What makes us different is what makes us human..
Personhood in Melanesia
Arrow talk (el ik) is a genre of political oratory among the Melpa-speaking people of Mount Hagen in the Western Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea. It is practiced at the end of political events to express how history has crystallized into a state of transactional play between participants in the exchanges that constitute the event, including the sense of the event as a transition between other events and any suggestions of contradictions involved in these transactions.
Strathern, Andrew and Pamela J. Stewart2000 Arrow Talk: Transaction, Transition, and Contradiction in New Guinea Highlands History. Kent State University Press, p.1.
A whole genre of vampire films designed for viewing by people in Europe and America taps into the same concerns as are exhibited in African contexts today. In general, these phenomena force us to recognize the final demise of the myth that modernity is based on the "triumph of rationality" in human affairs. Witchcraft ideas are themselves rational if we view them as logics of explanation. At the same time, they draw their power from fantasies of guilt and desire that arise from sources that could be labeled as "irrational."
Stewart, Pamela J. and Andrew Strathern2003 Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors and Gossip. Cambridge University Press, pp. 91-2.
Each narrator tends to have an overall way of achieving a presentation of self corresponding to what Caroline Barros (1998) has called the "autobiographical persona." Like personhood, persona is the overall self-characterization that the narrator is attempting to project through the narrative process.
Stewart, Pamela J. and Andrew Strathern2000 Introduction. In Identity Work: Constructing Pacific Lives, edited by Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern. University of Pittsburgh Press, p. 5.
The min (spirit) comes directly from the ancestors, entering into the body during gestation, while noman (mind) develops after birth through the socializing influences of kin and primarily through the ability to speak. The person is therefore a complex amalgam of substances and influence.
Strathern, Andrew and Pamela J. Stewart1998 elpa and Nuer ideas of life and death: the rebirth of a comparison. In Bodies and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia, edited by M. Lambek and A. Strathern, Cambridge University, p. 236.
Pigs lined up and tethered to stakes for a compensation payment, Mount Hagen, Papua New Guinea, 1998. The occasion brought people from two different language groups together, since a killing had taken place between the Hagen and the Enga peoples, threatening the peace in the town of Mount Hagen itself, where immigrants from Enga live along with Hageners.
Round sweet potato beds in gardens at high altitude on the south road from Mt. Hagen to Tambul, Papua New Guinea, 1998. The sweet potato has been of prime importance in the social evolution of societies in the Highland region.
Large house built on stilts amid secondary regrowth in Hagu settlement among the Duna speakers of the Aluni Valley, Papua New Guinea, 1999. This house was being build for a young pastor of the Baptist church who is from the settlement, and its design reflects the status accorded to this new category of ritual leader.
Andrew Strathern
Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart are a husband and wife research team that have published many books and articles on their fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, Taiwan, Ireland and Scotland.
They are the Co-editors of Journal of Ritual Studies, and the Ritual Studies Monograph Series.
More information about their research and publications can be found at http://www.pitt.edu/~strather/
Selected Publications
Stewart, Pamela J. and Andrew Strathern (eds) (2008) Exchange and Sacrifice. Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press.
Stewart, Pamela J. and Andrew Strathern (eds) (2005) Expressive Genres and Historical Change: Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and Taiwan. Ashgate Publishing.
Strathern, Andrew and Pamela J. Stewart (2004) Empowering the Past, Confronting the Future, The Duna People of Papua New Guinea. Palgrave Macmillan.
Stewart, Pamela J. and Andrew Strathern (2003) Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors and Gossip. Cambridge University Press.
Stewart, Pamela J. and Andrew Strathern (2002) Remaking the World: Myth, Mining and Ritual Change among the Duna of Papua New Guinea. Smithsonian Institution Press.
Stewart, Pamela J. and A. Strathern (2002) Gender, Song, and Sensibility: Folktales and Folksongs in the Highlands of New Guinea. Greenwood Publishing.
Stewart, Pamela J. and Andrew Strathern (2002) Violence: Theory and Ethnography. Continuum Publishing.