Pacific Interest Group
The Pacific Interest Group (PIG) was established in December 2007 as a multi-disciplinary forum aimed at promoting high-quality research, encouraging excellence in teaching, and sharing ideas and expertise on topics related to Pacific Studies (covering Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea and Oceania).
PIG also provides post-graduates and senior scholars with the opportunity to present and workshop academic papers, research projects or other related material with fellow scholars of the region.
The group meets to hear papers or presentations from local and visiting scholars of the Pacific region. Sessions operate as informal round-table discussions with the intention of encouraging dialogue and synergies across the disciplines.
The Pacific Interest Group invites participation by interested scholars across all disciplines. If you would like to join the PIG email list, or if you wish to present a paper or lead an informal discussion, please contact the co-coordinators.
The seminar series is open to all.
News:
We have launched the Pacific Interest Group Working Paper Series which will feature papers based on past presentations in the Pacific Interest Group Seminar Series.
Forthcoming events
Installation Design and the Exhibition of Oceanic Things: Two New York Museums in the 1940s
Professor Robert Foster (University of Rochester, N.Y. )
Kanaris Lecture Theatre, The Manchester Museum
Wednesday 9 November, 3-5 pm.
Abstract:
This seminar documents some of the experimentation in museum installation designs for the exhibition of non-Western objects during the 1930s and 1940s.This is a period in which ethnographic artefacts were being displayed as artworks in natural history museums, and in which the exhibition of such objects in art museums drew on techniques characteristic of not only natural history museums, but also of commercial urban window displays (which were themselves enjoying a period of dazzling exuberance).The seminar responds to the provocation of Alfred Gell’s influential writings on art and agency, specifically, his conception of art as entrapment and enchantment—his claim that artworks captivate, and thus exert a kind of (secondary) agency on people (patients).
Here is a link to publicity about the project on which the seminar will be based: http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=3771
About the Presenter:
Professor Foster received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago where he also taught as a William Rainey Harper Postdoctoral Instructor. At the University of Rochester, he has served as Mercer Brugler Distinguished Teaching Professor and in 2008 was awarded the Goergen Award for Distinguished Achievement and Artistry in Undergraduate Teaching. Prof. Foster is also a core faculty member in the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies. Prof. Foster has done field research in Papua New Guinea since 1984. He has been a visiting professor at the Australian National University and at L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His current research interests include globalization, corporations, material culture and mass consumption. His research has been supported by the U.S. Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, the Australian-American Educational Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Spencer Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is the author of Social Reproduction and History in Melanesia (Cambridge 1995) and Materializing the Nation: Commodities, Consumption and Media in Papua New Guinea (Indiana 2002). His most recent book is titled Coca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea (Palgrave Macmillan 2008).
Past events / seminars
Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson (Australian National University): Culture Crisis: Anthropology and Politics in Aboriginal Australia - A Discussion (8 June 2011)
Jenny Peachey (University of Manchester) Suffering in Silence: Heartbreak, hate and compensation in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea (23 March 2011)
Will Rollason (University of St Andrews) Working for the future: Some notes from the Panapompom beche-de-mer fishery. (23 March 2010)
Susan Luckman (University of South Australia) Darwin, a tropical Southeast Asian city? Re-thinking remoteness and proximity. (8 December 2009)
Larissa Sandy (La Trobe University) Free vs. Forced: The everyday lived experiences of Cambodian sex workers and the voluntary/forced dichotomy. (28 October 2009)
Stuart Kirsch (University of Michigan) Indigenous discourses in the Pacific and South America: Emerging claims about subsistence rights, loss, and freedom. (1 October 2009)
Jonathon Prasad (Lancaster University) The Good, the Bad and the Faithful: The religious background to Fiji’s constitutional crisis of April 2009. (6 May 2009)
Maggie Waters (University of Tasmania) Engaging Indigenous communities with research: How to do it (25 March 2009)
Martin Gibbs (University of Sydney) Beyond the New World: The failed 16th Century Spanish Colonies of the Solomon Islands (4 March 2009)
Chris Gregory (Australian National University) Dravidian Kinship in Fiji and India: Is it perfectly identical? Who cares anyway? (25 February 2009).
Karen Sykes (University of Manchester) The Value of a Beautiful Memory: Imitation, borrowing and serious play in the making of mortuary sculptures in New Ireland (21 January 2009).
Margaret Jolly (Australian National University) Gender and Nature: The globalisation of motherhood and stratified reproduction. (Roundtable discussion with Sarah Green, Karen Sykes and Jeanette Edwards, 21 October 2008).
Margaret Jolly (Australian National University) Beyond the Blue: Revisioning gender and sexuality on Cook’s voyages in the Pacific (with the Dept of Anthropology Seminar Series, 20 October 2008).
Tiffany McComsey (University of Manchester) The Stolen Generations: Representation and articulation and the spaces in between 6 (June 2008).
Keir Martin (University of Manchester) Big Man, Big Shot, Grassroots, Thief: The strange death of the Melanesian Way. (2 May 2 2008).
Lucy Pickering (Liverpool John Moores University) Coming to Hawai'i: Arrival stories and the failed indigenous other (4 April 4 2008).
Ana Carden-Coyne (University of Manchester) Men in Pain: Silence, resistance and passive pleasures. (7 March 2008).
John Taylor (University of Manchester) Epistemologies of Rupture: Kava and the articulation of gender and modernity in Vanuatu. (1 February 2008).
Fiona Magowan (Queens University, Belfast) The Conflict between Australian and Customary Law. (7 December 2007).
Contact
Group Coordinators
- Stewart Muir: stewart.muir@manchester.ac.uk
- Karen Sykes: karen.sykes@manchester.ac.uk
To join the PIG email list, please contact Stewart Muir