Frederick H. Damon

My initial research in the Kula Ring of Papua New Guinea intended to use a structuralist version of exchange theory to describe the northeast corner of the Kula Ring as a regional system. Indigenous understandings forced me to consider production, not exchange, as the organizing value among the people with whom I lived. Tensions between exchange and production views of society remain a focus of my work. With those I maintain an interest in the problem of how to understand and describe the regional settings in which all social life is embedded. For the remainder of my professional life I expect to consider these issues in light of recent concerns with chaos theory and possible dialogues between several branches of mathematics -fractal mathematics and knot theory to name two-and anthropological questions about model building. The idea of models includes the devices anthropologists use to talk about social systems and the critique of theoretical structures it uses to understand indigenous socialities.

As intended, seven returns to PNG between 1991 and 2005 along with new teaching interests have generated shifts in my original topical, theoretical and areal stances. I conduct interdisciplinary research to explore how anthropogenic environments relate to better-known social structural and cosmological transformations throughout the Kula Ring. This work has led me to view that region against the backdrop of the whole Indo-Pacific and its natural and human history. Recent publications reflect the initial stages of this work which should climax soon in a book entitled TREES, KNOTS AND OUTRIGGERS: Reflections on Environmental Research in the Northeast Kula Ring. I expect to be in China during the summer of 2006 to initiate language learning and to explore new research locales proximate to the point of separation between East Asia and the Austronesian world of the Indo-Pacific.

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Work in progress involves dialogues with scholars in other disciplines and sub-disciplines including ecologists, botanists, and, for writing about the outrigger canoes of the Kula Ring, a host of other specialists. In the spring of 2007 I will teach a course with Professor H. Hank Shugart, a forest ecologist and ecological modeler, designed to organize interaction between our respective disciplines and raise the question of how to put in order focused research in the context of large areas, spatially and temporally conceived. Our focus will be the Indo-Pacific over the last 12,000 years.

Specializations

Courses

Transforming Everyday Life in America; Ecology & Society; Economic Anthropology; Areal Perspectives on Society, History And 'Environment' in the Pacific; Analyzing Global Change: Ecological and Anthropological Synergisms.

Selected Publications

• ON THE IDEAS OF A BOAT: From Forest Patches To Cybernetic Structures In The Outrigger Sailing Craft Of The Eastern Kula Ring, Papua New Guinea. In press.
• 2007 A STRANGER=S VIEW OF BIHAR-RETHINKING RELIGION AND PRODUCTION: More than a Poetry of Properties. Speaking of Peasants: Essays on Indian History and Politics in Honor of Walter Hauser. Edited by William Pinch. New Deli: Manohar Publishers.
  
• 2005 - "PITY" and "ECSTACY," The Problem of Order and Differentiated Difference Across Kula Societies, Chapter 4 in On the Order of Chaos: Social Anthropology and the Science of Chaos. Editor with Mark Mosko. London and New York: Berghahn Books. Pp.79-107.
• 2003 - WHAT GOOD ARE ELECTIONS? An Anthropological Analysis of American Elections. Taiwan Journal of Anthropology. 1(2):38-82.
  
• 2002 - Kula Valuables, the Problem of Value and the Production of Names. L'Homme April-June 162: 107-136.
• 2000 - From Regional Relations to Etnic Groups? The transformation of value relations to property claims in the Kula Ring of Papua New Guinea. in The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology. (formerly Canberra Anthropology) Vol 1(2)
• 1998 - Selective Anthropomorphization: Trees in the Northeast Kula Ring. In Social Analysis. Vol 42 (3).
• 1997 - Cutting the Wood of Woodlark: Retrospects and Prospects for Logging on Muyuw, Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea in Colin Filer (ed.) The Political Economy of Forest Management in Papua New Guinea. NRI Monograph 32. Hong Kong: National Research Institute and International Institute for Environment and Development Pp. 180-203.
• 1990 - From Muyuw to the Trobriands: Transformations Along the Northern Side of the Kula Ring. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
• 1989 - (with Roy Wagner, eds.). Death Rituals and Life in the Societies of the Kula. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
• 1983 - Muyuw Kinship and the Metamorphosis of Gender Labour. Man 18(2):305- 26.
• 1980 - The Kula and Generalized Exchange: Considering Some Unconsidered Aspects of the Elementary Structures of Kinship. Man 15(2):267-93.