Colonial and postcolonial museum collecting in Papua New Guinea

This essay contrasts early and later colonial collecting by anthropologists and museum scientists in Melanesia with the postcolonial collecting in which I participated in the 1980s under the auspices of the Australian Museum (1987). My contention is that museum collections made during early colonialism took place in a relatively hierarchical and androcentric context of moral difference. In subsequent phases of the colonial era, as well as in the ongoing postcolonial period, anthropological collecting sought, and continues to seek, egalitarian and gender inclusive dialogue with vendors; in part by drawing from local metaphors and idioms to express status inclusivity.     

Emplacing Christ: An Indigenous Australian Ethics of Placemaking Across Borders

ABSTRACT

Travelling from my old heimat, Germany, I joined in September 2015 a group of Anangu Pitjantjatjara Bible translators on a two-week long pilgrimage to the Holy Land. This journey offered further probing into Anangu attachments to place that, until then, I had only known through ethnographic research in their desert homelands in northern South Australia. In the present article, I explore how and why the Anangu Christians forged links with biblically inscribed places to which they had no ancestral ties. What they did bring is a deep-seated sense of emotional connection with Jesus abiding in heaven, and here the pilgrimage was a chance to anchor this relationship in his land – to emplace Christ. Notable in this process of shifting the presence of Jesus from heaven to earth was the pilgrims’ moral concern to keep separate the emplaced stories of their ancestral lands on one hand, and the grounded narratives of the Christian Scriptures on the other. In Jonathan Mair and Nicholas Evans’ terms, their approach was one of ‘incommensuration’, a strategy to avoid moral conflict by refusing to make comparisons between religious traditions. My article may thus be read as an ethnographic contribution towards the understanding of an Australian Indigenous ethics of placemaking across borders.     

Moral Horizons of Land and Place

ABSTRACT

A recent ‘moral turn’ in anthropology has cast new light on morality as a subject of ethnographic inquiry, and on the making of moral meaning and judgment. This article, and the special issue it prefaces, contribute to this emergent literature through foregrounding and examining the moral dimensions of land and place. Taking up Didier Fassin’s injunction for a critical moral anthropology – rather than an anthropology of morality – we look to land and place as groundings for moral challenges and practices that are nevertheless not place-bound. A critical moral anthropology of land and place should be directed, we argue, to the interplay of mobility and emplacement, to the dynamics of landscape and ‘dwelling’, and to the multiplicities of expectation and meaning that surround the making and exploitation of resources. In contexts of global and local change, land and place offer productive grounds from which to consider the moral horizons – both spatial and temporal – of our world and our discipline.     

Retrieving the Red Continent: settler colonialism and the history of American Indians in the US

While present in the contemporary academy, American Indian history remains marginalized by being associated with regional and national histories of the United States. Recently, postcolonial scholarship has provided a pathway out of that marginalization. The postcolonial critique of traditional anthropological and historical writing about indigenous peoples suggests a new way to imagine the relationship between American Indian history and other areas of scholarship. The most promising aspect of this critique is the formulation of ‘settler colonialism’. That framework first emerged among geographers and has recently been embraced by historians and anthropologists. The settler colonial framework offers a way to conceive of the Native past in a transnational context as well as to understand indigenous encounters with modernity as an ongoing struggle with colonial rule rather than as a campaign to accommodate Native people to ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’ or to ‘assimilate’ them into a nation state.     

Settler Postcolonial Ecologies and Native Species Regeneration on Banks Peninsula,Aotearoa New Zealand

ABSTRACT

The 2050 Ecological Vision for Banks Peninsula, New Zealand is ‘to create an environment in which the community values, protects and cares for the biodiversity, landscape and special character of Banks Peninsula’. Its aspirational goals point to the peninsula conservation trust’s vision for success on the moral horizons of land and place. These horizons stretch visually from the volcanic crater ridgelines to the outer coastal bays and the sea beyond. Temporally they span 175 years of cultural encounters of peoples and biota, and reveal community-based strategies designed to support thriving biodiversity on land that has been used primarily for production. This article draws on the event, textual and interview data as well as fieldwork conducted in 2015 during the 175th anniversary of organised European settlement. Settler pasts and presents are negotiated in natural heritage preservation through the restoration of native flora and fauna in natural areas and protected connectivity corridors. A settler postcolonial ecology for these hill country lands is committed to the simultaneous conservation of biological and cultural diversity in which indigenous flora and fauna, landscapes and people, are irreversibly hybridised, and endemic species become constitutive of a postcolonial national identity in Aotearoa New Zealand.     

Are Bush Fires and Drought ‘Natural Disasters’? The Naturalisation of Politics and Politicisation of Nature in New Caledonia

ABSTRACT

Based on long-term doctoral fieldwork on bush fires in New Caledonia, this paper aims to explore the double assumption that bush fires were shaped as a public issue through specific categorisations of human and natural elements, and that this work resulted in negative outcomes as far as the environment is concerned. This paper will address the question of mediation between human agency (colonial history, population distribution and development choices) and the production of ‘bush fires’ as an event category and as a ‘public problem’ calling for a policy solution. More specifically it will address the validity of the definition of bush fires as a ‘disaster’. While this phenomenon is both a discursive creation rooted in colonial imagination and a consciously forgotten strategy used by administrators and settlers to control land and dominate indigenous people, its growing importance today is related to the emergence of environmental concerns. However, one must not forget other issues obscured by the smoke of bush fires, namely a declining cattle farming sector and its lasting environmental impacts on drought (also considered a ‘natural disaster’ in New Caledonia by inhabitants, local administrations and scientists) and biodiversity loss. Addressing this issue leads to more general questions about the manner in which policy-makers, naturalists and environmentalists conceptualise and morally address environmental (natural and man-made) phenomena through time in a colonial/postcolonial setting.     

Whiteness and loss in outer East London: tracing the collective memories of diaspora space

Abstract

This paper explores collective memory in Newham, East London. It addresses how remembering East London as the home of whiteness and traditional forms of community entails powerful forms of forgetting. Newham's formation through migration – its ‘great time’ – has ensured that myths of indigeneity and whiteness have never stood still. Through engaging with young people's and youth workers' memory practices, the paper explores how phantasms of whiteness and class loss are traced over, and how this tracing reveals ambivalence and porosity, at the same time as it highlights the continued allure of race. It explores how whiteness and class loss are appropriated across ethnic boundaries and how they are mobilized to produce new forms of racial hierarchy in a ‘super-diverse’ place.     

Postcolonial Ecologies of Parasite and Host: Making Parasitism Cosmopolitan

The interest of F. Macfarlane Burnet in host–parasite interactions grew through the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in his book, Biological Aspects of Infectious Disease (1940), often regarded as the founding text of disease ecology. Our knowledge of the influences on Burnet’s ecological thinking is still incomplete. Burnet later attributed much of his conceptual development to his reading of British theoretical biology, especially the work of Julian Huxley and Charles Elton, and regretted he did not study Theobald Smith’s Parasitism and Disease (1934) until after he had formulated his ideas. Scholars also have adduced Burnet’s fascination with natural history and the clinical and public health demands on his research effort, among other influences. I want to consider here additional contributions to Burnet’s ecological thinking, focusing on his intellectual milieu, placing his research in a settler society with exceptional expertise in environmental studies and pest management. In part, an ‘‘ecological turn’’ in Australian science in the 1930s, derived to a degree from British colonial scientific investments, shaped Burnet’s conceptual development. This raises the question of whether we might characterize, in postcolonial fashion, disease ecology, and other studies of parasitism, as successful settler colonial or dominion science.     

Transgressing community: the case of Muslims in a twenty-first-century British city

Abstract

This paper draws on ethnographic research carried out in Birmingham, UK – a city significant for its sizeable Muslim population and its iconic role in the history of minority ethnic settlement in Britain – to consider how associations of place and ethnicity work in different ways to inform ideas about ‘Muslim community’ in twenty-first-century Britain. The paper charts happenings around a local event in an area of majority Asian settlement and how representations of the area as a place of Muslim community were used to implicate it in the ‘war on terror’. The paper goes on to show how this sensibility is disrupted by Muslims themselves through alternative engagements with space and ethnicity. The paper argues that these offer a ground for making Muslim community in ways that actively engage with histories and patterns of ethnic settlement in the city rather than being determined by them.     

Powhatan's Werowocomoco: Constructing Place, Polity, and Personhood in the Chesapeake, C.E. 1200--C.E. 1609

Colonial encounters within the Powhatan village of Werowocomoco in Tidewater Virginia have captured the public's imagination through romantic literature and popular films. Shifting the focus of inquiry away from English colonial narratives and toward a history of landscape provides an alternative understanding of Werowocomoco as a Native place. Archaeological investigation has identified evidence of earthworks and related social practices that altered Werowocomoco's built environment and subjective experiences of its spaces in ways that colonial chroniclers failed to appreciate. A landscape history combining built environments, cognitive maps, and spatial practices across the historic—precontact divide indicates that the settlement became a ritualized location for the production of political status and social personhood well before English colonization in the Chesapeake. Spatial practices rooted in Algonquian cosmology and centered on Werowocomoco shaped the origins of the Powhatan chiefdom and early colonial history through which Powhatans sought to incorporate Jamestown colonists into their world. A biography of Werowocomoco as a Native place illustrates how a deep historical anthropology may challenge notions of a "prehistoric" past comprised of homogenized societies lacking history.     

Of wildmen and white men: cryptozoology and inappropriate/d monsters at the cusp of the Anthropocene

People on the Indonesian island of Halmahera claim that the hairy and barely human giants that are said to roam the jungle are seventeenth-century Portuguese colonizers. Employing the feminist concept of ‘inappropriate/d’, I show how the appropriation of the Portuguese wildman into village narratives, regional political history, and national development plans as well as into global discourses of science and media in each case inappropriately collapses the boundaries that the white wildman is implicated in maintaining: those between human and animal, the colonial sovereign and ‘the primitive native’, cryptozoology and the politics of the real. The wild-yet-Western figure, I argue, is inappropriate/d – is ‘on the loose’ – across local, regional, and global registers of reality in ways that trouble linear histories of the wildman as fading from reality into allegory. Like so many other monsters of the Anthropocene, the truthlikeness, or verisimilitude, of the white wildman is enhanced rather than attenuated by recent turns in politics and media.     

‘Straightening What’s Crooked’? Recognition as Moral Disruption in Indonesia’s Confucianist Revival

ABSTRACT

In 2006, the Indonesian state re-recognised Confucianism as an official religion, but this did not have the straightforwardly positive consequences that either Confucianist revivalists or some theorists of recognition might have predicted. Revivalists were often – but not always – gripped by feelings of outrage and moral torment, whilst the pace of the revival itself was very uneven. These varied outcomes reflect the complex politics pervading the lives of Indonesian Confucianists (and Chinese Indonesians more generally) as post-Suharto reforms force them to grapple with their diverse histories of accommodation and resistance to the New Order’s discriminatory policies. To fully understand such material, first-person moral perspectives must be incorporated into critical anthropological studies of recognition, as a complement to approaches focused on power and domination. Doing so reveals an important general truth about recognition – its capacity to be morally disruptive – and broadens our understanding of why recognition can hurt those it ostensibly stands to benefit.     

Catching the pulse: money and circulation in a Sri Lankan marketplace

This article traces the movement, management, and generation of money in a Sri Lankan wholesale vegetable market, pulling into focus certain local economic and moral logics. What traders do with cash is revealing. I argue that how traders use money – the way it is handled, risked, spent, and lent – exhibits skill, implies hierarchy, and cultivates social connections. Exploring idioms of economic activity such as ‘catching the pulse’ and ‘rolling the money’, the article examines relations between different kinds of trader. Moving money through businesses permits participation in the complex communication network of the market. This is central to existing in the social world of the trader. I argue that following money notes – rather than commodities – as they travel around the marketplace and between the hands of transactors renders ethnographically observable the formations of personhood and long‐term relations that take place in the market.     

Are second-generation Filipinos ‘becoming’ Asian American or Latino? Historical colonialism,culture and panethnicity

Abstract

This article examines how second-generation Filipinos understand their panethnic identity, given their historical connection with both Asians and Latinos, two of the largest panethnic groups in the USA. While previous studies show panethnicity to be a function of shared political interests or class status, I argue that the cultural residuals of historical colonialism in the Philippines, by both Spain and the USA, shape how Filipinos negotiate panethnic boundaries with Asians and Latinos, albeit in different ways. Filipinos cite the cultural remnants of US colonialism as a reason to racially demarcate themselves from Asians, and they allude to the legacies of Spanish colonialism to blur boundaries with Latinos. While the colonial history of Filipinos is unique, these findings have implications for better understanding racialization in an increasingly multiethnic society – namely, how historical legacies in sending societies interact with new racial contexts to influence panethnic identity development.     

Intention and Moral Enhancement

Recently philosophers have proposed a wide variety of interventions referred to as ‘moral enhancements’. Some of these interventions are concerned with helping individuals make more informed decisions; others, however, are designed to compel people to act as the intervener sees fit. Somewhere between these two extremes lie interventions designed to direct an agent's attention either towards morally relevant issues – hat‐hanging – or away from temptations to do wrong – hat‐hiding. I argue that these interventions fail to constitute genuine moral enhancement because, although they may result in more desirable outcomes – more altruism, more law‐following, and/or less self‐destructive behavior, they ignore a person's intentions, and often what makes an action right or wrong is the intent behind it.     

Adolescent Movements: Dating,Elopements, and Youth Policing in Ladakh,India

ABSTRACT

In India's northwest border region of Ladakh, norms of sexuality are changing, which is resulting in the emergence of new sexual practices, such as dating, ‘roaming’, and the dramatic elopements of Buddhist and Muslim youth. This has caused the emergence of youth policing the perceived sexual infractions of others, through targeting particular zones of intimacy – marriage, religious identity, and mobility. Yet, youth policing is uneven, targeting those considered to be the most ‘at risk’ for moral transgressions, including Buddhists, the elite, and those pursuing education. Ladakhi youth are in a tenuous position, where they negotiate their desires to be ‘modern’ with the community pressure to maintain a strong sense of cultural identity. This paper examines how youth navigate between tensions of modernity and culture, showing that they employ a range of strategic practices and tactics that provide space for expressing desires for modernity, while simultaneously securing cultural loyalty.     

German Missionaries and Australian Anthropology

ABSTRACT

In their primary task of converting Indigenous Australians to Christianity, German missions active in various parts of Australia through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century recorded relatively few successes. On the other hand, their endeavours in observing and recording Aboriginal languages and cultures have left a rich – and yet frequently overlooked – anthropological legacy. A common element in that legacy is their work in the area of linguistics, which they understood to be a necessary foundation for their evangelical work. Nonetheless, caution must be exercised in evaluating the German missionary contribution to Australian anthropology according to either national or religious paradigms. German anthropology, as practised within the community of missionaries and outside, evinces a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. Moreover German anthropologists, including missionaries, were by the late nineteenth century connected into international knowledge networks.     

The artist Carl Abrahams and the cosmopolitan work of centring and peripheralizing the self⋆

The article looks at the work and life of Jamaican artist and ‘citizen of the world’ Carl Abrahams. Responding to Gell's argument that art should be thought of as a ‘technology of enchantment’, and to a wider approach that seeks to explain art by reference to cultural context, the article takes Abrahams's own Weltkenntnis, or world‐knowledge, as its focus. The Weltkenntnis of an artist, or indeed any person, is often at odds both with their surrounding cultural situation and the technical means they have to express themselves. It is never entirely possible to reduce a particular form of self‐expression either to the wider worldview or to a particular set of technical effects. The article explores the conceptual tensions involved in Abrahams's claims to be a cosmopolitan artist and his work of centring and peripheralizing himself in colonial and postcolonial Jamaica.     

Lulik encounters and cultural frictions in East Timor: Past and present

In the East Timorese lingua franca, Tetun, the word lulik is often simply translated as ‘sacred’ or ‘forbidden’. But the concept has much wider application as a set of fundamental, philosophical and moral orientations in Timorese social life. In this paper we present six historical and contemporary encounters with lulik, by a range of outsiders from beyond the Timorese tradition. Placed in the context of Sahlin's notion of ‘the structure of the conjuncture’, they illustrate the way lulik agency adapts to novel or contingent events in culturally inflected ways, and how ideas of lulik may be configured as agents of resistance as well as enabling strategies.     

Introduction: Patterns of generational change: convergent,reactive or emergent?

Abstract

The aim of this special issue is to map the extent of generational change among Britain's ethnic minority population and to understand some of the underlying processes involved. Is there greater integration across generations, or has the ‘new second generation’ in Britain remained isolated from the mainstream, perhaps as a result of the prejudice and discrimination from the white British that they have encountered or because of desires to maintain ethnic values and resist western practices? We also ask whether processes of generational change have proceeded at the same pace and direction in different domains – notably cultural, social, structural and political – and whether it has proceeded at the same pace among different minorities.