Adventures in the Stone Age
A New Guinea Diary
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
About This Book
The first publication of a charming fieldwork memoir by a giant of legal anthropology. When Leopold Pospíšil first arrived in New Guinea in 1954 to investigate the legal systems of the local tribes, he was warned about the Kapauku, who reputedly had no laws. Skeptical of the idea that any society could exist without laws, Pospíšil immediately decided to live among and study the Kapauku. Learning the language and living as a participant-observer among them, Pospíšil discovered that the supposedly primitive society possessed laws, rules, and social structures that were as sophisticated as they were logical. Drawing on his research and experiences among the Kapauku—he would stay with them five times between 1954 and 1979—Pospíšil broke new ground in the field of legal anthropology, holding a professorship at Yale, serving as the anthropology curator of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and publishing three books of scholarship on Kapauku law.This memoir of Pospíšil's experience is filled with charming anecdotes and thrilling stories of trials, travels, and war told with humor and humility and accompanied by a wealth of the author's personal photos from the time.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Contents
- Note on the Title
- How I Became an Anthropologist
- Language
- Data Gathering
- The Participant Observer
- Membership
- Collecting
- Non-horticultural Food
- Kapauku Culture and the Concept of “Primitive Society”
- Kapauku Personality
- Kapauku Mathematics
- Quantity Obsession
- Economy Ceremonies
- Life Cycle Ceremonies
- Law
- Two Kapauku Legal Cases
- Overview of Kapauku Law
- War
- Magic and Religion
- Health, Sickness and Medicine
- Changes Introduced by the Encroaching Western World
- Wege Bagee
- My Research and the Dutch Administration
- Departure from the Kamu Valley
- Afterword: Leopold Pospíšil, Anthropology and the Kapauku
- References for Afterword:
- Bibliography
- Index