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"This book presents a comprehensive and balanced description of major aspects of Polynesian cultures, using both the accounts of the European "discoverers" and the up-to-date writings of archaeologists and anthropologists".--BOOKJACKET.
Texts and Contexts is concerned with the development of Pacific Islands history as a specialization in its own right. Specifically, this volume examines the foundational texts that pioneered and consolidated the new subdiscipline and served as the building blocks and stepping stone for further developments in the field. Thirty-five texts, all of which represent defining points in the development of Pacific Islands historiography, are examined. Much more than retrospective appraisals of the foundational texts, the individual chapters consider a text or complimentary texts within the context of the time of writing and gauge what ongoing influence they exerted. In some cases they suggest how a ...
“Tahiti is far famed yet too little known.” Thus wrote J. M. Orsmond in 1848, and the same assertion can be made in 1972. Thousands of pages had been published about Tahiti and its neighboring islands when Orsmond uttered his judgment, and tens of thousands have been published since that time, but a unified, comprehensive, and detailed description of the pre-European ways of life of the inhabitants of those Islands is yet to appear in print. The present work, lengthy as it is, makes no such claim to comprehensiveness; rather, it is concerned mainly with the social relations of those inhabitants, and it serves up only enough about their technology, their religion, their aesthetic expressions, and so forth to place descriptions of their social relations in context and render them more comprehensible. Volumes 1 and 2 of this work are a reconstruction of the Islanders’ way of life as it was believed to have been just before it began to be transformed by European influence—a period labeled the Late Indigenous Era. Volume 3 covers events in Tahiti and Mo‘orea from about 1767 to 1815—a period labeled the Early European Era.
"Part 1 of the book...deals with the geography of the region and with the biological, linguistic, and archaeological evidence concerning the origins of the Oceanians and their movements into and within the region. Part 2 describes the tools and techniques by which the recent (but not yet markedly Westernized) Oceanians satisfied their basic, pan-human needs, as qualified by their many different, culturally defined, perceptions of those needs...Finally, Part 3 focuses on the varieties of social structures within which those 'technical' activities took place." -from the Prologue
"By far the best compendium on Pacific studies available today. There have been several attempts to imitate it during the past decade but they are either boiled-down histories or else reference works without any cohesive structure." --H.E. Maude, Australian National University
Boys' Life is the official youth magazine for the Boy Scouts of America. Published since 1911, it contains a proven mix of news, nature, sports, history, fiction, science, comics, and Scouting.
The Springer Handbook of Auditory Research presents a series of com prehensive and synthetic reviews of the fundamental topics in modem auditory research. It is aimed at all individuals with interests in hearing research including advanced graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and clinical investigators. The volumes will introduce new investigators to important aspects of hearing science and will help established inves tigators to better understand the fundamental theories and data in fields of hearing that they may not normally follow closely. Each volume is intended to present a particular topic comprehensively, and each chapter will serve as a synthetic overview and guide to the literature. As such, the chapters present neither exhaustive data reviews nor original research that has not yet appeared in peer-reviewed journals. The series focusses on topics that have developed a solid data and con ceptual foundation rather than on those for which a literature is only beginning to develop. New research areas will be covered on a timely basis in the series as they begin to mature.
The Giddens Reader contains a comprehensive selection of readings from the works of the pre-eminent social theorist Anthony Giddens. A wide range of important theoretical issues are covered, including the author's encounter with the writings of Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Parsons and Foucault. The 'Reader' also presents elaborations of Giddens' own innovative approach to the fundamental questions of social theory. His views on power, time-space and the relationship between action and structure are well represented, as are his highly illuminating analyses of the 'late modern age'. The readings are prefaced by a straightforward introduction by the editor.