In the Sepik Basin of Papua New Guinea, ritual culture was dominated by the Tambaran --a male tutelary spirit that acted as a social and intellectual guardian or patron to those under its aegis as they made their way through life. To Melanesian scholarship, the cultural and psychological anthropologist, Donald F. Tuzin, was something of a Tambaran, a figure whose brilliant and fine-grained ethnographic project in the Arapesh village of Ilahita was immensely influential within and beyond New Guinea anthropology. Tuzin died in 2007, at the age of 61. In his memory, the editors of this collection commissioned a set of original and thought provoking essays from eminent and accomplished anthropologists who knew and were influenced by his work. They are echoes of the Tambaran. The anthology begins with a biographical sketch of Tuzin's life and scholarship. It is divided into four sections, each of which focuses loosely around one of his preoccupations. The first concerns warfare history, the male cult and changing masculinity, all in Melanesia. The second addresses the relationship between actor and structure. Here, the ethnographic focus momentarily shifts to the Caribbean before turning back to Papua new Guinea in essays that examine uncanny phenomena, narratives about childhood and messianic promises. The third part goes on to offer comparative and psychoanalytic perspectives on the subject in Fiji, Bali, the Amazon as well as Melanesia. Appropriately, the last section concludes with essays on Tuzin's fieldwork style and his distinctive authorial voice.

Despite the plethora of research on gender and the many projects designed to improve their status in the Pacific region, women continue to be disadvantaged and marginalised in social, economic and political spheres. How are we to understand this and what does it mean for researchers, policy-makers and development practitioners? This book examines these questions, partly by looking back but also by continuing the effort to explain and understand gender inequities in the Pacific through reference to the concept of societies in transition. The contributors discuss emerging masculinities and femininities in the Pacific in order to chart the development of these in their contexts. Exploring how contemporary Pacific identities are shaped by local contexts and traditions, they focus on how these are remade through interaction with global ideas, images and practices, including new forms of Christianity and economic transformations. Grounded in recent, original research in both the villages and towns of Melanesia, the collection engages with the study of gender in Melanesia as well as scholarship on global modernities. ‘This collection is a welcome addition to the study of gender in Melanesia … Collectively, the essays present complex, locally contextualised and regionally situated case studies of gender transformation occurring alongside, in many instances, the re-codification of hegemonic gendered norms and practices. Gender is not understood as simply code for women in this volume rather, the majority of chapters incorporate men and masculinities in their analysis of gender relations and dynamics. A highlight of the collection is the attention paid to how “the politics of tradition” (and of modernity) are expressed through morally loaded concepts of the “good” or “bad” woman or man and vice versa.’ — Kalissa Alexeyeff, University of Melbourne

How does design and innovation shape people’s lives in the Pacific? Focusing on plant materials from the region, How Materials Matter reveals ways in which a variety of people – from craftswomen and scientists to architects and politicians – work with materials to transform worlds. Recognizing the fragile and ephemeral nature of plant fibres, this work delves into how the biophysical properties of certain leaves and their aesthetic appearance are utilized to communicate information and manage different forms of relations. It breaks new ground by situating plant materials at the centre of innovation in a region.

In a world that promotes assertion, agency, and empowerment, this book challenges us to revalue a range of actions and attitudes that have come to be disregarded or dismissed as merely passive. Mercy, resignation, politeness, restraint, gratitude, abstinence, losing well, apologizing, taking care: today, such behaviors are associated with negativity or lack. But the capacity to give way is better understood as positive action, at once intricate and demanding. Moving from intra-human common courtesies, to human-animal relations, to the global civility of human-inhuman ecological awareness, the book's argument unfolds on progressively larger scales. In reminding us of the existential threat our drives pose to our own survival, Steven Connor does not merely champion a family of behaviors; he shows that we are more adept practitioners of them than we realize. At a time when it is on the wane, Giving Way offers a powerful defense of civility, the versatile human capacity to deflect aggression into sociability and to exercise power over power itself.

Emergent Masculinities in the Pacific focuses on the plasticity and contingent nature of Pacific Island masculinities over the course of colonial and postcolonial histories. The several case histories concern the use of sports to recuperate but also refashion past masculinities in the name of contemporary masculine pride; the effects of market participation on younger males; how urbanisation and migration set the stage for experimenting with male gender and sexuality; the impacts of military and labour histories on local masculinities; masculinity and violence in war and gender violence; and structural violence and disruptions in male gender identity. Depicting contemporary Pacific Island societies as a space of gender invention and pluralism as indigenous gender regimes respond to the stimulations of transnational flows, the book asks a key historical question: Do emergent masculinities signal a rupture, or some continuity with, past masculinities? This book was originally published as a special double issue of The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology.

This book analyses the dual alienations of a coastal group rural men, the Murik of Papua New Guinea. David Lipset argues that Murik men engage in a Bakhtinian dialogue: voicing their alienation from both their own, indigenous masculinity, as well as from the postcolonial modernity in which they find themselves adrift. Lipset analyses young men’s elusive expressions of desire in courtship narratives, marijuana discourse, and mobile phone use—in which generational tensions play out together with their disaffection from the state. He also borrows from Lacanian psychoanalysis in discussing how men’s dialogue of dual alienation appears in folk theater, in material substitutions—most notably, in the replacement of outrigger canoes by fiberglass boats—as well as in rising sea-levels, and the looming possibility of resettlement.

""This work is a masterpiece already as it stands now! It presents an unusually rich ethnography of a part of a community in Europe's farthest Arctic Northeast, with a focus on an extremely difficult topic to do fieldwork on: the conversion of a so-far hardly known group of reindeer nomads to radical evangelical Baptism / Pentecostalism." - Florian Stammler, author of Reindeer Nomads Meet the Market: Culture, Property and Globalisation at the "End of the Land" "Although not working from within the subdiscipline of linguistic anthropology, Vallikivi foregrounds speaking and communication in his analysis of the transformation from "pagan" to Christian. He finds a complex interweaving of speaking and refraining from speaking is key to Nenets personhood, and demonstrates how we have to understand cultural ways of speaking in order to understand Nenets Baptists and Pentecostals. [...] I have been reviewing book manuscripts for two decades for over a dozen presses, and this is by far the most polished and impressive manuscript I have read." - Alexander D. King, author of Living with Koryak Traditions: Playing with Culture in Siberia Words and Silences tells the story of an extraordinary group of independent Nenets reindeer herders in the northwest Russian Arctic. Under socialism these nomads managed to avoid the Soviet state and its institutions of collectivization but soon after the atheist regime collapsed, while some staunchly resisted, many of them became fervent fundamentalist Christians. By exploring differing concepts of how traditional and convert Nenets use and define words, and of the meanings they ascribe to the withholding of speech, Vallikivi shows how a local form of global Christianity has emerged through intricate negotiations of self, sociality, and cosmology. Moving beyond studies of modernization and globalization that have all-too-predictable outcomes for indigenous peoples, Words and Silences invites us to view not only religious devotees, but words themselves, as agents of a complex and ongoing transformation"--