| Subject: Historical Vines |
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Date Posted: 23:45:38 07/13/04 Tue
Just wondering if anyone living in Australia has a copy of the following book, and would be happy to lend it out for a few weeks, or maybe know of a library in Australia that has the book?
I would return the book promptly and would cover any postage costs.
Historical Vines
Enga Networks of Exchange, Ritual, and
Warfare in Papua New Guinea
Polly Wiessner and Akii Tumu
Drawing on interviews conducted over ten years with elders in 110 tribes, Polly Wiessner and Akii Timu chart Enga history over a span of seven generations. They reconstruct the ecological, social, political, and
ideological processes that shaped these continually changing networks before first contact with Europeans. At the heart of the book is an ethnohistory of the Tee ceremonial exchange cycle, which originated in some
twenty clans eight generations ago and, by the onset in the 1950s of the colonial era, had grown to encompass about 355 clans and involve the redistribution of up to 100,000 pigs. Wiessner and Timu describe how Enga
big-men crafted the full-blown Tee cycle by drawing on three different exchange networks: alliances to control trade in the east, great ceremonial wars in the center, and religious cult networks in the west. They also show
how, by using religious cults to alter norms and values, Enga leaders mediated the tensions caused by economic competition and inequality amidst a growing population.
In this unusual collaboration between an anthropologist and a member of the society being investigated, the authors use practice theory and a vanishing oral record to argue that not only economic but also cultural needs motivated the men and women who, in altering social meanings and values, also directed the course of change in Enga society.
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