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For the Ankave of Papua New Guinea, men, unlike women, do not reach adulthood and become fathers simply by growing up and reproducing. What fathers—and by extension, men—actually are is a result of a series of relational transformations, operated in and by rituals in which men and women both perform complementary actions in separate spaces. Acting for Others is a tour de force in Melanesian ethnography, gender studies, and theories of ritual. Based on years of fieldwork conducted by the author and her husband and co-ethnographer, this book’s “double view” of the Ankave ritual cycle—from women in the village and from the men in the forest—is novel, provocative, and one of the most incisive analyses of the emergence of ideas of gender in Papua New Guinea since Marilyn Strathern’s The Gender of the Gift.
At the heart of Pascale Bonnemère’s argument is the idea that it is possible for genders to act for and upon one another, and to do so almost paradoxically, by limiting action through the obeying of taboos and other restrictions. With this first English translation by acclaimed French translator Nora Scott, accompanied by a foreword from Marilyn Strathern, Acting for Others brings the Ankave ritual world to new theoretical life, challenging how we think about mutual action, mutual being, and mutual life.

 

Modernity has divided animals into two categories: those deemed worthy of protection and affection, and those reduced to raw material for industry. How can we make sense of this strange split between protective love and intensive exploitation? Hunting, which both predates this opposition and continues to unsettle it, provides an exceptional vantage point from which to examine our contradictory relationship with living beings in the midst of an ecological crisis. Drawing on an immersive field study, Charles Stépanoff documents the accelerated erosion of rural biodiversity, and the paradoxical relationships between hunting, protection, and compassion. Over the course of this rich journey, he sheds new light on the anthropological and ecological foundations of the violence inflicted on living beings, as well as on the wild origins of political sovereignty. Ultimately, by questioning the peculiar moral hierarchy that this violence produces today, Stépanoff gives our moral and emotional perception a deeper field of vision.

Claude-Henri Rocquet—poet, playwright, and critic—has marshalled the full range of his talents to create a dazzling historical novel about the artist Peter Bruegel the Elder. To the few facts we have—Bruegel died in 1569 around the age of fifty; he lived in Antwerp and in Brussels; his work was much admired—Rocquet adds his own speculations on the sights, smells, and textures of Bruegel's world, on the artist's innermost feelings and intimate conversations, on his spiritual life and its possible translation on the artist's canvas.

When we think of giving gifts, we think of exchanging objects that carry with them economic or symbolic value. But is every valuable thing a potentially exchangeable item, whose value can be transferred? In The Enigma of the Gift, the distinguished French anthropologist Maurice Godelier reassesses the significance of gifts in social life by focusing on sacred objects, which are never exchanged despite the value they possess.

Beginning with an analysis of the seminal work of Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strass, and drawing on his own fieldwork in Melanesia, Godelier argues that traditional theories are flawed because they consider only exchangeable gifts. By explaining gift-giving in terms of sacred objects and the authoritative conferral of power associated with them, Godelier challenges both recent and traditional theories of gift-giving, provocatively refreshing a traditional debate.

Elegantly translated by Nora Scott, The Enigma of the Gift is at once a major theoretical contribution and an essential guide to the history of the theory of the gift.