Alterity and Autochthony

Austronesian Cosmographies of the Marvellous

Bibliographic Data

ID20045069
AuthorsMarshall Sahlins (Australian National University, corresponding author)
Year2017
Pages37-76
Publication date2017-04-07
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueTides of Innovation in Oceania (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherANU Press (PUBLISHER • AU)
DOI10.22459/tio.04.2017.01
OpenAlexW2189035692
ISBN9781760460921
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited58

Raymond Firth's Tikopia corpus is a treasure for all time. 'A treasure for all time' was Thucydides's modest assessment of his own History of the Peloponnesian War, no doubt intended as an invidious contrast to Herodotus, since it followed from the observation that he was not one to pander to a credulous public by relating fanciful tales of the marvellous. Indeed, Thucydides's invocations of a universal, interestdriven rationality based on supposed natural desires of power and gainof the kind that led to the spectacularly irrational debacle of the Sicilian campaign-have made him the darling of contemporary IR realists. All the same, the ethnographically-informed history of Herodotus, rich in its accounts of local legends and unusual customs, turned out to be the real intellectual gold. And in the same way as Herodotus's sustained excursus on the marvellous of the peoples involved in the Greco-Persian

Alterity · Austronesian languages · Geography · Linguistics · Sociology · Theology · Anthropology · Asian Studies and History · History · Philosophy · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

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