International workshops
We are planning a series of four workshops. The launch workshop, The Value Question Today - Interdisciplinary perspectives on the Moral Economy was held at the University of Manchester in May 2011, and the presentations and programme are available at the link. Future workshops will be held at ANU in September 2012, and will be planned by our project partner, Jon Altman, in collaboration with colleagues at the Australian National University. In this and in each of the following workshops in August 2013 at Queens University Belfast and June 2014 at the University of Manchester, and in the final conference in April 2015 at Manchester we will address the general question of the values that inform monetary and non-monetary transfers between kin and non-kin on the boundaries of the domestic moral economy (DME) in the Asia Pacific region. These events will deal with topics arising from our Research agenda: Ethnographic studies of value in the DME of the Asia-Pacific which provides details of the historical and theoretical context of the issues to be discussed. Final dates will be posted here.
The theme of the workshops will be Ethnography in Comparative Perspective. These will allow PhD scholars and other scholars who have recently completed fieldwork in Asia-Pacific, and on Asia-Pacific transnational families in Europe, to present the results of their work. The first part of the workshop will examine the values informing money transfers in the context of life-cycle rituals, the second part of the workshop with transfers in ‘everyday’ contexts. Our temporary working hypotheses are that rituals not only reveal the values of the DME in a dramatic formal way but that they also define and redefine relations between valuers, that these values inform everyday transfers of money and property, and that the disputes and estrangements these transfers often give rise to redefine the boundaries between kin and non-kin.
The theme of the conference will be the Theoretical, methodological, and policy implications. This workshop will enable participants to locate their ethnographic findings in the broader context of Asia and the Pacific as a whole, and to consider the theoretical and policy implications of these findings. The conceptual framework for discussion that we propose is a modified conception of Peterson and Taylor’s (2003) notion of the DME. This conceptual framework involves a theoretical shift from the traditional approach to the analysis of kinship and exchange that has its origins in the work of Polanyi (1944) and Lévi-Strauss (1947) and developed by Sahlins (1972). The traditional approach gives primacy to the analysis of marriage exchanges between socio-centric kin groups such as moieties, clans and lineages; while this model has proved extremely useful in the past historical changes over the past 50 years, which has seen global movements of people, the emergence of the transnational family, and hyper-inflated expenditure on life-cycle rituals and remittances, renders it inappropriate to the problem in hand. A study of the DME, as we are using the concept, invites attention to be focussed on the ego-centric kindred group and fraternal alliances, the so-called ‘brotherhood.’ Lévi-Strauss himself (1947: 483-4), recognised the importance of this notion in the final chapter of his classic work on kinship where he notes the ‘exchange or gift of women’ is not the only way to establish an alliance, noting that the Nambikwara with whom he worked ‘also rely on the notion of brotherhood.’ This important qualification to his theory has been virtually ignored save for Turner’s (1980) analysis of fraternal alliance in Australian Aboriginal society. The ego-centric brotherhood is an extremely important kindred grouping in India too. In Bastar District this notion is called dadabhai, from dada, elder brother, and bhai, brother. The constitution of the brotherhood varies greatly throughout India of course but the significance of this concept lies not in its generality but in the culturally specific form it takes in different regions, at different points of time. This variation can only be grasped by taking the indigenous point of view because, by definition, its boundaries of the ego-centric brotherhood vary. It is precisely this variability that is of interest to us because the grey zone that defines the boundary between kin and non-kin is one of great ambiguity as Martin’s (2009) recent study of ‘the limits of reciprocity’ among the Tolai of PNG illustrates. Our concept of the DME, then, does not supply a tool of analysis that can be mechanically applied but rather serves as an instrument to focus attention on an ambiguous value zone that, paradoxically, clarifies the values at stake by drawing attention to the social relations between valuers situated concretely in time and place. Our aim is not to develop a general theory in the grand tradition of Lévi-Strauss’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) but rather to recapture something of the spirit of his comparative analysis of kinship and exchange in the Asia-Pacific through a modification and transcendence of his ideas, and that of others, in the light of contemporary historical circumstances.