Books in the ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology series

Presents fresh perspectives on death and mourning across the Pacific Islands. Through its set of rich ethnographies, the book examines how funerals and death rituals give rise to discourse and debate about sustaining moral persons and community amid modernity, and its enormous transformations.

Exploring the role of empathy in a variety of Pacific societies, this book is at the forefront of the latest anthropological research on empathy. It presents distinct articulations of empathy in the Pacific region. More specifically, the volume examines significant regional patterns in the experience, enactment, recognition, and limits of empathy.

In 1994, the Pacific island village of Matupit was partially destroyed by a volcanic eruption. This study focuses on the subsequent reconstruction and contests over the morality of exchanges that are generative of new forms of social stratification. Such new dynamics of stratification are central to contemporary processes of globalization in the Pacific, and more widely. Through detailed ethnography of the transactions that a displaced people entered into in seeking to rebuild their lives, this book analyses how people re-make sociality in an era of post-colonial neoliberalism without taking either the transformative power of globalization or the resilience of indigenous culture as its starting point. It also contributes to the understanding of the problems of post-disaster reconstruction and development projects.

The phrase Christian politics points in two directions: political relations between denominations in one direction, and ways that Christian churches contribute to debates about how society should be governed in the other.

Since the Colonial era, gambling has come to dominate nighttime activity in Papua New Guinea. This richly detailed ethnography intersects with theories of money, value, play, money, exchange, informal economy, materiality, social change, leadership, and the anthropology of Melanesia.

Within little more than ten years in the early nineteenth century, inhabitants of Tahiti, Hawaii and fifteen other closely related societies destroyed or desecrated all of their temples and most of their god-images. In the aftermath of the explosive event, which Sissons terms the Polynesian Iconoclasm, hundreds of architecturally innovative churches - one the size of two football fields - were constructed. At the same time, Christian leaders introduced oppressive laws and courts, which the youth resisted through seasonal displays of revelry and tattooing. Seeking an answer to why this event occurred in the way that it did, this book introduces and demonstrates an alternative "e;practice history"e; that draws on the work of Marshall Sahlins and employs Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, improvisation and practical logic.

Dreams Made Small offers an in-depth, ethnographic look at journeys of education among young Papuans under Indonesian rule, ultimately revealing how dreams of transformation, equality, and belonging are shaped and reshaped in the face of multiple constraints.

Reconsidering issues of representation in the insular Pacific, this volume explores authenticity and authorship in practice as "traveling concepts" that spawn cross-fertilization along the cultural and historical routes they traverse.

This volume illuminates the ways in which an Asia-based analysis of migration can yield new data on global migration patterns, new theoretical insights for a broader understanding of global migration, and new methodological approaches to the spatial and temporal complexity of human migration.