Table of Contents

1 Introduction: Heidegger and Anthropology's Nihilism Part I: Place, Death and Voice in Foi 2 Space and Naming: The Inscriptive Effects of Foi Life Activity 3 Being and Striving: Death, Gender and Temporality among the Poi 4 To Be At Home with Others in an Empty Place 51 Part Il: The Limits of Human Relationship 5 The Limit of Relationship 6 Technology and Techne in Trobriand and Yolngu Art Part III: The Aestheticization of Social Relations 7 The Community as a Work of Art 8 Prelude: Light and Language 9 On Televisualist Anthropology: Representation, Aesthetics, Politics, 10 The Scale of Human Life

Promotional Information

Also available in hardback, 9781859735015 GBP50.00 (October, 2001)

About the Author

James F. Weiner is Visiting Fellow, Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University

Reviews

'What are the limits of relationship? What bounds the scope of imagination? Blending his ethnographic experience among the Foi of Papua New Guinea with his personal reading of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Weiner seeks the wellsprings of art and social life in the tension between revelation and concealment. In a world bedazzled by the glitz and speed of telecommunications, bathed in a phantasmagoria of ephemeral images, it is easy to think that reality can be whatever we choose to make of it. In the fashionable doctrine of social constructionism, anthropology has succumbed to this temptation. Tree Leaf Talk bursts the constructionist bubble. The book is a passionate appeal for a rigorously down-to-earth anthropology, rooted in the slow, pedestrian rhythms of day-to-day activity through which experience, history and meaning are sedimented in the land.' Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen 'Freed from the descriptor, 'A heideggerian Anthropology', Tree leaf talk can then be read as a careful demonstration of the power of something like 'an allegorical anthropology'. University of Technology Sydney 'A powerful, dense and vital contribution to anthropology.' Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 'It is hard to imagine an anthropological reader who would not find this book stimulating and provocative, regardless of where they do their research. And hence it marks not just another significant contribution to Weiner's impressive body of work, but an important milestone in the coming of age of Melanesianist social theory more generally.' Joel Robbins, University of California, in Australian Journal of Anthropology (17:1)