ISBN:
978-0-9973675-8-4
Language:
English
Pages:
xxi, 295 Seiten
,
Illustrationen
Series Statement:
Hau Books
Uniform Title:
Agir pour un autre: La construction de la personne masculine en Papouasie Nouvelle-Guinée
Keywords:
Papua-Neuguinea Geschlechterforschung
;
Mann
;
Heirat
;
Vaterschaft
;
Couvade
;
Ritual, alltägliches
;
Ritual
;
Anthropologie
Abstract:
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 cycle from women in the village and from the men in the forest is novel, provocative, and one of the most incisive analyses of the emergence of ideas of gender in Papua New Guinea since Marilyn Strathern's The Gender of the Gift. At the heart of Pascale Bonnem re's argument is the idea that it is possible for genders to act for and upon one another, and to do so almost paradoxically, by limiting action through the obeying of taboos and other restrictions. With this first English translation by acclaimed French translator Nora Scott, accompanied by a foreword from Marilyn Strathern, Acting for Others brings the Ankave ritual world to new theoretical life, challenging how we think about mutual action, mutual being, and mutual life.
Description / Table of Contents:
Foreword. Marilyn Strathern -- Preface to the English Translation -- Introduction: Mothers are born, fathers are made. We arrive in the Suowi Valley -- Chapter One: An out-of-the-way situation: Prohibitions and relations. The Anga and their anthropologists. The Anga in The gender of the gift -- Chapter Two: "Your wife is pregnant. Cover your head!" A special meal. Preparing the vegetal blood. Food taboos. Lime: A male product? -- Chapter Three: Accompanying a birth. "Tok piksa," "tok bokis": Picture talk -- Chapter Four: Transmitting know-how -- Chapter Five: A long ritual journey. The unfolding of collective rituals. The women's involvement -- Chapter Six: Abstaining for oneself, abstaining for others. Couvade and its interpretations. Anthropology of prohibitions -- Chapter Seven: Exchanges and prohibitions: A relational view. Concerning the som'e gift. Exchanges at the end of a life -- Chapter Eight: Male metamorphosis. Of birds and men -- Chapter Nine: Women`s lives: A path unmarked by rituals? Part I. The mariage request. A ritial of adjustment -- Chapter Ten: The brother-sister relationship through the years. Coming back to the Ankave -- Chapter Eleven: Women`s lives: A path unmarked by rituals? Part II. Hunting cassowaries. Catching eels. The impossibility of braking the symbiotic bond with the mother -- Chapter Twelve: A few other relational figures? Leenhardt and Kanak personhood. Revealing language forms. Personal names --Chapter Thirteen: "The Melanesian person": Debates. An unproductive quarrel in the end -- Conclusion -- Glossary -- References -- Index
Note:
Literaturverzeichnis: Seite [265] - 282; [Revised and slightly augmented version of a work published in French in 2015 [...], entitled Agir pour un autre: La construction de la personne masculine en Papouasie Nouvelle-Guinée." (Preface to the English translation)
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