Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place

English Studies in Canada, 2018

Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, 2021

A first way to research, understand, and place Indigenous people would be through using settler- generated records, classic sources in the social history of the colonised, of the poor, of the under- class. Using the tools of the social historian – census records, police records, property maps, and more – we shed light on the oppression and misery of the slum in which many Indigenous people lived and died: Kanaka Row, an area named for Kanaka (that is, Native Hawaiians) who were an important part of its population. In Kanaka Row we see a small enclave, a place under a police microscope, a slum of horrors hemmed in by colonial power.These sources and this method are powerful for showing how colonial relations of power shaped that place and emphasise the boundedness of a hemmed-in area. A second way to research, understand, and place the death of Kanaka Mary Opio’s is though the work of Critical Indigenous Studies, turning to the use of Indigenous language sources, and to genealogy. That methodology allows us to interrogate the categories that colonial states were placing on Indigenous people as surely as they were imposing geopolitical boundaries on them – and it allows us to see how Indigenous people frustrated both these categories and these geopolitical boundaries.These sources and this method place people in broader worlds.They leads us away from the study of just the individual (a profoundly Western optic) and toward the study of relationality and of kinship – of humans to humans, of humans to other-than-human people, and of humans to the land (Moreton-Robinson 2017; Rifkin 2011; Simpson 2014; Brooks 2018, Chang 2019; Dietrich 2017). It shows us how, through relationality, they exceeded and trans- gressed the categories and boundaries that settler colonial power imposed upon them.

Social Anthropology, 2009

This volume draws its inspiration from perspectives that have developed over the last few decades in media anthropology. These include seminal works such as Bourdieu’s (1993 ) analysis of cultural production, Larkin’s (2008 ) study of the impact of media technologies on cultural form and Ginsburg’s (1995a , 2002 ) work on indigenous media. Methodologically, the volume relies heavily on ethnography; each of the contributions is grounded in qualitative research. Most of the chapters are based upon data that their authors collected while doing long-term research. Typically, such research involves building up lasting relationships with one’s interlocutors, learning about their ideas, attitudes and practices by accompanying them in everyday life. Taken together, the various contributions explore how media that is made for audiences deemed indigenous is produced, shared, and viewed or ‘consumed’. The chapters explore the social and political impact of old and new media technologies and me...

Social Anthropology, 2022

A conventional book review of Stephen Muecke and Paddy Roe's experimental ethnography would miss the point of their imaginative prose. Th at point being: research creates non-representational kaleidoscopes of worlding, even if buttoned-up genres of academic prose pretend otherwise. Consider that proposition seriously before you embark on Muecke and Roe's writerly adventure down the Lurujarri Trail, which weaves its way through ochre landscapes, beige concepts and blue legalities. Each chapter of Th e Children's Country is recast as a narrative day on a week-long hike through Western Australia. But the trail that Muecke and Roe recreate is not a snow globe idyll. Rather, it is a fi cto-critical recomposition of the Lurujarri Trail, which Roe fi rst established to share his Aboriginal 'songlines' with Australian publics. Roe wanted to share these songlines (which are part landscape, part music and part dream) because he was concerned that extractivism would obliterate such practices of walking with Country. Th ese songlines, which hybridise nature and culture, are hard for cosmopolitan Moderns to grasp. Roe appreciated this modernist shortcoming, however, and designed the Lurujarri Trail as an embodied pedagogy to teach Moderns about Aboriginal dream-tracks. Taking the embodied pedagogy of this trail seriously, Th e Children's Country seems to ask: if this trail was a scholar, what book would it write? Muecke and Roe answer this question by writing performatively. Performative writing (which becomes steeped in its object, rather than desiccating its object) has become an established technique in the subfi eld of experimental ethnography. Th e Children's Country off ers an Australian spin on performative writing, deploying Muecke's characteristic 'fi cto-critical' style-a style which emerges as an oasis in the binary desert between fi ction and fact. Ficto-criticism encourages its reader to wonder where the story stops and the truth begins. It surprises because it does not use criticism to 'undermine' truth. Instead, it highlights that 'facts are always carried by stories' (p. xvi). It is as if Muecke and Roe composted fi ction and fact into an earthy storytelling aroma. Th e Children's Country performs these fi cto-critical experiments while simultaneously engaging transdisciplinary debates that are oft en called 'multispecies ethnography' or 'cosmopolitics'. Drawing on the concepts that have gained traction in such posthuman subfi elds, Muecke and Roe develop new approaches to These book reviews are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license as part of Berghahn Open Anthro, a subscribe-to-open model for APC-free open access made possible by the journal's subscribers. 150 BOOK REVIEWS networks and ontologies through phrases like 'modes of belonging' (p. 125). Th ey defi ne this phrase in contradistinction to Latourian modes of existence, which attend to what a network is, rather than what a network has. Moving beyond nuanced defi nition, Muecke and Roe also propose posthuman updates to classical concepts, such as totemism, by suggesting: 'Aboriginal "sciences" may have invented totemism as an extended multispecies kinship system' (p. 62). Th is multispecies update to totemism bolsters the accreditations of the Lurujarri Trail as a landscaped lecturer who teaches Moderns about the merits of Aboriginal governance. Totemism, in this view, is reconfi gured as a 'time-honoured system for ecological management' (p. 146) that incorporates 'non-humans into representative democracy' (pp. 51-52). Th is totemistic democracy emerges in contradistinction to the naturalistic government of Modern Australia. Muecke and Roe's fi cto-critical account of the Lurujarri Trail defl ects the cut-and-dry concepts of critique. But I am so well trained! Like a dog sniffi ng for stimulating aromas in a bed of roses, my critical instincts encounter curious scents when Th e Children's Country describes itself as a 'partisan text', which presents its 'case in the best possible light, to the point of avoiding counter-evidence' (p. xvii). Th is partisan approach is particularly well-illustrated when Muecke and Roe mention 'Indigenous sciences' (p. 86)-or what is frequently called TEK (Traditional Ecological Knowledge). A complex debate swirls around TEK. But Muecke and Roe seem to sidestep this complexity, perhaps because it provides evidence against the merits of Indigenous science. For example, while Muecke and Roe persuasively describe an incident in which Indigenous science locates endangered turtles more accurately than Western science, a review of the TEK literature turns up many anecdotes in which Indigenous peoples do not conform to the fi gure of the 'ecologically noble savage'. I suggest, then, that a partisan text is more persuasive if it confronts (rather than avoids) counter-evidence. Showing why common critiques of TEK do not apply to Australian Indigenous sciences would make it harder for the well-trained critic to pick up provoking scents in the green gardens of Th e Children's Country. While wandering along the Lurujarri Trail, with Muecke and Roe by your side, it may help to glance at the legal calendar in the appendix, treating it as a temporal map through a spell-binding literary landscape.

Cambridge Scholars, 2018

The volume invites the reader to join in the debate regarding subjectivity and self-reflection, as the means of understanding and engaging through story telling with the social and historical changes that currently take place in the world. It examines the symbiosis between anthropology and fiction. On the one hand, by looking at various ways in which the two field co-emerge in a fruitful manner, and, on the other, by re-examining their political, aesthetic, and social relevance to world history. Following the intellectual crisis of the 1970s, anthropology lost its ethnographic authority and vocation. However, because of this, the ethnographic scope has opened up, towards more subjective and self-reflexive forms of knowledge and representations, such as the crossing of the boundaries between autobiography and ethnographic writing. In addition to this, the volume returns to authorship, discussed in direct relation to readership and spectatorship, making a ground-breaking move towards the study of fictional texts and images as cultural, sociological, and political reflections of the time and place in which they were produced. In this way, the authors of the volume contribute to the widening of the ethnographic scope of contemporary anthropology. A number of the chapters were presented as papers in two conferences organised by the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, entitled "Arts and aesthetics in a globalising world" (2012), and at the University of Exeter, entitled "Symbiotic Anthropologies" (2015). Each chapter offers a unique method of working in the grey area between and beyond the categories of fiction and non-fiction, while creatively reflecting upon current methodological, ethical, and theoretical issues, in anthropology and cultural studies. This is an important book for undergraduate and post-graduate students of anthropology, cultural and media studies, art theory, and creative writing, as well as academic researchers in these fields. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introductory Note ...................................................................................................1 Towards an Anthropology of Fiction Michelangelo Paganopoulos Part I: Literature Chapter One...........................................................................................................20 Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology and the Rise of World Society Michelangelo Paganopoulos Chapter Two ..........................................................................................................47 A Bottle of Manchester United Chardonnay Keith Hart Chapter Three........................................................................................................73 Parallel Perspectives in Ethnography and Literature: Reflections from Assamese Literature Prarthana Saikia Chapter Four..........................................................................................................73 Beyond Ethnographic Surealism: Hauntology and Ethnography Carrie B. Clanton Chapter Five ..........................................................................................................97 The Working Day John Hutnyk Chapter Six ..........................................................................................................120 Multinational Banking Culture in India: Facts in Fiction Geetika Ranjan Chapter Seven .....................................................................................................130 Mario Lodi’s Educational Approach: Is this Relevant for Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century? Melania Calestani Part II: Film Chapter Eight.......................................................................................................146 Forest of Bliss: Un poème réaliste—On the Aesthetic Structure of a Poetical Documentarism Norbert M. Schmitz Chapter Nine........................................................................................................161 Notes from a Film: The Places from which We are Absent Marta Kucza Chapter Ten .........................................................................................................176 Sensorial Resonance as a Key Reading Tool into Migrants’ Experiences Monica Heintz Chapter Eleven....................................................................................................187 The Post-Socialist Aesthetics of Jia Zhang-ke and the DV Revolution Ishita Tiwary Chapter Twelve...................................................................................................196 Mapping the Rrise of Subversive Slave Consciousness in Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s The Last Supper Ira Sahasrabudhe Chapter Thirteen .................................................................................................210 The “Other” Within: Constructions of Disability in Popular Hindi Cinema Shubhangi Vaidya

Making Mockeries, Making Connections: The "Revolutionary Potential" of Parody in Contemporary Art & Literature, 2018

Parody has been a strategy within cultural production since the ancient Greeks: “paraodia” referred to a song sung alongside the main narrative thread of a dramatic work; the prefix “para-” also signifies “against.” In A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-century Art Forms, Linda Hutcheon offers this core definition: parody is “a form of repetition with ironic critical distance, marking difference rather than similarity … [with] tension between the potentially conservative effect of repetition and the potentially revolutionary impact of difference” (xii). This and other aspects of Hutcheon’s theory guide my interpretations of works by three contemporary artists working in Canada: Sybil Lamb’s novel I’ve Got a Time Bomb; Ursula Johnson’s (Mi’kmaq) three-part exhibition Mi’kwite’tmn (Do You Remember); and Kent Monkman’s (Cree and Irish) exhibition Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience. I argue that the presence of parodic elements in these artists’ works enables them to do two things: to claim spaces that enable recognition of their subject positions, and to critique an aspect of hegemonic norms in contemporary society. I read Lamb’s novel as a critique of the heteronormative gender binary via parody of the picaresque genre and of heteronormative discourse/language. Certain pieces in Monkman’s exhibition parody the epistemological and display strategies of traditional Eurocentric anthropological museums and archives, as can Johnson’s work; her sculptural-installations may also be read as parodying the traditions of Mi’kmaw basket-making. The work of both artists critiques colonial narratives that sought (and may still seek) to denigrate and/or erase Indigenous peoples; such narratives of cultural genocide were both tacitly and directly propagated by museums. I analyze these three artists’ works, considering key features of parody (ambiguity; irony and “double-voicedness”; trans-contextualization; and humour), and their effects (defamiliarization; ontological instability; complicity; and laughter). Parody challenges the post-structuralist emphasis on the “decoder,” (viewer/reader) reinstating the “encoder” (artist/author) as agent. Decoders recognize their complicity within the context of the hegemonic narrative, whether the heteronormative gender binary or colonialism, and may come to shift perception – as per Hutcheon’s “potentially revolutionary impact.”

(all lauded as master poets or novelists-the landmarks of literature), King Leopold II, the war in Vietnam, Nazi concentration camps-a strange conglomerate of writers, historical fi gures and facts; a suffocating labyrinth and the deadly 'tentacular' grip of modern civilization. One may wonder who or what connects them all. The answer may astound you: Cedric Watts' study of Heart of Darkness-or, to be more precise, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Watts expertly demonstrates how the tale encompasses all the major preoccupations of modern literature and, like a proleptic mirror, refl ects all the atrocities of twentieth-century civilization. First things fi rst. This is a second edition of Watts' 1977 monograph published by Mursia International of Milan and acclaimed by reviewers as "criticism of the highest order" and "an important book" (Watts xi). It has been republished in the outstanding series of "Conrad Studies" overseen by Allan H. Simmons and J.H. Stape and published by Rodopi. We have already had the pleasure of poring over such excellent scholarly studies as Richard Hand's Conrad's Victory. The Play and Reviews (2009) or Under Western Eyes. Centennial Essays edited by Allan H. Simmons and Jeremy Hawthorn. This volume is the seventh to appear. In a new preface written for this re-edition, Watts openly admits that the book has its shortcomings. Certain themes are not discussed-in particular allusions or issues connected with ethnicity, racism and gender that were later raised by Chinua Achebe, Elaine Showalter and Terry Eaglton (Watts x). However, the plethora of intertextual references that are meticulously analysed-together with the book's wealth of contextual information-is indeed very impressive. We must also bear in mind that the book was written in 1971, when critical views such as those of Achebe and Showalter were only just beginning to make themselves heard.