Social theory after Strathern:An introduction

Taking its cue from the articles in this special issue, this introduction explores what value a critical engagement with Strathern’s work might have for the social sciences by setting such an engagement in motion. It argues that Strathern’s writings are a particularly fruitful starting point for reflecting on our assumptions about what exactly theory might be and how and where it may be made to travel. Through the juxtaposition of articles published in this special issue and Strathern’s writings on Melanesia it explores the theorization of power in the social sciences as one arena in which Strathernian strategies might be harnessed in order to reflect on and extend Euro-American concepts. It also takes Strathern’s own interest in gardening as a metaphoric base for generating novel topologies of subject and object, the particular and the general, and the concrete and the abstract. This introduction does not provide a primer for ‘Strathernian theory’. Instead it reviews some of the original strategies and techniques – differentiation, staging of analogy, surprise, bifurcation, the echo, and an unremitting focus on how we make our familiar categories of analysis known to ourselves – that Strathern has used to ‘garden’ her theory: it can be used, if you like, as a conceptual toolkit

Ethnographic Advocacy Against the Death Penalty

This article develops the concept of “ethnographic advocacy” to make sense of the humanizing, open‐ended knowledge practices involved in the defense of criminal defendants charged with capital murder. Drawing from anthropological fieldwork with well‐respected figures in the American capital defense bar, as well as my own professional experience as an investigator specializing in death penalty sentencing mitigation, I argue that effective advocacy for life occurs through qualitative knowledge practices that share notable methodological affinities with contemporary anthropological ethnography. The article concludes with a preliminary exploration of what the concept of ethnographic advocacy might reveal about academic anthropology\u27s own advocative engagements

Working out abjection in the Panapompom bêche-de-mer fishery: Race, economic change and the future in Papua New Guinea

This is the accepted version of the following article: Rollason, W. (2010), Working out abjection in the Panapompom bêche-de-mer fishery: Race, economic change and the future in Papua New Guinea. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 21: 149–170. doi: 10.1111/j.1757-6547.2010.00076.x, which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1757-6547.2010.00076.x/abstract.This is a paper about how men from Panapompom, an island in Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea (PNG), understand how they relate to white people and imagine the future. Until recently, men from Panapompom understood themselves to be engaged in a project of ‘development’, in which they would become more and more similar to white people. This was a desirable future. However, changes in the way Panapompom men work for money have resulted in a very different imagination of the future—one in which Panapompom people are not getting whiter, but blacker, and hence more and more excluded from the lives to which they aspire. Men now dive for bêche-de-mer, work which they regard as being particularly hard and dangerous. Diving has profound effects on the skin, blackening and hardening it, leading Panapompom men to liken themselves to the machines that create the wealth that white people use. These ‘mechanising’ effects that diving has on the black body lead men to see white people as the sole beneficiaries of the bêche-de-mer industry, and black people as mere tools or extensions. For bêche-de-mer divers, value and desired forms of life are lodged in Australia, Europe or America, while they find themselves excluded from this future by their growing blackness.ESR

What is ambiguous about ambiguous goods?

Ambiguous goods are not a category of things. No goods are ambiguous by default, not even digital virtual ones. Ambiguity may arise in many ways, but this article examines one specific process: ambiguity that occurs when entities appear as objects that blur category boundaries. Ambiguity is created around pre-existing categories through socio-material entanglements. This article explores how a central category in consumer capitalist societies-property-takes on ambiguous forms in distributions and recirculations of prestige items in the massively multi-player online role-playing game Final Fantasy XI. Prestige objects are powerful, sought-after armour and weapons acquired in the game world by completing difficult battlefields or tasks, often in large groups. When discussing these items, respondents are not confused actors trying to make sense of slippery things. Instead, they produce ambiguities around property by blurring distinctions between gifts and commodities. Blurred boundaries help resolve tensions arising from different orderings of people, relations and things. Hybridised property forms allow selective alienation of goods, allowing participants to privilege some relations and connections over others. With this article, I hope to spark further debate on building a conceptual toolkit to explore ambiguities, and contribute to increasing interest in non-dyadic gift relations in consumer culture research. 'Ambiguous goods' is not a viable category for thinking about things, people and relations or digital virtual objects. But ambiguity can be a useful way to think about how people and things-whether they are digital, virtual or neither-are related. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

We are playing football: Seeing the game on Panapompom, PNG

© Royal Anthropological Institute 2011.This article is about football, played by men from Panapompom in Papua New Guinea's Milne Bay province. Football is problematic not because it is culturally appropriated or modified, but rather because Panapompom desired accurately to reproduce the appearance of the international game. As such it questions conventional frames of reference. An interpretation in terms of culture obscures Panapompom interests in football: its globally recognizable character. It mattered profoundly that Panapompom people played football. Yet framing football as a universal sporting institution is equally inadequate, erasing the specific political project that was embedded in the game. Displacing the interpretative framings, I argue that football itself provides a context in which Panapompom people can judge themselves in relation to others, who are defined in terms of colonial and postcolonial discourses on ‘development’. Taking football as a contextualizing image, Panapompom people appear in distinctive ways in the field of relationships that it defines.ESR

Jizz and the joy of pattern recognition:virtuosity, discipline and the agency of insight in UK naturalists’ arts of seeing

Approaches to visual skilling from anthropology and STS have tended to highlight the forces of discipline and control in understanding how shared visual accounts of the world are created in the face of potential differences brought about by multi-sensorial perception. Drawing upon a range of observational and interview material from an immersion in naturalist training and biological recording activities between 2003 and 2009, I focus upon jizz, a distinct form of gestalt perception much coveted by naturalist communities in the UK. Jizz is described as a tacit and embodied way of seeing that instantaneously reveals the identity of a species, relying upon but simultaneously suspending the arduous and meticulous study of an organism’s diagnostic characteristics. I explore the potential and limitations of jizz to allow for both visual precision and an enchanted and varied form of encounter with nature. In so doing, I explore how the specific characteristics of wild, intangible and irreverent virtuoso performance work closely together with disciplining taxonomic standards. As such, discipline and irreverence work together, are mutually enabling, and allow for an accommodation rather than a segregation of potential difference brought about by perceptual variety

To be Makiran is to see like Mr Parrot: the anthropology of wonder in Solomon Islands

This article lays out a general thesis for the development of a comparative ethnographic approach to the anthropology of wonder. It suggests that wonder is both an index and a mode of challenge to existing ontological premises. Through analytical engagement with the theme of wonder in Western philosophy and the anthropology of ontology, it extends this thesis to include the corollary that different ontological premises give rise to different wonders. Ethnographically, the article supports these claims via analysis of wonder discourses among the Arosi of Solomon Islands. These discourses, it is argued, both respond to and promote ontological transformations in a context where the premises at stake are neither those of the Cartesian dualism commonly ascribed to modernity nor of the relational non-dualism commonly ascribe to anthropology’s ethnographic ‘others’, but of a non-Cartesian pluralism termed poly-ontology

Reflecting on loss in Papua New Guinea

This article takes up the conundrum of conducting anthropological fieldwork with people who claim that they have 'lost their culture,' as is the case with Suau people in the Massim region of Papua New Guinea. But rather than claiming culture loss as a process of dispossession, Suau claim it as a consequence of their own attempts to engage with colonial interests. Suau appear to have responded to missionization and their close proximity to the colonial-era capital by jettisoning many of the practices characteristic of Massim societies, now identified as 'kastom.' The rejection of kastom in order to facilitate their relations with Europeans during colonialism, followed by the mourning for kastom after independence, both invite consideration of a kind of reflexivity that requires action based on the presumed perspective of another