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Ranging from colonial modernism to postcolonial disappointment, the papers in this collection explore the possibilities of Dark Anthropology and an Anthropology of the Good in Papua New Guinea. With these two prospects in mind, I consider what these papers tell us about the situations of rural people on the peripheries of large resource projects and those in 'Last Places' bypassed by development and the State. In all of these cases, difficult predicaments entail hardship or suffering, but are also met with responses seeking to realise varying versions of the good. This, in turn, prompts further questions about which and whose good are at issue amid a plurality of values. I conclude by suggesting that the ensemble of papers offers a retrospective on local versions of modernity as possibility contends with experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various papers discussed within the issue related to ethnography and the interpretation of Cronulla, including "They Always Seem to be Angry" by Andrew Lattas, a paper clarifying the contrasting views of Australian society on political philosophy and ethnography by Judy Lattas and another exploring the construction of desire around transgression by Anthony Redmond.

This paper tackles the concept of alterity through an embodied perspective. By questioning my lived experience of cancer and how illness—as a disruptive event (Carel, 2008, 2016, 2021)—enables philosophical reflection and the exploration of 'other' ways of being‐in‐the‐world (Merleau‐Ponty 2012 [1945]), I ask if an embodied 'chimeric‐thinking' can be used to question established notions of alterity and reshape our relationship with 'otherness' (Leistle 2015, 2016b). Building on a phenomenological approach to illness (Carel 2012, 2014, 2016, 2021), and a feminist post‐humanist approach (Haraway 1990, 1991, 2016), I present a case in which an autoethnographic and phenomenological approach focused on embodied experience may help revise dominant perspectives, providing access to understanding and engaging with profound biopsychosocial and somatic transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the impact of the researcher's linguistic fluency or competence (or lack thereof) on the data collection process during fieldwork and subsequent analysis. We focus on researcher interaction with the field in a largely monolingual setting in Japan, and the multilingual setting of an international school in Indonesia. Researcher positionality during fieldwork shifts with their (perceived) linguistic fluency, which in turn affects the data. Despite the emphasis on reflexive ethnography, anthropological research rarely interrogates the impact of the researcher's linguistic fluency on the field. We attribute this silence to the perception that highlighting researcher language ability may compromise their ethnographic authority. In this paper we use self-reflexivity to make visible the ethnographic impact that the researcher's language ability has on fieldwork processes. We argue that being self-reflexive about our linguistic fluency, or lack thereof, does not necessarily compromise our analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her 2016 article Sherry Ortner discusses what she calls the rise of 'dark anthropology': that is, ethnographic work that analyses situations of domination, dispossession, and violence. She, like Joel Robbins (), posits as a counterpoint the emergence of 'anthropologies of the good,' which emphasise care and ethics. In this paper I put these two anthropological projects into generative tension through an analysis of HIV‐positive women's lives in Papua New Guinea. In the first part of the paper I demonstrate the ways in which resource extraction has created vulnerabilities to HIV—in part through the coerced marriages of women to powerful landowners. In the second, I discuss ways in which the antiretroviral era has made possible unexpected forms of kindness towards HIV‐positive women. I end the paper with a discussion of what HIV‐positive women mean when they claim that they are happier now than in their pre‐diagnosis lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropology is now developing and using ethnography to research uses and experiences of digital communication technology (including mobile phones, the internet and software), in and across many different cultures and societies. Ethnography enables a focus on the complex intertwining of society, culture and technology allowing us to see how technologies are being transformed by existing modes of life, while simultaneously having a 'messy' influence over those lives, resulting in what are often unexpected consequences. This special issue discusses the use of mobile phones in Papua New Guinea and along the borders of Haiti and the Dominican Republic; the mixture of phone and internet usage in Central Australia and among the Tongan diaspora in Melbourne; the use of internet based video translation practices focused on West Papuan politics; and the disorder produced by software in work environments in Australia. Collectively, these papers help us to reimagine ethnography and challenge conventional theorising of technology by allowing us to discuss the relationships between communication and power in diverse contexts, opening up opportunities for us to engage with and explore the significance of both order and disorder in technologically mediated social processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do Dalit women forge certain forms of critical perspectives in relation to their existence? This paper explores the very particular poetics that shape the women's responses to an invitation by the ethnographer to tell her their life stories. Their narratives made use of several dominant discourses in south India that ritually construct a woman's life as a teleology of an unfolding essence, an embodied force that comes into flower and fruition, and must be socially shaped and tended in order to bring about an auspicious confluence for both woman and the social order. The women also made use of the structure and tropes of several styles of performance that have tragedy at their emotional heart, and which gain their force against the normative construction of life cycle as temporality. By using these forms, women were able to bring into discourse several aspects of their experience of marriage that would otherwise gain no social recognition. In particular, they highlighted the prematurity of their marriage, having wed while still children themselves. The wider argument of this paper engages with two very different versions of agency---one predicated on the use of reason and consent by the individual, the other derived from an examination of the Dalit women's narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following out certain implications of the 1980s Writing Culture critique, this paper envisions a future for anthropology that remains focused on innovations in the ethnographic research process. A sense of change in the world, conceived in the 1980s as postmodernity and now widely discussed as globalisation, suggests the need for an alternative paradigm of ethnographic practice, different in significant ways from that which shaped social-cultural anthropology over the previous eighty years. Based on working through the implications for the norms and forms of both fieldwork and ethnographic writing of the multi-sited design of many current research projects, this paper outlines such an alternative paradigm. Further, the paper argues that the explicit disciplinary dynamic driving such innovation in ethnography is, in contrast to the so-called crisis of representation of the 1980s, a more urgent crisis of reception for anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores avenues for prestige‐making now available to and championed by the Baruya, the archetypal 'Great Man' people of Papua New Guinea, who I recently studied following previous work by Maurice Godelier. Amid critiques by Robbins and Ortner of anthropologists' drive to document and empathise with "suffering subjects", I suggest that being 'left behind' and 'forgotten' is an important part of Baruya social life that reinterprets previous ways of 'making great men.' Baruya exposure to material and institutional modernity remains very limited. Local rhetorics of being 'last place' (las ples) are both concomitant and discordant with Baruya assumptions and assertions of being 'the greatest people' of their region. Unable to revive traditional contexts for producing great men through warriorship, shamanism, cassowary hunting, and salt‐making, Baruya turn to the very modernity they cannot quite reach for their own pursuit of masculinity and prestige—which paradoxically now lies within domains also open to women. Desirous to both establish continuity with their glorified past and to depart from it, Baruya's local modernity itself constrains their newly‐shaped desire for prestige—and dramatically changes gender relations in the process. Though the concrete impossibility to 'be great' reinforces Baruya perceptions of enduring what we might call a 'suffering slot', the larger issue is how concrete experiences sediment into socio‐cultural change over time. This process is informed by a tension between a quest for modernity and its larger failure, resulting in a drive to reignite longer standing values of morality, spirituality, and ultimately, greatmanship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between obesity, knowledge and education in a South Australian community setting. In public health circles and public understandings it is commonly assumed that obesity is the result of lack of knowledge about the right things to eat or how to take care of oneself. It is thought that education will fill this knowledge lacunae and most public health campaigns have education as the main platform of information dissemination to enact behavioural change. Based on long‐standing ethnographic work in a community targeted as obesogenic, I explore the limits of mainstream nutrition education, and how constructing people as having deficit knowledge has the unwarranted effect of implying ignorance. Key to the analysis is Ingold's articulation of different modalities of education, one dominant mode which inducts people into rules and regulations of already pre‐formed knowledge, and another which sees education as learning that goes on in the doing of everyday environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

East Malaysia's vibrant nightlife is a lucrative industry employing many Filipina migrants. The paper addresses the impact on Filipinas of discursive regimes of work, the state and family. These are derived from national discourses of ethnicity, class and nation intertwined with dominant discourses of womanhood in both Malaysia and the Philippines. The paper argues that in transnational space disciplinary regimes are heavily constraining, but resistance and negotiation are possible. The paper follows a feminist poststructuralist approach, which finds that disciplinary forces, rather than being coercive, are subtly inculcated in the migrant subject. Embodiment is never absolute and everyday actions of women initiate instability in the category 'Woman'. This offers the opportunity for agency. Ethnographic methods are used to explore the tensions and constraints of the Filipinas' everyday experience of migration. In the setting of a largely non-Muslim East Malaysia, ethnic identity seems differently constructed than in a predominantly Muslim Peninsula Malaysia. Through friendship and marriage with Malaysians, and integration into local communities, Filipinas are able to resist and negotiate their migrant status. The actions of Filipinas and their local Malaysian partners contest conservative notions of ethnicity, gender, class and nation in both the Philippines and Malaysia. This offers a potential for agency for Filipinas, the possibility for which could also extend to the largely non-Muslim local Malaysians with whom they share their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In global discourses about sex work, the image of the 'sex slave' has been influential in constructing the view of women working in the sex industry in developing countries as 'victims'. This paper examines the perpetuation of such discourses through powerful lobbying groups and socially conservative governments. It argues that frameworks that situate women working in the Cambodian sex industry through a singular identity of 'victim' or 'agent' are inadequate in informing our understandings of sex work in the country. Based on ethnographic research and interviews with sex workers in the port city of Sihanoukville, Cambodia, this paper questions prevailing stereotypes of 'trafficking victims' and the image of 'defiled' or 'duped' women and girls central to such frameworks. It examines the intricate intertwining of elements of individual choice and coercion in women's lives and illuminates how, in the transition to a market economy, women's choices are constrained by hierarchal structures such as gender, class and socio-cultural obligations and poor employment opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the evidence for land succession in western Victoria and considers the fission, fusion, and extinction of some clan groups at the time of contact with non-Aboriginal people in the late 1830s and 1840s. A special study is made of the intriguing scraps of evidence surrounding Knenknenwurrung. This appears to be the case of a cluster of related clans fragmenting and being absorbed into contiguous language groups--some into Djadjawummg, some Jardwadjali, and the majority absorbed into Djabwoirrung. Exactly when this fragmentation and fission occurred is unclear, but certainly within the living memory of Aboriginal people in the early 1840s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to participate in the reconciliation between 'modern' and cultural studies styles of approaches to kinship, and the more formal and structural analyses of the 'classical' type. It is argued that it is the methodological combination of these approaches that produces intelligible descriptions of social structure and process in relation to kinship. The fundamental assumption is that individual strategies play within, and to a certain extent (consciously) exploit, the structural particularities a kinship system provides. A heuristic tool is proposed from which such an analysis can be elaborated. The notion of 'consubstantiality' as a reflector of modes of 'relatedness-conception' is discussed, because such modes do exhibit interactionist processes while being framed within the structural precepts of the formal kinship system with its terminology and prescriptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights the significant role the anthropological perspective with its broad comparative outlook, and its focused ethnographic observations, can play in understanding historical processes in general, and the under-theorised processes of stasis and historical inertia in particular. It does so by engaging with the history of the white Australian family. It argues that the sense of radical shifts in the family is misplaced. Conceived of as a life trajectory, the nuclear family remains overwhelmingly dominant cognitively, culturally and normatively. The recent limited changes that have emerged largely in response to the increased cost of social reproduction, do not amount to an overwhelming shift, nor do they reflect major cultural or normative transformations. The continuities in the Australian family are consistent with the broad continuity in family practice in comparable metropolitan and settler European societies for well over a millennium. These continuities demand a historical explanation. The paper shows the inevitable conservative entailments of heterodox alternatives, and the conservative effects of the powerful cultural preconditioning of social agents' cognition. It also links the symbolic politics of family practice to the social politics of cultural and ideological production. More generally, the paper argues that stasis is no less historical, no less dynamic, and no less worthy of analysis and explanation, than are change and transformation; and, that stasis and transformation are not different processes, but rather intertwined facets of the always multi-faceted historical process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes an ethnographic journey into Italian-Australian cultural production through an examination of the Italian term for both the flavour and taste of herbs, aroma. Here, I explore the ways in which staple foods and their commensalities engender staple cultural production without necessarily overdetermining the culture produced. Taking the material indeterminacy of culture as a theoretical starting point, I argue that this is the reliable beauty of aroma as well as is its capacity to capture the realities of culture as lived experience. When culture is approached from this direction, stature is returned to ethnographic subjects as people living lives rather than as automatons of cultural form. From this vantage, a theoretical preoccupation with order and structure may be seen to hinder rather than enhance an apprehension of ethnographic fact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an anthropological exegesis on the Hare Krishna theology and practice of sankirtana-- a form of proselytisation in which devotees chant the Holy Names of the Lord through city streets and in other public places, and which can also involve other means of 'spreading the word'. This is also an inquiry into the relationship between anthropology and proselytism and their respective modes of communication, a topic I approach reflexively by addressing the awkward methodological question as to whether my writing about Hare Krishna proselytisation is itself a form of proselytisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one by Chris Gregory and Diane Austin-Bross who describe what they see as having been a retreat from economy by anthropologists over the last decades and another by Jon Altman and Deirdre McKay who challenge notions of standardisation of the economy from differing ethnographic and conceptual standpoints.

Anthropologists working at 'home' or in realms of the familiar often share a considerable sense of connection with participants. In these contexts, the researcher's potential position as an 'insider' offers particular opportunities for utilising self as a key resource. Through my own fieldwork at 'home' in Melbourne as an 'insider' among Bosnian migrants, I was confronted with the challenge Of using my self to understand others' experiences. In this paper I discuss the autoethnographic process and consider how its application enabled me to consciously understand my own experiences and utilise my experiential self to inform my study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I draw on ethnography I undertook amongst locals in the Cronulla area after the riot of December 2005. A number of the young beach goers I came across had been on a P&O 'schoolies cruise' at the time of the riot. For two weeks the students depended on the media for information about what was going on in their suburbs. Sailing back, I was told, a pumped-up chorus of 'Shi-ire!' and 'White Pride!' rang out over Sydney Heads, as expectations climbed high of the ship being met by gangs of Middle Eastern youths, ready for the fight. Back on the beach, months later, bodies baking in the sun try to reconcile the thought of riot with what they know about Australia, and Cronulla, as a place of laid back, leisurely, lazily tolerant people. How can the two scenes of bodily excess be brought together? What are the limits of the 'moral panic' idea, in relation to the Cronulla riot? How do the competing truths of major discourses on Cronulla misrepresent the community in question? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines some of the theoretical developments in cultural anthropology that have been particularly useful in elucidating human engagements with land and resources. It examines some of the meanings and values encoded in water by a range of water using groups along the Mitchell River in northern Queensland, and their diverse ideas of what constitutes environmental 'productivity'. Exploring some of the cultural and sub-cultural beliefs and practices within the catchment area, it considers how these intersect with ecological issues; social issues; and with local conflicts over the ownership, control and management of water. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Balinese society is undergoing rapid change, but remains discursively situated in a 'timeless' ethos of cultural tradition. This tension can be observed in relation to the cultural activities of the island's young people, particularly the young men. The staging of bazar (neighbourhood fundraising parties), the making of ogoh-ogoh (giant papier-mâché effigies to mark Nyepi, the Balinese New Year) and the competitive flying of oversize kites are--despite their sometimes contentious reception from older generations--popularly dubbed as 'traditional' expressions of Balinese youth culture. This recourse to tradition must be viewed in relation to two pervasive discourses: that of adat (customary law) and ajeg (a new protectionist ethos in the discourse on Balinese cultural identity). This paper argues that in contemporary urban Bali, male youth culture finds its most visible expressions in relation to the abiding standards of established public ritual and the equally abiding gender divisions that serve to guarantee the reproduction of 'traditional' social life. Rather than fighting aggressively against the grown-up norm, these expressions replicate the public culture of the adult world--while drawing on global and national youth styles--and strive towards the expression of a specifically 'Balinese' youth culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little has been written on the construction and projection of indigenous social identity in public ('non-restricted') ritual among Aboriginal Australians. Elsewhere, I have analysed nearly half a century of such public rituals (1946-1990) among the Warlpiri of Yuendumu in Central Australia, concentrating on the shifting forces of gender and kinship. This paper focuses on the key moments motivating senior Warlpiri women, since the 1990s, to reconfigure their ritual participation and roles in inter-indigenous ceremonial events. I analyse how these women participate in inter-Aboriginal performances, exhibiting the iconic and sensory virtues of the Dreaming and weaving new forms of political identity, shaped by the pressures of neo-colonialism, with female ambassadors of other Aboriginal groups. I argue that in this performative process women are reconfiguring the meanings of Aboriginalities and rearticulating their connectedness to one another, a connectedness rooted in their beliefs and responsibilities towards the Dreaming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'women's business' on Hindmarsh Island has had spectacular success although vital evidence had been kept secret 'in a sealed envelope'. This paper, drawing primarily on the author's own encounter with the native title claims procedure, discusses various formative processes involved in the contemporary construction of Aboriginal indigeneity in which religious belief is heavily valorised. Subjected to a process of rationalisation for a long time, religious traditions are now being used as a strategic resource in native title claims. In the endeavour to make best possible use of the jurisprudential opportunity offered, the maintenance of secrecy and cloaking of information emerges as an important strategy. Secrecy clearly is an integral part of traditional Aboriginal culture. However, cloaking in fact may not only privilege esoteric contents, but merge with attempts of deliberate deception. Yet, in itself this too might be considered an Aboriginal cultural tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Motu and the Hula, two south coast Papua New Guinea societies, are linguistically related, have similar social organisation and were economically linked before European colonisation. They were both introduced to Christianity by the London Missionary Society in the late 19th century, and each appeared to incorporate the new religion into their social life and thought quickly and unproblematically. More than a century later, however, generalities about the similar adoption of Christianity by the Mom and the Hula are no longer possible. Nor are generalities about the engagement with Christianity within one or the other group, as individual Motu and Hula villages have unique histories. In this regard, while Christianity has now arguably become part of putative tradition among the Motu, some Hula are experiencing conflict between Christianity and their sense of tradition. In particular, while in the Motu village of Pari Christian virtues are appealed to as part of Pari's conception of itself as a 'traditional' Motu village, the situation in the Hula village of Irupara is more or less the contrary. Many people in Irupara are now lamenting 'tradition' as something lost, a forgotten essence destroyed or replaced by Christianity. Based on fieldwork in both villages, this paper discusses some differences in their engagement with Christianity and compares contemporary perceptions of religion, tradition and identity in both societies, informing a commentary on notions of tradition and anthropological representations of the Melanesian experience of Christianity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent writing on the ethnogeography of Vanuatu has identified mobility and primordial connection as two counterpoised aspects of connection to place that have a long history in the archipelago. These themes are taken up in this paper in the specific case of north Ambrym, an island community in north-central Vanuatu in which the accidental geography of active volcanoes has fostered an equally active interest in making connections outside the island. In the post-contact period, Ambrymese were more mobile than many of their neighbours, as they recruited vigorously in a labour trade taking them to distant destinations and facilitating a fragmentation of the local population, already decimated by introduced disease. In addition, conversion of a large proportion of the population to Christianity brought local movement. The named domains, with their primordial connections to ancient sites replete with cosmo-mythic significance, were reconstituted as villages of one denomination or another, containing members of many different origin sites. Cash-cropping became characteristic of coastal, Christian settlements whose residents saw themselves as opposed to their 'heathen' neighbours. For the bush-folk, kastom was both symbolic of their identification with the past and their justification for exclusive access to its popular manifestations in the artefact trade, in the present. In the pre-Independence 1970s, local politics and pressure on productive resources including kastom, forced a radical re-emphasis on primordial connection at the expense of the more 'rhizomatic' attachments inside and outside domains, the boundaries of districts and even the island itself that had been, until then, more characteristic of Ambrymese place-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on research with Aboriginal people in the Victoria River District of Australia, this paper explores time in patterns of motion and pause. Taking Cath Ellis's insight that some Aboriginal musicians possess a faculty of 'perfect time', and that the meshing of rhythms and other patterns in music has the effect of altering perceptions and understandings of time, I explore rhythmic patterns in four domains--nomadology, ecology, dance and cosmology. I suggest that the cosmogonic and temporal effects of rhythm in motion are capable of becoming performative events because they link the rhythms of ecological, social and ritual domains. Such events implicate the ephemeral motion and temporality of the world in a continuing flow of becoming, and implicate the continuity of flow in the actions of the ephemeral. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Dark Anthropology' and its complementary 'Anthropology of the Good' have become influential and debated notions in anthropology in recent years. I here parse distinctive features of these emphases, address their relation to theory and to ethnography, and consider the stakes involved in concretely applying their conceptual designations. I discuss the general shift in anthropology from grand theory to key concept, and the topical delimitation of theory that results. In larger purview, Dark Anthropology and the Anthropology of the Good both have long theoretical genealogies as well as practical contexts of political and social understanding, including vis‐à‐vis recent events in the U.S. and elsewhere. I suggest that considering the relationship between politico‐economically structured inequality and attempts to assert positive meaning and purpose is the most productive way to ethnographically apply their alternative conceptualisations. This brings to greater focus the thorny question of whose understanding of inequality or suffering, or of moral value and positive wellbeing, is being articulated—the sentiments of the people studied, or the concepts of the analyst? It seems vital to examine both analytic and indigenous views of dark times, and of the good, to refine our understanding of both, that is, in order to consider our complementary conceptualisations in relation to both sides of the emic/etic coin. This refines our understanding of local sensibilities and also of the appropriate limit points of our own conceptual associations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will focus on perceptions about the health of tenants at an independent‐living residence for indigent elderly and disabled people. At this site tenants often resisted aid provided, which was a marked contrast to their caregiver's moral and legal imperative to help. This “caregiver's dilemma” will be explored within the shifting perspectives of older adults with low social and economic positions. In this diverse setting social workers engaged in caregiving practices to address social and economic inequalities. Ultimately, regulations designed to alleviate inequality created a framework to judge tenants on multiple fronts to foster and maintain their wellbeing. Under these conditions, interpretations of tenants’ behaviours toward care practices created boundaries with tensions embroiled in larger issues surrounding ethnic, linguistic, and social difference. By exploring these boundaries this research aims to address the growing complexity of affordable housing in the United States as the population‐at‐large continues to diversify. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses intergenerational relations and moral values among Karen communities in Thailand, Myanmar, Australia, Norway and the UK. We use a conceptual framework inspired by Christian anthropology and the notion of the “common good” to analyse how the practice of honouring the elderly is sustained by virtues of “acknowledged dependence” and “rational independence” (MacIntyre ). The article argues that honour of the elders in Karen communities is an intergenerational process. The younger's “acknowledged dependence” of the vulnerability of the elder results in respect and support enabling the elder's “rational independence”. In turn, this facilitates ongoing imparting of wisdom and socially valuable knowledge contributing to an effective social order; thus, the common good of their communities. Research processes of long‐term participant observation and more recent interviews revealed that honour and respect of older persons in diverse Karen communities across five countries remains a virtue valued by younger and older alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is based on my conviction that Australian ethnography's narrow purview and anthropology's theoretical limitations need exploring and explaining. While internationally the discipline developed new sites, new theoretical fields and new political ideas in the post-colonial era from around 1970, classicism continued to dominate research in Australia. New forms of Aboriginal social life and politics created by changing 'post-colonial' conditions largely escaped ethnographic attention, but anthropology was rescued from irrelevance with the emergence of opportunities to assist the courts and Aborigines with land retrievals. By examining selected ethnographies and exceptions to the discipline's main trajectory, I hope to encourage reflection and expansion so that the discipline might realise its potential as the most radical and critical of the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists have long attempted to come to grips with Indigenous Australian sorcery beliefs and especially with the idea that acts with no understandable efficacy bring about illness and death. In this ethnographic interpretation of sorcery beliefs in the remote community of Numbulwar, I follow those few who have attempted to find a link between these apparently harmless acts and real physiological consequences, arguing that the fear of sorcery that pervades Numbulwar contributes directly to the stress of daily life and indirectly to the premature morbidity and mortality of too many lives. Belief is posited as the mechanism whereby the human stress response is activated to a harmful extent, a process in which the projection of envious feelings may often be critical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theoretical orientation, encapsulated in the semi-serious concept of 'tooglies'of F.E. Williams, government anthropologist for the Territory of Papua in the inter-war period, is considered. His ideas about culture change are contrasted with those of Bronislaw Malinowski, who acted as his mentor at one time. His treatment of the social organisational anomaly of Sogeri Koiari 'sex affiliation', often cited as a case of parallel bilineal descent, is compared with Margaret Mead's analysis of the 'Mundugumor ropes', which is classed as the opposite, cross-sex bilineal descent. It is shown that Williams was able to get a clearer insight into this anomalous data than Mead and Fortune, and, on the whole, worked with an understanding of culture and Papuan social organisation that presages the relational approach of today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I draw from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2013 in San Pedro Cutud, a village located in the Philippine province of Pampanga. The focus is on the performance of the Via Crucis y Passion y Muerte, a passion play held there every year on Good Friday. Central to the play is the individual pursuit of panata, or divine pledge, by the cast of around forty actors, and particularly by the play's main protagonist: the Kristo, who is nailed to a cross in front of tens of thousands of spectators. In the first part, I describe how the cast engages in the production of a particular theatrical aesthetic that is coterminous with the embodied pursuit of their respective appeals for divine intervention. In the latter portion, I focus on the act of nailing as a context for the formation of intersubjective bonds of trust, or tiuala ya lub, between the Kristo, and his ritual associates. By describing how rituals of pain are premised upon the shareability and entrustedness of ritual agency, I situate the ethnographic data on passion rituals in relation to wider discussions about the anthropological turn to affect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Terms for affective constructs and references to social ideals proliferate in the ethnography of the Mekeo, but these are often inconsistently defined and treated in isolation. I here attempt to produce a more coherent account of relevant terms and, ultimately, a systematic representation of the ontologically disparate elements that combined to produce a viable socio-moral order in twentieth-century Mekeo village society. The exercise reveals unexpected synergies between seemingly unrelated dispositions and emotions, espoused values and enacted Using Bourdieu's concept of a 'generative model' (1990) I develop a schematic account that brings a gamut of diverse socio-moral constructs into semi-orderly alignment with the realities of a disorderly lifeworld. For a certain time at least, the socio-moral discourse and practices summarised in this schema successfully resolved the basic lived problem of the Mekeo lifeworld-the antinomy between a social structure based on inequality and the intransigence of a narcissistic and hubristic inner male self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropological accounts of Vanuatu's independence have emphasised both the materiality of land alienation and the importance of kastom (custom) as a symbol of cultural practice, political resistance and national unity in accounts of decolonisation and postcolonial nation-making. For 74 years indigenous ni-Vanuatu were stateless and lacked all forms of citizenship and nationality in the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides (1906-1980). This article situates anthropological accounts of land, kastom and the state in Vanuatu's transition to independence in relation to statelessness, citizenship and hierarchies of ethnographic authenticity within the geo-classificatory frameworks of colonial rule established by the condominium. The embodiment of citizenship and demands to end the cumulative humiliations of statelessness that ni-Vanuatu experienced in the condominium illuminate both tensions and continuities in idealist and materialist accounts of Melanesian nationalisms evident in kastom and land as they were mediated by the emancipatory claims and promises of postcolonial citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Public diplomacy' is a term increasingly used among policy makers and academics, yet its meaning is ambiguous and contested. Advocates proclaim it as a new approach to statecraft entailing a participatory approach of shared meaning-making between politicians and the public markedly different from the elitist, Machiavellian inter-governmental practices of traditional ('Westphalian') diplomacy. The European Union (EU) has embraced these ideals, proclaiming public diplomacy a cornerstone of European external relations policy. We examine these claims in the context of the EU's delegations to Australia and New Zealand. Using three ethnographic case studies, we highlight discrepancies between official discourses on public diplomacy and its practice. The participatory ideals of EU public diplomacy, we argue, are undermined by the EU's preoccupation with image and branding, public relations and marketing techniques, and continuing reliance on traditional 'backstage' methods of diplomacy. We conclude by outlining the implications of these paradoxes for both anthropological research and EU external relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A. P. Elkin, who had dominated Australian anthropology since his appointment to the Chair of Anthropology at the University of Sydney in 1934, was concerned that coinciding with his retirement in 1955 was the possibility of the demise of Aboriginal anthropology as the core of the Sydney department. He thus attempted to influence the University authorities in their selection of his chosen successor, Ronald Murray Berndt. Such a selection would ensure the continuance of the department as the pre-eminent authority on all matters to do with Aboriginal ethnography and affairs, and maintain its critical role in the formulation of policy with mission bodies and government. The other long-serving member of the department, H. Ian Hogbin, was equally determined to see this did not happen. Hogbin wanted an appointment of a scholar who was in no way connected to Elkin. This would address the problem, inadvertently, of changing the focus of the department and would open the possibility of a shift in theoretical orientation and renewal. This article examines the machinations of the protagonists, the selection process, the quality of the candidates and the role of the mostly British-based referees, especially the LSE-based anthropologists Raymond Firth and Isaac Schapera, in shaping and influencing the decision to appoint the Africanist J. A. Barnes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting with Arthur Smith's metaphor of the 'peephole method', this article explores the issues of ruralism and awkwardness which underlie much ethnographic fieldwork in rural China. In the first part, the continuing influence of ruralism-the idea that the Chinese countryside represents the 'real' China-is discussed. This idea is based on a radical conceptual separation of the countryside and the city, which denies modern everydayness to the countryside. If we accept that the modern everyday is now present in rural China and that ordinary people are aware of ruralism and its opposites (urbanism and modernity), we need to find research methods suitable to address the entanglement and the social uses of ruralist and modernist representations in everyday life. In the second part of the article, I argue that the 'reflective peephole method' could be such a method. Starting from the awkwardness I felt in my own fieldwork in south-western Hubei Province, I argue that the dilemmas of the 'peephole method' might be a good starting point for reflecting on the intensified ambiguity of moral discourse and action in contemporary rural China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oceania occupies an intriguing place within anthropology's genealogy. In the introduction to this collection of essays, we examine the role of the ethnography of Oceania in the development of our anthropological perspectives on materialisation, the dynamic process by which persons and things are inter-related. Building upon the recent resurgence of theoretical interests in things we use the term materialisation (rather than material culture or materiality) to capture the vitality of the lived processes by which ideas of objectivity and subjectivity, persons and things, minds and bodies are entangled. Taking a processual view, we advocate for an Oceanic anthropology that continues to engage with things on the ground; that asks what strategies communities use to materialise their social relations, desires and values; and that recognises how these processes remain important tools for understanding historical and contemporary Oceanic societies. Examining these locally articulated processes and forms contributes to a material (re)turn for anthropology that clarifies how we, as scholars, think about things more widely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The claim of most town whites that Aboriginal people of Wilcannia make art but have no culture and the claim by Aboriginal people of the town that their art work and art designs demonstrate their culture and cultural traditions opens up the powerful and productive dimensions of art and culture for closer scrutiny. In so doing, the ambivalence and ambiguity which saturates these categories is ethnographically revealed. How can the presence and production of artworks in Wilcannia and the white denial of culture be considered? Why indeed do these questions matter, in what ways do they matter, and to whom do they matter? How do the categories of traditional/remote, urban/settled and their avatars intersect with black and white notions of Aboriginal art and Aboriginal culture discursively and experientially? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'outside points of view' of Muslims, Indian Hindus, tourists and other non Balinese towards Balinese culture and religion are often invoked by Balinese religious leaders and urban intelligentsia. This has been described in the literature as 'defensiveness' related to the process of gaining state acceptance for Balinese religion as Hinduism. I argue for a more subtle reading of the importance of assumed outside points of view to transformations of Balinese practices and to the construction of Balinese identities, by analysing examples from fieldwork (2001-2003) and from Balinese media relating to current debates over cockfighting, the Balinese language, and Balinese religion. One must differentiate the importance of outside points of view to differently positioned Balinese, determine what specific practices are called into question by such assumed points of view, and clearly distinguish between the flow of cultural categories and concepts in a globalised world and the phenomenon of perceived interactions between religions and cultures. Furthermore, a wider cross-cultural perspective reveals the limitations of understanding these processes as uniquely postcolonial or postmodern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Stone Men of Malekula: Vao (1942), a text that was published more than twenty-five years after he carried out long-term fieldwork in Vanuatu, John Layard introduced a new technique for rendering kinship data in diagrammatic form. Inspired in part by Gregory Bateson, his 'circular technique' was derived from diagrams drawn up according to the genealogical method, and was designed to overcome certain structural problems identified within these. One important implication of the 'circular technique' that is not made explicit in Layard's analysis is a resonance with many of the idioms and metaphors that ni-Vanuatu evoke in talking about relationships of exchange and kinship. Where processes of birth, death, marriage and exchange are conceptualised in terms of a broad flow of departures and returns across discernible trajectories, images incorporating circles and spirals are utilised as key metaphors for understanding social relationships through space and time. Focusing on the Raga-speaking district of North Pentecost, Vanuatu, this article explores such idioms while presenting a revision of Layard's circular technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropology is a discipline based on the motif of the journey and 'the myth of the eternal return'. This is the journey out to the 'other' in order to return to constitute 'self', and this movement is a movement of desire. The desire is for wholeness, for self-presence, for a unified self. It is a desire for origins. And this desire is evident in anthropological practices as it is in myths and fairytales--all tell stories that speak of the desire for a separate, an original, self. Yet 'the myth of the eternal return' reveals that the enactment of the story is itself originating. The origin is not a thing to be hunted down and appropriated--it is no thing. Like the archetypes which flow through stories, it is alive in the telling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Criticizes the theorization of culture as difference that dominates Australian cultural studies and cultural anthropology. Review of related studies; Relationships between ethnography, experience and empathy; Relationship of ideology to culture.

Observes that recent theoretical developments in anthropology present a challenge to ethnography understood as a holistic study involved in the task of translation. Argument raised by Rolph Trouillot; Review of related studies; Issues surrounding postcolonial critique.