[Anthropgrad] Friday Seminar (12 Sep 2008)

[Sin Wen Lau]

Anthropology Friday Seminar Series, Semester 2, 2008
Milgate Room, AD Hope
12 September 2008, 3 pm

'War mementos and the souls of missing soldiers: returning effects of 
the battlefield dead'
by SIMON HARRISON

This paper discusses acts of restitutive giving, a range of practices 
similar to the gift except that they express sociability by reaffirming 
between donors and recipients the existence of social boundaries rather 
than connections. The particular case discussed concerns military 
personnel in the major wars of the twentieth century, who took personal 
items from the enemy dead as battle trophies. Focussing on the Pacific 
War, the paper explores the meaning of these objects for the servicemen 
who kept them, and the ways in which this meaning altered during their 
later lives. In particular, the article seeks to explain why some 
veterans in old age, or their families after their deaths, traced the 
original owners' surviving kin and returned the objects to them.

Simon Harrison is Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of 
Ulster, and has carried out ethnographic fieldwork among the people of 
Avatip in Papua New Guinea. He has published on cultural identity, and 
on Melanesian warfare, ethnopsychology, and indigenous forms of 
intellectual property. He is currently carrying out a three-year project 
on the collection of war trophies among military personnel.

==================================================================
Lau Sin Wen
Department of Anthropology
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT0200
Australia

Telephone : +61-2-6125-3271
Fax	 : +61-2-6125-4896
Email	 : sinwen.lau at anu.edu.au
Website	 : http://rspas.anu.edu.au/anthropology
==================================================================