Kwaio Religion: The Living and the Dead in a Solomon Island Society

By Roger Keesing

Book Overview

In Kwaio Religion , Roger Keesing examines how the Kwaio, challenged by 110 years of European colonialism and now by the militant Christianity of their own rapidly Westernizing nation, have managed to continue their ancestral ways. Drawing on fieldwork carried out over a lost 20 years, Keesing explores the phenomenological reality of world where one's group includes the living and the dead, where conversations with the spirits, and the sing of their presence and acts, are very much a part of everyday life. He describes conceptions of mana and tabu that shed revealing light on old issues regarding Oceanic religion. Keesing situates the elegant though largely implicit structures of Kwaio cosmology within a framework of the "political economy of knowledge," examining the distribution of expertise in the community and the uses of religion as ideology, and asking how symbolic systems are perpetuated and changed. Questioning some currently fashionable anthropological approaches to symbolism, myth, ritual, and cosmology--approaches Keesing characterizes as "cultural cryptography"-- Kwaio Religion challenges common assumptions about cultural symbols and shared meanings.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 023105341X
• ISBN13: 9780231053419
• Release Date: April 1982
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.9" x 8.7"
• Age Range: 22 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

An Interesting Read!!

I read this book several years ago for a class on "Magic, Witchcraft and Religion" at Wichita State University. Though it's written on the doctoral level, I was able to get a goodly amount of valuable information concerning this ancient tribe from a third-world country. It gracefully lines out the reasons for the failure of the Christian Model to take hold with this people. It is interesting to note that the Kwaio remain a happy and vibrant people with a rich spiritual heritage of their own. To spoil that with Christian ideology would be a travesty.