Abstract
The Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea has been portrayed as a unique and
sacred place in the genealogy of the discipline of anthropology, and especially that
lineage which reveres Bronislaw Malinowski as one of its founding fathers. Mark
Mosko’s recent book – Ways of Baloma – insists on the centrality of baloma (ancestral
spirits) as palpable, perduring presences in the lives of contemporary Trobriand
Islanders. We might say that this book also animates the baloma, the ancestral
spirit of Malinowski, not so much through rituals of reverence but through iconoclastic
arguments which erode the empirical and theoretical foundations of Malinowski’s
corpus and much of the voluminous anthropological literature on the Trobriands.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 362-368 |
Journal | The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology |
Volume | 20 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2019 |