Kwaio Religion: The Living and the Dead in a Solomon Island Society / Edition 1

by Roger Keesing

Overview

In Kwaio Religion, Roger Keesing examines how the Kwaio, challenged by 110 years of European colonialism and now by the militant Christianity of their own rapidly Westernizing nation, have managed to continue their ancestral ways. Drawing on fieldwork carried out over a lost 20 years, Keesing explores the phenomenological reality of world where one's group includes the living and the dead, where conversations with the spirits, and the sing of their presence and acts, are very much a part of everyday life. He describes conceptions of mana and tabu that shed revealing light on old issues regarding Oceanic religion. Keesing situates the elegant though largely implicit structures of Kwaio cosmology within a framework of the "political economy of knowledge," examining the distribution of expertise in the community and the uses of religion as ideology, and asking how symbolic systems are perpetuated and changed. Questioning some currently fashionable anthropological approaches to symbolism, myth, ritual, and cosmology—approaches Keesing characterizes as "cultural cryptography"—Kwaio Religion challenges common assumptions about cultural symbols and shared meanings.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231053419
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	11/22/1982
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	257
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Roger Keesing is professor and head of the department of anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra.

Table of Contents

Kwaio Orthography
Preface
Introduction
1. The Kwaio of Malaita
2. Encountering Ancestors
3. The Spirit World
4. Magic
5. Cosmological Structures
6. Ancestors in Kwaio Social Structure
7. Adalo: AThe Powers and Precepts of the Dead
8. Communications and Transactions iwth Ancestors
9. Sacrifice
10. Death anc Desacralization
11. The Sociology of Kwaio Ritual
12. Symbolism in Kwaio Ritual
13. Structures, Meanings, and the Sociology of Knowledge
14. Ancestors, Celestialization, and Earthly Politics
15. The Struggle for Atonomy
Conclusion
Kwaio Glossary
References
Index