BIC SubjectsLinguistics/Oceanic & Austronesian languages

Titles (4) | Order by:

Growing up on the Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea: Childhood and educational ideologies in Tauwema

Barbara Senft and Gunter Senft

This volume deals with the children’s socialization on the Trobriands. After a survey of ethnographic studies on childhood, the book zooms in on indigenous ideas of conception and birth-giving, the children’s early development, their integration into playgroups, their games and their education… read more

[Culture and Language Use, 21] 2018. xxv, 248 pp. | open access

Imdeduya: Variants of a myth of love and hate from the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea

Gunter Senft

This volume presents five variants of the Imdeduya myth: two versions of the actual myth, a short story, a song and John Kasaipwalova’s English poem “Sail the Midnight Sun”. This poem draws heavily on the Trobriand myth which introduces the protagonists Imdeduya and Yolina and reports on Yolina’s… read more

[Culture and Language Use, 20] 2017. xvi, 244 pp. | open access

Tales from the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea: Psycholinguistic and anthropological linguistic analyses of tales told by Trobriand children and adults

Gunter Senft

This volume presents 22 tales from the Trobriand Islands told by children (boys between the age of 5 and 9 years) and adults. The monograph is motivated not only by the anthropological linguistic aim to present a broad and quite unique collection of tales with the thematic approach to illustrate… read more

[Culture and Language Use, 16] 2015. xviii, 299 pp. | open access

The Tuma Underworld of Love: Erotic and other narrative songs of the Trobriand Islanders and their spirits of the dead

Gunter Senft

The Trobriand Islanders' eschatological belief system explains what happens when someone dies. Bronislaw Malinowski described essentials of this eschatology in his articles "Baloma: the Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands" and "Myth in Primitive Psychology". There he also presented the… read more

[Culture and Language Use, 5] 2011. xvii, 138 pp. | open access