Twisted Histories, Altered Contexts: Representing the Chambri in the World System

by Deborah B. Gewertz , Frederick K. Errington

• ISBN13: 9780521395878
• ISBN10: 0521395879
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1991-06-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington have worked as anthropologists in Papua New Guinea for nearly two decades. In this, their second joint study of the Chambri, they consider the way those in a small-scale society, peripheral to the major centers of influence, struggle to sustain some degree of autonomy. They describe the Chambri caught up in world processes of social and cultural change, and attempt to create a "collective biography" that conveys the intelligibility and significance of the twentieth century experience of these Papua New Guineans whom they have come to know well. This biography consists of interlocking stories, twisted histories, commentaries and contexts about Chambri who are negotiating their objectives while entangled in systemic change and confronting Western representations of modernization and development.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: On writing the Chambri

1. The new traditionalism: tourism and its transformation

2. The initiation: making men in 1987

3. The town

4. Western representations at home

5. The written word

6. Negotiating the state

Conclusion: interlocking stories, intersecting lives

References

Index