Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self

Fülszöveg

Anthropology / Geography
The Pintupi, a hunting-and-gathering people of Australia's Western Desert, were among the last Aborigines to come into contact with white Australians. Anthropologist Fred Myers, who has been working with the Pintupi since 1973, presents an innovative study of this small-scale, spatially dispersed, egalitarian society. His comprehensive ethnography focuses on contradictions between indigenous ideas of individual autonomy and those of "relatedness," a tension mediated in politics, spatial relations, and the mythological construction of The Dreaming. Myers's sophisticated analysis shows how these contradictions shape Pintupi personhood; despite the duress of recent relocation in settlements, these Aboriginal people struggle to define themselves in terms of this cultural logic.
"This sensitively written work makes a major contribution to Australian Aboriginal studies and the examination of hunter-gatherer societies, bringing breadth of thinking and careful... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Anthropology / Geography
The Pintupi, a hunting-and-gathering people of Australia's Western Desert, were among the last Aborigines to come into contact with white Australians. Anthropologist Fred Myers, who has been working with the Pintupi since 1973, presents an innovative study of this small-scale, spatially dispersed, egalitarian society. His comprehensive ethnography focuses on contradictions between indigenous ideas of individual autonomy and those of "relatedness," a tension mediated in politics, spatial relations, and the mythological construction of The Dreaming. Myers's sophisticated analysis shows how these contradictions shape Pintupi personhood; despite the duress of recent relocation in settlements, these Aboriginal people struggle to define themselves in terms of this cultural logic.
"This sensitively written work makes a major contribution to Australian Aboriginal studies and the examination of hunter-gatherer societies, bringing breadth of thinking and careful ethnographic interpretation to a notably difficult field."
American Anthropologist
"Neatly summarized by its title, this Australian ethnography by American scholar Fred Myers is richly interpreted in terms of mid-1980s social theory and makes a concrete contribution to the refinement of a postpositivist theory of practice. Of the recent books on Australian Aborigines it is theoretically the most important, ethnographically the deepest, and certainly the most lucid."
American
"This is the most important publication in Aboriginal anthropology since Mervyn Meggitt's Desert People appeared in 1962. Like Meggitt's book it is a major ethnography but the approach is quite different. In place of structural-functionalism we have the first complete cultural analysis of Aboriginal society. The result is a refreshing analysis that will broaden the ethnographic and theoretical agenda."
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Fred R. Myers is Associate Professor of Anthropology at New York University.
Cover photograph: Kim Napurrula and her son on a cold winter day. [Warlungurru, 1983] Vissza