"The Vailala Madness", and other Essays
Author(s): Francis Edgar Williams, Erik Schwimmer(ed.)
Secondhand.
Francis Edgar Williams died in an aeroplane crash in the Owen Stanley Range in 1943 at the age of fifty. He had been a Rhodes Scholar (1915) and obtained a Diploma in Anthropology with distinction at Oxford (1922). Also in 1922 he became Assistant Anthropologist, Papua, and in 1928 Government Anthropologist. Williams' ethnographic records of the people of the Purari Delta, the Gulf Coast, Lake Kutubu, the Orokaiva and several mountain tribes have become classics, which will undoubtedly be read by scholars both inside and outside Papua New Guinea for generations to come, if only as monuments to a way of life which was already partly extinct by the time Williams died, but of which the positive achievements are a basis for ideological development in the future.
Edited, with an Introduction, by Erik Schwimmer. Included in this work are: 'Trading Voyages from the Gulf of Papua'; 'Bull-Roarers in the Papuan Gulf'; 'Sex Affiliation and its Implications' and 'Natives of Lake Kutuma, Papua' among others.
VG. Old label mark on the front dust jacket.
Product Information
Francis Edgar Williams (1893-1943), anthropologist and public servant. During his distinguished anthropological career Williams undertook a remarkable amount of field-work. Of his nineteen years in the Territory, he spent more than five living in Papuan villages. In 1939 he was elected president of the anthropology section of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science.
A careful and thorough ethnographer, Williams nevertheless admitted to being an indifferent linguist who rarely made the effort to learn vernaculars. His writing style was clear, candid, unpretentious, and at times wryly self-deprecating. While not a major theorist, he was a searching and rigorous one, who made some strikingly original theoretical observations. His analyses of certain systems of kinship and marriage, for example, foreshadowed exchange theory and the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss.
General Fields
- :
- : University of Queensland Press
- : University of Queensland Press
- : 01 April 1976
- : Great Britain
- : books
Special Fields
- : Francis Edgar Williams, Erik Schwimmer(ed.)
- : Hardback with dj
- : very good
- : 432
