BASEL CONFERENCE OF THE EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR OCEANISTS
to be held in Basel 15 to 17 December 1994
Jürg Wassmann and Verena Keck
From 15 to 17 December 1994, the Institute of Ethnology of the University of Basel will host the Conference of the European Society for Oceanists (ESO).
This conference is an outcome of the recently founded ESO, a professional association, the purpose of which is to create closer links between European Oceanic scholars. Its subject is designed to accommodate the diversity of problems by the scholars and the disciplines concerned and of the geographical area covered. Its main goal is to facilitate the emergence of a field of study specific to the region of the world.
The general theme of the conference will be Knowing Oceania; Constituting Knowledge and Identities.
The diversity of contemporary developments in Oceania, both global and local appears to raise questions which can not be answered by using segmented concepts like gender, colonialism, exchange, politics, and modernization. Alternatively, increasing attention has been devoted to notions of 'knowledge' and 'identity', which, unprecise as they still are, allow for a flexibility that may arrive at new insights into the problems posed. Through these notions, the aim is to convey some central dimensions of the Oceanic specificity.
Within that context, the main title of the conference, 'Knowing Oceania', is of course intended to acknowledge that there is much that remains to be known about Oceania, and therefore that there is indeed an extensive body of specific knowledges pertaining to its people. As such, this is a particularly appropriate theme for a conference of ESO. But the notion also alludes to two further processes central to the anthropological problematic. First, 'knowing' is an inherently active process through which Oceania has been and continues to be constructed in its identities, both by its people themselves and by outsiders. The notion of identity is here suggested as a way to bridge the tension between conflicting forms of processes like acculturation, appropriation or confrontation. Secondly, knowing conveys the idea that the specifity of Oceanic knowledges permanently obliges us to re-scrutinize our own knowledges. In that sense it also alludes to our own anthropological methodology which determines our scientific identity.
The general theme Knowing Oceania: Knowledge and Identities may be developed around different aspects, including gender perspectives. The Board Members of the ESO have specified ten sub-themes, each characterized by a number of key-words. The sub-themes will be discussed in workshop sessions.
In addition, it is planned to invite four keynote speakers who will address the general theme of the conference.
Proposed themes of workshop sessions:
Local and imported knowledges.
Christian and Islamic fundamentalism; syncretism; indigenous use of scientific, medical and technical knowledges; acculturation or appropriation of exogenous forms
2. Common worlds and single lives
Communal identities; changing concepts of the person; changing ontology; making biographies and autobiographies
3. Cultural practices of identity construction and nation building
Democracies and aristocracies; co-consumption of imagery, goods, foodstuffs; sport; construction of shared ideologies; pidgins and Creoles; living with diversity; hegemonic practices
4. Genealogies, land and titles
Kinship in local and national life; reassessing colonial law; going to court and landmark court cases
5. Competing and converging systems of exchange
Migration in a historical perspective; remittance economies; subsistence production and monetarization; urbanization; the 'village' in the city; old and new elites
6. Ecological pluralism?
Ecologies in collision; politics of ecology; ecology and development; myth, ritual and ecology
7. Scrutinizing regional systems
Constructing units for comparison; perils of essentialism and the attraction of distance; regional systems over time ('Melanesia', 'Polynesia', PNG-'Highlands', 'kula- cultures')
8. Modelling Oceania
The relevance of Oceanic models beyond Oceania; the applicability of non-Oceanic models to Oceania (kinship, exchange, social structure, identity)
9. Identity of objects - objects of identity
Museum-ification; Cultural Centres and the production of locality; souvenir-culture; projecting local cultures; proliferation of objects and performances'; consumer products
10. Ethics and politics of fieldwork
Use and exploitation of informants and anthropologists; authorship and copyright; feedback of information; mediating between cultures; selection of fieldsites; theoretical, personal and institutional expectations; university politics and marginalization of Oceania; anti-anthropologism and regional marginalization.
We invite papers on any of these ten sub-themes. Please let us know whether you intend to participate and/or prepare a paper, and if so, on what subject (please indicate the number of the sub-theme). Short abstracts of the papers (not longer than 1/3 DIN A 4 page) are requested by September 1, 1994. A complete collection of abstracts will be made available to all conference participants.
Send all correspondence to: Dr. Jürg Wassmann, Institute of Ethnology, University of Basel, Münsterplatz 19, CH-4051 Basel, Switzerland. FAX: (41) (61) 2665605; Tel.: (41) (61) 2612638.