Paper short abstract:

State prohibition hinders PIED users' access to health information and medical services. This paper describes how users negotiate legislative barriers and the power relations that result from differentially valued forms of PIED knowledge to create their own strategies to reduce harm.

Paper long abstract:

In Australia performance and image enhancing drugs (PIED) are classed alongside heroin, cocaine and ice in the highest category of dangerous illicit drugs, despite evidence that suggests that the risks to users and society posed by PIED use is dwarfed by the harms of these other drugs. State legislation prohibiting use is currently hindering PIED users access to health information and medical services that they could use to reduce harm. This paper presents the results of an ethnography conducted both online and offline (in Australia) with members of the largest group of PIED users: recreational bodybuilders (i.e. those who do not intend to compete in sport or bodybuilding competitions). The study approaches both PIEDs, and PIED-related knowledge, as having social lives i.e. as taking on meaning through social relations and having implications for these relations. In the absence of public health messages that resonate with their experiences and practices, people who use PIEDs recreationally have developed harm minimisation strategies that combine mainstream health science, with the experiential knowledge of bodybuilders ('broscience', a type of 'folk pharmacology'). This paper focuses on how recreational PIED users, conceptualise the risks they face, and negotiate the power relations that result from differentially valued forms of PIED knowledge.

Paper short abstract:

The personal, community or cultural embodiments of healthy bodies are often at odds with state prescribed, public health oriented, objective measurements of health. "Healthiness" is caught in contention between state standards and individual, social and culturally determined ideas around wellbeing.

Paper long abstract:

The relationship between the state and the individual in the sphere of public health is fundamentally prescriptive. The state circumscribes certain patterns of behaviour and ways of being, informed by an image of "healthiness", that people either embody or fail to embody in how they choose to live their lives. This dynamic emerges again and again in a range of settings: in the provision of medical services and in schools, in supermarkets, the community services sector, and even fast-food restaurants. Underpinning all of this is a strong notion of personal responsibility; to the extent that the individual does not reflect the image of the healthy self, it is because of a failure in their character or commitment, rather than the policy model itself.

Following ethnographic research with families in Adelaide, South Australia, I suggest that health is a strongly subjective concept that is embodied by participants in everyday social practices and routines. The body is representative of how people understand and achieve health in different geographic, socioeconomic and cultural contexts. Embodied practices around food, eating and activity emphasise that people understand and experience "health" in highly personal forms shaped by varied priorities, references and life histories. These embodied experiences of health are essential in examining why Australian public health policy fails, particularly in promoting nutrition and activity guidelines and in addressing rising obesity rates.

Paper short abstract:

Widely accepted practices of touch-based healing provide a site for the embodiment and convergence of spiritual concepts emerging from both western and eastern traditions. Such practices serve to resist normative beliefs aligned with state-sponsored health, and suggest the tenacity of holistic care.

Paper long abstract:

In Australia, state-sponsorship of conventional biomedicine renders this form of treatment highly accessible to the general public, including persons of low-income status. Health beliefs and healthcare practice expectations espoused by biomedicine are secular and materialistic in nature and theoretical premises. As a result, aspects of socio-cultural context, or spirituality and identity, are rarely incorporated into health explanations. Biomedicine is thus able to refute the validity of truly holistic approaches to the provision of healthcare. ‘Alternative’ healing practices therefore remain excluded from mainstream health systems and access to supportive public funding.

While research among rural residents occasionally reveals practices that may be viewed as folksy or unusual when compared to those prevalent in urban locations, recent anthropological fieldwork in rural Victoria, in a community with a substantial presence of interfaith spiritual organisations, discovered commonalities, in the form of unconventional healthcare practices that are also often used in urban places. Among numerous alternative healing practices studied, several widely accepted (and some less recognised) methods of touch-based healing were described, which provide a site for the embodiment and convergence of spiritual concepts arising from both western and eastern traditions. Such healing practices serve to resist many of the normative beliefs that are aligned with state-sponsored healthcare. They thereby suggest the tenacity of holistic modes of health provision, and the ongoing importance for spiritual identity of holistic healing, in contemporary Australian communities.

Paper short abstract:

Aesthetic practices involving cross-cultural impersonation are one form of imaging the state through the eyes of 'the other'. This paper takes an example of a 1920's literary masquerade of a German author as a Samoan chief and its reinterpretation in photographic form by Samoan artist Yuki Kihara .

Paper long abstract:

The appropriation of the indigenous art and design in order to symbolically forge the settler colonial nation-state is a well-documented phenomenon. A less common, but nevertheless historically persistent, form of imaging the state occurs in aesthetic practices of cross-cultural impersonation, for example literary impersonations of an 'other' voice or in performance practices such as 'blackface'. This paper takes one example, Der Papalagi: Die Reden des Südseehäuptlings Tuiavii aus Tiavea (The White Man: The Speeches of the South Seas Chief Tuiavii from Tiavea, 1920) written by a German masquerading as a Samoan chief in order to critique and re-imagine the German state. This novel was re-appropriated by Samoan artist Yuki Kihara who, in 2016, created Der Papalagi as a series of still photographs and a video installation, featuring two long-term German residents dressed in Samoan chiefly garments. In doing so, the work reveals the racialized poetics of national imaginaries as well as providing commentary on transracial aesthetic practices that accompanied European colonialism and continue in global and neo-colonial forms of artistic production.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how rural Australians of mixed cultural heritage negotiate and express rural identities through embodied acts. I examine both everyday acts and rites of inversion as instances of embodied reflection on rural identity.

Paper long abstract:

Narratives of 'the outback', of sunburnt stockmen in semi-arid plains, are central to the Australian nationalistic imagination. However, just 2.2% of Australians live beyond regional areas, with the overall rural population decreasing. Popular tropes of 'the outback', situate rural people as both spatially and temporally distanced from urban culture, often as remnants of a romantic peasantry or as backwards hicks. In an increasingly global society, many scholars now argue for viewing rurality as social construct, based on cultural ideas of spatialisation, national mythologies, and identity formation.

In this paper, I explore how rural Australians of mixed cultural heritage negotiate and express rural identity through embodied acts. How do such embodied acts reinforce or offer counter-narratives to nationalistic ideas and media portrayals of rurality?

I examine the intersect of national mythology and lived reality through everyday acts, such as moving through paddocks; commemorative ceremonies, such as rodeos; and rites of inversion, such as the 'ringer's rally' competitions held at community gathering across Outback Queensland.

I suggest that embodied acts may be viewed as silent narratives of experience, counter-narratives to media portrayals of rurality, and self-conscious reflections on rural identity today.

Paper short abstract:

Performances of haka by the New Zealand Army overseas are also performances of the biculturalism of the New Zealand state. However, what Pākehā soldiers' poor execution of haka actually embodies is discomfort in enacting this bicultural project.

Paper long abstract:

The New Zealand state presents itself as a bicultural "partnership" between Pākehā and Māori, based on the rehabilitation of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi as the nation's founding document. The performance of haka by multi-ethnic groups of New Zealand soldiers on peacekeeping deployments overseas is seen as one of the most powerful embodiments of this biculturalism, demonstrating New Zealand's preferred national identity to the world. However, the bicultural project has also been challenged in the public sphere. While national appropriations of indigenous rituals are often "divorced from any […] understanding of […] the wider political issues of indigenous struggles" (Bell 2014) (as in the case of the All Blacks' haka) Ngāti Tūmatauenga (Tribe of the God of War- the New Zealand Army)'s actual biculturalism means that Pākehā soldiers have been unable to avoid exposure to such struggles. To fully embody New Zealand soldierhood, members must be capable of performing multiple haka. Although soldiers are generally confident and comfortable in their bodies, Pākehā soldiers' uncertainty over their right to take part in Māori rituals manifests in physical awkwardness and hesitancy. Based upon fieldwork in which I was embedded with a platoon deployed as part of the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI), this paper argues that Pākehā soldiers' physical inability to appropriately perform haka embodies the ambiguous reality of the bicultural state.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores connections between diasporic Pasifika identity and "Australian" identity through the lens of commercially successful and traditionally masculine sports, addressing questions of gender, race, and what it might mean to be indigenous in Australia but not to Australia.

Paper long abstract:

It is often through sports where the most publicly visible discourses around race, gender and indigeneity occur in Australia. With the dramatic increase of Pasifika players in rugby league over recent years, this paper raises some preliminary questions around diasporic Pasifika identity in Australia and its connections to a broader "Australian" identity and a global "indigenous" identity. Through the lens of rugby league, I present some of my PhD findings to explore what it might mean to be indigenous in Australia but not to Australia. I argue that at the centre of the state-identified Australian relationship with sport is the otherwise often neglected and problematised indigenous male body, and that this body raises important questions about indigeneity, gender, diaspora, and belonging within the Australian landscape.

Paper short abstract:

How were LGBTIA and Queer Sydney-siders' enactments of femininities informed by the state's same sex marriage postal survey? In this paper I consider embodied performances of queer(ed) femininities as acts of resistance to the state's processes of gender and sexual normalisation.

Paper long abstract:

What does it mean to be 'feminine' in neoliberal, Western societies where forms of gender and sexuality beyond heteronormative models are increasingly visible? What does it mean to be 'queer' when relationships, bodies and identities that exceed heterosexual, binary and cisgender norms are becoming incrementally recognised by government, private and social institutions? And what happens when the government puts the rights of these increasingly visible and recognised relationships and identities to a public opinion poll? In this paper I consider these and other questions in relation to my in-progress ethnographic fieldwork with LGBTIA and Queer Sydney-siders who self-identify as feminine. In the first few months of my field research, the Australian government conducted a postal survey which asked "Should the law be changed to allow same sex couples to marry?". The survey, and the 'Yes' and 'No' campaigns that it gave rise to, shifted national conversations around gender and sexuality onto a narrow focus on marriage. For many in Sydney's LGBTIA and Queer social scenes, the terms of the survey excluded gender identities and sexual practices that are central to their ways of understanding themselves and their communities. These participants, rather than retreating from social life or throwing their full support behind the official yes campaign, often sought out ways of enacting their non-heteronormative forms of femininities with greater visibility. Reflecting on what makes these participants' embodied performances queer, I ask if their enactments of femininity may be understood as forms of resistance to the state's processes of gender and sexual normalisation.

Paper short abstract:

Grounded in an 11-month ethnographic research on the lifeworlds of stateless Shan youth in urban Chiang Mai, this paper explores how Thainess are corporally and literally instructed and how these youth strategically use this embodiment to their advantage in the real world outside school.

Paper long abstract:

For stateless youth in Thailand, public schools represent both space of normalization and differentiation. On the one hand, school provides a "protected zone" where their identity as students supersedes their statelessness and where in theory they achieve equal status to their Thai peers. On the other hand, school is instrumental in reinforcing state's ideals of Thainess that exclude non-citizens such as themselves. At once space of exclusion and inclusion, school is where the body, mind, and emotions of stateless youth are simultaneously trained to perform citizenship habitus and master "the techniques of the (Thai) body".

Grounded in my 11-month-PhD ethnographic research on the lifeworlds of stateless Shan youth in urban areas in Chiang Mai, this paper conceptualizes the body of stateless youth as both a political locus of state's version of citizenship and a personal expression of agency. In exploring how daily rituals and public performances of citizenship conducted in Thai public schools shape the body, movement and performance of Thainess among stateless Shan youth, I call the attention to the state-crafted "aesthetic citizenship". I also aim to reveal how stateless youth apply these techniques of the (Thai) body acquired in school as strategies for survival and self-protection as they spatially navigate the city. I argue that these strategic performances of "aesthetic citizenship" presents a critical paradox: on a personal level it demonstrates agency but on a macro level, it perpetuates the Thai state's project of exclusion.

Paper short abstract:

Witch murders escape village boundaries and become embodied by the state. The police contend with and administer this citizen/state encounter. By sketching key historical murder this paper highlights the public rituals, symbols and performances and how these are embodied and contested by citizens.

Paper long abstract:

The ethnographer's entry into a witch accusation is typically when the accusation escapes the boundaries of the village and becomes embodied by the police, administration, and courts of law. Historically, the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh has been, and continues to be, confronted with violent assaults and murder targeting individuals who are believed to practice witchcraft. Intersecting with national and state discourses of modernist ideals, witch related violence has been embodied as a politicised object that signals extreme underdevelopment to a state whose legitimacy has depended upon progress and development. The Indian Police Service, the foremost organisation to contend with these issues, maintains a crucial role in administering the citizen/state processes, practices and systems. Commonly associated with attributes of corruption, misuse of authority, violence and partisan politics, the police official emerges in this paper as an ordinary citizen having a special and sometimes difficult public job. By examining a discretionary 'practice' at work in police dealings with witchcraft accusations, I argue that power shapes what is recognised as criminal behaviour, the significance assigned to a crime and therefore embodied practices of policing. By sketching key historical moments this paper highlights the prevailing public rituals, symbols and performances around witch murder and the ways these are both embodied and contested by citizens. This paper concludes that discretionary power opens up a terrain of unpredictability and 'formlessness' that lends hope for citizen rights.