Power of Perspective Social Ontology and Agency on Ambrym Island, Vanuatu [Hardcover]

Focusing on different forms of agency in North Ambrym social life, the author demonstrates the potency of outsiders at different times and in different situations in Ambrym society. This model challenges the premises of much Western thinking about reciprocity, and suggests new directions in the analysis of Melanesian societies

Readers interested in Pacific kinship and exchange will find much to value in The Power of the Perspective. This is also a book that can be useful for scholars who want an ethnographic example of how to approach analyzing society as a universal, albeit locally produced, concept.?????Pacific Affairs

As the first ethnographic monograph of Ambrym to find its way to publication,The Power of Perspectiveis to be highly recommended, particularly to students and scholars of Melanesian anthropology and to theoreticians of ritual agency and exchange. Rio's treatment of exchange, ritual process and social form are highly sophisticated, and I have no doubt that his development of the theory of 'thirdness' will prove to be of enduring value to the discipline.????Oceania

Rio's ethnography effectively documents Vanuatu's enduring abundance of culture and the power of its perspective - the uses of looking at our world through Islander eyes. ????The Contemporary Pacific

La lecture de cet ouvrage tr?s savant, aux abondantes r?f?rences autant classique que contemporaines, anthropologiques, sociologiques ou philosophiques, demand une attention soutenue, mais n'en t?moigne pas moins d'une pens?e novatrice, clairement exprim?. ????Moussons

What Rio does do well is to encourage the reader to understand how peoples' actions, especially with regards to exchange, are situated within larger webs of social interactions to create order and meaning for the people involved. FurtherlC'