Material Encounters

Bronwen Douglas, Chris Ballard, Bronwen Douglas, Chris Ballard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781032494692
• eBook ISBN: 9781000993165
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This topical and conceptually innovative book proposes new perspectives on the theme of materiality which, since the 1980s, has animated work across and within disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

The particular focus of the chapters in this volume is the materiality of knowledge produced through embodied encounters between people, places, and things in the Pacific Islands, New Guinea, Australia, and Myanmar. The authors consider how materiality mediates the ways in which knowledge is generated or acquired in encounters and becomes expressed through things and material forms of inscription – charts and maps; journals, letters, and reports; drawings; objects; human remains; legends, cartouches, captions, labels, marginalia, and notes; and published works of all kinds. The essays further address processes whereby materialized knowledge is archived, conserved, distributed, restricted, or dispersed – through serendipity, excess, loss, silence, absence, and suppression.

This book will be of great interest to upper-level students, researchers, and academics in History, Anthropology and Oceania Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of History and Anthropology.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction—Contact tracing: The materiality of encounters
• 1 Mapping the once and future strait: Place, time, and Torres Strait from the sixteenth century to the Pleistocene
• 2 Re-presenting encounters: The drawings of Jean Piron
• 3 ‘With the consent of the tribe’: Marking lands on Tanna and Erromango, New Hebrides
• 4 Marginal history
• 5 Making the visual record of New Guinea: William G. Lawes’s photographic encounters
• 6 Heads and ‘cultures’: A. C. Haddon, colonial exploration and the ‘Strickland River’ inscription
• 7 Smoke and mirrors in Arnhem Land: What expeditions tell us about the materiality of crosscultural encounters
• 8 On the banality of paperwork and the brutality of judicial bureaucracy in Myanmar
• Index