Ritual And Knowledge Among The Baktaman Of New Guinea

Rituals of Manhood provides some of the most dramatic and richly textured accounts of ritual passages known to anthropologists of the late twentieth century. When in an earlier time anthropologists and sociologists described collective initiation rituals, the political and gender aspects of these practices were seldom underscored. Today, the power relationships of the body and domination, and the social arena of gender politics are widely regarded as critical to the cultural meaning and interpretation.

Based on 3 conferences held 2001-2003

Historically, canonic studies of ritual have discussed and explained ritual organization, action, and transformation primarily as representations of broader cultural and social orders. In the present, as in the past, less attention is given to the power of ritual to organize and effect transformation through its own dynamics. Breaking with convention, the contributors to this volume were asked to discuss ritual first and foremost in relation to itself, in its own right, and only then in relation to its socio-cultural context. The results attest to the variable capacities of rites to effect transformation through themselves, and to the study of phenomena in their own right as a fertile approach to comprehending ritual dynamics.

A wide spectrum of scholars, historians, art historians, anthropologists, students of performance, students of religion, archaeologists, cognitive scientists, and linguists were all asked to think and comment on how ritual can be traced in archaeology and which ways ritual research can go in that discipline. The product is a fairly accurate representation of research on ritual and the archaeology of ritual: scholars from various disciplines, backgrounds and agendas, arguing mostly in the most logical fashion, yet with little agreement between them. So this book should not be seen as presenting one unified attitude towards ritual and its study in archaeology. It should rather be seen as a reflection of what the discourse in the archaeology of ritual is today. The outcome has been extremely thought-provoking, often controversial, but always of extremely high quality.

Bringing Ritual to Mind explores the psychological foundations of religious ritual systems. Participants must recall their rituals well enough to ensure a sense of continuity across performances, and those rituals must motivate them to transmit and re-perform them. Most religious rituals the world over exploit either high performance frequency or extraordinary emotional stimulation (but not both) to enhance their recollection (literacy does not affect this). McCauley and Lawson argue that participants' cognitive representations of ritual form explain why. Reviewing a wide range of evidence, they explain religions' evolution.

Ethnographic and archaeological records feature a rich body of data suggesting that understandings of the mineral world are in fact both culturally variable and highly diverse. Soils, Stones and Symbols highlights studies from the fields of anthropology, archaeology and philosophy that demonstrate that not all individuals and societies view minerals as commodities to be exploited for economic gain, or as passive objects of disembodied scientific enquiry. In visiting such diverse contexts as contemporary India, colonial-period Australia and prehistoric Europe and the Americas, the papers in this volume demonstrate that in pre-industrial societies, minerals are often symbolically meaningful, ritually powerful, and deeply interwoven into not just economic and material, but also social, cosmological, mythical, spiritual and philosophical aspects of life. In addressing the theme of the mineral world, this book is not only unique within the social and geo-sciences, but also at the forefront of recent attempts to demonstrate the importance of materiality to processes of human cognition and sociality. It draws upon theoretical developments relating to meaning, experience, the body, and material culture to demonstrate that studies of rock art, landscapes, architecture, technology and resource use are all linked through the minerals that constantly surround us and are the focus of our never-ending attempts to understand and transform them.

One understanding of child maltreatment is limited in that it is based almost entirely on research and clinical experience in Western nations. The cross-cultural record, a "natural laboratory" of human behavior, allows a consideration of child abuse and neglect from the perspective of a wider range of social and environmental conditions. Each of the nine original essays in this volume examines child-rearing practices and child maltreatment in the context of a culture very different from our own. There is no universal standard for optimal child rearing, nor for child abuse and neglect. Seeking culturally appropriate definitions of child abuse, the authors stress the socialization goals of the particular cultural group, the intentions and beliefs of adults in the group, and the interpretations children place on their treatment. The authors differentiate practices such as harsh initiation rites, severe punishment, or, conversely, many Western practices viewed as abusive by other cultures, from idiosyncratic mistreatment by individuals. They further distinguish idiosyncratic child abuse and neglect form the suffering caused children, and their families, by circumstances such as poverty, food scarcity, and disease. Though several of the essays focus on the socioeconomic factors implicated in the etiology of child abuse (particularly rapid socioeconomic change), they indicate that cultural factors determine how a society will respond to negative socioeconomic conditions. The authors concur that while children may be exposed to considerable hardship in these non-Western societies, harm at the hands of individual caretakers is rare. They consider factors in the cultural context that may act either to increase or to decrease the likelihood of child abuse and neglect. Among these factors are the value that a culture places on children in general, categories of children that are more vulnerable to mistreatment, beliefs about the developmental age capabilities of children, and, most important, the embeddedness of child rearing in a network of kin and community that extends beyond individual biological parents. Contributors:Forewords by Robert B. Edgerton and C. Henry KempeOrna R. JohnsonJill E. KorbinL. L. LangnessSara LeVineRobert LeVineEmelie A. OlsonThomas PoffenbergerJames Ritchie Jane RitchieHiroshi WagatsumaDavid Y. H. Wu This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.

Calls for a "consilient" or "vertically integrated" approach to the study of human mind and culture have, for the most part, been received by scholars in the humanities with either indifference or hostility. One reason for this is that consilience has often been framed as bringing the study of humanistic issues into line with the study of non-human phenomena, rather than as something to which humanists and scientists contribute equally. The other major reason that consilience has yet to catch on in the humanities is a dearth of compelling examples of the benefits of adopting a consilient approach. Creating Consilience is the product of a workshop that brought together internationally-renowned scholars from a variety of fields to address both of these issues. It includes representative pieces from workshop speakers and participants that examine how adopting such a consilient stance -- informed by cognitive science and grounded in evolutionary theory -- would concretely impact specific topics in the humanities, examining each topic in a manner that not only cuts across the humanities-natural science divide, but also across individual humanistic disciplines. By taking seriously the fact that science-humanities integration is a two-way exchange, this volume takes a new approach to bridging the cultures of science and the humanities. The editors and contributors formulate how to develop a new shared framework of consilience beyond mere interdisciplinarity, in a way that both sides can accept.