P Roscoe
Biographic Data
| ID | 3611 |
|---|---|
| NAME | P Roscoe |
| GIVEN NAMES | P |
| FAMILY NAME | Roscoe |
| SIGNATURE | ROSCOE P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Maine |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3070-1540 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 59 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 456 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 59 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
The Emergence of Leadership, Power, and Prestige
Problematizing 'alliance' in anthropological archaeology
Alliances are critical components of human sociality, often essential to social existence itself. It is no surprise therefore that alliance crops up everywhere in anthropological and archaeological discourse. Yet scholarship on alliance consists largely of case studies rather than analytical discussion of the phenomenon itself. While alliances can be difficult to identify with confidence in the archaeological record, they are too important in hum…
The Plot against Mt Hurun
The Global Dynamics of Inequality (Gini) project
The GINI project investigates the dynamics of inequality among populations over the long term by synthesising global archaeological housing data. This project brings archaeologists together from around the world to assess hypotheses concerning the causes and consequences of inequality that are of relevance to contemporary societies globally
Social Substitutability and the Emergence of War and Segmental, Multilevel Society
Power Theory and the Rise and Reproduction of Patriarchy in Contact-Era New Guinea
Social Signaling and the Warrior-Big-Man among the Western Dani
Positivism
In the early 1970s, “positivism” began to morph from a term referring to a long‐standing social philosophy into a pejorative identifying an epistemology and practice that, by advocating and executing a “scientific” approach to the study of society, had led cultural anthropology catastrophically astray. This antipositivist critique was useful in correcting excesses in this “scientific” approach. At the same time, it helped broker the introduction …
Foragers and War in Contact-Era New Guinea
This chapter evaluates the arguments that feuding and war are comparatively recent human innovations using data on a set of simple foragers that have been consistently overlooked: the hunters and gatherers of New Guinea. It argues that there are problems with some of the definitional and theoretical underpinnings to Douglas Fry&s;s argument. The chapter shows that even when people set these reservations aside, they can plausibly infer from the Ne…
Method, Measurement, and Management in IPCC Climate Modeling
Economizing Habitus
Pierre Bourdieu's classical sociology and the actor network-based 'economization' literature are often considered contradictory, despite some agreement on the constructed nature of economic man. Through an examination of the publishing industry, we argue that Bourdieu's concept of habitus may offer a useful contribution to the literature on economization. We examine how those new to a field come to understand their position and the role of materi…
A Changing Climate for Anthropological and Archaeological Research? Improving the Climate-Change Models
Climate change is the latest in a dismaying series of challenges that industrialism and modernity have gifted to humanity. To date, anthropological and archaeological responses have focused largely on the culturally particular-that is, on the interactions of climate, environment, cultural schema, and social systems in specific locales and eras. In this article, I urge a complementary response that capitalizes on archaeology and anthropology's hol…
Social Signaling, Conflict Management, and the Construction of Peace
This chapter addresses the political dimensions of peace. What are the processes that generate and maintain peace within every political community? And what are the processes—economic, diplomatic/political, cultural, ideological—that maintain peace between allied communities (or even, for that matter, between communities linked in cold war relations)? The chapter focuses on small-scale societies, documenting in ethnographic detail the working of …
Cooperation and Collective Action in the Cultural Evolution of Complex Societies
Introduction
In 2007, Donald Francis (Don) Tuzin died at the age of sixty-one. We who knew him as students and colleagues or simply admired his work from afar lost an anthropologist's anthropologist-a kind that has gone out of fashion, to say the least. He combined the interests of a generalist with the skills of an experienced field ethnographer. His work drew from and contributed to archaeology as well as reflexive anthropology. Driven by methodological ind…
Dead Birds
Thanks in part to the filmDead Birds, the theatrical and largely innocuous battles fought by the Dugum Dani of New Guinea are regarded as a classic instance of restrained or "ritualized" combat. This impression is misplaced. Participants were trying to kill one another, but the waterlogged terrain of the mid-Baliem Valley blunted their ability to do so. If they were to engage on a large scale, Dani armies had to prearrange confrontations on one o…
Symbolic Violence and Ceremonial Peace
Social Signaling and the Organization of Small-Scale Society
Manuscript XXI
On the ‘Pacification’ of the European Neolithic
In this journal, Spriggs has recently criticized the use of anthropological ethnographies from New Guinea as a source of analogy for the archaeology of the European Neolithic, arguing that they fail to reckon with how radically colonialism had changed New Guinea's communities by the time anthropological fieldwork got under way. Old World archaeologists looking to the Pacific for analogical inspiration, he suggests, would do better to look to its …
Hot air and the Colonialist 'Other
Images of the exotic 'Other' are widely recognized in anthropology as part of an 'intellectual technology' by which colonialism extended and maintained its control over imperial frontiers. For want of analysis, however, another kind of Other still languishes in anthropology: the Domestic Colonialist. In standard analytical narratives, this figure and the milieu in which it operated are still drawn in radically homogenized terms. In actuality, the…
Settlement fortification in village and ‘tribal’ society
The Comparative Method
The comparative method is a formalization of the comparison that is unavoidable in any attempt at cross-cultural analysis. Yet, the comparative method has generated considerable controversy in religious studies. This article reviews the issues raised about comparison in anthropology, the social science that has as its enduring goal a holistic understanding of all human societies and that consequently has made greater use of comparison - and accor…
Emergent Warfare in Our Evolutionary Past
Kim and Kissel’s hypothesis in this excellent book on emergent warfare is that “organized violence” has deep – likely biological – roots but “war is a cultural invention” (p205). This seemingly par
Mythic Images and Objects of Myth in Rauto Female Puberty Ritual
Cooperation and Collective Action in the Cultural Evolution of Complex Societies
Practice and Political Centralisation
The Hunters and Gatherers of New Guinea
Social Signaling and the Organization of Small-Scale Society
War and Society in Sepik New Guinea
Un certain nombre de chercheurs melanesianistes ont recemment accuse les theories occidentales du lien social et de la violence - qui derivent, selon eux, d'ideologies servant a legitimer les societes etatiques - de deformer nos analyses des societes sans etat, en particulier des communautes melanesiennes. Harrison a montre que la notion de personne dans la region du Sepik est tout a fait differente de la conception occidentale et qu'elle engendr…
Of Power and Menace
The anthropological analysis of art is still dominated by a notion that the artistic creations of traditional societies communicate intellectual meanings or 'messages' that are implicated in the reproduction of culture and society. In this article, I argue that frequently this approach is at best incomplete, at worst untenably functional. Using as illustration the ka nimbia spirit house produced by the Yangoru Boiken of the East Sepik Province, P…
The Perils of 'Positivism' in Cultural Anthropology
Positivism,' it seems, is a movement that cultural anthropology can do without. But what is positivism, who are these positivists, and what precisely are their sins? Notwithstanding appearances to the contrary, the image of positivism in cultural anthropology is comparatively coherent and the criticism directed at it relatively well founded. What is dubious is the conclusion to which many critics think it leads: that the methods of the natural sc…
Intelligence, Coalitional Killing, and the Antecedents of War
Advances in primatological research have recently led to a hypothesis that lethal coalitionary raiding in chimpanzees is the product of an evolutionarily adaptive "dominance drive" that disposes adult males to seek out low-cost opportunities for conspecific killing. This conclusion has been extended into a claim that human warfare and other forms of coalitional killing are outcomes of a hardwired, "demonic male" complex. Reversing this evidential…
New Guinea Leadership as Ethnographic Analogy
Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune, and Mountain Arapesh Warfare
In Sex and Temperament, Margaret Mead depicted the Mountain Arapesh of New Guinea as a gentle, nurturant people among whom warfare was "practically unknown." A few years later, however, Reo Fortune, her husband and cofieldworker, was to claim that warfare was "good Arapesh custom." This article reexamines this disagreement, addressing two issues: Did the Arapesh have a tradition of warfare?, and How do we reconcile the differences in Mead and For…
The Bow and Spreadnet
Mbuti bands in eastern Zaire differ in their hunting use of the spreadnet and the bow, a variation previously attributed to historical contacts with different non-Mbuti groups, population pressure, and differences in the floral diversity and abundance of the Ituri Forest. None of these factors, however, adequately explains a similar differentiation in the Sepik Basin of Papua New Guinea. Instead, the Sepik data indicate that the net and the bow m…
On the edge of empire
Military brokers have played a decisive role in human affairs, but pragmatic obstacles make this an exceedingly difficult phenomenon to examine. Capitalizing on an unpublished documentary archive of interviews conducted in the early 1970s, we attempt a partial reconstruction of three barely known but consequential episodes of military brokerage in the early encounter between empire and the Middle Sepik people of New Guinea. In these incidents, "e…
Fish, Game, and the Foundations of Complexity in Forager Society
Drawing ethnographic data from the foraging communities of New Guinea, an underused resource in hunter-gatherer research, this article examines the relationship between subsistence form and four aspects of cultural complexity: density, settlement size, settlement form, and settlement permanence. On the basis of global data, it is commonly proposed that in forager communities, these characteristics are directly related to the degree of dependence …
The People of the Lower Arafundi
Ethnographic work in the Sepik Basin of New Guinea has been heavily biased toward the region's more dense and culturally elaborated communities. This article uses archival documentation and the results of rapid ethnographic surveys to reconstruct the contactera ethnography of one of its lesser-known groups, the Lower Arafundi. The Lower Arafundi people were ethnographically significant as foragers of the tropical rainforest, as progenitors of a r…
Amity and Aggression
Dernierement, les recherches sur l'inceste se sont de plus en plus centrees sur l'hypothese d'Edward Westermarck (l'intimite enfantine forme un element decisif de l'aversion pour l'inceste, de son evitement et des tabous garantissant sa prohibition) : cette approche est insuffisante. L'A. defend l'idee que l'aversion pour l'inceste se developpe entre ceux qui, ayant pu faire l'experience de l'entente familiale, peuvent eprouver de l'amitie l'un p…
Sepik Culture History
A Changing Climate for Anthropological and Archaeological Research? Improving the Climate-Change Models
Climate change is the latest in a dismaying series of challenges that industrialism and modernity have gifted to humanity. To date, anthropological and archaeological responses have focused largely on the culturally particular-that is, on the interactions of climate, environment, cultural schema, and social systems in specific locales and eras. In this article, I urge a complementary response that capitalizes on archaeology and anthropology's hol…
Social Archaeology and the Irrational [and Comments and Reply]
Dead Birds
Thanks in part to the filmDead Birds, the theatrical and largely innocuous battles fought by the Dugum Dani of New Guinea are regarded as a classic instance of restrained or "ritualized" combat. This impression is misplaced. Participants were trying to kill one another, but the waterlogged terrain of the mid-Baliem Valley blunted their ability to do so. If they were to engage on a large scale, Dani armies had to prearrange confrontations on one o…
The far side of Hurun
Investigations of Melanesia's so-called cargo cults tend to concentrate on the circumstances under which millenarian contexts of belief, attitude, and value are generated. In themselves, though, contexts do not precipitate millenarian movements. Instead, as the millenarian history of the Yangoru Boiken, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea indicates, movements must be constructed from millenarian milieus, a process requiring that leaders not onl…
Mythic Images and Objects of Myth in Rauto Female Puberty Ritual
On the ‘Pacification’ of the European Neolithic
In this journal, Spriggs has recently criticized the use of anthropological ethnographies from New Guinea as a source of analogy for the archaeology of the European Neolithic, arguing that they fail to reckon with how radically colonialism had changed New Guinea's communities by the time anthropological fieldwork got under way. Old World archaeologists looking to the Pacific for analogical inspiration, he suggests, would do better to look to its …
The Pig and the Long Yam
That human communities cannot be treated a mosaic of isolated cultural permutations has been realized for some time. Rather, they are embedded in larger systems of relations which increasingly have become the focus of anthropological study in their own right. To date, the main work in this area is by political economists who have attempted to elucidate the interrelations of local economies and polities, usually out of an interest in the effects o…
Problematizing 'alliance' in anthropological archaeology
Alliances are critical components of human sociality, often essential to social existence itself. It is no surprise therefore that alliance crops up everywhere in anthropological and archaeological discourse. Yet scholarship on alliance consists largely of case studies rather than analytical discussion of the phenomenon itself. While alliances can be difficult to identify with confidence in the archaeological record, they are too important in hum…
The Comparative Method
The comparative method is a formalization of the comparison that is unavoidable in any attempt at cross-cultural analysis. Yet, the comparative method has generated considerable controversy in religious studies. This article reviews the issues raised about comparison in anthropology, the social science that has as its enduring goal a holistic understanding of all human societies and that consequently has made greater use of comparison - and accor…
Sepik Culture History
The far side of Hurun
Investigations of Melanesia's so-called cargo cults tend to concentrate on the circumstances under which millenarian contexts of belief, attitude, and value are generated. In themselves, though, contexts do not precipitate millenarian movements. Instead, as the millenarian history of the Yangoru Boiken, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea indicates, movements must be constructed from millenarian milieus, a process requiring that leaders not onl…
The Flight From the Fen
This paper has two goals. Its specific aim is to establish the prehistoric migrations of the Boiken people of the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, using a large corpus of Boiken settlement histories supplemented by linguistic, genetic, and ecological data. In the course of the analysis, a method of applying cluster techniques to detect underlying directional patterns in settlement histories is demonstrated. The migration history thus reveal…
The Pig and the Long Yam
That human communities cannot be treated a mosaic of isolated cultural permutations has been realized for some time. Rather, they are embedded in larger systems of relations which increasingly have become the focus of anthropological study in their own right. To date, the main work in this area is by political economists who have attempted to elucidate the interrelations of local economies and polities, usually out of an interest in the effects o…
The Bow and Spreadnet
Mbuti bands in eastern Zaire differ in their hunting use of the spreadnet and the bow, a variation previously attributed to historical contacts with different non-Mbuti groups, population pressure, and differences in the floral diversity and abundance of the Ituri Forest. None of these factors, however, adequately explains a similar differentiation in the Sepik Basin of Papua New Guinea. Instead, the Sepik data indicate that the net and the bow m…
Warfare, terrain, and political expansion
Practice and Political Centralisation
The Net and the Bow in the Ituri
Settlement and Sociality among the Mountain Arapesh
Thanks to the early ethnographic work Margaret Mead and Reo Fortune, the Arapesh the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, have become one the standard exemplars human culture. They constitute one 30 New Guinea cases in the Ethnographic Atlas, they have featured in numerous comparative analyses, and, thanks to Mead's Sex and Temperament (reprinted numerous times since its appearance in 1935), they are perhaps better known to western lay audience…
Amity and Aggression
Dernierement, les recherches sur l'inceste se sont de plus en plus centrees sur l'hypothese d'Edward Westermarck (l'intimite enfantine forme un element decisif de l'aversion pour l'inceste, de son evitement et des tabous garantissant sa prohibition) : cette approche est insuffisante. L'A. defend l'idee que l'aversion pour l'inceste se developpe entre ceux qui, ayant pu faire l'experience de l'entente familiale, peuvent eprouver de l'amitie l'un p…
Cargo Cult Strange Stories of Desire from Melanesia and Beyond. Lament Lindstrom
Familiar Partners? The Mountain Arapesh and the Westermarck Effect
In her work on the Mountain Arapesh of New Guinea, Margaret Mead reported a betrothal practice in which a small girl goes to live with a future husband and is raised with him like a sister. The case has since played an unusual role in the anthropological debate about incest, having been used both to support and refute Edward Westermarck's "childhood-socialization" hypothesis of incest avoidance. Drawing upon the published Mountain Arapesh record …
Of Power and Menace
The anthropological analysis of art is still dominated by a notion that the artistic creations of traditional societies communicate intellectual meanings or 'messages' that are implicated in the reproduction of culture and society. In this article, I argue that frequently this approach is at best incomplete, at worst untenably functional. Using as illustration the ka nimbia spirit house produced by the Yangoru Boiken of the East Sepik Province, P…
The Perils of 'Positivism' in Cultural Anthropology
Positivism,' it seems, is a movement that cultural anthropology can do without. But what is positivism, who are these positivists, and what precisely are their sins? Notwithstanding appearances to the contrary, the image of positivism in cultural anthropology is comparatively coherent and the criticism directed at it relatively well founded. What is dubious is the conclusion to which many critics think it leads: that the methods of the natural sc…
Social Archaeology and the Irrational [and Comments and Reply]
Oceanic Art
War and Society in Sepik New Guinea
Un certain nombre de chercheurs melanesianistes ont recemment accuse les theories occidentales du lien social et de la violence - qui derivent, selon eux, d'ideologies servant a legitimer les societes etatiques - de deformer nos analyses des societes sans etat, en particulier des communautes melanesiennes. Harrison a montre que la notion de personne dans la region du Sepik est tout a fait differente de la conception occidentale et qu'elle engendr…
Anthropology in the New Melanesia
Social Reproduction and History in Melanesia: Mortuary Ritual, Gift Exchange, and Custom in the Tanga Islands. Robert J. Foster Nation Making: Emergent Identities in Postcolonial Melanesia. Robert J. Foster
The Return of the Ambush
Over the last 15 years or so, ‘raskols’ have become a prominent feature of the cultural scene in Papua New Guinea and have prompted a number of academic studies, focussed mostly on urban crime. This paper documents and analyses a dramatic rise of raskolism in a rural setting, the Yangoru Subdistrict of the East Sepik Province. It seeks to describe how interactions between raskols and the population they exploit evolved, and it focusses on why Yan…
New Guinea Leadership as Ethnographic Analogy
History, Ethnogeography, and the “last unknown
Bonnemaison, Joël. The Tree and the Canoe: History and Ethnogeography of Tanna. Josée Pénot‐Demeiry, transi. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994. xxiv + 368 pp. including notes, glossary, references, and index. $36.00 cloth. Errington, Frederick K. and Deborah B. Gewertz. Articulating Change in the “Last Unknown.” Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995. xvii + 196 pp. including references and index. $59.95 cloth, $19.95 paper
“Strength” and Sexuality
This chapter examines the correlation between sexual continence, abstinence, and separation on the one hand, and masculine aggressivity and strength on the other, in the Amazonian and Melanesian cultures. It argues that “sexual avoidances are part of the means by which males temporarily or more permanently constitute themselves as strong.” Furthermore, the chapter shows that the essence of masculinity includes not only strength and courage, but a…
The Hunters and Gatherers of New Guinea
Commentary
Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune, and Mountain Arapesh Warfare
In Sex and Temperament, Margaret Mead depicted the Mountain Arapesh of New Guinea as a gentle, nurturant people among whom warfare was "practically unknown." A few years later, however, Reo Fortune, her husband and cofieldworker, was to claim that warfare was "good Arapesh custom." This article reexamines this disagreement, addressing two issues: Did the Arapesh have a tradition of warfare?, and How do we reconcile the differences in Mead and For…
History (38 works) · Sociology (37 works) · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies (27 works) · History (26 works) · Ethnology (21 works) · Geography (20 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (18 works) · Anthropology (18 works) · New guinea (18 works) · Political science (18 works)