From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesia and Anthropology - Softcover

Knauft, Bruce

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0472066870 ISBN 13: 9780472066872

Publisher: University of Michigan Press, 1999

Synopsis

What have anthropologists taught us about Melanesia--one of anthropology's most important and intensively studied world regions? In this book, Professor Bruce Knauft draws together and critically reanalyzes what we know about major features of Melanesian cultural history, warfare and politics, gender, bodily practices, and spirituality as discerned from more than a century of academic study.
 From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesia and Anthropology is arguably the most comprehensive single reassessment of Melanesia as an ethnographic world area to have been published in several decades. Written for students as well as professional scholars, this work further broadens our understanding by analyzing the history of Melanesian ethnography and relating this history to the larger relationship between Melanesia as a contemporary world area and anthropology as a field of contemporary human study.

 Bruce M. Knauft is Professor of Anthropology, Emory University, and the author of three previous books as well as some thirty journal articles and chapters. Knauft's interests span a wide range of issues in the anthropology of Melanesia and he is articulate with general issues of cultural theory and anthropological history.

About this title

Review:

". . . a splendid scholarly contribution, unique in its aims and achievements for Melanesia as a culture area and the implications of accumulated knowledge for anthropology as a whole."--Gilbert Herdt, San Francisco State University

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0472066870
• ISBN 13: 9780472066872
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352