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Island Rivers »
Fresh Water and Place in Oceania
Edited by: John R. Wagner, Jerry K. Jacka
Publication date: June 2018
Anthropologists have written a great deal about the coastal adaptations and seafaring traditions of Pacific Islanders, but have had much less to say about the significance of rivers for Pacific island culture, livelihood and identity. The authors of this collection seek to fill that gap in the ethnographic record by drawing attention to the deep historical attachments of island communities to rivers, and the ways in which those attachments are changing in response to various forms of economic development and social change. In addition to making a unique contribution to Pacific island ethnography, the authors of this volume speak to a global set of issues of immense importance to a world in which water scarcity, conflict, pollution and the degradation of riparian environments afflict growing numbers of people. Several authors take a political ecology approach to their topic, but the emphasis here is less on hydro-politics than on the cultural meaning of rivers to the communities we describe. How has the cultural significance of rivers shifted as a result of colonisation, development and nation-building? How do people whose identities are fundamentally rooted in their relationship to a particular river renegotiate that relationship when the river is dammed to generate hydro-power or polluted by mining activities? How do blockages in the flow of rivers and underground springs interrupt the intergenerational transmission of local ecological knowledge and hence the ability of local communities to construct collective identities rooted in a sense of place?
Indigenous Mobilities »
Across and Beyond the Antipodes
Edited by: Rachel Standfield
Publication date: June 2018
This edited collection focuses on Aboriginal and Māori travel in colonial contexts. Authors in this collection examine the ways that Indigenous people moved and their motivations for doing so. Chapters consider the cultural aspects of travel for Indigenous communities on both sides of the Tasman. Contributors examine Indigenous purposes for mobility, including for community and individual economic wellbeing, to meet other Indigenous or non-Indigenous peoples and experience different cultures, and to gather knowledge or experience, or to escape from colonial intrusion.
‘This volume is the first to take up three challenges in histories of Indigenous mobilities. First, it analyses both mobility and emplacement. Challenging stereotypes of Indigenous people as either fixed or mobile, chapters deconstruct issues with ramifications for contemporary politics and analyses of Indigenous society and of rural and national histories. As such, it is a welcome intervention in a wide range of urgent issues. Second, by examining Indigenous peoples in both Australia and New Zealand, this volume is an innovative step in removing the artificial divisions that have arisen from “national” histories. Third, the collection connects the experiences of colonised Indigenous peoples with those of their colonisers, shifting the long-held stereotypes of Indigenous powerlessness. Chapters then convincingly demonstrate the agency of colonised peoples in shaping the actions and the mobility itself of the colonisers.
While the volume overall is aimed at opening up new research questions, and so invites later and even more innovative work, this volume will stand as an important guide to the directions such future work might take.’
— Heather Goodall, Professor Emerita, UTS
Transforming Hawai‘i »
Balancing Coercion and Consent in Eighteenth-Century Kānaka Maoli Statecraft
Authored by: Paul D’Arcy
Publication date: June 2018
This study examines the role of coercion in the unification of the Hawaiian Islands by Kamehameha I between 1782 and 1812 at a time of increasing European contact. Three interrelated themes in Hawaiian political evolution are examined: the balance between coercion and consent; the balance between general structural trends and specific individual styles of leadership and historical events; and the balance between indigenous and European factors. The resulting synthesis is a radical reinterpretation of Hawaiian warfare that treats it as an evolving process heavily imbued with cultural meaning. Hawaiian history is also shown to be characterised by fluid changing circumstances, including crucial turning points when options were adopted that took elements of Hawaiian society on paths of development that proved decisive for political unification. These watershed moments were neither inevitable nor predictable. Perhaps the greatest omission in the standard discourse on the political evolution of Hawaiian society is the almost total exclusion of modern indigenous Hawaiian scholarship on this topic. Modern historians from the Hawai‘inuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa argue that political leadership and socioeconomic organisation were much more concensus-based than is usually allowed for. Above all, this study finds modern indigenous Hawaiian studies a much better fit with the historical evidence than more conventional scholarship.
Popular Music, Stars and Stardom »
Publication date: June 2018
A popular fascination with fame and stardom has existed in Western culture since the late eighteenth century; a fascination that, in the twenty‑first century, reaches into almost every facet of public life. The pervasive nature of stardom in modern society demands study from the perspectives of a range of distinct but thematically connected disciplines. The exploration of intersections between broader considerations of stardom and the discourses of popular music studies is the genesis for this volume. The chapters collected here demonstrate the variety of work currently being undertaken in stardom studies by scholars in Australia. The contributions range from biographical considerations of the stars of popular music, contributions to critical discourses of stardom in the industry more broadly, and the various ways in which the use of astronomical metaphors, in both cultural commentary and academic discourse, demonstrate notions of stardom firmly embedded in popular music thought. Not only do these chapters represent a range of perspectives on popular music, stars and stardom, they provide eloquent and innovative contributions to the developing discourse on stardom in popular music.
International Review of Environmental History: Volume 4, Issue 1, 2018 »
Edited by: James Beattie
Publication date: May 2018
International Review of Environmental History takes an interdisciplinary and global approach to environmental history. It encourages scholars to think big and to tackle the challenges of writing environmental histories across different methodologies, nations, and time-scales. The journal embraces interdisciplinary, comparative and transnational methods, while still recognising the importance of locality in understanding these global processes.
The journal’s goal is to be read across disciplines, not just within history. It publishes on all thematic and geographic topics of environmental history, but especially encourage articles with perspectives focused on or developed from the southern hemisphere and the ‘global south’.
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The Contest for Aboriginal Souls »
European missionary agendas in Australia
Authored by: Regina Ganter
Publication date: May 2018
This book covers the missionary activity in Australia conducted by non-English speaking missionaries from Catholic and Protestant mission societies from its beginnings to the end of the mission era. It looks through the eyes of the missionaries and their helpers, as well as incorporating Indigenous perspectives and offering a balanced assessment of missionary endeavour in Australia, attuned to the controversies that surround mission history. It means neither to condemn nor praise, but rather to understand the various responses of Indigenous communities, the intentions of missionaries, the agendas of the mission societies and the many tensions besetting the mission endeavour. It explores a common commitment to the supernatural and the role of intermediaries like local diplomats and evangelists from the Pacific Islands and Philippines, and emphasises the strong role played by non-English speakers in the transcultural Australian mission effort.
This book is a companion to the website German Missionaries in Australia – A web-directory of intercultural encounters. The web-directory provides detailed accounts of Australian missions staffed with German speakers. The book reads laterally across the different missions and produces a completely different type of knowledge about missions. The book and its accompanying website are based on a decade of research ranging across mission archives with foreign-language sources that have not previously been accessed for a historiography of Australian missions.
‘A remarkable intellectual achievement, compelling reading.’
— Dr Niel Gunson
‘The range of knowledge on display here is very impressive indeed.’
— Professor Peter Monteath
The Moral Economy of Mobile Phones »
Pacific Islands Perspectives
Edited by: Robert J. Foster, Heather A. Horst
Publication date: May 2018
The moral economy of mobile phones implies a field of shifting relations among consumers, companies and state actors, all of whom have their own ideas about what is good, fair and just. These ideas inform the ways in which, for example, consumers acquire and use mobile phones; companies promote and sell voice, SMS and data subscriptions; and state actors regulate both everyday use of mobile phones and market activity around mobile phones. Ambivalence and disagreement about who owes what to whom is thus an integral feature of the moral economy of mobile phones. This volume identifies and evaluates the stakes at play in the moral economy of mobile phones. The six main chapters consider ethnographic cases from Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Vanuatu. The volume also includes a brief introduction with background information on the recent ‘digital revolution’ in these countries and two closing commentaries that reflect on the significance of the chapters for our understanding of global capitalism and the contemporary Pacific.
Focality and Extension in Kinship »
Essays in Memory of Harold W. Scheffler
Edited by: Warren Shapiro
Publication date: April 2018
When we think of kinship, we usually think of ties between people based upon blood or marriage. But we also have other ways—nowadays called ‘performative’—of establishing kinship, or hinting at kinship: many Christians have, in addition to parents, godparents; members of a trade union may refer to each other as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’. Similar performative ties are even more common among the so-called ‘tribal’ peoples that anthropologists have studied and, especially in recent years, they have received considerable attention from scholars in this field. However, these scholars tend to argue that performative kinship in the Tribal World is semantically on a par with kinship established through procreation and marriage. Harold Scheffler, long-time Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, has argued, by contrast, that procreative ties are everywhere semantically central, i.e. focal, that they provide bases from which other kinship ties are extended. Most of the essays in this volume illustrate the validity of Scheffler’s position, though two contest it, and one exemplifies the soundness of a similarly universalistic stance in gender behaviour. This book will be of interest to everyone concerned with current controversy in kinship and gender studies, as well as those who would know what anthropologists have to say about human nature.
“The study of kinship once ruled the discipline of anthropology, and Hal Scheffler was one of its magisterial figures. This volumes reminds us why. Scheffler’s powerful analyses of kinship systems often conflicted with the views of his more relativist contemporaries. He cut through the fog of theory to emphasise the human essentials, namely the importance of the social bonds rooted in motherhood and fatherhood. Anthropology in its decades-long retreat from the serious study of kinship has lost a great deal. This volume points the way to a restoration.”
— Peter Wood, National Association of Scholars
Expressions of Austronesian Thought and Emotions »
Edited by: James J. Fox
Publication date: April 2018
This collection of papers is the seventh volume in the Comparative Austronesian series. The papers in this volume focus on societies from Sumatra to Melanesia and examine the expression and patterning of Austronesian thought and emotions.
The Quest for the Good Life in Precarious Times »
Ethnographic Perspectives on the Domestic Moral Economy
Edited by: Chris Gregory, Jon Altman
Publication date: April 2018
The study of the quest for the good life and the morality and value it presupposes is not new. To the contrary, this is an ancient issue; its intellectual history can be traced back to Aristotle. In anthropology, the study of morality and value has always been a central concern, despite the claim of some scholars that the recent upsurge of interest in these issues is new. What is novel is how scholars in many disciplines are posing the value question in new ways. The global economic alignments of the present pose many political, moral and theoretical questions, but the central issue the essays in this collection address is: how do relatively poor people of the Australia–Pacific region survive in current precarious times? In looking to answer this question, contributors directly engage the values and concepts of their interlocutors. At a time when understanding local implications of global processes is taking on new urgency, these essays bring finely honed anthropological perspectives to matters of universal human concern—they offer radical empirical critique based on intensive fieldwork that will be of great interest to those seeking to comprehend the bigger picture.