HOME | BESTSELLERS | NEW RELEASES | PRICE WATCH | FICTION | BIOGRAPHIES | E-BOOKS |
+ PRICE WATCH
* Amazon pricing is not included in price watch
On the Bones of the Serpent: Person, Memory and Mortality in Sabarl Island Society Book
Sabarl islandâ??created, in myth, from the bones of a serpentâ??is a coral atoll in the Louisiade archipelago of Papua New Guinea. The Sabarl speak of themselves as true "islanders": persons separated from the means of both physical and social survival. The Sabarl struggle for continuityâ??of the physical and social person and of social relations, of cultureal values, of paternal influence in a matrilineal societyâ??is the subject of Debbora Battaglia's sensitive ethnography of loss and reconstruction: the first major work on cultural responses to mortality in the southern Massim culture area and an important contribution to studies of personhood in Melanesia. The creative focus of Sabarl cultural life is a series of mortuary feasts and rituals known as segaiya. In assembling and disassembling commemorative food and objects in segaiya exchanges, Sabarl also assemble and disassemble the critical social relations such objects stand for. These commemorative acts create a collective memory yet also a collective experience of forgetting social bonds that are of no future use to the living. Sabarl anticipate this disaggregation in patterns of everyday life, which reveal the importance of categorical distinctions mapped in beliefs about the physical and metaphysical person. Using remembrance and forgetting as an analytic lens, Battaglia is able to ask questions critical to understanding Melanesian social process. One of the "new ethnographies" addressing the limits of ethnographic representation and the fragmented nature of knowledge from an indigenous perspective, her finely wrought study explores the dynamics of cultural practices in which decontruction is integral to construction, allowing a new perspective on the ephermeral nature of sociality in Melanesia and new insight into the efficacy of cultural images more generally. Read More
from£N/A | RRP: * Excludes Voucher Code Discount Also available Used from £N/A
- 0226038890
- 9780226038896
- Battaglia
- 1 February 1990
- Chicago University Press
- Paperback (Book)
- 248
- 2nd
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. If you click through any of the links below and make a purchase we may earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you). Click here to learn more.
Would you like your name to appear with the review?
We will post your book review within a day or so as long as it meets our guidelines and terms and conditions. All reviews submitted become the licensed property of www.find-book.co.uk as written in our terms and conditions. None of your personal details will be passed on to any other third party.
All form fields are required.