those which concentrate on the more mundane orderings of nature which employ perceptual (usually morphological) criteria.
Growth And Structure Of The Lexicon Of New Guinea Pidgin / Book Review, Terence Hays
Growth And Structure Of The Lexicon Of New Guinea Pidgin / Book Review, Terence Hays
Terence Hays
New Guinea Pidgin (NGP) is the language of politics and the most widely used lingua franca in Papua New Guinea. It may also provide a crucial test case for theories of pidgin and creole languages and, more broadly, "for statements about the relationship between the internal and external history of language and that between linguistic variation and social stratification."
Grand Valley Dani, Terence Hays
Grand Valley Dani, Terence Hays
Terence Hays
The Dani must by now be the most familiar of all New Guinea Highlands peoples to anthropologists and students alike. Through Robert Gardner_s evocative film, Dead Birds, Peter Matthiessen_s novelistic, Under the Mountain Wall, and Karl Heider_s numerous scholarly papers, books, and films, they have been portrayed in various ways, always fascinating and ever eluding our complete understanding.