European Society for Oceanists 2022 Conference

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Session Detail (parallel)

Oceania in World Anthropologies. Circulation of people, objects, and ideas in the knowledge production of ‘marginal’ anthropological traditions

Coordinator(s)

Fabiana Dimpflmeier, Lorenzo Brutti

Session presentation

Oceania has long been at the centre of anthropological cogitations. It is – not to mention – the birthplace of classic anthropological fieldwork. From Bronislaw Malinowski to Marshall Sahlins, concepts and practices of seminal importance to the construction of theories and methodologies of the dominant Western anthropological discourse have developed in interaction with Pacific cultures and/or in relation with their material or immaterial aspects.
But how objects and ideas from Oceania have circulated in space and time, helping to shape careers, schools, museums, theories, paradigms, representations and practices in marginal anthropological traditions such as, e.g., the Norwegian, Italian, Turkish, Russian, Brazilian or Japanese? In a perspective that aims at pluralizing the history of anthropology beyond the French and Anglo-American (major) traditions (Barrera-González, Heintz, Horolets 2017; Bérose 2017-2021; Histories of Anthropology Annual 2014-2021) and challenging a monolithic view of contemporary anthropology as a unified discipline emanating from the West (Restrepo 2005; Lins Ribeiro, Escobar 2006; 2018), in this panel we invite participants to critically investigate the complexities and the embeddedness of anthropological knowledge transfer between Oceania and ’minor’ European scholarly traditions and/or World Anthropologies.
In particular, we would like to explore questions like: How, how deep and at what point, material and immaterial aspects of the Pacific area impacted on the formation of marginal traditions? It was by direct contact or by “travelling theory” (Said 1982)? Following which courses, people, ideas, images, and/or objects? How Pacific anthropological data and Pacific-based theoretical traits were selected and accepted by the hosting traditions? Which weight, respectively, Pacific material and immaterial have held? How the circulation of Pacific “travelling” concepts, objects and theories can help us better understand (and challenge) the dynamic of knowledge production and transfer, and the same conceptual distinction between material and immaterial?
We welcome original case studies from ethnographical and historical perspectives as well as papers based on consistent visual documentation (pictures, drawings, video, etc.) and/or addressing these topics within the larger theoretical developments in contemporary anthropology.

Paper submissions are closed

Accepted papers

„Admirable, Innocent Nations of the South Sea”: James Cook, Exoticism and the Concepts of Early Anthropology in the Kingdom of Hungary, 1760-1835

Ildiko Kristof (Hungarian Academy of Sciences)

The transmission of the Voyages of James Cook in the Kingdom of Hungary in the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries makes an important chapter in the history of the emergence of anthropology there. The cultural and the political contexts of the Hungarian translation(s) provide valuable insights into the micro-circumstances of the making of science in a local, non-western context, and also in the mechanisms of the formation and distribution of anthropological concepts.
Not less than four different Hungarian translations of the Voyages of James Cook (1728-1779) were carried out in the period. A Jesuit and three Protestant translations represent specific micro-contexts from which the Enlightenment science of the so-called „world ethnography” and anthropology started to rise.
The aim of my talk is to present those contexts, to highlight the similarities and the differences of the translations, and by doing so, to reveal how the early ideas of anthropology (e.g. „earthly Paradise,”„children of nature,” „simple societies” etc) gained popularity not only in the Western but also in the Eastern part of Europe. All the four Hungarian contexts are well-documented and, due to my previous archival exploration, the particular editions of the Voyages used by the Hungarian translators are identifiable. While the first context suggest a French and Jesuit connection, the other three indicate German ones (esp. the university of Göttingen).

Italian ways in Melanesia. Odoardo Beccari, Luigi Maria D’Albertis and Lamberto Loria between science and prejudices.

Lorenzo Brutti (Aix-Marseille University, CNRS, EHESS)

There are so many ways to travel. Italians are masters in this: both those who came from the Italian "mere geographical expression" of the pre-Risorgimento period, and those who, for various reasons, went far beyond the borders of the "Europe of powers" in the times of an independent and united Italy. Starting from the second half of the 19th century, a specific scientific travel tradition delineated in relation with Melanesia, and Papua New Guinea more in particular, when Odoardo Beccari, Luigi Maria D’Albertis and Lamberto Loria travelled extensively in Irian Jaya, the Fly region, and British New Guinea, bringing high the name of Italy and its scientific endeavours. All three “traveller-naturalists” (Puccini 1999) helped shaping the basis of new ways of interpreting and practicing anthropology in Italy (Brutti 2016; Dimpflmeier 2018, 2020). Moreover, they helped us better understand the passage from naturalistic to anthropological travelling and the development of fieldwork at large. At the same time, however, in British New Guinea and Australia they soon acquired a negative stigma in relation to their supposed ways of dealing with the natives (MacGregor 1897; Haddon 1897). D’Albertis and Loria, in particular, were long considered as representatives of an “Italian aggressive style of work” rooted somehow in their warm emotional Latino behaviour. This paper will shed light on the question, exploring and contextualising both “Italian ways” from a historical perspective.

The Pathways of Albert English’s PNG photographs

S R Jan Hasselberg

Among the great number of historical photograph collection from PNG, the photos by Albert English have travelled particularly interesting paths. His photographs are of great importance, taken as they were mostly between 1890 and 1905 and with a strong ethnographic focus, but only a few have found their way to public access and awareness.
Albert English, as a colonial agent, has also been mysteriously overlooked in the writing of the history of British New Guinea. He was one of the early arrivals and he stayed longer than any other expatriate; he took part in historic expeditions; he was a highly regarded colonial agent for sixteen years; his plantation was the most important in the colony; and he patrolled energetically on both coast and inland. And he photographed.
There are six collections of between 50 and 250 of English’s photographs kept at major institutions, although not all under his name, plus a private collection of 60 prints. Most of these can today only be accessed by visiting the archives. Through exchanges with other expatriates and visitors some of his photos have ended up in others’ collections (i.e. Seligman’s).
In my presentation I will discuss the background for and content of English’s photographs, and the pathways of his collections. A few other important PNG collections which have had an anonymous existence will also be mentioned.

Papuan Threads, Italian Canvas: the Fabric of Lamberto Loria’s Etnografia Italiana

Fabiana Dimpflmeier ('Gabriele d'Annunzio' University of Chieti-Pescara)

In the spring of 1905, according to a story that has become famous in the history of Italian anthropology, Lamberto Loria, later to be accounted for as one of its founding fathers, made an excursion to the countryside in Campania which resulted in his ‘conversion’ to Italian ethnography. Less than a decade before, he had come back from a seven-year long sojourn in the British New Guinea (BNG), where he observed native tribes, took ethnographic photographs, and collected artefacts.
Loria's fieldwork in the Melanesian subcontinent was unique in an era filled with armchair anthropologists. However, the originality of his work has been mostly overshadowed by his later Italian accomplishments, so much so that the impact of his research in BNG on the shaping of his Etnografia Italiana, has been at length underestimated or neglected. Consequently, Italian history of anthropology interpreted his Italian Ethnography as a discipline mainly interested in material culture.
As this paper reconstructs Loria's fascination for the exotic and the 'inner' savage, it demonstrates how his conception of Etnografia Italiana was deeply influenced by his experiences at the peripheries of the world, and Melanesia in particular. His wholistic conception of Papuan ethnography, as the study of both material and immaterial aspects of culture, would have envisioned a new way of studying and interpreting Italian folk traditions, in contraposition with previous and contemporary philological and anthropolo

New feminine representations in context of decolonization through the figure of Celeste, daughter of North African deportees.

Melica Ouennoughi (University Vincennes Paris VIII)

The forced migration of North Africans in the 19th century, has made it possible to identify a link between the penal colony of New Caledonia and the penal colony of Corsica around the oral transmission of families originating from the Sahara. We will take the example of Celeste "wandering" then "reconstructed" who became an icon of Nouméa. By revisiting the unique journey of Celeste, we propose a dynamic anthropology in the context of decolonization in the renewal of classical anthropological issues (Bronislaw Malinowski), through the restitution of objects, artistic emblems, his love affair with the governor of the colony. It is by revisiting the story of the daughters of deportees through Celeste and others, that we felt it necessary to restituate her singular journey within a collective trajectory. Despite the ideology, it is about deconstructing the image of the “exotic” woman, there is a silent tradition either around informal sources making it possible to justify the presence of matriarchs.