Whatever Happened to the Mother? A New Look at the Old Problem of the Mother's Brother in Three New Guinea Societies: Gimi,Daribi, and Iatmul

Kinship systems cannot be analysed as straightforward translations of the ‘facts of nature’ when those facts are limited to the production of a child by a heterosexual couple. Based upon analyses of three New Guinea societies (Gimi, Daribi, and Iatmul), I suggest that kinship systems take account – often by denying – certain ‘facts’ of human reproduction when those facts are extended beyond coitus and parturition to include both the very long period of infantile dependence upon one significant caregiver (always the mother in the societies in question and nearly universally) and the subsequent requirement for the child to be extracted from a dyadic maternal universe. Separation from mother is as critical to the survival and development of the individual as is the original prolonged and intense attachment to her. The question, then, is not whether indigenous peoples accurately understand coitus and conception – they do – but rather the ways in which they manipulate that knowledge in rules and rites of kinship in order to manage the growth and development of a child long after parturition. Rules of kinship and social relations neither ignore nor exist apart from theories of procreation as many anthropologists now claim. Rather, it is precisely because theories of procreation indicate and idealise the flow of bodily substance during coitus and pregnancy that they serve as organisational premises for social relations. The fact that kinship is a symbolic construction does not mean that it is wholly ideological nor, like a language, free to vary in ways that are arbitrary and unconnected to the ‘facts of life’ as Westerners understand them. Even when interlocutors openly deny such understanding and knowledge, especially of the male role in coitus and conception, evidence to the contrary is abundantly provided in myth, ritual, and indigenous theories of procreation. What kinship systems often do show, however, is a strategic denial of the role of the mother who, upon deeper understanding of indigenous concepts of procreation, turns out to be a ‘sterile vessel’ or without substantial contribution to her child. I illustrate this premise by extending earlier analyses of Gimi kinship and reexamining certain materials on neighbouring Daribi provided by Roy Wagner and on Iatmul peoples of the Sepik River as originally described in Naven by Gregory Bateson eighty years ago.     

中国民族考古学的形成与考古学的本土化

中国民族考古学的形成是由自身独特背景和学术环境所决定的,在辩证唯物史观指导下,运用民族志材料解释,复原考古学材料。从民族考古发展到民族考古学形成了中国民族考古学的强烈特色。     

Cross-Cultural Approaches in Archaeology: Comparative Ethnology, Comparative Archaeology, and Archaeoethnology

Cross-cultural approaches have been used widely in archaeological research. Comparative ethnology has provided a number of archaeological indicators of behavior, but large segments of the archaeological record have not yet been subjected to extensive comparative analysis. Comparative archaeology has aided in exploring variation among societal types (such as chiefdoms) and categories within the archaeological record (such as settlements). Diachronic comparisons have been used frequently by archaeologists, but these have often been based on unique samples and only rarely have employed statistics to aid in the discovery or testing of hypotheses. Archaeoethnology, comparative analyses of archaeological cases employing valid samples and statistical evaluation of theories and hypotheses, is introduced.     

谈考古学中的民族学类比方法

考古学中的民族学类比方法即是运用民族学材料做类比范本,综合其他文献及考古资料,研究解释考古材料,复原社会群体全貌的方法。这里的民族学材料作广义的解释,既包括现今仍存的民族学材料,也包括历史记载的民族学材料。...     

Island Networks and Missionary Methods: Locating Charles E. Fox and Frederick G. Bowie in the History of Pacific Archaeology

ABSTRACT

‘Missionary’ and ‘archaeology’ may appear incongruous partners within contemporary archaeological practice, but archival, museum and oral sources reveal historical connections. This paper explores two missionaries, active in the western Pacific from 1896 to 1973. Reverends Charles Elliot Fox (Melanesian Mission, Solomon Islands) and Frederick Gatherer Bowie (Free Church of Scotland Mission, Vanuatu) both conducted studies related to the prehistory and migration of Pacific people. Both produced material assemblages, as well as textual and visual documents, and formed ideas influenced by their own networks and self identities. The paper examines their data collection methods and relationships with others, considering particularly how their relationships with Pacific Islanders and with psychologist and ethnologist W.H.R. Rivers influenced the missionary research process. By understanding these aspects of their work, Fox and Bowie can be placed within a broader genealogy of Anglophone missionary archaeology dating back to the late 18th century.     

Colonial ethnology and political rationality in french west Africa

This article explores the circular and mutually reinforcing relationship between professional anthropology and new technologies of administration that emerged after the First World War in French West Africa. Local administrators wrote fieldwork monographs that were formative for metropolitan science, while new native policies concerned with protecting yet improving indigenous social institutions incorporated the methods and insights of professional ethnologists. Together they created a shared field of colonial ethnology, a scientific‐administrative complex through which practical science and scientific administration constituted one another, whether deliberately or despite actors' self‐understanding. The goal is neither to dismiss anthropology as tainted by colonial history nor to accuse individual anthropologists of supporting colonial violence. Instead, this article analyzes how ethnologists' (contradictory) characterizations of African social relations and (contradictory) native policies were intrinsically related to, and did not simply influence, one another. These administrative and scientific imperatives constituted colonial humanism, a doubled and contradictory political rationality, even as they were its products. The French administration thus produced terms and data taken up by French ethnology that then shaped policies, which fueled administrative ethnographies that generated metropolitan scholarship and vice versa.     

Leroi-Gourhan, a Philosopher of Technique and Evolution

With the publication of two volumes on technology—L'Homme et la matière and Milieu et technique in 1943–45, and Le geste et la parole (translated into English in 1993 as Gesture and Speech)—-Leroi-Gourhan asserted himself as a major social anthropologist, prehistorian, and the founder of the French schools of the ethnology of technique and of prehistoric ethnology. This paper analyzes the innovative concepts and the content of these original works, which draw their inspiration and data from biology, physiology, psychology, anthropology, and prehistory to study evolution, and technique as its medium, to create a global science of humanity.