Structure and Process in a Melanesian Society: Ponam’:S Progress in the Twentieth Century FROM THE PUBLISHER
This volume studies kinship and exchange in Ponam, a small island in Papua New Guinea, within the wider context of Ponam's social, political and economic development and the ways it has changed in the twentieth century. The authors demonstrate how classical structural analysis ignored the way change occurs, and how individual strategy can bend and even break rules. Equally, they show that the more recent processual approach fails to consider how individual strategies and historical events are shaped by the structures they affect, and how they result in new structures with new rules.
FROM THE CRITICS
Australian Journal of International Affairs
...the book [is] valuable not only for what it has to say about a contemporary Papua New Guinea community...but more particularly for its wide-ranging critique of other anthropological accounts of Melanesian societies.
Home
