The preliminary programme for this year’s annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (18-22 November) in Denver is out and looks great. With my AAA Melanesia Interest Group (MIG) Convener hat on, I have scanned through the programme and compiled a list of sessions, papers and meetings that will be of interest to people working in Oceania. I’ve cast my net slightly wider than Melanesia to include as many places in the Pacific as I could find, including Australia and New Zealand.
If I have missed anything please let me know so I can add it!
Wednesday 18 November
Making Sense of Unexpected Events & Manifesting the Possible in New Caledonia
Tate A LeFevre
Wednesday 1:00 pm, Colorado Convention Center: 608
Interrogating Innovation in the Governance of Very Large Marine Protected Areas
Rebecca Gruby, Lisa Campbell, Noella Gray and Robert Greene
Wednesday 2:30 pm, 705 (Colorado Convention Center)
Embracing Legal Pluralism for Adaptive Management of Small-Scale Fishing in Palau
Keith McLain Carlisle
Wednesday 2:45 pm, 705 (Colorado Convention Center)
Marine Conservation and Social Adaptation in the Seascapes of Raja Ampat, West Papua, Indonesia
Ian Nicholas Parker
Wednesday 3:30 pm, 705 (Colorado Convention Center)
The Performance and Management of Hospitality in Fijian Society
Pauline McKenzie Aucoin
Wednesday, 4:15 pm, 201 (Colorado Convention Center)
Earth, Air, Fire, and Water: The Role of Prediction in the Management of Climatic Variability in South Australia
Steve Rayner
Wednesday 4:45 pm, 702 (Colorado Convention Center)
THURsday 19 November
CULTS, CHRISTIANS, AND COPPER ON THE GLOBAL FRONTIER: ENGAGING THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF DAN JORGENSEN (PART 1)
Thursday 8:00-9:45 am, 704 (Colorado Convention Center)
- 8:00 am – Mother House Portmortem, Roy Wagner
- 8:15 am – The Meaning of Meaninglessness: What Is in a Name for the Paiwan?, Kun-Hui Ku
- 8:30 am – Yams and Gold: Order, Entropy and Biangai Relations with Nature,
Jamon A Halvaksz II - 8:45 am – Regional Scale-Making in the Anthropology of Papua New Guinea, John Barker
- 9:00 am – Between Mates and Wantoks: Alternative Egalitarianisms Amongst Transnational Papua New Guinean Householders, Karen M Sykes
- 9:15 am – Answerability, Acknowledgement, and the Unknowable: Anthropological Entanglements with the Mining Industry and the Work of Dan Jorgensen, Alex J Golub
CULTS, CHRISTIANS, AND COPPER ON THE GLOBAL FRONTIER: ENGAGING THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF DAN JORGENSEN (PART II)
Thursday 10:15 am-12:00 pm
704 (Colorado Convention Center)
- 10.15 am – Mining, Mythic Space-Time, and Resilience at the Porgera Gold Mine, Papua New Guinea, Jerry Jacka
- 10:30 am – Order, Entropy and Values: On Culture and Cultural Change (using Christian Conversion as an Example), Joel L Robbins
- 10:45 am – New Houses: The Embrace of Modernity in Misima and Lihir, Martha Adele Macintyre
- 11:00 am – Ethico-Political Conundrums in Fieldwork on Men’s Cults, Melanesian and Academic, Rena Lederman
- 11:15 am – Boys Will be “Boys”?: On Social Reproduction in Modernist Papua New Guinea, Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington
- 11:30 am – Policing Witchcraft: Quandaries of Law and Justice in Papua New Guinea Today, Thomas Strong
- 11:45 am – Discussant, Dan Jorgensen
Keeping the Photographs Safe: Archival Infrastructures, Intercultural Collaboration, and Digital Interfaces in Indigenous Central Australia
Sabra G Thorner
Thursday 8:30 am, 111 (Colorado Convention Center)
“You Wouldn’t Build a Bridge over the Vatican”: Tasmania’s Brighton Bypass Controversy and the Enactment of Value
Christopher D Berk
Thursday 8:45 am, 111 (Colorado Convention Center)
Cannibals in Paradise: The Exotic, the Familiar, and the Strange in Ritual and Performance in Vanuatu
Hugo E DeBlock
Thursday 11:15 am, 205 (Colorado Convention Center)
The Development of Ecological and Local Knowledge in Maximizing Seaweed Production: A Case Study of I-Kiribati Farmers in the Solomon Islands
Tammy Tabe
Thursday 11:30 am, Centennial G (Hyatt Regency)
Shifting Languages or Shifting Identities? : The Incorporation of Solomon Islands Pijin into Domestic Language Use
Rachel D Emerine
Thursday 2:00 pm, Centennial B (Hyatt Regency)
Creating New Currencies for Degrowth and Relocalisation in Aotearoa New Zealand
Emma McGuirk
Thursday 3:15 pm, 403 (Colorado Convention Center)
The Value of the Vanua – understanding the Nexus of People and Land in Fiji’s Market Economy
Geir Henning Presterudstuen
Thursday 4:30 pm, Centennial F (Hyatt Regency)
MELANESIA INTEREST GROUP BUSINESS MEETING
Thursday 6.15 pm, venue TBA
FRIDAY 20 November
Causality in a Tongan Cultural MODEL of Nature
Giovanni Bennardo
Friday 8:00 am, Mile High 1D (Colorado Convention Center)
Affective Responsibility: Giving and Physical Space in the Marshall Islands
Elise C Berman
Friday 8:15 am, Centennial A (Hyatt Regency)
An Unfamiliar Heritage: Colonial Legacies, Landscapes and Discomfort in the Marquesas Islands
Emily C Donaldson
Friday 10:30 am, Mile High 1D (Colorado Convention Center)
American Samoan Preschool Teachers and Globalization: Negotiating Curriculum in the Periphery
Allison Henward and Mene Tauaa
Friday 10:45 am, 207 (Colorado Convention Center)
Dogs Gone Wild: Indigneous-Canine Relationships and Articulations of Nature in Central Australia
Noah Orion Pleshet
Friday 10:45 am, 708 (Colorado Convention Center)
THE MORAL ECONOMY OF MOBILE PHONES: PACIFIC ISLANDS PERSPECTIVES
Friday 1:45-3:30 pm
Mineral Hall C (Hyatt Regency)
- 1:45 pm – Mobiles Phones and Melanesian Modernity, David Lipset
- 2:00 pm – Domi and the Mobile System: Apocalypse and Salvation in Papua New Guinea’s Wireless Network, Dan Jorgensen
- 2:15 pm – Mobile Branding and the Curation of Consumer-Citizens in Fiji, Heather A Horst
- 2:30 pm – “Working the Mobile”: Exchanging Phones and Credit in Port Vila, Vanuatu, Daniela Kraemer
- 2:45 pm – Top up: The Moral Economy of Prepaid Mobile Phone Subscriptions, Robert J Foster
Relational Infrastructures in Papua New Guinean Nursing Education
Barbara A Andersen
Friday 2:00 pm, 707 (Colorado Convention Center)
Is Chronic Maternal Psychosocial Stress Linked to Neonate Outcomes in American Samoan Women? the Intergenerational Effects of Stress on Neonate Body Size
Michaela E Howells, Darna L Dufour, Richard L Bender, Margaret Sesepasara and Alex Lloyd
Friday 2:15 pm, 603 (Colorado Convention Center)
Credibility and the Inexplicable: Parkinson’s Disease and Assumed Diagnosis in Contemporary Australia
Narelle Warren and Lenore H Manderson
Friday 4:30 PM, 201 (Colorado Convention Center)
Trajectories of Samoan Students at a U.S. College: Mapping the Roles of Fa’asamoa in Their Academic Success and Well Being
Rochelle Tuitagava’a Fonoti
Friday, Four Seasons Pre-function- Blue (Colorado Convention Center)
Telemedicine: Constructing and Negotiating Danger in the Outback
Kelly Hacker
Friday, Four Seasons Pre-function- Blue (Colorado Convention Center)
SATURDAY 21 November
The Arbitrariness of the Denominational Sign: Ambivalences about Institutions in Protestant New Guinea Missions
Courtney J Handman
Saturday 8:00 am, Centennial A (Hyatt Regency)
What the “Internal Assessment” Reveals: Kinship, Generosity, and the Modern Self in Tongan High Schools
Mary K Good
Saturday 8:15 am, Centennial E (Hyatt Regency)
Older New Zealanders Ageing in an Increasingly Diverse Aotearoa New Zealand
Molly George
Saturday 8:30 am, Mile High 1D (Colorado Convention Center)
Freedom and Stress: Pentecostal Expressions of Christian Difference in Samoa
Jessica A Hardin
Saturday 9:00 am, Centennial A (Hyatt Regency)
Provincializing Global Health: Or Why Global Health in Papua New Guinea Is Still Public Health
Alice Naomi Street
Saturday 9:00 am, 102 (Colorado Convention Center)
Political Loyalties As a New Order and Means of Participation in the Solomon Islands
Alexis Elizabeth Tucker Sade
Saturday 9:00 am, Centennial B (Hyatt Regency)
In the Sea of Night: Ancient Polynesia and the Dark
Cynthia L Van Gilder
Saturday 11:15 am, Mile High 1F (Colorado Convention Center)
Dreaming Objects: The Thaumatography of a Solomon Islands Canoe House Post
Michael W Scott
Saturday 2:00 pm, 401 (Colorado Convention Center)
Ethnography in Chuuk’s “Developing” System: Examining Bio-Bureaucratic Regimes Imposed in a Neo-Colonial Space
Sarah A Smith
Saturday 2:00 pm, 404 (Colorado Convention Center)
Historicity and (Re)Producing the Social Past amid Present and Future Uncertainties: The Cultural Heritage Process in Yap State, FSM
Stefan M Krause
Saturday 2:15 pm, 113 (Colorado Convention Center)
Indigenous Art and Empire: ‘Enduring Civilisation’ at the British Museum
Gaye Sculthorp
Saturday 4:30 pm, Mile High 2 & 3 (Colorado Convention Center)
Roads to Kwima: From Feet to Wheels in Papua New Guinea
Allison Jablonko
Saturday 4:30 pm, Mile High 1F (Colorado Convention Center)
Anthropological Art History: New Approaches to Aboriginal Desert Art
John Richard Carty
Saturday 5:15 pm, Mile High 2 & 3 (Colorado Convention Center)
SUNDAY 22 November
Ni-Vanuatu Conceptions of Endangered Health: Narratives of Food Security, Well-Being, and Urban Environmental Change in Vanuatu
Chelsea Wentworth
Sunday 8:30 am, 109 (Colorado Convention Center)
Faith in Expertise: Documents and Conditions of Textuality in an International NGO
Drew Anderson
Sunday 8:45 am, Mile High 1B (Colorado Convention Center)
Secrets of Success in Aoteara/New Zealand: Indigenous Reality Television and the Moral Economy of Identity
Daniel Rosenblatt
Sunday 10:45 am, 111 (Colorado Convention Center)
Keeping the Stranger Strange
Cameo Dalley
Sunday 10:45 am, 705 (Colorado Convention Center)
A View of Indigenous Futures from Terra Australis
Francesca C Merlan
Sunday 11:00 am, 708 (Colorado Convention Center)
Warlpiri Conceptions of Strangers and Appraisals of Strangeness
Yasmine Musharbash
Sunday 11:00 am, 705 (Colorado Convention Center)
Lorena Gibson 