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Animating the Ancestors in the Anthropology of the Trobriands

Animating the Ancestors in the Anthropology of the Trobriands The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 2019 Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 362–368 REVIEW ESSAY Animating the Ancestors in the Anthropology of the Trobriands Ways of Baloma: Rethinking Magic and Kinship from the Trobriands MARK MOSKO Chicago, Hau Books (Malinowski Monograph Series), 2017 The Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea has been portrayed as a unique and sacred place in the genealogy of the discipline of anthropology, and especially that lineage which reveres Bronislaw Malinowski as one of its founding fathers. Mark Mosko’s recent book – Ways of Baloma – insists on the centrality of baloma (ancestral spirits) as palpable, perduring presences in the lives of contemporary Trobriand Islanders. We might say that this book also animates the baloma, the ancestral spirit of Malinowski, not so much through rituals of reverence but through iconoclas- tic arguments which erode the empirical and theoretical foundations of Malinowski’s corpus and much of the voluminous anthropological literature on the Trobriands. Perhaps this is why in his Introduction Mark describes the Trobriands not just as a ‘unique and sacred place in anthropology’ but also as a ‘ground zero’ for ‘our’ ethno- graphic field methodologies’ (1). That image – used for the central terrestrial point http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology Taylor & Francis

Animating the Ancestors in the Anthropology of the Trobriands

Jolly, Margaret
The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology , Volume 20 (4): 7 – Aug 8, 2019
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Animating the Ancestors in the Anthropology of the Trobriands

Abstract

The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 2019 Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 362–368 REVIEW ESSAY Animating the Ancestors in the Anthropology of the Trobriands Ways of Baloma: Rethinking Magic and Kinship from the Trobriands MARK MOSKO Chicago, Hau Books (Malinowski Monograph Series), 2017 The Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea has been portrayed as a unique and sacred place in the genealogy of the discipline of anthropology, and especially that lineage which reveres Bronislaw Malinowski...
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Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Copyright
© 2019 Margaret Jolly
ISSN
1740-9314
eISSN
1444-2213
DOI
10.1080/14442213.2019.1623006
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 2019 Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 362–368 REVIEW ESSAY Animating the Ancestors in the Anthropology of the Trobriands Ways of Baloma: Rethinking Magic and Kinship from the Trobriands MARK MOSKO Chicago, Hau Books (Malinowski Monograph Series), 2017 The Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea has been portrayed as a unique and sacred place in the genealogy of the discipline of anthropology, and especially that lineage which reveres Bronislaw Malinowski as one of its founding fathers. Mark Mosko’s recent book – Ways of Baloma – insists on the centrality of baloma (ancestral spirits) as palpable, perduring presences in the lives of contemporary Trobriand Islanders. We might say that this book also animates the baloma, the ancestral spirit of Malinowski, not so much through rituals of reverence but through iconoclas- tic arguments which erode the empirical and theoretical foundations of Malinowski’s corpus and much of the voluminous anthropological literature on the Trobriands. Perhaps this is why in his Introduction Mark describes the Trobriands not just as a ‘unique and sacred place in anthropology’ but also as a ‘ground zero’ for ‘our’ ethno- graphic field methodologies’ (1). That image – used for the central terrestrial point

Journal

The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology – Taylor & Francis

Published: Aug 8, 2019

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