In this paper, I explore agency and resistance in the context of writing an ethnography on the Kokoda Trail, as an insider, in ways that contest taken-for-granted and hegemonic notions that the trail is only significant because it is a hallowed Australian World War II heritage site.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I explore agency and resistance in the context of writing an ethnography on the Kokoda Trail in ways that deconstruct and recalibrate taken-for-granted notions that the trail is only significant because it is a hallowed Australian World War II heritage site. The paper explores how I call-out epistemic violence in writing in ways that resist hegemonic Kokoda Trail discourses by: exploring local meanings in culturally-mediated understandings of tourism and development; re-inscribing traditional place names; re-designating local significances to places; tracing the origins of informants from their own stories, and; validating my own feelings of trepidation in usurping colonial labels like 'indigenous' with ones like 'autochthonous'. I attend to examining recalibration in writing an ethnography grounded in local understandings of being-at-home along the Kokoda Trail, for 525 autochthonous 'Isurava' people living in the Iora Creek valley, and how these contrast with being-at-war along the Kokoda Trail. I discuss the value of this wherein the canonical methodologies of anthropology is deployed in fields outside of the discipline, in order to understand and address contestations violence, and dispossession, in epistemic and every day contexts.