Books
2014 Subversion, Conversion, Development. Cross Cultural Knowledge Encounter and the Politics of Design (edited with Lee Wilson) MIT Press 2014
mitpress.mit.edu/books/subversion-conversion-development
A volume that explores alternative cultural encounters with and around information technologies, encounters that counter dominant, Western-oriented notions of media consumption. They include media practices as forms of cultural resistance and subversion, ‘DIY cultures’ and other non-mainstream models of technology production. The contributors - leading thinkers in science and technology studies, anthropology, and software design—pay special attention to the specific inflections that different cultures and communities give to the value of “knowledge.” The richly detailed accounts presented here challenge the dominant view of knowledge as a neutral “good”--information available for representation and encoding but separated from all social relations.
The chapters examine specific cases in which forms of knowledge and cross-cultural encounter are shaping technology use and development. They consider design, use, and reuse of technological tools including databases, GPS devices, books, and computers, in locations that range from Australia and New Guinea to Germany and the United States.
Contributors: Laura Watts, Gregers Petersen, Helen Verran, Michael Christie, Jerome Lewis, Hildegard Diemberger, Stephen Hugh-Jones, Alan Blackwell, Dawn Nafus, Lee Wilson, James Leach, Marilyn Strathern, David Turnbull, Wade Chambers.
Reite Plants. An Ethnobotanical Study in Tok Pisin and English by Porer Nombo and James Leach, Canberra: ANU EPress (2010) PDF Download (free) or Print on Demand: Link
Kinship and Beyond. The Genealogical Model Reconsidered. (ed. with Sandra Bamford), New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books (2009). Link
Rationales of Ownership. Transactions and claims to ownership in contemporary Papua New Guinea (2004), Sean Kingston Publishing: Oxford. Link
Autopoeisis: novelty, meaning and value, (with Simon Biggs) Artwords and Sheffield Hallam University Press.(2004). Link
Creative Land. Place and procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea, Berghahn Books: Oxford (2003). Link
