Engendering objects explores social and cultural dynamics among
Maisin people in Collingwood Bay (Papua New Guinea) through the
lens of material culture. Focusing upon the visually stimulating
decorated barkcloths that are used as male and female garments,
gifts, and commodities, it explores the relationships between these
cloths and Maisin people. The main question is how barkcloth, as an
object made by women, engenders people's identities, such as
gender, personhood, clan and tribe, through its manufacturing and
use. This book describes in detail how barkcloth (tapa) not only
visualizes and expresses, but also materializes and defines,
people's multiple identities. By 'following the object' and how it
is made and used in the performance of life-cycle rituals, in
exchanges and in church festivities, this interaction between
people and things, and how they are mutually constituted, becomes
visible. How are women's bodies and minds linked with the
production of barkcloth? How do cloths produced by women both
establish and contest clan identity? In what ways is the
commodification of barkcloth related to gender dynamics? Barkcloth
and its associated designs show how gender ideologies and the
socio-material constructions of identity are performed and, as
such, developed, established and contested. The narratives of both
men and women reveal the ways in which barkcloth provides a link
with the past and dreams for the future. The author argues that the
cloths and their designs embody dynamics of Maisin culture and in
particular of Maisin gender relations. In contributing to the
current debates on the anthropology of 'art', this study offers an
alternative way of understanding the significance of an object,
like decorated barkcloth, in shaping and defining people's
identities within a local colonial and postcolonial setting of
Papua New Guinea. "Engendering Objects is among the most
comprehensive and innovative new works emerging from Melanesia
examining the intimate connections between material culture,
cultural identity and gendered personhood. Drawing upon extensive
ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and examination of museum
collections, Anna-Karina Hermkens traces the enduring yet
innovative place of tapa (barkcloth) among the Maisin people.
Written with warm compassion and immediacy, the book is a
theoretically provocative, accessible and compelling portrait of
changing life in a Papua New Guinean village society." - John
Barker, University of British Columbia "This book makes a most
welcome contribution to the study of the materiality by showing how
gender is performed in the sensuous terms of clothing, food, and
the exchange of objects. Anna-Karina Hermkens accomplishes this
with enviable care and intellectual resources, and a prose and
ethnography that make the book a pleasure to read." - David Morgan,
Duke University "Anna-Karina Hermkens takes us to look at designs
on bark cloth from Papua New Guinea through a magnifying glass. A
fascinating perspective on material culture evolves. Beyond the art
work we discover individuals - mainly women - painting their
stories about who they and their beloved are as women and men, as
traditional members of a clan, and also what they head for as
strugglers in a new economy driven world." - Christian Kaufmann,
Honorary Research Associate, Sainsbury Reseach Unit, University of
East Anglia, Norwich UK, former curator for Oceania at the Museum
der Kulturen Basel About the author: Anna-Karina Hermkens obtained
her PhD in Cultural Anthropology in 2005 from Radboud University
Nijmegen. She is currently working as a postdoctoral research
fellow at the 'College of Asia and the Pacific' of the Australian
National University in Canberra Australia.
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