Michael French Smith

Biographic Data

ID120602
NAMEMichael French Smith
GIVEN NAMESMichael French
FAMILY NAMESmith
SIGNATURESMITH M F
AFFILIATIONSAustralian National University
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS13
TOTAL CITATIONS21
AUTHOR COUNT13
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1980
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2021
H-INDEX2

  • Taking exception

    Theodore Schwartz, Michael French SmithCHAPTERLike Fire2021

    Taking exceptionWe are eager to get to the islands, beaches, and lagoons of Manus and the flesh-and-blood people and remarkable events of the Paliau Movement.But before we do, we need to say more about some of the distinctive aspects of our approach and the issues they entail that we summarised in Chapter 1

  • Comparing the cults

    Theodore Schwartz, Michael French SmithCHAPTERLike Fire2021

    Comparing the cultsKnowledge of the local history of millenarian thought and action is invaluable for understanding millenarian efforts in particular populations.Thus, before we examine the demise of the Cemetery Cult, we want to draw attention to important differences between it and the Noise and how our knowledge of local millenarian history helps illuminate them.Researchers often have very little such information.But in the Manus case we know …

  • Like Fire: The Paliau Movement and Millenarianism in Melanesia

    Theodore Schwartz, Michael French SmithBOOKLike Fire2020Cited by: 1References: 47

    Like Fire consummates remarkable longitudinal ethnographic research on the Paliau Movement in Papua New Guinea, pursued from the 1950s into the 1990s by Theodore Schwartz, with Michael French Smith as his sometime assistant, and updated by Smith in 2015. The theoretical arguments are highly provocative and the book is well written and fascinating throughout. Like Fire poses

  • Bloody time revisited: New observations on time in a Papua New Guinea Village

    Open AccessMichael French SmithARTICLEThe Australian Journal of…2015

    In a 1982 paper I argued that perceptions of time scarcity in Kragur Village, Papua New Guinea, in the mid‐1970s were best understood as a reaction to new forms of authority characteristic of the growth of capitalism and calls for greater time order were grounded largely in its perceived ritual significance. More than forty years later, villagers are much more familiar with Western time, but less likely to perceive time as scarce. As in the 1970s…

  • Perspectives on World Politics

    Michael Shackleton, Michael French Smith et al.BOOKPerspectives on World Politics2005

  • Issues in World Politics

    Brian White, Richard Little et al.CHAPTERIssues in World Politics1997

    The dramatic television pictures of the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, that powerful symbol of the Cold War, may already have faded from memory, but the hopes and expectations generated by the set of events between 1989 and 1991 known collectively as the end of the Cold War, have not. Accounts of world politics written in the 1990s have all highlighted the idea that we are living in an exciting new world in which political leaders struggle to co…

  • Hard Times on Kairiru Island: Poverty, Development, and Morality in a Papua New Guinea Village

    Nancy Mcdowell, Michael French SmithARTICLEPacific Affairs1997

  • The Cultural Politics of Co-operation: An American Corporation and a Papua New Guinea Village

    Open AccessMichael French SmithARTICLEEthnology1995

    Michael French Smith, The Cultural Politics of Co-operation: An American Corporation and a Papua New Guinea Village, Ethnology, Vol. 34, No. 3, Special Issue on Politics of Culture in the Pacific Islands: Part II (Summer, 1995), pp. 191-199

  • Hard Times on Kairiru Island: Poverty, Development and Morality in a Papua New Guinea Village

    T Otto, Michael French SmithARTICLEJournal of the Royal Anthropologica…1995

    This book follows the difficult lives of people living in the village of Kragur in Papua New Guinea. They have been in poverty since European contact and now must find a way to become prosperous

  • Androgynous Melanesians and Theoretical Dilemmas

    Michael French Smith, M StrathernARTICLEAnthropological Quarterly1990

  • "Wild" Villagers and Capitalist Virtues: Perceptions of Western Work Habits in a Preindustrial Community

    Michael French SmithARTICLEAnthropological Quarterly1984Cited by: 3

    distorted. They see capitalist coordination and regularityi as having magico-religious effects and as a spontaneous manifestation of social harmony. They do so even though as migrant workers they have experienced the coercive nature ofsuch laborprocesses and though there is cultural precedent for sensitivity to restraints on autonomy in the labor process. This misperception contributes to the legitimation of colonial and post-colonial inlequaliti…

  • Bloody Time and Bloody Scarcity: Capitalism, authority, and the transformation of temporal experience in a Papua New Guinea village

    Open AccessMichael French SmithARTICLEAmerican Ethnologist1982Cited by: 17References: 16

    This article argues that the development of perceptions that time is scarce is not simply the result of increases in the quantity of demand for a finite supply of time. Rather, in Koragur Village, Papua New Guinea, it is part of the larger process of incorporation into a capitalist political economy. The imposition of authoritative control over temporal conduct by external authorities and by new kinds of local leaders, together with the spread of…

  • From Heathen to Atheist: Changing views of Catholicism in a Papua New Guinea Village

    Open AccessMichael French SmithARTICLEOceania1980