Du Toit contributes to the study of the climacteric as an important phase of the life cycle among women of different cultures (the later reproductive and postreproductive years). Drawing upon perspectives in anthropology, sociology, psychology, and gerontology, he demonstrates the need for an adequate cross-cultural theory of aging among women, and offers a solid body of research from South Africa in establishing a standard methodology for the study of the climacteric.

First Published in 2002.Foodways can reveal the strongest and deepest traces of human history and culture, and this pioneering volume is a detailed study of the development of the traditional dietary culture of Southeast Asia from Laos and Vietnam to the Philippines and New Guinea from earliest times to the present. Being blessed with abundant natural resources, dietary culture in Southeast Asia flourished during the pre-European period on the basis of close relationships between the cultural spheres of India and China, only to undergo significant change during the rise of Islam and the age of European colonialism. What we think of as the Southeast Asian cuisine today is the result of the complex interplay of many factors over centuries. The work is supported by full geological, archaeological, biological and chemical data, and is based largely upon Southeast Asian sources which have not been available up until now. This is essential reading for anyone interested in culinary history, the anthropology of food, and in the complex history of Southeast Asia.

Visions of Culture: A Reader, Second Edition, has been revised and expanded with new selections and is coordinated for use with Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists, Fifth Edition. Each selection is prefaced with a brief introduction about the anthropologist and the text. Each primary text is followed by a section titled “Queries and Connections,” a series of questions designed to help students focus on the central issues in each text and to relate them to other readings. NEW TO THIS EDITION Part VII: Neo-Darwinian Evolutionary Theories 25: Leda Cosmides and John Toobey, from The Evolutionary Primer 26: Eric Alden Smith, from Why Do Good Hunters Have Higher Reproductive Success? 27. Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, from “Introduction”from The Origin and Evolution of Culture Part VIII—The Ontological Turn 28: Philippe Descola, from Beyond Nature and Culture 29: Tim Ingold, from Anthropology beyond Humanity 30: Bruno Latour, from “Introduction”from Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory

.J. c. Vergouwen's work, Het Rechtsleven der T'oba-Bataks, here presented in an English translation, was published in the autumn of 1933, a few weeks before the author's death at the early age of 44 from tuberculosis, from which he had suffered since 1930. During the time he spent in a sanatorium in Davos and later in the Netherlands, he began and completed his monograph on the customary law of the Toba-Batak. His book immediately became one of the outstanding works of Dutch scholarship on Indonesian customary law (Adat law). Jacob Cornelis Vergouwen began his career as an administrative officer in South Borneo (now Kalimantan) in 1913, after a brief prac tical training. In 1921 he was given the opportunity for further study at the University of Leiden where a five-year scientific training for a career as an administrative officer in the Dutch East Indies had just been instituted. On obtaining his Master's degree, he was appointed to the Tapanuli Residency, from of old, the homeland of the Toba, Mandailing, Angkola, and Dairi or Pakpak Batak. As a young official, Vergouwen had already evinced great interest in the laws and customs of the Dayak people in Borneo. His studies at the University brought him into close contact with the founder of the science of Indonesian Adat law, Professor Cornelis van Vollenhoven, one of the greatest Dutch jurists of this century.

What are the limits of national belonging? Focusing on Biak--a set of islands off the coast of western New Guinea, in the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya--Danilyn Rutherford's analysis calls for a rethinking of the nature of national identity. With the resurgence of separatism in the province, Irian Jaya has become the focus of fears that the Indonesian nation is falling apart. Yet in the early 1990s, the fieldwork for this book was made possible by the government's belief that Biaks were finally beginning to see themselves as Indonesians. Taking in the dynamics of Biak social life and the islands' long history of millennial unrest, Rutherford shows how practices that indicated Biaks' submission to national authority actually reproduced antinational understandings of space, time, and self. Approaching the foreign as a focus of longing in cultural arenas ranging from kinship to Christianity, Biaks participated in Indonesian national institutions without accepting the identities they promoted. Their remarkable response to the Indonesian government (and earlier polities laying claim to western New Guinea) suggests the limits of national identity and modernity, writ large. This is one of the few books reporting on the volatile province of Irian Jaya. It offers a new way of thinking about the nation and its limits--one that moves beyond the conventions of both scholarship and recent journalism. It shows how people can "belong" to a nation yet maintain commitments that fall both short of and beyond the nation state.

Community in the Balance presents a fresh perspective on some classic social science issues. It examines the conflicts and tensions that permeate day-to-day interactions of a people in a remote region of the eastern Indonesian province of Maluku. The Maneo openly tout the pleasures of living alone in the forests of Seram away from the demands of kith and kin and the scrutiny that comes from life in villages in close proximity. The option is real. Yet while the incessant social demands and low-level enmities they attribute to village life are also felt, most acutely in the peril of sorcery, the accounts of strife are exaggerated to help establish the mutuality of the terms on which people do associate-as a collective sacrifice and virtue. Drawing on Aristotelian ideas of morality and exploring the modalities of recognition, desire, and displacement, the book focuses on the strategies of negotiation and obfuscation Maneo employ to foster community life. As volition is central to moral practice, the book's analysis of the subsequent religious conflagration that swept the province between 1999 and 2002 illuminates how fears and rumors of attack narrowed options that might otherwise have enabled enough people to opt out, condemn the violence, and perhaps contain it.

The Bird's Head Peninsula of Irian Jaya has long been an area neglected by New Guinea Studies. Only in the late seventies, interest began to focus more intensively on this scientifically important border area between Austronesian and Papuan languages and cultures. In the early nineties, this led to the creation in The Netherlands of the Irian Jaya Studies programme ISIR, which organizes and coordinates multi-disciplinary research on the Bird's Head Peninsula. Within this framework, study of the peninsula has reached a peak, with research being conducted in the area by scientists from different disciplines: anthropology, archaeology, (ethno)botany, demography, development administration, geology and linguistics. The diverse perspectives of these disciplines are subject to constant internal debate. Through ISIR and other research initiatives, there is a growing body of data on and insights into the various disciplines concerned with this fascinating area, with each discipline developing its own specific perspectives on the Bird's Head. These perspectives were presented during the First International Conference Perspectives on the Bird's Head of Irian Jaya, Indonesia, organized by ISIR in cooperation with the Indonesian Institute of Sciences LIPI (Jakarta) and the International Institute for Asian Studies ILAS (Leiden) and held at Leiden University, 13-17 October 1997. Researchers were informed on current perspectives in many disciplines to facilitate integration of findings into wider, interdisciplinary frameworks and to stimulate international debate within and between disciplines. As a result of the Conference, the forty-two contributions in these Proceedings present a wealth of recent developments from various disciplines in New Guinea Studies.

This encyclopedia provides a comprehensive overview of the traditions, cultures, kinship norms, and other significant cultural aspects of the tribes, or otherwise named ethnic groups, of Indonesia, by an Indonesian anthropologist. The entries are supported by illustrations drawn by the late author himself, and are also accompanied by maps indicating the geographic locations and distributions of each tribe throughout the vast archipelago. Originally written and published in Bahasa Indonesian, the text has been translated into English and revised to feature up-to-date information. In showcasing the extent of diversity and the distinctiveness of the numerous tribal cultures in Indonesia, the volume presents itself as an important academic reference in Indonesian anthropology and ethnography studies, now finally available to global readership. Intended as a short work of reference, it will be indispensable to students and scholars researching Indonesia from anthropological, sociocultural, and ethnographic perspectives.