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Sitting on the terrace of the royal plantation Frederiksgave, his favourite retreat, Governor Edward Carstensen came to see the inevitable: Denmark had to give up her ìpossessionsî in Africa. As fate would have it, he came to be the instrument by which two centuries of Danish involvement on the Gold Coast was terminated, thereby making way for the emergence of the colonial system that developed there. After the abolition of the slave trade, Denmark had struggled to find ways and means to legitimate her continued stay at the Coast. At an early stage the Danes initiated a number of attempts to establish experimental plantations to cultivate export crops such as cotton, coffee and sugar. But a transition from slave trade to ìlegitimateî products required stability and peace, and a need for control, which the rather limited Danish presence was not able to maintain. CLOSING THE BOOKS comprises a compilation of the official reports that the last Danish Governor sent home during his term of office at the Gold Coast. The reports reflect his personal views regarding the economic and political situations there, as well as his ideas on the "civilization of Africa". ... Read more

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This is the third of the trilogy by the author on the subject of good representative, responsive, responsible, clean, efficient and effective government for ALL. The first book Judicial Systems of the Third World: The Case of India, ISBN 1-4033-3975-5-7-9 examined how well the promises of equality and social, political, and economic justice enshrined in the Constitution of India had been fulfilled. It was found that even though India did adopt in 1949 a democratic Constitution-which guaranteed fundamental rights without discrimination, the courts generally continued to function in the same manner as they used to during the British raj. The second book LCM & HCF of Democracy: Paradigm of Hamburger and Vadapaav, ISBN 978-1 4259-8176-1 based on case studies of actual civil and criminal cases prosecuted in Colorado courts found that written mandatory laws are violated at will by courts in Colorado and a Colorado enjoys dictatorial powers to decide whom to favor, and how quickly. This present study examines the manner how a major decision of war was made as though in a dictatorship, only to find after converting nearly four thousand young men and women into war fodder that the decision was wrong. The former supporters of war in Congress now want to disclaim their support. The naked truth is that the unalienable rights of life and liberty of over 3,300 young men and women were summarily abolished in one stroke and they were made guinea pigs. The unalienable right to pursuit of happiness was destroyed for several more thousand men, women and children. The Administration now attempts to explain away its misadventures with the help of sacrificial goats and scapegoats. Significantly, the former Director of C.I.A. has publicly claimed that he has been made a scapegoat. What is the guarantee that this will not happen again? ... Read more

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As Chief Factor of the Dutch fort at Eliminia, Bosman found himself at the centre of coastal political and commercial gravity due to Dutch pre-eminence in 17th-century maritime affairs. This is his account of native life and culture of the area. ... Read more

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A collection of 50 essays by scientists and historians at the University of Papua New Guinea, this volume details the political and economic development of PNG in the late colonial years and the first 17 years of independence, through the prime ministerships of Somare, Chan, Namaliu and Wingri. ... Read more

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Kragur village lies on the rugged north shore of Kairiru, a steep volcanic island just off the north coast of Papua New Guinea. In 1998 the village looked much as it had some twenty-two years earlier when author Michael French Smith first visited. But he soon found that changing circumstances were shaking things up. Village on the Edge weaves together the story of Kragur villagers' struggle to find their own path toward the future with the story of Papua New Guinea's travails in the post-independence era. Smith writes of his own experiences as well, living and working in Papua New Guinea and trying to understand the complexities of an unfamiliar way of life. To tell all these stories, he delves into ghosts, magic, myths, ancestors, bookkeeping, tourism, the World Bank, the Holy Spirit, and the meaning of progress and development. Village on the Edge draws on the insights of cultural anthropology but is written for anyone interested in Papua New Guinea.

"In Village on the Edge, Michael French Smith provides the reader with something rare and precious--a humane and sharply insightful view into the rich local world of a village in transition in Papua New Guinea." --- Bruce Beehler, Conservation International

"Michael French Smith spins a great yarn. He has an admirable ability to translate personal experiences into a meaningful message and can describe complex social phenomena in ways that the anthropologically uninitiated can understand and appreciate. I finished this book in just a few sittings and thoroughly enjoyed it." --- Richard Scaglion, University of Pittsburgh

"Michael French Smith's Village on the Edge is a heartfelt and perceptive account of a people facing enormous change. In essence, although this book concerns the people of Kragur Village, it tells the story of all of contemporary Melanesia. It is a unique work, elucidating a unique period of change among an extraordinary people." --- Tim Flannery, author of Throwim Way Leg: Tree Kangaroos, Possums and Penis Gourds ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Dispela buk em i tok tru
After almost a century of modern-style research, the world is not exactly short of ethnographies.You can find works on everybody from Indiana town dwellers to Sri Lankan fishermen.Papua New Guinea, as an area where a wide variety of cultures, some with Stone Age technologies, endured well into the 20th century, attracted the attention of anthropologists right from the start.There are a very large number of books on the country, starting with Malinowski�s seminal works on the Trobriand Islands during and after WW I.Most, but not all, of them concentrated on investigations of what are often referred to as �traditional cultures�, if not �primitive�.Anthropologists, not unlike Western tourists, have often been lured by the �exotic� parts of the world where cultures extremely different from their own could be found. Bateson, Burridge, Glasse, Heider, Hogbin, Mead, Pospisil, Rappaport,Reay, Schieffelin, and Wagner to name a few, gravitated to Papua New Guinea, drawn perhaps by the chance to study people whose cultures were �untouched� by the West.�Untouched� is no doubt a relative word.A few others, especially Lawrence and Worsley, delved into the cargo cults, an aspect of Melanesian religion that sprang up in the wake of colonial pressures on traditional beliefs.Modern Papua New Guinea, with its Christianity, bureaucracy, development projects, education, corruption, urban crime, and population explosion, has not received so much attention.Until now.Michael French Smith�s VILLAGE ON THE EDGE is a delightful new ethnography based on work in the same village in the mid-1970s and then in the late �90s.Based on the idea of observing change, because Kragur village, on Kairiru island, off the north coast of the country, has been changing rapidly for many decades, Smith succeeds brilliantly.To my taste, he strikes just the right note between popular writing and professional investigation.In a clear, jargon-less style, he covers many areas usually found in ethnographies, such as village structure, family structure, the economic and political system, and religious beliefs, but focusses on how all these things have changed.It is a down-to-earth, non-exotic picture of present dilemmas for the Kragur villagers who still, after over twenty years of independence, remain poised between a sharing, cooperative society based on personal ties and the money-based, more individualistic one introduced as a correct model by the West and emulated by educated, town-dwelling locals.Smith puts himself into the picture, admits to his predilections and difficulties.Refreshingly, he does not hide behind some false �objectivity�, but shows how he accepted certain privileges (and dealt with some problems) that came with being a �whiteman�.This honesty, coupled with a sense of humor and nice introduction of the flavor of Pidgin English or Tok Pisin, a national language in the country, made the book all the more appealing.

Melanesian societies often believed that knowledge�-of magic or ritual�-held the key to success in any endeavor, would be the best guarantee of prosperity.Those who had the best knowledge grew the best crops, caught the most fish, or had the most successful trading relationships.But, if many people in the village had that knowledge, then the whole village would be prosperous and successful.Thus, Kragur villagers, like most Melanesians, saw Western education as the way to go if they wanted to raise their standard of living, to obtain money and an easier life.Get Western education, prosper like the Westerners.In a way, Smith points out in the heart of the book, they have been proven right, but the results challenge the whole belief system that underlay their society.For them, if individuals prosper, but the village does not, the new knowledge has failed to produce the desired result.But as time goes by, as more individuals prosper, will not the old ideals completely fade, will not the old cooperative society vanish ?The village is on the edge.

I urge everyone interested in knowing what Papua New Guinea is like today to read this book.It should be on every reading list dealing with the modern Pacific, modern Melanesia, or �dilemmas of development�.If you are trying to attract students to the field of anthropology or to draw their attention to the process of writing ethnographies, you can hardly go wrong with VILLAGE ON THE EDGE. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (2)

A good overview and analysis of events
The author provides a good summary of the conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau. He also does justice to the place and the role of ECOWAS/ECOMOG and of its members. The book clearly points out the successes and failures of all international and regional actors involved in the cruel conflicts that ravaged West Africa during the last few decades.
An excellent source of information for anyone interested in topics ranging from multilateralism/regionalism, conflict resolution or West African studies.

Some background before you read, please.
This book is a good overview at West Africa's attempts to police itself and solve its own problems.It covers the three ECOMOG deployments to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau (this was written before the as of now potential ECOMOG deployment to Cote d'Ivoire) as well as adding several chapters which analyze all three of the deployments and how they succeded or failed in their missions.Finally, a brief view of how ECOMOG and the rest of the world should cooperate is peppered throughout the book.While small, the book is well researched and intelligently put together.It covers the history of each conflict well, and explores the deployments without getting bogged down in details of combat or the establishment of bases, etc.However, I would not reccomend this book to someone who does not already have a basic understanding of West Africa or else of basic peacekeeping principles from operations in other areas of the world.Without this, much of the details needed to fill in some of the gaps in the book would be missing and would bring down the value of the read.This book is not intended to educate a person on each of conflicts, but rather to provide an overview of how ECOMOG/ECOWAS responded to each, and whether lessons were learned. ... Read more

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Cette première édition critique d'un manuscrit écrit en arabe et mandinka focalise l'importance des communautés mandinka et jakhanké dans la construction et la préservation de la mémoire collective de l' ""empire"" païen du Kaabu en Sénégambie.This is the very first scholarly publication of an arabographic manuscript in Mandinka language revealing also the importance of the Mandinka and Jakhanka clerical diaspora in the making of the history of the pagan ""empire"" of Kaabu in the Senegambia. ... Read more

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Ramon Sarró explores an iconoclastic religious movement initiated by a Muslim preacher during the French colonial period. Employing an ethnographic approach that respects the testimony of those who suffered violence as opposed to those who wanted to "get rid of custom," this work discusses the extent to which iconoclasm produces a rupture of religious knowledge and identity and analyzes its relevance in the making of modern nations and citizens.The Politics of Religious Change on the Upper Guinea Coast examines the historical complexity of the interface between Islam, traditional religions, and Christianity in West Africa, and how this interface connects to dramatic political change. The book unveils a rare history and brokers a dialogue between a long tradition of anthropology and contemporary anthropological debates. A wide range of readers, particularly those with an interest in the anthropology of religion, iconoclasm, the history and anthropology of West Africa, or the politics of heritage, will gravitate toward this work.

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His Master’s Voice: Mass Communication and Single Party Politics in Guinea under Sekou ToureMohammed Saliu Camara

This book refutes the simplistic pattern of condescending criticism versus a complaisant justification, which often transpires from the debate on post-colonial Africa’s general departure from political pluralism toward autocracy under single-party regimes. Hence, it places the debate in the historical context of statecraft and nation-building, whereby the line between pre-colonial heritage, colonial legacy, and post-colonial innovations, against all appearances, has chiefly been a thin one.

By using the case study of Guinea, the author explores systemically (1) the nature of the single-party regime in first-generation post-colonial African leadership, (2) the central role of ideology in the twin-programs of statecraft and nation-building by ‘ideological one-party states’, and (3) the contribution of mass communication to the PDG (Parti Démocratique de Guinée) regime’s political survival and self-rejuvenation under the charismatic leadership of Sékou Touré from 1957 to 1984. With methodically examined inside accounts the author, himself an insider, documents the different phases and facets of the recent political history of Guinea dramatically impacted by the Cold War.

From a deconstructionist perspective of the workings of the African nation-states, the author identifies the political symbiosis of ideology and mass communication as the pillar that sustained the regime, rather than state repression of political dissent or Sékou Touré’s personal charisma as widely believed. The author argues that ideology was the political blood of the party-state in Guinea and mass communication its circulatory system. He furthermore demonstrates that with Sékou Touré’s theory of information révolutionnaire serving as the official guideline for all mass communication, ideological sensitization/indoctrination and political education/regimentation of party membership led to the structural rejection of any ideas deemed incompatible with national unity. This, in turn, led to the imperceptible merger of ideology and political mythology and culminated into institutionalized self-censorship as the defining norm of revolutionary participation in statecraft and nation-building. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from The Australian Journal of Politics and History, published by University of Queensland Press on January 1, 1997. The length of the article is 733 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The 1992 Papua New Guinea Election: Change and Continuity in Electoral Politics. (book reviews)
Author: Mark Turner
Publication: The Australian Journal of Politics and History (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 1997
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Volume: v43Issue: n1Page: p94(2)

Article Type: Book Review

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This digital document is an article from The Australian Journal of Politics and History, published by University of Queensland Press on March 1, 2000. The length of the article is 1044 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

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Title: Charles Abel and the Kwato Mission of Papua New Guinea, 1891-1975.(Review) (book review)
Author: Clive Moore
Publication: The Australian Journal of Politics and History (Refereed)
Date: March 1, 2000
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Volume: 46Issue: 1Page: 140

Article Type: Book Review

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This digital document is an article from The Australian Journal of Politics and History, published by University of Queensland Press on September 1, 2009. The length of the article is 554 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

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Title: Britain and the West New Guinea Dispute, 1949-1962.(Book review)
Author: Jan Maskey
Publication: The Australian Journal of Politics and History (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 1, 2009
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Volume: 55Issue: 3Page: 460(2)

Article Type: Book review

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This digital document is an article from Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society, published by Australian Catholic Historical Society on January 1, 2003. The length of the article is 631 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

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Title: Peter Donovan. For Youth and the Poor: History of the De La Salle Brothers in Australia, Papua New Guinea and New Zealand 1906-2000.(Book Review)
Author: Mary Kneipp
Publication: Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society (Magazine/Journal)
Date: January 1, 2003
Publisher: Australian Catholic Historical Society
Volume: 24Page: 72(2)

Article Type: Book Review

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