Trobriand Research Articles

Rethinking field research: accounts and places

The dominant narrative present in much of current psychological research and teaching is that which sees empirical science in general as a very special program of activity, having as its goal what Richard Rorty has called “Redemptive Truth”. That is “..a set of beliefs which would end, once and for all, the process of reflection on what to do with ourselves” (2000 p2); a belief that there is “..something behind the appearance, the one true description of what is going on, the final secret”(2000 p.2), fulfilling the need that religion and philosophy have attempted to satisfy. Because they carry humanity’s hopes for the future on their shoulders, scientists see themselves as special people, carefully trained and who go about their tasks in equally special ways. Care must be taken with measures, observations must be objective and correct procedures must be followed in order to avoid the observer contaminating the observed and to guarantee that results are fit for consideration. Whilst the empirical science orientation is clearly strongest in experimental psychology or laboratory research, the hegemony that these areas exercise over the rest of the discipline is very great - including over social psychology. Qualitative research approaches are required to show that those who carry out open interviews have been correctly trained, that the subject matter has been correctly registered and that proper methods of analysis used. Qualitative methods have to be “triangulated” in order to demonstrate the validity of conclusions. Those who advance beyond the laboratory or interview room and go into the ‘field’ are required to treat the ‘field’ in a similar manner. The ‘field’ is seen as a place where psychologists go to gather ‘data’ which they bring back for analyses. The growing use of terms such as ‘ethnography’ in social psychology is much more a consequence of this pressure than it is of a sudden interest in anthropology; after all, it is not very easy to give a scientific spin to activities like “hanging about in cafes”, “walking aimlessly around streets”, “overhearing conversations”, “chatting to people in queues”. Key to this initial conception of “field” is the idea of difference, not just as a place but, following the transference of Malinowski’s long conversation with the Trobriand Islands between 1914 and 1918 to Park’s Chicago in 1925, as an analytic process in which the other is regarded as a stranger, or is “strangerized”. We use terms like “distance”, “separation” and, of course, “objectivity”, lots of “objectivity”. However, when ordinary people – and that includes psychologists when they are not being psychologists – meet other people for the first time they normally try to get to know them, to come closer to them. They seek in other words to de-strangerize the other, to bring people together. Now the need for some kind of collective judgment about the validity of what is being discussed in social psychology or any other field of activity, academic or otherwise, is not, in itself, problematic.

Malinowski and Ignorance of Physiological Paternity

Bronislaw Malinowski began producing scientific texts several years before conducting his ethnographic study of the Trobriand Islands during World War I. This article shows how his first book, The Family among the Australian Aborigenes. A Sociological Study (1913), can very much be considered the matrix of his later research; in this work he lays the foundations for his later methodological innovations and sketches out a first analysis of kinship phenomena. Moreover, from the start Malinowski granted a crucial role to what he claimed to be certain primitive peoples? ignorance of physiological paternity. He could not accept contradiction on this point, as is made particularly clear in his dispute with a colonial administrator named Alex Rentoul. Malinowski?s harsh, unpleasant tone in their exchange of views suggests the strong transferential aspect of this theme.

Determinants of serum triglycerides and high‐density lipoprotein cholesterol in traditional Trobriand Islanders: the Kitava Study

Objectives: To analyse variables explaining the variation between serum triglycerides (TGs) and high density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL‐C) in a non‐western population characterized by unfavourable TG and HDL‐C levels despite marked leanness, low blood pressure and low fasting serum insulin. The study subjects included yraditional Pacific Islanders from Kitava, Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea and a population in Sweden. Methods: The study was designed as a cross‐sectional survey. Fasting serum lipoproteins and apolipoproteins, insulin, blood pressure and anthropometric measurements were analysed in 122 male and 47 female Kitavans aged 20–86 years and in a control population of 729 healthy men and women aged 20–66 from Uppsala. Main outcome measures were determinants of TG and HDL‐C using a simple and multiple linear regression analysis. Results: A negative association was found between TGs and HDL‐C in Kitava (r=−0.38, p<0.0001) and Sweden (r=−0.46, p<0.0001), while TGs were positively associated with non‐HDL‐C and ApoB in both groups. In contrast to what was found in the Swedish subjects, TG and HDL‐C levels were not associated with body mass index, waist circumference, glucose, insulin or systolic blood pressure in the Kitavans. Conclusion: Despite an apparent absence of cardiovascular disease and the metabolic syndrome in the Kitavans, the relationship between TGs and HDL‐C was similar to that observed in Caucasians, while neither of the variables was associated with markers of insulin sensitivity in the Kitavans. Whether the findings can be explained by normal physiology or partially reflect the high intake of carbohydrates and saturated fat in Kitava is uncertain.

Determinants of serum triglycerides and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol in traditional Trobriand Islanders: the Kitava Study

Determinants of serum triglycerides and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol in traditional Trobriand Islanders: the Kitava Study

Structure and Message in Trobriand cricket*

Ce texte est une version révisée des « Notes » afférentes à Trobriand cricket, film très connu parmi les anthropologues, qui fut réalisé à l’époque où leur attention se centrait (et c’est encore souvent le cas) sur le « message » décelable dans les comportements sociaux. Le thème principal de l’article se résume ainsi : comment les messages ont-ils été construits et insérés dans l’ensemble du documentaire, par le biais des relations entre ses bases constitutives, les images, le discours ? En formalisant quelque peu, l’auteur rend manifestes certains de ces messages du film. Bien sûr, ceux que perçoivent de facto un spectateur ou un public donnés relèvent d’un autre registre et restent ouverts à des recherches ultérieures.

Perspectives on the Yi of Southwest China (review)

BOOK REVIEW Harrell, Stevan, ed. 2001. Perspectives on the Yi of Southwest China. Berkeley: University of California Press 321 p. Why do most professional anthropologists trained in the Anglo-European academy know something about the Trobriand Islanders (the Nuer, the Tikopia, the Balinese), but nothing about the Yi? What causes some peoples to become part of shared anthropological knowledge while others do not? Part of what brings a particular group into the domain of collective disciplinary knowledge is sustained research and publication by professional anthropologists. Perspectives on the Yi of Southwest China presents the Yi as an object of shared anthropological scrutiny for an English-reading audience. To paraphrase editor Stevan Harrell in the volume's introduction, the book begins to establish a field of social and cultural scholarship about the nearly seven million Yi living in southwest China-more Yi, he points out, than there are Danes, Israelis, or Cambodians-of whom most educated people have never even heard.(1) Harrell's introduction is a useful guide to the volume's achievements. chapters began as papers at the First International Conference on Yi Studies that Harrell convened in Seattle in 1995 (2). This conference initiated a conversation between scholars of the Yi who worked in Chinese, Yi, and English language environments. Harrell wants to encourage scholars of the Yi from diverse educational backgrounds to engage more fully with one another as researchers and thinkers. Limited interactions across the Yi, Chinese, and English spheres of scholarship on the Yi had occurred, but scholars from these language environments had rarely, if ever, seriously discussed the distinctly different scholarly interpretations that they, as members of their separate intellectual circles produced (2-3). conference and book begin a truly open transnational dialogue about the Yi, and ethnicity and ethnic relations in China more generally (5), with the aim of producing a more profound, pluralistic, and integrated cosmopolitan scholarly discourse. Readers who want to learn more about the authors and their backgrounds can refer to the short biographies in the list of contributors at the back of the book. Perspectives on the Yi of Southwest China is divided into four sections: part one on Yi history, part two on the Nuosu of Liangshan (a Yi subgroup of about 2 million), part three on the Yi in Yunnan (where more than four million Yi live), and part four, entitled The Yi Today, on the PRC government policies toward the Yi and the outcomes of these policies. Almost all of the volume's chapters consider history to some extent, but the explicit focus of the articles by Wu Gu, Wu Jingzhong, Liu Yu, and Margaret Byrne Swain is history. Articles by Lu Hui, Ann Hill and Eric Diehl (co-authors), Ma Erzi, Eric Mueggler, Bamo Ayi, and Qubi Shimei and Ma Erzi (co-authors) focus on Yi social structure and social institutions. Several chapters present aspects of Yi culture: Ma, Qubi and Ma, and Lu discuss Yi aphorisms and language, and Bamo and Li Yongxiang depict Yi ritual and cosmology. Wu Ga, Thomas Heberer, and David Bradley focus on the party-state's policies, looking at the implementation and consequences of the rural economic reforms for women, political representation and the question of ethnic autonomy, and language policy in the post-Mao era, respectively. Most of the authors provide general portraits of the Yi and/or segments of the Yi. This decision makes sense given that the authors wish to introduce the Yi to a general social studies audience and build Yi studies into a transnational academic project. Readers gain a basic understanding of Yi collective identity, the major regional subgroups of the Yi, Yi social stratification patterns (which at their most complex include four caste strata, patrilineages, patrilineal lineage segments, and divisions by degree of agnatic relatedness, affinity, age, gender, generation, birth order, and hereditary and non-hereditary religious specializations, plus a range of socioeconomic, educational, and rural-urban differences), cosmological beliefs, marriage customs, death rituals, customary law for homicides, naming practices, kinship terminologies, the spoken and written characteristics of the Yi language (divided into six major subgroups that subdivide into numerous variants), modes of production and productive activities, participation in nation-building, and broad historical trajectory. …

Systematic Revision Within the Phalanger orientalis Complex (Diprotodontia, Phalangeridae): A Third Species of Lowland Gray Cuscus from New Guinea and Australia

A study of specimens from the mammal collections of the American Museum of Natural History that were originally assigned to Phalanger orientalis sensu lato revealed the presence of three taxa: P. orientalis from northern New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands; P. intercastellanus from southeast New Guinea, the D'Entrecasteaux Islands, the Trobriand Islands, and the Louisade Archipelago; and a group from southern New Guinea and the Cape York Peninsula of Australia that could not be assigned to either of the two foregoing species. Possession of a distinctive suite of morphological characters warrants recognition of this group at the species level. The characteristics and habitat of the species are described, and the zoogeographic implications of its distribution are discussed.

Under the Eyes of Texas

Institute, the Humanities Research Center, Research in African Literatures, and that strangely un-African name and center of energy that somehow drew these institutions together, Bernth Lindfors. Others like myself, from South Africa, Malawi, Kenya, Nigeria, Cameroon, made the trip, usually with tenuous scholarship funding, to risk a great deal on the mysterious chemistry that associated Texas with Africa. What a shock we received when we got there. Not only students, but many faculty, spoke an almost impenetrable dialect of English, one which, as J. M. Coetzee once remarked, might as well have come from the mouths of Trobriand Islanders. Papier-mache catde adorned the entrances of bookstores, middle-class cowboys and Generation X punks jostled unkempt sidewalks, and Confederate heroes dominated the quadrangles. Most surprisingly, especially to someone from as embattied a place as South Africa was in the 1980s, in Austin's public spaces there was no sign of any self-consciousness or ambiguity about either a Texan or a national identity. Nor, it seemed at first glance, was there much hand-wringing in the English department, which is where one had to establish oneself if one wanted to work with Lindfors. There they still taught undergraduate cours? es with tides like Masterworks of Literature: British, or more tellingly, Masterworks of Literature: American, although everywhere else the canon, patriarchy, and national identity were in crisis. And the heat, of course, unlike anything in Africa, was unspeakable. So where in this squared-off, seemingly unnuanced intellectual com? plex was African literature? The answer was, in Lindfors's office. It was a haven, a nest, an oasis, certainly not a Mecca, and it would come as a fur? ther shock to discover that there were other students, and a few faculty, who did not even know who Lindfors was. They should have known, since his research output was more voluminous than most, as the English grad? uate students' association discovered when they ran surveys of the faculty through the freshly online MLA bibliographies. As for the Institute, its principal function was to coordinate undergraduate courses on Africa and in Black Studies, and the Humanities Research Center, impressive though it obviously was, had not invested in African literature other than its col? lection of white South African manuscripts from the 1950s and 1960s (a fine collection, but marginal to those with an interest in autochthonous expression). Without exaggeration, one could say that African literature in Texas was Bernth Lindfors.

Christianity After Christendom

The World of the Gift. Jacques T. Godbout with Alain Caille. Translated by Donald Winkler. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1998. Locations of the Sacred. Essays on Religion, Literature, and Canadian Culture. William Closson James. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1998. To Set the Captives Free. Liberation Theology in Canada. Oscar Cole-Arnal. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1998. In Good Faith: Canadian Churches Against Apartheid. [Comparative Ethics Series: 4] Renate Pratt. Waterloo: Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion [Wilfred Laurier University Press], 1997. Becoming Human. Jean Vanier. Toronto: Anansi, 1998. There was a time, not long ago, when the principles of the Christian tradition permeated Canadian society. The church shared with law, medicine and education the aura of being the employer of choice for the brightest graduates of colleges and universities. Theologians and Christian philosophers articulated ideals that motivated the whole culture, and politicians appealed to a shared understanding of a world under the benevolent care of an omniscient God who blessed the faithful and chastised the improvident. Young people responded with enthusiasm to the call to go to the far reaches of the world, not only carrying the Christian understanding of the natural and human cosmos, but introducing education, medicine and social services to regions that had not yet been touched with Western culture. Those times seem far removed. We live in a society that has forgotten, and repudiated, its past. Our young people do not know, nor do they care to discover, the values that moulded their grandparents and the world in which they lived. This is not simply a result of the religious pluralism that became characteristic of Canadian society once government policy no longer gave precedence to European immigrants. There is a deeper malaise, which stems from the individualism of modern culture. Ever since the Enlightenment attacked the superstition of faith and put reason in its place with its interest in manipulating nature and society to achieve useful results, and ever since the modern world, inspired by Descartes, put the ultimate standard of truth and goodness in the human subject, the trend has been towards individualism, where each person determines for herself or himself what ideas make the most sense, what values are most worth achieving. Lacking any sense of a tradition that transmits standards and norms, the modem world has espoused the principle of individualistic self-determination. Young and old delight in offending ingrained sensibilities. Those who appeal to ultimate standards as a bulwark against the contemporary values of expediency, personal fulfilment and self-interest are condemned as reactionary. Christianity has been forced to adapt to this brave new world. No longer able to assume the truth of its traditional world-view, where God created and redeemed the whole world, it has retreated to the spiritual, the realm of personal feeling and the sense of something beyond - not as defining the way the world is, but rather as a component of human psychology, necessary as a way of coming to terms with the impersonal contingencies of natural and human affairs. In the five books considered here, we have five different examples of how Christian men and women are coping with this new world - the world after Christendom. Godbout's and Caille's The World of the Gift is not explicitly Christian. It builds on an academic tradition initiated by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, who explored the forms and function of gift exchanges in archaic societies: the potlatch among the natives of north-west British Columbia and the kula practiced by the Trobriand Islanders. But the practice of giving resonates with fundamental themes of Christian doctrine. Creation is a free, uncoerced gift of existence, and the incarnation is described as an act of grace, unconstrained goodwill. …

The King and I: Bronislaw Malinowski, King Sobhuza II of Swaziland and the vision of culture change in Africa

Recent research into the life and work of Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the most important figures in British social anthropology in the 20th century, has concentrated upon his early life up to and including the years he spent in the Trobriand Islands undertaking his epoch-making fieldwork. However, very little of this research has been into the last decade of his life, especially his work on the impact of imperialism upon Africa’s colonized peoples. The purpose of this article is to extend this interest to his later research by contextualizing, describing and analysing Malinowski’s relationship with King Sobhuza II of Swaziland to whom he was introduced in 1934. I demonstrate that over the following four years, Malinowski sought to assist Sobhuza in regard to a number of matters, most notably his efforts to establish a national school linked to the Swazi age-grade system and his negotiations over the proposed transfer of Swaziland to the Union of South Africa. I argue that Malinowski gave this assistance because Sobhuza personified for him his vision of colonial and even postcolonial Africa which is contained in the largely ignored works of Freedom and Civilization and The Dynamics of Culture Change. Thus, these works reflect not only his background as a Pole in the Hapsburg empire, but also his contemporary experiences of colonial Africa.

Oedipus as normative? Freud's complex, Hook's query, Malinowski's trobrianders, Stoller's anomalies.

Oedipus as normative? Freud's complex, Hook's query, Malinowski's trobrianders, Stoller's anomalies.

Having and Holding: Storage, Memory, Knowledge, and Social Relations

Starting from Giddens's concept of mutual knowledge, in this article I argue for an expanded definition of storage as a situated practice through which groups construct identity, remember, and control knowledge as part of a moral economy. Drawing on ethnographic and archaeological examples from a range of societies, including those of the Trobriand Islands, Neolithic Europe, and Mesoamerica, I consider the spatial and social meaning of utilitarian, household storage. Many of the social meanings embodied in utilitarian storage are found to also inform other kinds of storage, especially those categorized as burials and votive offerings, or caches, [storage, mutual knowledge, social memory, inalienable wealth, Mesoamerica]

The Redshifting Web

To read Arthur Sze's The Redshshifling Web is to walk through Paul Rivet's Musee de l'Homme, research institute of Surrealist movement its scientific repository. The book's near-dishevel of human artifact and natural object is a display that resists artificiality of ordering systems, reveling defamiliarization provoked by stark juxtaposition. But Sze is no cheap trickster out for an easy shock: he's an ethnographer and naturalist who poetically ponders Malinowskian imponderables, throwing an 1 Ching of images to make some sense of the most mysterious of all possible worlds (Kaiseki 29). In The Predicament of Culture, James Clifford argues for an Ethnographic Surrealism which artists and ethnographers subject their culture to activity of fragmentation and collage rendering familiar strange. These participant observers delight in cultural impurities and disturbing syncretisms:''1 Clifford himself describes transformation of British game cricket Trobriand islands: Now it is Indic warfare, extravagant sexual display, political competition and alliance, parody.... [O]n a chair sits umpire, calmly influencing game with magical spells. He is chewing betel nut, which he shares out from a stash held on his lap. It is a bright blue plastic Adidas bag.2 Here is Sze: you are walking across MoonCrossing Bridge slashing rain, / meet a Rinzai monk with a fax machine / who likes to crank up a Victrola with a gold horn... (The Flower Path 211-2). This image, as with most of images Sze's beautiful poems, is left unadorned, un-interpreted, lyrically resonant with its own predeterminations: Sze announces, allowing images to be slogans for themselves and not become a message service for poet's beliefs. The reader, too, becomes a participant, as if Sze has constructed small kinetic sculptures that observer slowly realizes are moving, part, because sculptures are being observed and thought about. The poems many ways resemble act of thinking itself at synaptic level: poems render intelligible our innate sense of similarity and relevance among disparate images and activities by resembling way these disparate things enter consciousness first place. The poems, though, are not cold portrayals, but are infused with an uncloying sincerity and an understanding of human tragedy that is very much lacking American poetry. The collected works span twenty-eight years, with selections from Sze's first two collections, The Willow Wind (1972) and Two Ravens (1976), and three complete books, Dazzled ( 1982), River River ( 1987), and his breakthrough work, Archipelago ( 1995). The collection begins with several new poems, all of which are poem sequences, which Sze now writes almost exclusively. The reader moves from nearly baroque incorporation of Sze's recent work back to his more timid, lyric early work. The poems his first two collections wear Tang dynasty poets on their sleeves; two poems are, fact, titled Li Po and Wei:' Sze does not capitalize on an Orientalism, instead he recognizes efficacies of this early Chinese aesthetic to capture uniqueness of a very American landscape. As Wang Wei's poetry, landscape is everything Sze's early poems: Landscape and feeling tangle until startle of sparks and flight a hallucinatory acceptance of edgy loneliness of a desert buried snow. The greenness of wine, too, signals strangeness; fact, green is often, for Sze, a surreal color, a sign that all is what it seems: odd, yet familiar. Though early work is more lyrically grounded, it utilizes a synaptic poetic that runs through all of Sze's poetry. His insistent iterations and images-green, glints, sheens, glazes, mushrooms, birds, fish, human skin-rescue work from precious and precocious free associations. By framing poems around a stable of images, Sze's synaptic poetic urges reader toward sensing, commanding her to see, taste, feel, hear moment that was impetus for poetic moment through a transparent language: poem is a mind at work, and reader thinks with poem inside poem, as if it is directing firing mechanisms reader's own mind. …

Low serum insulin in traditional pacific islanders—The Kitava study

Increased serum insulin is related to abdominal obesity and high blood pressure in affluent societies where insulin, weight, and blood pressure typically increase with age. The increased insulin level has been thought to reflect insulin resistance, a well-known associated factor in the metabolic syndrome. In most nonwesternized populations, body weight and blood pressure do not increase with age and abdominal obesity is absent. However, it is not known whether serum insulin likewise does not increase with age in nonwesternized societies. Fasting levels of serum insulin were measured cross-sectionally in 164 subsistence horticulturalists aged 20 to 86 years in the tropical island of Kitava, Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea, and in 472 randomly selected Swedish controls aged 25 to 74 years from the Northern Sweden WHO Monitoring Trends and Determinants in Cardiovascular Diseases (MONICA) Study. In Kitava, the intake of Western food is negligible and stroke and ischemic heart disease are absent or rare. The body mass index (BMI) and diastolic blood pressure are low in Kitavans. The main outcome measures in this study were the means, distributions, and age relations of serum insulin in males and females of the two populations. Serum fasting insulin levels were lower in Kitava than in Sweden for all ages ( P < .001). For example, the mean insulin concentration in 50- to 74-year-old Kitavans was only 50% of that in Swedish subjects. Furthermore, serum insulin decreased with age in Kitava, while it increased in Sweden in subjects over 50 years of age. Moreover, the age, BMI, and, in females, waist circumference predicted Kitavan insulin levels at age 50 to 74 years remarkably well when applied to multiple linear regression equations defined to predict the levels in Sweden. The low serum insulin that decreases with age in Kitavans adds to the evidence that a Western lifestyle is a primary cause of insulin resistance. Low serum insulin may partly explain the low prevalence of cardiovascular disease in Kitavans and probably relates to their marked leanness.

The world of the gift

There was a time, not long ago, when the principles of the Christian tradition permeated Canadian society. The church shared with law, medicine and education the aura of being the employer of choice for the brightest graduates of colleges and universities. Theologians and Christian philosophers articulated ideals that motivated the whole culture, and politicians appealed to a shared understanding of a world under the benevolent care of an omniscient God who blessed the faithful and chastised the improvident. Young people responded with enthusiasm to the call to go to the far reaches of the world, not only carrying the Christian understanding of the natural and human cosmos, but introducing education, medicine and social services to regions that had not yet been touched with Western culture.Those times seem far removed. We live in a society that has forgotten, and repudiated, its past. Our young people do not know, nor do they care to discover, the values that moulded their grandparents and the world in which they lived. This is not simply a result of the religious pluralism that became characteristic of Canadian society once government policy no longer gave precedence to European immigrants. There is a deeper malaise, which stems from the individualism of modern culture. Ever since the Enlightenment attacked the superstition of faith and put reason in its place with its interest in manipulating nature and society to achieve useful results, and ever since the modern world, inspired by Descartes, put the ultimate standard of truth and goodness in the human subject, the trend has been towards individualism, where each person determines for herself or himself what ideas make the most sense, what values are most worth achieving. Lacking any sense of a tradition that transmits standards and norms, the modern world has espoused the principle of individualistic self-determination. Young and old delight in offending ingrained sensibilities. Those who appeal to ultimate standards as a bulwark against the contemporary values of expediency, personal fulfilment and self-interest are condemned as reactionary.Christianity has been forced to adapt to this brave new world. No longer able to assume the truth of its traditional world-view, where God created and redeemed the whole world, it has retreated to the spiritual, the realm of personal feeling and the sense of something beyond--not as defining the way the world is, but rather as a component of human psychology, necessary as a way of coming to terms with the impersonal contingencies of natural and human affairs.In the five books considered here, we have five different examples of how Christian men and women are coping with this new world--the world after Christendom.Godbout's and Caille's The World of the Gift is not explicitly Christian. It builds on an academic tradition initiated by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, who explored the forms and function of gift exchanges in archaic societies: the potlatch among the natives of north-west British Columbia and the kula practiced by the Trobriand Islanders. But the practice of giving resonates with fundamental themes of Christian doctrine. Creation is a free, uncoerced gift of existence, and the incarnation is described as an act of grace, unconstrained goodwill. Christians are urged to practice agape: love not as sexual desire, not as a devotion to something transcendent, not as friendship, but as charity.Anthropologists and others have examined how gifts function as a medium of exchange in various cultures. While no return is expected immediately, the giving of gifts produces a sense of obligation, which in due course requires a gift in return. Yet the Christian tradition has canonized Nicholas as the embodiment of charity, a simple good man whose gifts were always anonymous precisely because anonymity removes the opportunity for any reciprocity.In the World of the Gift Caille explores the structure of the gift in archaic society. …

Enter and Exit in Kilivila

Based on film animation scenes and on an elicitation-task devised by members of the Cognitive Anthropology Research Group I elicited data on how the concepts ENTER and EXIT are expressed in Kilivila, the Austronesian language of the Trobriand Islanders. The paper presents the methodology used for data elicitation and the results for Kilivila. Kilivila can express ENTER and EXIT concepts either with specific lexicalized verbal expressions, or with constructions that use the motion verbs 'come' and/or 'go' together with a locative like 'in, into' or 'out, outside' (these constructions can be compared to Talmy's "verb+satellite constructions"), or with serial verb constructions that minutely describe the ENTER/EXIT actions observed. Both the form and the semantics of these constructions are discussed.

Molecular genetic evidence for the human settlement of the Pacific: analysis of mitochondrial DNA, Y chromosome and HLA markers.

Present-day Pacific islanders are thought to be the descendants of Neolithic agriculturalists who expanded from island South-east Asia several thousand years ago. They speak languages belonging to the Austronesian language family, spoken today in an area spanning half of the circumference of the world, from Madagascar to Easter Island, and from Taiwan to New Zealand. To investigate the genetic affinities of the Austronesian-speaking peoples, we analysed mitochondrial DNA, HLA and Y-chromosome polymorphisms in individuals from eight geographical locations in Asia and the Pacific (China, Taiwan, Java, New Guinea highlands, New Guinea coast, Trobriand Islands, New Britain and Western Samoa). Our results show that the demographic expansion of the Austronesians has left a genetic footprint. However, there is no simple correlation between languages and genes in the Pacific.

Body and Mind in the Trobriand Islands

This article discusses how the Trobriand Islanders speak about body and mind. It addresses the following questions: do the linguistic data fit into theories about lexical universals of body‐part terminology? Can we make inferences about the Trobrianders' conceptualization of psychological and physical states on the basis of these data? If a Trobriand Islander sees these idioms as external manifestations of inner states, then can we interpret them as a kind of ethnopsychological theory about the body and its role for emotions, knowledge, thought, memory, and so on? Can these idioms be understood as representation of Trobriand ethnopsychological theory?

A Sentimental Economy: Commodity and Community in Rural Ireland.

On the fringe of western Europe, yet fully integrated into the capitalist market, the rural economy of the west of Ireland seems to provide a fascinating object of analysis to the student of European folk cultures. This book concentrates on a particular aspect of that rural economy: the social organization and cultural construction of work in a community of family farms. The concept of work, which is primarily farm work, is taken here as a very elementary set of ideas, images and experiences that enable us to penetrate in the different cultural spheres that intersect life on an Irish family farm. Work, the author concludes, is to this farming community what the Kula ring is to the Trobriand islanders - a kind of Maussian total social fact the analysis of which incorporates a comprehensive description of a particular social system.

Activity Monitoring of the Inhabitants in Tauwema, a Traditional Melanesian Village: Rest/Activity Behaviour of Trobriand Islanders (Papua New Guinea)

The inhabitants of Tauwema village represent a traditionally living society. Altogether, 39 inhabitants belonging to seven families were included in this study. Families or people living in one household were preferentially chosen for monitoring particularly the effects of social zeitgebers and synchronization within families. They were observed continuously for 7 consecutive days using microelectronic actometers that register locomotor activity with a sampling period of 2 minutes and a resolution of 7 bit. The activity data obtained showed that in young infants circadian patterns develop out of ultradian components dominating in the first months of life. The rhythmicity of the adults was well-related to the natural light-dark cycle, combined with a strong social component which is reflected in a comparatively small intra- and inter-individual variability in the time of the end of the main sleep span in the morning, while the variability in the beginning of the main sleep period in the evening is much greater. The mean sleep duration of the younger infants (up to 11 months; n =4) varied between 9 and 12 h per day and that of the adults (n = 23) between 7 and 10 h. Gender-specific differences occurred in married couples with wives having a longer sleep duration in 7 out of 9 cases.