Friends, colleagues, please join us for the second seminar in the Deakin Anthropology Seminar Series 2017, presented by Eben Kirksey, of UNSW. (See below for a description of Eben’s research.) The seminar will be followed by drinks at The Edge, 6/8 Eastern Beach Rd, Geelong.
Date: Thursday 30th March
Time: 4:00-5:30pm
Location: Deakin Waterfront AD1.122
(Also: Burwood C2.05; Melbourne Corporate Center, enquire at desk; VMP 39384)
Lively multispecies communities and deadly racial assemblages in West Papua
Indigenous people from West Papua, a territory under Indonesian rule, are foraging for food in spaces by the side of the road, in the ruins of recently logged forests. Living on the margins of market economies and transportation infrastructures comes with opportunities as well as risks. Emergent ecosystems are teeming with grasshoppers, katydids, praying mantises, and other edible insects, as well as marsupial game animals. Children are finding happiness in the hap of what happens in these multispecies worlds. At the same time, plans by technocrats in distant metropolitan centers to turn nomadic hunter-gatherers into a governable population have gone awry. Infrastructures and modern medical practices protect some people in Indonesia from tropical diseases like malaria, while Papuans die. Black lives matter. But some black lives matter more than others. The case of one black boy who was shot dead along the side of the road in June 2015 while hunting with friends is part of an ongoing process of genocide in West Papua. Race, nationality, and class all help determine who has full personhood before the law. In pursuing the elusive promise of justice in West Papua, indigenous people are pushing back against powerful assemblages and infrastructures, creating the conditions for continued life in multispecies communities.
Biography:
Eben Kirksey studies the political dimensions of imagination as well as the interplay of natural and cultural history. Duke University Press has published his two books—Freedom in Entangled Worlds (2012) and Emergent Ecologies (2015)—as well as one edited collection: The Multispecies Salon (2014). Dr Kirksey is perhaps best known for his work in multispecies ethnography—a field that mixes ethnographic, historical, ethological, and genetic methods to study spaces where humans and other species meet. He has been working in West Papua, the Indonesian-controlled half of New Guinea, since 1998. Princeton University hosted Dr Kirksey as the 2015-2016 Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor and he is currently Senior Lecturer and the Environmental Humanities Convener at UNSW Australia.