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Displaying results 31 to 37 of 37.
Steep Slopes »
Music and change in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea
Authored by: Kirsty Gillespie
Publication date: December 2010
The Duna live in a physical environment of steep slopes that are sometimes difficult to traverse. A stick of bamboo used as a prop goes a long way in assisting a struggling traveller. Similarly, the Duna live in a social and cultural environment of steep slopes, where the path on which they walk can be precarious and unpredictable. Songs, like the stick of bamboo, assist the Duna in picking their way over this terrain by providing a forum for them to process change as it is experienced, in relation to what is already known.
This book is a musical ethnography of the Duna people of Papua New Guinea. A people who have experienced extraordinary social change in recent history, their musical traditions have also radically changed during this time. New forms of music have been introduced, while ancestral traditions have been altered or even abandoned. This study shows how, through musical creativity, Duna people maintain a connection with their past, and their identity, whilst simultaneously embracing the challenges of the present.
The Disaster of the Third Princess »
Essays on The Tale of Genji
Authored by: Royall Tyler
Publication date: June 2009
These seven essays by the most recent English translator of The Tale of Genji emphasize three major interpretive issues. What is the place of the hero (Hikaru Genji) in the work? What story gives the narrative underlying continuity and form? And how does the closing section of the tale (especially the ten “Uji chapters”) relate to what precedes it? Written over a period of nine years, the essays suggest fresh, thought-provoking perspectives on Japan’s greatest literary classic.
The Land is a Map »
Placenames of Indigenous Origin in Australia
Edited by: Luise Hercus, Flavia Hodges, Jane Simpson
Publication date: March 2009
The entire Australian continent was once covered with networks of Indigenous placenames. These names often evoke important information about features of the environment and their place in Indigenous systems of knowledge. On the other hand, placenames assigned by European settlers and officials are largely arbitrary, except for occasional descriptive labels such as ‘river, lake, mountain’. They typically commemorate people, or unrelated places in the Northern hemisphere.
In areas where Indigenous societies remain relatively intact, thousands of Indigenous placenames are used, but have no official recognition. Little is known about principles of forming and bestowing Indigenous placenames. Still less is known about any variation in principles of placename bestowal found in different Indigenous groups. While many Indigenous placenames have been taken into the official placename system, they are often given to different features from those to which they originally applied. In the process, they have been cut off from any understanding of their original meanings. Attempts are now being made to ensure that additions of Indigenous placenames to the system of official placenames more accurately reflect the traditions they come from.
The eighteen chapters in this book range across all of these issues. The contributors (linguistics, historians and anthropologists) bring a wide range of different experiences, both academic and practical, to their contributions. The book promises to be a standard reference work on Indigenous placenames in Australia for many years to come.
The Lexicon of Proto Oceanic »
The culture and environment of ancestral Oceanic society: 2 The physical environment
Authored by: Malcolm Ross, Andrew Pawley, Meredith Osmond
Publication date: March 2007
This is the second in a series of five volumes on the lexicon of Proto Oceanic, the ancestor of the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian language family. Each volume deals with a particular domain of culture and/or environment and consists of a collection of essays each of which presents and comments on lexical reconstructions of a particular semantic field within that domain.
Volume 2 examines how Proto Oceanic speakers described their geophysical environment. An introductory chapter discusses linguistic and archaeological evidence that locates the Proto Oceanic language community in the Bismarck Archipelago in the late 2nd millennium BC. The next three chapters investigate terms used to denote inland, coastal, reef and open sea environments, and meteorological phenomena. A further chapter examines the lexicon for features of the heavens and navigational techniques associated with the stars. How Proto Oceanic speakers talked about their environment is also described in three further chapters which treat property terms for describing inanimate objects, locational and directional terms, and terms related to the expression of time.
Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago »
Revised Edition
Authored by: Peter Bellwood
Publication date: March 2007
Since its publication in 1985, Peter Bellwood’s Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago has been hailed as the sole authoritative work on the subject by the leading expert in the field. Now that work has been fully revised and includes a complete up-to-date summary of the archaeology of the region (and relevant neighboring areas of China and Oceania), as well as a comprehensive discussion of new and important issues (such as the “Eve-Garden of Eden” hypothesis and its relevance to the Indo-Malaysian region) and recent advances in macrofamily linguistic classification.
Moving north to south from northern Peninsular Malaysia to Timor and west to east from Sumatra to the Moluccas, Bellwood describes human prehistory from initial hominid settlement more than one million years ago to the eve of historical Hindu-Buddhist and Islamic cultures of the region. The archaeological record provides the central focus, but chapters also incorporate essential information from the paleoenvironmental sciences, biological anthropology, linguistics, and social anthropology. Bellwood approaches questions about past cultural and biological developments in the region from a multidisciplinary perspective. Historical issues given extended treatment include the significance of the Homo erectus populations of Java, the dispersal of the present Austronesian-speaking peoples of the region within the past 4,000 years, and the spread of metallurgy since 500 B.C. Bellwood also discusses relationships between the prehistoric populations of the archipelago and those of neighboring regions such as Australia, New Guinea, and mainland Asia.
Sharing the Earth, Dividing the Land »
Land and territory in the Austronesian world
Edited by: Thomas Reuter
Publication date: October 2006
This collection of papers is the fifth in a series of volumes on the work of the Comparative Austronesian Project. Reflecting the unique experience of fourteen ethnographers in as many different societies, the papers in this volume explore how people in the Austronesian-speaking societies of the Asia-Pacific have traditionally constructed their relationship to land and specific territories. Focused on the nexus of local and global processes, the volume offers fresh perspectives to current debate in social theory on the conflicting human tendencies of mobility and emplacement.
The Austronesians »
Historical and Comparative Perspectives
Publication date: September 2006
The Austronesian-speaking population of the world are estimated to number more than 270 million people, living in a broad swathe around half the globe, from Madagascar to Easter Island and from Taiwan to New Zealand. The seventeen papers in this volume provide a general survey of these diverse populations focusing on their common origins and historical transformations. The papers examine current ideas on the linguistics, prehistory, anthropology and recorded history of the Austronesians. This volume is a publication of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies’ Comparative Austronesian Project.