Within the context of the Purari Delta’s transforming materialities of resource extraction, and the legacy of the Tom Kabu iconoclastic modernist movement (1946–69), I examine the processes of materialisation bound up with two related but different things: heirlooms (eve uku) and documents (Incorporated Land Group (ILG) forms). Eve uku (‘hand head’) lie within a continuum of things (names, relations, totemic ancestral spirit‐beings and sites in the environment) through which ancestral actions are shown to have happened, and descent groups’ identities manifest. However, given the ambiguous status of the traditional past among the I’ai, the power of these forms is circumscribed to the village thus making them ineffectual tokens in the bid to secure royalties from resource extraction. Instead, highly coveted documents known as ILG certificates have emerged as efficacious things by which royalties can be secured. Examining these certificates as objects, I investigate how these documents help materialise anew descent groups, communities’ relations to their environment and thus their aspirations for development with its attending materialities. The problem for the I’ai, however, remains how to obtain these documents and, as with eve uku, how to control them.
Within this article I discuss the productive potentials of looking at historic photographs of the Purari Delta with indigenous communities today. A particular type of artifact, the meanings of photographs are promiscuous. Thinking about the shape of cultural property relations that are manifest photographs, I show how engagements with indigenous communities unsettles European preconceptions about what photographs are as well as how doing so raises issues about what cultural property is, and perhaps can be. Instead of being a discreet entity, cultural property for the I'ai emerges as a network of relationships that envelopes people, environment, and ancestors. This expansive notion of cultural property can help us rethink how we treat and handle objects within museums and archives.Relations wither or flourish according to the properties seen to flow alongside them. The effectiveness of relationships thus depend on the form in which certain objects appear.
Oceania occupies an intriguing place within anthropology's genealogy. In the introduction to this collection of essays, we examine the role of the ethnography of Oceania in the development of our anthropological perspectives on materialisation, the dynamic process by which persons and things are inter-related. Building upon the recent resurgence of theoretical interests in things we use the term materialisation (rather than material culture or materiality) to capture the vitality of the lived processes by which ideas of objectivity and subjectivity, persons and things, minds and bodies are entangled. Taking a processual view, we advocate for an Oceanic anthropology that continues to engage with things on the ground; that asks what strategies communities use to materialise their social relations, desires and values; and that recognises how these processes remain important tools for understanding historical and contemporary Oceanic societies. Examining these locally articulated processes and forms contributes to a material (re)turn for anthropology that clarifies how we, as scholars, think about things more widely.
How can we make any progress in the understanding of cultures, ancient or modern, if we persist in dividing what the people join and in joining what they keep apart?( Hocart 1952: 23)
Anthropology has always involved collections and collecting. Collections helped give rise to the discipline's formation and were integral to theoretical perspectives rooted in hierarchies of race and technology in the nineteenth century. With the disavowal of these perspectives, collecting, and its resulting collections, remained an ongoing but unacknowledged activity. The material (re)turn in the 1980s brought anthropology's material legacies under renewed scrutiny by repositioning objects as having histories and agency. Ethnographies of collecting have helped reveal the often obscured collaborations that were, and are, critical to anthropological knowledge. Collaborations with indigenous communities involving collections are helping to address the discipline's asymmetry by challenging anthropological categories and authority. In the process, experimental ethnographies through digital and nondigital means are demonstrating that collections are profoundly relational. This relational perspective is helping to chart new directions for work in museums and the wider discipline.
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