Bøger af Michael Goddard

Papua New Guinea's village court system was introduced in 1974, partly in an effort to overcome the legal, geographical, and social distance between village societies and the country's formal courts. There are now more than 1100 village courts all over PNG, hearing thousands of cases each week. This anthropological study is grounded in ethnographic research on three different village courts and the communities they serve. It also explores the colonial historical background to the establishment of the village court system, and the local and global processes influencing the efforts of village courts to deal with everyday disputes among grassroots Melanesians.

The Kakoli of the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG), the focus of this study, did not traditionally have a concept of mental illness. They classified madness according to social behaviour, not mental pathology. Moreover, their conception of the person did not recognise the same physical and mental categories that inform Western medical science, and psychiatry in particular was not officially introduced to PNG until the late 1950s. Its practitioners claimed that it could adequately accommodate the cultural variation among Melanesian societies. This book compares the intent and practice of transcultural psychiatry with Kakoli interpretations of, and responses to, madness, showing the reasons for their occasional recourse to psychiatric services. Episodes involving madness, as defined by the Kakoli themselves, are described in order to offer a context for the historical lifeworld and praxis of the community and raise fundamental questions about whether a culturally sensitive psychiatry is possible in the Melanesian context.

Raul Ruiz, while considered one of the world's most significant filmmakers by several film critics, is yet to be the subject of any thorough engagement with his work in English. This volume sets out on this task by mapping, as fully as possible, Ruiz's cinematic trajectory across more than five decades of prolific work, up to his death in 2011; ranging from his earliest work in Chile to high-budget 'European' costume dramas culminating in Mysteries of Lisbon (2010). It does so by treating Ruiz's work-with its surrealist, magic realist, popular cultural, and neo-Baroque sources-as a type of 'impossible' cinematic cartography, mapping real, imaginary, and virtual spaces, and crossing between different cultural contexts, aesthetic strategies, and technical media. It argues that across the different phases of Ruiz's work identified, there are key continuities such as the invention of singular cinematic images and the interrogation of their possible and impossible combinations.

This book examines radical media ecologies as guerrilla networks, emphasising the proximity and inseparability of radical media and political practices.

A comprehensive account of the writing and thought of the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz.