Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington have worked as anthropologists in Papua New Guinea for nearly two decades. In this, their second joint study of the Chambri, they consider the way those in a small-scale society, peripheral to the major centers of influence, struggle to sustain some degree of autonomy. They describe the Chambri caught up in world processes of social and cultural change, and attempt to create a "collective biography" that conveys the intelligibility and significance of the twentieth century experience of these Papua New Guineans whom they have come to know well. This biography consists of interlocking stories, twisted histories, commentaries and contexts about Chambri who are negotiating their objectives while entangled in systemic change and confronting Western representations of modernization and development.
Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington have worked as anthropologists in Papua New Guinea for nearly two decades. In this, their second joint study of the Chambri, they consider the way those in a small-scale society, peripheral to the major centres of influence, struggle to sustain some degree of autonomy. They describe the Chambri caught up in world processes of social and cultural change, and attempt to create a 'collective biography' which conveys the intelligibility and significance of the twentieth-century experience of these Papua New Guineans whom they have come to know well. This biography consists of interlocking stories, twisted histories, commentaries and contexts about Chambri who are negotiating their objectives while entangled in systemic change and confronting Western representations of modernization and development.
Gewertz and Errington unpack the aspirations and anxieties, calculations and controversies that inhabit an inexpensive cut of fatty meat. Following the trail of sheep bellies from slaughterhouses in Australia and New Zealand to the plates of Pacific Islanders, they evenhandedly map the divergent perspectives of commercial traders, government officials, and ordinary consumers acting within a contested material and moral economy. Cheap Meat provides a startling view of how global food markets fashion the bodies and identities of people everywhere."--Robert J. Foster, author of Coca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea "Cheap Meat is a compelling example of how ethnography concerned with Oceania can elucidate broader questions in anthropology and the social sciences in general. Gewertz and Errington show the complexity of globalization by focusing on the most unlikely commodity. This work at once demonstrates how unfettered capitalism is able to use global circulation to literally convert one person's trash to another's treasure and how resilient Pacific Islanders refashion Western commodities to their own ends."--Paige West, Curator for the Pacific American Museum of Natural History
This remarkable book explores questions of identity and value posed by people living on or near the small Pacific island of Karavar in Papua New Guinea. Focusing on how the Karavarans' long-term preoccupation with identity and worth has played out in various social contexts within this rather small place, Errington and Gewertz convey a grounded sense of how these people actually live and engage with such widely significant issues as ethnic diversity and the development of national unity. The authors present a historical and ethnographic analysis that, in its scope and mastery of detail, does justice to the complexity and significance of change in a colonial and postcolonial world.
Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington have worked as anthropologists in Papua New Guinea for nearly two decades. In this, their second joint study of the Chambri, they consider the way those in a small-scale society, peripheral to the major centres of influence, struggle to sustain some degree of autonomy. They describe the Chambri caught up in world processes of social and cultural change, and attempt to create a 'collective biography' which conveys the intelligibility and significance of the twentieth-century experience of these Papua New Guineans whom they have come to know well. This biography consists of interlocking stories, twisted histories, commentaries and contexts about Chambri who are negotiating their objectives while entangled in systemic change and confronting Western representations of modernization and development.
Gewertz and Errington unpack the aspirations and anxieties, calculations and controversies that inhabit an inexpensive cut of fatty meat. Following the trail of sheep bellies from slaughterhouses in Australia and New Zealand to the plates of Pacific Islanders, they evenhandedly map the divergent perspectives of commercial traders, government officials, and ordinary consumers acting within a contested material and moral economy. Cheap Meat provides a startling view of how global food markets fashion the bodies and identities of people everywhere."--Robert J. Foster, author of Coca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea "Cheap Meat is a compelling example of how ethnography concerned with Oceania can elucidate broader questions in anthropology and the social sciences in general. Gewertz and Errington show the complexity of globalization by focusing on the most unlikely commodity. This work at once demonstrates how unfettered capitalism is able to use global circulation to literally convert one person's trash to another's treasure and how resilient Pacific Islanders refashion Western commodities to their own ends."--Paige West, Curator for the Pacific American Museum of Natural History
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