The Dugum Dani: A Papuan Culture in the Highlands of West New Guinea, Volume 49

Voorkant
Transaction Publishers - 334 pagina's
"For many years anthropologists have speculated about primitive warfare, its place in a particular culture, its form, and its consequences on other tribes. This full-scale ethnography of the Dugum Dani centers on the issue of hostility between groups of human beings and the place and function of violence. Warfare, like rituals and kinship alliances, is part of a total culture, and for this reason Professor Heider has approached the Dani from a holistic point of view. Other aspects of Dani life and organization are shown in interrelationship with the institution of warfare, such as the social, ecological, and technological elements in the Dani way of life. Professor Heider examines particularly the role of warfare itself in terms of the particular needs, and lack of them. The first section of this book documents the Dani and their warfare and provides one of the most detailed accounts of tribal life available. The second section focuses on the material aspects of Dani culture, to explore the interrelationships of the material objects with the other aspects of Dani culture; this analysis is especially interesting since the Dani moved from a stone-age culture to steel tools during the period of study itself. Professor Heider also notes the distinctive aspects of Dani culture; the paucity of color, number, and other attribute terms, the near absence of art; their five-year post-partum sexual abstinence, and other traits that seem to suggest that the Dani have little interest in intellectual elaboration or sex, and that despite their warfare, they are not a particularly aggressive people. Including previously unpublished photographs and descriptions of tribal life and warfare, this book provides anthropologists with a full and vivid account of Dani culture and with new insights into the general problems of human aggression."--Provided by publisher
 

Geselecteerde pagina's

Inhoudsopgave

Preface
vii
Acknowledgments
ix
Introduction
3
Subsistence
23
Social Organization
62
Conflict
99
Man and the Supernatural
134
Language and Categories
169
The Natural Environment
203
The Body
220
Artifact of Culture
241
Conclusions
295
Exploration and Research in the Dani Area
302
Texts of Songs
305
An Account of Battles and Raids AprilSeptember 1961
310
Bibliography
314

Art and Play
180
PART II
201

Overige edities - Alles bekijken

Veelvoorkomende woorden en zinsdelen

Populaire passages

Pagina ix - ... mention a few by name. I would like to thank the Government of Netherlands New Guinea, the United Nations Temporary Executive Authority, and the Republic of Indonesia for their gracious hospitality to anthropological research in a sensitive area. In particular, I would like to name Dr. JV De Bruijn, then Director of the Bureau of Native Affairs of the Government of Netherlands New Guinea, who first invited us to come to New Guinea and who eased our way in countless respects; Dr. Jan Pouwer, then...
Pagina 3 - One of the first conditions of acceptable Ethnographic work certainly is that it should deal with the totality of all social, cultural and psychological aspects of the community
Pagina 3 - early' societies, social phenomena are not discrete; each phenomenon contains all the threads of which the \\ social fabric is composed. In these total social phenomena, as we propose to call them, all kinds of institutions find simultaneous expression: religious, legal, moral, and economic. In ) addition, the phenomena have their aesthetic aspect and they reveal morphological types.
Pagina viii - ... anthropological usage of Papuan for the non-Austronesian speakers of the Central Highland zone and Melanesian for the Austronesian speakers of the coast. Also, the people at the far western end of the Central Highlands are well known in the anthropological literature (especially through the works of Pospisil) as Kapauku, but by 1968 they themselves had rejected that name as a foreign term and insisted on the use of their own term, Ekagi.

Bibliografische gegevens