Bücher der Reihe ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology

This fascinating collection explores how through mimesis, wayfarers and locales alike borrow images from one another to expand their cultural repertoire of meanings or borrow images from their own past to validate their identities.

The practice of affiliating the female child with the mother and the male child with the father was considered a rare and inexplicable practice in Papua New Guinean ethnography at the time the original data was collected some forty years ago...

In 2014, the island of Ahamb in Vanuatu became the scene of a startling Christian revival movement led by thirty children with 'spiritual vision'. However, it ended dramatically when two men believed to be sorcerers and responsible for much of the society's problems were hung by persons fearing for the island's future security. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork on Ahamb between 2010 and 2017, this book investigates how upheavals like the Ahamb revival can emerge to address and sometimes resolve social problems, but also carry risks of exacerbating the same problems they arise to address.

Drawing on twenty years of research, this book examines the historical perspective of a Pacific people who saw "e;globalization"e; come and go. Suau people encountered the leading edge of missionization and colonialism in Papua New Guinea and were active participants in the Second World War. In Memory of Times to Come offers a nuanced account of how people assess their own experience of change over the course of a critical century. It asks two key questions: What does it mean to claim that global connections are in the past rather than the present or the future, and what does it mean to claim that one has lost one's culture, but not because anyone else took it away or destroyed it?

Mortuary Dialogues presents fresh perspectives on death and mourning across the Pacific Islands. Through a set of rich ethnographies, the book examines how funerals and death rituals give rise to discourse and debate about sustaining moral personhood and community amid modernity and its enormous transformations. The book's key concept, "e;mortuary dialogue,"e; describes the different genres of talk and expressive culture through which people struggle to restore individual and collective order in the aftermath of death in the contemporary Pacific.

This volume illuminates the ways in which an Asia-based analysis of migration can yield new data on global migration patterns, new theoretical insights for a broader understanding of global migration, and new methodological approaches to the spatial and temporal complexity of human migration.

Reconsidering issues of representation in the insular Pacific, this volume explores authenticity and authorship in practice as "traveling concepts" that spawn cross-fertilization along the cultural and historical routes they traverse.

The civil conflict in Solomon Islands (1998-2003) is often blamed on the failure of the nation-state to encompass culturally diverse and politically fragmented communities. Writing of Ranongga Island, the author tracks engagements with strangers across many realms of life-pre-colonial warfare, Christian conversion, logging and conservation, even post-conflict state building. She describes startling reversals in which strangers become attached to local places, even as kinspeople are estranged from one another and from their homes. Against stereotypes of rural insularity, she argues that a distinctive cosmopolitan openness to others is evident in the rural Solomons in times of war and peace.

Dreams Made Small offers an in-depth, ethnographic look at journeys of education among young Papuans under Indonesian rule, ultimately revealing how dreams of transformation, equality, and belonging are shaped and reshaped in the face of multiple constraints.

Presents fresh perspectives on death and mourning across the Pacific Islands. Through its set of rich ethnographies, the book examines how funerals and death rituals give rise to discourse and debate about sustaining moral persons and community amid modernity, and its enormous transformations.

Providing a comprehensive treatment of a full range of migrant destinies in East Asia by scholars from both Asia and North America, this volume captures the way migrants are changing the face of Asia, especially in cities, such as Beijing, Hong Kong, Hamamatsu, Osaka, Tokyo, and Singapore.

Within little more than ten years in the early nineteenth century, inhabitants of Tahiti, Hawaii and fifteen other closely related societies destroyed or desecrated all of their temples and most of their god-images. In the aftermath of the explosive event, which Sissons terms the Polynesian Iconoclasm, hundreds of architecturally innovative churches - one the size of two football fields - were constructed. At the same time, Christian leaders introduced oppressive laws and courts, which the youth resisted through seasonal displays of revelry and tattooing. Seeking an answer to why this event occurred in the way that it did, this book introduces and demonstrates an alternative "e;practice history"e; that draws on the work of Marshall Sahlins and employs Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, improvisation and practical logic.

Since the Colonial era, gambling has come to dominate nighttime activity in Papua New Guinea. This richly detailed ethnography intersects with theories of money, value, play, money, exchange, informal economy, materiality, social change, leadership, and the anthropology of Melanesia.

The phrase Christian politics points in two directions: political relations between denominations in one direction, and ways that Christian churches contribute to debates about how society should be governed in the other.

Tongan women living outside of their island homeland create and use hand-made, sometimes hybridized, textiles to maintain and rework their cultural traditions in diaspora. Central to these traditions is an ancient concept of homeland or nation- fonua-which Tongans retain as an anchor for modern nation-building. Utilizing the concept of the "e;multi-territorial nation,"e; the author questions the notion that living in diaspora is mutually exclusive with authentic cultural production and identity. The globalized nation the women build through gifting their barkcloth and fine mats, challenges the normative idea that nations are always geographically bounded or spatially contiguous. The work suggests that, contrary to prevalent understandings of globalization, global resource flows do not always primarily involve commodities. Focusing on first-generation Tongans in New Zealand and the relationships they forge across generations and throughout the diaspora, the book examines how these communities centralize the diaspora by innovating and adapting traditional cultural forms in unprecedented ways.

In 1994, the Pacific island village of Matupit was partially destroyed by a volcanic eruption. This study focuses on the subsequent reconstruction and contests over the morality of exchanges that are generative of new forms of social stratification. Such new dynamics of stratification are central to contemporary processes of globalization in the Pacific, and more widely. Through detailed ethnography of the transactions that a displaced people entered into in seeking to rebuild their lives, this book analyses how people re-make sociality in an era of post-colonial neoliberalism without taking either the transformative power of globalization or the resilience of indigenous culture as its starting point. It also contributes to the understanding of the problems of post-disaster reconstruction and development projects.

Exploring the role of empathy in a variety of Pacific societies, this book is at the forefront of the latest anthropological research on empathy. It presents distinct articulations of empathy in the Pacific region. More specifically, the volume examines significant regional patterns in the experience, enactment, recognition, and limits of empathy.