Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture

Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture. Sherry B. Ortner. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996. 262 pp.     

Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art

Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art. Fred R. Myers. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. 410 pp.     

Taking the photographs home: The recovery of a Maori history

The act of taking back to their communities some early twentieth‐century photographs of Maori elders unlocked both history and memory. This article analyses the creation of two very different books based on photographs and the oral histories that were narrated to the authors.     

The Invention of Convention

The traditional past of the people of South-West Bay, Malekula, featured a great deal of cultural borrowing. Like most Christians in Vanuatu, their negative attitude to a 'pagan' past has been changed into one of positive interest by the recent national emphasis on kastorn. Their older perception of kastorn as commodity - knowledge, rituals, objects, etc. to be bought, sold or exchanged at will - has been supplemented by the more wide- spread notion of kastom as a stable body of traditions, unshared as well as shared. The validatory potential of kastorn is being realized as people re-evaluate and reinvent their past, exploiting lacunae in customary knowledge by imaginative citation of the written ethnographic word. Contemporary needs are apparently more effectively satisfied by reference to fixed truths rather than to fluid and dynamic representations of culture.     

The Fremont Culture: Its Derivation and Ultimate Fate

Abstract

Aikens (1966) has proposed that Fremont-Promontory culture originated on the Northwestern Plains and representsan Athabascan migration into the Utah area at circa A. D. 500, their descendents, he suggests, were later forced back onto the Plains by the 12th century expansion of Shoshoneans from the Great Basin. He also proposes that FremontPromontory culture was ancestral to Dismal River culture. In this paper an alternative hypothesis is proposed, i.e., that Fremont and then Promontory cultures were sequential developments from an indigenous Utaztecan or proto-Utaztecan base and that there is no direct cultural relationship between theUtah cultures and the Dismal River aspect.