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Session Detail (plenary)
Plenary keynote: Paige West
Knowing Oceania Now
Paige West
Columbia University
In this talk I think through the role of research and writing in fixing both the material and the immaterial. For me my engagement in and with Oceania is material intimacy enveloped in motion. It is leaving home, traveling to, and being with. It is long days on boats in crashing waves. It is cold nights in smoky rooms listening to songs and stories that meander from the before to the now to sometime new. It is the sweaty touch of holding material steady with someone as you build a house. It is talking for hours, days, years, and in that talking pulling dynamic knowledge into the world in collective exchange. Yet when I write, place, touch, engagement, and the material natures of life lose their corporeality and the animated, living nature of knowledge appears to others is immaterial. Thinking about this is not new for anthropologists, historians or philosophers. Yet thinking about it now, at a time when the conditions of intimacy are radically changed – the unseen exchange between bodies in breath is more likely than before to kill us – is important. For many scholars, the past two years have changed the nature of the material intimacy of their scholarship. In this paper, drawing on work from New Ireland, Papua New Guinea and the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, I’ll ask what scholarship in Oceania might look like in the future.
