Sinuous Objects

Sinuous Objects
Author: Anna-Karina Hermkens
Publisher: ANU Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2017-08-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1760461342

Some 40 years ago, Pacific anthropology was dominated by debates about ‘women’s wealth’. These exchanges were generated by Annette Weiner’s (1976) critical reappraisal of Bronis?aw Malinowski’s classic work on the Trobriand Islands, and her observations that women’s production of ‘wealth’ (banana leaf bundles and skirts) for elaborate transactions in mortuary rituals occupied a central role in Trobriand matrilineal cosmology and social organisation. This volume brings the debates about women’s wealth back to the fore by critically revisiting and engaging with ideas about gender and materiality, value, relationality and the social life and agency of things. The chapters, interspersed by three poems, evoke the sinuous materiality of the different objects made by women across the Pacific, and the intimate relationship between these objects of value and sensuous, gendered bodies. In the Epilogue, Professor Margaret Jolly observes how the volume also ‘trace[s] a more abstract sinuosity in the movement of these things through time and place, as they coil through different regimes of value … The eight chapters … trace winding paths across the contemporary Pacific, from the Trobriands in Milne Bay, to Maisin, Wanigela and Korafe in Oro Province, Papua New Guinea, through the islands of Tonga to diasporic Tongan and Cook Islander communities in New Zealand’. This comparative perspective elucidates how women’s wealth is defined, valued and contested in current exchanges, bride-price debates, church settings, development projects and the challenges of living in diaspora. Importantly, this reveals how women themselves preserve the different values and meanings in gift-giving and exchanges, despite processes of commodification that have resulted in the decline or replacement of ‘women’s wealth’.

Knots

Knots
Author: David Lipset
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2023-05-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000840212

Knots are well known as symbols of moral relationships. This book develops an exciting new view of this otherwise taken-for-granted image and considers their metaphoric value in and for moral order. In chapters that focus on Japan, China, Europe, South America and in several Pacific Island societies, granular ethnography depicts how knots are deployed to express unity in daily and ritual embodiment, political authority and the cosmos, as well as in social thought. The volume will be of interest to anthropologists and other scholars concerned with metaphor and symbolism, material culture and technology.

The World Below the Window

The World Below the Window
Author: William Jay Smith
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2001-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780801867835

This selection of William Jay Smith's work of sixty years covers the entire career of one of America's acknowledged poetic masters. It moves from the dark pre-war lyrics ( Quail in Autumn) to the powerful long-lined free verse of the 1960s ( The Tin Can). Here are memorable WWII lyrics ( Dark Valentine) and masterful light verse ( The Tall Poets), displaying the wit that enlivens all of Smith's work. Previously uncollected poems range from a haunting delineation of the ironies of age in "The Shipwreck" to the dramatic intensity of The Cherokee Lottery, which deals with the forced removal of Indian tribes east of the Mississippi. Praise for William Jay Smith: "A most gifted and original poet... One of the very few who cannot be confused with anybody else."—Richard Wilbur "William Jay Smith has been one of our best poets for more than sixty years, and The Cherokee Lottery is his masterwork: taut, harrowing, eloquent, and profoundly memorable."—Harold Bloom "His best poems are unlike anything else in contemporary American literature... Although often based on realistic situations, Smith's compressed, formal lyrics develop language musically in a way which summons an intricate, dreamlike set of images and associations."—Dana Gioia "William Jay Smith has given us many of the truest and purest poems an American has written: the most resonantly musical, the most magical."—X. J. Kennedy

City at the Edge of Forever

City at the Edge of Forever
Author: Peter Lunenfeld
Publisher: Viking
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2020
Genre: History
ISBN: 0525561935

"An engaging account of the uniquely creative spirit and bustling cultural ecology of contemporary Los Angeles ... [The author] weaves together the city's art, architecture, and design, juxtaposes its entertainment and literary histories, and moves from restaurant kitchens to recording studios to ultra-secret research and development labs. In the process, he reimagines Los Angeles as simultaneously an exemplar and cautionary tale for the 21st century"--Provided by publisher.

Co-creating for Context in the Transfer and Diffusion of IT

Co-creating for Context in the Transfer and Diffusion of IT
Author: Amany Elbanna
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2022-10-01
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3031179684

This volume, IFIP AICT 660, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the IFIP WG 8.6 International Working Conference "Co-creating for Context in Prospective Transfer and Diffusion of IT" on Transfer and Diffusion of IT, TDIT 2022, held in Maynooth, Ireland, during June 15–16, 2022. The 19 full papers and 10 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 60 submissions. The papers focus on the re-imagination of diffusion and adoption of emerging technologies. They are organized in the following parts:

Computational Challenges in the Geosciences

Computational Challenges in the Geosciences
Author: Clint Dawson
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2013-09-17
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 1461474345

Computational Challenges in the Geosciences addresses a cross-section of grand challenge problems arising in geoscience applications, including groundwater and petroleum reservoir simulation, hurricane storm surge, oceanography, volcanic eruptions and landslides, and tsunamis. Each of these applications gives rise to complex physical and mathematical models spanning multiple space-time scales, which can only be studied through computer simulation. The data required by the models is often highly uncertain, and the numerical solution of the models requires sophisticated algorithms which are mathematically accurate, computationally efficient and yet must preserve basic physical properties of the models. This volume summarizes current methodologies and future research challenges in this broad and important field.

The Role of Digital Technologies in Shaping the Post-Pandemic World

The Role of Digital Technologies in Shaping the Post-Pandemic World
Author: Savvas Papagiannidis
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 504
Release: 2022-09-06
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3031153421

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21st IFIP WG 6.11 Conference on e-Business, e-Services, and e-Society, I3E 2022, which took place Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK, in September 2022. The 37 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 72 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: Artificial intelligence; Data and Analytics; Careers and ICT; Digital Innovation and Transformation; Electronic Services; Health and Wellbeing; Pandemic; Privacy, Trust and Security.

The New Port Moresby

The New Port Moresby
Author: Ceridwen Spark
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2020-07-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0824882792

The New Port Moresby: Gender, Space, and Belonging in Urban Papua New Guinea explores the ways in which educated, professional women experience living in Port Moresby, the burgeoning capital of Papua New Guinea. Drawing on postcolonial and feminist scholarship, the book adds to an emerging literature on cities in the “Global South” as sites of oppression, but also resistance, aspiration, and activism. Taking an intersectional feminist approach, the book draws on a decade of research conducted among the educated professional women of Port Moresby, offering unique insight into class transitions and the perspectives of this small but significant cohort. The New Port Moresby expands the scope of research and writing about gendered experiences in Port Moresby, moving beyond the idea that the city is an exclusively hostile place for women. Without discounting the problems of uneven development, the author argues that the city’s new places offer women a degree of freedom and autonomy in a city predominantly characterized by fear and restriction. In doing so, it offers an ethnographically rich perspective on the interaction between the “global” and the “local” and what this might mean for feminism and the advancement of equity in the Pacific and beyond. The New Port Moresby will find an audience among anthropologists, particularly those interested in the urban Pacific, feminist geographers committed to expanding research to include cities in the Global South and development theorists interested in understanding the roles played by educated elites in less economically developed contexts. There have been few ethnographic monographs about Port Moresby and those that do exist have tended to marginalize or ignore gender. Yet as feminist geographers make clear, women and men are positioned differently in the world and their relationship to the places in which they live is also different. The book has no predecessors and stands alone in the Pacific as an account of this kind. As such, The New Port Moresby should be read by scholars and students of diverse disciplines interested in urbanization, gender, and the Pacific.

Going to Pentecost

Going to Pentecost
Author: Annelin Eriksen
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2019-02-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1789201411

Co-authored by three anthropologists with long–term expertise studying Pentecostalism in Vanuatu, Angola, and Papua New Guinea/the Trobriand Islands respectively, Going to Pentecost offers a comparative study of Pentecostalism in Africa and Melanesia, focusing on key issues as economy, urban sociality, and healing. More than an ordinary comparative book, it recognizes the changing nature of religion in the contemporary world – in particular the emergence of “non-territorial” religion (which is no longer specific to places or cultures) – and represents an experimental approach to the study of global religious movements in general and Pentecostalism in particular.

Climate Hazards, Disasters, and Gender Ramifications

Climate Hazards, Disasters, and Gender Ramifications
Author: Catarina Kinnvall
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2019-06-11
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0429756275

This book focuses on the challenges of living with climate disasters, in addition to the existing gender inequalities that prevail and define social, economic and political conditions. Social inequalities have consequences for the everyday lives of women and girls where power relations, institutional and socio-cultural practices make them disadvantaged in terms of disaster preparedness and experience. Chapters in this book unravel how gender and masculinity intersect with age, ethnicity, sexuality and class in specific contexts around the globe. It looks at the various kinds of difficulties for particular groups before, during and after disastrous events such as typhoons, flooding, landslides and earthquakes. It explores how issues of gender hierarchies, patriarchal structures and masculinity are closely related to gender segregation, institutional codes of behaviour and to a denial of environmental crisis. This book stresses the need for a gender-responsive framework that can provide a more holistic understanding of disasters and climate change. A critical feminist perspective uncovers the gendered politics of disaster and climate change. This book will be useful for practitioners and researchers working within the areas of Climate Change response, Gender Studies, Disaster Studies and International Relations.