Category: anthropology

The Ethnographic Frontier in German New Guinea

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Anthropologists and world historians make strange bedfellows. Although the latter frequently employ anthropological methods in their descriptions of cross-cultural exchanges, the former have raised substantial reservations about global approaches to history. Fearing loss of specificity, anthropologists object to the effacing qualities of techniques employed by world historians—this despite the fact that anthropology itself was a global, comparative enterprise in the nineteenth century. Anthropology’s Global Histories: The Ethnographic Frontier in German New Guinea, 1870–1935, by Rainer F. Buschmann, seeks to recover some of anthropology’s global flavor by viewing its history in Oceania through the notion of the ethnographic frontier—the furthermost limits of the anthropologically known regions of the Pacific. The colony of German New Guinea (1884–1914) presents an ideal example of just such a contact zone.

October 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3184-4 / $55.00 (CLOTH)

Migration and Tourism in the Indonesian Borderlands

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Since the late 1960s the Indonesian island of Batam has been transformed from a sleepy fishing village to a booming frontier town, where foreign investment, mostly from neighboring Singapore, converges with inexpensive land and labor. Indonesian female migrants dominate the island’s economic landscape both as factory workers and as prostitutes servicing working class tourists from Singapore. Indonesians also move across the border in search of work in Malaysia and Singapore as plantation and construction workers or maids. Export processing zones such as Batam are both celebrated and vilified in contemporary debates on economic globalization. The Anxieties of Mobility: Migration and Tourism in the Indonesian Borderlands, by Johan A. Lindquist, moves beyond these dichotomies to explore the experiences of migrants and tourists who pass through Batam. Johan Lindquist’s extensive fieldwork allows him to portray globalization in terms of relationships that bind individuals together over long distances rather than as a series of impersonal economic transactions.

“A fine-grained picture of working class Indonesians and Singaporeans who travel in opposite directions in pursuit of jobs, money, sex, drugs, legitimacy, and bright lights. They cross multiple barriers—national, urban, moral, gender, and religious—in order to attain some measure of individual success in the globalizing economies that link Singapore’s development with Indonesia’s supply of cheap migrant workers. The ethnography is rich and fascinating, and it captures a complex shifting world with delicacy, grace, and clarity.” —Aihwa Ong, University of California, Berkeley

October 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3315-2 / $22.00 (PAPER)

The Politics of Islamic Education in Southeast Asia

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When students from a Muslim boarding school were convicted for the 2002 terrorist bombings in Bali, Islamic schools in Southeast Asia became the focus of intense international scrutiny. Some analysts have warned that these schools are being turned into platforms for violent jihadism. Making Modern Muslims: The Politics of Islamic Education in Southeast Asia, edited by Robert W. Hefner, is the first book to look comparatively at Islamic education and politics in Southeast Asia. Based on a two-year research project by leading scholars of Southeast Asian Islam, the book examines Islamic schooling in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, and the southern Philippines. The studies demonstrate that the great majority of schools have nothing to do with violence but are undergoing changes that have far-reaching implications for democracy, gender relations, pluralism, and citizenship.

“This is a timely, well-conceived, and extremely well-crafted volume that addresses topics of the utmost importance in today’s increasingly globalized—and dangerously fraught—world. It will appeal to a wide range of scholars with diverse disciplinary backgrounds and to general readers with vastly different levels of knowledge about the peoples and cultures of modern Asia and the culture and politics of contemporary Islam.” —Michael G. Peletz, Emory University

October 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3316-9 / $24.00 (PAPER)

Art from Burma in the Denison Museum

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The collection of Burmese art housed at the Denison Museum in Granville, Ohio, includes more than 1,500 objects dating from the late first millennium A.D., through the twentieth century. While particularly strong on textiles originating with minority groups in Burma, it also includes Buddha images, lacquer objects, works on paper, manuscripts, wood carvings, and pieces made from bronze, silver, and ivory. The core holdings were acquired by Baptist missionaries, United States government employees, diplomats, and others living in Burma, and this material was augmented by judicious purchases.

Eclectic Collecting: Art from Burma in the Denison Museum, edited by Alexandra Green, discusses theoretical approaches to the study of textiles and examines in some depth the production and use of textiles by the Karenic, Chin, Kachin, Lahu, and Tai, and Wa minority groups, as well as ethnic Burmans, within the context of their histories and cultures. Vibrant photographs illustrate the distinctive designs characteristic of each population group and the production techniques they use.

270 illus., 261 in color, 2 maps

August 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3311-4 / $60.00 (CLOTH)

Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific

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What is globalization? How is it gendered? How does it work in Asia and the Pacific? The authors of the sixteen original and innovative essays presented in Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific: Method, Practice, Theory, edited by Kathy E. Ferguson and Monique Mironesco, take fresh stock of globalization’s complexities. They pursue critical feminist inquiry about women, gender, and sexualities and produce original insights into changing life patterns in Asian and Pacific Island societies. Each essay puts the lives and struggles of women at the center of its examination while weaving examples of global circuits in Asian and Pacific societies into a world frame of analysis. The work is generated from within Asian and Pacific spaces, bringing to the fore local voices and claims to knowledge.

August 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3241-4 / $35.00 (PAPER)

Bridal Laments in Rural China

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Performing Grief: Bridal Laments in Rural China, by Anne E. McLaren, is the first in-depth study of Chinese bridal laments, a ritual and performative art practiced by Chinese women in premodern times that gave them a rare opportunity to voice their grievances publicly. Drawing on methodologies from numerous disciplines, including performance arts and folk literatures, the author suggests that the ability to move an audience through her lament was one of the most important symbolic and ritual skills a Chinese woman could possess before the modern era.

July 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3232-2 / $54.00 (CLOTH)

“Performing Grief introduces us to the fascinating culture of the bridal lament. Drawing upon the rich materials from the small village of Shuyuan in Nanhui near Shanghai for her primary materials, the author reconstructs a once vibrant culture in which young women on the eve of their wedding voiced their anxieties in ritual songs. The study is based on extensive local research, makes full use of the existing scholarship on female traditions of lament inside and outside China, and illustrates its argument with the almost complete translation of one of the most fully preserved cycle of laments. This study is an absolute must for anyone who is interested in the position of women in traditional society until quite recently. It also is essential reading for anyone working in the field of Chinese women’s literature as it highlights the rich oral traditions of poor rural women.” –Wilt Idema, Harvard University

Ways of Being and Place in Vanuatu

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The Other Side: Ways of Being and Place in Vanuatu, by John Patrick Taylor, is the first major ethnographic and historical study of the Sia Raga people of north Pentecost Island, a region that was home to the late Father Walter Lini, Vanuatu’s first prime minister. Exploring Raga social, spatial, and historical consciousness, this richly poetic account provides important theoretical contributions to ongoing debates in Pacific anthropology about the relation between structure and history, and place and time. It reveals important insights into the convergence of indigenous and exogenous cosmologies and hegemonies historically, and shows how these are implicated in contemporary social, ritual, and material cultural expressions. These analyses engage with broader concerns relating to colonial and postcolonial identities, political economy, and globalization in island Melanesia.

Pacific Islands Monograph Series, No. 22
July 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3302-2 / $52.00 (CLOTH)
Published in association with the Center for Pacific Islands, University of Hawai‘i

Cultural Tourism and the Negotiation of Tradition

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At the 1989 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, throngs of visitors gathered on the National Mall to celebrate Hawai‘i’s multicultural heritage through its traditional arts. The “edu-tainment” spectacle revealed a richly complex Hawai‘i few tourists ever see and one never before or since replicated in a national space. The program was restaged a year later in Honolulu for a local audience and subsequently inspired several spin-offs in Hawai‘i. In both Washington, D.C., and Honolulu, the program instigated a new paradigm for cultural representation. Based on archival research and extensive interviews with festival organizers and participants, American Aloha: Cultural Tourism and the Negotiation of Tradition by Heather A. Diamond, is an innovative cross-disciplinary study that uncovers the behind-the-scenes negotiations and processes that inform the national spectacle of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

June 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3171-4 / $55.00 (CLOTH)

Exploring Work and Life in Urban Cambodia

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Khmer Women on the Move: Exploring Work and Life in Urban Cambodia, by Annuska Derks, offers a fascinating ethnography of young Cambodian women who move from the countryside to work in Cambodia’s capital city, Phnom Penh. Female migration and urban employment are rising, triggered by Cambodia’s transition from a closed socialist system to an open market economy. This book challenges the dominant views of these young rural women—that they are controlled by global economic forces and national development policies or trapped by restrictive customs and Cambodia’s tragic history. The author shows instead how these women shape and influence the processes of change taking place in present-day Cambodia.

““This is a fascinating ethnography about young Khmer women moving to the city to work in the garment factories, in prostitution, and as street sellers. The author makes good use of new theoretical approaches in anthropology that focus on negotiation and creativity in situations of rapid change. The result is not only a welcome new book on post-war Cambodia but an important addition to the literature on women, migration, and labor in Southeast Asia and the world.” —Judy Ledgerwood, Northern Illinois University

April 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3270-4 / $25.00 (PAPER)

Na Kua‘aina Wins History Prize

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Na Kua‘aina: Living Hawaiian Culture, by Davianna Pomaika‘i McGregor (professor of ethnic studies, University of Hawai‘i), recently received the Kenneth W. Baldridge Prize for best history book written by a Hawai‘i resident. The prize is awarded by the Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society.

Na Kua‘aina has also been selected as a finalist for the National Council on Public History Book Award. Winners will be announced at the NCPH Annual Meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, on April 11, 2008.

Margaret Mead and the Emergence of American Cosmopolitanism

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Margaret Mead’s career took off in 1928 with the publication of Coming of Age in Samoa. Within ten years, she was the best-known academic in the United States, a role she enjoyed all of her life. In On Creating a Usable Culture: Margaret Mead and the Emergence of American Cosmopolitanism, Maureen A. Molloy explores how Mead was influenced by, and influenced, the meanings of American culture and secured for herself a unique and enduring place in the American popular imagination. She considers this in relation to Mead’s four popular ethnographies written between the wars (Coming of Age in Samoa, Growing Up in New Guinea, The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe, and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies) and the academic, middle-brow, and popular responses to them.

“On Creating a Usable Culture presents a lucid and intriguing analysis of Margaret Mead’s place in U.S. culture in the 1920s and 1930s. By focusing on Mead’s early work at this important moment in the search for the meanings of ‘American,’ Maureen Molloy reveals both the relevance of that society to the genesis of Mead’s career as a public intellectual and why Americans were so receptive to her studies of Samoa, New Guinea, and Native America. Malloy also skillfully situates Mead, the anthropologist, within the intellectual world of the ‘arbiters of American culture’ who both criticized U.S. society and hoped to redefine it.”—Julia E. Liss, Scripps College

March 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3116-5 / $39.00 (CLOTH)

The Sociology of Southeast Asia

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One of the main problems faced by teachers and students who have a scholarly interest in Southeast Asia is the lack of general, user-friendly texts in the social sciences. The absence of an introduction to the sociology of Southeast Asia is especially unfortunate. The Sociology of Southeast Asia: Transformations in a Developing Region, by Victor T. King, attempts to meet these needs. This is, then, the first sole-authored introductory sociology text on Southeast Asia that focuses on change and development in the region, provides an overview of the important sociological and political economy writings, and considers the key concepts and themes in the field since 1945.

“Victor King has produced a lucid, comprehensive, and challenging analysis of the state-of-the-art of Southeast Asian sociology. The book is not only an excellent textbook for courses on Southeast Asia or development sociology, but also ‘required reading’ for all social scientists embarking on research on the area. I am certain that it will become a long-lasting addition to the standard literature on Asia.” —Hans-Dieter Evers, University of Bonn

January 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3229-2 / $26.00 (PAPER)

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