- Department of Anthropology, NHB 112
National Museum of Natural History
Smithsonian Institution
PO Box 37012
Washington, DC 20013-7012
USA
Joshua A. Bell
Smithsonian Institution, Anthropology, Faculty Member
- American Museum of Natural History, Anthropology, Department MemberThe George Washington University, Anthropology, AdjunctInternational Center for Language Revitalization, Auckalnd University of Technology, School of Languages, Department Memberadd
- Pacific Island Studies, Cultures of Oceania, Environmental Anthropology, Materiality (Anthropology), Historical Anthropology, Visual Anthropology, and 38 moreAnthropology, Anthropology of Media, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology Of Art, Ecological Anthropology, Museum Anthropology, Anthropology of Knowledge, Anthropology Of Consumption, Anthropology of the Senses, De-industrialization (Anthropology), Papua New Guinea, Forestry, History, Materiality, Photography, Theory, Oceania (Anthropology), Documents, Papua New Guinea (Pacific Islands art), Colonial history of Papua New Guinea, Polynesian ethnology, F.E. Williams, Purari Delta, Papuan Gulf, Iconoclasm, Iconoclastic Controversy and Iconophilia, Repair and Maintenance, Infrastructure, Technology, Mobile Technology, Chaîne Opératoire, Media Ideologies, Urban Mining, Micronesia, Mobile Phones, Repair, Anthropology of Work, and Mimesisedit
- Combining ethnographic fieldwork with research in museums and archives, my work broadly examines the shifting local a... moreCombining ethnographic fieldwork with research in museums and archives, my work broadly examines the shifting local and global network of relationships between persons, artefacts and the environment. I am interested in materiality, the politics of representation, transforming political economies and ecologies, as well as issues around the production and understanding of history. To date these interests have involved me in fieldwork since 2000 with communities in the Purari Delta, a ecologically diverse tidal estuary on Papua New Guinea’s south coast. Examining the social, economic and environmental transformations in the wake of regional resource extraction, I am collaborating with I'ai/Iare speaking communities to document aspects of their heritage and traditions. In the Pacific, I have also carried out shorter work in the Aitape region on Papua New Guinea’s north coast (2000) and in O’ahu, Hawai’i (1998). These experiences are complemented with on-going archival and museum-based research in Australia, Papua New Guinea, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
My curatorial responsibilities at the National Museum of Natural History involve the Pacific collections, particularly those from Melanesia (New Caledonia, New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu). I am actively involved in NMNH’s Recovering Voices initiative (http://recoveringvoices.si.edu/), which is marshaling the museum's century and half years of collections to help community's sustain their endangered language and knowledge traditions.
At NMNH, I am carrying out two related collections based projects. The first, The Sweetness of the Stone-Age, examines the narratives found in, and around, the dispersed collections made during the 1928 United States Department of Agriculture's Sugarcane Expedition to New Guinea. The second project, Melanesian Networks, is a survey of NMNH's Melanesian collections (New Caledonia, New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanatau) to tease out the professional and personal relations, and histories, found in the Smithsonian's collections.
Since 2011, I have begun a new project which is a collaboration with Joel Kuipers (George Washington University) to examine ethnographically the extraordinary intimate and global relations materialized in cell phones. To date we have conducted survey and interview work in the DC Metro region about the meanings and uses of cell phones across different communities, have been conducting ethnography on cell phone repair, and carried out research on and with DC Metro high school students.edit
This is a book presents assistant government anthropologist F.E. Williams' 96 photographs as well as maps and drawings made during his fieldwork in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea in 1922. With text and captions in I'ai and English... more
This is a book presents assistant government anthropologist F.E. Williams' 96 photographs as well as maps and drawings made during his fieldwork in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea in 1922. With text and captions in I'ai and English the book was designed to present the region's past cultural heritage traditions anew, and was aimed to help supplement elementary school teaching.
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Linguistic and Material Intimacies of Cell Phones offers a detailed ethnographic and anthropological examination of the social, cultural, linguistic and material aspects of cell phones. With contributions from an international range of... more
Linguistic and Material Intimacies of Cell Phones offers a detailed ethnographic and anthropological examination of the social, cultural, linguistic and material aspects of cell phones. With contributions from an international range of established and emerging scholars, this is a truly global collection with rural and urban examples from communities across the Global North and South. Linking the use of cell phones to contemporary discussions about representation, mediation and subjectivity, the book investigates how this increasingly ubiquitous technology challenges the boundaries of privacy and selfhood, raising new questions about how we communicate.
Research Interests: Technology, Media Studies, Languages and Linguistics, Pacific Island Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, and 18 moreMobile Technology, Africa, Australia, Haiti, Cell Phones, Social Media, Brazil, Materiality (Anthropology), Oceania (Anthropology), Democratic Republic of Congo, Repair and Maintenance, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Norway, Mobile Money, United States, South America, and Cellphone
In the West at the turn of the twentieth century, public understanding of science and the world was shaped in part by expeditions to Asia, North America, and the Pacific. The Anthropology of Expeditions draws together contributions from... more
In the West at the turn of the twentieth century, public understanding of science and the world was shaped in part by expeditions to Asia, North America, and the Pacific. The Anthropology of Expeditions draws together contributions from anthropologists and historians of science to explore the role of these journeys in natural history and anthropology between approximately 1890 and 1930. By examining collected materials as well as museum and archive records, the contributors to this volume shed light on the complex social life and intimate work practices of the researchers involved in these expeditions. At the same time, the contributors also demonstrate the methodological challenges and rewards of studying these legacies and provide new insights for the history of collecting, history of anthropology, and histories of expeditions. Offering fascinating insights into the nature of expeditions and the human relationships that shaped them, The Anthropology of Expeditions sets a new standard for the field.
Research Interests: Botany, Asian Studies, Photography, Cultural Heritage, Pacific Island Studies, and 23 moreTibetan Studies, History of Science, History of Social Sciences, History of Anthropology, History of Museums, China, History of Collections, Materiality (Anthropology), Papua New Guinea, Collecting and Collections, Burma Studies, Digital Anthropology, Pacific History, India, American Museum of Natural History, Natural history collections, Biography of Objects, Natural History Dioramas, History of Botany, Scientific Expeditions, North American Studies, Expedition, and National Museum of Natural History (NMNH)
The tropical forests of Oceania are an enduring source of concern for indigenous communities, for the migrants who move to them, for the states that encompass them within their borders, for the multilateral institutions and aid agencies,... more
The tropical forests of Oceania are an enduring source of concern for indigenous communities, for the migrants who move to them, for the states that encompass them within their borders, for the multilateral institutions and aid agencies, and for the non-governmental organisations that focus on their conservation. Grounded in the perspective of political ecology, contributors to this volume approach forests as socially alive spaces produced by a confluence of local histories and global circulations. In doing so, they collectively explore the multiple ways in which these forests come into view and therefore into being. Exploring the local dynamics within and around these forests provides an insight into regional issues that have global resonance. Intertwined as they are with cosmological beliefs and livelihoods, as sites of biodiversity and Western desire, these forests have been and are still being transformed by the interaction of foreign and local entities. Focusing on case studies from Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and the Gambier Islands, this volume brings new perspectives on how Pacific Islanders continue to creatively engage with the various processes at play in and around their forests.
Research Interests: Political Economy, Globalization, Cultural Heritage, Pacific Island Studies, Political Ecology, and 9 moreEnvironmental History, Indigenous Knowledge, Materiality (Anthropology), Forest Ecology, Oceania (Anthropology), Papua New Guinea, Political Ecology (Anthropology), Solomon Islands, and Tropical Forest Ecology
Recreating First Contact explores themes related to the proliferation of adventure travel which emerged during the early twentieth century and that were legitimized by their associations with popular views of anthropology. During this... more
Recreating First Contact explores themes related to the proliferation of adventure travel which emerged during the early twentieth century and that were legitimized by their associations with popular views of anthropology. During this period, new transport and recording technologies, particularly the airplane and automobile and small, portable, still and motion-picture cameras, were utilized by a variety of expeditions to document the last untouched places of the globe and bring them home to eager audiences. These expeditions were frequently presented as first contact encounters and enchanted popular imagination. The various narratives encoded in the articles, books, films, exhibitions and lecture tours that these expeditions generated fed into pre-existing stereotypes about racial and technological difference, and helped to create them anew in popular culture. Through an unpacking of expeditions and their popular wakes, the essays (12 chapters, a preface, introduction and afterward) trace the complex but obscured relationships between anthropology, adventure travel and the cinematic imagination that the 1920s and 1930s engendered and how their myths have endured. The book further explores the effects - both positive and negative - of such expeditions on the discipline of anthropology itself. However, in doing so, this volume examines these impacts from a variety of national perspectives and thus through these different vantage points creates a more nuanced perspective on how expeditions were at once a global phenomenon but also culturally ordered.
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Echoing Koyptoff's call for a biography of a cell phone, with a mind to Tsing's call to examine supply chain capitalism, the articles in this special issue are organized to reveal different aspects of the devices construction and use.... more
Echoing Koyptoff's call for a biography of a cell phone, with a mind to Tsing's call to examine supply chain capitalism, the articles in this special issue are organized to reveal different aspects of the devices construction and use. While the first two articles (Hockenberry, Mantz) bring origins, labor, and supply chains into view, the second two (Taylor and Horst, Dent) examine the different subjectivities and infrastructures that emerge from the integration and use of cell phones. The final piece (Bell et al.) examines the end (or resurrection) of life of these devices through a focus on repair.
Research Interests: Information Technology, Political Economy, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Mobile Technology, Haiti, and 11 moreCell Phones, Social Media, Brazil, Materiality (Anthropology), Political Ecology (Anthropology), Democratic Republic of Congo, Repair and Maintenance, Iphones, Impact of cell phones, Coltán, and Cell Phone Cloning
Special issue of Culture Theory and Critique which interrogates the notion of the 'newness' of new media. Includes the following articles: Text Messaging in Tok Pisin: Etymologies and Orthographies in Cosmopolitan Papua New Guinea... more
Special issue of Culture Theory and Critique which interrogates the notion of the 'newness' of new media. Includes the following articles:
Text Messaging in Tok Pisin: Etymologies and Orthographies in Cosmopolitan Papua New Guinea (Courtney Handman); What They Said (She Said) I Said: Attribution and Expertise in Digital Circulation
(Kathryn Graber); Back to the Future: Warlpiri Encounters with Drawings, Country and Others in the Digital Age (Melinda Hinkson); Tricks, Lies, and Mobile Phones: ‘Phone Friend’ Stories in Papua New Guinea (Barbara Andersen); Mobail: Moral Ambivalence and the Domestication of Mobile Telephones in Peri-Urban Papua New Guinea
(David Lipset); The Jolt of the New: Making Video Art in Arnhem Land
(Jennifer Deger); Intimacy and Self-Abstraction: Radio as New Media in Aboriginal Australia (Daniel Fisher)
Text Messaging in Tok Pisin: Etymologies and Orthographies in Cosmopolitan Papua New Guinea (Courtney Handman); What They Said (She Said) I Said: Attribution and Expertise in Digital Circulation
(Kathryn Graber); Back to the Future: Warlpiri Encounters with Drawings, Country and Others in the Digital Age (Melinda Hinkson); Tricks, Lies, and Mobile Phones: ‘Phone Friend’ Stories in Papua New Guinea (Barbara Andersen); Mobail: Moral Ambivalence and the Domestication of Mobile Telephones in Peri-Urban Papua New Guinea
(David Lipset); The Jolt of the New: Making Video Art in Arnhem Land
(Jennifer Deger); Intimacy and Self-Abstraction: Radio as New Media in Aboriginal Australia (Daniel Fisher)
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This double issue of Museum Anthropology Review collects papers originally presented at a January 2012 workshop titled “After the Return: Digital Repatriation and the Circulation of Indigenous Knowledge.” Hosted by the National Museum of... more
This double issue of Museum Anthropology Review collects papers originally presented at a January 2012 workshop titled “After the Return: Digital Repatriation and the Circulation of Indigenous Knowledge.” Hosted by the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution and funded by the (U.S.) National Science Foundation and the Understanding the American Experience and Valuing World Cultures Consortia of the Smithsonian Institution, the workshop was organized by Kimberly Christen (Washington State University), Joshua Bell (Smithsonian Institution), and Mark Turin (Yale University). The workshop brought together scholars from diverse anthropological fields, indigenous communities, and collecting institutions to document best practices and case studies of digital repatriation in order to theorize the broad impacts of such processes in relation to: linguistic revitalization of endangered languages, cultural revitalization of traditional practices, and the creation of new knowledge stemming from the return of digitized material culture. Like the workshop itself, the peer-reviewed and revised papers collected here ask how, and if, marginalized communities can reinvigorate their local knowledge practices, languages, and cultural products through the reuse of digitally repatriated materials and distributed technologies. The authors of the collected papers all have expertise in applied digital repatriation projects and share theoretical concerns that locate knowledge creation within both culturally specific dynamics and technological applications.
Research Interests: Native American Studies, Music, Indigenous Studies, New Media, Intellectual Property, and 26 moreDigital Humanities, Languages and Linguistics, Film Studies, Cultural Heritage, Material Culture Studies, Film Music And Sound, Arctic Social Science, Digital Media, South Asia, Endangered Languages, Digital Culture, Archives, Indigenous Knowledge, Digital Preservation, Materiality (Anthropology), Museums and Identity, Digital Archives, Papua New Guinea, Digital Anthropology, Knowledge, Descriptive Linguistics, Language Documentation, Indigenous Languages, Sociolinguistics, Field Linguistics, Cherokee Studies, Indigenous Cultural Revitalization, Tlingit Indians, Smithsonian, and Zuni Pueblo
Special issue of TAJA including the following pieces: 1. Bell, Joshua A. and Gesimar, Haidy. 2009 Materialising Oceania: New ethnographies of things in Melanesia and Polynesia (pages 3–27) 2. Bell, Joshua A. 2009. Documenting... more
Special issue of TAJA including the following pieces:
1. Bell, Joshua A. and Gesimar, Haidy. 2009 Materialising Oceania: New ethnographies of things in Melanesia and Polynesia (pages 3–27)
2. Bell, Joshua A. 2009. Documenting discontent: Struggles for recognition in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea (pages 28–47)
3. Geismar, Haidy 2009. The Photograph and the Malanggan: Rethinking images on Malakula, Vanuatu (pages 48–73)
4. Bonshek, Elizabeth 2009. A personal narrative of particular things: Tevau (feather money) from Santa Cruz, Solomon Islands (pages 74–92)
5. Coupaye, Ludovic 2009. What’s the matter with technology? Long (and short) yams, materialisation and technology in Nyamikum village, Maprik district, Papua New Guinea (pages 93–111)
6. Baker, Jade Tangiāhua 2009. Te Kupenga: Re-casting entangled networks (pages 112–130)
7. Wonu Veys, Fanny 2009. Materialising the king: The royal funeral of King Tāufa`āhau Tupou IV of Tonga (pages 131–149)
1. Bell, Joshua A. and Gesimar, Haidy. 2009 Materialising Oceania: New ethnographies of things in Melanesia and Polynesia (pages 3–27)
2. Bell, Joshua A. 2009. Documenting discontent: Struggles for recognition in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea (pages 28–47)
3. Geismar, Haidy 2009. The Photograph and the Malanggan: Rethinking images on Malakula, Vanuatu (pages 48–73)
4. Bonshek, Elizabeth 2009. A personal narrative of particular things: Tevau (feather money) from Santa Cruz, Solomon Islands (pages 74–92)
5. Coupaye, Ludovic 2009. What’s the matter with technology? Long (and short) yams, materialisation and technology in Nyamikum village, Maprik district, Papua New Guinea (pages 93–111)
6. Baker, Jade Tangiāhua 2009. Te Kupenga: Re-casting entangled networks (pages 112–130)
7. Wonu Veys, Fanny 2009. Materialising the king: The royal funeral of King Tāufa`āhau Tupou IV of Tonga (pages 131–149)
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This afterword to the special issue “Materiality, Belonging, and the Activation of Difference” begins and ends with Kim TallBear's notion of kin-making as a frame for understanding the relations between objects, peoples, places, heritage... more
This afterword to the special issue “Materiality, Belonging, and the Activation of Difference” begins and ends with Kim TallBear's notion of kin-making as a frame for understanding the relations between objects, peoples, places, heritage regimes, and museums that allows us to keep different ontological perspectives in view. More specifically, “making kin” allows us to unsettle still-dominant settler-colonial violence with an idiom of mutual obligation.
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During the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Walter Benjamin and Charles-Marie Gustave LeBon must have been rolling in their graves. The first predicted how an individuating shift in reproductive circulation—indexed these... more
During the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Walter Benjamin and Charles-Marie Gustave LeBon must have been rolling in their graves. The first predicted how an individuating shift in reproductive circulation—indexed these days by cellular telephony and social media—could prefigure fascism (W. Benjamin 1986). The second anticipated the loss of accountability that emerged from the Make America Great Again mob when it smashed the Capitol and murdered its protectors to overturn democracy (Le Bon 1897). Mobile technology is often blamed for both phenomena. Here we suggest disentangling media effects by focusing on the way that multiple potentialities hover over all cellular phone use. These diverse instantiations of cellular phone use play out in particular ways in mobs, where sounds and images not only capture the event, but become part of its enactment.
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Anthropology has always involved collections and collecting. Collections helped gave rise to the discipline’s formation and were integral to theoretical perspectives rooted in hierarchies of race and technology in the 19th century. With... more
Anthropology has always involved collections and collecting. Collections helped gave rise to the discipline’s formation and were integral to theoretical perspectives rooted in hierarchies of race and technology in the 19th century. With the disavowal of these perspectives, collecting and collections remained an ongoing but unacknowledged activity. The material (re)turn in the 1980s brought anthropology’s material legacies under renewed scrutiny by repositioning objects as having histories and agency. Ethnographies of collecting have helped reveal the collaborations that were, and are, critical to anthropological knowledge but are too often obscured. Collaborations with indigenous communities around collections are helping correct the discipline’s asymmetry by challenging anthropological categories and authority. In the process, experimental ethnographies through digital and non-digital means are demonstrating that collections are profoundly relational. This relational perspective is helping to chart new directions for work in museums and for the wider discipline.
Research Interests: Museum Studies, Cultural Heritage, Social and Cultural Anthropology, History of Science, Collaboration, and 12 moreMuseum Anthropology, Materiality (Anthropology), Collecting and Collections, Cultural Anthropology, Material Culture, Museums, History of Collecting, Torres Strait, A.C. Haddon, Museum Collections (Research), Smithsonian, and National Museum of Natural History (NMNH)
Scientific collections are crucial to understanding the biological and cultural diversity of the Earth. Anthropological collections document the human experience and the interactions between people, ecosystems, and organisms.... more
Scientific collections are crucial to understanding the biological and cultural diversity of the Earth. Anthropological collections document the human experience and the interactions between people, ecosystems, and organisms. Unfortunately, anthropological collections are often poorly known by the public and face a variety of threats to their permanent care and conservation.
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Years of resource extraction by multinational corporations have transformed the Purari Delta into a resource frontier where communities’ desires, subjectivities and histories are being unevenly reconfigured. Focusing on the struggles of... more
Years of resource extraction by multinational corporations have transformed the Purari Delta into a resource frontier where communities’ desires, subjectivities and histories are being unevenly reconfigured. Focusing on the struggles of I'ai communities for recognition by the Papua New Guinean government as traditional resource owners, I examine how, in the wake of the destruction of regional archives and the perceived inaccessibility of PNG's National Archives, men are marshalling new assemblages of evidence: written ancestral histories, heirloom objects, found images and maps. I explore how I'ai men are strategically deploying these materials to actualise their utopian dreams of recognition.
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A reflection on the work of the artist Camille Henrot, as it relates to Oceania.
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Interview carried out for Practicing Anthropology in which I reflect on the role of curators, the capacity of museums to work with and for communities by connecting them to collections.
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With over 6 billion handsets in use, cell phones are one of the most iconic technologies of the current era. An interdisciplinary ethnographic and linguistic study currently underway at GWU and the Smithsonian is investigating how these... more
With over 6 billion handsets in use, cell phones are one of the most iconic technologies of the current era. An interdisciplinary ethnographic and linguistic study currently underway at GWU and the Smithsonian is investigating how these devices are used among so-called millennials in the DC area. By focusing on contexts of repair--both material repair of actual devices and verbal repair of dropped or misunderstood connections--we are examining the implications of this media technology for communicative and social relationships. The lecture will describe the project, some of its proposed theoretical and ethnographic implications, and provide some preliminary examples.
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As a topic, repatriation has ignited debates for years amongst scholars, local communities, and collecting institutions. The digital age has intensified and changed these discussions in ways that are sometimes unpredictable. One such... more
As a topic, repatriation has ignited debates for years amongst scholars, local communities, and collecting institutions. The digital age has intensified and changed these discussions in ways that are sometimes unpredictable. One such shift is away from legal definitions and assumptions about repatriation to more inclusive notions of digital return and community stewardship. There are ever more stakeholders involved in the circulation of culture, often collaborating in innovative ways to manage, preserve, use and re-use digitally returned materials in mutually beneficial and meaningful ways. The articles in this special issue explore this critical field and extend the emerging discussion.
Research Interests: Native American Studies, Music, Technology, Indigenous or Aboriginal Studies, New Media, and 35 moreIntellectual Property, Film Studies, Cultural Heritage, Material Culture Studies, Film Music And Sound, Digital Media, Experimental Media Arts, Collaboration, Cultural Heritage Conservation, Endangered Languages, Digital Culture, Digitization, Archives, Copyright, Indigenous Knowledge, Materiality (Anthropology), Museums and Identity, Digital Archives, Collaboration Technology, Digital Copyright, Cultural Heritage Management, Repatriation (Archaeology), Material Culture, Cultural Repatriation, Museums, Digitization and the Music Industry, Canada, Descriptive Linguistics, Language Documentation, Indigenous Languages, Sociolinguistics, Field Linguistics, Digital Anthropologies, Community-Engaged Scholarship, Cherokee Studies, IPR, Smithsonian, Digital Repatriation, and Zuni Pueblo
When scholars of media attend to the material and historical particularities of media, many recognise that ‘newness’ is not a self-evident social category (see Marvin 1988; Gitelman 2006; Gitelman and Pingree 2003; Peters 1999; Larkin... more
When scholars of media attend to the material and historical particularities of media, many recognise that ‘newness’ is not a self-evident social category (see Marvin 1988; Gitelman 2006; Gitelman and Pingree 2003; Peters 1999; Larkin 2008; Ginsburg et al. 2002). Instead, they explore how people on the ground interpret and make use of the newness of their media. In the process these scholars have shed light on how people discuss and experience their changing social contexts through their engagement with these different forms. Studying the newness of new media involves understanding people as social analysts in their own right, and exploring how they think about communication and change. Today the media technologies that are understood as new – the Internet, mobile phones and social networking sites – provide another venue for innovation and continuity, as well as a means to reflect on how newness is constituted. In this special issue, the authors explore how the ‘newness’ of new media is experienced by people outside of the Global North, ranging from how communities have and are responding to the introduction of writing to the introduction of mobile phones and social networking sites.
To understand how newness is constructed, the authors in this issue were guided by three types of intellectual investments: a focus on history, on media ecologies and on media ideologies.
To understand how newness is constructed, the authors in this issue were guided by three types of intellectual investments: a focus on history, on media ecologies and on media ideologies.
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This piece is a report about a workshop entitled, “After the Return: Digital Repatriation and the Circulation of Indigenous Knowledge", held at the National Museum of Natural History in January 18-21, 2012. More information can be... more
This piece is a report about a workshop entitled, “After the Return: Digital Repatriation and the Circulation of Indigenous Knowledge", held at the National Museum of Natural History in January 18-21, 2012.
More information can be found here: http://digitalreturn.wsu.edu/workshop/
More information can be found here: http://digitalreturn.wsu.edu/workshop/
Research Interests: Indigenous Studies, Digital Humanities, Cultural Heritage, Endangered Languages, Museum Anthropology, and 9 moreDigital Culture, Indigenous Knowledge, Papua New Guinea, Cultural Repatriation, First Nations of Canada, Native North American Ethnography, India, Smithsonian Institute, and Papua New Guinea Linguistics
Over the last 40 years museums have become important sites to understand the politics and poetics of heritage management, display, and knowledge production. The books under consider- ation here all help demonstrate how museums as... more
Over the last 40 years museums have become important sites to understand the politics and poetics of heritage management, display, and knowledge production. The books under consider- ation here all help demonstrate how museums as relational entities—containing dynamic relations between persons and things, as well as generating them—are emergent processes. Each work helps demonstrate why museums in their many guises remain critical terrains for the negotiation of identity, history, and culture in the push for more collaborative accounts of our world and the circulation and display of things.
Discussion and Review of:
Bodinger de Uriarte, John. 2007. Casino and Museum: Representing Mashantucket Pequot Identity. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.
Carpenter, Edmund. 2005. Two Essays: Chief & Greed. North Andover: Persimmon Press.
Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Chip, Stephen E. Nash, and Steven R. Holen. 2010. Crossroads of Culture: Anthropology Collections at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Boulder: University of Colorado.
Price, Sally. 2007. Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Silverman, Helaine, ed. 2006. Archaeological Site Museums in Latin America. Gainsville: University Press of Florida.
Discussion and Review of:
Bodinger de Uriarte, John. 2007. Casino and Museum: Representing Mashantucket Pequot Identity. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.
Carpenter, Edmund. 2005. Two Essays: Chief & Greed. North Andover: Persimmon Press.
Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Chip, Stephen E. Nash, and Steven R. Holen. 2010. Crossroads of Culture: Anthropology Collections at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Boulder: University of Colorado.
Price, Sally. 2007. Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Silverman, Helaine, ed. 2006. Archaeological Site Museums in Latin America. Gainsville: University Press of Florida.
Research Interests: Archaeology, Visual Anthropology, Cultural Heritage, Collaboration, Museum Anthropology, and 9 moreMuseums, Materiality, Musee du quai Branly, Latin American Archaeology, Museums & Casinos, Social relations, National Museum of the American Indian, Denver Museum of Nature & Science, and George Gustav Heye
"Whom and what do we touch, hear and see when we hold, listen and look at photographs? What histories are enfolded within photographs' materiality? What elided pasts do they contain, and what possible futures can be negotiated with source... more
"Whom and what do we touch, hear and see when we hold, listen and look at photographs? What histories are enfolded within photographs' materiality? What elided pasts do they contain, and what possible futures can be negotiated with source communities by engaging with these artefacts in the present? In this paper I consider these related questions through an exploration of the nexus of relations, perspectives and histories enfolded within a particular glass plate (A6510,499) held in the National Australian Archives. Taken by the government anthropologist F. E. Williams in 1922 in the village of Ukiaravi, this portrait of the two young boys Kauei Ove and Kauri demonstrating a string-figure is one of some ninety-six glass plates produced by Williams during his eight-month trip to the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea. Viewed with communities, this photograph generated a series of conversations about a set of relations involving the mimetic faculties of Crocodile Monitor Lizards, the growth of knowledge through bodily transformation during male initiation, and various modes of history telling and making. In examining these relationships and the ways in which they unfolded around engagements with this glass plate, I contribute to discussions about the nature of fieldwork and the productive possibilities that connecting source communities to their photographic and archival legacies has for them, museums and the discipline.
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Drawing on Chris Pinney's suggestion that images 'narrate a different story, one told, in part, in their own terms', I examine the 1929 silent 35-mm film Sugar Cane Hunting in New Guinea. Emerging out of a particular moment in the... more
Drawing on Chris Pinney's suggestion that images 'narrate a different story, one told, in part, in their own terms', I examine the 1929 silent 35-mm film Sugar Cane Hunting in New Guinea. Emerging out of a particular moment in the colonial history of the Territories of Papua and New Guinea, the film and the United States Department of Agriculture Sugar Expedition from which it arose, provide important but largely overlooked glimpses into the workings of colonial science, racial imaginaries and exploration. Examining this film helps restore it to the larger discussion of such events of the 1920s, but more importantly enables a discussion of the narratives constructed and elided by this artefact. Doing so complicates the Expedition's account and repositions the film as an important vehicle for recovering silences in the histories of colonial science, practice and encounter in New Guinea.
Research Interests: History, Botany, Historical Anthropology, Visual Anthropology, Globalization, and 10 moreFilm Studies, Ecological Anthropology, Museum Anthropology, Papua New Guinea, Sugar cane, History of Collecting, Economic botany, Colonial history of Papua New Guinea, United States Department of Agriculture, and Lake Murray
Oceania occupies an intriguing place within anthropology's genealogy. In the introduction to this collection of essays, we examine the role of the ethnography of Oceania in the development of our anthropological perspectives on... more
Oceania occupies an intriguing place within anthropology's genealogy. In the introduction to this collection of essays, we examine the role of the ethnography of Oceania in the development of our anthropological perspectives on materialisation, the dynamic process by which persons and things are inter-related. Building upon the recent resurgence of theoretical interests in things we use the term materialisation (rather than material culture or materiality) to capture the vitality of the lived processes by which ideas of objectivity and subjectivity, persons and things, minds and bodies are entangled. Taking a processual view, we advocate for an Oceanic anthropology that continues to engage with things on the ground; that asks what strategies communities use to materialise their social relations, desires and values; and that recognises how these processes remain important tools for understanding historical and contemporary Oceanic societies. Examining these locally articulated processes and forms contributes to a material (re)turn for anthropology that clarifies how we, as scholars, think about things more widely.
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Within the context of the Purari Delta's transforming materialities of resource extraction, and the legacy of the Tom Kabu iconoclastic modernist movement (1946–69), I examine the processes of materialisation bound up with two related but... more
Within the context of the Purari Delta's transforming materialities of resource extraction, and the legacy of the Tom Kabu iconoclastic modernist movement (1946–69), I examine the processes of materialisation bound up with two related but different things: heirlooms (eve uku) and documents (Incorporated Land Group (ILG) forms). Eve uku ('hand head') lie within a continuum of things (names, relations, totemic ancestral spirit-beings and sites in the environment) through which ancestral actions are shown to have happened, and descent groups' identities manifest. However, given the ambiguous status of the traditional past among the I'ai, the power of these forms is circumscribed to the village thus making them ineffectual tokens in the bid to secure royalties from resource extraction. Instead, highly coveted documents known as ILG certificates have emerged as efficacious things by which royalties can be secured. Examining these certificates as objects, I investigate how these documents help materialise anew descent groups, communities' relations to their environment and thus their aspirations for development with its attending materialities. The problem for the I'ai, however, remains how to obtain these documents and, as with eve uku, how to control them.
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Within this article I discuss the productive potentials of looking at historic photographs of the Purari Delta with indigenous communities today. A particular type of artifact, the meanings of photographs are promiscuous. Thinking about... more
Within this article I discuss the productive potentials of looking at historic photographs of the Purari Delta with indigenous communities today. A particular type of artifact, the meanings of photographs are promiscuous. Thinking about the shape of cultural property relations that are manifest photographs, I show how engagements with indigenous communities unsettles European preconceptions about what photographs are as well as how doing so raises issues about what cultural property is, and perhaps can be. Instead of being a discreet entity, cultural property for the I'ai emerges as a network of relationships that envelopes people, environment, and ancestors. This expansive notion of cultural property can help us rethink how we treat and handle objects within museums and archives.
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In 1922, F.E. Williams began his first assignment as the Australian Territory of Papua's assistant government anthropologist in the Purari Delta. During this eight-month trip, Williams obtained information on daily life, social relations,... more
In 1922, F.E. Williams began his first assignment as the Australian Territory of Papua's assistant government anthropologist in the Purari Delta. During this eight-month trip, Williams obtained information on daily life, social relations, material culture, as well as religious beliefs and practices. He collected ethnographic specimens, made sketches and took some 96 photographs and used 29 of these photographs in his 1924 monograph The Natives of the Purari Delta , a publication that subsequently came to define the area for Europeans. However, Williams obscured the culturally specific ways in which Purari histories were locally reproduced and understood. This essay highlights a long-term ethnographic trend by which communities of the Purari have been portrayed as without `history' or as having only a rudimentary historical consciousness and suggests that, despite this `particular bundle of silences', the Purari is not without `important stories'.
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Traded down the Purari River by male youth through a network of friends, kuku dipi, as marijuana is known in the Purari Delta, is consumed locally, and traded for guns it is rumoured that the American Mafia bring in submarines. The... more
Traded down the Purari River by male youth through a network of friends, kuku dipi, as marijuana is known in the Purari Delta, is consumed locally, and traded for guns it is rumoured that the American Mafia bring in submarines. The movement of kuku dipi is part of a constellation of informal trade that has emerged alongside the large-scale logging and oil projects in the Gulf Province. These networks involve the exchange of alcohol, pornography and radios by logging ship crews for live birds, crocodile skins and other local flora and fauna. Numerous sets of speculations have arisen about the seen and unseen transactions that these exchanges are felt to entail. Focusing on aspects of kuku dipi's use and movement in the Delta, I examine some of the explanations and anxieties around this illicit commodity. Doing so provides insight into kuku dipi's social impact and illuminates how the Purari's engagement in this trade is an attempt to transcend and cope with the economic and political disparities caused by the current resource extraction projects.
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This paper survey's the University of Cambridge's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology's photographs of communities of the Papuan Gulf of Papua New Guinea.
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In this chapter, I focus on breakdown and the hope that grows in its wake, in the context of collaborations in and around museum collections. Reflecting on my collaborations with community members of the Purari Delta documenting their... more
In this chapter, I focus on breakdown and the hope that grows in its wake, in the context of collaborations in and around museum collections. Reflecting on my collaborations with community members of the Purari Delta documenting their dispersed heritage in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, I dwell on the transformations of value that are involved in this process, and the messy complications of museum work. Doing so, I provide some thoughts on the obligations involved in museum work, and how to deal with objects the valuing of which are difficult for communities. This chapter contributes to larger discussions of value and social relations in Melanesia and those that intersect with anthropology, museums and communities.
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This book is a cargo of sorts, containing the legacy of a set of encounters between Jerry W. Leach and numerous Trobriand interlocutors during 1970–1974. If my experiences in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea are any proxy,... more
This book is a cargo of sorts, containing the legacy of a set of encounters between Jerry W. Leach and numerous Trobriand interlocutors during 1970–1974. If my experiences in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea are any proxy, these en-counters involved talk, cups of tea and instant coffee, food, cigarettes, and betel nut, as well as laughter, silences, and some tears. Transformed from orations into audio record-ings and then into handwritten manuscripts through the labor of Trobriand students, these materials traveled to Cambridge and then to the United States before coming to rest in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Anthropological Archives (NAA) in 1988. The largest anthropological archive in the world and the fourth- largest archival repository at the Smithsonian Institution, the NAA holds a vast set of inscriptions of people’s worlds and experiences in manuscripts and audiovisual recordings in various formats obtained from the eighteenth to twenty- first centuries. This archive is a place brimming with cargo and thus the potential for reclamation, revitalization, documentation, and research. As with all cargo, these materials—once reengaged with by Sergio Jarillo and numerous Trobriand Islanders between 2011 and 2018—have proved to be profoundly generative. The results of these engagements are in this volume.
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If people and objects are “a tying together of lines”, as Ingold puts it, where then do they begin and end? The answer to this question, if there is one, tells us as much about our own understandings as it does other people’s conceptions... more
If people and objects are “a tying together of lines”, as Ingold puts it, where then do they begin and end? The answer to this question, if there is one, tells us as much about our own understandings as it does other people’s conceptions of the interconnections between persons and things, and what objects are and entail. Within this paper, I explore the beginnings and ends of a specific object, the akeke, which is found in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea. A plaited basket made from young sago palm leaves by women, the akeke is a humble but ubiquitous thing. Used to process and store food as well as hold personal items, akeke are an expression of a regional basketry technology that underpins aspects of most local material culture from fishing and housebuilding to the making of now no longer extant ritual objects. Despite this centrality, however, and indeed perhaps because of it, this female-made and largely female-used artefact, and indeed the technology it is a part of, has been overlooked by surveys of the region’s material culture. Eschewing a discussion of these ostensibly utilitarian forms, these surveys have instead focused on the more spectacular male-created arts of carvings and large barkcloth masks, which formed the centrepoint of a ritual complex that served to make visible the relations between humans and nonhumans of the Delta. Though F. E. Williams, who carried out the first ethnographic study of the Purari Delta, discusses baskets, he does so cursorily as if to fulfil the checklist from the fieldwork manual Notes and Queries.
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Focusing on the virtually constituted community of scrappers through their digital publics (online forums, websites and youtube videos), in this chapter I examine how expertise is performed and value materialized through the scrapping of... more
Focusing on the virtually constituted community of scrappers through their digital publics (online forums, websites and youtube videos), in this chapter I examine how expertise is performed and value materialized through the scrapping of cellphones. Thinking through the performances of these women and men as they work to create digital publics of shared expertise, as well as the transforming materialities that scrappers are endeavoring to harness and understand through their craft, I touch on how the boundaries between self and object, and between truth and ficture, are blurred. In the process I demonstrate how in re-enlivening our e-waste, scrappers are striving to remake themselves.
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Research Interests: Information Technology, New Media, Languages and Linguistics, Material Culture Studies, Trust, and 10 moreSocial and Cultural Anthropology, Mobile Technology, Cell Phones, Performance, Materiality (Anthropology), Mobile Phones, Intimacy, Anxiety, Repair and Maintenance, and Mass Communication and New Media
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Information Technology, Communication, Technology, Media Studies, and 10 moreNew Media, Languages and Linguistics, Digital Media, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Mobile Technology, Cell Phones, Materiality (Anthropology), Mobile Phones, Intimacy, and Mass Communication and New Media
"Everything Will Come Up Like TV, Everything Will Be Revealed: Death in a Age of Uncertainty in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea." In Lipset, D. and Silverman, E. eds. Mortuary Dialogues Death Ritual and the Reproduction of Moral Community in Pacific Modernities. Pp. 208-233. New York: Berghahn.more
Examination of the shifting perceptions of death, and transforming mortuary practices in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea. I look at how resource extraction and prolonged lack of access to services have impacted people's discourses... more
Examination of the shifting perceptions of death, and transforming mortuary practices in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea. I look at how resource extraction and prolonged lack of access to services have impacted people's discourses about death and the belief that the region suffers from moral decline.
Research Interests: Death, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology of the Body, Ritual, Modernity, and 11 morePhenomenology of the body, Oceania (Anthropology), Papua New Guinea, Anthropology of Death, Structural Violence, Materiality, Natural Resource Extraction, Mortuary Practices, Purari Delta, Papuan Gulf, and Sorcery
Introduction to the volume which chronicles the following: In the West at the turn of the twentieth century, public understanding of science and the world was shaped in part by expeditions to Asia, North America, and the Pacific. The... more
Introduction to the volume which chronicles the following:
In the West at the turn of the twentieth century, public understanding of science and the world was shaped in part by expeditions to Asia, North America, and the Pacific. The Anthropology of Expeditions draws together contributions from anthropologists and historians of science to explore the role of these journeys in natural history and anthropology between approximately 1890 and 1930. By examining collected materials as well as museum and archive records, the contributors to this volume shed light on the complex social life and intimate work practices of the researchers involved in these expeditions. At the same time, the contributors also demonstrate the methodological challenges and rewards of studying these legacies and provide new insights for the history of collecting, history of anthropology, and histories of expeditions. Offering fascinating insights into the nature of expeditions and the human relationships that shaped them, The Anthropology of Expeditions sets a new standard for the field.
In the West at the turn of the twentieth century, public understanding of science and the world was shaped in part by expeditions to Asia, North America, and the Pacific. The Anthropology of Expeditions draws together contributions from anthropologists and historians of science to explore the role of these journeys in natural history and anthropology between approximately 1890 and 1930. By examining collected materials as well as museum and archive records, the contributors to this volume shed light on the complex social life and intimate work practices of the researchers involved in these expeditions. At the same time, the contributors also demonstrate the methodological challenges and rewards of studying these legacies and provide new insights for the history of collecting, history of anthropology, and histories of expeditions. Offering fascinating insights into the nature of expeditions and the human relationships that shaped them, The Anthropology of Expeditions sets a new standard for the field.
Research Interests: Asian Studies, Museum Studies, Tibetan Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, History of Science, and 11 moreHistory of Anthropology, Central Asian Studies, Museum Anthropology, Papua New Guinea, Collecting and Collections, Burma Studies, Museums, India, History of Collecting, Scientific Expeditions, and History of Expeditions and Travel
Examination of the afterlives of three sets of objects collected during the 1928 USDA Sugarcane expedition to New Guinea: photographs, artifacts and botanical specimens.
Research Interests: Botany, Photography, Museum Anthropology, Field botany, Papua New Guinea, and 10 moreCollecting and Collections, Pacific History, History of Collecting, Economic botany, Colonial History, History of Sugar, Colonial history of Papua New Guinea, Sugarcane, United States Department of Agriculture, and National Museum of Natural History (NMNH)
Examination of the effects of logging and gas extraction in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea.
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Introduction to edited volume on Tropical Forest of Oceania: Anthropological Perspectives.
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Drawing on the research group's ethnography of cell phone repair technicians in Washington, D.C., this chapter explores through a hypothetical "first day" on the job dialogue/description what one needs to know for this job.
Research Interests: Technology, Sociology of Work, Material Culture Studies, Sociology of Knowledge, Anthropology of Knowledge, and 13 moreUrban Anthropology, Mobile Technology, Information Communication Technology, Cell Phones, Anthropology of Technology, Mobile Phones, Cultural Anthropology, Repair and Maintenance, United States, Apprenticeship Learning, Cell phone social aspects, Washington DC, and Science and Technology Studies
In this paper I chart the trajectory of a Moustached Treeswhift (Hemiprocne mystacea) at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, as a way to think about the collecting networks involved in all natural history... more
In this paper I chart the trajectory of a Moustached Treeswhift (Hemiprocne mystacea) at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, as a way to think about the collecting networks involved in all natural history specimens and the role of the London Missionary Society in natural history.
Research Interests: History of Natural History, History of Science, History of Museums, Materiality (Anthropology), Papua New Guinea, and 7 moreCollecting and Collections, History of Collecting, Birds, History of the London Missionary Society, London Missionary Society, Colonial history of Papua New Guinea, and Missionaries In the Pacific
This chapter examines the shifting materialities and knowledge regimes in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea and the messiness of cross-cultural collaboration.
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[Proof Copy available]
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Entry about the history of anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution - charts the role and development of the Bureau of American Ethnology, and the the anthropology department in the U.S. National Museum.
Research Interests: Film Theory, Photography, Material Culture Studies, History of Anthropology, Museum Anthropology, and 17 moreArchives, Linguistics, History of Collections, Collecting and Collections, Sound Recording, Franz Boas, The Smithsonian Institution, John Wesley Powell (1834-1902), Bureau of American Ethnology (Bae), National Anthropological Archives, Human Studies Film Archive, National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), Frank Hamilton Cushing, Matilda Coxe Stevenson, James Mooney, Walter Jesse Fewkes, and Otis T. Mason
Research Interests: Museum Studies, History of Science, Colonialism, Museum Anthropology, Indigenous Knowledge, and 12 moreHistory of Collections, Materiality (Anthropology), Papua New Guinea, Collecting and Collections, Empire, Sugar cane, Imperialism, Agency, Economic botany, Scientific Expeditions, Colonial history of Papua New Guinea, and United States Department of Agriculture
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Teasing out the ‘making and remaking of relationships’ (Strathern 1993:91) that occurred during transactions between Papuan communities and representatives of the London Missionary Society, in this chapter I explore the intentions,... more
Teasing out the ‘making and remaking of relationships’ (Strathern 1993:91) that occurred during transactions between Papuan communities and representatives of the London Missionary Society, in this chapter I explore the intentions, histories and experiences materialized in the collections of the Reverends
James Chalmers and John H. Holmes. These men’s collections form the bulk of the LMS’s Papuan objects in the British Museum, and
collectively span forty-two years of their experiences in Papua (1877–1919). To complicate our understanding of these
collections, I bring the actions of Pacific Island teachers, specifically those of Rarotongans, into view. Doing so reveals how Pacific Islanders played a critical, but unacknowledged role, in
the movement of objects into museums, and points to the historical entanglement of Polynesia and Melanesia in the making of contemporary Oceania (Thomas 1989). Finally, I reflect on how material embodiments of these histories continue to shape sociality in PNG.
James Chalmers and John H. Holmes. These men’s collections form the bulk of the LMS’s Papuan objects in the British Museum, and
collectively span forty-two years of their experiences in Papua (1877–1919). To complicate our understanding of these
collections, I bring the actions of Pacific Island teachers, specifically those of Rarotongans, into view. Doing so reveals how Pacific Islanders played a critical, but unacknowledged role, in
the movement of objects into museums, and points to the historical entanglement of Polynesia and Melanesia in the making of contemporary Oceania (Thomas 1989). Finally, I reflect on how material embodiments of these histories continue to shape sociality in PNG.
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Research Interests: Visual Anthropology, Photography, Material Culture Studies, History of Science, Colonialism, and 10 moreMuseum Anthropology, Film History, Materiality (Anthropology), Papua New Guinea, Collecting and Collections, Sugar cane, Economic botany, Scientific Expeditions, Colonial history of Papua New Guinea, and United States Department of Agriculture
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Within this book chapter, I look at the encounters of Kathleen Haddon and her father A.C. Haddon during their 1914 trip to Papua through their photographic record. A.C. Haddon's last trip to Papua, this trip was critical for a number of... more
Within this book chapter, I look at the encounters of Kathleen Haddon and her father A.C. Haddon during their 1914 trip to Papua through their photographic record. A.C. Haddon's last trip to Papua, this trip was critical for a number of later publications but has remained largely unacknowledged within the history of British Anthropology. Focusing on the materiality of the photographs and the different photographic strategies involved, within this chapter I examine the disciplinary slippages that have elided certain moments, such as this trip, from the intertwined histories of photography and anthropology. Salvaging this trip brings Kathleen Haddon's photographic styles back into view and offers a more nuanced view of our discipline's representational strategies.
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Bell, J.A. 1999. A New Hale for the Nation: The Center for Hawaiian Studies, Manoa Campus, University of Hawai'i." In Welsch, R. (ed) Proceedings of a special session of the Pacific Arts Association: festschrift to honor Dr. Philip JC Dark: working papers. Hanover, NH : Pacific Arts Association.more
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Review of The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.
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Review of Echo of Things by Chris Wright
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While of different ontological status, photographs, one of the marks of the intersecting histories on which I am working, share the same social embeddedness (Morphy and Banks 1997). Outside of the museum or archive and brought back to the... more
While of different ontological status, photographs, one of the marks of the intersecting histories on which I am working, share the same social embeddedness (Morphy and Banks 1997). Outside of the museum or archive and brought back to the field of their original production, visual repatriation (Fienup-Riordan this vol.) or photoelicitation (Collier and Collier 1986) has emerged as another aspect of photographs' social lives (Appadurai 1986). Used productively to re-engage indigenous communities, visual repatriation can generate counter-narratives to the once monolithic, colonial and disciplinary histories that the photographs themselves often helped to create and sustain. In the process, visual repatriation helps untangle the knots that bind these histories, their narratives and the assumptions invested in them (Binney and Chaplin this vol.; Edwards 1994; Poignant 1996). In this chapter, I discuss the role of two photographic collections in eliciting narratives about past and pr...