Creative Land

James Leach is Research Fellow in Anthropology, King's College, Cambridge, and Affiliated Lecturer in the Dept. of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.Field research: Madang Province, Papua New Guinea 1994-5, 1999, 2000-2001, 2003. Published works on kinship and place, creativity, artistic production, ownership and cultural/intellectual property. (Creative Land. Place and Procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea. 2003 Berghahn Books, Rationales of Ownership. Transactions and Claims to Ownership in Contemporary Papua New Guinea, (ed with Lawrence Kalinoe), 2004 Sean Kingston Publishing.) Field Research U.K.: 2002 to present, as 'Attached Observer' with artists placements in Industry and Science. Also directing research on constructions of gender among Open Source software programmers, and on artist’s relation with the law in the UK. Awarded the Royal Anthropological Institute JB Donne Prize in the Anthropology of Art for 1999, and The Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2004.

• List of Maps, Figures, Tables, and PhotographsNotes on the TextPrefaceAcknowledgementsIntroduction: The Rai CoastChapter 1. Process and KinshipKinship, Process, and CreativityCognation and FlexibilityAn Alternative to the Genealogical ModelThe PalemChapter 2. Residence History and PalemHamlets Past and PresentHamlets as Social GroupsThe Labours of Lawrence ComplexityChapter 3. Marrying SistersDefining RelationshipsMyths and ExplanationsChapter 4. Gardens, Land, and GrowthOrigin PointsGendered Productivity: The Tambaran Households and GardensGardening, not ‘Production’Gardens, Land, and SubstanceMale Continuity, Female MovementChapter 5. Birth, Emergence, and ExchangeThe Transactions Between Affinal Kin Focused on ChildrenMother’s Brothers in the Anthropological LiteratureAffinal Payments and Lineality in ReiteVisibility and RecognitionChapter 6. Spirit, Flesh, and BoneThe Palem as a BodyPerforming PlacesPeople and Spirits as Land Made MobileChapter 7. Places and Bodies, Landscape and PerceptionThe Concept of Landscape in AnthropologyHearing and Vision as Sensory ModalitiesLandscape in the Nekgini LifeworldChapter 8. Creative LandLand, Place, and PersonSimple Principles, Complex ProcessCreativityGlossaryReferencesIndex

"What is new in Leach’s account is the emphasis Nekgini speakers put on land. His attention to this emphasis makes his ethnography in many ways a powerful development... the book as a whole is consistently stimulating and theoretically sophisticated throughout."  ·  Joel Robbins, Contemporary Pacific"The ethnography itself is full of interesting observations and novel information, and repays a close reading with a vivid sense of the distinctiveness of Reite social life…Creative Land is itself ‘creative’ and will attain its own ‘place’ in the historical ‘landscape’ of studies of kinship in New Guinea and elsewhere.  ·  Andrew Strathern, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute