Melanesian Odysseys: Negotiating the Self, Narrative, and Modernity

The effect is refreshing the book is written with on imiffediacy of feeling for place and time and person it is real pledsdre to read, its theoretical Impetus shot thiough with insights and aphorisms that can only have come from lonatona reflected upon ethnographic widom This engaging book will be much debated and deseives tabe---Marilyn Strathen in the Australian Journal of Anthropology

Melanesian Odyssey is one of the finest ethnographies I have read in recent yearselt interleaves analytical and descriptive passages with unusual sensitivity and skill, while integrating anthropology and philosophy with great expertise. This is also the kind of book my students crave and that I all too rarely find-the writing vivid and vital, the ethnography compassionate, engaging and crativ.---Michael Jackson

...convincing and empathetic, rich in detail, and clearly basedon a lifetime of fieldwork and friendship-Pacific Affairs

In a series of epic self-narratives ranging from traditional cultural embodiments to picaresque adventures, Christian epiphanies and a host of interactive strategies and techniques for living, Kewa Highlanders (PNG) attempt to shape and control their selves and their relentlessly changing world. This lively account transcends ethnographic particulartity and offers a wide-reching perspective on the nature of being human. Inverting the analytic logic of her previous work, which sought to uncover what social structures concealed, losephides focuses instead on the cultural understandings that people make explicit in their actions and speech. Using approaches from philosophy and anthropology, she examines elicitation (how people create their selves and their worlds in the act of making explicit) and mimesis (how anthropologists produce ethnographies), to arrive at an unexpected conclusion: that knowledge of self and other alike derives from self-externalization rather than self-introspection.

Lisett Josephides is Reader in Anthropology at Queen's University Belfast, following many years of fieldwork in Papua New Guinea and teaching positions at the University of Papua New Guinea, the London School of Economics and the University of Minnesota.