Dancing Through Time presents a rich and incisive analysis of person, time, and identity among the Karawari speakers of Ambonwari village in the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, through the examination of everyday practices, language, social institutions, kinship, myths, spirit things, rituals, and dances.

In their previous book, Structural Models in Anthropology, Hage and Haray used graph theory, a branch of pure mathematics, to develop a family of models for the study of social, symbolic, and cognitive relations. With Exchange in Oceania the authors extend these models using ethnographic data from Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia to demonstrate that the language, techniques, and theorems of graph theory provide the essential basis for the description, quantification, simulation, enumeration, and notation of the great variety of exchange forms actually found in Oceanic societies.

The Jains of India are a flourishing and prosperous community, but their religion is focused on the teaching and example of ascetic renouncers, whose austere regime is actually dedicated to ending worldly life and often culminates in a fast to death. This book, which draws upon a detailed study of Jainism in the city of Jaipur, shows how renunciation and ascetism play a central part in the life of a thriving business community, and how world-renunciation combines for Jain families with the pursuit of worldly happiness.

Janet Carsten offers an original and very personal investigation of the nature of kinship in Malaysia, based upon her own experience as a foster daughter in a family on the island of Langkawi. She shows that Malay kinship is a process, not a state: it is determined partly by birth, but also throughout life by living together and sharing food. Carsten gives the reader a fascinating "anthropology of everyday life," including a compelling view of gender relations; she urges reassessment of recent anthropological work on gender, and a new approach to the study of kinship.

This book combines the insights of history and anthropology with innovative techniques such as computer simulation to investigate the relationships between politics, kinship, and marriage in the late-medieval city-state of Ragusa (present-day Dubrovnik). At its heart is a reconsideration of office' and the ways in which ties of kinship and marriage were mobilized to build electoral success.

This is a first-hand account of a reindeer-herding collective in the remote Taimyr peninsula of Siberia. The author gives an intimate description of the day-to-day lives of a little-known group of Evenkis as they face both economic and ecological challenges. His study addresses questions of identity, nationalism, and ecological theory, as well as mapping the changes caused in the region by the formation of and the recent break-up of the Soviet Union.

For the past thirty years, adherents of a millenarian cult in Papua New Guinea, known as the Pomio Kivung, have been awaiting the establishment of a period of supernatural bliss, heralded by the return of their ancestors bearing "cargo." The author of this book, Harvey Whitehouse, was taken for a reincarnated ancestor, and was able to observe the dynamics of the cult from within. From the stable mainstream of the cult, localized splinter groups periodically emerge, hoping to expedite the millennium; the core of this volume concerns the close study of one such group in two Baining...

For the past thirty years, adherents of a millenarian cult in Papua New Guinea, known as the Pomio Kivung, have been awaiting the establishment of a period of supernatural bliss, heralded by the return of their ancestors bearing "cargo." The author of this book, Harvey Whitehouse, was taken for a reincarnated ancestor, and was able to observe the dynamics of the cult from within. From the stable mainstream of the cult, localized splinter groups periodically emerge, hoping to expedite the millennium; the core of this volume concerns the close study of one such group in two Baining villages....

Born and Bred is an ethnography of Bacup in the north-west of England. At the heart of the cotton industry in the nineteenth century, this Lancashire town has undergone deep social and economic change during the twentieth, yet it remains a hive of social activity. The book focuses on the way in which the past continues to figure in people's talk about the place and about each other, but it questions the claim that such a preoccupation is simply due to nostalgia for better times. Narratives about the past, like narratives about the kind of place Bacup is, mobilize cultural understandings of...

Readers will find here a rich and reflective representation of Iceland and Icelanders today. Kristen Hastrup not only draws on extensive first-hand research of Iceland, she also relies on her own theory of what anthropology is and should be in fully documenting this place and its people. In two previous books, Hastrup studied the processes and patterns that shaped Icelandic society from medieval times to the nineteenth century. In these pages, she updates this record by giving us a view of contemporary Iceland from within the landscape. Hastrup also traces key resonances from Icelandic...