In a series of epic self-narratives ranging from traditional cultural embodiments to picaresque adventures, Christian epiphanies and a host of interactive strategies and techniques for living, Kewa Highlanders (PNG) attempt to shape and control their selves and their relentlessly changing world. This lively account transcends ethnographic particularity and offers a wide-reaching perspective on the nature of being human. Inverting the analytic logic of her previous work, which sought to uncover what social structures concealed, Josephides focuses instead on the cultural understandings that people make explicit in their actions and speech. Using approaches from philosophy and anthropology, she examines elicitation (how people create their selves and their worlds in the act of making explicit) and mimesis (how anthropologists produce ethnographies), to arrive at an unexpected conclusion: that knowledge of self and other alike derives from self-externalization rather than self-introspection.
In a series of epic self-narratives ranging from traditional cultural embodiments to picaresque adventures, Christian epiphanies and a host of interactive strategies and techniques for living, Kewa Highlanders (PNG) attempt to shape and control their selves and their relentlessly changing world. This lively account transcends ethnographic particularity and offers a wide-reaching perspective on the nature of being human. Inverting the analytic logic of her previous work, which sought to uncover what social structures concealed, Josephides focuses instead on the cultural understandings that people make explicit in their actions and speech. Using approaches from philosophy and anthropology, she examines elicitation (how people create their selves and their worlds in the act of making explicit) and mimesis (how anthropologists produce ethnographies), to arrive at an unexpected conclusion: that knowledge of self and other alike derives from self-externalization rather than self-introspection.
List of Illustrations
Dramatis Personae
Preface
Overtures, Ethnographic and Theoretical
Chapter 1. The Aesthetics of Fieldwork among the Kewa
Chapter 2. Self Strategies: Ascription, Interlocution, Elicitation
PART I: NARRATIVES
Chapter 3. Narrating the Self I: Moral Constructions of the Self as Paradigmatic Accounts
Chapter 4. Narrating the Self II: Metanarratives of Culture, Self, and Change
Chapter 5. Narrating the Self III: The Heroic, the Epic and the Picaresque in a Changed World
PART II: PORTRAITS (Several Weddings, Some Divorces and Three Funerals)
Chapter 6. Portraits and Minimal Narratives: Elicitations of Social Reality
Chapter 7. Love and All That: Negotiating Marriage and Marital Life
Chapter 8. The Politics of Death
Chapter 9. Mimesis, Ethnography and Knowledge
References
Index