The Religious imagination in New Guinea /

A deeply philosophical work that is entirely consonant with a prophetic insight of William James in his The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) to the effect that religion is a critical domain in which to study human consciousness. As ethnography, this collection of new essays is an exploration of some of the varieties of religious imagination found in societies of New Guinea. As ethnological theory, the book is concerned with the interactions of "culture," "self," and "representations of self outside conscious awareness." The strongest conceptual contributions are those of the two editors; not in their coauthored introduction, but in their separately authored articles in Part 1, which are concerned with theoretical orientations. These two articles and the conclusion integrate the five ethnographic chapters of Part 2 and focus on what the editors refer to as "the divided self, "the sacred self," and "autonomous imagination." The five ethnographic chapters, one by each editor and others by Bruce Knauft, Eytan Bercovitch, and Donald Tuzin, are thoughtful essays that exemplify and substantiate the importance and utility of the editors' conceptual generalizations. Few collections of essays by different authors have achieved as high a level of integrity. Advanced undergraduates and up. R. Provencher Northern Illinois University