Zaria's fire

Description

In an example of the new "dialogical anthropology," Nancy Lutkehaus interweaves the voices of three generations of Manam Islanders with those of two women anthropologists who lived and worked among them - one British, a member of England's "intellectual aristocracy," the other a middle-class Americanto create a multivocal, cross-cultural conversation about men and women, power and authority, and colonialism and post-coloniality in Papua New Guinea. Using the unpublished diaries, notebooks, and photographs of anthropologist Camilla Wedgwood, juxtaposed with her own contemporary field material and that of government officials, Catholic missionaries, and local scholars, Lutkehaus contrasts her narrative of Manam cultural resilience with Wedgwood's story of demoralization and inevitable cultural disintegration. More than simply a reinterpretation of Manam history or an explanation of why Wedgwood's prediction of cultural disintegration did not come about, Lutkehaus's argument reveals as much about epistemological shifts in anthropological knowledge and discourse as it does about the nature of Manam society. Her analysis situates Wedgwood's interpretation of Manam culture within the colonial context of British social anthropology as taught between the wars by Wedgwood's mentors Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown. In focusing on the relationship between symbolic and material dimensions of gender, the body, musical performance, chieftainship, and exchange, Lutkehaus's analysis also exemplifies the cultural embeddedness of political economy. Zaria's Fire will be of interest not only to scholars of Melanesia, but to students of gender studies, the writing of ethnography, and the history of anthropology and colonial culture.

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