1st Edition

Material Encounters

Edited By Bronwen Douglas, Chris Ballard Copyright 2024
196 Pages
by Routledge

196 Pages
by Routledge

196 Pages
by Routledge

This topical and conceptually innovative book proposes new perspectives on the theme of materiality which, since the 1980s, has animated work across and within disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The particular focus of the chapters in this volume is the materiality of knowledge produced through embodied encounters between people, places, and things in the Pacific Islands, New... Read more

Introduction—Contact tracing: The materiality of encounters

Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard

1. Mapping the once and future strait: Place, time, and Torres Strait from the sixteenth century to the Pleistocene

Bronwen Douglas

2. Re-presenting encounters: The drawings of Jean Piron

Nicola Dickson

3. ‘With the consent of the tribe’: Marking lands on Tanna and Erromango, New Hebrides

James L. Flexner

4. Marginal history

Chris Ballard

5. Making the visual record of New Guinea: William G. Lawes’s photographic encounters

Antje Lübcke

6. Heads and ‘cultures’: A. C. Haddon, colonial exploration and the ‘Strickland River’ inscription

Ricardo Roque

7. Smoke and mirrors in Arnhem Land: What expeditions tell us about the materiality of crosscultural encounters

Martin Thomas

8. On the banality of paperwork and the brutality of judicial bureaucracy in Myanmar

Nick Cheesman

Biography

Bronwen Douglas is Honorary Professor in the College of Arts & Social Sciences at the Australian National University. Her work combines the ethnohistory of encounters in Oceania with the history of the human sciences and the sciences of place.

Chris Ballard is a Pacific historian at the Australian National University. His work focuses on Indigenous historicities and histories and the supplementary role in these histories of repatriated archives, grounded in collaborative fieldwork with communities in West Papua, Papua New Guinea, and Vanuatu.