Karen J Brison
Biographic Data
| ID | 96471 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Karen J Brison |
| GIVEN NAMES | Karen J |
| FAMILY NAME | Brison |
| SIGNATURE | BRISON K J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Union College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 115 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Fijians in Transnational Pentecostal Networks
In Fijians in Transnational Pentecostal Networks, Karen J. Brison examines the Harvest Ministry, an independent Fijian Pentecostal church that sends Fijian and Papua New Guinean missionaries to East Africa, Southeast Asia, Europe and elsewhere. After studying the ministry's main church in Suva for several years, Brison visited its missionaries and their local partners in East
The General’s Goose
"The General’s Goose: Fiji’s Tale of Contemporary Misadventure." The Journal of Pacific History, 53(3), pp. 348–349
Kingdom Culture
The Harvest Ministry, an independent Fijian Pentecostal church that sends missionaries to East Africa, Asia, Europe and the Pacific, sees itself as embedded in a transnational community of Christians sharing a common “kingdom culture.” Transnational Pentecostal networks are often seen by scholars and believers as a vehicle for disembedding individuals from local social groups and promoting individual-centered moral systems. Fijians, Papua New Gui…
Facebook and urban kinship in Suva, Fiji
Facebook both reflects and reinforces emerging patterns in kinship among urban indigenous Fijians created by challenges to age and gender stratification posed by younger and female relatives with good jobs in town. Changes are also created by an emerging indigenous Fijian middle class who identify with a transnational middle class and have aspirations to migrate overseas in the wake of three decades of political instability. Facebook posts reflec…
The power of submission
Pentecostal Christianity can lead to moral tensions by advocating the impossible goal of freeing the interior self from social entanglements. But many Pentecostals see no tension between self and community. The Harvest Ministry, an independent Fijian Pentecostal church, encourages people to develop the interior self by submitting to a hierarchical church. This construction frees successful urban professionals from some social pressures and define…
Teaching Neoliberal Emotions through Christian Pedagogies in Fijian Kindergartens
This article examines a Fijian kindergarten using Accelerated Christian Education (ACE), a curriculum produced by an American corporation for Christian homeschoolers, which combines academic and emotion pedagogies. Pedagogies prompting children to label, reflect on, and control their emotions are popular in American schools and said to develop skills necessary to be self-directed, risk-taking entrepreneurs under neoliberalism. In contrast, in Fij…
Children, Social Class, and Education
Class-based self-perception is a rising issue worldwide. Through observation in kindergartens in Fiji, Brison examines how schools instil these ideas in Suva children. Teachers have different goals de
Producing "Confident" Children
Kindergartens in Fiji contribute to incipient class-based identities in a society traditionally structured by ethnicity. Teachers emphasize making children confident, but define confidence differently with varying student groups, building class-based orientations toward person and society. Parental expectations also differ with many upwardly mobile professional parents preferring schools that promote identification with a transnational middle cla…
Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics by Niko Besnier
State of Suffering
In God's Image
Shifting Conceptions of Self and Society in Fijian Kindergartens
Play with peers in urban Fijian kindergartens leads to significant changes in conceptions of self, gender, ethnicity, and social class. Rural children play in mixed gender groups where relationships among children are defined by relative age and kinship; children learn to see themselves as playing a role in a community. In contrast, urban kindergarten children negotiate their way through large groups of unrelated same-age peers by distinguishing …
Our wealth is loving each other
Imagining Modernity in Rural Fiji
Understanding ethnic identity in Fiji and elsewhere in the Pacific requires looking at the ways that individuals draw on ideologies to make sense of the particular circumstances of their lives. While national identity in Fiji is often defined in opposition to the West through reference to a romanticized premodern tradition, individual Fijians are more concerned with defining their identity vis-a-vis other villagers. When people justify their posi…
Crafting Sociocentric Selves in Religious Discourse in Rural Fiji
This article examines narratives about religious experience among rural Fijians in order to reexamine the claim that Fijians and other Pacific Islanders have "sociocentric selves." Individuals insisted in their narratives that they had actively chosen to commit to churches in order to become more sociocentric. They suggested that sodocentrism was only a satisfying orientation if freely chosen. This article suggests that in our contemporary global…
Constructing Identity through Ceremonial Language in Rural Fiji
This article re-examines the sevusevu, a ceremonial presentation of kava in Fiji, in light of recent literature on globalization. Scholars have traced the sevusevu to Fijian assumptions about the polity and about the cosmos and have argued that sevusevu reproduce assumptions about rank and are used to negotiate relative status. This essay argues that such concerns are now secondary to using sevusevu to define a meaningful place for rural Fijians …
Commentary
Hierarchy in the World of Fijian Children
The A. argues that children in Rakiraki, Fiji, develop assumptions about social relations and styles of interaction in playing with other children which are different from those favored in adult life. Childhood experiences shape attitudes about gender and about hierarchy among adults that are at odds with public ideology in Fijian culture. Fijian culture stresses hierarchy based on relative age in which older and wiser people nurture and guide yo…
Imagining a Nation in Kwanga Village Courts, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea
This article contributes to a growing literature on nation-making in the Pacific by examining the ways that village court magistrates among the Kwanga of the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea appropriated, and in the process altered, state-sponsored visions of the nation. Kwanga village magistrates combined a rhetoric contrasting new law and tradition with a practice that included many features of local conflict resolution procedures. The u…
Giving Sorrow New Words
This article examines the relationship between personhood and polity among the Kwanga of New Guinea, using as an example the response of a Christian pastor and his wife to the sudden death of their daughter. The position is adopted that emotional experience and expression are profoundly shaped by cultural scripts, which are, in turn, linked to systems of inequality. Conditions are identified under which, during personal crises- such as bereavemen…
Becoming Savage
This paper examines the impact of European representations on identity in a Papua New Guinean village. Local leaders reinforce their authority by echoing a colonial rhetoric portraying Melanesians as "ignoble savages." On other occasions the same leaders praise local society as orderly, showing that they do not entirely subscribe to European views. But villagers have internalized the European view that Melanesians are violent, an assumption that …
To Remember the Faces of the Dead
You Will Never Forget
Changing Constructions of Masculinity in a Sepik Society
The last decade has seen increasing interest in effects of colonialism on Melanesian culture and identity. Several excellent collections (Carrier 1992; Jolly and Thomas 1992; Keesing and Tonkinson 1982; Linnekin and Poyer 1990; White and Lindstrom 1993) have demonstrated that exposure to Europeans and to their ideas about Pacific Islanders has wrought changes in Melanesian and cultural practices, even those that appear to be most conservative (e.…
Coping with Bereavement
Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction
Just Talk
In Just Talk: Gossip, Meetings, and Power in a Papua New Guinea Village, Karen Brison offers an ethnographic study of the Kwanga of the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea. Brison analyzes Kwanga social life through the lens of their communicative practices, focusing on gossip, formal meetings, and political oratory. She argues that these forms of talk are not merely reflections of social relations but are constitutive of them, shaping power dy…
Coping with Bereavement
You Will Never Forget
Changing Constructions of Masculinity in a Sepik Society
The last decade has seen increasing interest in effects of colonialism on Melanesian culture and identity. Several excellent collections (Carrier 1992; Jolly and Thomas 1992; Keesing and Tonkinson 1982; Linnekin and Poyer 1990; White and Lindstrom 1993) have demonstrated that exposure to Europeans and to their ideas about Pacific Islanders has wrought changes in Melanesian and cultural practices, even those that appear to be most conservative (e.…
Shifting Conceptions of Self and Society in Fijian Kindergartens
Play with peers in urban Fijian kindergartens leads to significant changes in conceptions of self, gender, ethnicity, and social class. Rural children play in mixed gender groups where relationships among children are defined by relative age and kinship; children learn to see themselves as playing a role in a community. In contrast, urban kindergarten children negotiate their way through large groups of unrelated same-age peers by distinguishing …
Hierarchy in the World of Fijian Children
The A. argues that children in Rakiraki, Fiji, develop assumptions about social relations and styles of interaction in playing with other children which are different from those favored in adult life. Childhood experiences shape attitudes about gender and about hierarchy among adults that are at odds with public ideology in Fijian culture. Fijian culture stresses hierarchy based on relative age in which older and wiser people nurture and guide yo…
Crafting Sociocentric Selves in Religious Discourse in Rural Fiji
This article examines narratives about religious experience among rural Fijians in order to reexamine the claim that Fijians and other Pacific Islanders have "sociocentric selves." Individuals insisted in their narratives that they had actively chosen to commit to churches in order to become more sociocentric. They suggested that sodocentrism was only a satisfying orientation if freely chosen. This article suggests that in our contemporary global…
Constructing Identity through Ceremonial Language in Rural Fiji
This article re-examines the sevusevu, a ceremonial presentation of kava in Fiji, in light of recent literature on globalization. Scholars have traced the sevusevu to Fijian assumptions about the polity and about the cosmos and have argued that sevusevu reproduce assumptions about rank and are used to negotiate relative status. This essay argues that such concerns are now secondary to using sevusevu to define a meaningful place for rural Fijians …
The power of submission
Pentecostal Christianity can lead to moral tensions by advocating the impossible goal of freeing the interior self from social entanglements. But many Pentecostals see no tension between self and community. The Harvest Ministry, an independent Fijian Pentecostal church, encourages people to develop the interior self by submitting to a hierarchical church. This construction frees successful urban professionals from some social pressures and define…
Imagining Modernity in Rural Fiji
Understanding ethnic identity in Fiji and elsewhere in the Pacific requires looking at the ways that individuals draw on ideologies to make sense of the particular circumstances of their lives. While national identity in Fiji is often defined in opposition to the West through reference to a romanticized premodern tradition, individual Fijians are more concerned with defining their identity vis-a-vis other villagers. When people justify their posi…
Giving Sorrow New Words
This article examines the relationship between personhood and polity among the Kwanga of New Guinea, using as an example the response of a Christian pastor and his wife to the sudden death of their daughter. The position is adopted that emotional experience and expression are profoundly shaped by cultural scripts, which are, in turn, linked to systems of inequality. Conditions are identified under which, during personal crises- such as bereavemen…
Facebook and urban kinship in Suva, Fiji
Facebook both reflects and reinforces emerging patterns in kinship among urban indigenous Fijians created by challenges to age and gender stratification posed by younger and female relatives with good jobs in town. Changes are also created by an emerging indigenous Fijian middle class who identify with a transnational middle class and have aspirations to migrate overseas in the wake of three decades of political instability. Facebook posts reflec…
Teaching Neoliberal Emotions through Christian Pedagogies in Fijian Kindergartens
This article examines a Fijian kindergarten using Accelerated Christian Education (ACE), a curriculum produced by an American corporation for Christian homeschoolers, which combines academic and emotion pedagogies. Pedagogies prompting children to label, reflect on, and control their emotions are popular in American schools and said to develop skills necessary to be self-directed, risk-taking entrepreneurs under neoliberalism. In contrast, in Fij…
All Talk and No Action? Saying and Doing in Kwanga Meetings
There is a small but growing literature in anthropology about political language (e.g., Bailey 1983; Bloch 1975; Brenneis and Myers 1984; Paine 1981). Significantly, several recent contributions to this field have been made by scholars not primarily concerned with sociolinguistic issues. Rather, it has been increasingly recognized that in many societies politics tends to be all talk and no action (Myers quoted in Atkinson 1984:35) and that, there…
Kingdom Culture
The Harvest Ministry, an independent Fijian Pentecostal church that sends missionaries to East Africa, Asia, Europe and the Pacific, sees itself as embedded in a transnational community of Christians sharing a common “kingdom culture.” Transnational Pentecostal networks are often seen by scholars and believers as a vehicle for disembedding individuals from local social groups and promoting individual-centered moral systems. Fijians, Papua New Gui…
Imagining a Nation in Kwanga Village Courts, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea
This article contributes to a growing literature on nation-making in the Pacific by examining the ways that village court magistrates among the Kwanga of the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea appropriated, and in the process altered, state-sponsored visions of the nation. Kwanga village magistrates combined a rhetoric contrasting new law and tradition with a practice that included many features of local conflict resolution procedures. The u…
All Talk and No Action? Saying and Doing in Kwanga Meetings
There is a small but growing literature in anthropology about political language (e.g., Bailey 1983; Bloch 1975; Brenneis and Myers 1984; Paine 1981). Significantly, several recent contributions to this field have been made by scholars not primarily concerned with sociolinguistic issues. Rather, it has been increasingly recognized that in many societies politics tends to be all talk and no action (Myers quoted in Atkinson 1984:35) and that, there…
Just TalkGossip, Meetings, and Power in a Papua New Guinea Village
"Just Talk" published on by University of California Press.
Just talk
Just Talk
Unnatural Emotions
Just Talk
In Just Talk: Gossip, Meetings, and Power in a Papua New Guinea Village, Karen Brison offers an ethnographic study of the Kwanga of the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea. Brison analyzes Kwanga social life through the lens of their communicative practices, focusing on gossip, formal meetings, and political oratory. She argues that these forms of talk are not merely reflections of social relations but are constitutive of them, shaping power dy…
Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction
Rethinking Context
To Remember the Faces of the Dead
You Will Never Forget
Changing Constructions of Masculinity in a Sepik Society
The last decade has seen increasing interest in effects of colonialism on Melanesian culture and identity. Several excellent collections (Carrier 1992; Jolly and Thomas 1992; Keesing and Tonkinson 1982; Linnekin and Poyer 1990; White and Lindstrom 1993) have demonstrated that exposure to Europeans and to their ideas about Pacific Islanders has wrought changes in Melanesian and cultural practices, even those that appear to be most conservative (e.…
Coping with Bereavement
Becoming Savage
This paper examines the impact of European representations on identity in a Papua New Guinean village. Local leaders reinforce their authority by echoing a colonial rhetoric portraying Melanesians as "ignoble savages." On other occasions the same leaders praise local society as orderly, showing that they do not entirely subscribe to European views. But villagers have internalized the European view that Melanesians are violent, an assumption that …
Giving Sorrow New Words
This article examines the relationship between personhood and polity among the Kwanga of New Guinea, using as an example the response of a Christian pastor and his wife to the sudden death of their daughter. The position is adopted that emotional experience and expression are profoundly shaped by cultural scripts, which are, in turn, linked to systems of inequality. Conditions are identified under which, during personal crises- such as bereavemen…
Hierarchy in the World of Fijian Children
The A. argues that children in Rakiraki, Fiji, develop assumptions about social relations and styles of interaction in playing with other children which are different from those favored in adult life. Childhood experiences shape attitudes about gender and about hierarchy among adults that are at odds with public ideology in Fijian culture. Fijian culture stresses hierarchy based on relative age in which older and wiser people nurture and guide yo…
Imagining a Nation in Kwanga Village Courts, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea
This article contributes to a growing literature on nation-making in the Pacific by examining the ways that village court magistrates among the Kwanga of the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea appropriated, and in the process altered, state-sponsored visions of the nation. Kwanga village magistrates combined a rhetoric contrasting new law and tradition with a practice that included many features of local conflict resolution procedures. The u…
Commentary
Crafting Sociocentric Selves in Religious Discourse in Rural Fiji
This article examines narratives about religious experience among rural Fijians in order to reexamine the claim that Fijians and other Pacific Islanders have "sociocentric selves." Individuals insisted in their narratives that they had actively chosen to commit to churches in order to become more sociocentric. They suggested that sodocentrism was only a satisfying orientation if freely chosen. This article suggests that in our contemporary global…
Constructing Identity through Ceremonial Language in Rural Fiji
This article re-examines the sevusevu, a ceremonial presentation of kava in Fiji, in light of recent literature on globalization. Scholars have traced the sevusevu to Fijian assumptions about the polity and about the cosmos and have argued that sevusevu reproduce assumptions about rank and are used to negotiate relative status. This essay argues that such concerns are now secondary to using sevusevu to define a meaningful place for rural Fijians …
Imagining Modernity in Rural Fiji
Understanding ethnic identity in Fiji and elsewhere in the Pacific requires looking at the ways that individuals draw on ideologies to make sense of the particular circumstances of their lives. While national identity in Fiji is often defined in opposition to the West through reference to a romanticized premodern tradition, individual Fijians are more concerned with defining their identity vis-a-vis other villagers. When people justify their posi…
Our wealth is loving each other
Shifting Conceptions of Self and Society in Fijian Kindergartens
Play with peers in urban Fijian kindergartens leads to significant changes in conceptions of self, gender, ethnicity, and social class. Rural children play in mixed gender groups where relationships among children are defined by relative age and kinship; children learn to see themselves as playing a role in a community. In contrast, urban kindergarten children negotiate their way through large groups of unrelated same-age peers by distinguishing …
Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics by Niko Besnier
State of Suffering
In God's Image
Sociology (25 works) · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs (20 works) · Political science (16 works) · Law (12 works) · Anthropology (11 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · History (10 works) · Ethnology (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (8 works)