he Handbook of Sociocultural Anthropology presents a state of the art overview of the subject - its methodologies, current debates, history and future. It will provide the ultimate source of authoritative, critical descriptions of all the key aspects of the discipline as well as a consideration of the general state of the discipline at a time when there is notable uncertainty about its foundations, composition and direction. Divided into five core sections, the Handbook: examines the changing theoretical and analytical orientations that have led to new ways of carrying out research; presents an analysis of the traditional historical core and how the discipline has changed since 1980; considers the ethnographic regions where work has had the greatest impact on anthropology as a whole; outlines the people and institutions that are the context in which the discipline operates, covering topics from research funding to professional ethics.Bringing together leading international scholars, the Handbook provides a guide to the latest research in social and cultural anthropology. Presenting a systematic overview - and offering a wide range of examples, insights and analysis - it will be an invaluable resource for researchers and students in anthropology as well as cultural and social geography, cultural studies and sociology.

Class has become a feature of life in Papua New Guinea, evident in both "traditional" and "modern" settings. This book examines the emergence of class differences and its social and cultural ramifications in Wewak, capital of the East Sepik Province. It movingly conveys the injuries of class inequalities, and reveals how class has worked in similar and different ways, and how it has become possible and plausible for relatively affluent "nationals," even those living in modest urban centers, to present themselves as fundamentally superior to other Papua New Guineans.

This accessible 1999 study of social class in contemporary Papua New Guinea deals with the new elite, its culture and its institutions, and its relationship to the broader society. The Papua New Guinea described here is not a place of exotic tribesmen, but a modernising society, shaped by global forces, and increasingly divided on class lines. The authors describes the life-style of the elite Wewak, a typical commercial centre, their golf clubs and Rotary gatherings, and bring home the ways in which differences of status are created, experienced and justified. In a country with a long tradition of egalitarianism, it has become at once possible and plausible for relatively affluent 'nationals' to present themselves in a wide range of contexts as fundamentally superior to 'bushy' people, to blame the poor for their misfortunes, and to turn their backs on their less successful relatives.

Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington have worked as anthropologists in Papua New Guinea for nearly two decades. In this, their second joint study of the Chambri, they consider the way those in a small-scale society, peripheral to the major centers of influence, struggle to sustain some degree of autonomy. They describe the Chambri caught up in world processes of social and cultural change, and attempt to create a "collective biography" that conveys the intelligibility and significance of the twentieth century experience of these Papua New Guineans whom they have come to know well. This biography consists of interlocking stories, twisted histories, commentaries and contexts about Chambri who are negotiating their objectives while entangled in systemic change and confronting Western representations of modernization and development.

he Handbook of Sociocultural Anthropology presents a state of the art overview of the subject - its methodologies, current debates, history and future. It will provide the ultimate source of authoritative, critical descriptions of all the key aspects of the discipline as well as a consideration of the general state of the discipline at a time when there is notable uncertainty about its foundations, composition and direction. Divided into five core sections, the Handbook: examines the changing theoretical and analytical orientations that have led to new ways of carrying out research; presents an analysis of the traditional historical core and how the discipline has changed since 1980; considers the ethnographic regions where work has had the greatest impact on anthropology as a whole; outlines the people and institutions that are the context in which the discipline operates, covering topics from research funding to professional ethics.Bringing together leading international scholars, the Handbook provides a guide to the latest research in social and cultural anthropology. Presenting a systematic overview - and offering a wide range of examples, insights and analysis - it will be an invaluable resource for researchers and students in anthropology as well as cultural and social geography, cultural studies and sociology.