Rosita Henry

Gifts of grief: performative ethnography and the revelatory potential of emotion

After participation in the funeral of a beloved friend in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, I was drawn to contemplate the revelatory potential of emotions such as grief. With reference to literature on the anthropology of emotions and the concept of empathy, I consider the relationship between ethnographic knowledge and deep emotional responses in the context of fieldwork. I argue that moments of intense emotional engagement, which many researchers record as having experienced during fieldwork, have the potential to lead to rich ethnographic understanding, particularly when such moments productively draw us into participatory cultural performances that help mediate the conceptual divide between meaning and feeling, observer and observed.

Ethnographic artifacts and value transformations

Transactions of ethnographic artifacts between Indigenous producers, European collectors, museums, and the state create and transform multiple notions of value. In this paper we discuss how an artifact’s value is generated and transformed through various transactions linked to the documentation and property claims made by scientific collectors, such as Eric Mjöberg, Herman Klaatsch, and Ursula McConnel. Such artifacts have now entered a new dynamic given Aboriginal claims for repatriation and other forms of reappropriation. We argue that the entanglement of artifacts in the property claims of the collectors, the producers (or their descendants), the granting bodies, and the public institutions, exposes artifacts to complex processes of value accretion and transformation.

Relations and products: dilemmas of reciprocity in fieldwork

The relationship between fieldworkers (anthropologists, archaeologists, linguists, historians) and people we have variously called research participants, informants, consultants, collaborators, teachers and friends, lies at the foundation of productive ethnographic research. While there is a plethora of publications on fieldwork methods and on the art of ethnographic writing, here we specifically focus on the products of field research, both tangible and intangible. In particular, we explore the nature and consequences of the exchanges that take place between researchers, their host communities and civil society. We argue that our research products play a crucial role not only in the relationships we develop through fieldwork but also take on a life of their own beyond the fields of their original production.

Connecting the Miles: Introduction

[Extract] The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology (TAPJA) is proud to celebrate the career of Douglas Miles, who pioneered Anthropological studies of Southeast Asia in Australia, through major fieldwork among the Ngadju Dayaks of Borneo (1959-60, 1961-63) and the Yao of Northern Thailand and Laos (1966-69, 1970, 1996-97).

‘A Tulip in Lotus Land’: History and Agency in Colonial Sri Lanka

The present paper considers the historical processes and human agency involved in the creation of a particular identity category, the Dutch Burghers of Sri Lanka, by reflecting upon Karl Marxs maxim that ‘People make their own histories, but not just as they please’. I pay homage to the guidance I received from my supervisor, Doug Miles, who enabled me to recognise that people are not so weighed down by colonial pasts that they cease to be creative agents in constituting their own life worlds and who encouraged me to analyse Dutch Burgher writings, published in the Journal of the Dutch Burgher Union, as cultural products and as material evidence of social agency.

Veiled commands: anthropological perspectives on directives

The great diversity of command strategies that can be found cross-linguistically provides rich comparative material for consideration by speech act theorists and other linguistic philosophers. Speech act theory has generated productive debates on how illocutionary acts such as commands are situated in context, and the relationship between speech action, power relations, politics, and diplomacy. This chapter concerns the way culturally specific strategies for authority, politeness, and diplomacy are encoded in how people deliver directives to others. The focus is on veiled commands, especially in the context of public speeches in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG), as they relate to egalitarian values and concepts of autonomy. While veiled commands are not able to be universally correlated with an egalitarian ethos, in any context the veiling of words is related to the human awareness of others and that the world we inhabit is always a social world.

Heritage transactions at the Festival of Pacific Arts

The Festival of Pacific Arts, hosted by a different Pacific Island state once every four years, is a prime site for the reproduction of the global discourse on heritage. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted at the festival, this paper focuses on how the concept of heritage is employed at the festival as both an instrument of statecraft and a tool for the assertion of grass-roots political and economic agency. We conclude that heritage in the context of the festival is a form of cultural practice involving relationships of power and inequality, expressed in transactions of ownership and value transformations that have become over determined by economic logic and the concept of property.

Double Displacement: Indigenous Australians and Artefacts of the Wet Tropics

The history of dispossession of Indigenous Australians as a result of government policies has been well documented. Going beyond this established literature, this paper explores connections between the displacement of Aboriginal people of the rainforest region of North Queensland to reserves and the ethnographic trade in museum artefacts. I provide an analysis of how Aboriginal people and some of their material products were historically sent along different trajectories. The paper sheds light on debates about the political and economic aspects of a history of displacement, circulation, and emplacement that continues to produce inequalities today.