Creative Land: Place and Procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea

"The ethnography is full of interesting observations and novel information, and repays a close reading with a vivid sense of the distinctiveness of Reite social life, intensely local but reminiscent of a much wider field of peoples in the Southwest Pacific, including the Highlands of New Guinea . . . Creative Land is itself 'creative' and will attain its own 'place' in the historical 'landscape' of studies of kinship in New Guinea and elsewhere." - Contemporary Pacific "The ethnography itself is full of interesting observations and novel information, and repays a close reading with a vivid sense of the distinctiveness of Reite social life . . . Creative Land is itself 'creative' and will attain its own 'place' in the historical 'landscape' of studies of kinship in New Guinea and elsewhere. - The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute What is creative in kinship? How are people connected to places? James Leach answers these questions through formulating "creativity" as an integral part of kinship on the north coast of Papua New Guinea. The book contains a new critique of the genealogical model of kinship, suggesting that this model prevents us from grasping the way generative relations, including those to land and place, constitute persons on the Rai Coast. Analytic attention is focused upon the life cycle, marriage, exchange and artistic production as the activities in which substantial connection is generated. The argument, made in relation to detailed ethnography, yields a fresh perspective on the connections people trace to each other. James Leach is Research Fellow in Anthropology, King's College, Cambridge, and Affiliated Lecturer in the Dept. of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. ?Awarded the Royal Anthropological Institute JB Donne Prize in the Anthropology of Art for 1999, and The Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2004.