In this Book
- Lines That Connect: Rethinking Pattern and Mind in the Pacific
- Book
- 2010
- Published by: University of Hawai'i Press
This striking and original study brings together objects and photographs, historical literature and contemporary ethnographic case studies to explore pattern in its logical workings. It presents the first-ever analysis of the well-known patterned shell valuable called kapkap as revealed in New Ireland mortuary feasts. Innovative research in the study of Christianity and the Baha’i faithful in the region shows how pattern has been appropriated in new religious communities. Were argues that pattern is used in various guises in performances, church architecture, and funerary images to contrasting effect. He explores the conditions under which pattern facilitates a connecting of old and new ideas and how missionary processes are implicated in this flow. He then considers the mechanisms under which pattern is internalized, paying particular attention to its embeddedness in spatial and numerical thinking. Finally, he examines how pattern carries new materials and technologies, which in turn provide new resources for sustaining old beliefs.
Drawing on a multitude of fields (anthropology; art history; Pacific, museum, and religious studies; education; ethnomathematics), Lines That Connect raises key questions about the capacity of pattern across the Pacific to bind and sustain ideas about place, body, and genealogy in the most logical of ways.
44 illus.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-x
- One Loci: Lines That Connect
- pp. 1-22
- Five Repetition: The Logic of Pattern
- pp. 107-131
- Seven Trajectories: Pattern in Transition
- pp. 152-176
- Eight On the Mathematical Mind
- pp. 177-180
- References
- pp. 187-196