1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910132418403321

Autore

Reay Marie <1922-2004, >

Titolo

Wives and wanderers in a New Guinea highlands society : women's lives in the Waghi Valley / / by Marie Olive Reay ; edited by Francesca Merlan ; with additional introduction by Marilyn Strathern

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Canberra, Australia : , : Australian National University Press, , 2014

©2014

ISBN

1-925022-16-1

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (lxvi, 202 pages) : illustrations, maps, portraits (some colour)

Collana

Knowledge Unlatched

Disciplina

305.4209953

Soggetti

Wahgi (Papua New Guinean people) - Social life and customs

Women - Papua New Guinea - Social conditions

Women - Papua New Guinea - Social life and customs

Women - Papua New Guinea - Wahgi River Valley

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Sommario/riassunto

Wives and Wanderers in a New Guinea Highlands Society brings to the reader anthropologist Marie Reay's field research from the 1950's and 1960's on women's lives in the Wahgi Valley, Central Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Dramatically written, each chapter adds to the main story that Reay wanted to tell, contrasting young girls' freedom to court and choose partners, with the constraints (and violence) they were to experience as married women. Had this manuscript appeared when Reay apparently completed it in its present form - around 1965 - it would have been the first published ethnography of women's lives in the Central Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Its retrieval from Reay's papers, and availability now, adds a new dimension to works on gender relations in Melanesian societies, and to the history of Australian and Pacific anthropology.