When we think of giving gifts, we think of exchanging objects that carry with them economic or symbolic value. But is every valuable thing a potentially exchangeable item, whose value can be transferred? In The Enigma of the Gift, the distinguished French anthropologist Maurice Godelier reassesses the significance of gifts in social life by focusing on sacred objects, which are never exchanged despite the value they possess. Beginning with an analysis of the seminal work of Marcel Mauss and Claude Levi-Strass, and drawing on his own fieldwork in Melanesia, Godelier argues that...
When we think of giving gifts, we think of exchanging objects that carry with them economic or symbolic value. But is every valuable thing a potential...
The Achuar Indians of the Upper Amazon have developed sophisticated strategies of resource management. The author documents their knowledge of the environment, and explains how it is interwoven with cosmological ideas that endow nature with the characteristics of society.
The Achuar Indians of the Upper Amazon have developed sophisticated strategies of resource management. The author documents their knowledge of the env...
The subjugation of millions of people in a caste system that is a radical form of apartheid has long had its critics, both from within India and from outside it. Although the government has introduced equal opportunity legislation in an effort to right some of history's wrongs, untouchability is an accident of birth that continues to stigmatize and ostracize more than one hundred and forty million people. Untouchables remain on the bottom of the socioeconomic scale and are found, more often than not, in unskilled, low status occupations. They are forbidden to enter temples, often beg for...
The subjugation of millions of people in a caste system that is a radical form of apartheid has long had its critics, both from within India and fr...
For the Ankave of Papua New Guinea, men, unlike women, do not reach adulthood and become fathers simply by growing up and reproducing. What fathers--and by extension, men--actually are is a result of a series of relational transformations, operated in and by rituals in which men and women both perform complementary actions in separate spaces. Acting for Others is a tour de force in Melanesian ethnography, gender studies, and theories of ritual. Based on years of fieldwork conducted by the author and her husband and co-ethnographer, this book's -double view- of the Ankave ritual...
For the Ankave of Papua New Guinea, men, unlike women, do not reach adulthood and become fathers simply by growing up and reproducing. What fathers--a...
