One
Banana Leaf Bundles and Skirts:
A Pacific Penelope's Web?
Margaret Jolly
In her review of the significance of cloth in Pacific polities, Annette Weiner has evoked the persona of Penelope, “weaving by day, and unweaving the same fabric by night, in order to halt time” (1986, 108).[1] This image of a Pacific Penelope halting time was inspired by Weiner's reanalysis of the Trobriand islands. In her monograph (1976), in several subsequent papers (1980, 1982a, 1983a, 1986) and in her shorter text (1988) she conclusively demonstrated that Malinowski and a host of other male observers had failed to see women's central place in Trobriand exchange: that in fixating so totally on men's exchanges of yams in urigubu and of shell valuables in the
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Not far from this gravesite, another stone marks the grave of Mitakata, successor to Touluwa and Powell's informant in 1950. Mitakata died in 1961, and Vanoi became his heir. (1976, xix)
The rhetorical device that Weiner uses in Women of Value, Men of Renown, namely, heading each section with a quotation from Malinowski, does, as she suggests, highlight their historical relation, but, again, ultimately it stresses the consistency of their ethnographic questions and the constancy of Tro-
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― 40 ― briand culture despite the gap in time and interpretation. The same point is made explicitly in a later essay.
What initially astounded me upon my arrival in Kiriwina was the striking similarity between a Kiriwina village in 1971 and Malinowski's descriptions and photographs of the same village in 1922. Although superficially some things had changed (an airstrip, tourists, some Western clothing) everything else was as if nothing was changed. (Weiner 1980, 272)
The introductory notes to this later essay situate the Massim in Melanesian colonial history—cataloging the successive influences of whalers, pearlers and bêche-de-mer traders, gold prospectors, and labor recruiters from the 1850s; Christian missions from 1894; and the controls of government from the establishment of a British colonial administration post at Losuia in 1906 to the Massim's incorporation within the
Off the Veranda by Bronislaw Malinowski is a documentary that begins to discuss the start of his upcoming in the field of anthropology, the people of Trobriand Island and Functionalism. In the start of the Documentary we learn Malinowski began his field work by studying the Mailu people. During his work he was studying the natives afar from a Veranda. We learn that in order to fully understand the society of the Mailu; Malinowski believes he needs to learn their native language. Ultimately he decides to start afresh by studying the people of Trobriand Island. During the beginnings of his encounters he began to understand what it takes to be a member of the Trobriand. At first he was seen as an outsider and that his studies weren’t “working”
After earning a doctorate, Castro was hired by a small men’s college in rural Indiana to teach feminism theory and women 's literature to thirty-five men. She was prepared and ready for the disagreements, the drop outs and the failures that couldn’t open up their minds on feminism. But she values those voices, the questions and hostility because "they taught me how to make feminism 's insights relevant to people outside a closed, snug room of agreement" (Castro, 98). She had learned how to create feminism theory, critical race theory and observation about class privilege relevant, exciting and even needful to people who had no material reason to care. She learned diplomacy.
The Portrayal of the Plight of Women by the Author, In Their Particular Period of Time
Do peace, unity, and equality still exist this day in time among groups of people? Are we influenced by our environment to associate our way of seeing things and create language based on that fact? How we view the environment around us helps shape our understanding by creating language to give it meaning. Based on the linguistic data of the recently discovered tribe, we can draw conclusions about the tribe’s climate and terrain, diet, views on family and children, system of government and attitude towards war. This data shows that the lost tribe was an isolated group that lived in a valley, coexisted in unison, valued life, had high regards for
The reader gets a rare and exotic understanding of a totally foreign and ancient culture experiencing the growing pains of colonial expansion during the British domination
The author’s different styles of writing attract different audiences. Momaday uses a historical approach to storytelling while Kingston uses a personal and social approach. Both authors engage their readers by using metaphors, similes, and an individual style of writing. Yet they use these rhetorical devices to make different points and to draw different conclusions from the past. Ultimately, these rhetorical devices convey the oral traditions in each passage that provide the history of different cultural
During the study, the renowned anthropologist uses the local lingua franca “Neo-Melanesian” to collect his data from the Imbonggu villages. At first, the Wormsley finds himself as an object of competition as different communities wanted to stay with him. The men thought that Wormsley had come to collect the "head tax”, one of the renowned colonial payments that were subjected to men based on the number of women. In these communities, the author observes the culture of both men and women to collect his data. He notes how men are engaged in war, religion and politics (Wormsley, 1993). Women, on the other
In the book “The Things They Carried” four female characters played an important role in the lives of the men. Whether imaginary or not, they showed the power that women could have over men. Though it's unknown if the stories of these women are true or not, they still make an impact on the lives of the soldiers and the main narrator.
Feminism is a prominent controversy in present times and is relevant through literary works. In the article, “Throwing like a Girl,” James Fallows analyzes that saying exactly for what it means in our society, and more importantly if there’s any truth to the stereotype. In the article, “Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History,” Laurel Thatcher Ulrich shows how feminist historians, by challenging traditional accounts of both men's and women's histories, have prompted more vibrant accounts of the past. While Fallows analyzes the styles of throwing to identify a possible theory of the stereotypical saying, “throwing like a girl,” Ulrich discusses and encourages women to be strong and accomplish their goals, by using her phrase “well behaved women seldom make history.”
The first thing to consider is the progression of technology and its impact on the region. Lady Amelia Murray visited “by stage from Palatka” to see the valley’s
Conrad Phillip Kottak has visited the small village of Arembepe numerous times over the years. His visits were frequent, but spaced out over a couple years, which caused him to begin to notice some very dramatic changes from the Arembepe he came to know. The development of a more stratified society caused for some major changes coming to the small community. This essay is going to address the major cultural changes from the 1960’s to the 1980’s and whether or not the suburbanization of this village community was good or bad.
Chapter one, “Fieldwork among the Maisin”, describes how anthropologist John Barker, author of Ancestral Lines, goes to Uiaku New Guinea to study the Maisin people. His specific goals were to study how a people can maintain a cultural identify in a modernizing world and how they can live without destroying their environment. Barker first arrived in New Guinea in 1982 where he examined “how the Maisin make a living, organize social interactions, conceptualize the spiritual world, and meet the opportunities and tragedies of life” (Barker 2016:2). He studied the tapa cloth, a fabric made from bark, that the Maisin use as a connection to their ancestral past and to help define their culture. Barker discovered that the Maisin have faith in traditional methods and do what they can to preserve that lifestyle. Barker‘s work went
Bronislaw Malinowski is arguably the most influential anthropologist of the 20th century, certainly for British social anthropology. Malinowski saw himself as effecting a revolution in anthropology by rejecting the evolutionary paradigm of his predecessors and introducing functionalism, whereby institutions satisfied human biological need, as the way to understand other cultures. I argue that his lasting legacy, however, is methodological rather than theoretical. Although not the first to conduct fieldwork, his lengthy stay among the Trobriand islanders during World War 1 enabled him to study their culture and cover a wide range of topics, from economics to sexuality. He contributed to ethnography and fieldwork by living with the people he studied, getting to know them personally, participating in their activities, and conducting his research in the field has since become known as ‘participant observation’.
Understanding the cultural context within which a text is written can help readers experience things that they may never experience in their lives. Culture leads readers intellectually and emotionally and deepens their understanding of the character’s history, the society that they live in and their individual lives. Learning culture plays a fundamental role in making readers understand the social and political context in which the novel is written, the people the author associates with, and the larger society that frames the whole work. It is hard to read literature without a solid comprehension of the work through its cultural context. In light of this information this essay will explain how culture influences the plot line, character development,
The culture of a space has a powerful influence on the people inhabiting that space, an influence that alters inhabitants to varying degrees. Through the writings of Kant, Montaigne, and Shakespeare–in particular their works What is Enlightenment?, Of Cannibals, and The Tempest, respectively–this idea of cultural influence is able to take shape. Culture is something that all people carry with them, pieces of places and people they have known and groups to which they have been a member. The natural state of people is twisted by culture until there default worldview is changed as if looking through a bias lens. All people carry with them a view of normalcy that is a product of their environments.