Contentment and Suffering: Culture and Experience in Toraja

by Douglas W. Hollan and Jane C. Wellenkamp

Book Overview

Contentment and Suffering, a psychocultural ethnography of the Toraja wet-rice farmers of Indonesia, provides a rich portrait of Torajan life and contributes to debates on the relationship between culture and individual psychology.

Hollan and Wellenkamp describe the central aspects of Torajan personal experience -emotion, identity, and sense of self- and a variety of fascinating cultural practices, including possession trance, kickfights,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231084234
• ISBN13: 9780231084239
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 313 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.1"
• Age Range: 22 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

A person-centered ethnography

Traditional ethnographies have generally focused on large scale aspects of a society's life. In a new approach, Hollan and Wellenkamp are innovating the field of psychological anthropology with ethnographies that focus on the commanalities as well as the differences found in individuals belonging to a particular culture, in this case the Toraja of Sulawesi, Indonesia. This methodology allows readers to understand what it is like to live in Tana Toraja as well as gain insight into the individual lives, not just the society as a whole. The components of the individuals' enculturation can be seen through larger cultural processes of socialization that affect everyone, but person-centered ethnography takes into account the uniqueness of people and that the same culture can lead to drastically different people with differing views on the same issue, despite being raised in the same cultural environment. Contentment and Suffering is well-organized and does not attack the reader with technical jargon. Yet its approach does not condescend to the reader. Its concise wording is direct yet never terse or curt.