A J Pickles
Biographic Data
| ID | 13382 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A J Pickles |
| GIVEN NAMES | A J |
| FAMILY NAME | Pickles |
| SIGNATURE | PICKLES A J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7524-602X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 38 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Expectations of the Gift: Toward a Future-Oriented Taxonomy of Transactions
People engage in transactions because they expect to bring about certain futures. This suggests replacing Marcel Mauss's three obligations of gift exchange-giving, taking, and returning-with the notion of expectations. From this perspective, three contingencies constitute gift exchange: gifts create futures that remain indeterminate; they presuppose a social whole whose boundaries are unclear; and they visibly constitute opaque persons. Reconside…
Gambling Futures: Playing the Imminent in Highland Papua New Guinea
Card games and their material remains dominate the human landscape of settlements even while gambling remains side-lined in anthropological accounts of the region.1 As both a present- and a future-oriented activity, gambling requires
Chapter 3. The Tyranny of Denomination
It is Christ or Corruption in Papua New Guinea: Bring in the Witness
Endemic corruption and fervent Christianity dominate Papua New Guinea (PNG) public discourse. We draw on ethnographic material—including the emplacement of a King James V Bible in Parliament—to contextualise corruption discourse and Christian measures against corruption within evolving Papua New Guinean ideas about witnessing. Both corruption discourse and Christianity invoke a specific kind of observer: a disembodied, reliable witness capable of…
The Escalation of Gambling in Papua New Guinea, 1936-1971: Notable absence to national obsession
Future Papua New Guineans (PNG) start gambling from the 1880s. Gambling was then made illegal (for them but not for their colonisers). It takes off during World War II, becoming ubiquitous knowledge by the late 1970s, just after Papua New Guineans achieve independence from Australia. As incidence accelerates gambling relationships proliferate until they plateau at saturation point. This exciting, liberating, unpredictable cloud of activity became…
Transfers: A Deductive Approach to Gifts, Gambles, and Economy at Large
This paper reinterprets core issues in economic anthropology by exploring transfers as a theoretical resource. After describing deliberate usage of the term "transfer" in anthropology and economics, transfers are defined as movements of economic matter, while transactions are the forms arising from their configuration. Transactional categories such as Maussian gift exchange or market exchange become second-order reifications. Examining the politi…
Distribution and denomination in Papua New Guinea: A Field Method and Its Results
In highland Papua New Guinea wealth distribution after a windfall is typically concealed by the donor. This trend was made easier by the introduction of state-issued currency, such that wealth reckoning and especially distribution preferences are often shrouded in mystery. The researcher set out to learn how denomination structures those money transfers by employing a semi-structured interview method centered around hypothetical distributions bas…
Money Games
Gambling in Papua New Guinea, despite being completely absent prior to the Colonial era, has come to supersede storytelling as the region’s main nighttime activity. Money Games is an ethnographic monograph which reveals the contemporary importance of gambling in urban Papua New Guinea. Rich ethnographic detail is coupled with cross-cultural comparison which span the globe. This anthropological study of everyday economics in Melanesia thereby inte…
Money Games: Gambling in a Papua New Guinea Town
To Excel at bridewealth, or ceremonies of Office
At a bridewealth payment made at the start of a wedding in Papua New Guinea, the groom diligently kept a note of contributions from relatives and co‐workers. The next day, he used one of his employer's computers to compile an Excel spreadsheet that detailed all the guests, what each one brought, and, in a separate column, its value in money. Turning people's gifts into nominal amounts of money helped register these into an enduring electronic for…
Gambling
Gambling occurs when a person commits one or more valuable items (a ‘stake’) to an event or series of events packaged together, and where the result determines a loss or win at a rate agreed before the final stake is committed. The practice is or was not present everywhere and is often marginal in a given society, and some gambling variations escape the boundaries of this definition. Some include financial speculation within the phenomenon of gam…
Introduction: Gambling as Analytic in M elanesia
In Euro‐American intellectual discourse gambling has become a metaphor for understanding social life, while in public life gambling is the subject of moralizing, medicalization, and gendered conflict over its status as leisure or vice. This introduction explores how one might approach the ways in which Melanesian peoples have comprehended their own worlds through gambling. I invite readers to consider our portrayals of indigenous ideas of ‘what g…
‘ Bom Bombed Kwin ’: How Two Card Games Model Kula , Moka , and G oroka
In 2009–2010, in G oroka, I studied card games that had a lineage traceable to a common ancestor called laki . Two games were dominant: kwin (queen) and bom (bomb). Both allowed players to test and act upon their efficacy, detect the disruptive negative thoughts of others, and cultivate the thoughts seen as essential to success. Yet the games' characters were contrasted: one was slow, the other fast; one is long‐standing, the other a craze; one f…
Pocket calculator: A humdrum 'obviator' in Papua New Guinea
This article examines the significance of pockets for controlling money in Highland Papua New Guinea. Contextualizing elaborate 'systems' for compartmentalizing monies in separate pockets, I draw upon the connection Highlanders make between transaction and skin. Pockets, I argue, offer opportunities to hide one's wealth reserves while gifting, keeping intentions opaque and leaving interlocutors guessing at the meaning of donors' speech, and forci…
From land to mouth: The agricultural 'economy' of the Wola of the New Guinea Highlands - By Paul Sillitoe
Part and Whole Numbers: An ‘Enumerative’ Reinterpretation of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits and its Subjects
From the starting point that concepts of number can contain within them a representation of a society's overall cosmology, reinforcing and strengthening its reality in logical terms through practice (a process I call enumeration), this paper charts the meeting of two systems of enumeration. As such systems are constantly changing, we concentrate on a particular point in time and space: the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits (C…
Pocket calculator: A humdrum 'obviator' in Papua New Guinea
This article examines the significance of pockets for controlling money in Highland Papua New Guinea. Contextualizing elaborate 'systems' for compartmentalizing monies in separate pockets, I draw upon the connection Highlanders make between transaction and skin. Pockets, I argue, offer opportunities to hide one's wealth reserves while gifting, keeping intentions opaque and leaving interlocutors guessing at the meaning of donors' speech, and forci…
Transfers: A Deductive Approach to Gifts, Gambles, and Economy at Large
This paper reinterprets core issues in economic anthropology by exploring transfers as a theoretical resource. After describing deliberate usage of the term "transfer" in anthropology and economics, transfers are defined as movements of economic matter, while transactions are the forms arising from their configuration. Transactional categories such as Maussian gift exchange or market exchange become second-order reifications. Examining the politi…
To Excel at bridewealth, or ceremonies of Office
At a bridewealth payment made at the start of a wedding in Papua New Guinea, the groom diligently kept a note of contributions from relatives and co‐workers. The next day, he used one of his employer's computers to compile an Excel spreadsheet that detailed all the guests, what each one brought, and, in a separate column, its value in money. Turning people's gifts into nominal amounts of money helped register these into an enduring electronic for…
The Escalation of Gambling in Papua New Guinea, 1936-1971: Notable absence to national obsession
Future Papua New Guineans (PNG) start gambling from the 1880s. Gambling was then made illegal (for them but not for their colonisers). It takes off during World War II, becoming ubiquitous knowledge by the late 1970s, just after Papua New Guineans achieve independence from Australia. As incidence accelerates gambling relationships proliferate until they plateau at saturation point. This exciting, liberating, unpredictable cloud of activity became…
Expectations of the Gift: Toward a Future-Oriented Taxonomy of Transactions
People engage in transactions because they expect to bring about certain futures. This suggests replacing Marcel Mauss's three obligations of gift exchange-giving, taking, and returning-with the notion of expectations. From this perspective, three contingencies constitute gift exchange: gifts create futures that remain indeterminate; they presuppose a social whole whose boundaries are unclear; and they visibly constitute opaque persons. Reconside…
Distribution and denomination in Papua New Guinea: A Field Method and Its Results
In highland Papua New Guinea wealth distribution after a windfall is typically concealed by the donor. This trend was made easier by the introduction of state-issued currency, such that wealth reckoning and especially distribution preferences are often shrouded in mystery. The researcher set out to learn how denomination structures those money transfers by employing a semi-structured interview method centered around hypothetical distributions bas…
Part and Whole Numbers: An ‘Enumerative’ Reinterpretation of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits and its Subjects
From the starting point that concepts of number can contain within them a representation of a society's overall cosmology, reinforcing and strengthening its reality in logical terms through practice (a process I call enumeration), this paper charts the meeting of two systems of enumeration. As such systems are constantly changing, we concentrate on a particular point in time and space: the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits (C…
From land to mouth: The agricultural 'economy' of the Wola of the New Guinea Highlands - By Paul Sillitoe
Pocket calculator: A humdrum 'obviator' in Papua New Guinea
This article examines the significance of pockets for controlling money in Highland Papua New Guinea. Contextualizing elaborate 'systems' for compartmentalizing monies in separate pockets, I draw upon the connection Highlanders make between transaction and skin. Pockets, I argue, offer opportunities to hide one's wealth reserves while gifting, keeping intentions opaque and leaving interlocutors guessing at the meaning of donors' speech, and forci…
Introduction: Gambling as Analytic in M elanesia
In Euro‐American intellectual discourse gambling has become a metaphor for understanding social life, while in public life gambling is the subject of moralizing, medicalization, and gendered conflict over its status as leisure or vice. This introduction explores how one might approach the ways in which Melanesian peoples have comprehended their own worlds through gambling. I invite readers to consider our portrayals of indigenous ideas of ‘what g…
‘ Bom Bombed Kwin ’: How Two Card Games Model Kula , Moka , and G oroka
In 2009–2010, in G oroka, I studied card games that had a lineage traceable to a common ancestor called laki . Two games were dominant: kwin (queen) and bom (bomb). Both allowed players to test and act upon their efficacy, detect the disruptive negative thoughts of others, and cultivate the thoughts seen as essential to success. Yet the games' characters were contrasted: one was slow, the other fast; one is long‐standing, the other a craze; one f…
Gambling
Gambling occurs when a person commits one or more valuable items (a ‘stake’) to an event or series of events packaged together, and where the result determines a loss or win at a rate agreed before the final stake is committed. The practice is or was not present everywhere and is often marginal in a given society, and some gambling variations escape the boundaries of this definition. Some include financial speculation within the phenomenon of gam…
To Excel at bridewealth, or ceremonies of Office
At a bridewealth payment made at the start of a wedding in Papua New Guinea, the groom diligently kept a note of contributions from relatives and co‐workers. The next day, he used one of his employer's computers to compile an Excel spreadsheet that detailed all the guests, what each one brought, and, in a separate column, its value in money. Turning people's gifts into nominal amounts of money helped register these into an enduring electronic for…
Money Games
Gambling in Papua New Guinea, despite being completely absent prior to the Colonial era, has come to supersede storytelling as the region’s main nighttime activity. Money Games is an ethnographic monograph which reveals the contemporary importance of gambling in urban Papua New Guinea. Rich ethnographic detail is coupled with cross-cultural comparison which span the globe. This anthropological study of everyday economics in Melanesia thereby inte…
Money Games: Gambling in a Papua New Guinea Town
Transfers: A Deductive Approach to Gifts, Gambles, and Economy at Large
This paper reinterprets core issues in economic anthropology by exploring transfers as a theoretical resource. After describing deliberate usage of the term "transfer" in anthropology and economics, transfers are defined as movements of economic matter, while transactions are the forms arising from their configuration. Transactional categories such as Maussian gift exchange or market exchange become second-order reifications. Examining the politi…
Distribution and denomination in Papua New Guinea: A Field Method and Its Results
In highland Papua New Guinea wealth distribution after a windfall is typically concealed by the donor. This trend was made easier by the introduction of state-issued currency, such that wealth reckoning and especially distribution preferences are often shrouded in mystery. The researcher set out to learn how denomination structures those money transfers by employing a semi-structured interview method centered around hypothetical distributions bas…
It is Christ or Corruption in Papua New Guinea: Bring in the Witness
Endemic corruption and fervent Christianity dominate Papua New Guinea (PNG) public discourse. We draw on ethnographic material—including the emplacement of a King James V Bible in Parliament—to contextualise corruption discourse and Christian measures against corruption within evolving Papua New Guinean ideas about witnessing. Both corruption discourse and Christianity invoke a specific kind of observer: a disembodied, reliable witness capable of…
The Escalation of Gambling in Papua New Guinea, 1936-1971: Notable absence to national obsession
Future Papua New Guineans (PNG) start gambling from the 1880s. Gambling was then made illegal (for them but not for their colonisers). It takes off during World War II, becoming ubiquitous knowledge by the late 1970s, just after Papua New Guineans achieve independence from Australia. As incidence accelerates gambling relationships proliferate until they plateau at saturation point. This exciting, liberating, unpredictable cloud of activity became…
Gambling Futures: Playing the Imminent in Highland Papua New Guinea
Card games and their material remains dominate the human landscape of settlements even while gambling remains side-lined in anthropological accounts of the region.1 As both a present- and a future-oriented activity, gambling requires
Chapter 3. The Tyranny of Denomination
Expectations of the Gift: Toward a Future-Oriented Taxonomy of Transactions
People engage in transactions because they expect to bring about certain futures. This suggests replacing Marcel Mauss's three obligations of gift exchange-giving, taking, and returning-with the notion of expectations. From this perspective, three contingencies constitute gift exchange: gifts create futures that remain indeterminate; they presuppose a social whole whose boundaries are unclear; and they visibly constitute opaque persons. Reconside…
Economics (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (9 works) · Ethnology (6 works) · History (6 works) · New guinea (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works)