CHAIRPERSON
Dr Carola Lorea, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
ABSTRACT
Taking as its point of departure similarities in ideas about relationships between ‘Heaven’ and ‘Earth’ and understandings about movement, this presentation explores affinities between major practices and concepts in ‘Ancient China’ and fundamental ideas in the northeast corner of the Kula Ring in Papua New Guinea, Muyuw (sometimes known as Woodlark Island). This synchronic analysis is designed to highlight one of the major questions in East Asian/ Austrolasian relations, the degree to which patterns which became central organizing concepts for China’s civilization were already part of the Austronesian expansion out of southeast-south coastal East Asia to Taiwan and then across the whole Indo-Pacific. Complex questions of history and ecological similarities and differences come into play in these issues. The presentation opens the door to those questions by making apparent what seem to be similarities in conceptual systems.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
With a BA from Duke University (Psychology, 1970) and PhD from Princeton University (Anthropology, 1978), Frederick Damon is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia, Department of Anthropology where he has been teaching since 1976. He has conducted over four years of research on the Melanesia island in Papua New Guinea called Muyuw (or Woodlark Island) and has done exploratory research in Fujian Province for close to a year. He has published on contemporary western society as well as his specialties, questions about ritual, cosmology, exchange and ecology through the lens of structuralism, Marxism and chaos theory.
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