Female adolescent sexuality is highly policed at upland Thai schools, particularly for students who teachers identify as ‘beautiful’. While Northern Thai cultural ideals of masculinity glorify the ‘wandering’ of male youth, girls are told that it is especially important that they postpone sexual activity until after completion of their schooling. For Karen students, this ideal may clash with personal

This article presents an analysis of an Aboriginal songline in South-eastern Australia that has not been previously recorded. As part of a project examining the astronomy and songline connections of the Saltwater Aboriginal peoples of the New South Wales coast, the Black Duck Songline was identified that may have links to the Pleiades star cluster. The Pleiades, known by many peoples as the Seven Sisters

The importance of embodied religious practice to public Islam in Indonesia is easily underrated. This article undertakes an empirical examination of two domains of public Islam in Indonesia: women's piety and formal Islamic party politics. Based on research with women's groups in West Java, the author argues that Islamic party politics rely upon fragmentation resulting from different understandings

Theories of vulnerability are most often seen in the anthropology of disaster studies, where socio-economic and political inequalities produce environmental vulnerabilities, and the people situated in these locations are positioned as vulnerable and dependent 'Others'. Rather than reproduce vulnerability as a concept denoting weakness, this paper seeks to examine the generative capacities of vulnerability

This article focuses on the properties of Paiwanese aesthetic expression and their contributions to the system of social values. My analysis examines the rituals and the accoutrement of an aristocratic wedding ceremony. The generation of Paiwanese aesthetic expression is related to the group's hierarchical social system as well as its ancestral past. Aesthetic expression strengthens the social status

This article explores the frustrations of men – both ‘local’ and ‘international’ – who work in the development sector in Papua New Guinea. It explores the views of men not because they are the only ones to express such dissatisfaction, but because their perspectives have not been documented, other than in informal conversations as occur over drinks or messaging platforms. These multiple narratives

Concern with climate change, and coal's contribution to it, has centred coal in an intensely moralised politics of accusation in Australia. This paper discusses the ordinary ethics through which pro‐coal lobbyists in Australia relate to this moralised landscape and offers an analysis of the everyday and ordinary production of complicity with climate change. It argues that complicity is not just something

The Pacific Island region is a key context in the history of anthropology. Yet, while much has been written about how anthropology of the Pacific Islands contributed to Anglo‐American anthropology, the discipline's institutional history in the Pacific Islands has received very little attention. This paper is the first to explore the history of anthropology at the University of the South Pacific (USP)

In remote Indigenous communities, people with end stage kidney disease have limited access to dialysis services and the vast majority of patients contend with urban displacement in order to access treatment. Through ethnographic encounters with Yolŋu renal patients and other actors in Northern Territory healthcare systems, this paper explores how the threats posed by end stage kidney disease are multiply

The construct of multispecies anthropology has helped explain some of the ways through which humans develop sensory and embodied connectedness with the more‐than‐human. Yet there is a need to fully comprehend how such connectedness leads to the discovery of the inner self. Through an ethnographic study carried out with rural South Punjabi pigeon flyers in Pakistan between 2008 and 2018, this paper

This is a story about the ‘arts of noticing’ more‐than‐human noticing. In it I reflect on the ways in which my own practice of ethnographic filmmaking is itself an agent of multisensory participation. As artifice and artificial eye, there is something both liberating and sensuous about filmmaking practice. It heightens the performativity of participants and their embodied rituals and allows me to enter

Pigdogging is a popular pastime in Australia, a form of recreational hunting whereby people collaborate with dogs to chase and catch wild pigs. This paper analyses the hunt as an interspecies event that unfolds through the sensual and sensory entanglements of human and nonhuman, with a particular focus on the perspectives of the hunters. The concept of ‘atmosphere’ will be employed to frame an ethnographic

An indelible memory of visitors to Willowra Aboriginal community in Central Australia is the sound of donkeys braying as they roam the village in search of sustenance and are chased by barking dogs. While Warlpiri people view donkeys as an integral part of their sonic landscape, outsiders typically perceive the animals as a noisy, land‐management ‘pest’ and want them removed. Recently, the arrival

#MeToo deals in the everyday ambiguous and intersectional, providing a space for discussion of the grey areas of sexual propriety. Since 2017, when the term was mobilised spectacularly in the US entertainment industry, other industries have undertaken an examination of their own practices and norms. In this paper we consider the implications of this political moment for the discipline of anthropology

What does ‘identity’ really mean for the migrant workforce beyond its function in production relations? How are forms of identity evoked within broader social relations in a migrant context? This article explores these questions by looking at how the Tamil Dalit tea workers in the South Indian state of Kerala experience the stigmatisation of their identity categories in the context of two significant

This paper explores the interweaving of Buddhist practice, old age and women's gendered roles in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Given Vietnamese gendered norms that emphasise women's lifelong attachment and responsiblity to their families, this paper shows that Buddhist practice is a way of life in old age for women. Old age is a time in life when one continues to hone relational personhood and negotiate

This article discusses the ambivalent status of local authorities in postcolonial state building in Timor‐Leste. We deploy two sets of empirical data to analyse the role ambiguity plays in particular power dynamics: the East Timorese legislation on community authority, and ethnographic descriptions of a local form of conflict resolution at the village level. The ethnographic analysis points to the

This article draws on ethnographic research conducted in 2015 with Hip Hop dancers in Perth, as well as my own personal engagement as a Breaking practitioner, to examine how membership within the local Perth Hip Hop dance scene is made and negotiated. The focus of this article is on the processual, embodied and locally particular aspects of personhood, alhough specifically my concern is with how Hip

The Mongol horse stems from ancient stock, similar to the first horses ridden on the Central Asian grassland steppe. Mongol horses subsequently migrated with their human counterparts throughout Eurasia, as far to the east as Japan. During archery festivals in Japan, horses gallop along a narrow runway within a temple complex in the heavily populated city of Kyoto. In Mongolia, with the recent re‐emergence

Stench is often the most immediate mark of something dirty, decaying and diseased. In India, stench and the smell of acrid smoke commonly indicate the proximity of an open dump or landfill. Frequently a slum is located in the vicinity too, housing waste‐pickers who forage in these sprawling dumps for salvageable waste. These spaces are also host to vermin, birds, stray dogs, pigs, cows and, more recently

This special issue suggests that the need to examine the entangled lives of species, selves and other beings through a multisensory perspective is crucial and timely. Developing on a sensory analysis, one that emerges through what Anna Tsing refers to as the ‘arts of noticing’ (2015), this introductory paper explores how both nonhuman and human lives are intertwined, and how their close examination

Like other Pentecostals, the Lelet of central New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, are urged to reject significant aspects of their cultural tradition in order to become born‐again Christians. Most Lelet Pentecostals say that all use of magic must be abandoned. I use the example of healing to show how commitments to break with the past are influenced by life’s exigencies, such as illness. Pragmatic responses

This article explores the interplay between culture and Christianity by detailing the history, experience, and impact of the Charismatic Catholic Renewal in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea (PNG). In 1985, the PNG Catholic Bishops' Conference approved the charismatic movement as one of the authentic movements for spiritual renewal of the Catholic Church in PNG. However, the

In the Sepik, names feature centrally in political and religious contexts. Esoteric knowledge about totemic names enables Nyaura men to achieve status and power and can set them in contact with spirits. A recently arrived Pentecostal/evangelical movement—Operation Joshua—claims to have found the true name of God, whom it presents as being radically different to the beings people's ancestors have known

In this article, I am interested in how belief and religious materiality—sacred objects, places, infrastructures and digital media—are entangled in globalisation processes. Drawing on a case study of the John of God spiritual movement, I analyse the ways in which places and objects that have recently acquired sacred status enter into older, more established global spiritual networks, and by doing so

In north central Timor‐Leste, multi‐sensory ecological engagement is deeply entangled with conceptualisations of and approaches to people’s wellbeing. How people understand human health and wellbeing is closely related to how they understand nature or more particularly human/nature relations and distinctions across multiple timescales. Working through complex cosmopolitics and activated through cross‐temporal

In a small Bahun village in Gorkha district, West Nepal, in only one generation, there has been a huge shift to educating young women and including them in modernity. Ideologies of ‘gender equality’ in education that are promoted in development programs and discourse, and in Maoist rhetoric, have been powerful drivers behind this. In this paper I highlight the gender and generational dynamics of the

© 2020 Australian Anthropological Society In its many forms, Christianity tends to focus adherents’ attention upon earlier religious traditions, compelling them to renew their faith, repent and seek redemption. This special issue takes up questions about Christianity’s temporal ‘secondarity’. Contributors move beyond increasingly futile theoretical debates about rupture and continuity by considering

Claimants and industry professionals frequently view conflict that arises in the course of a native title claim as a detriment to timely claims resolution. I argue instead that disputation itself may constitute an integrative social process through which participants define, delimit and reproduce community. I show also how ethnographic analysis of disputation can provide useful insights into broader

In the wine‐producing region of McLaren Vale, South Australia, the development of a detailed geology map has worked to increase understandings about the physical diversity of vineyard land. I argue that the production and deployment of social/scientific knowledge through the map is instrumental in strategic imaginings of the viticultural space of McLaren Vale. Ethnographic examination of ‘District

Knowing how to approach and experience contemporary art is a challenge to many people outside the art world. Emerging contemporary art, as the newest of this genre, is often the most challenging. This article recounts my own early struggles as a researcher in this field, and proposes a way of understanding the interaction between artist, artwork and perceiver based on my observations of how contemporary

Can native title, across remote, rural and urban settings, complement and overlap with current and future Australian senses of belonging? This is to explore a form of cultural coexistence that is potentially in tension with a sharp and mutually exclusive categorical distinction between those who embrace Indigenous identity and others. Can such cultural coexistence reinforce legal and economic achievements

This paper presents an interesting discussion and analysis of Pasifika (specifically Tongan and Samoan) migrants in Brisbane, and the diverse adaptive cultural practices they use to promote a sense of wellbeing and cultural continuity in diaspora contexts. Pacific Island migrant perspectives of wellbeing and worldviews are linked to their spatial behaviour and material cultural adaptations within places

First advanced in a major essay published in 2010, Mark Mosko's ‘partible penitent’ thesis asserts that Melanesian and Christian cultures are based upon analogous conceptions of dividual personhood. Consequently, conversion in the region has been characterised by continuity rather than rupture, as argued most prominently by Joel Robbins. This essay offers an assessment of Mosko's thesis in terms of

In this article I unpack the labour of “networking” to understand the changes in sociality and worker identity that have occurred in the Australian professional managerial class workforce under post‐Fordism. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken at the interface of the pubic service and private consultancy firms in Canberra, I break from dominant readings of intimacy in post‐Fordism which preference either

In this paper, the perceptions of Bhutanese refugee women were explored in relation to their changing identity and their behavioural responses in the use of preventive health services following resettlement. Interviews with 30 Bhutanese refugee women in Melbourne revealed resettlement drivers, challenges and dilemmas. There was no option for women other than resettlement, women wanted to escape from

This paper explores the disjuncture between medico‐legal trajectories of living and dying, in which lives start and stop, and the cyclic comings and goings of Buddhist and Hindu bodies. Drawing on fieldwork with Buddhist and Hindu communities in Adelaide, South Australia, I attend to the multiple temporalities that become implicated in end‐of‐life decision‐making about how and when a person may die

This article presents glimpses of the life and fieldwork of Grant Evans, the foremost anthropologist and historian to work on Laos in recent decades. It explores his youth in rural Australia, his tumultuous student years, and the challenges he faced as a professional scholar negotiating the Lao PDR bureaucracy. It draws insights from some of his early writing for alternative publications in Australia

Grant Evans’ body of work on Laos consistently sought to understand how peasant society responded to political, social and economic change. As the Lao peasantry became ever more integrated both nationally and within the wider Southeast Asian region, and relations of market exchange came to dominate rural life, Evans maintained the need to reflect on Laos’ peasant roots to understand resulting pathways

Idealistically speaking, schools are engines for upward social mobility. Education for ethnic minorities in Laos was set up to achieve nationalist, political, economic and sociocultural goals of ‘equity’ and ‘equality’. It was hoped that education would shift ethnic minorities from a lifestyle based on superstitious beliefs to a modern one, so that they could participate and enjoy ‘equality’ through

This article uses ethnographic data collected since 1994 in Northern Laos to reassess the modalities of Tai cultural and political influence on the Khmu, a Mon‐Khmer‐speaking highland population, and to understand why, after so many years of ‘Tai‐isation’, distinct identities still exist. For Grant Evans, who conducted fieldwork in Tai‐Dam and Sing Moon (Ksing Mul) villages at the end of the 1980s

Ranging from colonial modernism to postcolonial disappointment, the papers in this collection explore the possibilities of Dark Anthropology and an Anthropology of the Good in Papua New Guinea. With these two prospects in mind, I consider what these papers tell us about the situations of rural people on the peripheries of large resource projects and those in ‘Last Places’ bypassed by development and

This paper explores avenues for prestige‐making now available to and championed by the Baruya, the archetypal ‘Great Man’ people of Papua New Guinea, who I recently studied following previous work by Maurice Godelier. Amid critiques by Robbins and Ortner of anthropologists’ drive to document and empathise with “suffering subjects”, I suggest that being ‘left behind’ and ‘forgotten’ is an important

In her 2016 article Sherry Ortner discusses what she calls the rise of ‘dark anthropology’: that is, ethnographic work that analyses situations of domination, dispossession, and violence. She, like Joel Robbins (2013), posits as a counterpoint the emergence of ‘anthropologies of the good,’ which emphasise care and ethics. In this paper I put these two anthropological projects into generative tension

In this article I consider why individuals sacrifice their lives for the collective. In the Porgera Valley of highlands Papua New Guinea, young men who are called ‘Rambos’ engage in sustained tribal conflicts due to increasing social inequalities in an area that is supposedly benefiting from socioeconomic development. The opening of the Porgera Gold Mine in 1990 ushered in an era of anticipated benefits

Western ideologies of imperialism conceptualise time as heterogeneous in that they assume that colonised lands are outside of historical time. In this respect, the discursive construction of an empty frontier has been crucial to colonial dispossession. Yet colonial discourses become dominant through their circulation, and so the savage spaces they imagine take on a life of their own when they are revoiced

‘Dark Anthropology’ and its complementary ‘Anthropology of the Good’ have become influential and debated notions in anthropology in recent years. I here parse distinctive features of these emphases, address their relation to theory and to ethnography, and consider the stakes involved in concretely applying their conceptual designations. I discuss the general shift in anthropology from grand theory

This article is about instructing and persuading talk in social interaction. Two interactions are examined which revolved around an oral assignment delivered in a seminar session in Matvung, Papua New Guinea. I show how the interaction is achieved collaboratively by the seminar cohort, and how the cohort members assume event‐specific roles in doing so. At the same time they are drawing upon knowledge

This article historicises gender relations among Wampar speakers in New Guinea (PNG). It analyses three interconnected female biographies to show how historical background interacts with current large‐scale capitalist projects to exacerbate social inequalities. One biography exemplifies linkages between Christianisation, education and political representation; the second focuses on inheritance, access

This article examines the telling of ghost stories of Indigenous Australians who were removed from their families during Australia’s assimilation era. Known as the Stolen Generations, this group of people, were subjected to institutionalisation, adoption, and forced removals from their families, communities and Aboriginal country. In many of my ethnographic encounters with Stolen Generations, I was

In this paper we attempt to understand at least some of the complex and interacting forces – cultural, biological, developmental and historical – that influence adolescents’ sexual behaviour in three remote Australian Aboriginal communities. We use the concept of ‘agency’ only as a foil for our interpretation. Drawing upon ethnographic material, we focus on: ‘walkin’ around at night’, avoidance of

Airplane flights are one of the fastest, perhaps even the fastest, growing source of greenhouse gas emissions, even though there is much discussion of mitigating emissions to stave off a global climate change disaster. While business people, politicians, celebrities, and highly affluent people appear to be the most frequent flyers, the demands of an increasingly corporatised university sector have

While ‘later life sees care emerge in ways that are new’ (Dawson and Goodwin‐Hawkins), this article argues that there is a general form to ethical care that pertains to all individual citizens in a liberal or democratic society. The form is one of balance: between engagement and inclusion on the one hand, and a preservation of autonomy and personal sovereignty on the other; between action and inaction

In debates over medically assisted dying right to die activists are often accused of embracing an unbridled neoliberal individualistic ethics that devalue life and reject notions of community and care. Through an ethnographic study of activists in North America and Australia, this article aims to complicate this point of view by showing how they are deeply invested in what it means to act morally in

In this editors’ reply to Nigel Rapport’s Afterword to the articles collected in the special issue ‘Moralities of care in later life’, we wonder: does the social ethics of care come with unacknowledged limits? We join with Rapport’s call to maintain the individual’s ‘personal preserve’ but observe—critically—that his “so far as possible, for as long as possible” makes for an uncomfortable caveat. To

Demographic and social changes in Europe and OECD countries have increased the number of dependents in recent decades, challenging the organisation of health systems and raising calls for re‐definition of long‐term care services. In Spain the crisis of care has challenged a care regime based strongly on the family. Recent social policies have attempted to address this challenge. This article analyses

Building on recent anthropological work on post-Fordist affect, this article explores comparatively the ‘afterlives’ of the social organisation of production. In particular, based on comparative ethnography of milling and mining on Northern England, it explores the very different forms of work organisation and their relationships with similarly contrasting moralities of care amongst and for older people

This article will focus on perceptions about the health of tenants at an independent‐living residence for indigent elderly and disabled people. At this site tenants often resisted aid provided, which was a marked contrast to their caregiver's moral and legal imperative to help. This “caregiver's dilemma” will be explored within the shifting perspectives of older adults with low social and economic

In contemporary Japanese society the ability to care for oneself and other senior citizens has become a defining feature of good retirement. The capitalist Japanese state has historically mobilised moral virtues to foster a sense of productive citizenship among senior citizens and their family members. After the country failed to recover from the long recessionary era, policies regarding the welfare

Expectations for ageing well in later life are connected to, but not limited to, access to economic resources. This research investigates how older people of differing living standards reflect on choices made in the context of their everyday lives. In‐depth interviews with 143 older New Zealanders revealed that claims to choice were a means of validating oneself as capable, able to manage the uncertainty