Copy in Mahi Māreikura on loan from the whanau of Maharaia Winiata.

A comprehensive study of the Maori in New Zealand, this book covers Maori history and culture, language and art and includes chapters on the following: · Basic concepts in Maori culture · Land · Kinship · Education · Association · Leadership & social control · The Marae · Hui · Maori and Pakeha · Maori spelling and pronunciation There is an extensive glossary, bibliography and index. First published in 1967. This edition reprints the revised edition of 1976.

Inspired by existential thought, but using ethnographic methods, Jackson explores a variety of compelling topics, including 9/11, episodes from the war in Sierra Leone and its aftermath, the marginalization of indigenous Australians, the application of new technologies, mundane forms of ritualization, the magical use of language, the sociality of violence, the prose of suffering, and the discourse of human rights. Throughout this compelling work, Jackson demonstrates that existentialism, far from being a philosophy of individual being, enables us to explore issues of social existence and coexistence in new ways, and to theorise events as the sites of a dynamic interplay between the finite possibilities of the situations in which human beings find themselves and the capacities they yet possess for creating viable forms of social life.

Amiria Henare explores the role of material cultural research in anthropology and related disciplines from the late eighteenth century to the present.

‘Mana’, a term denoting spiritual power, is found in many Pacific Islands languages. In recent decades, the term has been taken up in New Age movements and online fantasy gaming. In this book, 16 contributors examine mana through ethnographic, linguistic, and historical lenses to understand its transformations in past and present. The authors consider a range of contexts including Indigenous sovereignty movements, Christian missions and Bible translations, the commodification of cultural heritage, and the dynamics of diaspora. Their investigations move across diverse island groups—Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Hawai‘i, and French Polynesia—and into Australia, North America and even cyberspace. A key insight that the volume develops is that mana can be analysed most productively by paying close attention to its ethical and aesthetic dimensions. Since the late nineteenth century, mana has been an object of intense scholarly interest. Writers in many fields including anthropology, linguistics, history, religion, philosophy, and missiology have long debated how the term should best be understood. The authors in this volume review mana’s complex intellectual history but also describe the remarkable transformations going on in the present day as scholars, activists, church leaders, artists, and entrepreneurs take up mana in new ways.

Marshall Sahlins (b. 1930) is an American anthropologist who played a major role in the development of anthropological theory in the second half of the twentieth century. Over a sixty-year career, he and his colleagues synthesized trends in evolutionary, Marxist, and ecological anthropology, moving them into mainstream thought. Sahlins is considered a critic of reductive theories of human nature, an exponent of culture as a key concept in anthropology, and a politically engaged intellectual opposed to militarism and imperialism. This collection brings together some of the world’s most distinguished anthropologists to explore and advance Sahlins’s legacy. All of the essays are based on original research, most dealing with cultural change - a major theme of Sahlins’s research, especially in the contexts of Fijian and Hawaiian societies. Like Sahlins’s practice of anthropology, these essays display a rigorous, humanistic study of cultural forms, refusing to accept comfort over accuracy, not shirking from the moral implications of their analyses. Contributors include the late Greg Dening, one of the most eminent historians of the Pacific, Martha Kaplan, Patrick Kirch, Webb Keane, Jonathan Friedman, and Joel Robbins, with a preface by the late Claude Levi-Strauss. A unique volume that will complement the many books and articles by Sahlins himself, A Practice of Anthropology is an exciting new addition to the history of anthropological study.