Pamela J. Stewart

Andrew J. Strathern

This book argues that the breaking and re-making of frames of analysis underlie the history of theorizing in anthropology. Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew J. Strathern note that this mode of analysis risks fabricating over-essentialized dichotomies between viewpoints. The authors advocate a mindful, nuanced, people-centered approach to all theorizing-one that avoids total system approaches (-isms) and suggest that theory should relate cogently to ethnography. Mindful anthropology, as this book envisages it, is not a specific theory but a philosophical aspiration for the discipline as a whole.

Anthropological Conundrums

Breaking the Frames

How have the Aluni Valley Duna people of Papua New Guinea responded to the challenges of colonial and post-colonial changes that have entered their lifeworld since the middle of the Twentieth-Century? Living in a corner of the world influenced by mining companies but relatively neglected in terms of government-sponsored development, these people have dealt creatively with forces of change by redeploying their own mythological themes about the cosmos in order to make claims on outside corporations and by subtly combining features of their customary practices with forms of Christianity, attempting to empower their past as a means of confronting the future.

Andrew J. Strathern

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