Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People

This influential work is the most important and widely cited book ever published in ecological anthropology. It is a classic case study of human ecology in a tribal society, the role of culture (especially ritual) in local and regional resource management, negative feedback, and the application of systems theory to an anthropological population. It is considered a major work of theory, yet it is also empirically grounded in Rappaport's meticulous collection of quantitative and qualitative data on such "material" matters as diet and energy expenditure, as well as such mental-cognitive-ideational domains as myth and folk taxonomies. Rappaport's tour de force is a recognized classic because it contributes in so many ways to anthropological theory, ethnographic methodology, ecological anthropology, and the anthropology of religion. This enlarged edition offers a carefully reasoned, empirically focused reassessment of Rappaport's original study in the context of ongoing theoretical and methodological problems.

Titles of related interest also available from Waveland Press: Hogbin, The Island of Menstruating Men: Religion in Wogeo, New Guinea (ISBN 9780881338843); Netting, Cultural Ecology, Second Edition (ISBN 9780881332049); Sillitoe-Sillitoe, Grass-Clearing Man: A Factional Ethnography of Life in the New Guinea Highlands (ISBN 9781577666011); and Townsend, Environmental Anthropology: From Pigs to Policies, Second Edition (ISBN 9781577665816).

Roy Abraham Rappaport, Walgreen Professor for the Study of Human Understanding, University of Michigan, a major figure in the theory and practice of anthropology, died October 9, 1997, after a long battle with cancer. Having joined the Department of Anthropology in 1965, he became its chairman for five years in 1975. He served as President of the American Anthropological Association (1987-89). Rappaport's dissertation became the first edition of Pigs for the Ancestors, a landmark in ecological anthropology for its scrupulous empirical research, innovative use of systems theory and interpretive and heuristically powerful arguments about the role of religious ritual in the adaptation and ecological regulation of certain kinds of communities. The second edition deals with the extensive responses to the book and tries to develop epistemological issues involved in his approach.