[ANU Pacific.Institute] Anthropology Seminar of interest to Pacific scholars.

[Nicholas Mortimer]

CARDS ON KIRIWINA: MAGIC, COSMOLOGY AND PERSONAL AGENCY IN TROBRIAND GAMBLING

Mark Mosko

Anthropology, CHL

The Australian National University

Wednesday, 30 October 2013, 9:30am, Seminar room  A

ABSTRACT: Trobriand card gambling, as elsewhere in Papua New Guinea, was adopted from Europeans in colonial times hand in hand with the people’s growing familiarity with introduced money and commodity goods. As I have argued elsewhere (Mosko 2012), most studies of gambling in the country until now have concentrated on its secular aspects to the relative neglect of its ritual dimensions. In this paper, I describe the main varieties of card gambling practiced in the Trobriand Islands in terms of the indigenous cosmology and local understandings of the composition and magico-religious agentive capacities of persons, both living humans and ancestral baloma and other spirits. Thus Trobriand gambling exemplifies the extent to which an exogenous Western practice has been effectively accommodated to preexisting cultural practices.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/pacific.institute/attachments/20131024/af7686a4/attachment.html