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What is the nature of knowledge? Anthropology imagines it possible to divide or separate social and analytical relations, whereby knowledge travels between persons as a thing. And yet, Bolivip imagines knowledge as the bodily resources or parts of a person that can be extended or combined with others. This methodological exchange is modelled on a moment from Bolivip – an exchange of skin whereby knowledge is returned in respect of prior nurture and care given, and two people become encompassed by one skin. The Min area of Papua New Guinea has proven to be one of the most enigmatic cultures in anthropological experience. But rather than accept this resistance to analysis as a problem of Melanesian secrecy, this book suggests that archaic notions of anthropological knowledge have been the problem all along. Taking up the ‘Min problem’ head on, it suggests a solution to the impasse. The argument works through alternating chapters: an imagistic ethnography of Bolivip describes how arboreal and horticultural metaphors motivate the growth of persons and plants by circulating bodily resources through others. Knowledge here comes from those who contribute to conception, and is withheld until a person is capable of bearing it. These images are used to provide new readings of classic Melanesianist texts – Mead, Bateson, and Fortune – substituting theoretical ideas for intimate relations; Weiner and Strathern's own experiments with anthropology modelled on Melanesia; and Barth's reading of secrecy amongst the Min.

This book addresses two of the most important questions in modern African history: the causes of rapid population growth, and the origins of the AIDS pandemic. It examines three societies on the Uganda–Tanzania border whose distinctive histories shed new light on both of these phenomena. This was the region where HIV in Africa first became a mass rural epidemic, and also where HIV infection rates first began to decline significantly. The book argues that only by analysing the long history of changes in sexual behaviour and attitudes can the shape of Africa's regional epidemics be fully understood. It traces the emergence of the sexual culture which permitted HIV to spread so quickly during the late 1970s and 1980s back to the middle decades of the twentieth century, a period when new patterns of socialization and sexual networking became established. The case studies examined in this book also provide new insights into the relationship between economic and social development and trends in fertility and mortality during the twentieth century. These three societies experienced the onset of rapid demographic growth at different moments and for different reasons, but in each case study area the key mechanisms appear to have been a decline in child mortality, a shortening of birth intervals, and a marked decline in primary and secondary infertility.

Based on long-term fieldwork with herding families along the Mongolian-Russian border, this book examines how people tend to past memories in their homes while navigating new ways of accumulating wealth and fortune in the face of political and economic uncertainties. It is at this intersection, where the politics of tending to the past and the morality of new means of accumulating wealth come together to shape intimate social relations, that the book reveals an innovative area for the study of kinship in anthropology. It combines personal experience with ethnographic insight.

This book is an ethnographic study of kinship and the nature and behaviour of ownership amongst the much-studied Sepik River Iatmul people. Until very recently, anthropology has remained a Western analytical project for understanding and conceptualising non-Western societies, and was often geared towards the pragmatics of colonial and post-colonial interest. In the spirit of social science, it has formulated a rigorous method of research and a specialised language of description and analysis. Embedded within this approach are metaphysical assumptions about the nature of human society, culture, history, and so forth. This book provides the vantage point from which to rethink anthropology's central assumption about social relations by focusing on the way in which they are assumed and prefigured in the methodological approach in data gathering and in subsequent theorisation. It presents an ethnographic study of the nature of personhood, name and marriage systems, gender, understandings of kinship, and concomitant issues of ownership amongst the Sepik River Iatmul people, a people well known and of enduring importance to anthropology on either side of the Atlantic and in Australasia.