[Anthropgrad] REMINDER GSC Seminar TODAY: Margaret Jolly

[Michelle Marie Antoinette]

The Australian National University
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Gender, Sexuality and Culture Seminar Series
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Seminars are in Seminar Room C, Top Floor, RSPAS Coombs Building, Monday 
12.00 - 1.30p.m.

Monday 25 August 2008

*Professor Margaret Jolly*
Gender Relations Centre
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******Of the Same Cloth:*/
Oceanic Anthropologies of Gender, Textiles and Christianities/***/*//*

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In the early 1980s the debate between Annette Weiner and Marilyn 
Strathern about women and cloth in the Pacific was a regional epicentre 
in the vortex of global controversies about essentialisms in approaches 
to gender. Decades later a tidal wave of field and archival research, 
writing and exhibitions has yielded creative new approaches to Oceanic 
textiles and fibrous arts. In this talk I connect several stories across 
Oceania, comparing indigenous modes of making fabrics from fibres and 
how novel textile traditions were appropriated in waves of Christian 
conversion, variously replicating, replacing, supplementing and 
synthesizing with indigenous cloth. I trace the biographies of some 
stunning fibrous forms: doba, bilums, tapa and quilts, inspired by 
Appadurai’s (1986) ‘the social life of things’. I explore the variegated 
fabric of femininities across time and space in Oceania and how this was 
mediated by rank, region and religion. I see women as passionate 
creators and consumers of cloth but also suggest how transformations of 
cloth might have been central to the changing fabric of masculinities. 
Through the dazzling materiality of textiles I hope to pursue some 
broader questions in the historical anthropology of Oceania about 
Christian conversion and the problematic place of ‘humiliation’ in 
radical cultural change suggested by Sahlins (1992) and explored by 
Wardlow and Robbins et al (2005).

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Enquiries re seminar series and suggestions for seminars or panels to
_Tamara.jacka at anu.edu.au <mailto:Tamara.jacka at anu.edu.au>_