Joshua A. Bell
International Center for Language Revitalization, Auckalnd University of Technology, School of Languages, ICLR International Advisory Fellows
Combining 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.
Address: Department of Anthropology, NHB 112
National Museum of Natural History
Smithsonian Institution
PO Box 37012
Washington, DC 20013-7012
USA
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.
Address: Department of Anthropology, NHB 112
National Museum of Natural History
Smithsonian Institution
PO Box 37012
Washington, DC 20013-7012
USA
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Edited Special Issues of Journals
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)
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)
Journal 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)
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)
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.
More information can be found here: http://digitalreturn.wsu.edu/workshop/
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.
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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.
[Proof Copy available]
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.