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  1. Home
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  3. Stealing People's Names
  • Cited by 56
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
September 2009
Print publication year:
1990
Online ISBN:
9780511521096
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511521096
Subjects:
Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology (71)
Information

Book description

Among the people of Avatip, a community in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, the most prestigious and valued forms of wealth are personal names. In this intriguing study, Simon Harrison analyses the significance of names in the context of Avatip ritual, cosmology and concepts of the person, and shows how the Avatip system of names parallels the gift-exchange systems of many other Melanesian societies. In ritualized debates, which form the public arena of Avatip political life, rival leaders and the groups they represent struggle in oratorical contests for the possession of strategic names, and, as they do so, continually manipulate possibilities of this symbolically constituted economy, these competitive processes over the past century have been progressively egalitarian type to one based on hereditary inequality and rank. The author offers a critique of the analytical arguing that it obscures the processes of political evolution in Melanesia and disguises the fundamental similarities underlying the sociocultural diversity of the region.

Reviews

"A short review cannot do justice to the complex and subtle analysis Harrison provides. This is a very rich ethnography that makes substantial contributions to important theoretical discussions in anthropology. Read it to appreciate it." Nancy McDowell, American Anthropologist

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