Staff associated with the Centre
Dr Tony Crook, Director
First visited the Min area of Papua New Guinea in 1990, and has undertaken over three years of fieldwork study with the Ankaiyakmin, Ningerum and Telefolmin peoples, focusing on knowledge-practices, gardening, ancestor cult ritual and the impacts of the Ok Tedi mine.
Crook's monograph Anthropological Knowledge, Secrecy and Bolivip, Papua New Guinea: Exchanging Skin (British Academy/OUP 2007) takes up and analyses the 'Min problem'—the Min peoples are renowned for their secret male initiation rituals and have proven to be one of the most enigmatic cultures in anthropological experience. This study, however, argues that all-along the root of this long-standing interpretative impasse has been in Anthropology's view of secrecy and knowledge.
More recently, this insight into Min knowledge-practices—by which 'knowledge' is a water-like substance that circulates between people, plants and the land—has been the basis for understanding Ningerum claims over the damaging effects of the Ok Tedi mine which are, however, unmeasurable by science. This focus pursues a research interest in the social relations produced by different knowledges, and uses Melanesian practices to critically analyse the epistemological premises of Anthropology and the extractive resource industry.
Dr Ioan Fazey
Ioan Fazey’s has been working with rural communities in the Solomon Islands since 2005. Most of this work has been with a group of 40 communities in eastern Makira Ulawa Province researching social and environmental change, vulnerability, local grass roots organisations that have established their own cross community governance structures, and assisting communities in participatory development. This includes implementing an EU funded project on forest resource management and conservation programme. Ioan’s work in the Solomon Islands informs his wider interests in human-environment relationships, environmental conservation and how communities can develop more resilient and sustainable trajectories. He is based in the School of Geography and Geosciences.
Dr Craig Lind
Craig Lind spent 2 years working with groups of Paamese people in various locations throughout the archipelago of Vanuatu. His work focuses on the way that Paamese people view names (isom) as a kind of "agent", as persons with the capacity to "behave". Additionally he looks at the ways in which personal and place names are uttered and unpacked, at key moments, in order to reveal what they "contain". Such practices are intended to have a specific effect and/or describe what we might call "social processes" and descriptions "self" and"other".
His other interests include - personhood, gender, migration, the problems of multi-sited fieldwork, small island ethnography, urban ethnography, practices of self description (e.g. local models of "ethnic difference") and indigenous localising practices (e.g. the ways in which groups form and articulate themselves in relation to or as place).
Dr Adam Reed
Did his first research in a prison just outside Port Moresby, the national capital of Papua New Guinea. His book Papua New Guinea's 'Last Place': Experiences of Constraint in a Postcolonial Prison focuses on how men understand and deal with incarceration, and what social relations inside the prison can tell us about relations between people outside it. Focus falls on memory, forgetting, money, document culture, cigarette sociality, Christianity, youth and gang culture, disciplinary regimes, postcolonial institutions, nationhood, urban culture and new social forms in Melanesia.
More broadly, he is interested in the fields of law and society, urban anthropology, material culture, anthropology and literature and history of anthropology. He has just started a new archival project on early fieldwork cultures in the Pacific and has a developing interest in Samoa. In addition, he also conducts anthropological research in Britain.
Professor Christina Toren
Toren's research focuses on Fiji. Making Sense of Hierarchy: Cognition as Social Process in Fiji shows how the ritualised use of space structures relations between people in the household, village and vanua (country or polity). She has written widely on all aspects of the lives of Fijian islanders – space and hierarchy, temporality, kinship and household organisation, money and the morality of exchange, and Fijian Christianity (see Mind Materiality and History. Essays in Fijian Ethnography).
Her recent research shows how a study of social relations centring on food and eating can illuminate central problems in understanding ourselves and others. See What is Happening to Epistemology? Special issue edited by Christina Toren and João de Pina-Cabral. Social Analysis. Volume 53, Issue 2, 2009.