Los mercados de la Mixteca son colectividades vibrantes y dinámicas que funcionan y forman parte del macrocontexto de la globalización, desde el consumismo hasta el movimiento mundial de productos y personas.Por lo general, la historia económica más formal deja mudos a los actores que definen esta economía: los comerciantes. Por medio de sus relatos, este libro documenta una historia informal que ha sido poco registrada. Cincuenta entrevistas, hechas entre 2004 y 2006 en algunas de las p...

This pioneering study charts the one-way traffic of cultural and historical objects during five centuries of European colonialism. It presents abundant examples of disappeared colonial objects and systematises these into war booty, confiscations by missionaries and contestable acquisitions by private persons and other categories. Former colonies consider this as a historical injustice that has not been undone.Former colonial powers have kept most of the objects in their custody. In the 1970s ...

The Pacific 'grass skirt' has provoked debates about the demeaning and sexualised depiction of Pacific bodies. While these stereotypical portrayals associated with 'nakedness' are challenged in this book, the complex uses and meanings of the garments themselves are examined, including their link to other body adornments and modifications. In nineteenth-century Fiji, beautiful fibre skirts (liku) in a great variety of shapes and colours were lifetime companions for women. First fitted around p...

Matters of Belonging foregrounds critical practices within ethnographic museums in relation to their diverse stakeholders, with a special focus on collaboration with artists and differently constituted, self-identified communities. The book emerges from the EU-funded project SWICH (Sharing a World of Inclusion, Creativity and Heritage) that places ethnographic museums at the centre of ongoing debates about Europe's shifting polity and questions around heritage, citizenship and belonging. Addr...

Ci is the Asmat word for dugout canoe. The ci is an integral part of the everyday life of the Asmat - an ethnic group residing in eastern Indonesia in Papua province (formerly Irian Jaya) - who live in the middle of a huge tidal swampy area. Owning a ci is part of the Asmat's habitus because ci is a guarantee for mobility, both individually and collectively. The ci is essential for the everyday lives of the Asmat. However, the existence of these dugout canoes is now critical as they tend to b...

Until recently it was assumed that all cultures perceive and express 'space' from the ego. However, this belief in a universal phenomenological bias is currently being challenged by many linguists from several disciplines, who believe that space can also be perceived intrinsically or absolutely. This ethno-linguistic analysis of the Cariban language, Wayana (still spoken in the dense rainforests of Suriname, French Guiana and Brazil), not only strengthens these claims but, more importantly, g...

The vast and extraordinary collections from the Pacific, collected from the late eighteenth century onwards, that are dispersed across ethnographic and other museums in Europe amount to hundreds of thousands of artefacts, ranging from seemingly quotidian and utilitarian baskets and fish-hooks to great sculptures of divinities, architectural forms and canoes. Alongside the works themselves are rich archives of documents, drawings by early travellers, and often vast photographic collections, as...

Life for people on atolls is hard, affected by droughts, rough seas and other adverse climatic conditions, and now, rise in sea level threatens their very inhabitance. No wonder kinship is the foundation of atoll societies, traditional and modern! This book presents a multidisciplinary, retrospective analysis of a Pacific Atoll People living in several countries but held together as a diaspora through notions of kinship.

The People have ancestral, cultural, social and continuing residential c...

The chain of linked cultures of the southern coast of New Guinea, from the Asmat in the west to the Papuan Gulf in the east all share remarkably similar mythology and rituals, inspired by a common ancient worldview.

In this book art historian and anthropologist Dr. Holger Braun takes us on a step by step journey to discover the underlying principles of this ancient worldview which is visible as a secret sign language inscribed into the art objects of this area and intended to be legible excl...

This is the first study to focus on ikat of the Timor region from a technical perspective, including microscopy and design analysis of asymmetry, an understudied subject. Paradoxically this technical perspective highlights the human factor. Focused on the last century of the colonial period, we see the weaver’s decisions in close-up, as if we are sitting next to her. This yields rich insights, not just in materiality, but also in the weavers’ creativity.

Asymmetry is widely distributed in...