Format:
1 online resource (389 pages)
ISBN:
9789088901461
Content:
Engendering objects explores social and cultural dynamics among Maisin people in Collingwood Bay (Papua New Guinea) through the lens of material culture. Focusing upon the visually stimulating decorated barkcloths that are used as male and female garments, gifts, and commodities, it explores the relationships between these cloths and Maisin people. The main question is how barkcloth, as an object made by women, engenders people's identities, such as gender, personhood, clan and tribe, through its manufacturing and use.This book describes in detail how barkcloth (tapa) not only visualizes and expresses, but also materializes and defines, people's multiple identities. By 'following the object' and how it is made and used in the performance of life-cycle rituals, in exchanges and in church festivities, this interaction between people and things, and how they are mutually constituted, becomes visible. How are women's bodies and minds linked with the production of barkcloth? How do cloths produced by women both establish and contest clan identity? In what ways is the commodification of barkcloth related to gender dynamics? Barkcloth and its associated designs show how gender ideologies and the socio-material constructions of identity are performed and, as such, developed, established and contested.The narratives of both men and women reveal the ways in which barkcloth provides a link with the past and dreams for the future. The author argues that the cloths and their designs embody dynamics of Maisin culture and in particular of Maisin gender relations. In contributing to the current debates on the anthropology of 'art', this study offers an alternative way of understanding the significance of an object, like decorated barkcloth, in shaping and defining people's identities within a local colonial and postcolonial setting of Papua New
Content:
Intro -- Engendering Objects -- Research Topic and theoretical setting -- Methodologies -- Theoretical setting -- Thematic structure -- Engendering people through things -- Gendering Maisin men and women -- Maisin setting -- Food and surroundings -- Settlement -- Social structure -- Outline -- Introduction -- Acknowledgments -- List of figures -- Part 1 -- Women and Barkcloth -- Chapter 1 -- 'Making' women -- Conceiving bodies -- Male versus female substances and descent -- Constituting the person -- Gendering children's bodies -- Initiating girls -- Making women and men -- Marking women's bodies -- Dangerous bodies: Female sexuality -- Gendered ways of thought and speech -- On being good husbands and wives -- The performativity of gender -- Chapter 2 -- Women making barkcloth -- Making tapa -- From tree to cloth -- Designing the cloth -- Tattoos and tapa designs -- Decorating and painting the cloth -- Transferring female knowledge -- The past in the present -- Learning to draw -- Making tapa at school -- Styles of identity: creativity and agency in tapa designs -- Tapa designs as forms of non-discursive agency -- Tapa production as a performative act -- Part 2 -- Materializations and the performance of identity -- Chapter 3 -- Ancestral travels and designs -- Following Clan designs -- Chiefs of the up- and downstream -- Following the ancestors -- Materialisations of the patrilineal clan -- Who owns wuwusi, the tapa tree? -- Drawing the clan -- Female knowledge and creativity -- Clan materialisations: gendered knowledge and practice -- Chapter 4 -- Life-cycle rituals and the performance of identity -- First-born exchanges -- Decorating the firstborn child: totumi and kesevi -- Girls' initiation -- Performing the initiated body -- Maternal connections? -- Marriages and weddings -- The performance of marital exchanges -- Death and mourning rituals.
Note:
Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources
Additional Edition:
ISBN 9789088901454
Additional Edition:
Erscheint auch als Druck-Ausgabe ISBN 9789088901454
Language:
English
Keywords:
Electronic books
