Inalienable Possessions

Author : Annette B. Weiner
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 9780520911802
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Inalienable Possessions written by Annette B. Weiner and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1992-05-13 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inalienable Possessions tests anthropology's traditional assumptions about kinship, economics, power, and gender in an exciting challenge to accepted theories of reciprocity and marriage exchange. Focusing on Oceania societies from Polynesia to Papua New Guinea and including Australian Aborigine groups, Annette Weiner investigates the category of possessions that must not be given or, if they are circulated, must return finally to the giver. Reciprocity, she says, is only the superficial aspect of exchange, which overlays much more politically powerful strategies of "keeping-while-giving." The idea of keeping-while-giving places women at the heart of the political process, however much that process may vary in different societies, for women possess a wealth of their own that gives them power. Power is intimately involved in cultural reproduction, and Weiner describes the location of power in each society, showing how the degree of control over the production and distribution of cloth wealth coincides with women's rank and the development of hierarchy in the community. Other inalienable possessions, whether material objects, landed property, ancestral myths, or sacred knowledge, bestow social identity and rank as well. Calling attention to their presence in Western history, Weiner points out that her formulations are not limited to Oceania. The paradox of keeping-while-giving is a concept certain to influence future developments in ethnography and the theoretical study of gender and exchange.

Author : Annette B. Weiner
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520076044
Total Pages : 263 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Inalienable Possessions written by Annette B. Weiner and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1992-05-13 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Weiner provides not only a new perspective on social and natural reproduction but also a framework through which to compare societies. This is an original point of view that will have real effects on the direction of future fieldwork and comparative analysis."—Ivan Karp, Smithsonian Institution

Author : Annette B. Weiner
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780520076037
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Inalienable Possessions written by Annette B. Weiner and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Weiner provides not only a new perspective on social and natural reproduction but also a framework through which to compare societies. This is an original point of view that will have real effects on the direction of future fieldwork and comparative analysis."--Ivan Karp, Smithsonian Institution "Weiner provides not only a new perspective on social and natural reproduction but also a framework through which to compare societies. This is an original point of view that will have real effects on the direction of future fieldwork and comparative analysis."--Ivan Karp, Smithsonian Institution

Author : Paul Kockelman
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139486268
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Language, Culture, and Mind written by Paul Kockelman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-18 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on fieldwork carried out in a Mayan village in Guatemala, this book examines local understandings of mind through the lens of language and culture. It focuses on a variety of grammatical structures and discursive practices through which mental states are encoded and social relations are expressed: inalienable possessions, such as body parts and kinship terms; interjections, such as 'ouch' and 'yuck'; complement-taking predicates, such as 'believe' and 'desire'; and grammatical categories such as mood, status and evidentiality. And, more generally, it develops a theoretical framework through which both community-specific and human-general features of mind may be contrasted and compared. It will be of interest to researchers and students working within the disciplines of anthropology, linguistics, psychology, and philosophy.

Author : Thomas E. Payne
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521588058
Total Pages : 434 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Describing Morphosyntax written by Thomas E. Payne and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-10-09 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of the 6000 languages now spoken throughout the world around 3000 may become extinct during the next century. This guide gives linguists the tools to describe them, syntactically and grammatically, for future reference.

Author : Deborah Wynne
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134772408
Total Pages : 223 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel written by Deborah Wynne and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-17 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How key changes to the married women's property laws contributed to new ways of viewing women in society are revealed in Deborah Wynne's study of literary representations of women and portable property during the period 1850 to 1900. While critical explorations of Victorian women's connections to the material world have tended to focus on their relationships to commodity culture, Wynne argues that modern paradigms of consumerism cannot be applied across the board to the Victorian period. Until the passing of the 1882 Married Women's Property Act, many women lacked full property rights; evidence suggests that, for women, objects often functioned not as disposable consumer products but as cherished personal property. Focusing particularly on representations of women and material culture in Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James, Wynne shows how novelists engaged with the vexed question of women's relationships to property. Suggesting that many of the apparently insignificant items that 'clutter' the Victorian realist novel take on new meaning when viewed through the lens of women's access to material culture and the vagaries of property law, her study opens up new possibilities for interpreting female characters in Victorian fiction and reveals the complex work of 'thing culture' in literary texts.

Author : Dale Southerton
Publisher : SAGE
ISBN 13 : 0872896013
Total Pages : 1665 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture written by Dale Southerton and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2011-09-15 with total page 1665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture is the first reference work to outline the parameters of consumer culture and provide a critical, scholarly resource on consumption and consumerism.

Author : Christopher Ball
Publisher : University of New Mexico Press
ISBN 13 : 0826358543
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.47/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Exchanging Words written by Christopher Ball and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2018-11-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like human groups everywhere, Wauja people construct their identity in relation to others. This book tells the story of the Wauja group from the Xingu Indigenous Park in central Brazil and its relation to powerful new interlocutors. Tracing Wauja interactions with others, Ball depicts expanding scales of social action from the village to the wider field of the park and finally abroad. Throughout, the author analyzes language use in ritual settings to show how Wauja people construct relationships with powerful spirit-monsters, ancestors, and ethnic trading partners. Ball’s use of ritual as an analytic category helps show how Wauja interactions with spirits and Indian neighbors, for example, are connected to interactions with the Brazilian government, international NGOs, and museums in projects of development. Showing ritual as a contributing factor to relationships of development and the politics of indigeneity, Exchanging Words asks how discourse, ritual, and exchange come together to mediate social relations close to home and on a global scale.

Author : Cynthia Werner
Publisher : Rowman Altamira
ISBN 13 : 0759115907
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Values and Valuables written by Cynthia Werner and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2004-01-13 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A group of distinguished anthropologists and economists discuss the value attached to material objects by different cultures. The authors consider the sacred nature of objects that are exchanged between individuals, the value and power of markets, money, and credit, and the ways in which contemporary people bestow symbolic value on objects or individuals. With its emphasis on the interplay of cultural and economic values, this volume will be a great resource for economists and economic anthropologists.

Author : Olga M. Mladenova
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
ISBN 13 : 3110198894
Total Pages : 485 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Definiteness in Bulgarian written by Olga M. Mladenova and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In its evolution from a synthetic to an analytic language, Bulgarian acquired a grammaticalized category of definiteness. The book presents the first attempt to explore in detail how this happened by comparing the earliest Modern Bulgarian texts with contemporary dialect and standard Bulgarian data. The basic units of analysis are the various types of nominal structures headed by nouns or pronouns. The analysis requires the strict terminological disentanglement of form from content and the adoption of a default inheritance model of definiteness that allow the exhaustive classification and tagging of nominal structures encountered in the texts. Tagging makes it possible to apply quantitative analysis to nominal structure and to assess the types available in the early texts from a current native-speaker perspective. Based on an S-curve model of language change, the study establishes that overt markers of definiteness were first made available to identifiability-based definites, then to inclusiveness-based definites, quantitative generics and unique referents. The overt markers of indefiniteness followed suit, separating indefinites from non-specifics and typifying generics. This progression of definiteness was directed by variables such as person, animacy, gender, number and noun-class, and started in contexts in which definiteness closely interacted with possessivity. Such an analysis leads to the realization that the two-dimensional S-curve model does not account for all language change and that there is a need for a three-dimensional model. It also demonstrates that, contrary to previous assumptions, there is continuity between the early Slavic marker of definiteness (long-form adjectives) and the Modern Bulgarian article. This discovery, in conjunction with geolinguistic arguments, sheds new light on the role that relations inside the Balkan Sprachbund played in the grammaticalization of Bulgarian definiteness.