Roads, plantations and consultants: Road-building and multiple territorializations in Pomio, Papua New Guinea
Seminar
Pomio is a large, sparsely populated and remote rural district of East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG). Large parts of the district are not connected to the provincial road network and accessible only by ships or speedboats. Roads have thus been a central concern of local politicians…
The Cultural Macroevolution of Religion
Seminar
Religious systems show the key properties of evolutionary systems: heritability, variation, and change. Yet they have only recently begun to be studied from an explicitly evolutionary perspective. In this talk, I will describe research on the origins of organised religion in hunter-gatherer…
Anthropogenic transformation of an island landscape: 3,000 years of adaptation and resilience on Efate, Vanuatu
Lecture/seminar
Join the Canberra Archaeological Society and the ANU Centre for Archaeological Research on Friday the 22nd of May for a special National Archaeology Week public lecture, delivered by the ANU's own Professor Stuart Bedford!Anthropogenic transformation of an island landscape: 3,000 years of…
Eating Abuse: Caste, Class and the Figure of Labour
Seminar
This paper explores how workers negotiate a stigmatized social category known as “labour”. On the surface this category appears to be a socio-economic one, referring to one’s position in a division of labour, namely a worker who engages in a range of manual, “unskilled” tasks. Such an…
The Real and the Created in Ethnographic Film: An Ethnomusicologist’s Perspective
Lecture/seminar
Ethnographic filmmakers often struggle to balance the need to let people speak for themselves with the need to create a coherent presentation through their own creative hand. Ethnographic writers face similar challenges in choosing to approach their subjects through expository versus evocative…