Research Catalog
Food rules : hunting, sharing, and tabooing game in Papua New Guinea
- Title
- Food rules : hunting, sharing, and tabooing game in Papua New Guinea / Harriet Whitehead.
- Author
- Whitehead, Harriet.
- Publication
- Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2000], ©2000.
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| Status | Format | Access | Call Number | Item Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Text | Request in advance | DU740.42 .W465 2000 | Off-site |
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Details
- Description
- xiii, 330 pages : illustrations; 24 cm
- Summary
- "In the two tiny Seltaman villages, situated in a remote corner of Papua New Guinea's central mountains, food rules divide the social world into distinct categories - men of different initiation statuses, women, children, and the elderly of both sexes. Ostensibly dictated by the ancestors, these eating rules are marked both by a mysterious stability and by equally mysterious sudden variations.".
- "Over the course of repeated visits to the Seltaman, Harriet Whitehead was caught up by the need to understand the kinds of eating restrictions that appear in so many societies around the world. Working against the strictly symbolic interpretive approach that has dominated the discussion of "food taboos" in the anthropological literature, Whitehead argues instead that food rules are the outcropping of diverse, dynamically interacting causes.
- With remarkable lucidity Whitehead teases out the multiple and sometimes conflicting strands of causality in the Seltaman case, giving us both a profoundly insightful account of Papuan village life and a new way of understanding culture."--BOOK JACKET.
- Subjects
- Seltaman (Papua New Guinean people) > Hunting
- Seltaman (Papua New Guinean people) > Food
- Food > Symbolic aspects > Papua New Guinea > Western Province
- Taboo > Papua New Guinea > Western Province
- Western Province (Papua New Guinea) > Social life and customs
- Food habits > Papua New Guinea > Western Province
- Seltaman (Papua New Guinean people) > Rites and ceremonies
- Bibliography (note)
- Includes bibliographical references (p. 297-308) and index.
- Contents
- Theoretical Introduction: Culture and Causality -- Ch. 1. The Research Background -- Ch. 2. Food -- Ch. 3. Taboos and Identities -- Ch. 4. Taboos and Disgusts -- Ch. 5. Zones of Edibility -- Ch. 6. Getting the Game -- Ch. 7. The Shareable Feast -- Ch. 8. Gender and Generosity -- Ch. 9. The Authority of the Ancestors -- Ch. 10. The Ancestor's Feast -- Ch. 11. The Realm of Ideas -- Ch. 12. The Loss of a Taboo.
- ISBN
- 0472097059 (cl. : acid-free paper)
- LCCN
- 00037412
- OCLC
- 44878468
- ocm44878468
- SCSB-3900203
- Owning Institutions
- Columbia University Libraries