Words Of The Lagoon

Words of the Lagoon is an account of the pioneering work of a marine biologist to discover, test, and record the knowledge possessed by native fisherman of the Palau Islands of Micronesia. Words of the Lagoon is an account of the pioneering work of a marine biologist to discover, test, and record the knowledge possessed by native fisherman of the Palau Islands of Micronesia.

“This is perhaps the best monograph on how Pacific islanders relate to their marine resources since Robert Johannes’s Words of the Lagoon: Fishing and Marine Lore in the Palau District of Melanesia (1981), and it stands as a major contribution to the study of indigenous marine tenure systems that should be required reading for everyone concerned with the issue of allocating marine resources.” —American Anthropologist Pacific Islands Monograph Series No. 14 Published in association with the Center for Pacific Islands Studies, University of Hawai‘i

Oceania is characterized by thousands of islands and archipelagoes amidst the vast expanse of the Pacific. Although it is one of the few truly oceanic habitats occupied permanently by humankind, surprisingly little research has been done on the maritime dimension of Pacific history. The People of the Sea attempts to fill this gap by combining neglected historical and scientific material to provide the first synthetic study of ocean-people interaction in the region from 1770 to 1870. It emphasizes Pacific Islanders' varied and evolving relationships with the sea during a crucial transitional era following sustained European contact. Countering the dominant paradigms of recent Pacific Islands' historiography, which tend to limit understanding of the sea's importance, this volume emphasizes the flux in the maritime environment and how it instilled an expectation and openness toward outside influences and the rapidity with which cultural change could occur in relations between various Islander groups. The author constructs an extended and detailed conceptual framework to examine the ways in which the sea has framed and shaped Islander societies. He looks closely at Islanders' diverse responses to their ocean environment, including the sea in daily life; sea travel and its infrastructure; maritime boundaries; protecting and contesting marine tenure; attitudes to unheralded seaborne arrivals; and conceptions of the world beyond the horizon and the willingness to voyage. He concludes by using this framework to reconsider the influence of the sea on historical processes in Oceania from 1770 to the present and discusses the implications of his findings for Pacific studies.

The book contains papers on the biology of aquatic oligochaetes and some related groups. They cover a wide range of topics including phylogeny, taxonomy, geographic distribution, freshwater and marine ecology population dynamics, histology and ultrastructure, physiology and behaviour. The wide scope is in line with recent trends in annelid research with less emphasis on pollution studies and faunistics and a renewed interest in experimental biology using new techniques.

Lagoons are characterized by an essential quality of uncertainty for use in resource management: these are physically vulnerable to various influences from not only the environment but also the adjacent marine and terrestrial areas. This book presents a variety of lessons learned from case studies from Asian countries (India, Japan and Thailand).

Constructing African Art Histories for the Lagoons of C?d'Ivoire is an investigation of the methods employed by art historians who study creative production in Africa. While providing insights into the rich visual arts of the Lagoon Peoples of southeastern C?d'Ivoire, this study is one of the few attempts by an Africanist to situate local and regional artistic practices in the context of the global art market, and to trace the varied receptions an African art work is given as it leaves a local context and enters an international one. Drawing on her three seasons of fieldwork among Akan populations in C?d'Ivoire, Monica Blackmun Vison?rovides a comprehensive account of a major art-producing region of Africa, and explores such topics as gender roles in performance, the role of sculpture in divination, and the interchange of arts and ideas across ethnic boundaries. The book also addresses issues inherent in research practices, such as connoisseurship and participant observation, and examines theoretical positions that have had an impact on the discipline of African art history.