1st Edition
Ancestral Presence Cosmology and Historical Experience in the Papuan Highlands
Prologue: A Path to Fuda; Introduction: What Causes Change?; Part I: Tidibe; 1.Tidibe as Creator Force; 2. Tidibe as Myth and Mythopoeia; Part II: In the Way of Tidibe; 3. Gab Transforming; 4. Exchange; 5. One Skin; 6. Dance; Part III: Centre of the World; 7. Mission; 8. Market; 9. Law; Conclusion: History and Tidibe: A Symmetical Inversion
Biography
Eric Hirsch is Reader in Anthropology at Brunel University London. He has a longstanding interest in the anthropology and history of Papua New Guinea and Melanesia more generally. His most recent publication is The Melanesian World (co-edited with Will Rollason), Routledge, 2019.
"Ancestral Presence is a rich, insightful, and enjoyable ethnography, and Hirsch makes important contributions to the field. By showing how continuity and change are not necessarily mutually exclusive, Hirsch meaningfully intervenes in key ongoing debates within the anthropology of Melanesia. [...] This book merits a wide audience." - Dario Di Rosa in Pacific Affairs
"I found Ancestral Presence to be an engaging account of a Melanesian lifeworld that successfully draws on key studies in Melanesian anthropology to outline a nuanced approach to the question of cultural continuity and change that is grounded in important insights derived from the Fuyuge’s perspective." - Christiane Falck in Oceania
"Ancestral Presence is a fruitful intervention in the continuing conversation about the structure and significance of history and historical thought in human experience, an anthropological conversation whose partners ought to include not only professional historians, but those like the Fuyuge who inhabit and reproduce other historicities." - Michael Lambek in History and Anthropology
