Quadripartite Structures: Categories, Relations and Homologies in Bush Mekeo Culture

by Mark S. Mosko

• ISBN13: 9780521105385
• ISBN10: 0521105382
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-03-19
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• More Book Details

Summary

Despite almost a century of contact with Europeans, the Bush Mekeo people of Papua New Guinea are still essentially unknown to the anthropological world. This book was the first detailed, comprehensive study of Bush Mekeo culture and society. Using a rigourous structuralist approach to interpret in a consistent and systematic way the principal meanings and social practices of this South Seas way of life, Mark Mosko provides a convincing portrayal of Bush Mekeo culture and society as a unified, coherent and logical 'whole'. The main force of the book is to explore empirically the logic by which Bush Mekeo symbols are connected. Beginning with native symbolic constructions of space and time, Professor Mosko carefully unfolds the associated beliefs and practices pertaining to the body, to the relations between genders, to the system of social organisation and to the dramatic and resplendent Bush Mekeo mortuary ceremonial.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction: the problem and the people

Between village and bush

Body and cosmos

Sex, procreation and menstruation

Male and female

Kin, clan and connubium

Feasts of death: de-conception and re-conception

Feasts of death: the sons of Akaisa

Tikopia and the Trobriands

Conclusions, indigenous categories, cultural wholes and historical process

Appendices

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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