Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place
Rupert Stasch
Abstract
This study upsets the popular assumption that human relations in small-scale societies are based on shared experience. In a theoretically innovative account of the lives of the Korowai of West Papua, Indonesia, this book shows that in this society, people organize their connections to each other around otherness. Analyzing the Korowai people's famous “tree house” dwellings, their patterns of living far apart, and their practices of kinship, marriage, and childbearing and rearing, the book argues that the Korowai actively make relations not out of what they have in common, but out of what divid ... More
Keywords: human relations, Korowai, West Papua, Indonesia, tree house dwellings, kinship, marriage, childbearing, child rearing, tribal societies
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2009 | Print ISBN-13: 9780520256859 |
| Published to California Scholarship Online: May 2012 | DOI:10.1525/california/9780520256859.001.0001 |
