ASAO Home Page

Other Publications

ASAO Monographs

Dangerous
Words:
Language
and
Politics
in the
Pacific

edited
by
Donald Lawrence Brenneis
and
Fred R. Myers

New York & London:
New York University Press

Reissued 1991
by Waveland Press

Introduction: Language and Politics in the Pacific

Fred R. Myers and Donald Lawrence Brenneis

 

I. Egalitarian Polity: The Production of Contexts of Understanding

1. "Wrapped Words": Poetry and Politics among the Wana of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia
Jane Monnig Atkinson

2. Straight Talk and Sweet Talk: Political Discourse in an Occasionally Egalitarian Community

Donald Lawrence Brenneis

 

3. Who Speaks Here? Formality and the Politics of Gender in Mendi, Highland Papua New Guinea

Rena Lederman

 

4. Putting Down Roots: Information in the Language of Managalase Exchange

William H. McKellin

 

II. Autonomy: Language, Objects, and the Limits of Control

 

5. Words That Are Moving: The Social Meanings of Ilongot Verbal Art

Michelle Z. Rosaldo

 

6. From Words to Objects to Magic: "Hard Words" and the Boundaries of Social Interaction

Annette B. Weiner

 

7. Of Symbolic Anchors and Sago Soup: The Rhetoric of Exchange among the Chambri of Papua New Guinea

Deborah Gewertz

 

III. Hierarchy: Speech and the "Taken-for-Granted" Polity

 

8. Lauga and Talanoaga: Two Speech Genres in a Samoan Political Event

Alessandro Duranti

 

9. Three Perspectives on Role Distance in Conversations between Tongan Nobles and Their "People"

George E. Marcus