Holger Jebens, Pathways to heaven: Contesting mainline and fundamentalist Christianity in Papua New Guinea. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2005, 256 pp., ISBN 1-84545-005-1 (hardback).
James Leach, Creative land: Place and procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2004, 256 pp., ISBN 1-57181-693-3 (paperback).
Eriksen 2014 ). The latter, I will claim, constitutes a gradually emerging cosmology in Melanesian contexts. It is in the rapid growth of some of the international Pentecostal churches that this transformation is mostly visible because here the idea that
these regions into vacation destinations. Gibson maintains that “the company’s favored islands were practically interchangeable” and “[a] vast array of cultures, including those of Papua New Guinea (PNG) as well as the Melanesian islands, tended to be
This introduction sketches the history of anthropological network analysis and examines its influence and significance with regard to contemporary conceptual and theoretical concerns in the discipline. It is argued that recent Melanesian ethnography is an effect of, and owes a debt to, certain mid-twentieth-century developments in Africanist anthropology. These debts allow for the elicitation of concepts and concerns from Melanesianist anthropology and their deployment in the analysis of African ethnography. Such deployment may in turn explore the limits of these conceptual constructs and allow for their return in distorted and extended forms. As demonstrated by the contributors to this special issue, the historical relationships between Melanesian ethnography and Africanist anthropology hence enable an exchange of theoretical gifts and traffic in analytics that cut the network and separate the two regions, thus allowing for a new form of anthropological comparison.
Twenty-five years ago, Roy Wagner in his book, The Invention of Culture asked his reader to comprehend the invention of society as an ongoing effort, especially an effort made by members aware of the changes that can be wrought by their actions. In doing so, he posed the problem of what kind of society people thought they were making, contrasting the social contract of the Euro-American political thought with the processual sociality imagined by Melanesians (1975, 1974). The theoretical insights of Wagner can be brought to bear on the period of independence in Papua New Guinea when Melanesians were making a new sociality. I will discuss the dialectics of Wagner’s approach, as they are played out at the time of the publication of his book; that is, in the early years of the creation of the new nation of Papua New Guinea.
This afterword is not a direct response to individual essays; it is instead a response to the spirit of the 'Afrinesia' experiment as a whole. It is prompted by a desire to imagine a return on the goodwill of the contributors to this special issue: Africanists thinking through the lessons and limits of Melanesian anthropology. In considering what Melanesianists might gain from thinking through Africanist anthropology, I speculate on potential openings. This includes an appreciation of the way that the experiment produces an effect of conventionality in the (Melanesianist) reader.
This article offers a relational perspective on the discussion of obligations and freedoms in Kuria women's voluntary associations in Tanzania and explores the impacts of these activities on sociality and public spaces. The constitution of a successful businesswoman is dependent on her membership in various cooperative groups, and her new rights and freedoms reside in the ambiguity between her sovereignty and group belonging. Historically an important means for self-extension, cooperative work remains pertinent in regulating the impacts of new resources. Diverse mediators and conversions have played a key role in building the Kuria person, making available a range of transformative options and revealing the possibilities for mixed forms. It is suggested that an engagement between Melanesian and African perspectives on personhood can contribute to a dynamic and temporally situated study of a social construction of mutuality.
This article responds to Michael Herzfeld's call for anthropologists to develop a new form of 'reflexive comparison' by imaginatively casting the peoples of the African Great Lakes as part of Melanesia. Specifically, it explores how notions of personhood and sociality in this African setting might be understood through interpretative approaches developed in the New Melanesian Ethnography of the 1970s and 1980s. It finds that this sort of thought experiment yields key insights by focusing analytical attention upon concepts of shared vital substances, upon practices intended to control the flow of these substances, and upon the agency of non-human actors (especially cattle) in shaping these processes. An examination of these features suggests new perspectives on a range of ethnographic 'problems', from condom use to Rwanda's ubuhake cattle exchange.
