R Ellen
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 12809 |
|---|---|
| NOME | R Ellen |
| PRENOMES | R |
| SOBRENOME | Ellen |
| ASSINATURA | ELLEN R |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Kent |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7349-2419 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 149 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 802 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 147 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1972 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 16 |
Satirical Allusion and Tug-of-Rattan on Seram
Nuaulu tug-of-rattan performances on Seram (eastern Indonesia) are accompanied by collective sung verse. These secular events are infrequent, but the sung verse, which has a quatrain pantun structure, is widely composed and performed outside the tug-of-rattan setting by individuals in private and semi-public situations. The composed stanzas may relate to, or mark, personal life-history events. They are sometimes historical but often contemporary,…
World Systems and Broken Plates
Glazed ceramics of Asian and European origin have played an important role as valuables in the traditional societies of island Southeast Asia. They often serve as symbols of authority, integrated into local ritual life through marriage payments, mortuary ceremonies and associations with head-taking and other practices. These objects survive today as heirloom objects, but many have been traded into the antique market or lost through breakage. Trac…
Visualizing Spirit Entities
This article re-examines the claim that supernatural entities can be treated as a semantic domain constituted of pseudo-natural kinds. It does so in relation to the Nuaulu people of Seram, eastern Indonesia, discussing ways of describing, visualizing, inventorying, and classifying spirits. While humans and animals are the models on which spirits are based, other features associated with how they are perceived and experienced as non-material entit…
The travelled landscape of Benjamin Harrison and the imagined eolithic world of the Kentish Weald
This paper seeks to show the relationship between the travelled landscape of the late nineteenth century Kentish Weald, the survey and collecting expeditions of Benjamin Harrison and his associates, and the imagined early Palaeolithic and ‘Eolithic’ life-ways that these investigators sought to uncover. We show how fieldwork shaped thinking and practice, and how walking served to organize the bodily practices of knowledge production
Multivocal responses to conservation in Maluku province, Indonesia
The Moluccan islands of eastern Indonesia (Maluku) were amongst the last frontiers to be opened‐up for large‐scale resource extraction and economic development in modern times. The interventions of organized conservation science and local conservation activity are also recent. Yet the area has a complex economic history and historical ecology linked to the spice trade, which itself prompted early scholarly interest in its natural history. Conserv…
Generational Difference, the Category Pemuda and the Several Paradoxes of Becoming Indonesian for Nuaulu in the Moluccan Islands
Being Indonesian is experienced differently depending on age and generation. In 1970 senior Nuaulu men had been young adults under Dutch colonialism. Those who in 2020 occupied key politically influential positions grew up in an independent Indonesia. Conflict with state agencies over resources, plus practical difficulties arising from non-recognition of their religion, have been obstacles to national integration. However, the impact of Christian…
Identifying Plants as a Process of Cultural Cognition
We all seek to identify plants in our ordinary lives, or as professionals, yet what we mean by ‘identifications’ and our intentions in seeking them are not always the same. Moreover, the ‘identifications’ we achieve are often subject to disagreement. This paper compares the practices of contemporary professional taxonomists in producing herbarium reference collections, and plant naming among Nuaulu subsistence cultivators in eastern Indonesia. I …
Vigilant Signage and the Ephemeral in the Magical Landscape of the Moluccas
Scare charms, in Ambonese Malay matakau, have long been a feature of the Moluccan landscape, but are little documented. They are erected by landowners or resourceowners either in response to infringements and thefts of property or to protect property from interference and theft. The sanction that makes them effective is the threat of spirit or some other kind of supernatural revenge or punishment. This article's systematic treatment of Nuaulu mat…
The Kentish Eoliths of Benjamin Harrison
Studies focusing on the history of collections generally emphasize what is estimable about them, but how should we make sense of collections that, once held in high regard, have subsequently been judged worthless? Such is the case for eoliths, stone objects resembling early artifacts, which held a pivotal position in arguments concerning the origins of human tool-making, but which are now largely considered nonartifactual. This article discusses …
Describing and Conceptualizing Minimal Tools in an Ethnographic Setting
How should we describe and conceptualize the simplest tools imaginable, especially in relation to distinctions between found, minimal, and repurposed objects? Most ethnographic accounts pay little attention to them, and neither does the organization of museums and the anthropological curriculum. Addressing the literature on the theory of tool use, this paper argues why rudimentary objects observed ethnographically, such as used as containers, scr…
Palms and the Prototypicality of Trees
Palms, as a group of plants, are of comparative ethnosemantic interest, as they are sometimes formally classified as trees in folk and scientific classifications and sometimes not; sometimes labelled as a separate group of plants and sometimes not. In European languages palms are nowadays unproblematically described as trees, but they are definitely not prototypical cognitively. This is what one would expect in a geographic area where they are no…
Individual Strategy and Cultural Regulation in Nuaulu Hunting
This paper examines the technical and ecological efficiency of Nuaulu hunting. For the purpose of this paper, the author use &s;hunting&s; to refer to the appropriation of all non-domesticated terrestrial vertebrates, and to include such marginal strategies as ambushing, besetting and trapping where the target is non-domesticated terrestrial vertebrates. It is a reasonable prediction that the hunting efficiency of individuals varies, and does so …
Nuaulu Use and Management of Culturally Salient Polymorphisms in Codiaeum variegatum
Codiaeum variegatum has become a well-known ornamental plant in Europe and North America and has long been culturally significant in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, for example as a boundary plant. This paper asks, firstly, how variations in foliage are classified, managed, and valued in one population (Nuaulu on the island of Seram, eastern Indonesia), and how this relates to the range of uses to which these variations are put. Secondly, the pap…
Nature Wars
Organized around issues, debates and discussions concerning the various ways in which the concept of nature has been used, this book looks at how the term has been endlessly deconstructed and reclaimed, as reflected in anthropological, scientific, and similar writing over the last several decades. Made up of ten of Roy Ellen’s finest articles, this book looks back at his ideas about nature and includes a new introduction that contextualizes the a…
Nature Wars
The Great Eolith Debate and the Anthropological Institute
From the 1880s onwards, the Anthropological Institute played a key role in arguments surrounding eoliths, both as a venue for significant events and through the pages of its journals. Eoliths, stone objects claimed to be man-made and regarded by ‘eolithophiles’ as the precursors of handaxes, had become an issue almost as soon as the first chipped flints had been accepted as artifacts in the mid-nineteenth century. The ensuing debate, that drew in…
Trade, Environment, and the Reproduction of Local Systems in the Moluccas
Trade in locally produced commodities falls into two categories: goods which are consumed within the network and those which are part of long-distance trade to Sulawesi, Java, or elsewhere. A trading system is composed of one or more networks and is characterized by a set of linkages which theoretically permit its reproduction over time through both a geographical and social division of labor. In the Moluccas local trading networks tend to be con…
Ritual, Landscapes of Exchange, and the Domestication of Canarium
It is widely accepted that a major historic pathway to agriculture in the tropics has been via the management of forest and reliance on tree resources. Using ethnographic and ethnobotanical data from Seram in the Moluccas, this article illustrates how this might have happened in one part of Island Southeast Asia. Several species of the genus Canarium produce proteinaceous nuts that have been ethnographically, historically, and prehistorically sho…
Pottery production and trade in the Banda zone, Indonesia
This article provides the first comprehensive description of pottery production in the Kei islands of eastern Indonesia, based on field data collected mainly in 1981 and on museum collections in the UK and the Netherlands. The account is situated in what we know of the dynamics of trading systems that existed in the Moluccan islands between 1500 and 2000. Kei pottery is widely thought to be the successor of a tradition established in the Banda is…
The impacts of local networks on subsistence resilience and biodiversity in a low-lying Moluccan reef system between 1600 and the present
Using field data for the 1980s and historic material, I show how the central places of networks crucial for regional and long-distance trades in the Moluccas between 1600 and the present were often environmentally vulnerable volcanic islands and low-lying reefs. After reviewing existing data on hazards, and evaluating the evidence for erosion and degradation, I suggest how resilience has been historically achieved through social and material exch…
Understanding geometrical features of Nuaulu shield design
This article seeks to elucidate the form and function of decorative designs on Nuaulu parrying shields from Seram, Indonesia. It builds on earlier work focusing on the shield as a sacred anthropomorphized entity with its own life-cycle, the reproduction of which mirrors the reproduction of sacred houses. It has previously been suggested that diversity in design elements is deliberately cultivated as part of a general aesthetic, connecting individ…
Ecological Anthropology
The term “ecological anthropology” was introduced into the anthropological literature to refer to ways of understanding human–environment relations using a systems approach and the conceptual and methodological apparatus of biological ecology. It grew in reaction to the perceived difficulties of Steward's cultural ecology and simplistic notions of environmental determinism and possibilism. Its key concepts have included ecosystem, feedback, cultu…
Settlement Patterns
A settlement pattern comprises the physical distribution of a population, spatially and over time. It reflects the impact of basic ecological interactions as well as social and cultural factors that influence spatiotemporal order. In environmental anthropology, a settlement pattern represents the most inclusive unit required to understand the physical interactions of a given population. In archaeology and prehistory, the recovered evidence for se…
Cultural Adaptation
Biological organisms display four types of adaptation: phylogenetic, physiological, learning, and cultural. Overall, adaptation may be a combination of these types. Cultural adaptation, combining learning and the social transmission of information or practices, is typified by its rapidity, though not by its fidelity. Drawing on the experience of others enables the trial‐and‐error stage of learning to be reduced in duration. Thus, heat loss can be…
Religious violence and conciliation in Indonesia
The communal unrest that destabilized the Moluccas between 1999 and 2002 – the so-called ‘Maluku wars’, or what Moluccans themselves usually describe euphemistically as the kerusahan – has already
What Black Elk Left Unsaid
Environment, Subsistence and System
Human ecology is ultimately part of a general theory of society. This is the argument developed here by Roy Ellen, whose exploration of the interplay between social organization and ecology in small-scale subsistence systems has direct bearings both on the investigation of human environmental relations in general and on contemporary social theory. He argues that while ecological study of non-industrial societies cannot be elevated to the status o…
Classifications in Their Social Context
Darwinian Selection, Symbolic Variation, and the Evolution of Culture [and Comments and Reply]
Most contemporary models of cultural change are derived from pre-Darwinian, especially Spencerian, sources and are conditioned by such unstated assumptions as typological thinking and a belief in directed, adaptive variation. This paper defends a Darwinian selectionist approach to cultural evolution. Darwinian selectionism requires undirected, heritable variation. Selection acts upon variants that are not preferentially oriented to or generated w…
On the Edge of the Banda Zone
The impact of the Indonesian spice trade on global and, more particularly, European history has been widely acknowledged. Although more recent studies have gone beyond the preoccupation with the colonial relationship to provide a more "Asiacentric" view, On the Edge of the Banda Zone is the first to focus an anthropological lens on the dynamics of trade in a specific area: that incorporating the Seram Laut and Gorom archipelagoes (and the adjacen…
The Cultural Relations of Classification
1. Introduction 2. The language of classification 3. Processes of identification and the structure of categories 4. The relations between non-basic categories 5. Consistency, sharing and flexibility 6. Social intrusions and cultural styles 7. Changes in classifying behaviour 8. Cognition and cultural relations of prehension Appendices Notes References Indexes
Mode of Subsistence and Folk Biological Taxonomy [and Comments and Reply]
There are significant differences between the folk biological taxonomy and nomenclature of hunter-gatherers and that of small-scale agriculturalists. While foragers possess sizable inventories of labeled plant and animal classes, small-scale farmers tend to have inventories that are considerably larger. Also, binomial names, such as English blue oak and shingle oak, are common in folk taxonomies of cultivators but rare in those of hunter-gatherer…
Fetishism
Social and Ecological Systems
An Evolutionary Approach to the Southeast Asian Cultural Sequence [and Comments and Reply]
Recent archaelogical work has directed attention toward Southeast Asia. However, while the substantive results of this research are significant for tracing worldwide prehistoric developments, the integration of these findings into a regional archaeological framework continues to be a problem. Most traditional chronological-developmental frameworks of Southeast Asian prehistory were patterned after the European paradigm of five prehistoric ages. I…
Local Knowledge and Management of Sago Palm
Given the cultural importance of palms it might be assumed that, like other starch staples, they would be internally diverse genetically, yielding large numbers of cultivars reflected in lexical polytypy. This article explores why this does not appear to be so for sago palms ( Metroxylon sagu), managed by the Nuaulu of Seram, eastern Indonesia. The economic and cultural significance of the sago palm for the Nuaulu, as for much of Maluku and lowla…
Trade, Traders and Trading in Rural Java
Microcosm, Macrocosm and the Nuaulu house
It is well-known that symbolic worlds can only be understood in terms of other symbols, by insiders and interpreters alike. Indeed, this is what people mean by a symbolic system: not merely so many symbols in dependently symbolizing some aspect of what is conveniently agreed to be 'reality', but symbols representing each other, sometimes symbolizing more than one other symbol, sometimes an aspect of a single symbol. Thus we are in the business of…
Omniscience and ignorance
The ethnographic analysis of categories is still largely based on assumptions of cultural uniformity, although, during the past decade, the significance of variation has become increasingly evident as attempts have been made to measure it. Delineation and measurement are themselves complex tasks, however. In a single body of data there may be variation according to many criteria which are often cross-cutting and reinforce each other irregularly. …
The social life of seeds
Humans play an important part in the dispersal of plant seed and other propagative material, either inadvertently or deliberately. We expand on this observation to demonstrate how the form of dispersal reflects different patterns of human interaction and relationship, and how the opposite is also true: that patterns of human exchange modify the properties of plant germplasm subject to further co-evolutionary selection. While these patterns are re…
The Structure of Folk Models
The Empty Seashell
Theories in anthropology and 'anthropological theory
What makes a theory 'anthropological' beyond it being a theory that anthropologists use? Assuming a framework that understands anthropology in its broadest sense, this article invites us to remind ourselves what theories are actually supposed to do. Distinguishing theories in terms of the scale of presumption in their claims, it argues for a pyramid of nested levels of explanation. As we move from the base to the tip of the pyramid, so our explan…
Unity in Diversity
From Ethno-Science to Science, or 'What the Indigenous Knowledge Debate Tells Us about How Scientists Define Their Project
This paper begins by examining the response of the organised scientific community to the claims of the indigenous knowledge lobby, and with some observations on the dichotomy between science and traditional technical knowledge. It reiterates the view that the potency of the distinction arises from a fusion of the general human cognitive impulse to simplify the processes by which we understand the world, reinforced by the socially-driven need of s…
Ethnobiological Classification
Pottery Manufacture and Trade in the Central Moluccas, Indonesia
Roy F. Ellen, I. C. Glover, Pottery Manufacture and Trade in the Central Moluccas, Indonesia: The Modern Situation and the Historical Implications, Man, New Series, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Sep., 1974), pp. 353-379
The Eolith Debate, Evolutionist Anthropology and the Oxford Connection Between 1880 and 1940
The eolith debate mirrors the development and demise of evolutionist anthropology in Britain between 1880 and 1940. This paper traces the connections between some of the key protagonists in the controversy, especially those associated with the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford. The evolutionist pre-occupation of early Oxford anthropology with the continuity between archaeology and ethnology is shown to be linked to an interest in the Eolithic controve…
Persistence and change in the relationship between anthropology and human geography
Ethnomycology Among the Nuaulu of the Moluccas
The Marsupial in Nuaulu Ritual Behaviour
Research on Indonesia
An Introduction to Social Anthropology
Pottery Manufacture and Trade in the Central Moluccas, Indonesia
Roy F. Ellen, I. C. Glover, Pottery Manufacture and Trade in the Central Moluccas, Indonesia: The Modern Situation and the Historical Implications, Man, New Series, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Sep., 1974), pp. 353-379
Variable constructs in Nuaulu zoological classification
A Pattern of Peoples
Non-domesticated resources in Nuaulu ecological relations
An Evolutionary Approach to the Southeast Asian Cultural Sequence [and Comments and Reply]
Recent archaelogical work has directed attention toward Southeast Asia. However, while the substantive results of this research are significant for tracing worldwide prehistoric developments, the integration of these findings into a regional archaeological framework continues to be a problem. Most traditional chronological-developmental frameworks of Southeast Asian prehistory were patterned after the European paradigm of five prehistoric ages. I…
The development of anthropology and colonial policy in the Netherlands
Although there have been studies of both Dutch colonial policy in the Indies and the development of anthropology in the Netherlands, there has been no systematic examination of the historical relations between them. This paper attempts this for a period of 160 years from the collapse of the Dutch East India Company to the birth of an independent Indonesian state. During this time, the need of successive governments for information on subject peop…
The trade in spices
(1977). The trade in spices. Indonesia Circle. School of Oriental & African Studies. Newsletter: Vol. 5, No. 12, pp. 21-25
Resource and Commodity
To properly understand the social relations of land use among the Nuaulu of Seram it is necessary to explore the wider structural and temporal context. Particular attention is paid here to the balance between domesticated and non-domesticated resources, the transition from hamlet to multi-clan villages, the movement from a low density highland area to a relatively higher density coastal location, the change from absolute political autonomy to one…
Nuaulu Settlement and Ecology
of Kings College London kindly undertook the analysis of soil specimens. At various stages in
Nuaulu Settlement and Ecology
This book is about the pattern of settlement and ecology of the Nuaulu, a group of sedentary swidden cultivators and hunters of southcentral Seram (Eastern Indonesia). It has three inter-related aims: to describe and account for nuaulu settlement; to outline and exemplify a suitable method of assessing the fine inter-action of cultural and ecological variables in small scale communities; and to explore the usefulness of a generative form of analy…
The Contribution of H.O. Forbes to Indonesian Ethnography
Ellen Roy F. The Contribution of H.O. Forbes to Indonesian Ethnography: A Biographical and Bibliographical Note. In: Archipel, volume 16, 1978. pp. 135-159
Problems and Progress in the Ethnographic Analysis of Small Scale Human Ecosystems
Omniscience and ignorance
The ethnographic analysis of categories is still largely based on assumptions of cultural uniformity, although, during the past decade, the significance of variation has become increasingly evident as attempts have been made to measure it. Delineation and measurement are themselves complex tasks, however. In a single body of data there may be variation according to many criteria which are often cross-cutting and reinforce each other irregularly. …
Social and Ecological Systems
Social and Ecological Systems
Classifications in Their Social Context
Nuaulu Settlement and Ecology
Environment, Subsistence and System
Human ecology is ultimately part of a general theory of society. This is the argument developed here by Roy Ellen, whose exploration of the interplay between social organization and ecology in small-scale subsistence systems has direct bearings both on the investigation of human environmental relations in general and on contemporary social theory. He argues that while ecological study of non-industrial societies cannot be elevated to the status o…
The Structure of Folk Models
Rindi
Rindi: an ethnographic study of a traditional domain in eastern Sumba. By Gregory L. Forth. (Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 93.) pp. xvi, 519, 8 pl. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff. 1981. Guilders 145. - Volume 115 Issue 2
Semantic anarchy and ordered social practice in Nuaulu personal naming
Inevitably, levél 2 is only accessible through level 3, though this does not mean that it is invalid to attempt to distinguish between them.An emic structure of the etic is logically impossible, being absorbed into level 2
Minahasa Civilization
Sociology (76 obras) · Geography (65 obras) · History (49 obras) · Anthropology (46 obras) · Biology (46 obras) · Archaeology (38 obras) · Philosophy (38 obras) · Ecology (36 obras) · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies (32 obras) · History (31 obras)