To Remember The Faces Of The Dead: The Plentitude Of Memory In Southwestern New Britain (New Directions in Anthropological Writing) - Softcover

Maschio, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0299140946 ISBN 13: 9780299140946

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994

Synopsis

As he challenges classical semiological accounts of cultural representation in this ethnography of Melanesian religious phenomenology, Thomas Maschio shows that ritual and poetic performance are about the enactment, expression, and invention of the self.

Maschio demonstrates how such emotions as nostalgia, anger, sadness, and grief are creatively transformed during the course of religious performance and expression into a form of cultural memory—one that juxtaposes a pattern of cultural meaning with the emotional feeling of plenitude the Melanesian Rauto call makai. Evoked during initiation, mourning, and agricultural rites, and figuring prominently in Rauto discourse about the self, makai joins personal memory to patterned sets of images and meanings that Westerners would call culture.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

After having arrived in New Guinea, on travels to southwestern New Britain by first taking a jet from Port Moresby to Kimbe, a new town that has grown up around a government-sponsored oil palm project. One takes a small plane over the rugged mountain range that cuts across the center of the island of New Britain to Kandrian, where there is a small government station, a mission, and a hospital.

About the Author:

Thomas Maschio received his Ph.D. in anthropology from McMaster University and his M.A. from New York University. He has taught at the American Museum of Natural History and New York University.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0299140946
• ISBN 13: 9780299140946
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256