Mimesis And Pacific Transcultural Encounters

How do images circulating in Pacific cultures and exchanged between them and their many visitors transform meanings for all involved? This fascinating collection explores how through mimesis, wayfarers and locales alike borrow images from one another to expand their cultural repertoire of meanings or borrow images from their own past to validate their identities.

The insular Pacific is a region saturated with great cultural diversity and poignant memories of colonial and Christian intrusion. Considering authenticity and authorship in the area, this book looks at how these ideas have manifested themselves in Pacific peoples and cultures. Through six rich complementary case studies, a theoretical introduction, and a critical afterword, this volume explores authenticity and authorship as “traveling concepts.” The book reveals diverse and surprising outcomes which shed light on how Pacific identity has changed from the past to the present.

Based on over a decade of research, this book connects dream studies to cognitive anthropology, to perspectives in the humanities on mimesis, ambiguity, and metaphor, to current dream research in psychology, and to recent work in economic and political relations. Traveling the dreamscapes of a variety of young people, Mimesis and the Dream explores their encounters with American cultures and the identities that derive from these encounters. While ethnographies typically concern shared social habits and practices, this book concerns shared aspects of subjectivity and how people represent and think about them in dreams. Each chapter grounds theory in actual cases. It will be compelling to scholars in multiple disciplines and illustrates how dreaming offers insights into twenty-first century debates and problems within these disciplines, bringing a vital theoretically eclectic approach to dream studies.

This book presents new directions in contemporary anthropological dream research, surveying recent theorizations of dreaming that are developing both in and outside of anthropology. It incorporates new findings in neuroscience and philosophy of mind while demonstrating that dreams emerge from and comment on sociohistorical and cultural contexts. The chapters are written by prominent anthropologists working at the intersection of culture and consciousness who conduct ethnographic research in a variety of settings around the world, and reflect how dreaming is investigated by a range of informants in ever more diverse sites. As well as theorizing the dream in light of current anthropological and psychological research, the volume accounts for local dream theories and how they are situated within distinct cultural ontologies. It considers dreams as a resource for investigating and understanding cultural change; dreaming as a mode of thinking through, contesting, altering, consolidating, or escaping from identity; and the nature of dream mentation. In proposing new theoretical approaches to dreaming, the editors situate the topic within the recent call for an "anthropology of the night" and illustrate how dreams offer insight into current debates within anthropology’s mainstream. This up-to-date book defines a twenty-first century approach to culture and the dream that will be relevant to scholars from anthropology as well as other disciplines such as religious studies, the neurosciences, and psychology.

Pacific populations are becoming younger and this ‘youth bulge’ is often perceived as a dangerous precursor to civil unrest. Yet young people are also a valuable resource holding exciting potential for the future of island nations. Addressing these conflicting views of youth, this volume presents ethnographic case studies of young people from across the Pacific and the diaspora. Moving beyond the typical focus on ‘youth problems’ in reports by Pacific governments and development agencies, the authors examine the highly diverse lives and perspectives of young people in urban and rural locations. They celebrate the contributions of youth to their communities while examining the challenges they face. The case studies explore the impacts of profound local and global changes and cover a wide sweep of youth experiences across themes of education, employment and economic inequalities, political and civil engagement, and migration and the diaspora. Contributors to this volume bring many decades of experience of research with Pacific people as well as fresh perspectives from early career and graduate researchers. Most are anthropologists and their chapters contribute to the interdisciplinary fields of youth studies and Pacific studies, offering thought-provoking insights into the possibilities for Pacific youth as they face uncertain futures.

This book considers how Samoans embraced and reshaped the English game of cricket, recasting it as a distinctively Samoan pastime, kirikiti. Starting with cricket’s introduction to the islands in 1879, it uses both cricket and kirikiti to trace six decades of contest between and within the categories of ‘colonisers’ and ‘colonised.’ How and why did Samoans adapt and appropriate the imperial game? How did officials, missionaries, colonists, soldiers and those with mixed foreign and Samoan heritage understand and respond to the real and symbolic challenges kirikiti presented? And how did Samoans use both games to navigate foreign colonialism(s)? By investigating these questions, Benjamin Sacks suggests alternative frameworks for conceptualising sporting transfer and adoption, and advances understandings of how power, politics and identity were manifested through sport, in Samoa and across the globe.

Gambling in Papua New Guinea, despite being completely absent prior to the Colonial era, has come to supersede storytelling as the region’s main nighttime activity. Money Games is an ethnographic monograph which reveals the contemporary importance of gambling in urban Papua New Guinea. Rich ethnographic detail is coupled with cross-cultural comparison which span the globe. This anthropological study of everyday economics in Melanesia thereby intersects with theories of money, value, play, informal economy, social change and leadership.

For the last five decades, the Dani of the central highlands of West Papua, along with other Papuans, have struggled with the oppressive conditions of Indonesian rule. Formal education holds the promise of escape from stigmatization and violence. Dreams Made Small offers an in-depth, ethnographic look at journeys of education among young Dani men and women, asking us to think differently about education as a trajectory for transformation and belonging, and ultimately revealing how dreams of equality are shaped and reshaped in the face of multiple constraints.