Simon Harrison
Biographic Data
| ID | 3621877 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Simon Harrison |
| GIVEN NAMES | Simon |
| FAMILY NAME | Harrison |
| SIGNATURE | HARRISON S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Ulster |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2383-8995 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 71 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 659 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 71 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Digital mediation in ESP genres
This editorial introduces the virtual special issue on digital mediation in ESP genres, bringing together a number of studies presented at LSPPC6: the 6th International Conference of the Asia–Pacific LSP and Professional Communication Association, held in collaboration with the International Society for Gesture Studies - Hong Kong Hub and organized by the Department of English, City University of Hong Kong. The editorial examines: 1) theoretical …
Dark Trophies
Many anthropological accounts of warfare in indigenous societies have described the taking of heads or other body parts as trophies. But almost nothing is known of the prevalence of trophy-taking of this sort in the armed forces of contemporary nation-states. This book is a history of this type of misconduct among military personnel over the past two centuries, exploring its close connections with colonialism, scientific collecting and concepts o…
Chinese Urban Shi-nema
Chinese Urban Shi-nema
Shi-Story and Theory
Posthumanist Applied LinguisticsAlastairPennycook. Abingdon, England
Horace’s Mercury and Mercurial Horace
In this piece I have surveyed the various guises under which the god Mercury is presented in the poetry of Horace. Mercury is an important figure in the Odes as inventor of the lyre, a key patron of lyric poetry and divine protector of the poet; though he can be paralleled with the young Caesar at one moment, he is not to be taken as symbolizing him at others, especially in Horace’s account of Philippi in Odes 2.7. References to his epic role as …
Metaphoricity in the real estate showroom
This article adopts an ecological view of cognition to analyze the role of the environment in scaffolding metaphorical experience. Using ethnographic material collected from two real estate showrooms in China, we describe how each showroom setting is equipped with to-be-phenomenologically-experienced objects designed to stimulate desirable sensorimotor experiences and altered bodily states during the guided showroom tours. By analyzing the qualit…
All hands on deck. Negotiation over gesture forms in collaborative discourse
Spectrums of thought in gesture
This study examines the form and function of gestural depictions that develop over extended stretches of concept explanation by a philosopher. Building on Streeck’s (2009) explorations of depiction by gesture, we examine how this speaker’s process of exposition involves sequences of multimodal, analogical depiction by which the philosophical concepts are not only expressed through gesture forms, but also dynamically analyzed and construed through…
Cross-Curricular Teaching and Learning in the Secondary School… Humanities
What is the role of the humanities in the modern school? Should geography, history, RE and Citizenship teachers remain faithful to long-standing subject cultures and pedagogies? Or is there another way to consider how the curriculum, and the notion of individual subjects and teachers’ pedagogy, could be constructed? Drawing on case studies taken from a range of innovative secondary schools, and interrogating the use of cross-curricular approaches…
Dark Trophies
Many anthropological accounts of warfare in indigenous societies have described the taking of heads or other body parts as trophies. But almost nothing is known of the prevalence of trophy-taking of this sort in the armed forces of contemporary nation-states. This book is a history of this type of misconduct among military personnel over the past two centuries, exploring its close connections with colonialism, scientific collecting and concepts o…
Dark trophies
Transformations of identity in Sepik warfare
Bones in the rebel lady's boudoir
This article discusses the collection and use of enemy skulls and other bones as trophies by soldiers and their supporters in the American Civil War. This behaviour was condemned at the time as that of 'savages'. However, the author argues that it was a local symptom of the shifts taking place after the Enlightenment in the ways in which human diversity was conceptualized. Civil War soldiers who collected and displayed their enemies' remains did …
Reply to Mark Mosko
Talk About Terrorism and the Media
Journal Article Talk About Terrorism and the Media: Communicating With the Conduit Metaphor Get access Simon J. Harrison, Simon J. Harrison 1Institute of Psychological Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Zazie Todd, Zazie Todd 1Institute of Psychological Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom Search for other works by this autho…
War mementos and the souls of missing soldiers
This article discusses acts of restitutive giving, a range of practices similar to the gift except that they express sociability by reaffirming between donors and recipients the existence of social boundaries rather than connections. The particular case discussed concerns military personnel in the major wars of the twentieth century, who took personal items from the enemy dead as battle trophies. Focusing on the Pacific War, the article explores …
Skulls and Scientific Collecting in the Victorian Military
As a result of colonial wars with indigenous peoples, especially in Africa and North America, a distinction seems to have arisen in Western military culture between 'civilized' and 'savage' enemies. The behavior of civilized enemies in battle appeared rational and constrained by rules. Savage enemies, on the other hand, evinced emotional and unregulated violence. Above all, they were distinguished by an excessive brutality they seemed to display …
Identity as a scarce resource
Forgetful and memorious landscapes
Skull trophies of the Pacific War
This article discusses the use of enemy body parts as war trophies, focusing on the collection of Japanese skulls as trophies by Allied servicemen in the Second World War, and on the treatment of these objects after the war. I argue that such human trophy-taking tends to occur in societies, including modern states, in which two conditions hold: the hunting of animals is an important component of male identity; and the human status of enemies is d…
Fracturing Resemblances
Western societies draw crucially on concepts of the 'individual' in constructing their images of the ethnic group and nation and define these in terms of difference. This study explores the implications of these constructs for Western understanding of social order and ethnic conflicts. Comparing them with the forms of cultural identity characteristic of Melanesia as they have developed since pre-colonial times, the author arrives at a surprising …
Fracturing resemblances
Fracturing Resemblances
Ritual as Intellectual Property
This article discusses the existence of property rights in ritual symbolism, focusing particularly on disputes over these rights. A universe of such rights is comparable in certain respects to a prestige economy such as the Kula system. They both manifest the same conception of property as a symbolic representation of persons. Both involve contests for the control of high-status forms of property, between political actors competing for prestige a…
Identity as a scarce resource
This article aims to shed light on a relatively neglected aspect of ethnic identity politics: namely, situations in which groups contest the ownership of ethnic practices. These conflicts suggest that symbols of ethnic affiliation are most usefully interpreted as a type of 'inalienable possession', a category conceived by Annette Weiner for analysing the symbolic dimensions of property and the exchange of goods
Four Types of Symbolic Conflict
The aim of this article is to derive a theory of political symbolism from an analysis of symbolic conflict. By symbolic conflict I mean that dimension of political conflict which focuses on the manipulation of symbols. Drawing on a range of ethnographic examples, I argue that symbolic conflict is a type of competition for what Bourdieu calls symbolic capital, and that it can tab four prototypical forms: it can concern either the valuation of poli…
The Mask of War
Community against clanship dangerous friends - the Iatmul of Japandai congenial enemies - patterns of enmity and alliance war and the men's cult the ethnopsychology of war magic war and ritual hierarchy violence and the symbolic construction of polity
Like People You See in a Dream
Abbreviations Introduction Edward L. Schieffelin 1. Colonial Papua and the tradition of exploration Edward L. Schieffelin and Robert Crittenden 2. The Strickland-Purari patrol: starting out Edward L. Schieffelin and Robert Crittenden 3. The Great Papuan plateau Edward L. Schieffelin 4. Across the Tari Furoro Bryant Allen and Stephen Frankel 5. The back door to the Purari Robert Crittenden and Edward L. Schieffelin 6. From the Waga Furari to the W…
From Prestige Goods to Legacies
A great deal of research over the past decade or so has been concerned with understanding the processes of objectification of "custom" or "traditional culture" in Melanesia and other parts of the South Pacific, reifications which have accompanied, or are accompanying, the emergence of new ethnic and national identities (see, for instance, Jolly and Thomas 1992b; Keesing and Tonkinson 1982; Linnekin and Poyer 1990a; Norton 1993). As Foster (1992:2…
The Commerce of Cultures in Melanesia
Dans un nombre de localites melanesiennes, les droits de propriete sur les rituels faisaient l'objet d'echanges marchands ou de transferts inter-culturels tres formels, identiques aux echanges de biens de prestige dans les economies du don. Cet article considere les implications de ce type de transactions pour la comprehension du phenomene rituel, de l'economie politique et de l'identite culturelle au sein des societes melanesiennes
Stealing People's Names
The Manambu 2. Avatip 3. Magic and the totemic cosmology 4. Ceremonial rank 5. Male initiation 6. Treading elder brothers underfoot 7. The debating system 8. The rise of the subclan Maliyaw 9. Symbolic economies in Melanesia Bibliography Index
Ritual hierarchy and secular equality in a Sepik River village
At Avatip, a Middle Sepik society in Papua New Guinea, domesticity and male cult ritual are two alternative forms of social action, based respectively on "egalitarian" and "hierarchical" models of the social order. Ritual does not "reflect" social reality but temporarily alters it, and the power of initiated men is the power to bring hierarchy periodically into existence within the circumscribed context of ritual. [Avatip, Sepik, Melanesia, relig…
Cultural Difference as Denied Resemblance
The most important advance in the understanding of ethnic and national identity has surely been the realization of its deeply relational nature. A nation or ethnic group is not a self-defined monad of some kind, but exists in and through its interactions with others (Duara 1996; Eriksen 1993:9-12, 111; Schwartz 1975:107-8
Anthropology and Politics
The Politics Of Resemblance
This article questions the assumption that shared culture, or affiliation to shared cultural symbols, is necessarily a source of social cohesion, and that ethnic divisions are associated specifically with perceptions or attributions of difference. I argue that shared cultural symbolism can give rise to competition over its ownership or use, and that this competition can play an important role in defining ethnic boundaries, by creating what might …
Cultural Boundaries
Concepts of the Person in Avatip Religious Thought
The New Guinea Highlands
Cultural efflorescence and political evolution on the Sepik River
This paper argues that the precolonial political system of the Manambu, a people of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea, was in a process of evolving institutions of rank, and that these patterns of hereditary stratification were emerging into existence from a religious ideology based in the male initiatory system. What made ritual an important motive force of political evolution in this society, was that prestigious ritual forms had exchange val…
Skull trophies of the Pacific War
This article discusses the use of enemy body parts as war trophies, focusing on the collection of Japanese skulls as trophies by Allied servicemen in the Second World War, and on the treatment of these objects after the war. I argue that such human trophy-taking tends to occur in societies, including modern states, in which two conditions hold: the hunting of animals is an important component of male identity; and the human status of enemies is d…
Anthropological Perspectives
Selon les societes occidentales et non-occidentales, la connaissance et l'information n'ont de valeur que si elles sont peu ou tres repandues mais dans la pratique une bonne gestion de l'information doit trouver un equilibre entre ces deux systemes comme le montre le parallele effectue entre les clans des Manambu de Nouvelle-Guinee, les compagnies d'informatique et les Universites. Quant a la notion de propriete, elle a une dimension plus morale,…
The Symbolic Construction of Aggression and War in a Sepik River Society
Avatip concepts of aggression are not of an innate drive held in check by normative constraints, but of a temporary ritual transformation of the self, and draw on imagery of masking and spirit-impersonation. The reason is that Avatip take peaceful sociality for granted and see war not as a failure or absence of that sociality but as an attempt by men to overcome it and define sociality in an alternative way: as based on inequalities of a ritually…
Magical and Material Polities in Melanesia
At Avatip, on the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea, the main forum of political competition between groups are debates, similar to those described by Bateson in his study of the neighbouring latmul, in which men dispute the ownership of totems and ancestral names. These contests are compared with the competitive transactions of wealth made in many other Melanesian societies, such as those of the Papua New Guinea Highlands. The two systems express …
The Anthropology of War
Skulls and Scientific Collecting in the Victorian Military
As a result of colonial wars with indigenous peoples, especially in Africa and North America, a distinction seems to have arisen in Western military culture between 'civilized' and 'savage' enemies. The behavior of civilized enemies in battle appeared rational and constrained by rules. Savage enemies, on the other hand, evinced emotional and unregulated violence. Above all, they were distinguished by an excessive brutality they seemed to display …
Feuding and Warfare
War mementos and the souls of missing soldiers
This article discusses acts of restitutive giving, a range of practices similar to the gift except that they express sociability by reaffirming between donors and recipients the existence of social boundaries rather than connections. The particular case discussed concerns military personnel in the major wars of the twentieth century, who took personal items from the enemy dead as battle trophies. Focusing on the Pacific War, the article explores …
Smoke Rising from the Villages of the Dead
This article discusses seasonal patterns of mood in a Papua New Guinea society, showing how these are connected with beliefs relating to cosmology and the afterlife, and with more abstract conceptions of personhood, sociality, and attachment. The argument suggests that cultural factors may play an important role in mediating the influences of seasonal changes on everyday moods, and that such moods may be complex socio-cultural constructs
Autumn On The Sepik River
A note on avatip children and the new moon
Yams and the Symbolic Representation of Time in a Sepik River Village
New Guinea Highland Social Structure in a Lowland Totemic Mythology
Names, Ghosts and Alliance in Two Sepik River Societies
Concepts of the Person in Avatip Religious Thought
Ritual hierarchy and secular equality in a Sepik River village
At Avatip, a Middle Sepik society in Papua New Guinea, domesticity and male cult ritual are two alternative forms of social action, based respectively on "egalitarian" and "hierarchical" models of the social order. Ritual does not "reflect" social reality but temporarily alters it, and the power of initiated men is the power to bring hierarchy periodically into existence within the circumscribed context of ritual. [Avatip, Sepik, Melanesia, relig…
Laments for Foiled Marriages
A Sepik Bachelor And The Mail-Order Love-Magic Of Australia
Cultural efflorescence and political evolution on the Sepik River
This paper argues that the precolonial political system of the Manambu, a people of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea, was in a process of evolving institutions of rank, and that these patterns of hereditary stratification were emerging into existence from a religious ideology based in the male initiatory system. What made ritual an important motive force of political evolution in this society, was that prestigious ritual forms had exchange val…
Armageddon in New Guinea
realize that nearly all of the history books in the various South African school systems ignore these same facts of resistance because they would give historical base to a just struggle against the ruling regime. By perpetuating concepts of biological determinism without examining whether their data in fact support such a conclusion, Nurse, Jenkins and Weiner open their writings to be used in support of legalized racial discrimination in South Af…
Magical Exchange of the Preconditions of Production in a Sepik River Village
In the Papua New Guinea Lowland community of Avatip, as in many New Guinea Highland societies, politics revolves around male-controlled ceremonial transactions of material resources between groups. The difference is that at Avatip these are magical and ritual exchanges of natural fertility made by hereditary magicians, rather than exchanges of wealth by Big Men. The key material values men in Avatip society represent themselves as controlling are…
The Symbolic Construction of Aggression and War in a Sepik River Society
Avatip concepts of aggression are not of an innate drive held in check by normative constraints, but of a temporary ritual transformation of the self, and draw on imagery of masking and spirit-impersonation. The reason is that Avatip take peaceful sociality for granted and see war not as a failure or absence of that sociality but as an attempt by men to overcome it and define sociality in an alternative way: as based on inequalities of a ritually…
The Anthropology of War
Magical and Material Polities in Melanesia
At Avatip, on the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea, the main forum of political competition between groups are debates, similar to those described by Bateson in his study of the neighbouring latmul, in which men dispute the ownership of totems and ancestral names. These contests are compared with the competitive transactions of wealth made in many other Melanesian societies, such as those of the Papua New Guinea Highlands. The two systems express …
Stealing People's Names
Among the people of Avatip, a community in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, the most prestigious and valued forms of wealth are personal names. In this intriguing study, Simon Harrison analyses the significance of names in the context of Avatip ritual, cosmology and concepts of the person, and shows how the Avatip system of names parallels the gift-exchange systems of many other Melanesian societies. In ritualized debates, which form the pub…
Melanesian Initiation as a Challenge to Psychoanalytic TheoryOedipus in the Stone Age
Anthropology and Politics
Stealing People's Names
The Manambu 2. Avatip 3. Magic and the totemic cosmology 4. Ceremonial rank 5. Male initiation 6. Treading elder brothers underfoot 7. The debating system 8. The rise of the subclan Maliyaw 9. Symbolic economies in Melanesia Bibliography Index
Stealing People's Names
Ritual as Intellectual Property
This article discusses the existence of property rights in ritual symbolism, focusing particularly on disputes over these rights. A universe of such rights is comparable in certain respects to a prestige economy such as the Kula system. They both manifest the same conception of property as a symbolic representation of persons. Both involve contests for the control of high-status forms of property, between political actors competing for prestige a…
Partial Connections
This article explores the concept of "partial connections" as a way of understanding the relationship between Melanesian and Western forms of sociality. Harrison and Strathern argue against the tendency to view Melanesian societies through the lens of Western kinship models, which often emphasize boundedness and exclusivity. Instead, they propose that Melanesian social relations are characterized by a fluidity and partiality that defy easy catego…
Like People You See in a Dream
Abbreviations Introduction Edward L. Schieffelin 1. Colonial Papua and the tradition of exploration Edward L. Schieffelin and Robert Crittenden 2. The Strickland-Purari patrol: starting out Edward L. Schieffelin and Robert Crittenden 3. The Great Papuan plateau Edward L. Schieffelin 4. Across the Tari Furoro Bryant Allen and Stephen Frankel 5. The back door to the Purari Robert Crittenden and Edward L. Schieffelin 6. From the Waga Furari to the W…
Just Talk
Southern New Guinea as a Culture Area South Coast New Guinea Cultures
History (38 works) · Sociology (36 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (22 works) · History (22 works) · Computer Science (19 works) · Political science (17 works) · Anthropology (16 works) · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies (16 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs (14 works)