Download or read book Cosmos and Society in Oceania written by Daniel de Coppet and published by Berg Publishers. This book was released on 1995 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Current anthropology uses expressions such as society as a whole, socio-cosmic relations, spatiotemporal extension, global ideology and cosmomorphy to establish that the clear-cut Western dichotomy between society and cosmos is not always to be found in the communities it studies. In fact, many elements that the West would at first undoubtedly classify as belonging either to the cosmos or to the society appear very often in Melanesia as belonging to neither one of these domains, but to a realm which combines the attributes of both. Focusing on different examples drawn from diverse Melanesian societies, this thought-provoking volume by eminent specialists re-examines the relation between society and cosmos and in the process opens new directions for research.