Smithsonian Institution

Faculty Member, National Museum of Natural History, Anthropology

Curator of Globalization

About

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 have an abiding interest 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.  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. 

Museums are a unique place in which anthropologists can examine the history of the discipline, as well as the movement of objects (both cultural and natural history specimens) and the knowledge they entail.  They are also important venues collaborative work between disciplines and, most importantly, with communities.

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 also have a strong interest in the manuscript, photographs and films in the National Anthropological Archive and the Human Film Studies Archive. Finally I am actively involved in NMNH’s Recovering Voices initiative, which is marshaling the museum's century and half years of collections to help community's sustain their endangered language and knowledge traditions.  In my role as a curator I work with interns and fellows, as well as help supervise PhD theses.

Outside of the museum I currently sit on the boards of the Council for Museum Anthropology (CMA) ( http://museumanthropology.blogspot.com/ ), and the Association of Social Anthropologists in Oceania (ASAO) ( http://www.asao.org/ ), and am involved with the blog Material World ( http://www.materialworldblog.com/ ).


Current Projects
The monograph that I am working on – tentatively titled Destruction’s Wake: Materiality, History and Resource Extraction in Papua New Guinea – examines the transforming materialities of the Purari Delta, and how communities articulate the intersecting histories and values that these transformations entail. While social transformation has always been indigenous to Purari communities, the arrival of the London Missionary Society (1874) and the advent of British (1884) and then Australian (1906) colonialism altered the flows of people, ideas and objects in and out of the region. The new forms of sociality and disenchantment that emerged found expression in the Tom Kabu Movement (1946-1969), an indigenous modernisation movement. While failing to achieve economic independence, the Movement transformed communities by destroying ritual artefacts, and by their cessation of associated practices. In the wake of the Kabu Movement, communities have become strong adherents of the Seventh Day Adventist and Pentecostal Churches, and have experienced fifty years of failed economic development. Today communities are struggling to engage logging operations carried out by the Malaysian conglomerate Rimbunan Hijau and its subsidiaries (1995 – present) and gas exploration by the InterOil Corporation (2002 – present) along the Purari Delta’s hinterland.  In the context of these projects surviving ritual objects and ancestral histories have become renewed sources of self-reflection as communities are striving to be recognised by one another, the Papua New Guinea State and resource companies as landowners. Along these various scales kinship, objects, histories and the relationships to the environment they materialize are highly contested. These projects are both destructive and generative and are transforming communities socially and materially. Exploring the dissonance caused by these struggles, and the new relationships they engender, this book contributes to discussions of materiality, the construction of the plural frames of history, and indigenous narratives about and experiences of loss and development in Papua New Guinea and beyond.

My second project – The Sweetness of the Stone-Age: Artefacts and Histories from the United State’s Department of Agriculture 1928 Sugarcane Expedition to New Guinea –
seeks to reintegrate materials collected by, and generated out of, the USDA 1928 expedition to what is now Papua New Guinea.  These materials are dispersed between National Museum of Natural History’s ethnographic collections, the National Anthropological Archive, the Human Studies Film Archive, the National Archive and the National Geographic Society.  Piecing together the narratives found in text, ethnographic objects, botanic and insect specimens, photographs and the expedition’s film (Sugar Plant Hunting in New Guinea), I am working to understand this particular moment in the global history of sugar and colonial science, and the various indigenous narratives and agencies embodied in therein.  A component of this project will involve consulting with communities from whom this material was collected as part of a wider dialogue about cultural and environmental transformation.

Finally, I am part of a multi-disciplinary project, entitled ‘Beyond the Basket: Construction, Order and Understanding’, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) (htthttp://projects.beyondtext.ac.uk/beyondthebasket/index.php) that is being carried out with colleagues in the World Art and Museology Department at the University of East Anglia (UEA).  ‘Beyond the Basket’ looks at basketry technology around the world and across time in terms of its cultural, technological and cognitive implications.  The project will result in symposium, publications and an exhibit at UEA’s Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. My contribution involves an examination of basketry in communities of the Purari Delta and the wider Papuan Gulf as a way to think about gender, narrative, food production and economic change.  This research has wider implications about the loss of cultural knowledge and the impact of new technologies and materials on social life.

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