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Despite a trend to use rational and utilitarian paradigms to interpret the revival of folk religions, other human motives need to be acknowledged. Humans do behave in their economic and spiritual self-interests. But wider social and structural factors bind people into a moral community. To obtain a broader and more nuanced interpretation of exchange relationships, we apply Marcel Mauss' paradigm of 'The Gift' to the ritual life of a Miao Tzu village (an ethnic minority of Southern China). This interpretation accounts for individual motives, such as for physical cures, healthy well-being, and favorable position in the afterlife. Simultaneously, Miao Tzu ritual life binds the community together with reciprocity to restore moral and emotional relationships. Our broader perspective aligns with David Palmer's 'religious gift economy' that legitimizes exchange relations with the supernatural as appropriate as with gifting to other humans. Maussian theory lays the foundation for understanding religion, ritual, exchange, and reciprocity in a fundamentally inclusive and holistic way in a Miao Tzu village subject to the state development program., Author(s): Tan Weihua [sup.1] , Li Chun [sup.1] , Stephen Zolvinski [sup.2] , Tian Guang [sup.3] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.411427.5, 0000 0001 0089 3695, Hunan Normal University, , Changsha, China [...]

Mortuary architecture and ritual assemblages have played a central role in archaeological inquiry since the discipline began. Most recently they have featured in the archaeology of social organization where variations in scale and value of the objects concerned are seen as reflections of religion, ideology, ethics or politics. This study looks at the shrines and cult assemblages of late prehistoric Roviana Lagoon, in the Western Solomon Islands. Drawing on a rich ethnographic record we show how these things were actively manipulated in the construction of social relations and religion. In doing so we argue that dedicatory offerings and shrines were involved in aspects of personhood and agency rather than simply serving as reflections of past social conditions. Keywords Melanesia; Solomon Islands; headhunting; cults; death: ritual.

A major part of the ethnographic literature concerning present-day Irian Jayais based on research dating back to the 1950s and 1960s. Following the independence of Indonesia, West New Guinea remained a separate Dutch colony between 1950 and 1962. The Dutch colonial administration had had little ethnographic interest in the area since the beginning of the century, so that interest in knowledge concerning the indigenous population had yet to develop. Lack of manpower, finances and timeto instigate adequate research meant that the resulting search for ethnographic data became itself a complex social process. People from a range of backgrounds and training - not only academic researchers, but also administrative and missionary personnel - became involved in the gathering of ethnographic material, often while engaged in quite different duties. In this article some light is shed both onthe resulting structure of research and on the motivations behind the separate research efforts. At the end of the article some conclusions are drawn concerning the nature of the material gathered.

R.A. Drake in Oceania (59:269-79) analyzed rumor panics in Borneo about the purported need for children's heads in concrete construction initiated by the state, as a form of ideological warfare. These rumors are ways of dealing with ambiguous situations and expressions of anxiety. The plausibility of these rumors, he argues, lies in the experience that tribal Borneo has had with state governments, most particularly during colonial times when head-hunting activities were suppressed. The present article looks at a similar rumor complex found in the district of Manggarai in Western Flores within a different cultural and historical context. Manggarai rumor panics center on European missionaries who have been in their region since the beginning of the century and who have been responsible for most of the concrete construction there. This rumor expresses the Manggarai's ambivalence towards foreigners which may be particularly understood, also, in light of their experience with slave-raiders up to the beginning of this century.

Levi-Strauss's canonic formula for the structure of myth, [f.sub.x.(a)] : [f.sub.y.(b)] [is congruent with] [f.sub.x.(b)] : [f.sub.a] - 1(y), was boldly intended to bring a 'kind of order to what was previously chaos' (1963a [1955]:202, 228). Rarely, however, has Levi-Strauss or have others systematically examined the formula's suitability for interpreting authentic mythic texts or--more puzzling, perhaps, given myth's centrality--seriously considered the potentially homologous structuring of nonmythical ethnographic data. In this article I attempt a detailed reinterpretation of the canonic formula and, after appropriately modifying it for the analysis of nonmythical materials, illustrate its empirical suitability with respect to diverse sociocultural contexts of North Mekeo (Papua New Guinea) tradition: notions and practices regarding the human body (eating, excretion, health, illness, sexuality, reproduction), space and time, social classification, political organization, and, finally, myth. By means of these controlled comparisons of nonmyth and myth internal to a single sociocultural system, I show that the revised canonic formula increases the empirical and methodological precision of Levi-Straussian structural analyses. The structure of myth, therefore, is not restricted to myths. [dualism (recursion/inversion), myth, social classification, structural analysis, ethnographic method, Melanesia]