Trobriand Research Articles

Presidential Address: Skepticism in Ethnohistory

I want to address what I think is the importance of skepticism both among the people we study and among those of us who study them. Since my field is the ethnohistory of late pre-Hispanic Mexico, I take most of my examples from there, but I want to start out with an anecdote from a very different part of the world, because it illustrates particularly well the point I want to make. The people of the Trobriand Islands, in Melanesia, believe that when a woman becomes pregnant, it is because the spirit of a dead person, often lured by magic, has entered the womb of a woman of its matrilineage. A male is not necessary. Annette B. Weiner, who did fieldwork in the Trobriands in the I970s, reports that this belief is still present there, just as it was in the time of Bronislaw Malinowski. She also reports that a certain Trobriand woman became very upset when she received a letter from her husband, who had been away working on the Papua New Guinea mainland for a year, telling her he was coming home. The reason she was upset was that she was six months pregnant, and if her husband came home and found her in that condition, he would be furious. He came home, found her in that condition, and was indeed furious. He reported her to the authorities and had her charged with adultery. At the preliminary hearing, the husband presented all the relevant dates and places, but the woman presented her maternal grandmother, who had been persuaded to testify that she had used magic to entice a spirit to make the woman pregnant. Faced with this testimony and with the belief that pregnancy resulted from the agency of spirits, the magistrate felt that he had no choice but to dismiss the case (Weiner i988: 55).

Age relations of cardiovascular risk factors in a traditional Melanesian society: the Kitava Study

This study examined cross-sectional age relations of blood pressure, anthropometric indexes, serum lipids, and hemostatic variables in 203 subsistence horticulturists aged 20-86 y in Kitava, Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea. The population is characterized by extreme leanness (despite food abundance), low blood pressure, low plasma plasminogen activator inhibitor 1 activity, and rarity of cardiovascular disease. Tubers, fruit, fish, and coconut are dietary staples whereas dairy products, refined fat and sugar, cereals, and alcohol are absent and salt intake is low. Although diastolic blood pressure was not associated with age in Kitavans, systolic blood pressure increased linearly after 50 y of age in both sexes. Body mass index decreased with age in both sexes. Serum total cholesterol, triacylglycerol, low-density-lipoprotein cholesterol, and apolipoprotein B increased in males between 20 and 50 y of age, whereas high-density-lipoprotein cholesterol and apolipoprotein A-I decreased. There were no significant differences in these indexes with age in the few females studied. A slight linear age-related increase of lipoprotein(a) was present in males. Plasma fibrinogen, factor VII clotting activity, factor VIII clotting activity, and von Willebrand factor antigen increased with age in both sexes but plasminogen activator inhibitor 1 activity did not. The modest or absent relations between the indexes measured and age are apparently important explanations of the virtual nonexistence of stroke and ischemic heart disease in Kitava.

Reconceptualizing the Leadership Roles of Women in Higher Education

In the early 1970s, Annette Weiner traveled to the Trobriand Islands near New Guinea in the South Pacific. The Trobriand Islands are well known to anthropologists, because those familiar with any social science, the Trobriand Islands need little introduction. Their renown is due to the voluminous and often brilliant writings of Branislaw Malinowski, who lived in the Trobriands for two years between 1915 and 1918 (Weiner, 1976, p. xv). Malinowski published extensively, using his experiences and observations among the Trobrianders to establish himself as one of the major figures in cultural anthropology and ethnography. In 1976 Weiner published her own study of the Trobriand Islanders as a book titled Women of Value, Men of Renown. Weiner juxtaposed her observations from the 1970s against those of Malinowski from the 1920s. She demonstrated sharp distinctions between the world Malinowski saw and the same, relatively untouched and unchanged world she observed some fifty years later. What becomes clear from Weiner's depiction of Trobriand life and culture in Women of Value, Men of Renown (1976) is that the interpretation of events and actions of people is often prone to misinterpretation, even obfuscation. Even more obvious when viewed through Weiner's revisions of Malinowski's ethnographic study is the notion that perspective and point of view are critical factors in making such interpretations. The ultimate point Weiner (1976) demonstrates is that the most fatal

Uses of insects as human food in Papua New Guinea, Australia, and North‐East India: Cross‐cultural considerations and cautious conclusions

Taxonomic identifications and vernacular names are given of insects as well as some spiders which are consumed as food by members of the following ethnic communities: Ao‐Naga (North‐east India), Chimbu (Papua New Guinea, Central Highlands), Onabasulu (Papua New Guinea, Southern Highlands), Kiriwina (Western Pacific, Trobriand Islands), Walbiri (Central Australian desert), Pintupi (Central Australian desert), and Maori (New Zealand, Aotearoa). Differences and similarities of entomophagy habits between the groups are examined in the light of cultural, ethnic, and linguistic relationships. It is postulated that prehistorically two centres in the region under discussion existed where entomophagy evolved and from where the practice spread: Southern India and South‐east Asia. It is further postulated that the sugar‐containing insects were the first to find a place in the regular diet of prehistoric man, followed by insects which were rich in fats and lipids, and finally those which contained mostly protein. According to this scenario Australian Aborigines belong to the earliest group of insect eaters. Evidence is also presented that the domestication of the silk worm and the use of its product (i.e. silk) could have arisen from the practice of eating wild silkworm larvae and pupae in North‐east India. Finally, a plea is made to fund research into the many uses of insects in traditional societies, before it is too late and such information is irretrievably lost.

Malinowski's ethnographic photography: Image, text and authority

Bronislaw Malinowski's ethnographic work in the Trobriand Islands, Southeast Papua New Guinea, from 1914 to 1918, established fundamental methodologies and presentations in modern anthropological fieldwork. Malinowski's monographs, including Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Coral Gardens and Their Magic, The Sexual Life of Savages in Northwest Melanesia and Sex and Repression in Savage Society, among others, have become ethnographic classics assuming the mythic quality within anthropology. An analysis of Malinowski's major monograph, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) suggests ways in which the act of photographing was an intrinsic part of his ethnographic methodology. The act of visual framing played a seminal role in the formulation of his ethnographic text and in his diary writing. Yet, while Malinowski used photography for fieldwork, his photographs are also suggestive of a more distant stance from native life.

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.

Colonialist Pretexts and Rites of Reply

In this essay I want to address two related issues for postcolonial criticism: the politics of intertextuality through the relationship between colonialist texts and the material conditions of colonial practices; and the politics of rewriting, by the former colonizers, of such colonialist texts. To do this I will focus on one particular context and cluster of texts: Randolph Stow's Visitants (set in the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea) and the pre-texts it interrogates. The self-conscious reinscription (by numerous writers from a variety of nations, races, and cultures) of European texts has been a widespread phenomenon over the last forty years. It has offered an important creative and political response to colonization and formed an essential part of the processes of postcolonized recovery and restitution. Such reinscriptions and replies have involved a variety of discourses and genres including western historical and political accounts of invasion and governance; the interrogation and reinterpretation of administrative records and legal documents; and the unmasking of authoritative discourses such as ethnography and anthropology as well as the questioning of the assumed superiority of western medical practices. Postcolonial responses to the written texts which underpinned and sustained western colonization have also taken the form of challenging those literary texts that were widely circulated in the imperial metropolis and abroad, through both education systems and publishing and distribution to colonial territories.' Chinua Achebe, Wilson Harris, Samuel Selvon, Jean Rhys, Audrey Thomas, and Raja Rao are but a few of those writers who have rewritten not just individual English (or European) canonical works, but through these reinscriptions interrogated the discursive fields within which such texts affected (and continue to affect) colonial and postcolonized societies. That such profound effects do occur seems generally agreed. It is, however, more difficult to assess the mechanisms by which texts, particularly literary texts, materially affect the lives of colonized people. Similarly difficult to assess are the ways in which postcolonial responses to such works aid in postcolonial social restitution and reconstruction. How did a text such

Crime and Custom in Corporate Society: A Cultural Perspective on Corporate Misconduct

We draw our title from Crime and Custom in Savage Society, Bronislaw Malinowski's 1926 study of law, deviance, and social control in the Trobriand Islands of the southwest Pacific.1 Malinowski, an Englishman born of Polish parents, was one of the inventors of modern ethnography, the anthropological practice of living among the people to be studied, participating in their culture, and trying to see the world though their eyes. (As with so many other inventions, this one had an accidental component: Malinowski's sojourn in the Trobriands was essentially a form of internment as a suspect alien during World War I.2) Although Malinowski's theoretical stance3 and reporting style4 now seem almost comically dated, Crime and Custom remains significant as the earliest effort to argue that societies lacking such Western trappings as judges, courts, and police can still have in a meaningful sense. Malinowski lacked a sense of that would be congenial to modern anthropologists and sociologists-indeed, as far as we can tell, the word culture does not appear in Crime and Custom-but he was, nonetheless, the first to take a cultural approach to law. The phenomenon that we in the West call is that set of cultural beliefs and practices that establishes norms for conduct, defines the limits of tolerable deviance, and decides how to deal with those who cross the line. Not only need law not take on the institutional form

Lipoprotein composition and serum cholesterol ester fatty acids in nonwesternized melanesians

In this study, the relationships between dietary fat [as measured by serum cholesterol ester fatty acids (CE-FA)], age, smoking, body mass index, and serum lipids were analyzed in 151 subsistence horticulturalists, aged 20-86 yr, from Kitava, Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea. Their diet consists of tubers, fruit, coconut, fish, and vegetables with a negligible influence of western food and alcohol. Total fat intake is low [21% of energy (en%)], while saturated fat intake from coconuts is high (17 en%, mainly lauric and myristic acid). In multivariate analysis, 11-43% of the variation of the serum lipoprotein composition was explained by CE-FA, age, and smoking habits. The proportion of CE20:5n-3 explained much of the variation of triglycerides (TG, negative relation) and high density lipoprotein-cholesterol (HDL-C, positive) in both sexes and serum apolipoprotein A1 (ApoA1, positive) in the males. CE16:0 was positively related to TG and negatively related to HDL-C and ApoA1 in both sexes, and in males it related negatively to total cholesterol (TC) and low density lipoprotein-cholesterol (LDL-C). In males, negative relationships were present between CE18:2n-6 and TC and between CE14:0 and serum lipoprotein(a). Smoking was independently associated with lower ApoA1 in both sexes and with lower HDL-C and higher TG, TC, LDL-C, and apolipoprotein B in males. In conclusion, marine n-3 fatty acids and linoleic acid showed the same potentially beneficial relationships with lipoproteins and apolipoproteins as in western populations. The relations of palmitic acid to serum lipids may be explained in terms of endogenous fat synthesis at a low-fat intake, rather than reflecting its relative intake.

An anthropologist's view of exchange

Abstract Exchange through markets is the most significant means by which goods move from person to person, though it should be placed in the context of exchange in general. Anthropologists have noted that the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia distinguish between approximately 80 forms of exchange between people in various status relationships. Though this may appear outlandish our own systems display similar, though less pronounced, features. Even though we may feel that the market exchange process is dominated by rationality and the calculus of utility anthropologists assert that economic activity is part of culture and a product of social organization. The consequences are far reaching, both in the developed world and particularly in countries where the market is a less important element among all forms of exchange.

Anthropology's conrad:Malinowski in the tropics and what he read

Abstract This paper seeks to show how imperial adventure fiction provided a charter for British social anthropology in the early years of this century by demonstrating links between Joseph Conrad and Bronislaw Malinowski. It includes brief biographies of both men, with particular attention to Malinowski's years in the Trobriand Islands, as well as a close reading of Malinowski's Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, which reveals strong narrative parallels with Conrad's fiction.

Cardiovascular risk factors in a Melanesian population apparently free from stroke and ischaemic heart disease: the Kitava study

To compare cardiovascular risk factor levels between non-westernized Melanesians, apparently free from stroke and ischaemic heart disease, nd healthy Swedish populations, and to analyse, among adult Melanesians, relations with age, sex and smoking status. Cross-sectional survey. (i) Traditional horticulturalists in Kitava, Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea, uninfluenced by western diet. this study tested 151 males and 69 females aged 14-87 years with 76% and 80% smokers over 20 years. (ii) Healthy Swedish reference populations. Sitting systolic and diastolic blood pressure, weight, height, body mass index, circumferences of waist, pelvis and mid upper arm, triceps skinfold thickness, fasting serum total cholesterol, triglycerides, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, estimated low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, apolipoprotein B, apolipoprotein A1 and apolipoprotein (a). Compared to Sweden, diastolic blood pressure, body mass index and triceps skinfold thickness were substantially lower in Kitava, where all subjects > or = 40 years were below Swedish medians. Among males > or = 20 and females > or = 60 years systolic blood pressure was lower in Kitavans. Fasting serum total cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and apolipoprotein B were 10-30% lower in Kitavan males > or = 40 and females > or = 60 years. Triglycerides were higher in Kitavans aged 20-39. High-density lipoprotein cholesterol did not differ while apolipoprotein A1 was lower in Kitavans. Apolipoprotein (a) tended to be lower in Kitavans, but the differences were small. Of the analysed variables, leanness and low diastolic blood pressure seem to offer the best explanations for the apparent absence of stroke and ischaemic heart disease in Kitava. The lower serum cholesterol may provide some additional benefit. Differences in dietary habits may explain the findings.

Time patterns in parent‐child interactions in a trobriand village (Papua New Guinea)

Abstract In June and July 1992 parent‐infant interactions were analyzed among the inhabitants of Tauwema (Trobriand Islands), who represent a traditionally living society. Parent‐infant interactions were continuously registered over a period of 7 days in 4 families with infants of 1,2,5, and 11 months of age using a microefectronic actometer. Based on self‐demand feeding, a remarkable synchronization between infant's and mother's movements occurred during both day and night. Despite the fact that the father also slept near the baby in the night no father‐infant correlation was found. Among the children aged 5 and 11 months no nocturnal response of both parents’ and siblings’ movements relative to infant's activity was found. Power spectra revealed inter‐individual differences of the rhythmicity patterns of infants and mothers depending on the infant's age. E.g. there is a dominant ultradian frequency of about 8 hours in the activity of the 2‐month baby, in the 5‐month‐old infant the circadian frequency pr...

Observing the other: reflections on anthropological fieldwork.

Aspects of anthropological fieldwork are examined from a psychoanalytic viewpoint using two sources: (1) Malinowski's A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, a fieldwork journal he kept in New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands "as a means of self-analysis"; (2) the analysis of an anthropologist both before and after she returned from the field. Malinowski's Diary, written in a virtually free-associative form, illustrates how fieldwork stimulates derivatives of significant early infantile conflicts. The patient's analysis revealed the unconscious meaning of, and motivation for, fieldwork for this particular individual. Based on these data, it is postulated that during fieldwork a new, emotionally charged object relationship, with its concomitant transference responses, may be unconsciously established by the anthropologist with the alien society being studied.

Review of Oedipus in the Trobriands.

Review of Oedipus in the Trobriands.

Sea level response to the 1986–1987 El Niño‐Southern Oscillation Event in the western Pacific in the vicinity of Papua New Guinea

Sea levels at the Papua New Guinea coast responded to the 1986–87 El Niño‐Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event much as would be expected for points on the inshore edge of a western boundary current driven by remote sea level disturbances. The first empirical orthogonal function of sea level in the region accounts for 60% of the variance, and shows a clear western boundary current signal. Sea level observations from tide gauges and estimates from adjacent expendable bathythermographs (XBTs) are in good agreement, so XBT data are used to supplement sea level results; specifically, we obtain an estimate of the western boundary current as a function of depth. The anomalous transport through Vitiaz Strait varied by about 15 Sv during the event, with possibly more following the eastern New Ireland coast. The western boundary current response appears to be located entirely equatorward of the inflow feeding it, as expected from linear theory. The boundary current followed the Trobriand Island ridge, rather than the main Papua New Guinea coastline, and appears to bifurcate along southern New Britain. A maximum response to the ENSO occurred south of New Ireland, where steric sea level appeared to vary by up to 45 cm due to the ENSO event; this may be an inertial feature.

When Anthropologists Wear Two Hats: Ethnographer and Health Professional

Years after he conducted field work in the Trobriand Islands, Malinowski's revealing description of his inner-most thoughts, feelings, and attitudes about the research site and informants was published posthumously (Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967). Since that time, personal accounts have appeared more frequently in the anthropological literature, although most are not as poignant and certainly not as pejorative as Malinowski's. These backstage descriptions and confessional tales provide anthropologists with opportunities to examine the ways in which their feelings and attitudes have impacted upon their research. They are especially important to the discipline as teaching tools, as means of alerting others to dilemmas they could face in ethnographic research and of stimulating consideration of alternative responses to such dilemmas.

Apparent absence of stroke and ischaemic heart disease in a traditional Melanesian island: a clinical study in Kitava.

On the island of Kitava, Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea, a subsistence lifestyle, uninfluenced by western dietary habits, is still maintained. Tubers, fruit, fish and coconut are dietary staples. Of the total population, 1816 subjects were estimated to be older than 3 years and 125 to be 60-96 years old. The frequencies of spontaneous sudden death, exertion-related chest pain, hemiparesis, aphasia and sudden imbalance were assessed by semi-structured interviews in 213 adults aged 20-96. Resting electrocardiograms (ECG's) were recorded in 119 males and 52 females. No case corresponding to stroke, sudden death or angina pectoris was described by the interviewed subjects. Minnesota Code (MC) items 1-5 occurred in 14 ECG's with no significant relation to age, gender or smoking. ST items (MC 4.2 and 4.3) were found in two females and Q items (MC 1.1.2, 1.3.2 and 1.3.3) in three males. Stroke and ischaemic heart disease appear to be absent in this population.

A Trobriand Complex

EthosVolume 21, Issue 1 p. 79-103 A Trobriand Complex STANLEY N. KURTZ, STANLEY N. KURTZ Prize Lecturer, Assistant Director Center for Research on Culture and Mental Health in the Committee on Human Development of the University of Chicago.Search for more papers by this author STANLEY N. KURTZ, STANLEY N. KURTZ Prize Lecturer, Assistant Director Center for Research on Culture and Mental Health in the Committee on Human Development of the University of Chicago.Search for more papers by this author First published: March 1993 https://doi.org/10.1525/eth.1993.21.1.02a00040Citations: 6AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Citing Literature Volume21, Issue1March 1993Pages 79-103 RelatedInformation

A Grammaticalization Hypothesis on the Origin of Kilivila Classificatory Particles

A partir de l'examen des traces substantives evidentes dans des particules classificatrices en kilivila, une langue austronesienne, l'A. soutient la these selon laquelle ces particules emanent du nom a la suite d'un processus de grammaticalisation, qui affecte la forme lexicale nominale en la transformant en classificateur