898421055     

510500390                        

---

Sinuous objects : revaluing women's wealth in the contemporary Pacific / edited by Anna-Karina Hermkens & Katherine Lepani

Hermkens, Anna-Karina, 1969- [Herausgeberin/-geber] ; Lepani, Katherine [Herausgeberin/-geber]

Acton, A.C.T : Australioan National University Press, 2017

xxix, 292 Seiten : Illustrationen, Karten

Englisch

201708

Erscheint auch als: Sinuous objects (Online-Ausgabe)

978-1-76046-133-1 ; 1-76046-133-4

9781760461331

OCoLC: 1231720481     

LB 44690      Ähnliche Literatur

HQ1865.6

*Pazifischer Raum ; Ozeanien ; Frau ; Gesellschaftsleben ; Produktivität ; Kreativität ; Textilien ; Tapa ; Aufsatzsammlung      Zum Register

LOC-SH: Women -- Pacific Area -- Social conditions ; Pacific Area -- Social life and customs ; Oceania -- Social life and customs

Some 40 years ago, Pacific anthropology was dominated by debates about womens wealth. These exchanges were generated by Annette Weiners (1976) critical reappraisal of Bronisław Malinowskis classic work on the Trobriand Islands, and her observations that womens production of wealth (banana leaf bundles and skirts) for elaborate transactions in mortuary rituals occupied a central role in Trobriand matrilineal cosmology and social organisation. This volume brings the debates about womens wealth back to the fore by critically revisiting and engaging with ideas about gender and materiality, value, relationality and the social life and agency of things. The chapters, interspersed by three poems, evoke the sinuous materiality of the different objects made by women across the Pacific, and the intimate relationship between these objects of value and sensuous, gendered bodies. In the Epilogue, Professor Margaret Jolly observes how the volume also trace[s] a more abstract sinuosity in the movement of these things through time and place, as they coil through different regimes of value The eight chapters trace winding paths across the contemporary Pacific, from the Trobriands in Milne Bay, to Maisin, Wanigela and Korafe in Oro Province, Papua New Guinea, through the islands of Tonga to diasporic Tongan and Cook Islander communities in New Zealand. This comparative perspective elucidates how womens wealth is defined, valued and contested in current exchanges, bride price debates, church settings, development projects and the challenges of living in diaspora. Importantly, this reveals how women themselves preserve the different values and meanings in gift giving and exchanges, despite processes of commodification that have resulted in the decline or replacement of womens wealth