Books by Andrew Strathern

Explores the significance of expressive genres for the social processes of coping with and adjusting to change, either from outside forces or from internal ones. This book covers Austronesian and non-Austronesian speakers in the wider Indo-Pacific region.

Presents a wide range of discussions and theorizing about ritual. This title covers definitional questions, issues of interpretation, meaning, and function, and a roster of ethnographic and analytical topics, covering classic themes such as ancestor worship and sacrifice, initiation, gender, healing, social change, and shamanic practices.

For courses in Social Organization, Kinship, and Cultural Ecology.Kinship has made a come-back in Anthropology. Not only is there a line of noted, general, introductory works and readers in the topic, but theoretical discussions have been stimulated both by technological changes in mechanisms of reproduction and by reconsiderations of how to define kinship in the most productive ways for cross-cultural comparisons.In addition, kinship studies have moved away from the minutiae of kin terminological systems and the ¿kinship algebrä often associated with these, to the broader analysis of processes, historical changes and fundamental cultural meanings in which kin relationships are implicated. In this changed, and changing context both Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart -- both of the University of Pittsburgh -- bring together a number of interests and concerns, in order to provide pointers for students, as well as scholars, in this field of study. Taking an explicitly processual approach, the authors examine definitions of terms such as kinship itself, approach the topic in a way that is invariably ethnographic, and deploy materials from field areas where they themselves have worked.

Strathern's illuminating study of the inequalities amongst the Highland societies of Papua New Guinea is now reissued with a new preface. The five papers in this volume seek to set these inequalities into a context of long-term and recent social changes that aim to develop schemes of analysis which will permit discussion of the societies over extended periods of time.

In the Mount Hagen area of central New Guinea, warfare has been replaced since the arrival of the Europeans by a vigorous development of moka, a competitive ceremonial exchange of wealth objects. The exchanges of pigs, shells and other valuables are interpreted as acting as a bond between groups, and as a means whereby individuals, notably the big-men, can maximize their status.