Society of others : kinship and mourning in a West Papuan place / Rupert Stasch.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 291-301) and index.

Introduction: otherness as a relation -- A dispersed society: place ownership and the crossing of spatial margins -- Pairing and avoidance: an otherness-focused approach to social ties -- Strange kin: maternal uncles and the spectrum of relatives -- Children and the contingency of attachment -- Marriage as disruption and creation of belonging -- Dialectics of contact and separation in mourning -- Conclusion.

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This important 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, Rupert Stasch shows that in this society, people organize their connections to each another 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, Stasch argues that the Korowai actively make relations not out of what they have in common, but out.

English.

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