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- Convenors:
-
Francesca Merlan
(Australian National University)
Victoria Burbank (University of Western Australia)
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- Formats:
- Roundtables
- Location:
- Jan Anderson (E101A), R.N Robertson Building
- Sessions:
- Thursday 5 December, -
Time zone: Australia/Sydney
Short Abstract:
We proposea roundtable where participants compare their folk values -- often taken for granted ideas about what is good and what is bad, learned prior to fieldwork -- and how they interact with the values we later learn from the people we engage with in our ethnographic efforts.
Long Abstract:
This conversation will enable us to ask ourselves how field experience may challenge or confirm the values we take into the field and how these experiences may or may not lead to changes in our thought. This conversation also enables us to consider how this comparison of values may lead to changes of various kinds in our own lives and possibly our societies.
We anticipate the conversation will include at least some of the following:
comparisons of our folk values and of the values we have learned in the field
how our field experiences may have challenged or reinforced our pre-field values
how our experiences of value dissonance and/or reinforcement have affected various aspects of our lives
how these experiences, if widely shared, might contribute to positive and/or negative social change, e.g. approaches to racism, terrorism, colonialism, free trade, free speech, inequality
how these experiences, if widely shared, might contribute to positive and/or negative change in the values of major Australian and/or global institutions, e.g. governments, corporations, universities
how these experiences, if widely shared might have an impact on anthropological thinking and practice
If you would like to join in this roundtable please send us a few lines, or a paragraph, telling us what you would like to bring to the exchange. Contributions on working in Australia, and with Indigenous communities, are welcome, but are not limited to that.
We envision the possibility of an edited volume emerging from this event.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 4 December, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
Fieldwork over many years in Solomon Islands has taught me to value the dirty work of love--the emotionally challenging, physically demanding, sometimes deeply unpleasant labour undertaken by women to care for the bodies of others.
Paper long abstract:
My involvement in the lives of Solomon Islander women over two decades has taught me to value the dirty work of love. I was young when I first lived in Solomon Islands. Unlike all of the young unmarried women my age, I had never nursed anyone who was dying; I had never helped in the birth a child; I had never even been responsible for feeding a large family. I did not value the hard work of caring for the bodies of others—work that is emotionally challenging, physically demanding, sometimes deeply unpleasant, and almost invariably undertaken by women. I did not want to dedicate my life to looking after children, households, and aged relatives; I wanted meaningful work, which I saw as a career outside the home, not the unremarked and undervalued sort of work that structured the life of my own mother. In Solomon Islands, women and girls enjoy far less freedom, can pursue far fewer opportunities, and are subjected to far stricter control than Solomon Islands men or women in much of the 'global North.' At the same time, though, the feminised work of love continues to be valued, embraced, and celebrated.
Paper short abstract:
This talk with focus on the value of autonomy, its place in my folk values prior to fieldwork, and discuss how my field experience challenged and displaced it. I will also throw open a question about the place of autonomy as a value in the ethnography of Aboriginal Australia based on my experience.
Paper long abstract:
This talk with focus on the value of autonomy, its place in my folk values learned prior to fieldwork, and discuss how my field experience challenged this value and displaced it in a way. I will also throw open a question or two about the place of autonomy as a key value in the ethnography of Aboriginal Australia based on my experience.
I was emotionally and politically attached to the concept of autonomy (largely via feminist and anarchist theory and practice) prior to fieldwork. I was also familiar with the concept of autonomy as an analytical tool in anthropological literature which describes Aboriginal sociality as being characterised by an 'unresolved tension between autonomy and relatedness' (Myers 1986). So while it wasn't something at the forefront of my mind autonomy was a key concept that I drew on in my interpretation and evaluation of everyday relations.
However, my experience living with my adoptive Yolngu family on the remote Yolngu Homelands in northeast Arnhem Land led me to question the universality or 'neutrality' of autonomy as a value and analytical tool. Indeed, my experience with my adoptive family encouraged me to seek out critiques of autonomy in the literature (Nedelsky 1989, Dworkin 1988).
By the time I had finished writing my dissertation I no longer felt that I could employ it in good faith as an analytical tool in my research. This experience and research also displaced autonomy as a value in my own personal folk set of values.
Paper short abstract:
Working first with migrants and then indigenes in Lindu, Central Sulawesi, catalysed a change in my own value orientations over decades of fieldwork, as I transitioned from adulation of the former's entrepreneurialism to an appreciation of the latter's focus on sustainability and sociality.
Paper long abstract:
I undertook my doctoral field work with Bugis migrants who had settled in the Lindu plain in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. Like other researchers (e.g. Christian Pelras) who had worked with them, I was enchanted by the dynamism and self-assured realisation of the metis (Scott 1998) of the Bugis, an ethnic group well known for entrepreneurial flair and an honour culture. As a descendant of migrant Italian-American background, and a migrant myself to Australia, I identified with their position and felt they had much to teach me about valuing migrants’ strategies for achieving self-realisation in a new world and secretly shared their disdain of the less entrepreneurial Indigenes.
However, as the years passed I learned of efforts of these Lindu Indigenes to preserve their community in the face of development and conservation initiatives threatening to displace them. I returned to Lindu and began living among the Indigenes. I came to appreciate how their reticence to pursue intensively such activities as cash cropping derived from their concern for sustainability and a desire to retain their more egalitarian form of sociality. My conversion was marked by the publication of an article (Acciaioli 1998) that re-evaluated the (malign) environmental effects of Bugis migrant entrepreneurialism. Since that time my own (ambivalent) stances toward conservation, development, and social transformation have continued to be informed by my dialogues with Indigenous Lindu interlocutors, including my wife, concerning the values needed to foster supportive sociality and productive commons across various fields.
Paper short abstract:
In my contribution I will discuss value dissonances that can arise in everyday communication in the context of fieldwork. Drawing on my fieldwork experiences in the Western Highlands of PNG and in North Queensland, I will focus on what it means ‘to promise’ something, and on the complexities of meeting promissory expectations and obligations.