Payback: The Logic of Retribution in Melanesian Religions

by G. W. Trompf

Overview

In this ambitious study, the first monograph on religion and "the logic of retribution," Professor Trompf shows how various aspects of "payback," both negative and positive, provide the best indices to an understanding of Melanesian views of life. The book explores the reasons why people "pay back" and opens up a whole new dimension in the cross-cultural study of human consciousness. The author conducts his readers through the most complex anthropological pageant on earth, illustrating his arguments from western New Guinea to Fiji.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521062770
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	05/15/2008
Pages:	568
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.10(d)

Table of Contents

Illustrations and tables; Preface; Abbreviations; Preliminaries: the theory of retributive logic; Part I. 'Tradition': 1. Revenge; 2. Reciprocity; 3. Integrating and explaining significant events; Part II. 'Cargo Cultism': 4. Reprisal; 5. Redemption; 6. Wishing and explaining the extraordinary; Part III. 'Modernization': 7. Recrimination - in 'modern' guises; 8. Making money and modernizing reciprocities; 9. Money, morals, meaning: old logics, new retributions?; Conclusions and recommendations: Bibliography; Index of Melanesian cultures; General index.

Editorial Reviews

"In this fascinating book, Trompf brings to fruition fifteen years of unstinting research on religion in the southwest Pacific region....Trompf's breadth of erudition and vision...is bound to stir fresh and stimulating debate, not only because it interprets the world of Melanesian retributive logics but also because it takes on the task of changing them." History of Religions

"Trompf pointedly rebukes materialist theories of human behavior and also notions of primitive irrationality....The volume combines an extraordinary, even numbing, assortment of ethnographic detail with a simple, unitary, explanatory premise." Lamont Lindstrom, The Contemporary Pacific

From the Publisher