Developed from papers presented at the first European Colloquium on Pacific Studies this volume addresses the dynamics of contemporary Oceanic religions. In particular, the contributors investigate how indigenous populations have come to terms with the enormous impact of colonization and missionization while maintaining a distinct cultural and religious identity.

The economic significance of Aboriginal culture for the British colonizers of Australia is rarely addressed and, until now, has not been closely studied by an economic historian. This imaginative book presents a concept of a pre-European Aboriginal economy. It shows how an Aboriginal presence over millennia shaped the local environment and responded to it, so that the Aboriginal economy developed into an ordered system of decision-making able to satisfy the wants of the people. The book analyzes the processes which allowed economic control of a country to pass, after more than 60,000 years in Aboriginal hands, into European hands within 60 years of settlement. Professor Butlin's presentation of the contrast between one of the world's most ancient economies and one of its youngest is both illuminating and exciting.

An Adjustment Movement in Arnhem Land was published in 1962. An earlier and abbreviated form of the book had been recognised by the award of the Royal Anthropological Institute Wellcome Medal for 1958. But in spite of this distinguished recognition, anthropology in Australia seemed not to know what to make of it. It had no obvious predecessors, nor was it written in a genre appropriate to the anthropological issues of the day. It was short - only 103 pages - and its internal organization was decidedly odd, with descriptions of individual Aboriginal people, their roles and relationships, an elaborate attempt to decode the designs on the sacred objects which form the centre of the account, forewords and appendices, and some black and white photographic plates. Finally, the anthropologist himself is, if not at centre stage, at least a frequent and sometimes significant presence in the text. In many respects it seems more like a postmodern work, filled with fragments and reflexivity, than the formalized ethnographies which were canonical at the time. It is concerned with Aboriginal life in Northeast Arnhem Land in the encounter with "change", most particularly with concepts, beliefs and ideas arising from the penetration of mission Christianity. -- Preface, p. 2.

This collection addresses the world-wide pattern of falling birth rates. Fertility has commonly been treated from a specialized demographic perspective, but there is today widespread dissatisfaction with conventional demographic approaches, which are criticized for neglecting the cultural, social, and political forces that affect reproductive behavior. For their part, anthropologists have only recently begun to apply their characteristic approaches to the study of reproduction. Drawing on new ethnographic and historical research and on a variety of theoretical approaches, the contributors to this book indicate some of the ways in which demography might take into account historical processes, political forces, and cultural conceptions.

This book was the first detailed, comprehensive study of Bush Mekeo culture and society.

The Chambri of Papua New Guinea are well known as being the "Tchambuli" of Margaret Mead's influential work, Sex and Temperament, in which she described them as people among whom, in contrast to Western society, women dominated over men. In this book, the authors analyze Mead's data and present original material to reveal that Mead misinterpreted the Chambri situation. In fact, Chambri women neither dominate men, nor vice versa. They use this reformulated interpretation to discuss the relevance of the Chambri case for the understanding of gender relations in Western society today, showing that male dominance is not inevitable. At the same time, they use their knowledge of cultural alternatives to clarify Western feminist objectives.

This 1988 book was the first full-length study ever to be published on the subject of sign language as a means of communication among Australian Aborigines. Based on fieldwork conducted over a span of nine years, the volume presents a thorough analysis of the structure of sign languages and their relationship to spoken languages.

Drawing on an ethnographic study of a remote farming community in the Auvergne, Dr Reed-Danahay challenges conventional views about the operation of the French school system. She demonstrates how parents and children subvert and resist the ideological messages of the teachers, and describes the ways in which a sense of local difference is sustained and valued, through a complex interplay of schooling and family life. This book explores the role played by history, identity, and power in local responses to a national institution. A significant contribution to the anthropology of education, this book offers fresh insights into the ways in which French culture is transmitted to the coming generation. Dr Reed-Danahay also provides lucid and critical discussions of sociological theories on education, including those of Bourdieu.

While the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says 'everyone has a right' to food, housing, livelihood and health, advocacy for human rights tends to emphasize people's civil and political rights rather than their economic and social rights. The poverty, violence and globalization which are depriving more and more people of these basic human entitlements calls for creative new approaches to economic and social rights which, the authors say, must be rooted in human needs, human dignity and legitimacy and underpinned by religious convictions. Such approaches will consider poverty and violence not merely as problems to be solved by economic development but as everyday realities for millions of people in the world -- realities which oblige their fellow human beings to act.