Vietnam’s Role in Understanding Settlement and Social Change in Mainland Southeast Asia from c. 5000 – 3500 BP.
Seminar
Vietnam’s Role in Understanding Settlement and Social Change in Mainland Southeast Asia from c. 5000 – 3500 BP. Vietnam possesses some of the best-preserved early 5th to mid- 3rd millennium BP archaeological sites anywhere in Southeast Asia. They are often deeply stratified open air settlements…
The Challenge of Sorcery
Seminar
In many small world, pre-state societies it is believed that many misfortunes are the result of malicious human agency, using occult techniques. Shit does not just happen. The aim of this paper is to persuade the audience that this is a puzzle for the human evolutionary sciences, that the standard…
How shopping centres and other modern public spaces transform human consciousness
Seminar
The study of shopping centres, or “malls”, is now an established subfield in anthropology and urban studies. Yet strangely, few (if any) of these studies have reflected on the etymology of the term shopping mall. Its origin appears to be related to the use of the term National Mall to refer to the…
The ‘three hearths’: Custom, religion and the state as colliding orders of time and space in Asmat, Indonesian Papua
Seminar
In Melanesia and Indonesia, socio-political life frequently centres around a tripartite relationship between custom, religion and state government. Building on the classic work of Kenelm Burridge, I analyse how tensions between these three institutional domains order the social fields of Asmat…
The genetic origins and impacts of historical Papuan migrations into Wallacea
Seminar
The Wallacean archipelago is a renowned hotspot for human linguistic and genetic diversity, testimony to a deep history that spans more than 50,000 years. Like their neighbours in Australia and New Guinea, the Indigenous peoples of Wallacea are thought to have remained isolated from outside groups…
The moral atmosphere of rule-dense elections: Creative relationality and forceful enforcement in Australian local politics
Seminar
Elections are governed by complex rules to ensure fair competition in a political field. Due to COVID-19, the 2021 New South Wales local government elections were subject to further regulations, widely considered as lacking logic and causing perverse consequences. The rules engendered no moral…
Kincentric political reform in Iceland after elite corruption
Seminar
This talk explores how kinship has been central to collective recovery after political crisis in Iceland. Revelations of elite corruption following the 2008 global financial crisis and more recent international whistleblower leaks have led to several government collapses and declining trust in…