Melanesian Odysseys : : Negotiating the Self, Narrative, and Modernity / / Lisette Josephides.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Berghahn Books Complete eBook-Package 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Josephides, Lisette,
• Place / Publishing House: New York ;, Oxford : : Berghahn Books, , [2008]; ©2008
• Year of Publication: 2008
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (272 p.)
• Other title: Frontmatter --; Contents --; 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
• Format: Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
• ISBN: 9780857450555; 9783110998283
• DOI: 10.1515/9780857450555
• Access: restricted access
• Hierarchical level: Monograph
• Statement of Responsibility: Lisette Josephides.

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.