Paul B Roscoe
Biographic Data
| ID | 3617094 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paul B Roscoe |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paul B |
| FAMILY NAME | Roscoe |
| SIGNATURE | ROSCOE P B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Maine Orono Maine |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 157 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 16 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Methodological Introduction
As cooperation between psychiatrists an anthropologists increases, various types of textual materials and life histories have become of increasing interest in anthropology. Further, we recognize more and more that verbatim data are of an order of immediacy differing profoundly from any material collected in ratio obliqua. For methodological reasons and because these two kinds of incentive to the collection of autobiographical materials involve qu…
War and Society in Sepik New Guinea
Un certain nombre de chercheurs melanesianistes ont recemment accuse les theories occidentales du lien social et de la violence - qui derivent, selon eux, d'ideologies servant a legitimer les societes etatiques - de deformer nos analyses des societes sans etat, en particulier des communautes melanesiennes. Harrison a montre que la notion de personne dans la region du Sepik est tout a fait differente de la conception occidentale et qu'elle engendr…
Anthropology in the New Melanesia
Social Reproduction and History in Melanesia: Mortuary Ritual, Gift Exchange, and Custom in the Tanga Islands. Robert J. Foster Nation Making: Emergent Identities in Postcolonial Melanesia. Robert J. Foster
Familiar Partners? The Mountain Arapesh and the Westermarck Effect
In her work on the Mountain Arapesh of New Guinea, Margaret Mead reported a betrothal practice in which a small girl goes to live with a future husband and is raised with him like a sister. The case has since played an unusual role in the anthropological debate about incest, having been used both to support and refute Edward Westermarck's "childhood-socialization" hypothesis of incest avoidance. Drawing upon the published Mountain Arapesh record …
Of Power and Menace
The anthropological analysis of art is still dominated by a notion that the artistic creations of traditional societies communicate intellectual meanings or 'messages' that are implicated in the reproduction of culture and society. In this article, I argue that frequently this approach is at best incomplete, at worst untenably functional. Using as illustration the ka nimbia spirit house produced by the Yangoru Boiken of the East Sepik Province, P…
The Perils of 'Positivism' in Cultural Anthropology
Positivism,' it seems, is a movement that cultural anthropology can do without. But what is positivism, who are these positivists, and what precisely are their sins? Notwithstanding appearances to the contrary, the image of positivism in cultural anthropology is comparatively coherent and the criticism directed at it relatively well founded. What is dubious is the conclusion to which many critics think it leads: that the methods of the natural sc…
Settlement and Sociality among the Mountain Arapesh
Thanks to the early ethnographic work Margaret Mead and Reo Fortune, the Arapesh the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, have become one the standard exemplars human culture. They constitute one 30 New Guinea cases in the Ethnographic Atlas, they have featured in numerous comparative analyses, and, thanks to Mead's Sex and Temperament (reprinted numerous times since its appearance in 1935), they are perhaps better known to western lay audience…
Amity and Aggression
Dernierement, les recherches sur l'inceste se sont de plus en plus centrees sur l'hypothese d'Edward Westermarck (l'intimite enfantine forme un element decisif de l'aversion pour l'inceste, de son evitement et des tabous garantissant sa prohibition) : cette approche est insuffisante. L'A. defend l'idee que l'aversion pour l'inceste se developpe entre ceux qui, ayant pu faire l'experience de l'entente familiale, peuvent eprouver de l'amitie l'un p…
Practice and Political Centralisation
The Net and the Bow in the Ituri
Warfare, terrain, and political expansion
The Bow and Spreadnet
Mbuti bands in eastern Zaire differ in their hunting use of the spreadnet and the bow, a variation previously attributed to historical contacts with different non-Mbuti groups, population pressure, and differences in the floral diversity and abundance of the Ituri Forest. None of these factors, however, adequately explains a similar differentiation in the Sepik Basin of Papua New Guinea. Instead, the Sepik data indicate that the net and the bow m…
The Flight From the Fen
This paper has two goals. Its specific aim is to establish the prehistoric migrations of the Boiken people of the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, using a large corpus of Boiken settlement histories supplemented by linguistic, genetic, and ecological data. In the course of the analysis, a method of applying cluster techniques to detect underlying directional patterns in settlement histories is demonstrated. The migration history thus reveal…
The Pig and the Long Yam
That human communities cannot be treated a mosaic of isolated cultural permutations has been realized for some time. Rather, they are embedded in larger systems of relations which increasingly have become the focus of anthropological study in their own right. To date, the main work in this area is by political economists who have attempted to elucidate the interrelations of local economies and polities, usually out of an interest in the effects o…
The far side of Hurun
Investigations of Melanesia's so-called cargo cults tend to concentrate on the circumstances under which millenarian contexts of belief, attitude, and value are generated. In themselves, though, contexts do not precipitate millenarian movements. Instead, as the millenarian history of the Yangoru Boiken, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea indicates, movements must be constructed from millenarian milieus, a process requiring that leaders not onl…
Maiyire
Practice and Political Centralisation
War and Society in Sepik New Guinea
Un certain nombre de chercheurs melanesianistes ont recemment accuse les theories occidentales du lien social et de la violence - qui derivent, selon eux, d'ideologies servant a legitimer les societes etatiques - de deformer nos analyses des societes sans etat, en particulier des communautes melanesiennes. Harrison a montre que la notion de personne dans la region du Sepik est tout a fait differente de la conception occidentale et qu'elle engendr…
Of Power and Menace
The anthropological analysis of art is still dominated by a notion that the artistic creations of traditional societies communicate intellectual meanings or 'messages' that are implicated in the reproduction of culture and society. In this article, I argue that frequently this approach is at best incomplete, at worst untenably functional. Using as illustration the ka nimbia spirit house produced by the Yangoru Boiken of the East Sepik Province, P…
The Perils of 'Positivism' in Cultural Anthropology
Positivism,' it seems, is a movement that cultural anthropology can do without. But what is positivism, who are these positivists, and what precisely are their sins? Notwithstanding appearances to the contrary, the image of positivism in cultural anthropology is comparatively coherent and the criticism directed at it relatively well founded. What is dubious is the conclusion to which many critics think it leads: that the methods of the natural sc…
The Bow and Spreadnet
Mbuti bands in eastern Zaire differ in their hunting use of the spreadnet and the bow, a variation previously attributed to historical contacts with different non-Mbuti groups, population pressure, and differences in the floral diversity and abundance of the Ituri Forest. None of these factors, however, adequately explains a similar differentiation in the Sepik Basin of Papua New Guinea. Instead, the Sepik data indicate that the net and the bow m…
Amity and Aggression
Dernierement, les recherches sur l'inceste se sont de plus en plus centrees sur l'hypothese d'Edward Westermarck (l'intimite enfantine forme un element decisif de l'aversion pour l'inceste, de son evitement et des tabous garantissant sa prohibition) : cette approche est insuffisante. L'A. defend l'idee que l'aversion pour l'inceste se developpe entre ceux qui, ayant pu faire l'experience de l'entente familiale, peuvent eprouver de l'amitie l'un p…
The far side of Hurun
Investigations of Melanesia's so-called cargo cults tend to concentrate on the circumstances under which millenarian contexts of belief, attitude, and value are generated. In themselves, though, contexts do not precipitate millenarian movements. Instead, as the millenarian history of the Yangoru Boiken, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea indicates, movements must be constructed from millenarian milieus, a process requiring that leaders not onl…
The Pig and the Long Yam
That human communities cannot be treated a mosaic of isolated cultural permutations has been realized for some time. Rather, they are embedded in larger systems of relations which increasingly have become the focus of anthropological study in their own right. To date, the main work in this area is by political economists who have attempted to elucidate the interrelations of local economies and polities, usually out of an interest in the effects o…
The Net and the Bow in the Ituri
Maiyire
Settlement and Sociality among the Mountain Arapesh
Thanks to the early ethnographic work Margaret Mead and Reo Fortune, the Arapesh the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, have become one the standard exemplars human culture. They constitute one 30 New Guinea cases in the Ethnographic Atlas, they have featured in numerous comparative analyses, and, thanks to Mead's Sex and Temperament (reprinted numerous times since its appearance in 1935), they are perhaps better known to western lay audience…
Maiyire
The far side of Hurun
Investigations of Melanesia's so-called cargo cults tend to concentrate on the circumstances under which millenarian contexts of belief, attitude, and value are generated. In themselves, though, contexts do not precipitate millenarian movements. Instead, as the millenarian history of the Yangoru Boiken, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea indicates, movements must be constructed from millenarian milieus, a process requiring that leaders not onl…
The Flight From the Fen
This paper has two goals. Its specific aim is to establish the prehistoric migrations of the Boiken people of the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, using a large corpus of Boiken settlement histories supplemented by linguistic, genetic, and ecological data. In the course of the analysis, a method of applying cluster techniques to detect underlying directional patterns in settlement histories is demonstrated. The migration history thus reveal…
The Pig and the Long Yam
That human communities cannot be treated a mosaic of isolated cultural permutations has been realized for some time. Rather, they are embedded in larger systems of relations which increasingly have become the focus of anthropological study in their own right. To date, the main work in this area is by political economists who have attempted to elucidate the interrelations of local economies and polities, usually out of an interest in the effects o…
The Bow and Spreadnet
Mbuti bands in eastern Zaire differ in their hunting use of the spreadnet and the bow, a variation previously attributed to historical contacts with different non-Mbuti groups, population pressure, and differences in the floral diversity and abundance of the Ituri Forest. None of these factors, however, adequately explains a similar differentiation in the Sepik Basin of Papua New Guinea. Instead, the Sepik data indicate that the net and the bow m…
Warfare, terrain, and political expansion
Practice and Political Centralisation
The Net and the Bow in the Ituri
Settlement and Sociality among the Mountain Arapesh
Thanks to the early ethnographic work Margaret Mead and Reo Fortune, the Arapesh the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, have become one the standard exemplars human culture. They constitute one 30 New Guinea cases in the Ethnographic Atlas, they have featured in numerous comparative analyses, and, thanks to Mead's Sex and Temperament (reprinted numerous times since its appearance in 1935), they are perhaps better known to western lay audience…
Amity and Aggression
Dernierement, les recherches sur l'inceste se sont de plus en plus centrees sur l'hypothese d'Edward Westermarck (l'intimite enfantine forme un element decisif de l'aversion pour l'inceste, de son evitement et des tabous garantissant sa prohibition) : cette approche est insuffisante. L'A. defend l'idee que l'aversion pour l'inceste se developpe entre ceux qui, ayant pu faire l'experience de l'entente familiale, peuvent eprouver de l'amitie l'un p…
Familiar Partners? The Mountain Arapesh and the Westermarck Effect
In her work on the Mountain Arapesh of New Guinea, Margaret Mead reported a betrothal practice in which a small girl goes to live with a future husband and is raised with him like a sister. The case has since played an unusual role in the anthropological debate about incest, having been used both to support and refute Edward Westermarck's "childhood-socialization" hypothesis of incest avoidance. Drawing upon the published Mountain Arapesh record …
Of Power and Menace
The anthropological analysis of art is still dominated by a notion that the artistic creations of traditional societies communicate intellectual meanings or 'messages' that are implicated in the reproduction of culture and society. In this article, I argue that frequently this approach is at best incomplete, at worst untenably functional. Using as illustration the ka nimbia spirit house produced by the Yangoru Boiken of the East Sepik Province, P…
The Perils of 'Positivism' in Cultural Anthropology
Positivism,' it seems, is a movement that cultural anthropology can do without. But what is positivism, who are these positivists, and what precisely are their sins? Notwithstanding appearances to the contrary, the image of positivism in cultural anthropology is comparatively coherent and the criticism directed at it relatively well founded. What is dubious is the conclusion to which many critics think it leads: that the methods of the natural sc…
War and Society in Sepik New Guinea
Un certain nombre de chercheurs melanesianistes ont recemment accuse les theories occidentales du lien social et de la violence - qui derivent, selon eux, d'ideologies servant a legitimer les societes etatiques - de deformer nos analyses des societes sans etat, en particulier des communautes melanesiennes. Harrison a montre que la notion de personne dans la region du Sepik est tout a fait differente de la conception occidentale et qu'elle engendr…
Anthropology in the New Melanesia
Social Reproduction and History in Melanesia: Mortuary Ritual, Gift Exchange, and Custom in the Tanga Islands. Robert J. Foster Nation Making: Emergent Identities in Postcolonial Melanesia. Robert J. Foster
Methodological Introduction
As cooperation between psychiatrists an anthropologists increases, various types of textual materials and life histories have become of increasing interest in anthropology. Further, we recognize more and more that verbatim data are of an order of immediacy differing profoundly from any material collected in ratio obliqua. For methodological reasons and because these two kinds of incentive to the collection of autobiographical materials involve qu…
History (13 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies (9 works) · Anthropology (7 works) · Ethnology (7 works) · History (7 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (6 works) · Geography (6 works) · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs (6 works) · Indigenous Studies and Ecology (4 works)