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How is cultural change perceived and performed by members of the Bena Bena language group, who live in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea? In her analysis, Knapp draws upon existing bodies of work on 'culture change', 'exchange' and 'person' in Melanesia but brings them together in a new way by conjoining traditional models with theoretical approaches of the new Melanesian ethnography and with collaborative, reflexive and reverse anthropology.

Rituals have always been a focus of ethnographies of Melanesia, providing a ground for important theorizing in anthropology. This is especially true of the male initiation rituals that until recently were held in Papua New Guinea. For the most part, these rituals have been understood as all-male institutions, intended to maintain and legitimate male domination. Women's exclusion from the forest space where men conducted most such rites has been taken as a sign of their exclusion from the entire ritual process.Women as Unseen Charactersis the first book to examine the role of females in Papua New Guinea male rituals, and the first systematic treatment of this issue for any part of the world. In this volume, leading Melanesian scholars build on recent ethnographies that show how female kin had roles in male rituals that had previously gone unseen. Female seclusion and the enforcement of taboos were crucial elements of the ritual process: forms of presence in their own right. Contributors here provide detailed accounts of the different kinds of female presence in various Papua New Guinea male rituals. When these are restored to the picture, the rituals can no longer be interpreted merely as an institution for reproducing male domination but must also be understood as a moment when the whole system of relations binding a male person to his kin is reorganized. By dealing with the participation of women, a totally neglected dimension of male rituals is added to our understanding.

Rituals have always been a focus of ethnographies of Melanesia, providing a ground for important theorizing in anthropology. This is especially true of the male initiation rituals that until recently were held in Papua New Guinea. For the most part, these rituals have been understood as all-male institutions, intended to maintain and legitimate male domination. Women's exclusion from the forest space where men conducted most such rites has been taken as a sign of their exclusion from the entire ritual process.Women as Unseen Characters is the first book to examine the role of females in Papua New Guinea male rituals, and the first systematic treatment of this issue for any part of the world. In this volume, leading Melanesian scholars build on recent ethnographies that show how female kin had roles in male rituals that had previously gone unseen. Female seclusion and the enforcement of taboos were crucial elements of the ritual process: forms of presence in their own right.Contributors here provide detailed accounts of the different kinds of female presence in various Papua New Guinea male rituals. When these are restored to the picture, the rituals can no longer be interpreted merely as an institution for reproducing male domination but must also be understood as a moment when the whole system of relations binding a male person to his kin is reorganized. By dealing with the participation of women, a totally neglected dimension of male rituals is added to our understanding.

How is cultural change perceived and performed by members of the Bena Bena language group, who live in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea? In her analysis, Knapp draws upon existing bodies of work on 'culture change', 'exchange' and 'person' in Melanesia but brings them together in a new way by conjoining traditional models with theoretical approaches of the new Melanesian ethnography and with collaborative, reflexive and reverse anthropology.

Sorcery and warfare are closely interrelated in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. In contrast to other areas of the Highlands, sorcery in large parts of the Eastern Highlands is considered to be an exclusively male domain, and violent retribution for deaths attributed to sorcery is primarily directed against other communities. Thus, sorcery accusations have the tendency to escalate to large-scale inter-group warfare, often causing additional casualties. Sorcery beliefs have undergone changes during the colonial and postcolonial era, with new forms of sorcery proliferating, and the zones of safety from sorcery shrinking, due to demographic and economic changes. Sorcery accusations were triggers for the resumption of warfare during the late 1970s and 1980s, and they remain pertinent to outbreaks of hostilities today. In fact, the majority of armed conflicts between 1975 and 2006 among a sample of Fore, Auyana, and Tairora communities in the Okapa and Obura-Wonenara districts of the Eastern Highlands Province are connected to sorcery beliefs and sorcery accusations. These sorcery accusations are the result of uneven economic development and failure to deliver basic social services. When violence is threatened, local leaders try to mediate the hostility, but the state seems unable to offer alternatives for the peaceful settlement of conflicts.

This article revives old descriptive data on Awa, a Papuan language of the Kainantu group. The tonal system was described in detail in a paper by Loving (1973), where he reports a series of toneless noun suffixes, falling into six classes depending on their tonal alternations when combined with a noun root. This article demonstrates that the suffixes are best understood as carrying lexical tone; the alternations in form arise from the interaction of typologically natural tonotactic constraints. While the system can be described in autosegmental terms without much difficulty, a formal constraint-based analysis is less straightforward. I show that strict ranking, as in optimality theory (Prince & Smolensky 2004 [1993]), fails to capture the data patterns due to cumulativity effects, some of which cannot be naturally captured even with local constraint conjunction (Smolensky 2006). The data are successfully modeled in harmonic grammar (Legendre et al. 1990).

This article revives old descriptive data on Awa, a Papuan language of the Kainantu group. The tonal system was described in detail in a paper by Loving (1973), where he reports a series of toneless noun suffixes, falling into six classes depending on their tonal alternations when combined with a noun root. This article demonstrates that the suffixes are best understood as carrying lexical tone; the alternations in form arise from the interaction of typologically natural tonotactic constraints. While the system can be described in autosegmental terms without much difficulty, a formal constraint-based analysis is less straightforward. I show that strict ranking, as in optimality theory (Prince & Smolensky 2004 [1993]), fails to capture the data patterns due to cumulativity effects, some of which cannot be naturally captured even with local constraint conjunction (Smolensky 2006). The data are successfully modeled in harmonic grammar (Legendre et al. 1990).

The Neoproterozoic Gamble Brook Formation in the Avalon Terrane of Nova Scotia consists of quartzitic, pelitic, and psammitic metasedimentary rocks. The formation is generally interpreted to have been deposited in an Atlantic-type passive margin setting along the Amazonian margin of Rodinia before the main ca. 650-550-Ma phase of Avalonian subduction-related magmatism. The geochemical and Sm-Nd isotopic signature of these metasedimentary rocks, however, shows that although the quartzites are predominantly derived from ancient cratonic basement, the pelites and psammites were derived from moderately fractionated mafic to intermediate proto-Avalonian crust. The two contrasting sources for the Gamble Brook rocks are incompatible with a passive margin setting and are instead interpreted to reflect deposition along a basin margin within a rifted-arc environment. Taken as a whole, the Amazonian margin of Gondwana preserves evidence of episodic subduction in a western Pacific-like setting between 1000 and 650 Ma, followed by terrane accretion and Andean-style magmatism between 640 and 550 Ma.

Most Neoproterozoic and Early Palaeozoic tectonic syntheses place Avalonia and related peri-Gondwanan terranes facing an open ocean along the northern margin of Gondwana, thereby providing important constraints for palaeocontinental reconstructions during that time interval. However, the precise location of Avalonia along the margin and its position relative to other peri-Gondwanan terranes is controversial. We present laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry U-Pb data for detrital zircons from Cambrian clastic rocks in two localities in Avalonia: the Antigonish Highlands of Nova Scotia (62 analyses) and the British Midlands (55 analyses). The data from both samples are very similar, and taken together indicate an overwhelming dominance of Neoproterozoic (c. 580-680 Ma) or Early Cambrian source rocks with minor older Neoproterozoic clusters at c. 710 Ma or of Mesoproterozoic age, three Palaeoproterozoic zircons and one Archaean zircon. The zircons can all be derived from local Avalonian sources. The Neoproterozoic zircons are attributed to erosion of the underlying Avalonian arc. Mesoproterozoic and Palaeoproterozoic zircons of similar ages are also found in Avalonian Neoproterozoic clastic rocks and their presence in the Cambrian clastic rocks could represent recycling of Neoproterozoic strata and do not necessarily imply the presence of Mesoproterozoic or Palaeoproterozoic basement rocks within their respective drainage basins. Comparison with the data from the Neoproterozoic arc-related clastic sequences suggests significant differences between their respective drainage systems. Whereas the Neoproterozoic data require extensive drainage systems, the Cambrian data can be attributed to localized drainage systems. The change in drainage patterns could reflect rifting and isolation of Avalonia from Amazonia between c. 585 and 540 Ma. Alternatively, it might reflect the creation of topographical barriers along the northern Gondwanan margin, in a manner analogous to the Cenozoic rise of the Andes or the creation of the Basin-and-Range topography in the Western USA.