Search

The Auhelawa people of Normanby Island (Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea) typically observe the death of an individual through a series of feasts in which the lineage of the deceased and its lateral relatives exchange food and perform rituals of mourning. Recently, a number of people have decided to reject all forms of 'custom' in favor of a practice of 'Christian custom' in which no food is exchanged and no rituals are performed. This paper examines the way people view custom and its Christian alternative. It argues that the basis for Christian forms of mortuary feasting is a shift away from thinking of feasts in terms of reciprocity and towards thinking of them in terms of traditional customary rules. In this context, active church members have begun to represent the absence of markers of custom as itself a marker of an alternative Christian custom. I argue that this reformulation of the relationship of custom and change is meant to give concrete form to the value of Christian individualism as the basis for sociality. The paper then concludes that in order to explain historical changes in ritual systems, the study of ritual needs to examine ritual in relation to the values that underlie it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory is the property of University of Chicago Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory is the property of University of Chicago Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

As the most abundant, and frequently the only, archaeological evidence preserved within the volcanic soils of the Willaumez Peninsula, Papua New Guinea, stone artefacts carry a heavy burden for scholars seeking to write the prehistory of subsistence and land use. Efforts to squeeze information from these recalcitrant informal assemblages of obsidian tools have produced contradictory and unsatisfactory results. Although alternative approaches should certainly be sought to find ways to make these silent stones speak about topics that archaeologists want to hear, other important stories concerning social process and exchange are beginning to be told by ongoing research being developed in West New Britain. These new results raise broader questions about the social functions of humble stone tools in other parts of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the political and social aspects of the Manus Highway, a road connecting inland villages on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea (PNG) to Lorengau, the capital of Manus Province, PNG. Particular focus is given to the role of the Highway in the 2007 Parliamentary Election in Manus Province. According to the author, the Highway was a highly contested subject in the election because it provide access to the modern world and was thus associated with political efficacy. It is suggested that the Highway carried symbolic meanings of exchange, connectedness, and power. Details related to the concepts of taun (town), ples (village), and gavman (state) in PNG are presented. Other topics include agency, state infrastructure, and economic development.

Over time, anthropology has lost the notion of ritual within the framework of exchange and of the 'total social fact.' Sahlins as well as Mauss interpreted the Maoris' hau as a paradigm of exchange in which any event comprising a circulation of objects is but an exchange. The notion of ritual thus vanished, leaving in its place a long chain of logically equivalent transitive exchanges. Drawing on Orokaiva (Papua New Guinea) material relative to the competitive attempt of several religious factions to establish a comparative view of customary and Christian ritual, the Maori hau is revisited. This reading shows a clear contrast between what we must call ritual, comprising a hierarchic and mediated form of exchange wherein gifts are equated by virtue of the 'spirit of the gift,' and exchange per se, constituted by a face-to-face transaction of goods wherein equivalence is posited between prestations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]