[ANU Pacific.Institute] Anthropology Seminar Wednesday 5 March: Margaret Jolly

[Nicholas Mortimer]

Anthropology Seminar Series

9.30 am Wednesday 5 March
Coombs Seminar Room A

Margaret Jolly, School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific

Moving Towers: Worlding the Spectacle of Masculinities between South Pentecost and Munich

The gol, the land dive has long been a spectacular ritual both for the people of the place and foreign tourists in Vanuatu. Annual performance cycles in the south of Pentecost have been relentlessly photographed; cinematic images of young men diving from the body of the tower have toured far beyond the archipelago in the worlding of this spectacle. Recent scholarly analyses have variously depicted it as a risky game (Lipp 2008), as a carnival of kastom (Tabani 2010), as a practice of visual consumption and embodied performance (Taylor 2010), as the acknowledged origin of bungee jumping, and as a contested site for claims of intellectual and cultural property (Forsyth 2012). Here I explore how its performance evinces changing relational masculinities, embodied between indigenous and foreign men (state officials, anthropologists, filmmakers) and the fraught dynamics of its transplantation to other places, as in the display of a miniature land diving tower for an exhibition at a museum in Munich in June 2009. How has this worlding locally reconfigured men as gendered persons and transformed hegemonic masculinities? How has commoditization and tourism contributed to the emergence of men’s individuated claims to traditional knowledge as property? What do these ‘moving towers’ reveal about how Pacific cultures move in the global circuits of contemporary tourism?

Margaret Jolly is an ARC Laureate Fellow and Professor in Anthropology, Gender and Cultural Studies and Pacific Studies in the School of Culture, History and Language in the College of Asia and the Pacific and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. She is an historical anthropologist who has written extensively on gender in the Pacific, on exploratory voyages and travel writing, missions and contemporary Christianity, maternity and sexuality, cinema and art.


All welcome.

________________________________
Melinda Hinkson
School of Archaeology and Anthropology
AD Hope Building #14
College of Arts and Social Sciences
Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200

P. +61 02 6125 8246
E. melinda.hinkson at anu.edu.au<mailto:melinda.hinkson at anu.edu.au>
W. http://archanth.anu.edu.au/visualanthropology/


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