Karen Sykes
Biographic Data
| ID | 95907 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Karen Sykes |
| GIVEN NAMES | Karen |
| FAMILY NAME | Sykes |
| SIGNATURE | SYKES K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Manchester |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6107-5899 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 302 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The Anthropology of Moralities
Anthropologists have been keenly aware of the tension between cultural relativism and absolute norms, and nowhere has this been more acute than with regards to moral values. Can we study the Other’s morality without applying our own normative judgments? How do social anthropologists keep both the distance required by science and the empathy required for the analysis of lived experiences? The plurality of moralities has not received an explicit an…
Bridewealth 1 and the Autonomy of Women in Melanesia
Considering bridewealth in Melanesia from the angle of women's autonomy, in this introduction we review and analyse the various elements of this marriage practice that reveal its place in the symbolic, social and economic worlds of women. With an accent on social transformation, we discuss women's autonomy and agency in relation to the constraints that bridewealth puts on their lives, and on how they engage with it. Knowing what bridewealth is, a…
A Father's Perspective on Bridewealth in the Making of the Transnational Papua New Guinean Household
That people value ‘people’ over ‘things’ is argued often by anthropologists, but how people value specific forms and qualities of relations as they do in the example of bridewealth is less so. I explore the perspective of Papua New Guinean‐born fathers in Australia as they advocate innovations in bridewealth traditions and thereby enable daughters to marry for love, cultivate a companionate marriage, and create a Papua New Guinean household. Past…
Bishops in the Political Community of England, 1213–1272, by S.T. Ambler
This is an important book, which revisits an old conundrum: why did a substantial group of bishops support the events of 1258–65, when Simon de Montfort and the barons challenged, and attempted to restrict, the exercise of royal power. The book, by S.T. Ambler, is deftly structured, and the argument unfolds across pairs of chapters, in which a forensic examination of events is set within a broader, comparative framework: comparisons and contrasts…
A Moral Economy of the Transnational Papua New Guinean Household: Solidarity and Estrangement While ‘Working Other Gardens’
Transnational Papua New Guinean (PNG) household members provide for each other while making new forms of traditional marriage, often ensuing in changes to their access to land in their homelands in Papua New Guinea. They capture the sense of that experience of migration away from clan lands with the idiom ‘working other gardens’, by which they mean they have migrated from PNG to ‘other gardens’. Although they sustain their household’s livelihood …
Value
Value is a compelling idea in anthropological theory because it has universal purchase on the course of human society, perhaps distinguishing humans from other animals for their capacity to make decisions that some persons, things, or actions are important. However, it has long been acknowledged that understanding how people create the importance of things or actions takes some disciplined reasoning about their place in a material world. The clai…
The Quest for the Good Life in Precarious Times: Ethnographic Perspectives on the Domestic Moral Economy
The study of the quest for the good life and the morality and value it presupposes is not new. To the contrary, this is an ancient issue; its intellectual history can be traced back to Aristotle. In anthropology, the study of morality and value has always been a central concern, despite the claim of some scholars that the recent upsurge of interest in these issues is new. What
Adopting an obligation: Innovative forms of inter-clan democracy in the Islands Region of Papua New Guinea
This article explores how aspects of clan equality and fraternity within segments of a state can be basic elements of democratic society. It describes the innovative forms of inter-clan democracy in the Islands Region of Papua New Guinea (PNG) that emerged during times of regional conflict at the site of a multinational-run copper mine in North Solomons Province. Those men who had been sent to reinstate civil services near the mining site adopted…
Mortgaging the bridewealth: Problems with brothers and problems with value
In this article I raise some questions about the nature of value, largely as these arise from a situation in which the implicit value of the brother-sister relationship is foregrounded and questioned as a challenge to the dignity of Papua New Guinean women living in North Queensland, Australia. In analyses of several case studies of how husbands and wives finance bridewealth payments with new personal financial arrangements, it is possible to ide…
Public Art as the 'Taonga' of Socialist Democracy: Remembering Equality as a Value in Papua New Guinea
Malanggans, ordinarily painted and used at funerals are displayed, unpainted in New Irelands 'international' airport. There they witness the return of dead political leaders returned to their home-clans for burial. Malanggans themselves in funeral use re-centre the dead in kin networks. In the airport, they inspire me to ponder (as perhaps they ponder) the loss of Papua New Guinea socialist democracy, which I elucidate using Mauss' concept of tao…
Adopting an Obligation: Moral reasoning about the duty to provide Bougainvillean children with access to social services in New Ireland
Entériner une obligation morale : à propos de la responsabilité visant à améliorer l'accès des enfants de l'île de Bougainville aux services sociaux Cette étude de cas tirée du travail ethnographique examine une situation où les enfants d'une île de Papouasie Nouvelle-Guinée furent adoptés par les habitants d'une autre. Le processus d'adoption révèle des traits saillants de la structure sociale traditionnelle en même temps qu'il montre comment il…
Ontology Is Just Another Word for Culture: Motion Tabled at the 2008 Meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, University of Manchester
Prickly Pear Polemics - Introduction to Sundar and Robbins: Culpability, Conversion and the Possibility of Justice
Prickly Pear Polemics - Introduction to Feuchtwang and Strathern: Judgement, Commensurability and Double Vision
Ethnographies of Moral Reasoning
Rather than measure the actions of their subjects by reference to either universal rationality or cultural relativism, contributors in this volume describe ordinary people as they value human relation
Subjectivity, Visual Technology, and Public Culture: Watching the Ethnographic Film, Malanggan Labadama in New Ireland
The study of cultural change requires a dialectical theory of culture that does not reduce vectors of change to extra-cultural forces. Despite changes in expert technology that included the uses of ethnographic film to aid the carvers of Melanesian funerary sculptures, which are named malanggan, the carvers typically present their sculpture to either ritual or secular publics who are incredulous at the brief display, but with a difference in eith…
The Moral Grounds of Critique: Between Possessive Individuals, Entrepreneurs and Big Men in New Ireland
This paper outlines the moral bases of critique of the possessive individual by examining small kin-based business enterprises in central New Ireland. I begin with an ethnographic example, comparing an elite entrepreneur with the head of a small kin-based rural business. Early economic development plans for Papua New Guinea enabled entrepreneurs to become distinctly different figures from Big Men (traditional leaders), but the head of the small b…
Interrogating Individuals: The Theory of Possessive Individualism in the Western Pacific
Both the theory of possessive individualism and its critique are present in recent economic restructuring in the western Pacific. These papers show that, although the theory of possessive individualism is not new, the moral basis of the critique of that specific form of social identity varies. I discuss how the inception of the concept emerged alongside the critique of this form of personhood, and then examine the emergence of possessive individu…
Arguing With Anthropology: An Introduction to Critical Theories of the Gift
Arguing with Anthropology is a fresh and wholly original guide to key elements in anthropology, which teaches the ability to think, write and argue critically. Using the classic 'question of the gift' as a master-issue for discussion, and drawing on a rich variety of Pacific and global ethnography, it provides a unique course in methods, aims, knowledge, and understanding. The book's highly original hypothetical approach takes gift-theory - the s…
My aim is true: Postnostalgic reflections on the future of anthropological science
L'A. propose quelques commentaires a propos de l'apport de trois ouvrages recents pour une anthropologie et une description de la complexite de la realite, centrant plus particulierement son propos sur le role de l'empathie dans la description. Chacun de ces trois ouvrages confirme que la recherche d'une methode pour decrire l'experience de la complexite demeure un defi. Ils annoncent une nouvelle science anthropologique, mais, dans leur globalit…
Introduction: The Ethnography of Children's and Youth's Work in the Age of Capitalist Restructuring
The Gift of Shame
Twenty-five years ago, Roy Wagner in his book, The Invention of Culture asked his reader to comprehend the invention of society as an ongoing effort, especially an effort made by members aware of the changes that can be wrought by their actions. In doing so, he posed the problem of what kind of society people thought they were making, contrasting the social contract of the Euro-American political thought with the processual sociality imagined by …
American Ethnological Society: AE Editor Sought
Paying a School Fee is a Father's Duty: Critical Citizenship in Central New Ireland
The analysis of citizenship often neglects descriptions of what people think about participating in routine civic duties, instead making valuable criticisms of the processes that exclude or restrict them from political involvement. Here, I describe how residents of central New Ireland reason about their debts as citizens in relation to the mundane work of arranging secondary school fees. The singular act of paying the school fee evokes multiple c…
Social Reproduction and History in Melanesia: Mortuary Ritual, Gift Exchange, and Custom in the Tanga Islands
Social Reproduction and History in Melanesia: Mortuary Ritual, Gift Exchange, and Custom in the Tanga Islands. ROBERT J. FOSTER. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xxii. 288 pp., index, bibliography, glossary, notes, figures
Ontology Is Just Another Word for Culture: Motion Tabled at the 2008 Meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, University of Manchester
Interrogating Individuals: The Theory of Possessive Individualism in the Western Pacific
Both the theory of possessive individualism and its critique are present in recent economic restructuring in the western Pacific. These papers show that, although the theory of possessive individualism is not new, the moral basis of the critique of that specific form of social identity varies. I discuss how the inception of the concept emerged alongside the critique of this form of personhood, and then examine the emergence of possessive individu…
Mortgaging the bridewealth: Problems with brothers and problems with value
In this article I raise some questions about the nature of value, largely as these arise from a situation in which the implicit value of the brother-sister relationship is foregrounded and questioned as a challenge to the dignity of Papua New Guinean women living in North Queensland, Australia. In analyses of several case studies of how husbands and wives finance bridewealth payments with new personal financial arrangements, it is possible to ide…
Paying a School Fee is a Father's Duty: Critical Citizenship in Central New Ireland
The analysis of citizenship often neglects descriptions of what people think about participating in routine civic duties, instead making valuable criticisms of the processes that exclude or restrict them from political involvement. Here, I describe how residents of central New Ireland reason about their debts as citizens in relation to the mundane work of arranging secondary school fees. The singular act of paying the school fee evokes multiple c…
After the 'Raskol' Feast: Youths’ alienation in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea
Youths' alienation from both the exchange networks of their kin and the wage economy in urban Papua New Guinea depletes their spirit and will, thereby challenging that aspect of personal identity which establishes their relations to others. Their thefts, violence and gluttony exceed conventional habits of consumption and distinguish many youth as 'rascals' (in Tok Pisin, raskols), who have 'no shame nor respect' ( nogat sem). In this article I an…
The Quest for the Good Life in Precarious Times: Ethnographic Perspectives on the Domestic Moral Economy
The study of the quest for the good life and the morality and value it presupposes is not new. To the contrary, this is an ancient issue; its intellectual history can be traced back to Aristotle. In anthropology, the study of morality and value has always been a central concern, despite the claim of some scholars that the recent upsurge of interest in these issues is new. What
My aim is true: Postnostalgic reflections on the future of anthropological science
L'A. propose quelques commentaires a propos de l'apport de trois ouvrages recents pour une anthropologie et une description de la complexite de la realite, centrant plus particulierement son propos sur le role de l'empathie dans la description. Chacun de ces trois ouvrages confirme que la recherche d'une methode pour decrire l'experience de la complexite demeure un defi. Ils annoncent une nouvelle science anthropologique, mais, dans leur globalit…
The Moral Grounds of Critique: Between Possessive Individuals, Entrepreneurs and Big Men in New Ireland
This paper outlines the moral bases of critique of the possessive individual by examining small kin-based business enterprises in central New Ireland. I begin with an ethnographic example, comparing an elite entrepreneur with the head of a small kin-based rural business. Early economic development plans for Papua New Guinea enabled entrepreneurs to become distinctly different figures from Big Men (traditional leaders), but the head of the small b…
Social Reproduction and History in Melanesia: Mortuary Ritual, Gift Exchange, and Custom in the Tanga Islands
Social Reproduction and History in Melanesia: Mortuary Ritual, Gift Exchange, and Custom in the Tanga Islands. ROBERT J. FOSTER. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xxii. 288 pp., index, bibliography, glossary, notes, figures
Arguing With Anthropology: An Introduction to Critical Theories of the Gift
Arguing with Anthropology is a fresh and wholly original guide to key elements in anthropology, which teaches the ability to think, write and argue critically. Using the classic 'question of the gift' as a master-issue for discussion, and drawing on a rich variety of Pacific and global ethnography, it provides a unique course in methods, aims, knowledge, and understanding. The book's highly original hypothetical approach takes gift-theory - the s…
Value
Value is a compelling idea in anthropological theory because it has universal purchase on the course of human society, perhaps distinguishing humans from other animals for their capacity to make decisions that some persons, things, or actions are important. However, it has long been acknowledged that understanding how people create the importance of things or actions takes some disciplined reasoning about their place in a material world. The clai…
Prickly Pear Polemics - Introduction to Feuchtwang and Strathern: Judgement, Commensurability and Double Vision
Social Reproduction and History in Melanesia: Mortuary Ritual, Gift Exchange, and Custom in the Tanga Islands
Social Reproduction and History in Melanesia: Mortuary Ritual, Gift Exchange, and Custom in the Tanga Islands. ROBERT J. FOSTER. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xxii. 288 pp., index, bibliography, glossary, notes, figures
After the 'Raskol' Feast: Youths’ alienation in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea
Youths' alienation from both the exchange networks of their kin and the wage economy in urban Papua New Guinea depletes their spirit and will, thereby challenging that aspect of personal identity which establishes their relations to others. Their thefts, violence and gluttony exceed conventional habits of consumption and distinguish many youth as 'rascals' (in Tok Pisin, raskols), who have 'no shame nor respect' ( nogat sem). In this article I an…
American Ethnological Society: AE Editor Sought
Paying a School Fee is a Father's Duty: Critical Citizenship in Central New Ireland
The analysis of citizenship often neglects descriptions of what people think about participating in routine civic duties, instead making valuable criticisms of the processes that exclude or restrict them from political involvement. Here, I describe how residents of central New Ireland reason about their debts as citizens in relation to the mundane work of arranging secondary school fees. The singular act of paying the school fee evokes multiple c…
The Gift of Shame
Twenty-five years ago, Roy Wagner in his book, The Invention of Culture asked his reader to comprehend the invention of society as an ongoing effort, especially an effort made by members aware of the changes that can be wrought by their actions. In doing so, he posed the problem of what kind of society people thought they were making, contrasting the social contract of the Euro-American political thought with the processual sociality imagined by …
My aim is true: Postnostalgic reflections on the future of anthropological science
L'A. propose quelques commentaires a propos de l'apport de trois ouvrages recents pour une anthropologie et une description de la complexite de la realite, centrant plus particulierement son propos sur le role de l'empathie dans la description. Chacun de ces trois ouvrages confirme que la recherche d'une methode pour decrire l'experience de la complexite demeure un defi. Ils annoncent une nouvelle science anthropologique, mais, dans leur globalit…
Introduction: The Ethnography of Children's and Youth's Work in the Age of Capitalist Restructuring
Arguing With Anthropology: An Introduction to Critical Theories of the Gift
Arguing with Anthropology is a fresh and wholly original guide to key elements in anthropology, which teaches the ability to think, write and argue critically. Using the classic 'question of the gift' as a master-issue for discussion, and drawing on a rich variety of Pacific and global ethnography, it provides a unique course in methods, aims, knowledge, and understanding. The book's highly original hypothetical approach takes gift-theory - the s…
Subjectivity, Visual Technology, and Public Culture: Watching the Ethnographic Film, Malanggan Labadama in New Ireland
The study of cultural change requires a dialectical theory of culture that does not reduce vectors of change to extra-cultural forces. Despite changes in expert technology that included the uses of ethnographic film to aid the carvers of Melanesian funerary sculptures, which are named malanggan, the carvers typically present their sculpture to either ritual or secular publics who are incredulous at the brief display, but with a difference in eith…
The Moral Grounds of Critique: Between Possessive Individuals, Entrepreneurs and Big Men in New Ireland
This paper outlines the moral bases of critique of the possessive individual by examining small kin-based business enterprises in central New Ireland. I begin with an ethnographic example, comparing an elite entrepreneur with the head of a small kin-based rural business. Early economic development plans for Papua New Guinea enabled entrepreneurs to become distinctly different figures from Big Men (traditional leaders), but the head of the small b…
Interrogating Individuals: The Theory of Possessive Individualism in the Western Pacific
Both the theory of possessive individualism and its critique are present in recent economic restructuring in the western Pacific. These papers show that, although the theory of possessive individualism is not new, the moral basis of the critique of that specific form of social identity varies. I discuss how the inception of the concept emerged alongside the critique of this form of personhood, and then examine the emergence of possessive individu…
Ethnographies of Moral Reasoning
Rather than measure the actions of their subjects by reference to either universal rationality or cultural relativism, contributors in this volume describe ordinary people as they value human relation
Ontology Is Just Another Word for Culture: Motion Tabled at the 2008 Meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, University of Manchester
Prickly Pear Polemics - Introduction to Sundar and Robbins: Culpability, Conversion and the Possibility of Justice
Prickly Pear Polemics - Introduction to Feuchtwang and Strathern: Judgement, Commensurability and Double Vision
Adopting an Obligation: Moral reasoning about the duty to provide Bougainvillean children with access to social services in New Ireland
Entériner une obligation morale : à propos de la responsabilité visant à améliorer l'accès des enfants de l'île de Bougainville aux services sociaux Cette étude de cas tirée du travail ethnographique examine une situation où les enfants d'une île de Papouasie Nouvelle-Guinée furent adoptés par les habitants d'une autre. Le processus d'adoption révèle des traits saillants de la structure sociale traditionnelle en même temps qu'il montre comment il…
Mortgaging the bridewealth: Problems with brothers and problems with value
In this article I raise some questions about the nature of value, largely as these arise from a situation in which the implicit value of the brother-sister relationship is foregrounded and questioned as a challenge to the dignity of Papua New Guinean women living in North Queensland, Australia. In analyses of several case studies of how husbands and wives finance bridewealth payments with new personal financial arrangements, it is possible to ide…
Public Art as the 'Taonga' of Socialist Democracy: Remembering Equality as a Value in Papua New Guinea
Malanggans, ordinarily painted and used at funerals are displayed, unpainted in New Irelands 'international' airport. There they witness the return of dead political leaders returned to their home-clans for burial. Malanggans themselves in funeral use re-centre the dead in kin networks. In the airport, they inspire me to ponder (as perhaps they ponder) the loss of Papua New Guinea socialist democracy, which I elucidate using Mauss' concept of tao…
Adopting an obligation: Innovative forms of inter-clan democracy in the Islands Region of Papua New Guinea
This article explores how aspects of clan equality and fraternity within segments of a state can be basic elements of democratic society. It describes the innovative forms of inter-clan democracy in the Islands Region of Papua New Guinea (PNG) that emerged during times of regional conflict at the site of a multinational-run copper mine in North Solomons Province. Those men who had been sent to reinstate civil services near the mining site adopted…
A Moral Economy of the Transnational Papua New Guinean Household: Solidarity and Estrangement While ‘Working Other Gardens’
Transnational Papua New Guinean (PNG) household members provide for each other while making new forms of traditional marriage, often ensuing in changes to their access to land in their homelands in Papua New Guinea. They capture the sense of that experience of migration away from clan lands with the idiom ‘working other gardens’, by which they mean they have migrated from PNG to ‘other gardens’. Although they sustain their household’s livelihood …
Value
Value is a compelling idea in anthropological theory because it has universal purchase on the course of human society, perhaps distinguishing humans from other animals for their capacity to make decisions that some persons, things, or actions are important. However, it has long been acknowledged that understanding how people create the importance of things or actions takes some disciplined reasoning about their place in a material world. The clai…
The Quest for the Good Life in Precarious Times: Ethnographic Perspectives on the Domestic Moral Economy
The study of the quest for the good life and the morality and value it presupposes is not new. To the contrary, this is an ancient issue; its intellectual history can be traced back to Aristotle. In anthropology, the study of morality and value has always been a central concern, despite the claim of some scholars that the recent upsurge of interest in these issues is new. What
Bishops in the Political Community of England, 1213–1272, by S.T. Ambler
This is an important book, which revisits an old conundrum: why did a substantial group of bishops support the events of 1258–65, when Simon de Montfort and the barons challenged, and attempted to restrict, the exercise of royal power. The book, by S.T. Ambler, is deftly structured, and the argument unfolds across pairs of chapters, in which a forensic examination of events is set within a broader, comparative framework: comparisons and contrasts…
Bridewealth 1 and the Autonomy of Women in Melanesia
Considering bridewealth in Melanesia from the angle of women's autonomy, in this introduction we review and analyse the various elements of this marriage practice that reveal its place in the symbolic, social and economic worlds of women. With an accent on social transformation, we discuss women's autonomy and agency in relation to the constraints that bridewealth puts on their lives, and on how they engage with it. Knowing what bridewealth is, a…
A Father's Perspective on Bridewealth in the Making of the Transnational Papua New Guinean Household
That people value ‘people’ over ‘things’ is argued often by anthropologists, but how people value specific forms and qualities of relations as they do in the example of bridewealth is less so. I explore the perspective of Papua New Guinean‐born fathers in Australia as they advocate innovations in bridewealth traditions and thereby enable daughters to marry for love, cultivate a companionate marriage, and create a Papua New Guinean household. Past…
Sociology (21 works) · Political science (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Anthropology (12 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs (7 works)