The Marshall Islands have an active community of competitive players of checkers (jekab) who use a rule set that is particular to the region. This game is featured in tournaments held during cultural ...celebrations on multiple islands in the archipelago, while the activity is considered an integral part of public life as it is witnessed on the islands. Marshallese checkers is shown to create a liminoid space in which a diversity of players in terms of age, language and socioeconomic circumstances interact across the playing board. Marshallese checkers supports the idea of board games as social lubricants that helps to explain how board games cross these borders so effortlessly historically as well as contemporaneously. The public presence, the rules and the diversity of players exhibited in the Marshall Islands point to a rich history of and a continuing future for abstract board games in the Pacific Islands.
WILLIAM B. KEMP Brody, Hugh; Wenzel, George W
Arctic,
09/2020, Volume:
73, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
An obituary for William B. Kemp, who died on Jan 5, 2020, is presented. Following six years as an instructor at the State University of New York, Binghamton, Kemp moved to McGill University in 1970, ...quickly becoming an integral contributor to the Department of Geography's developing Human Ecology and Northern Cultural programs, bringing with him a special focus on the Indigenous cultures of Canada's Arctic and Subarctic. Kemp was an ethnographer, cultural ecologist, archaeologist and consummate map maker. His research among the Inuit of Baffin Island and Northern Québec was not only comprehensive, but also deeply insightful. During a year living with Killikti and his family at Imiligaarjuit, he learned Inuktitut, a skill that allowed him to look at Inuit and the North through two lenses.
Pursuing a self-described anarcho-surrealist politics in the aftermath of Iceland's banking crisis, Jón Gnarr shocked the country's political establishment by winning the mayoral election in ...Reykjavík in May 2010. In this article, I explore the rise of Gnarr's Best Party, especially its refusal to accept a distinction between parody and sincerity in its mode of political performance. Against the backdrop of the increasing monopolization of (neo)liberal political discourse and action, I discuss how "Gnarrism" reflects at once something old and something new in northern liberal democracy.
This paper discusses the commencement of an Aboriginal art market focused on the production of bark paintings in Australia. It centres around Baldwin Spencer's visit to Oenpelli, today known as ...Gunbalanya, in 1912. During his visit, Spencer commissioned the first collection of Aboriginal bark paintings from western Arnhem Land. This paper explores how this was perceived from an Indigenous perspective through an interview conducted more than 50 years ago with one of the artists who painted for Spencer, Paddy Compass Namadbara (c. 1891/92 - 1978), the first artist known to have contributed to the Spencer/Cahill Collection. The interview, conducted by Lance Bennett in 1967 and presented here for the first time in English, provides evidence for how Spencer and Patrick Cahill influenced the commissioned bark paintings by Namadbara and other artists. This new information is significant for understanding the early interactive shaping of what has become an important art market in the region.
C'est à Prague que le jeune ethnographe russe Pëtr Grigor'evič Bogatyrëv (1893- 1971), qui a fait partie avec Roman Jakobson des fondateurs du Cercle linguistique de Moscou, développe dans les années ...1920 et 1930 une série de chantiers originaux qui concernent l'ethnographie rurale et l'étude du théâtre populaire. Ce volume propose une série de textes de cette période qui concernent les actes magiques, le costume populaire, la géographie ou les signes du théâtre et qu'éclairent les contributions de collègues français, allemands, suisses, russes et canadiens. L'oeuvre de Bogatyrëv est particulièrement évocatrice de la richesse des rencontres intellectuelles praguoises de l'entre-deux-guerres, dont le Cercle de Prague fut le fruit et l'illustration la plus célèbre. Marquée par les traditions ethnographiques russes mais aussi par le contact avec les formalistes, les héritiers de l'esthétique néo-herbartienne tchèque, la Volkskunde allemande de l'époque et les travaux de la linguistique et de l'ethnologie françaises, elle permet une approche transnationale de la genèse du premier structuralisme. Le dépassement des frontières nationales qui caractérise ces rencontres praguoises s'accompagne également d'un dépassement des séparations entre, d'un côté, formes artistiques populaires, en apparence « archaïques » et, de l'autre, formes artistiques urbaines et avant-gardistes, ainsi qu'entre discours théorique et pratique artistique.
Fieldworkers’ notebooks are full of sensations and observations in which the subjectivity of the ethnographer seeps through. Not really science. Much closer to life. Yet in classical anthropology ...they are invisible to the reader. In this book the focus is reversed, turning Anthropology Inside Out as it explores the vibrant backstage life of field notes. What happens when we put them centre stage? Aimed at both curious novice and experienced practitioner, the chapters read as a catalogue of experimental practices teetering on the edge of the tradition: intuitively observational drawings; notes pervaded with paranoia; collective notetaking; crisis-ridden personal confessions; layers of notes in photographs and archives; old flip-flops that trigger memories in mind and body. This exploration of what field notes are, can do and could be, concludes with a constellation of shimmering notes on notes from Michael Taussig, a meta-commentary on anthropologists’ fetishistic relationship with the most personal of professional tools.
Mary Douglas Fardon, Richard
1999, 20020104, 2002, 2002-01-04
eBook
This is the first full length account of the life and ideas of Mary Douglas, the British social anthropologist whose publications span the second half of the twentieth century. Richard Fardon covers ...Douglas' family background, and the pervasive influence of her catholic faith on her writings before providing an analysis of two of her most influential works; Purity and Danger (1966) and Natural Symbols (1970). The final section deals with Douglas' more controversial writings in the fields of economics, consumption, religion and risk analysis in contemporary societies. Throughout, Fardon highlights the centrality of Douglas' role in the history of anthropology and the discipline's struggle to achieve relevance to contemporary, western societies.
L’ethnologue jésuite Germain Lemieux (1914-2008) refait le chemin qui l’a mené de sa Gaspésie natale, contrée maritime, au pays des mines de Sudbury. À travers son témoignage, recueilli par l’auteur ...pour la radio en 1995 et livré sur le ton de la confidence, l’octogénaire soupèse les aléas d’une carrière entreprise un demi-siècle plus tôt. Il balise son récit d’éléments inédits, notamment sur ses origines et sa formation, qui éclairent les dessous de l’oeuvre et révèlent les traits de sa personnalité. Volontaire, il a su tracer sa voie et développer une expertise originale en dépit de moyens limités et des contraintes de son état. Ce document à l’allure intime constitue une source féconde, autant pour la compréhension de l’Ontario français et de son histoire au XXe siècle que pour l’institution du patrimoine oral que l’ethnologie a incarnée presque seul avant les années 1980. En faisant le bilan de son activité incomparable, Germain Lemieux y mêle un peu de son testament intellectuel.
R. H. Mathews (1841-1918) was an Australian-born surveyor and self-taught anthropologist. From 1893 until his death in 1918, he made it his mission to record all 'new and interesting facts' about ...Aboriginal Australia. His legacy is an outstanding record of Aboriginal culture in the Federation period.
Looking through Taiwan Hong, Keelung; Murray, Stephen O; Murray, Stephen
2005, 2005-12-01
eBook
Anthropologists have long sought to extricate their work from the policies and agendas of those who dominate—and often oppress—their native subjects. Looking through Taiwan is an ...uncompromising look at a troubling chapter in American anthropology that reveals what happens when anthropologists fail to make fundamental ethnic and political distinctions in their work. Keelung Hong and Stephen O. Murray examine how Taiwanese realities have been represented—and misrepresented—in American social science literature, especially anthropology, in the post–World War II period. They trace anthropologists’ complicity in the domination of a Taiwanese majority by a Chinese minority and in its obfuscation of social realities.   At the base of these distortions, the authors argue, were the mutual interests of the Republic of China’s military government and American social scientists in mischaracterizing Taiwan as representative of traditional Chinese culture. American anthropologists, eager to study China but denied access by its communist government, turned instead to fieldwork on the Republic of China’s society, which they incorrectly and disingenuously interpreted to reflect traditional Chinese society on the mainland. Anthropologists overlooked the cultural and historical differences between the island and the mainland and effectively legitimized the People’s Republic of China’s claim on Taiwan. Looking through Taiwan is a powerful critique of American anthropology and a valuable reminder of the political and ethical implications of social science research and writing.
