Some 40 years ago, Pacific anthropology was dominated by debates about ‘women’s wealth’. These exchanges were generated by Annette Weiner’s (1976) critical reappraisal of Bronisław Malinowski’s classic work on the Trobriand Islands, and her observations that women’s production of ‘wealth’ (banana leaf bundles and skirts) for elaborate transactions in mortuary rituals occupied a…
This publication of Remaining Karen is intended as a tribute to Ananda Raja and his consummate skills as an ethnographer. It is also a tribute to his long-term engagement in the study of the Karen. Remaining Karen was Ananda Raja’s first focused study of the Sgaw Karen of Palokhi in northern Thailand, which he submitted in 1986 for this PhD in the Department of Anthropology in the Research Sc…
This study examines the religious life of reformist Muslims in a Yogyakarta village. The foci of this discussion are on Muslim villagers’ construction, with the help of the reformist paradigm, of the image of the ‘good Muslim’ and ‘Muslim-ness’, on their efforts to incorporate an (reformist) Islamic framework to question taken-for-granted practices and ideas, on the position of tradit…
This collection deals with an ancient institution in Eastern Polynesia called the rahui, a form of restricting access to resources and/or territories. While tapu had been extensively discussed in the scientific literature on Oceanian anthropology, the rahui is quite absent from secondary modern literature. This situation is all the more problematic because individual actors, societies, and stat…
This study presents the contemporary Islamic resurgence movement among young people in Bandung Indonesia, focusing on its emergence, development and routinisation. It traces various factors and conditions that contributed to the emergence of the movement. It also tries to explain how and why young people (students in particular) turn to Islam, and how the movement is organised and developed amo…
For the people of Timor-Leste, independence promised a fundamental transformation from foreign occupation to self-rule, from brutality to respect for basic rights, and from poverty to prosperity. In the eyes of the country’s political leaders, revenue from the country’s oil and gas reserves is the means by which that transformation could be effected. Over the past decade, they have formulat…
This collection of papers is the fourth in a series of volumes on the work of the Comparative Austronesian Project. Each paper describes a specific Austronesian locality and offers an ethnographic account of the way in which social knowledge is vested, maintained and transformed in a particular landscape. The intention of the volume is to consider common patterns in the representation of place …
What did the future hold for Rhodesia’s white population at the end of a bloody armed conflict fought against settler colonialism? Would there be a place for them in newly independent Zimbabwe? Pioneers, Settlers, Aliens, Exiles sets out the terms offered by Robert Mugabe in 1980 to whites who opted to stay in the country they thought of as their home. The book traces over the next two decade…
This book offers another frame through which to view the event of the outrigger landing of 43 West Papuans in Australia in 2006. West Papuans have crossed boundaries to seek asylum since 1962, usually eastward into Papua New Guinea (PNG), and occasionally southward to Australia. Between 1984–86, around 11,000 people crossed into PNG seeking asylum. After the Government of PNG acceded to the U…
Ethnography; Kinship; Social life; Customs; Islands of the pacific; South east asia