I grew up in a family of beautiful, accomplished women at a time when most women stayed home. But the spectacular women in my mother's family also suffered spectacularly, and I was determined to understand family life at its very roots. I studied anthropology and, over a 15-year period, lived in a remote part of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea among a group of Gimi women who spent most of their time apart from men. I shared women's difficult daily lives, participated in their separate rites, learned their myths, and, through my writing, have devoted myself to giving them voices of their own.
I wrote...
Between Culture and Fantasy: A New Guinea Highlands Mythology
Myths of Gimi people of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea convey painful truths of human existence—disease, aging, mortality—as if they were the fault of one sex or the other. The conflicting myths of women and men shape Gimi reality, translating fantasies about sex and reproduction into founding principles of kinship, marriage and exchange.
In descriptions of cannibal ritual, sorcery, and rites of passage, the book explores how Gimi women and men play out their mythic debate, cooperating in shows of conflict and resolution that leave men undefeated and accord women the greater blame for misfortune. Based upon research of unusual depth, this book offers a portrait of Gimi people with implications for a general understanding of relations between the sexes.
Malinowski's pioneering work on people of the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea still holds a thrill because, after a century, it remains unique in its depth and precision.
Malinowski was an aristocrat and a snob who, like the armchair thinkers he admired, considered himself a scientist after Darwin. But when World War I broke out, as a Pole in London, he risked deportation to Austria-Hungary or internment as an 'enemy alien'.
Instead, Malinowski remained 'stuck' in the Trobriands for the duration of the War where, with the scrupulousness of one trained in math and physics and the intensity of an 'imprisoned' participant-observer, he produced the first firsthand accounts of indigenous life.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been…
The discovery that 'rituals of transition' in the lives of individuals—birth, puberty, marriage, childbirth, death—are structurally the same and analogous to a destabilizing "passage" through 'no man's land'—is an insight of genius.
My enduring 'affection' for ivory tower thinkers comes from having actually applied their ideas among a people in the New Guinea Highlands over a period of 15 years.
The methods of these early masters are sometimes faulty—"shreds and patches" of exotic beliefs and practices are grouped together, torn from their contexts in time and geography—but by trying to extend Charles Darwin’s theory of biological evolution into the realm of culture, they came up with universals of human existence that should never be forgotten.
Folklorist Arnold van Gennep's masterwork, The Rites of Passage, has been a staple of anthropological education for more than a century. First published in French in 1909, and translated into English by the University of Chicago Press in 1960, this landmark book explores how the life of an individual in any society can be understood as a succession of stages: birth, puberty, marriage, parenthood, advancement to elderhood, and, finally, death. Van Gennep's command of the ethnographic record enabled him to discern crosscultural patterns in rituals of separation, transition, and incorporation. With compelling precision, he elaborated the terms that would both…
This book consists of two exquisite essays, "The Collective Representation of Death" and "The Pre-Eminence of the Right Hand: A Study in Religious Polarity," written by an "armchair" philosopher searching for the origins and essence of human existence in exotic places: he looked for the meaning of death in the mortuary rites of the Dyak in Borneo; and the source of dualistic thinking in human anatomy.
The excitement of these works comes from recognizing ourselves in others, distant in time and space. They serve as a corrective and departure from the current exaggeration of cultures' uniqueness and national identities that lead, ultimately, to indifference about the fates of other peoples.
First published in English 1960. The historical value of Hertz's writings is that they are a representative example of the culmination of two centuries of development of sociological thought in France, from Montesquieu to Durkheim and his pupils. In the intervening years since publication, that development has grown into the systematic comparative study of primitive institutions, based on a great body of ethnographic facts from all over the world: in effect social anthropology.
A fascinating in-depth look at why ideas of Dead White Men of the late 19th and early 20th Century—Émile Durkheim, Arnold van Gennep, Robert Hertz—still matter and are, indeed, indispensable for understanding funerals and death rituals in places like Borneo, Bali, Thailand, early Egypt, Africa, and America.
By examining mortuary rites cross-culturally, the authors expose elements of a 'deep structure' in ritual that may be universal, thus offering the 'thrill of recognition' of ourselves in others.
This revised edition of a cross-cultural study of rituals surrounding death has become a standard text in anthropology, sociology and religion. Part of its fascination is that in understanding other people's death rituals we are able to gain a better understanding of our own. The authors refer to a wide variety of examples, from different continents and epochs. They compare the great tombs of the Berawan of Borneo and the pyramids of Egypt, as well as the dramas of medieval French royal funerals and the burial alive of the Dinka 'masters of the spear' in the Sudan, and other rituals…
A classic of ethnographic description and symbolic analysis based upon fieldwork among the Ndembu of Zambia—a must read for anyone interested in sociological and psychological implications of ritual belief and practice in a small-scale, non-literate, kinship-based society.
A stellar example of what is lost by cancelling "colonialist" literature and discarding the very concepts of "culture" and "religion" as relics of Western intellectual imperialism.
In 10 essays on color symbolism, circumcision rites, rites of passage, social dynamics, and more, Turner lays the groundwork for his proposition that ritual is the key to religion and religion is the key to culture.
A pioneering work of high quality, this collection of anthropological studies provides one of the most detailed records available for an African society-or indeed for any group-of the semantics of ritual symbolism. It combines unusually detailed ethnographic description, based upon field work among the Ndembu of Zambia, with remarkable theoretical sophistication. Professor Turner describes the ritual phenomena in terms both of practice and of their sociological and psychological implications within a preliterate society.
Case histories illustrate the function of ritual in creating community harmony. Data on circumcision rites and medical practices and an essay on color classification have wide implications…
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
Each of the sections is written from the perspective of the mythical Taurus, from the beginning at Lascaux to Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, and elsewhere. This is not just a history of the bull but also a view of ourselves through the eyes of the bull, illustrating our pre-literate use of myth, how the advent of writing and the urban revolution changed our view of ourselves, and how even bullfighting in Spain is a variation on the ancient sacrifice of the sacred bull.
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. In I Am Taurus, author Stephen Palmer traces the story of the bull in the sky, starting from that point 19,000 years ago - a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull. Each of the eleven sections is written from the perspective of the mythical Taurus, from the beginning at Lascaux to Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Greece, Spain and elsewhere. This is not just a history of the bull but also an attempt to see ourselves through…
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