Anthropology Commons^™

Humanities And Communities: A Dialogue In Pacific Studies, Teresia K. Teaiwa, April K. Henderson

Pacific Studies

This article presents a reflective dialogue between Teresia K. Teaiwa and April K. Henderson, two scholars in Pacific Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. On the occasion of their program’s tenth anniversary, they explore the intersections and tensions between humanities-based academic traditions and their responsibilities to Pacific communities. Drawing on their diverse academic backgrounds and experiences, they discuss the challenges of defining a “humanities approach,” the pressures of neoliberal university structures, and the need for “reflective delay” in knowledge production. They also examine the role of language, narrative, and community engagement in their teaching and research, emphasizing the importance of …

Vol. 32 No. 2-3 (2009): Pacific Island Studies Front Matter, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Front Matter for the Vol. 32, No 2-3-Jun/Sept 2009 edition of the Pacific Studies Journal.

Working The System: The Role Of Islam In Student Negotiations Of A Midwestern Charter School, Elizabeth J. Baer

Religious Studies Honors Projects

“What should the role of Islam be in American public life?” Rather than answer this question through broad, theoretical discourse, I turn to a case study of Somali Muslims in a Midwestern charter school. Through this case study, I analyze how individual Muslims, tied to communities and Allah in diverse ways, actively negotiate how to incorporate their religious practices into public space. I argue that by examining specific strategies used by individuals in an actual school setting, as opposed to making generalizing assumptions, one can better understand that Islam already plays a variety of constantly changing roles in American public …

Indigenous Informants Or Samoan Savants? German Translations Of Samoan Texts In Die Samoa-Inseln, Mary Elisabeth Cox

Pacific Studies

Most studies of Samoan culture and language published since 1900 rely on Augustin Krämer’s seminal ethnography Die Samoa-Inseln. It is unusual for a scholarly work to become so accepted and beloved by an indigenous people, but Samoans hand down copies of Die Samoa-Inseln from generation to generation. They particularly prize the extensive Samoan language texts that appear side by side with their German translations. However, an analysis of Krämer’s personal diaries reveals that his grasp of the Samoan language was at best rudimentary. I suggest that the German translation instead reflect the efforts of highly sophisticated Samoan informants who …

Books Noted: Recent Pacific Islands Publications: Selected Acquisitions, January 2008-June 2008, Riley Mofatt

Pacific Studies

THIS LIST of significant publications relating to the Pacific Islands was selected from new acquisitions lists received from Brigham Young University Hawai'i, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Bernice P. Bishop Museum, University of Auckland, East-West Center, University of South Pacific, National Library of Australia, Melanesian Studies Resource Center, Center for Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Nijmegen, University of California San Diego, Secretariat of the Pacific Community Library, Center for South Pacific Studies, University of New South Wales, Macmillan Brown Library at University of Canterbury, and the Australian International Development Assistance Bureau's Center for the Pacific Development Training. Other libraries …

Vol. 32 No. 2-3 (2009): Pacific Island Studies Full Issue, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Pacific Studies is published two times a year by The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies, Brigham Young University Hawai‘i #1979, 55–220 Kulanui Street, Lāʻie, Hawai‘i 96762, but responsibility for opinions expressed in the articles rests with the authors alone. Subscription rate is US $26.00 yearly, payable to The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies. The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies (formerly The Pacific Institute) is an organization funded by Brigham Young University Hawai‘i. The Center assists the University in meeting its cultural and educational goals by undertaking a program of teaching, research, …

Anthropology And Ethnography: Contributions To Integrated Marketing Communications, Claudia M. Wright

Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology Student Research

This paper explores the ways in which anthropological research, specifically ethnography, can be useful in an Integrated Marketing Communication approach. Starting from a brief description of the different ways in which the discipline of anthropology has studied consumption, the paper turns to review how it can serve effectively to understand both the corporate as well as the consumer culture. Furthermore, the role that the anthropological discipline plays for Integrated Marketing Communication strategies is presented along with some examples of how different firms have used it. This paper is an approach to understanding ethnography not only as a market research methodology, …

Introduction: The Practice And Prospects Of Grandparenting In The Pacific, Dorothy Ayers Counts

Pacific Studies

The contributors to this special issue represent the orientations and approaches of several social science disciplines and are variously involved in interdisci­ plina1y endeavors. However, anthropology is the primary discipline and ethno­ graphy a shared methodology. It is a main task of any ethnography to make the exotic familiar and to treat the familiar as though it were exotic. The papers in this special issue achieve this for grandparenthood in the Pacific. The familiar concept of grandparenthood is shown to have multiple meanings in close examinations of how the status is achieved, for example, what it means for a person's …

Men Of Steel Or Plastic Cops: The Use Of Ethnography As A Transformative Agent, Christine Teague, David Leith

Research outputs pre 2011

The Perth urban rail system, like many other rail systems in Australia and overseas, is subject to crime and anti-social behaviour around the railway environs from a small minority of the travelling public. The transit officers, who form part of the security section of the Public Transport Authority, are the people employed to deal with these incidents, which can result in transit officers being injured. To fully understand the violence and antisocial behaviour that they deal with on a regular basis and develop strategies to reduce this risk of injury, it was necessary to enter their world. The researcher in …

This Sporting Life: Sports And Body Culture In Modern Japan, William W. Kelly, Atsuo Sugimoto

CEAS Occasional Publication Series

Yale CEAS Occasional Publication Series - Volume 1

Sports in Japan have long been embedded in community life, the educational system, the mass media, the corporate structures, and the nationalist sentiments of modern Japan. For over a century, they have been a crucial intersection of school pedagogy, corporate aims, media constructions, gender relations, and patriotic feelings. The chapters in this book highlight a wide range of sports, and together, they offer a significant window on to the ways that the sporting life animates the institutions of modern Japan.

The (No) Work And (No) Leisure World Of Women In Assi, Banaras, Nita Kumar

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

In the riverside neighborhood (mohalla) of Assi, in the south of Banaras, families of the following professions are to be found: the preparation and retail of foods such as: milk, sweets, tea, paan, peanuts and snacks; clerical work in offices or shops; private professional work, such as priesthood, teaching, boating, cleaning toilets; and crafts, such as masonry, weaving, making and maintaining jacquard machines, carpentry, and goldsmithy. All this work is done by men in the public sphere. In Banaras, the observable and articulated sphere of activity called "work" (kam) largely exists for men only. Men are …

Comment On James M. Wilce, "Magical Laments And Anthropological Reflections", Claudia Strauss

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

Wilce draws our attention to the formulaic nature of anthropologists ethnographies, both considered as a distinctive genre and as inflected by larger modernist discourses of destruction and loss (which he terms neolament). His intriguing discussion of the laments that end many anthropological texts helped me to recognize similar laments that I heard when I conducted interviews in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. The latter examples raise issues about the politics of lamenting modernity and questions about what makes a lament effective.

'Listen, Rama’S Wife!’: Maithil Women’S Perspectives And Practices In The Festival Of Sāmā-Cakevā, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

As a female-only festival in a significantly gender-segregated society, sāmā cakevā provides a window into Maithil women’s understandings of their society and the sacred, cultural subjectivities, moral frameworks, and projects of self-construction. The festival reminds us that to read male-female relations under patriarchal social formations as a dichotomy between the empowered and the disempowered ignores the porous boundaries between the two in which negotiations and tradeoffs create a symbiotic reliance. Specifically, the festival names two oppositional camps—the male world of law and the female world of relationships—and then creates a male character, the brother, who moves between the two, loyal …

Exchanging Identities, James R. Allison

Faculty Publications

In many societies, economic activities are an important means through which individuals create their social identity. This is particularly evident in, for example, some Melanesian societies where successful participation in exchange systems is an important determinant of an individual‘s social status. These processes are difficult to see in the ethnographic or prehistoric Southwest, where status differences are understated, but some principles apply cross-culturally. This paper focuses on ethnographic examples showing how differential participation in institutionalized, inter-community exchange systems affects the negotiation of identity within communities. Examples from the prehistoric Puebloan Southwest are then examined in light of the ethnographic insights.

"We Didn't Think You Was Comin' Back": Art, Fieldwork, And History In The East Kimberley, Western Australia, Eric Kjellgren

Pacific Studies

Heracleitus observed that it is impossible to step into the same river, yet the river remains over time. This paradox summarizes the relationship between anthropological fieldwork and ethnography. Entering the field is to experience a culture at one point in time. To write ethnography is to create a general analysis of that culture. Just as one can better understand a river's nature by observing it over time, one gains a more nuanced understanding of a culture through repeated episodes of fieldwork. Using examples from my research in the East Kimberley, Western Australia, I explore how the ongoing history of cultural …

Living A "Convenient Fiction", Anne Chambers, Keith S. Chambers

Pacific Studies

Long-term fieldwork offers a unique perspective on the complex, interactive process of interpretation on which ethnography depends. Through shared experiences, the ethnographer(s) and host community collaborate in constructing reciprocal identities tailored to their respective needs and the local situation. The mutual expectations and assumptions grounding this relationship become more visible as they are defined by subsequent events and encounters over the years. Our article analyzes some significant and turns in our thirty-year relationship with the Tuvaluan atoll community of Nanumea. In initially defining us as "of the island," the community established us in a local category' resonant with key emic …

Real Time: Unwinding Technocratic And Anthropological Knowledge, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

“The Bank of Japan is our mother,” bankers in Tokyo sometimes said of Japan's central bank. Drawing on this metaphor as an ethnographic resource, and on the example of central bankers who sought to unwind their own technocratic knowledge by replacing it with a real-time machine, I retrace the ethnographic task of unwinding technocratic knowledge from those anthropological knowledge practices that critique technocracy. In so doing, I draw attention to special methodological problems—involving the relationship between ethnography, analysis, and reception—in the representation and critique of contemporary knowledge practices.

Cross Burning, Cockfighting, And Symbolic Meaning: Toward A First Amendment Ethnography, Timothy Zick

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Introduction: Communities In Crisis, Susanna Trnka

Pacific Studies

This introduction sets the stage for a volume of essays exploring the social, political, and cultural upheavals experienced in Fiji during and after the May 2000 coup led by George Speight. While media and political discourse have largely focused on national-level implications and ethnic divisions, this collection shifts attention to grassroots perspectives, highlighting how ordinary citizens experienced and interpreted the crisis. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted during or shortly after the coup, contributors examine local discourses, community reactions, and the reconfiguration of identities and power dynamics. The introduction contextualizes the coup within Fiji's broader history of political instability, including the …

Power And Patronage In Pakistan, Stephen Lyon

Faculty & Staff Publications

Asymmetrical power relationships are found throughout Pakistan's Punjabi and Pukhtun communities. This thesis argues that these relationships must be examined as manifestations of cultural continuity rather than as separate structures. The various cultures of Pakistan display certain common cultural features which suggest a reexamination of past analytical divisions of tribe and peasant societies. This thesis looks at the ways power is expressed, accumulated and maintained in three social contexts: kinship, caste and political relationships. These three social contexts are embedded within a collection of 'hybridising' cultures (i.e. cultures which exhibit strong mechanisms for cultural accommodation without loss of 'identity'). Socialisation …

Multigenerations And Multidisciplines: Inheriting Fifty Years Of Gwembe Tonga Research, Lisa Cliggett

Anthropology Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review: Social Organization And Cultural Aesthetics: Essays In Honor Of William H. Davenport, Stuart Kirsch

Pacific Studies

William W. Donner and James G. Flanagan, eds., Social Organization and Cultural Aesthetics: Essays in Honor of William H. Davenport. New York: University Press of America, 1997. Pp. v, 151, illus., bib. US$56.50 cloth; $30.50 paperback.

Reviewed by Stuart Kirsch, University of Michigan

Book Review: Greg Dening, Performances, Marta Rohatynskyj

Pacific Studies

Greg Dening, Performances. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1996. Pp. xvi, 296, bib., index. US$45 cloth; $19.95 paperback.

Reviewed by Marta Rohatynskyj, University of Guelph

An Ethnography Of Abstractions?, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Book Review Forum: Stephen F. Eisenman, Gauguin’S Skirt, Elizabeth C. Childs

Pacific Studies

Stephen F. Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt. London: Thames and Hudson, 1997. Pp. 232, 110 illus., notes, index. US$29.95 cloth; $24.95 paperback.

Review: Elizabeth C. Childs Washington University St. Louis

Discerning The Invisible In A Group Portrait Of Stability: An Ethnography Of The Butler-Tarkington Neighborhood, Lisa Marie Wheeler

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

The purpose of this ethnographic study has been to learn about the sub-culture of the Butler-Tarkington Neighborhood: who the people are who live in its geographic boundaries (according to each other) and how they experience and construct their community. Although residents recognize to some degree that their neighborhood is fragmented into smaller areas, most emphasize a sense of belonging to the neighborhood as a geographic whole, taking pride in its reputation for stability, diversity and integration. The "strong sense of community'" and stability that residents often say they enjoy relies on common interests and a shared goal among active residents …

Jane C. Goodale's Review Of Eric Venbrux's A Death In The Tiwi Islands: Conflict, Ritual, And Social Life In An Australian Aboriginal Community, Jane C. Goodale

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

Infinity Within The Brackets, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The ethnographic subjects of this article are UN-sponsored international conferences and their legal documents. Drawing upon fieldwork among Fiji delegates at these conferences, in this article I demonstrate the centrality of matters of form, as distinct from questions of “meaning,” in the negotiation of international agreements. A parallel usage of documents and of mats among Fijian negotiators provides a heuristic device for exploring questions of pattern and scale in the aesthetics of negotiation.

Official/Unofficial Images: Photographs From The Crane Pacific Expedition, 1928–1929, Virginia-Lee Webb

Pacific Studies

The Crane Pacific Expedition was privately funded by Cornelius Crane and institutionally sponsored by the Field Museum, Chicago. Originally planning a pleasure trip, Crane offered to fund and organize a scientific one for the museum. The expedition circled the globe from November 1928 to October 1929, and collected over 18,000 specimens of all types for various departments at the Field Museum. Sculptures were also collected and given to several museums. However, the Crane Expedition is particularly significant for its photographic record of the Sepik River, New Guinea. One official photographer, Sidney N. Shurcliff, was documented, yet five men are now …

“Olfala Pija Blong Niuhebridis Blong Bifo”: Old Pictures Of The Early New Hebrides (Vanuatu), Frédéric Angleviel

Pacific Studies

The postcard offers visual and documentary access to the past. As products of the transient and permanent European presence in the Pacific, postcards contain insights on the colonial mentality, missions, early ethnography, tourism, and the progress of colonial administration. They also reveal personal doubts, joys and loneliness, and mundane details of travel, weather, accommodation, friendships, and jobs. The photographic images on the front are less explicit but leave tantalizingly obscure and confused messages on a similar range of understandings of the colonial past. Postcards have been ignored by historians but eagerly sought by collectors. The Max Shekleton Collection is therefore …