Growing Artefacts, Displaying Relationships—Yams, Art and Technology Amongst the Nyamikum Abelam of Papua New Guinea

"How does one make powerful and beautiful and artefacts? What is in certain objects that give them the capacity to act simultaneously as symbols, valuables and images? This book answers these questions through joining together anthropology of material culture, anthropology of art and anthropology of techniques in order to study the decorated long yams of the Abelam of the Sepik in a contemporary Papua New Guinea village. It unpacks their process of making, which requires the combination of agricultural techniques, social interactions, and cosmological knowledge, and provides discussion of the complex positions of study of techniques and arts within anthropology"--

Ludovic Coupaye is a Lecturer in Material Culture Studies at the Department of Anthropology of University College London, a member of the Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur l’Oceanie (CREDO, Marseille), and teaches anthropology of Pacific Arts at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris. He has been a teaching fellow at the Sainsbury Research Unit (UEA) and assistant curator at the Musee du quai Branly in Paris.