Wednesday, January 5, 2011

MRS is back!

Dear all,

The MRS is back! Crack open your new diaries and write this down:

Friday January 21, 2011 3.30pm at the British Museum

Recent Cambridge PhD -- now at the University of Aberdeen -- Katharina Schneider has generously agreed to be our first presenter. Approximately one week before the seminar we will pre-circulate her paper, which will address the following theme:

Who sees what in Pororan marriage exchange?
Over time, anthropologists working in Melanesia have provided increasingly nuanced analyses of exchange, and specifically of the transformations of ‘objects’ and ‘images’ that people perceive in the course of particular sequences of events. One aspect of the complexity of exchange in Melanesia appears to have become sidelined, however, by a predominant interest in the temporal transformation of objects and images. This is the multiplicity of objects, images and sequences of their transformation that different participants perceive in the same sequence of events, and the politics (local and transnational) of who sees what in an exchange. The primary aim of this paper is to demonstrate this aspect of exchange ethnographically, and to discuss some of its implications for Pororan Islanders.

Planning ahead, our second presenter will be Eric Hirsch on Friday February 25 at 3.30pm. Further details will follow.

We hope as many of you as possible can make it. Meanwhile, steer clear of snowbanks!

Michael Scott
(on behalf of his fellow committee members: Lissant and Melissa)

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