Description
Book SynopsisRyan Schram explores the experiences of living in intercultural and historical conjunctures among Auhelawa people of Papua New Guinea in Harvests, Feasts, and Graves. In this ethnographic investigation, Schram ponders how Auhelawa question the meaning of social forms and through this questioning seek paths to establish a new sense of their collective self.
Harvests, Feasts, and Graves describes the ways in which Auhelawa people, and by extension many others, produce knowledge of themselves as historical subjects in the aftermath of diverse and incomplete encounters with Christianity, capitalism, and Western values. Using the contemporary setting of Papua New Guinea, Schram presents a new take on essential topics and foundational questions of social and cultural anthropology.
If, as Marx writes, the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living, Harvests, Feasts, and Graves asks: Which history weighs the most? A
Trade Review
Harvests, Feasts, and Graves offers a lively account of a people dealing with a seductive modernity that they nevertheless, as Schram puts it, hold at bay, offering a compelling alternative to accounts that emphasise a decisive rupture with the past or that misrecognise change as stasis.
* The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology *
Harvests, Feasts, and Graves is a rich, rewarding ethnography and stimulating contribution to current debates concerning the ways rural Papua New Guineans experience and make sense of their ongoing participation in wider institutional and discursive frameworks, particularly Christianity and capitalism.
* Pacific Affairs *
