Engendering Objects : Dynamics of Barkcloth and Gender among the Maisin of Papua New Guinea.
Title:
Engendering Objects : Dynamics of Barkcloth and Gender among the Maisin of Papua New Guinea.
Author:
Hermkens, Anna-Karina.
ISBN:
9789088901461
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (389 pages)
Contents:
Engendering Objects -- Research Topic and theoretical setting -- Methodologies -- Theoretical setting -- Thematic structure -- Engendering people through things -- Gendering Maisin men and women -- Maisin setting -- Food and surroundings -- Settlement -- Social structure -- Outline -- Introduction -- Acknowledgments -- List of figures -- Part 1 -- Women and Barkcloth -- Chapter 1 -- 'Making' women -- Conceiving bodies -- Male versus female substances and descent -- Constituting the person -- Gendering children's bodies -- Initiating girls -- Making women and men -- Marking women's bodies -- Dangerous bodies: Female sexuality -- Gendered ways of thought and speech -- On being good husbands and wives -- The performativity of gender -- Chapter 2 -- Women making barkcloth -- Making tapa -- From tree to cloth -- Designing the cloth -- Tattoos and tapa designs -- Decorating and painting the cloth -- Transferring female knowledge -- The past in the present -- Learning to draw -- Making tapa at school -- Styles of identity: creativity and agency in tapa designs -- Tapa designs as forms of non-discursive agency -- Tapa production as a performative act -- Part 2 -- Materializations and the performance of identity -- Chapter 3 -- Ancestral travels and designs -- Following Clan designs -- Chiefs of the up- and downstream -- Following the ancestors -- Materialisations of the patrilineal clan -- Who owns wuwusi, the tapa tree? -- Drawing the clan -- Female knowledge and creativity -- Clan materialisations: gendered knowledge and practice -- Chapter 4 -- Life-cycle rituals and the performance of identity -- First-born exchanges -- Decorating the firstborn child: totumi and kesevi -- Girls' initiation -- Performing the initiated body -- Maternal connections? -- Marriages and weddings -- The performance of marital exchanges -- Death and mourning rituals.
Public mourning -- Individual mourning: seclusion and re-socialisation -- Marking the end of mourning: emergence -- Gendered ways of mourning -- Death and mourning exchanges -- Life-cycle rituals: Constituting the person -- Chapter 5 -- Maintaining relationships -- Maisin ideologies of exchange -- Principles of exchange (vina): marawa-wawe and muan -- Kinship relations and exchange -- Reciprocity within the clan -- Reciprocity outside the clan -- Exchanges between clans -- Exchange relations between affines -- Exchanges outside one's clan and kin -- The gender of exchange -- Gender and the production and bartering of objects -- Betel nut and money -- Tapa as gift and commodity -- Women in between -- Chapter 6 -- Church festivals and the performance of identity -- Clan feasts and church festivals -- A church festival in Sefoa -- Feasts of exchange -- Food and the expression of relationships -- Money and tapa -- Decorating the body -- Ornaments (nomo) -- Clan decorations -- Performing the body, performing identity -- Moving identities -- Individual versus collective identities -- The female body as a male display -- Part 3 -- Colonial and postcolonial appropriations of tapa -- Chapter 7 -- Colonial collecting: Dialogues of gender and objects -- Colonising and collecting Collingwood Bay: Sir William MacGregor -- Governing Collingwood Bay: William MacGregor -- Collecting British New Guinea: Sir William MacGregor -- The Anglican mission: missionisation through exchange -- Wilfred Abbot (1898 - 1901) -- Abbot's collection -- John Percy Money (1901 - 1910) -- Money's collection -- In the name of science -- Scientific collector Rudolf Pöch (1905 - 1906) -- Pöch's collection -- Collingwood Bay Collections -- Comparing collections -- Colonial exchanges as forms of barter -- Colonial materialisations -- Tools and ornaments -- Materialising bodies.
Colonial collecting: materialising relationships -- Chapter 8 -- The commodification of tapa: Gender dynamics and identity -- Roots of commodification -- Painting for Church and Greenpeace -- Drawings for the Church -- Tapa against logging -- Tapa as a green commodity -- MICAD: Clan, gender equality and the tapa business -- Crossing boundaries: men making tapa - women representing Maisin -- The advent of male designers -- Crossing boundaries: female representatives -- Transformations of property -- Transformations of gendered property -- Cultural property rights -- Colliding images -- Conclusions -- Maisin is tapa -- Appendices -- Appendix 1 - Chapter 2 - Tapa designs -- Appendix 2 - Chapter 5 - The myth of Embeatofo -- Appendix 3 - Chapter 8 - The Maisin campaign -- Appendix 4 - Chapter 8 - The Maisin Declaration, 29 July 1994 -- Glossary -- References -- Dutch summary.
Abstract:
Engendering objects explores social and cultural dynamics among Maisin people in Collingwood Bay (Papua New Guinea) through the lens of material culture. Focusing upon the visually stimulating decorated barkcloths that are used as male and female garments, gifts, and commodities, it explores the relationships between these cloths and Maisin people. The main question is how barkcloth, as an object made by women, engenders people's identities, such as gender, personhood, clan and tribe, through its manufacturing and use.This book describes in detail how barkcloth (tapa) not only visualizes and expresses, but also materializes and defines, people's multiple identities. By 'following the object' and how it is made and used in the performance of life-cycle rituals, in exchanges and in church festivities, this interaction between people and things, and how they are mutually constituted, becomes visible. How are women's bodies and minds linked with the production of barkcloth? How do cloths produced by women both establish and contest clan identity? In what ways is the commodification of barkcloth related to gender dynamics? Barkcloth and its associated designs show how gender ideologies and the socio-material constructions of identity are performed and, as such, developed, established and contested.The narratives of both men and women reveal the ways in which barkcloth provides a link with the past and dreams for the future. The author argues that the cloths and their designs embody dynamics of Maisin culture and in particular of Maisin gender relations. In contributing to the current debates on the anthropology of 'art', this study offers an alternative way of understanding the significance of an object, like decorated barkcloth, in shaping and defining people's identities within a local colonial and postcolonial setting of Papua New
Guinea."Engendering Objects is among the most comprehensive and innovative new works emerging from Melanesia examining the intimate connections between material culture, cultural identity and gendered personhood. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and examination of museum collections, Anna-Karina Hermkens traces the enduring yet innovative place of tapa (barkcloth) among the Maisin people. Written with warm compassion and immediacy, the book is a theoretically provocative, accessible and compelling portrait of changing life in a Papua New Guinean village society." - John Barker, University of British Columbia"This book makes a most welcome contribution to the study of the materiality by showing how gender is performed in the sensuous terms of clothing, food, and the exchange of objects. Anna-Karina Hermkens accomplishes this with enviable care and intellectual resources, and a prose and ethnography that make the book a pleasure to read." - David Morgan, Duke University"Anna-Karina Hermkens takes us to look at designs on bark cloth from Papua New Guinea through a magnifying glass. A fascinating perspective on material culture evolves. Beyond the art work we discover individuals - mainly women - painting their stories about who they and their beloved are as women and men, as traditional members of a clan, and also what they head for as strugglers in a new economy driven world." - Christian Kaufmann, Honorary Research Associate, Sainsbury Reseach Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich UK, former curator for Oceania at the Museum der Kulturen BaselAbout the author:Anna-Karina Hermkens obtained her PhD in Cultural Anthropology in 2005 from Radboud University Nijmegen. She is currently working as a postdoctoral research fellow at the 'College of Asia and the Pacific' of the Australian National University in Canberra
Australia.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
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