Richard Salisbury (1926-1989) was a pioneer in development anthropology and one of the founders of McGill University's anthropology department. His work had immense influence in the areas of economic anthropology, ethnographic practice (New Guinea, northern Canada) and policy formation. This volume commemorates and explores his life and work. Ethnography and Development presents eighteen articles written by Salisbury between 1954 and 1988, framed by seven original essays that explore his basic ideas as well as the intellectual and personal contexts in which he worked. The articles and essays highlight many of the issues that informed those of his generation who worked in economic and political anthropology, the anthropology of development, public anthropology, advocacy and applied anthropology, and in developing the organisational vehicles on which the profession currently depends. Salisbury's broad socio-economic vision, conceptual ideas, and socio-cultural ethnographic theories continue to exert a powerful influence on the discipline. Contributors include Harvey A. Feit (McMaster University), Henry J. Rutz (Hamilton College), and Colin H. Scott (McGill University).

Originally published in 1973 and now reissued with a new Preface, this striking book challenges the whole structure of our thinking on how societies develop – why some are primitive and others advanced. It demonstrates that the pursuit of progress is not the real driving force behind change. Economic development, it argues, is simply the escape route of societies caught in the ecological pincers of population growth and scarce resources. The author explains the processes by which industrialization is forced upon societies by the progressive scarcity of all land-based resources. The things we think of as the fruits of man's search for progress including increasingly sophisticated technology, labour-saving machinery and the rest - are in fact part of the struggle to keep up with the growing productive task created by ecological pressures. ln this light primitive societies appear less poor than we imagine, and advanced ones less rich.

"One of the most innovative monographs in recent Pacific Islands studies." --Reviews in Anthropology

This is an important book. It is a reprint of the first detailed study of how Pacific Islanders responded politically and economically to their rulers across the German empire of the Pacific. Under one cover, it captures the variety of interactions between the various German colonial administrations, with their separate approaches, and the leaders and people of Samoa in Polynesia, the major island centre of Pohnpei in Micronesia and the indigenes of New Guinea. Drawing on anthropology, new Pacific history insights and a range of theoretical works on African and Asian resistance from the 1960s and 1970s, it reveals the complexities of Islander reactions and the nature of protests against German imperial rule. It casts aside old assumptions that colonised peoples always resisted European colonisers. Instead, this book argues convincingly that Islander responses were often intelligent and subtle manipulations of their rulers’ agendas, their societies dynamic enough to make their own adjustments to the demands of empire. It does not shy away from major blunders by German colonial administrators, nor from the strategic and tactical mistakes of Islander leaders. At the same time, it raises the profile of several large personalities on both sides of the colonial frontier, including Lauaki Namulau’ulu Mamoe and Wilhelm Solf in Samoa; Henry Nanpei, Georg Fritz and Karl Boeder in Pohnpei; or Governor Albert Hahl and Po Minis from Manus Island in New Guinea.

Politics: a static network of structural and functional models? Is it a "given" set of rules, statuses and procedures? Or a dynamic process, a continuum related to the past as well as to the present and continually influenced by pressures within and outside of a society? Taking the latter view of the nature of political behavior, the editors of Political Anthropology here present an original compilation of papers that thoroughly assess contemporary anthropological research and theory on political phenomena and explore the sources and maintenance of political power. One of the aims of this book is to take tentative steps toward resolving the developing crisis by investigating the structure of political action revealed in empirical data. Within the general framework of political dynamics the book uses processes such as decision making, the judicial process, the disturbance and settlement of policy issues, the application of sanctions, and the outcome of disputes among other things. These items will find their places as components of phases in the major sequence. Investigating societies from Africa to Alaska, politics is shown to be a global phenomenon--a "human process of action" centering on the conflict between the "common good" and "interests of groups," and on the resolution or extension of that conflict by the religious, structural, sociocultural, and psychological pressures within and external to a social grouping. Essential reading for anyone concerned with the nature of political process, Political Anthropology presents a fresh, important and comprehensive overview of the "wind of change" currently abroad in the study of political behavior.

Vunamami attempts to isolate the dynamic that produces economic development by analyzing the interplay of forces over a ninety-year period in a village in the Tolai area of New Guinea. Theories that stress the importance of external forces in producing economic development, or contrast “traditional conservatism” with “innovative modernization,” view history through the eyes of outsiders and misconstrue the nature of traditional society. This "outside view" sees change as a result of external pressures; the “local view” regards outsiders only as triggers for processes of internal development, political initiatives, and the adaptation of technical innovations to local conditions, spurred by political entrepreneurs and technological innovators in the community . Richard F. Salisbury argues that without internal changes, technical innovations are uneconomical and destined to fail. Vunamami is optimistic about the potentialities of internal social change for producing economic development without foreign aid. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1970.

For the past thirty years, adherents of a millenarian cult in Papua New Guinea, known as the Pomio Kivung, have been awaiting the establishment of a period of supernatural bliss, heralded by the return of their ancestors bearing "cargo." The author of this book, Harvey Whitehouse, was taken for a reincarnated ancestor, and was able to observe the dynamics of the cult from within. From the stable mainstream of the cult, localized splinter groups periodically emerge, hoping to expedite the millennium; the core of this volume concerns the close study of one such group in two Baining villages. The two aspects of the cult studied here--on the one hand a large, uniform, and stable mainstream organization with a well-defined hierarchy demanding orthodoxy of views, and on the other hand a small-scale and temporary movement, emotional and innovatieve in its views--stand in sharp contrast one to the other, but are here seen as divergent manifestations of the same relifious ideology, implemented in differeing ways. This original theory of "modes of religiosity" which Whitehouse develops draws on recent findings in cognitive psychology to link styles of codification and cultural transmission to the political scale, structure, and ethos of religious communities.