Overview

Culture and History in the Pacific is a collection of essays originally published in 1990. The texts explore from different perspectives the question of culture as a repository of historical information. They also address broader questions of anthropological writing at the time, such as the relationship between anthropologists' representations and local conceptions. This republication aims to make the book accessible to a wider audience, and in the region it discusses, Oceania. A new introductory essay has been included to contextualize the volume in relation to its historical setting, the end of the Cold War era, and to the present study of the Pacific and indigenous scholarship. The authors of Culture and History in the Pacific include prominent anthropologists of the Pacific, some of whom - Roger Keesing and Marilyn Strathern, to name but two - have also been influential in the anthropology of the late 20th and early 21st century in general.

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9789523690462

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Jukka Siikala is Professor Emeritus of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki. Specializing on the Pacific since the mid-1970s, Siikala has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the Cook Islands first in 1983-1984, later in the 1980s and 1990s as well as fieldwork with Cook Island migrants in New Zealand. Central themes in Siikala's research are the focus on culture and textuality, for example recitation and recording of genealogies, and interactions between indigenous hierarchies, state institutions and the global system. He has edited a number of volumes, such as Departures: How Societies Distribute their People (2001) and published a multitude of articles internationally and in Finnish. He is the author of two monographs of the Cook Islands, Akatokamanāva: Myth, History and Society in the Southern Cook Islands (1991) and Return to Culture: Oral Tradition and Society in the Southern Cook Islands (2005) together with Anna-Leena Siikala.

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