Ecology and the Sacred

Ecology and the Sacred

Ecology and the Sacred Engaging the Anthropology of Roy A. Rappaport Edited by Ellen Messer and Michael Lambek Ann Arbor

Copyright by the University of Michigan 2001 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 2004 2003 2002 2001 4 3 2 1 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ecology and the sacred : engaging the anthropology of Roy A. Rappaport / edited by Ellen Messer and Michael Lambek. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-472-11170-1 (alk. paper) 1. Rites and ceremonies. 2. Ritual. 3. Religion. 4. Human ecology. 5. Maring (Papua New Guinea people) 6. Rappaport, Roy A. I. Rappaport, Roy A. II. Messer, Ellen. III. Lambek, Michael. GN473.E26 2001 306.6 9138 dc21 2001018112

For Skip

Contents Acknowledgments Thinking and Engaging the Whole: The Anthropology of Roy A. Rappaport 1 Ellen Messer Bibliography of the Works of Roy A. Rappaport 39 Part I. Ecology and the Anthropology of Trouble Kicking Off the Kaiko: Instability, Opportunism, and Crisis in Ecological Anthropology 49 Susan H. Lees Human Ecology from Space: Ecological Anthropology Engages the Study of Global Environmental Change 64 Emilio F. Moran and Eduardo S. Brondizio Ecological Embeddedness and Personhood: Have We Always Been Capitalists? 88 Alf Hornborg Considering the Power and Potential of the Anthropology of Trouble 99 Barbara Rose Johnston Teens and Troubles in the New World Order 122 Fran Markowitz Part II. Ritual Structure and Religious Practice The Life and Death of Ritual: Reflections on Some Ethnographic and Historical Phenomena in the Light of Roy Rappaport s Analysis of Ritual 145 Robert I. Levy ix

viii Contents New Ways in Death and Dying: Transformation of Body and Text in Late Modern American Judaism. A Kaddish for Roy Skip Rappaport 170 Peter K. Gluck Monolith or the Tower of Babel? Ultimate Sacred Postulates at Work in Conservative Christian Schools 193 Melinda Bollar Wagner Belief Beheld Inside and Outside, Insider and Outsider in the Anthropology of Religion 207 James Peacock Notes for a Cybernetics of the Holy 227 Thomas J. Csordas Rappaport on Religion: A Social Anthropological Reading 244 Michael Lambek Part III. The Papua New Guinea Context: Following Skip s Ethnographic Footsteps Rappaport s Maring: The Challenge of Ethnography 277 Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart Reflections on Pigs for the Ancestors 291 Gillian Gillison Averting the Bush Fire Day: Ain s Cult Revisited 300 Polly Wiessner and Akii Tumu Reading Exchange in Melanesia: Theory and Ethnography in the Context of Encompassment 324 Edward LiPuma List of Contributors 353 Index 357

Acknowledgments The idea of producing a festschrift volume to engage Skip Rappaport s anthropology originated in the spring of 1996, shortly before his announcement that he had incurable cancer. In the months that followed, a trio of Skip s Michigan colleagues (Tom Fricke, Steve Lansing, Barbara Smuts) and another pair of his former students (Aletta Biersack, Jim Greenberg) announced their desires and intentions to honor Skip. Although in the end we each went our separate ways, we would like to thank them here for their early collaborative efforts, gracious support, and successful independent projects which informed our work. We would also like to thank Gisli Pálsson, A. P. Vayda, Howard Kunreuther, Laura Kunreuther, Kai Erikson, and Howard Norman, who participated at various points in this project. Our editors at the University of Michigan Press, Susan Whitlock and later Ingrid Erikson, provided encouragement and good advice that assisted the project to completion. We are indebted to Conrad Kottak and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan for a generous gift that provided partial subsidy for the volume and to Ann Rappaport for her advice. Ellen also would like to thank Jean Jackson for her critical readings and mention gratefully the hospitality of her college classmates, Peg and Jeff Padnos, now of Holland, Michigan, who provided good company and the gift of friendship during a critical period each summer. Michael thanks Deidre Rose and Sarah Gould for editorial assistance, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Division of Social Sciences, University of Toronto at Scarborough for financial support, and Jackie Solway for her steady counsel. Each of us would like to thank the other for friendship, inspiration, and cooperation throughout the editing process, and we both thank our contributors, whose enthusiastic responses assisted in thinking and engaging the whole, and producing the kind of wide-ranging anthropology volume that we trust would have pleased our mentor.