C Toren
Biographic Data
| ID | 8299 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Toren |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Toren |
| SIGNATURE | TOREN C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of St Andrews |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1722-5869 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 383 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Haciendo historia
This article argues that a rigorous comparative anthropology of mind requires recognizing ontogeny as a historical process. Such recognition, in turn, entails dissolving the established dichotomies between biology and culture, and between individual and society, which have been fundamental to theories of mind in the social sciences. An analysis of four ethnographic cases in which the meanings constructed by children are direct inversions of those…
How Ritual Articulates Kinship
Introduction. Culture, Context and Anthropologists’ Accounts
The relationship between anthropologists’ ethnographic investigations and the lived social worlds in which these originate is a fundamental issue for anthropology. Where some claim that only native voices may offer authentic accounts of culture and hence that ethnographers are only ever interpreters of it, others point out that anthropologists are, themselves, implanted within specific cultural contexts which generate particular kinds of theoreti…
Six… The Effectiveness of Ritual
Anthropology as the Whole Science of What It Is to Be Human
To claim that anthropology is “the whole science of what it is to be human” is not to be merely provocative. Rather, it seems important to draw attention to anthropology as science at this juncture in the history of the discipline, when it would appear to some to have been eclipsed by the rise of cultural studies, on the one hand, and of cognitive science, on the other. For a human scientist, words are analytical tools, so one wants to be able to…
Como nos tornamos quem somos
Professora emérita do Departamento de Antropologia Social da University of St. Andrews e diretora fundadora do Centre for Pacific Studies, Christina Toren tem atuado de modo determinante no traçado dos novos rumos da antropologia contemporânea. Suas contribuições aos estudos de Fiji/Pacífico, socialidade, parentesco e noções de pessoa, ontogenia como processo histórico, e epistemologia, são notáveis, e nortearam profundas reformulações teóricas e…
How we become who we are
Professor Emeritus of the Department of Social Anthropology at University of St. Andrews and founding director of the Center for Pacific Studies, Christina Toren has been instrumental in charting the new directions of contemporary anthropology. Her contributions to the study of Fiji and the Pacific, sociality, kinship and ideas of the person, ontogeny as historical process, and epistemology, are remarkable, and have guided profound theoretical re…
How Ritual Articulates Kinship
What is a schema
Comment on Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond nature and culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd with a foreword by Marshall Sahlins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Anthropology and Psychology
Sociality
Imagining the World that Warrants Our Imagination
Antropologia e psicologia
The Stuff of Imagination
Comparison and ontogeny
A matéria da imaginação
Por meio de uma análise de redações de crianças fijianas sobre o futuro, este artigo examina ideias de socialidade, pessoalidade e self que constituem a matéria mesmo da intersubjetividade e, portanto, da imaginação. O material aqui apresentado toca em um único aspecto dos dados derivados de 75 redações de crianças fijianas, moradoras de aldeias, entre 7 e 15 anos de idade, coletados em abril de 2005: a constituição, ao longo do tempo, de uma ori…
What Is Happening to Epistemology
Anthropologists debate the primacy of epistemology over ontology, and vice versa, or whether the one is bound always to implicate the other. Our collective and personal history, however, makes the lived world what it is for us, and not all explicit knowledge is constituted in the same way, with the same purposes in mind and within the same sets of binding parameters. Thus, the task of ethnography is to inquire into the different nature of the dif…
Intersubjectivity as Epistemology
By means of a tale of food poisoning as retribution, this article describes a kind of reasoning that consciously defies commonsense logic. The lived validity of this form of reasoning emphasizes the necessity of an epistemology for anthropology that puts the analysis of relations between people at the heart of our understanding of human reasoning and its ontogeny. An ethnographic analysis of how certain island Fijians give form to kinship relatio…
Sunday Lunch in Fiji
In this article, I compare drawings of "Sunday lunch" produced by Fijian village children in 1990 and 2005 and their responses to prepared drawings in 1982, which show remarkable continuity over time. I suggest this continuity is largely attributable to the ritualization of eating practices. At the same time, the children's data indicate that a substantive, if subtle, change is occurring in ideas of the inclusiveness of the household; I suggest t…
The Effectiveness of Ritual
Como sabemos o que é verdade? O caso do mana em Fiji
A análise de uma conversa particular que se deu em Fiji sugere que sabemos o que é verdade basicamente por aquilo que se evidencia aos nossos olhos e aos de outras pessoas. Mesmo assim, nesse caso fijiano, a verdade não é necessariamente a priori, não é sempre dada na natureza das coisas. Em certos casos - a feitiçaria, por exemplo - o que é verdade permanece por ser descoberto. Isso também se aplica à questão de saber se as palavras e os atos de…
Laughter and Truth in Fiji
This paper examines a series of events which took place in a Fijian village in the late 1980s and which, for the ethnographer, brought into question joking, lying and telling the truth. The analysis suggests that our ideas of what language is good for necessarily inform our understanding of the truth conditions of what is said, from which it follows that truth may be regarded not as an absolute, but as a function of the moral force of language — …
Mind, Materiality and History
This book explores the complex relationship between mind, materiality, and history in Fijian ethnography. Christina Toren challenges conventional anthropological approaches that separate material culture from mental processes, arguing for a more integrated understanding of how Fijians engage with their world. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, she examines how objects, landscapes, and historical narratives are intertwined with Fijian concepts of per…
Do Babies Have Culture
Alma Gottlieb. The Afterlife Is Where We Come From: The Culture of Infancy in West Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. '[B]efore local officials of the Ivoirian government ordered all thatch-roofed houses to be destroyed in the late 1960s, the Beng [of the Côte d'Ivoire] lived in large, round dwellings that accommodated an extended family, which was meant to include not only the living but also the dead. Every night someone in the…
Becoming a Christian in Fiji
By means of an ethnographic and developmental analysis, this article shows how everyday ritual practice is fundamental to people's constitution over time of ideas that, in this case, inform a specifically Fijian Christianity. Focusing on the developmental process that is the fixation of belief, and on the significance of ritual for this process, it explores transformations in ideas about God, Sunday school, and death ceremonies held by Sawaieke g…
Making History
L'anthropologie cognitive doit reconnaitre l'ontogenese comme un processus veritablement historique. Partant de l'observation que certaines significations construites par les enfants sont des inversions symetriques de celles produites par l'adulte, on suggere que toute analyse des relations collectives devrait inclure une etude systematiquement de l'apprehension mentale du monde par les enfants. Partant de l'observation suivant laquelle la cognit…
Making the Present, Revealing the Past
Wrapping in Images
Wrapping in Images is the first comparative analysis of tattooing in Polynesia in its original setting, based on a comprehensive survey of both written and visual documentary sources. Drawing on modern social theory, psychoanalysis, and contemporary anthropology, Alfred Gell shows how tattooing formed part of a complex array of symbolic techniques for controlling sacredness and protecting the self. He uses this framework to examine the iconograph…
Becoming a Christian in Fiji
By means of an ethnographic and developmental analysis, this article shows how everyday ritual practice is fundamental to people's constitution over time of ideas that, in this case, inform a specifically Fijian Christianity. Focusing on the developmental process that is the fixation of belief, and on the significance of ritual for this process, it explores transformations in ideas about God, Sunday school, and death ceremonies held by Sawaieke g…
Compassion for One Another
L'A. demontre comment le processus ontogenique par lequel la parente est constituee comme intentionalite donne a tous les Fidjiens quels qu'ils soient la possibilite ideale d'etre apparentes a qui que ce soit, et en outre fait que les relations de parente soient a la fois l'expression de l'ordre collectif, le domaine des relations dans les termes desquels le desir libidinal est structure et le terrain des idees de soi et d'autrui. Une comprehensi…
From Brightness to Hue
Sunday Lunch in Fiji
In this article, I compare drawings of "Sunday lunch" produced by Fijian village children in 1990 and 2005 and their responses to prepared drawings in 1982, which show remarkable continuity over time. I suggest this continuity is largely attributable to the ritualization of eating practices. At the same time, the children's data indicate that a substantive, if subtle, change is occurring in ideas of the inclusiveness of the household; I suggest t…
Imagining the World that Warrants Our Imagination
Antropologia e psicologia
Thinking Symbols
What is a schema
Comment on Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond nature and culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd with a foreword by Marshall Sahlins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Como sabemos o que é verdade? O caso do mana em Fiji
A análise de uma conversa particular que se deu em Fiji sugere que sabemos o que é verdade basicamente por aquilo que se evidencia aos nossos olhos e aos de outras pessoas. Mesmo assim, nesse caso fijiano, a verdade não é necessariamente a priori, não é sempre dada na natureza das coisas. Em certos casos - a feitiçaria, por exemplo - o que é verdade permanece por ser descoberto. Isso também se aplica à questão de saber se as palavras e os atos de…
Mind, Materiality and History
This book explores the complex relationship between mind, materiality, and history in Fijian ethnography. Christina Toren challenges conventional anthropological approaches that separate material culture from mental processes, arguing for a more integrated understanding of how Fijians engage with their world. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, she examines how objects, landscapes, and historical narratives are intertwined with Fijian concepts of per…
A matéria da imaginação
Por meio de uma análise de redações de crianças fijianas sobre o futuro, este artigo examina ideias de socialidade, pessoalidade e self que constituem a matéria mesmo da intersubjetividade e, portanto, da imaginação. O material aqui apresentado toca em um único aspecto dos dados derivados de 75 redações de crianças fijianas, moradoras de aldeias, entre 7 e 15 anos de idade, coletados em abril de 2005: a constituição, ao longo do tempo, de uma ori…
Como nos tornamos quem somos
Professora emérita do Departamento de Antropologia Social da University of St. Andrews e diretora fundadora do Centre for Pacific Studies, Christina Toren tem atuado de modo determinante no traçado dos novos rumos da antropologia contemporânea. Suas contribuições aos estudos de Fiji/Pacífico, socialidade, parentesco e noções de pessoa, ontogenia como processo histórico, e epistemologia, são notáveis, e nortearam profundas reformulações teóricas e…
Do Babies Have Culture
Alma Gottlieb. The Afterlife Is Where We Come From: The Culture of Infancy in West Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. '[B]efore local officials of the Ivoirian government ordered all thatch-roofed houses to be destroyed in the late 1960s, the Beng [of the Côte d'Ivoire] lived in large, round dwellings that accommodated an extended family, which was meant to include not only the living but also the dead. Every night someone in the…
Thinking Symbols
Making the Present, Revealing the Past
Drinking cash
Many times during the eighteen months of my fieldwork in the village of Sawaieke on the island of Gau, Central Fiji, I listened to one or other of my hosts champion na i vakarau ni bula vakaviti , ‘the Fijian way of life’ which he or she contrasted with na i vakarau ni bula vakailavo se vakavavalagi , ‘a way of life in the manner of money or in the European way’. Virtually all Fijian villagers remark on this contrast to visiting Europeans and the…
From Brightness to Hue
Remembering and the Structure of RepresentationImages of Memory
Sign into symbol, symbol as sign
This essay challenges a common anthropological assumption that we can demarcate a domain of ‘the symbolic’, that this domain is self-evident, located ‘out there’, its paradigm being given by ritual. This assumption itself rests on the conventional anthropological distinction between sign and symbol, where the sign is propositional or simply referential and the symbol is evocative of meaning beyond itself, and thus on the notion that the sign too …
Making History
L'anthropologie cognitive doit reconnaitre l'ontogenese comme un processus veritablement historique. Partant de l'observation que certaines significations construites par les enfants sont des inversions symetriques de celles produites par l'adulte, on suggere que toute analyse des relations collectives devrait inclure une etude systematiquement de l'apprehension mentale du monde par les enfants. Partant de l'observation suivant laquelle la cognit…
All things go in pairs, or the sharks will bite
Via an historical‐cum‐ethnographic analysis of the history of chiefship in the vanua (country) of Sawaieke, central Fiji, this essay argues against the prevailing view that Fijian social relations are fundamentally hierarchical. Rather social relations in general and chiefship in particular are predicated on complementary and opposing concepts of equality and hierarchy, such that neither can become, in Dumont's terms, ‘an encompassing value’. Thi…
Seeing the Ancestral Sites
Where I lived in Fiji, in the chiefly village of Sawaieke on the island of Gau, people routinely remark on the most ordinary events.1 So, when the truck that twice a day makes a circuit of the villages is sighted in the distance or its horn heard someone is bound to say, Lori! Or it might be the doctor’s van, or the drum for church, or women returning from fishing, and all of us present can see or hear whatever it is, but even so someone always r…
Wrapping in Images
Wrapping in Images is the first comparative analysis of tattooing in Polynesia in its original setting, based on a comprehensive survey of both written and visual documentary sources. Drawing on modern social theory, psychoanalysis, and contemporary anthropology, Alfred Gell shows how tattooing formed part of a complex array of symbolic techniques for controlling sacredness and protecting the self. He uses this framework to examine the iconograph…
Compassion for One Another
L'A. demontre comment le processus ontogenique par lequel la parente est constituee comme intentionalite donne a tous les Fidjiens quels qu'ils soient la possibilite ideale d'etre apparentes a qui que ce soit, et en outre fait que les relations de parente soient a la fois l'expression de l'ordre collectif, le domaine des relations dans les termes desquels le desir libidinal est structure et le terrain des idees de soi et d'autrui. Une comprehensi…
Do Babies Have Culture
Alma Gottlieb. The Afterlife Is Where We Come From: The Culture of Infancy in West Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. '[B]efore local officials of the Ivoirian government ordered all thatch-roofed houses to be destroyed in the late 1960s, the Beng [of the Côte d'Ivoire] lived in large, round dwellings that accommodated an extended family, which was meant to include not only the living but also the dead. Every night someone in the…
Becoming a Christian in Fiji
By means of an ethnographic and developmental analysis, this article shows how everyday ritual practice is fundamental to people's constitution over time of ideas that, in this case, inform a specifically Fijian Christianity. Focusing on the developmental process that is the fixation of belief, and on the significance of ritual for this process, it explores transformations in ideas about God, Sunday school, and death ceremonies held by Sawaieke g…
Laughter and Truth in Fiji
This paper examines a series of events which took place in a Fijian village in the late 1980s and which, for the ethnographer, brought into question joking, lying and telling the truth. The analysis suggests that our ideas of what language is good for necessarily inform our understanding of the truth conditions of what is said, from which it follows that truth may be regarded not as an absolute, but as a function of the moral force of language — …
Mind, Materiality and History
This book explores the complex relationship between mind, materiality, and history in Fijian ethnography. Christina Toren challenges conventional anthropological approaches that separate material culture from mental processes, arguing for a more integrated understanding of how Fijians engage with their world. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, she examines how objects, landscapes, and historical narratives are intertwined with Fijian concepts of per…
The Effectiveness of Ritual
Como sabemos o que é verdade? O caso do mana em Fiji
A análise de uma conversa particular que se deu em Fiji sugere que sabemos o que é verdade basicamente por aquilo que se evidencia aos nossos olhos e aos de outras pessoas. Mesmo assim, nesse caso fijiano, a verdade não é necessariamente a priori, não é sempre dada na natureza das coisas. Em certos casos - a feitiçaria, por exemplo - o que é verdade permanece por ser descoberto. Isso também se aplica à questão de saber se as palavras e os atos de…
Sunday Lunch in Fiji
In this article, I compare drawings of "Sunday lunch" produced by Fijian village children in 1990 and 2005 and their responses to prepared drawings in 1982, which show remarkable continuity over time. I suggest this continuity is largely attributable to the ritualization of eating practices. At the same time, the children's data indicate that a substantive, if subtle, change is occurring in ideas of the inclusiveness of the household; I suggest t…
What Is Happening to Epistemology
Anthropologists debate the primacy of epistemology over ontology, and vice versa, or whether the one is bound always to implicate the other. Our collective and personal history, however, makes the lived world what it is for us, and not all explicit knowledge is constituted in the same way, with the same purposes in mind and within the same sets of binding parameters. Thus, the task of ethnography is to inquire into the different nature of the dif…
Intersubjectivity as Epistemology
By means of a tale of food poisoning as retribution, this article describes a kind of reasoning that consciously defies commonsense logic. The lived validity of this form of reasoning emphasizes the necessity of an epistemology for anthropology that puts the analysis of relations between people at the heart of our understanding of human reasoning and its ontogeny. An ethnographic analysis of how certain island Fijians give form to kinship relatio…
Comparison and ontogeny
A matéria da imaginação
Por meio de uma análise de redações de crianças fijianas sobre o futuro, este artigo examina ideias de socialidade, pessoalidade e self que constituem a matéria mesmo da intersubjetividade e, portanto, da imaginação. O material aqui apresentado toca em um único aspecto dos dados derivados de 75 redações de crianças fijianas, moradoras de aldeias, entre 7 e 15 anos de idade, coletados em abril de 2005: a constituição, ao longo do tempo, de uma ori…
The Stuff of Imagination
Anthropology and Psychology
Sociality
Sociology (23 works) · Anthropology (15 works) · History (14 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (12 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs (10 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Art (7 works)