Introduction / Chris Gregory -- The Good Death? Paying Equal Respects in Fijian Funerals / Matti Eräsaari -- Changing Standards of Living: The Paradoxes of Building a Good Life in Rural Vanuatu / Rachel E. Smith -- 'According to Kastom and According to Law': 'Good Life' and 'Good Death' in Gilbert Camp, Solomon Islands / Rodolfo Maggio -- 'This Custom from the Past Is No Good': Grassroots, 'Big Shots' and a Contested Moral Economy in East New Britain / Keir Martin -- A Moral Economy of the Transnational Papua New Guinean Household: Solidarity and Estrangement While 'Working Other Gardens' / Karen Sykes -- Cycles of Integration and Fragmentation: Changing Yolngu-Balanda Sentiments of the 'Good Life' in Northern Australia / Fiona Magowan -- 'The Main Thing Is to Have Enough Food': Kuninjku Precarity and Neoliberal Reason / Jon Altman -- The Rise of the Poverty-Stricken Millionaire: The Quest for the Good Life in Sargipalpara / Chris Gregory.

The study of the quest for the good life and the morality and value it presupposes is not new. To the contrary, this is an ancient issue; its intellectual history can be traced back to Aristotle. In anthropology, the study of morality and value has always been a central concern, despite the claim of some scholars that the recent upsurge of interest in these issues is new. What is novel is how scholars in many disciplines are posing the value question in new ways. The global economic alignments of the present pose many political, moral and theoretical questions, but the central issue the essays in this collection address is: how do relatively poor people of the Australia-Pacific region survive in current precarious times? In looking to answer this question, contributors directly engage the values and concepts of their interlocutors. At a time when understanding local implications of global processes is taking on new urgency, these essays bring finely honed anthropological perspectives to matters of universal human concern--they offer radical empirical critique based on intensive fieldwork that will be of great interest to those seeking to comprehend the bigger picture.

"The chapters in this collection were among papers presented at a conference held at the University of Manchester, 24-26 March 2015, entitled 'The Quest for the Good Life in Precarious Times: Grassroots Perspectives on the Value Question in the 21st Century'. The conference marked the end of a UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)- funded project entitled 'Domestic Moral Economy: An Ethnographic Study of Value in the Asia-Pacific Region' ..."

Includes bibliographical references.

National edeposit: Available onsite at national, state and territory libraries Online access with authorization. star AU-CaNED

Added to collection customer.56279.3