Aletta Biersack
Biographic Data
| ID | 3597258 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Aletta Biersack |
| GIVEN NAMES | Aletta |
| FAMILY NAME | Biersack |
| SIGNATURE | BIERSACK A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oregon |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 257 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Reading and Remembering the Anthropologist James F. Weiner
à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés
Reproducing Inequality: The Gender Politics of Male Cults in the Papua New Guinea Highlands and Amazonia
Local Knowledge, Local History: Geertz and Beyond
Afterword: From Witchcraft to the Pentecostal-Witchcraft Nexus
Framed by an ambitious introduction, this book contributes importantly to the literature on modernity and the occult by highlighting the workings of Pentecostalism in that relationship
Changing Contexts, Shifting Meanings: Transformations of Cultural Traditions in Oceania
This book sheds new light on processes of cultural transformation at work in Oceania and analyzes them as products of interrelationships between culturally created meanings and specific contexts. In a series of inspiring essays, noted scholars of the region examine these interrelationships for insight into how cultural traditions are shaped on an ongoing basis.The collection marks a turning point in the debate on the conceptualization of traditio…
Paula Brown Glick: A Retrospective
From time to time, readers and contributors to Oceania inquire whether we have published an obituary of a particular Oceanian scholar. Oceania does not routinely publish obituaries, but these enquiries reveal a desire to be reminded of or to have the chance to acknowledge an intellectual debt to a colleague. Consequently, short tributes to such scholars will appear as an occasional feature in Oceania. 'Paula Brown Glick: a Retrospective' is the f…
Human Rights Work in Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Vanuatu
Papua New Guinea (PNG), Fiji and Vanuatu emerged between 1970 and 1980, as they gained independence from their respective colonisers: Australia, Britain and France. As ratifiers of the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), they participate in the international human rights regime outlined in the introduction to this volume, the bureaucratic machiner…
Gender Violence & Human Rights: Seeking Justice in Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu
The postcolonial states of Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu operate today in a global arena in which human rights are widely accepted. As ratifiers of UN treaties such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, these Pacific Island countries have committed to promoting women's and girls
Introduction: Emergent Masculinities in the Pacific
This special issue focuses on the plasticity and contingent nature of Pacific Island masculinities over the course of colonial and postcolonial histories. The several case histories concern the use of sports to recuperate but also refashion past masculinities in the name of contemporary masculine pride; the effects of market participation on younger males; how urbanisation and migration set the stage for experimenting with male gender and sexuali…
Foucault among Ipili Speakers: Foucault among Ipili Speakers
Coffee Producers in a World of Fair Trade
The Sun and the Shakers, Again: Enga, Ipili, and Somaip Perspectives on the Cult of Ain
The ‘Sun and the Shakers, Again’ resumes the conversation begun by Mervyn J. Meggitt in his 1973 article ‘The Sun and the Shakers’ concerning the circumstances and mindset of Enga and Ipili speakers on the eve (or in the early stages) of colonial penetration. The ‘Cult of Ain,’ as Meggitt termed a regional cult that broke out in the mid‐1940s, followed on the heels of devastating epidemics and famine and was in some measure, at least in most area…
The Sun and the Shakers, Again: Enga, Ipili, and Somaip Perspectives on the Cult of Ain Part One
In the middle 1940s, at a time when white people were just beginning to penetrate the western highlands of what would become Papua New Guinea, a cult spread quickly among Engas, Ipili speakers, and Somaips. In the seminal article ‘The Sun and the Shakers' published almost 40 years ago, Mervyn J. Meggitt would call this cult the ‘Cult of Ain.’ The cult's core feature involved a massive sacrifice of pigs to the sun in an attempt to enlist the sun's…
Comment on Maclean’s “globalization and bridewealth rhetoric,” by Aletta Biersack
Bound Blood: Paiela `Conception' Theory Interpreted
While aboriginal populations have been widely reported to entertain magico-religious beliefs concerning conception, the Paiela of the Papua New Guinea Highlands apparently do not. Semen, it is thought, must wrap around menstrual blood many times to keep it from 'coming outside' if the woman is to conceive. Bound blood forms the foetus. This seemingly naturalistic view is herein examined for its symbolic content. Uaiela 'conception' theory, it is …
Reverse Anthropology: Indigenous Analysis of Social and Environmental Relations in New Guinea by Stuart Kirsch
Reimagining Political Ecology
Reimagining Political Ecology is a state-of-the-art collection of ethnographies grounded in political ecology. When political ecology first emerged as a distinct field in the early 1970s, it was rooted in the neo-Marxism of world system theory. This collection showcases second-generation political ecology, which retains the Marxist interest in capitalism as a global structure but which is also heavily influenced by poststructuralism, feminism, pr…
Reproducing Inequality: The Gender Politics of Male Cults in the Papua New Guinea Highlands and Amazonia
This chapter examines some resemblances between Amazonian and Melanesian men's cults. These cults portray the omatisia ritual of the Paiela of the Papua New Guinea highlands as a political act of “reproduction” in which immature boys are “reborn” as fertile adults. Women's fertility is subordinated to the claimed “fertility” of men. Thus, Amazonia and Papua New Guinea societies share ritual paraphernalia such as flutes and bullroarers, as well as…
The Mount Kare Python and His Gold: Totemism and Ecology in the Papua New Guinea Highlands
Lying between the Huli and Paiela peoples of the Papua New Guinea highlands, Mt. Kare, the site of a gold rush from 1988 to 1990, presently inspires millenarian speculations about an imminent cosmic revolution. Mt. Kare was traditionally a ritual site where pigs were sacrificed to Taiyundika, a totemic python, to promote the fertility of plant, animal, and human species. Today it is where gold is mined in pursuit of unprecedented riches and mille…
Introduction: From the "New Ecology" to the New Ecologies
An earlier ecological anthropology defined its project within the compass of the idealism v. materialism debate. Culture was an adaptive tool, instrumental rather than formal; it was intelligible with respect to its material effects, not-as the idealists would maintain-in terms of itself, as an autonomous, self-determining order of reality. This argument was mounted with respect to bounded, stable, self-regulating, local, or at best regional enti…
Migration and Transformations: Regional Perspectives on New Guinea
Migration and Transformations: Regional Perspectives on New Guinea. ANDREW J. STRATHERN and GABRIELE STÜRZENHOFECKER, eds. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994. xi + 327 pp., figures, maps, tables, notes, references, index
Word Made Flesh: Religion, the Economy, and the Body in the Papua New Guinea Highlands
Papuan Borderlands: Huli, Duna, and Ipili Perspectives on the Papua New Guinea Highlands
The Ngatik Massacre: History and Identity on a Micronesian Atoll. LIN Poyer
General/Theoretical Anthropology: Anahulu. The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii, Volume 1: Historical Ethnography. Marshall Sahlins with Dorothy B. Barrère
Introduction: From the "New Ecology" to the New Ecologies
An earlier ecological anthropology defined its project within the compass of the idealism v. materialism debate. Culture was an adaptive tool, instrumental rather than formal; it was intelligible with respect to its material effects, not-as the idealists would maintain-in terms of itself, as an autonomous, self-determining order of reality. This argument was mounted with respect to bounded, stable, self-regulating, local, or at best regional enti…
The Mount Kare Python and His Gold: Totemism and Ecology in the Papua New Guinea Highlands
Lying between the Huli and Paiela peoples of the Papua New Guinea highlands, Mt. Kare, the site of a gold rush from 1988 to 1990, presently inspires millenarian speculations about an imminent cosmic revolution. Mt. Kare was traditionally a ritual site where pigs were sacrificed to Taiyundika, a totemic python, to promote the fertility of plant, animal, and human species. Today it is where gold is mined in pursuit of unprecedented riches and mille…
Ginger Gardens for the Ginger Woman: Rites and Passages in a Melanesian Society
The Logic of Misplaced Concreteness: Paiela Body Counting and the Nature of the Primitive Mind
The paper has two goals: to demonstrate ethnographically the connection between "structure" and communication, which Lévi-Strauss has consistently alleged to exist, and to challenge the thesis of Hallpike's book, The Foundations of Primitive Thought, that primitive thought reflects an "incomplete," unsophisticated logic.The paper focuses on the counting system of the Paiela, a highland Papua New Guinea group. It argues that Paiela counting behavi…
Intimations of Infinity: The Mythopoeia of the Iqwaye Counting System and Number
Word Made Flesh: Religion, the Economy, and the Body in the Papua New Guinea Highlands
Gender Violence & Human Rights: Seeking Justice in Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu
The postcolonial states of Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu operate today in a global arena in which human rights are widely accepted. As ratifiers of UN treaties such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, these Pacific Island countries have committed to promoting women's and girls
Histories in the making: Paiela and historical anthropology
"Paiela "women-men: The Reflexive Foundations of Gender Ideology
Paiela notions about femaleness and maleness stem from an indigenous reflexive doctrine concerning the character of "women-men" or humanity. This reflexive doctrine, that "we" are both "good" and "bad," serves as the semantic key to a rather unique social structure predicated on a distinction between domestic and public domains and its moral entailments. The way in which gender functions as a master code of that structure is explored at length. I…
Bound Blood: Paiela `Conception' Theory Interpreted
While aboriginal populations have been widely reported to entertain magico-religious beliefs concerning conception, the Paiela of the Papua New Guinea Highlands apparently do not. Semen, it is thought, must wrap around menstrual blood many times to keep it from 'coming outside' if the woman is to conceive. Bound blood forms the foetus. This seemingly naturalistic view is herein examined for its symbolic content. Uaiela 'conception' theory, it is …
Migration and Transformations: Regional Perspectives on New Guinea
Migration and Transformations: Regional Perspectives on New Guinea. ANDREW J. STRATHERN and GABRIELE STÜRZENHOFECKER, eds. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994. xi + 327 pp., figures, maps, tables, notes, references, index
Clio in Oceania: Toward a Historical Anthropology
Introduction: Emergent Masculinities in the Pacific
This special issue focuses on the plasticity and contingent nature of Pacific Island masculinities over the course of colonial and postcolonial histories. The several case histories concern the use of sports to recuperate but also refashion past masculinities in the name of contemporary masculine pride; the effects of market participation on younger males; how urbanisation and migration set the stage for experimenting with male gender and sexuali…
Clio in Oceania: Toward a Historical Anthropology
Reading and Remembering the Anthropologist James F. Weiner
à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés
Changing Contexts, Shifting Meanings: Transformations of Cultural Traditions in Oceania
This book sheds new light on processes of cultural transformation at work in Oceania and analyzes them as products of interrelationships between culturally created meanings and specific contexts. In a series of inspiring essays, noted scholars of the region examine these interrelationships for insight into how cultural traditions are shaped on an ongoing basis.The collection marks a turning point in the debate on the conceptualization of traditio…
The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia
Cultural/Applied: The Voice of the Tambaran: Truth and Illusion in Ilahita Arapesh Religion. Donald F. Tuzin
Ginger Gardens for the Ginger Woman: Rites and Passages in a Melanesian Society
The Logic of Misplaced Concreteness: Paiela Body Counting and the Nature of the Primitive Mind
The paper has two goals: to demonstrate ethnographically the connection between "structure" and communication, which Lévi-Strauss has consistently alleged to exist, and to challenge the thesis of Hallpike's book, The Foundations of Primitive Thought, that primitive thought reflects an "incomplete," unsophisticated logic.The paper focuses on the counting system of the Paiela, a highland Papua New Guinea group. It argues that Paiela counting behavi…
"Paiela "women-men: The Reflexive Foundations of Gender Ideology
Paiela notions about femaleness and maleness stem from an indigenous reflexive doctrine concerning the character of "women-men" or humanity. This reflexive doctrine, that "we" are both "good" and "bad," serves as the semantic key to a rather unique social structure predicated on a distinction between domestic and public domains and its moral entailments. The way in which gender functions as a master code of that structure is explored at length. I…
Where the Waves Fall: A New South Sea Islands History from First Settlement to Colonial Rule. K. R. Howe
Cultural/Ethnology: Food, Sex, and Pollution: A New Guinea Religion
Moonlight: Negative Images of Transcendence in Paiela Pollution
The new cultural history: Essays
Across the humanities and the social sciences, disciplinary boundaries have come into question as scholars have acknowledged their common preoccupations with cultural phenomena ranging from rituals and ceremonies to texts and discourse. Literary critics, for example, have turned to history for a deepening of their notion of cultural products; some of them now read historical documents in the same way that they previously read 'great' texts. Anthr…
Intimations of Infinity: The Mythopoeia of the Iqwaye Counting System and Number
The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia
Histories in the making: Paiela and historical anthropology
Thinking Difference: A Review of Marilyn Strathern's: The Gender of the Gift
Clio in Oceania: Toward a Historical Anthropology
Clio in Oceania: Toward a Historical Anthropology
General/Theoretical Anthropology: Anahulu. The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii, Volume 1: Historical Ethnography. Marshall Sahlins with Dorothy B. Barrère
Ku Warn: Language and Segmentary Politics in the Western Nebilyer Valley, Papua New Guinea. FRANCESCA Merlan and Alan Rumsey
The Ngatik Massacre: History and Identity on a Micronesian Atoll. LIN Poyer
Word Made Flesh: Religion, the Economy, and the Body in the Papua New Guinea Highlands
Papuan Borderlands: Huli, Duna, and Ipili Perspectives on the Papua New Guinea Highlands
Migration and Transformations: Regional Perspectives on New Guinea
Migration and Transformations: Regional Perspectives on New Guinea. ANDREW J. STRATHERN and GABRIELE STÜRZENHOFECKER, eds. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994. xi + 327 pp., figures, maps, tables, notes, references, index
The Mount Kare Python and His Gold: Totemism and Ecology in the Papua New Guinea Highlands
Lying between the Huli and Paiela peoples of the Papua New Guinea highlands, Mt. Kare, the site of a gold rush from 1988 to 1990, presently inspires millenarian speculations about an imminent cosmic revolution. Mt. Kare was traditionally a ritual site where pigs were sacrificed to Taiyundika, a totemic python, to promote the fertility of plant, animal, and human species. Today it is where gold is mined in pursuit of unprecedented riches and mille…
Introduction: From the "New Ecology" to the New Ecologies
An earlier ecological anthropology defined its project within the compass of the idealism v. materialism debate. Culture was an adaptive tool, instrumental rather than formal; it was intelligible with respect to its material effects, not-as the idealists would maintain-in terms of itself, as an autonomous, self-determining order of reality. This argument was mounted with respect to bounded, stable, self-regulating, local, or at best regional enti…
Reproducing Inequality: The Gender Politics of Male Cults in the Papua New Guinea Highlands and Amazonia
This chapter examines some resemblances between Amazonian and Melanesian men's cults. These cults portray the omatisia ritual of the Paiela of the Papua New Guinea highlands as a political act of “reproduction” in which immature boys are “reborn” as fertile adults. Women's fertility is subordinated to the claimed “fertility” of men. Thus, Amazonia and Papua New Guinea societies share ritual paraphernalia such as flutes and bullroarers, as well as…
Reimagining Political Ecology
Reimagining Political Ecology is a state-of-the-art collection of ethnographies grounded in political ecology. When political ecology first emerged as a distinct field in the early 1970s, it was rooted in the neo-Marxism of world system theory. This collection showcases second-generation political ecology, which retains the Marxist interest in capitalism as a global structure but which is also heavily influenced by poststructuralism, feminism, pr…
Reverse Anthropology: Indigenous Analysis of Social and Environmental Relations in New Guinea by Stuart Kirsch
Sociology (33 works) · History (18 works) · Political science (16 works) · Anthropology (15 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (14 works) · Law (14 works) · History (13 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Ethnology (11 works) · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs (11 works)