Download or read book From a Shattered Sun written by Susan McKinnon and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among a growing number of ethnographies of eastern Indonesia that deal with cosmology, exchange, and kinship, From a Shattered Sun is the first to address squarely issues originally broached by Edmund Leach and Claude Lévi-Strauss concerning the relation between hierarchy and equality in asymmetric systems of marriage. On the basis of extensive fieldwork in the Tamimbar islands, Susan McKinnon analyzes the simultaneous presence of both closed, asymmetric cycles and open, asymmetric pathways of alliance--of both egalitarian and hierarchical configurations. In addition, Tamimbarese society is marked by the existence of multiple, differentially valued forms of marriage, affiliation, and residence. Rather than seeing these various forms as analytically separable types, McKinnon demonstrates that it is only by viewing them as integrally related--in terms of culturally specific understandings of "houses," gender, and exchange--that one can perceive the processes through which hierarchy and equality are created.