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Session Detail (parallel)

Late modernity in the flesh

Coordinator(s)


Geir Henning Presterudstuen, Yasmine Musharbash


Session presentation

Experience in and of the world is embodied before it is known conceptually and narrated discursively. In this panel, we gather contributions discussing processes of social change and historical transformation as they are understood through the human body; focussing on the ways in which they are experienced phenomenologically, how they are sensuously known and embodied in the flesh.

We welcome contributions from across Oceania exploring relationships between the human body and social change in the current age of late modernity. While we aim for a cross-culturally comparative panel displaying diversity and plurality across Oceania, we also wish to identify pan-Oceanic themes. These might best be found by a focus on the ways in which this contemporary historical moment is signified across the region: through rapid demographic change, urbanisation, increased marketization and related processes, and so forth.

We invite ethnographic explorations of the interplay between the body and social transformation, including but not limited to analyses of bodily experience/expression of new class distinctions, of food or clothes, of bodies in flux, militarized bodies and bodies in conflict, bodies and mobility, and relatedly: the bodies of self and strangers, and, of course, bodies and the experiences of diseases, illnesses and other risks of the time. While we are open to various theoretical perspectives we encourage papers that are ethnographically grounded and seek to understand bodily experience in ways that do not reduce them to a matter of representation or discourse.


Paper submissions are closed



Accepted papers


Switching on the Bula smile: Commodified bodies and the tourist gaze in Fiji



Geir Henning Presterudstuen (University of Bergen)


In this paper I analyse the stories Fijian hospitality workers told me about their experiences working in the tourism industry, with a particular focus on how they experienced their labour market participation bodily, and how they perceived their own employment in relation to the overall commodification of Fijian culture and identity. Over recent years/decades, Fijians themselves have become one of the most highly valued commodities in the country with their amiable, smiling faces serving as the main drawcard for international visitors, and strong, rigid warrior-bodies being the most common symbols of Fiji’s tourist industry,. As I demonstrate, engagement in wage labour, then, for many has become synonymous with presenting and performing these marketable Fijian identities of which their own bodies are the main site of production, and I detail this process through which Fijian bodies are turned into objects of economic desire. Many of my respondents plying their trade in hospitality jobs consequently referred to their work as a conscious corporeal performance where they ‘switch on the bula smile’, ‘flash the Fiji muscles’, or ‘turn on the warrior’ for the tourist gaze. In my analysis I treat these self-reflexive statements as indications of a changing perception of bodies and selves occurring under the conditions of wage labour in the tourism industry, as well as, more theoretically, clues to the relationship between objectification and commodification.

Putting the body on the line, online: The use of YouTube by Aboriginal people in northern Australia



Cameo Dalley (Australian National University)


The video sharing website YouTube has become host to a vast collection of videos depicting physical fights between Aboriginal people in northern Australia. In the remote community of Mornington Island, the sharing of these videos reached a peak between 2009 and 2012 in the years immediately following the local availability of the internet via smart phones. On Mornington Island, Aboriginal peoples’ desire to project images of their bodies in conflict emphasise the perception of physical violence as a legitimate means of mediating disputes between individuals. This value, arguably one shared with working class Australians more broadly, exemplify a kind of forceful autonomy against the backdrop of the state’s attempts to reform Aboriginal people towards modern middle-class ideals highlighting the sanctity of the human body. Drawing on ethnography undertaken on Mornington Island, this paper will analyse the genre of fight videos as illustrative of Mornington Islanders’ conceptions of their bodies as well as the impact of reformist ideals and programs on online behaviour.

The chief’s hair, womb and house



Thiago Oppermann (Australian National University)


Halia kinship is in the first instance somatic. It is the continuity of flesh between mother and child that traces its core, and if, as it must, this core is in practice composed of lineages that have only tentative relationships of descent, the composition is formed through the construction of houses known as tsuhana. The power to construct such a house is nitsunono, the authority-essence of the chief, tsunono. It is a substance that accrues on his shoulders, head and above all, hair. Such a house built for nitsunono is also directly mapped to the bodies of the lineage heads, male and female, contained and reproduced under its roof, in particular the body of the tsunono. This somaticism, moreover, is profoundly invested in sexuality – it is libidinal, reproductive and political. Consequently, there is a superposition of several gendered forms of embodiement and power: in the past, this was given an especially salient form by the designation of the highest rank of tsunono by means of scarifying on his back a design representing a vulva. In this paper, I discuss the body of one of the last men in Buka to have performed scarifications, but who could not himself be scarified, but whose house was an especially beautiful articulation of the Halia political ontology. In particular, I note how the polyvalent sexuality of this political ontology has come to present a problem for Halia tsunono as they recycle it as kastom in a Christian, sexually repressive context – but also how it remains, as a taboo core, a powerful means through which to assert authenticity in the contemporary Bougainvillean political landscape.

Becoming ‘fat’: A case study from Eastern Highlands Province, PNG



Olivia Barnett - Naghshineh (University of Auckland)


In this paper, I consider one embodied consequence of increasing numbers of women in PNG moving to live in or near towns. In the case of the Eastern Highlands, leaving behind their subsistence lifestyles for a new reliance on cash seems concurrent with increased body mass, locally called becoming ‘fat’. Through my own experience of being called fat on a daily basis, I ponder how Eastern Highland perspectives on what it means to be ‘fat’ can shed light on what makes a desirable body, reflecting other aspects of social change related to urbanisation. Even women who are visibly overweight and complain of knee problems and diabetes consider themselves desirable because of their fatness. Previously associated with corrupt politicians and greed (demonstrating political leaders’ ability to ‘eat the nation’s resources’ or ‘chew up the benefits’ of being in a position of power), being ‘fat’ also represents good health, strength, vitality and the ability to provide food for others – particularly when in reference to women. Being slim or skinny, on the other hand, is tantamount to weakness and undesirable to men (some skinny women are even likened to men). This is not only the case for urban women in the Highlands. Village women who can survive without doing garden work – the result of an increasingly diversified cash economy – are also gaining weight and not ashamed of it. New health products are being introduced to this growing market of women however, who are becoming conscious of their bodies and health. My analysis focuses on how fatness can be the embodiment of economic success and symbolic of more sedentary urban lifestyles, these interlink with contemporary forms of heterosexual desire in PNG.

Through thick and thin with Tameka



Yasmine Musharbash (University of Sydney)


Drawing on ethnographic and biographical research with one of my closest Warlpiri friends from Yuendumu, central Australia, I paint narrative miniatures of moments of Tameka’s life, in chronological order, from when we first met and Tameka was 16 years old through to her 32nd birthday this year. Focussed on sensuous experiences such as being a girl, becoming a mother, physical training, office work, exhaustion, disappointment and hope, the vignettes capture moments, both pivotal and mundane, of how Tameka experienced herself and the world through her body. In sequence they charter how her body as well as her ideas about the body changed over time. By foregrounding close up attention to Tameka’s idiosyncratic experiences in and of the body against the wide-lens contextual background of Indigenous disadvantage in Australia (including the statistical implications in regards to Indigenous ill-health and shocking mortality rates) within which Tameka’s life is lived, I also demonstrate how Tameka’s embodied experience of herself and the world is always and intricately linked to her positionality of a neo-colonial Indigenous subject. By traversing the fertile analytical ground between these two very disparate perspectives, I interconnect experiences in and of the body with late modernity and neo-colonialism. In my conclusion I reflect about the pushes away from and pulls towards that which inescapably makes Tameka a neo-colonial Indigenous subject, and how her body is inscribed by and a cypher of these circumstances.

Imagined Embodied Experiences of Social Change in Papua, Indonesia



Rachel Shah (Durham University)


Rachel Shah

Durham University

This papers explores a young girl's experience of social change, and particularly of schooling, in the highlands of Papua. My fieldwork, undertaken over nineteen months, gave me the opportunity of observing first-hand remarkable and rapid social change in this girl's home region. She and I both witnessed the building of a dirt road by hand, the establishment of the first active primary school, an explosion of zinc roof houses, the building of a road with heavy machinery which gave full vehicular access to the region, and of course the impact of my own presence as an anthropologist. In this paper, I present ethnographic data on these social changes and their effects on young Walak girls as I observed them. I then imagine the same changes through the bodily sensations of this particular young girl, who we'll call Maria. I explore, for example, Maria's enrolment in school by imagining her changing physical experiences. Before school, she had spent most of her days outdoors, many in the garden, digging alongside her mother till the fog brought its chill over her skin and she hauled twenty odd kilograms of sweet potatoes back to her kitchen. Now her days have been moved indoors, to crowded rooms under zinc roofs, where she sits cross-legged on wooden floors in large groups. This exploration of Maria's possible physical experiences of evidenced social changes sheds light on the particular and embodied ways that schooling and other developments are affecting people's lives and livelihoods in this part of Papua.