رشد آثار، نمایش روابط: یام‌ها، هنر و فناوری در میان نیامیکوم آبلام‌های پاپوآ گینه نو (مداخلات مادی: مردم و اشیاء در دنیای حرکت، جلد ۲)

What gives artefacts their power and beauty? This ethnographic study of the decorated long yams made by the Nyamikum Abelam in Papua New Guinea examines how these artefacts acquire their specific properties through processes that mobilise and recruit diverse entities, substances and domains. All come together to form the 'finished product' that is displayed, representing what could be an indigenous form of non-verbal 'sociology'. Engaging with several contemporary anthropological topics (material culture, techniques, arts, aesthetics, rituals, botany, cosmology, Melanesian ethnography), the text also discusses in depth the complex position of the study of 'technology' within anthropology. "How does one make powerful and beautiful and artefacts? What is in certain objects that give them the capacity to act simultaneously as symbols, valuables and images? This book answers these questions through joining together anthropology of material culture, anthropology of art and anthropology of techniques in order to study the decorated long yams of the Abelam of the Sepik in a contemporary Papua New Guinea village. It unpacks their process of making, which requires the combination of agricultural techniques, social interactions, and cosmological knowledge, and provides discussion of the complex positions of study of techniques and arts within anthropology"-- Provided by publisher