Detail of traditional fale tong roof construction, Huku’alofa, Tonga, 1998.
Detail of traditional fale tong roof construction, Huku’alofa, Tonga, 1998
From Susanne Küchler and Graeme Were, 2005. PACIFIC PATTERN. London, Thames and Hudson. (Photograph by Glenn Jowitt)
image
Ershiba xiu Feye Huang Ming gesheng diyu zongtu 二十八宿分野 皇明各省地輿總
The comprehensive general map of the Fenye correlation
Trobriand Island (Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea) Kula Canoe structure. 2019.
Trobriand Island (Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea) Kula Canoe structure. 2019
The fine carving on the two prow-boards show themes and techniques widely distributed in Melanesia and Polynesia.
A “String figure” “flower,” a point in a sequence that depicts the Pleiades moving across the nighttime and yearly sky.
A “String figure” “flower,” a point in a sequence that depicts the Pleiades moving across the nighttime and yearly sky
Muyuw, Woodlark Island Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea) 2002.

This workshop, which took place at the University of Virginia on January 8-11, 2020, explores similarities and differences evident in cosmological and social structures across East Asia (principally China), Southeast Asia into Eastern Indonesia, Melanesia and Polynesia.

 

Principal workshop personnel are anthropologists (Barnes, Damon, Digim’Rina, Küchler, , Ma, Wang, Were, and Zhang[F]), some with archaeological backgrounds (Rowlands), classical students of Chinese culture (Dorofeeva-Litchmann) and historians (Dean, Love and Zhang[EC]).

 

The workshop’s historical contours follow the Austronesian expansion out of southeastern China, now Fujian Province, over the last 6000 years. However, the geometrical forms that underlie the living practices in this area are not just historical issues or relics: they form fundamental patters for social life.

 

 

Supported by: 

Institute of the Humanities & Global Cultures logo UVA Dept. of Anthropology logo

UVA Center for
Global Inquiry & Innovation