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The Wampar of Papua New Guinea are an ethnic group with contested boundaries and a strong ethnic identity and consciousness. Since their first contact with White missionaries, government officials and anthropologists, body images have changed and become more important. ‘Foreign' migrants from other PNG provinces are now coming in great numbers into...

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Relevance. The relevance of the problem under study is conditioned by the growing ethnocultural diversity of modern societies and the need to form harmonious interethnic relations. Purpose. The work aims to develop and test pedagogical design on the use of art opportunities in training future teachers for the development of their ethnocultural comp...

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... Marriages within the same sagaseg were formerly subject to sanctions, but this is no longer the case, and some young people have even become unclear about their membership of a sagaseg (Fischer, 1996, pp. 129-144;Beer, 2006). ...
... These changes (Beer, 2006;Beer and Schroedter, 2015) and others (including the very real possibility that a large gold/copper mine will be opened) have tended to challenge the hegemony of descent identities; what defines a Wampar, who counts as a member of the sagaseg, and how inter-sagaseg relations are configured are less clear than they once were. Fieldwork between 2009 and 2013 made it clear that kin networks, which now often join ethnically different groups, have complexified Wampar ideas concerning boundaries and significant social identities. ...
... The child receives his or her own blood (wi) only from the father, but an emotional and bodily bond (the child is formed in the uterus) between mother and child -developed through the uterus (wawang) during pregnancy -is also thought of as important. This theory is used in pragmatic ways, with little regard for coherence of doctrine, particularly when it comes to interpreting the belonging of children of interethnic marriages (Beer, 2006;Bacalzo, 2012). 10 A 2009 investigation into preferred marriage partners revealed cases of relationships that were seen as incestuous according to Wampar norms. ...
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As social beings, people need to be able to interact intelligently with others in their social environment. Accordingly, people spend much time conversing with one another in order to understand the broad and fine aspects of the relations that link them. They are especially interested in the interactive behaviors that constitute social relations, such as mutual aid, gift giving and exchange, sharing, informal socializing, or deception. The evaluations of these behaviors are embedded in social relationships and charged with values and emotions. We developed tasks to probe how people in an unfamiliar socio-cultural setting understand and account for the behavior of others conditional upon their category membership – by trying to elicit the basic categories, stereotypes, and models that inform the causal perceptions, inferences and reasoning people use in understanding others’ interactive behaviors – and we tested these tasks among the Wampar in Papua New Guinea. The results show changes in the relevance of social categories among the Wampar but also, and perhaps more important, limitations in the translation and applicability of cognitive tasks.
... We are confident that Beer's long-term ethnographic fieldwork has yielded good, reliable qualitative data (Beer 2006a(Beer , 2006b(Beer , 2008(Beer , 2010. However, the ethnographic census data poses some challenges for the quantitative analysis. ...
... Negative stereotypes about other ethnic groups are common among the Wampar (Beer 2006a). In daily interactions and in the evaluation of partners, however, individual qualities and potential are more important and outweigh these negative images. ...
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In this article we examine how partner choice and strategies of social reproduction among the Wampar of northeastern Papua New Guinea are implicated in currently pressing questions about the future of Wampar as a socio-cultural unit. We use long-term qualitative and quantitative data based on fieldwork and census surveys conducted between 1954 and 2013 from the village of Gabsongkeg to analyse temporal and spatial patterns of partner choice. We are especially interested in interethnic marriages and their effects on group boundaries and group identities, given a pre-existing pattern of ethnic endogamy. Our results show that intermarriages between Wampar and non-Wampar have constantly been rising; in younger marriage cohorts some 60% of Wampar individuals are intermarried with partners of other ethnic identities. The data reveal that local and historical particularities inflect partner choices in ways that impact on settlement patterns, modes of engagement with the economic institutions of the modern state and, ultimately, the taken-for-granted nature of the identity inhering in the name “Wampar”; these impacts, in turn, increase the likelihood of interethnic marriage and precipitate questions about the rights attaching to local corporate identities under conditions where land is increasingly related to its commodity values.
... In diesem Beitrag gebe ich zunächst einen kurzen Überblick über ethnologische Forschungen zu Verwandtschaftsterminologien und deren Bedeutung für die Kognitionsethnologie. Danach stelle ich Beispiele für zentrale neue Bereich der Zusammenarbeit zwischen (Verwandtschafts-)Ethnologie und Kognitionswissenschaften an eigenen empirischen Forschungen zu transkulturellerV erwandtschaft bei den Wampar in Papua-Neuguinea dar (siehe auch Beer 2006aBeer , b, 2008Beer , 2010. Im Anschluss zeige ich, welche empirischen Methoden die Verwandtschaftsethnologie zu bieten hat, um ver-200 Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 135 (2010) wandtschaftliches Wissen und dessen Organisationz ue rheben und Verhalten (z. ...
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In this paper I analyse changes in the kinship terminology of the Wampar of Papua New Guinea (PNG) and address some problematic questions in cognitive anthropology. In recent decades, Wampar modes of social reproduction have changed as transcultural marriages, and the intercultural kindreds these produce, have increased. One manifestation of this is revealed by longitudinal data on kin terms; these also show how the blending of vernaculars and Tok Pisin (PNG's lingua franca) respond to the hybridizing effects of social life in this part of contemporary PNG. The formal semantic analysis of kinship terms was an important early focus of cognitive anthropology; as complex, systematic and shared realms of meaning, such terminologies were seen as paradigmatically cultural. Later, textual and agency-centred models became more popular than the formal semantic approaches. My analysis of changes to Wampar terms in the face of transformed relations between cultures is relevant to those interested in the connections between cognitive models and cultural practice. A focus on actors' choices of kin terms and behaviours in complex, culturally and linguistically heterogeneous settings that are well-described ethnographically can help overcome the polarization between an emphasis on formal structural models and actor-centred case studies.
... In diesem Beitrag gebe ich zunächst einen kurzen Überblick über ethnologische Forschungen zu Verwandtschaftsterminologien und deren Bedeutung für die Kognitionsethnologie. Danach stelle ich Beispiele für zentrale neue Bereich der Zusammenarbeit zwischen (Verwandtschafts-)Ethnologie und Kognitionswissenschaften an eigenen empirischen Forschungen zu transkulturellerV erwandtschaft bei den Wampar in Papua-Neuguinea dar (siehe auch Beer 2006aBeer , b, 2008Beer , 2010. Im Anschluss zeige ich, welche empirischen Methoden die Verwandtschaftsethnologie zu bieten hat, um ver-200 Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 135 (2010) wandtschaftliches Wissen und dessen Organisationz ue rheben und Verhalten (z. ...
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In this paper I analyse changes in the kinship terminology of the Wampar of Papua New Guinea (PNG) and address some problematic questions in cognitive anthropology. In recent decades, Wampar modes of social reproduction have changed as transcultural marriages, and the intercultural kindreds these produce, have increased. One manifestation of this is revealed by longitudinal data on kin terms; these also show how the blending of vernaculars and Tok Pisin (PNG's lingua franca) respond to the hybridizing effects of social life in this part of contemporary PNG. The formal semantic analysis of kinship terms was an important early focus of cognitive anthropology; as complex, systematic and shared realms of meaning, such terminologies were seen as paradigmatically cultural. Later, textual and agency-centred models became more popular than the formal semantic approaches. My analysis of changes to Wampar terms in the face of transformed relations between cultures is relevant to those interested in the connections between cognitive models and cultural practice. A focus on actors' choices of kin terms and behaviours in complex, culturally and linguistically heterogeneous settings that are welldescribed ethnographically can help overcome the polarization between an emphasis on formal structural models and actor-centred case studies.
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