1,720,958 research outputs found
Faces of shame, masks of development: recognition and oil palm among the Baining of Papua New Guinea
Get PDFThis thesis explores the role of “shame” in the Vir Kairak Baining people’s
understanding of the relationships that underpin positive social change. Previous
studies of shame in the context of colonial and postcolonial transformation in
Melanesia have suggested that encounters with outsiders humiliated local
communities and incited their cultural and economic conversion. This thesis starts
from the position that “shame” could be an inherent feature of and a virtue within a
culture that offers both grounds for resisting and prospecting change and
development. While previous studies have often discussed “shame” as a negative
experience, this thesis argues that among the Vir Kairak Baining people of Papua New
Guinea “shame” is cultivated through practice and understood as a highly productive
behaviour that enables social ties within the community and forms the basis for
development.
The study draws on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, which I conducted
mainly in a Vir Kairak rural settlement in central East New Britain. Recently, the
Baining region has become central to Papua New Guinea’s rapidly expanding oil
palm sector and many local communities have agreed to lease their customary land
for the establishment of monocrop plantations. This thesis shows how the transition
from smallholder farmers to rentiers occurred as a result of people’s land and market
insecurity driven by their resettlement by the Australian administration in the
aftermath of World War II and the Cocoa Pod Borer (CPB) blight in 2006. It explores
how people envisioned the oil palm plantation and their relationships with the
company and the state, what outcomes they imagined for their community and
customary land, and how the land-leasing process affected their sociality and
identity. It traces the links between notions of landownership, local understandings
of shame, and struggle for recognition, through which the Baining people conceive
and position themselves in relationships with others and the environment. This thesis argues that whilst Baining experience of shame involves some degree of
hiding, it is ultimately about shaping and displaying one in a particular form for
others to see. This form enables people to relate in meaningful ways and orient their
actions with respect to their future aspirations and expectations from that
relationship. The thesis explores the ways in which the Baining make themselves
visible and seek recognition by others (such as the state, international corporations,
God, provincial bureaucrats, expats, NGO representatives, scientists, tourists,
members of other Papua New Guinean and Baining communities) as persons and
people with particular kind of capacities, in hopes to re-claim their land and bring
development to their community. But drawing on the large body of anthropological
literature that has highlighted the “looseness,” “fluidity,” and “instability” of
Melanesian social identities, I discuss recognition not merely in terms of recognising
individual identity, indigeneity, or legal rights, but as a condition for agency and
relationships with others as well as realisation of personhood. I illustrate how people
frame their “right to development” and deploy discursive and practical strategies that
are shaped by local understandings of shame, in order to establish their recognition
as a people, landowners, mask makers, and Christians.
By showing the participation in and display of multiple identities by which local
people want to be recognised and bring the kind of development they desire, this
thesis offers a valuable contribution not only to the wider discussion of recognition
and the role of emotions in producing visible and recognisable people and relations,
but also to the studies of political ecology and development
Mourning with Masks: Political Death and Virtual Life
No full textIn this essay I explore how the V mask (Guy Fawkes mask) not only became a ‘re- sistance’ mask for the Turkish protesters during the 2013 Gezi Park demonstrations, but also how it visually transformed into a new image. I argue that this new face became a virtual ‘death mask’ for one of the killed protesters and that the image exemplifies a shift in commemorative practices. Furthermore, I examine the relationship between this mask and the process of mourning to dis- cover why the Turkish protesters decided to adopt this particular mask for the dead. This essay argues that the mask and the need to wear it can be explained as an attempt to keep the lost one alive by virtually becoming him. In this sense, the V mask transformed from being just a ‘politi- cal’ symbol in real life activist movements, into a new mask which signifies something beyond the political, that is, a more ‘personal’ connection with the deceased that in turn ‘resurrects’ him
Covering the land with oil palm:revelation, value, and landownership among the Kairak-speaking Baining of Papua New Guinea
No full textThis article explores how a displaced Papua New Guinean people decided to lease their customary land for oil palm plantation farming to restore their land use rights and resolve ongoing disputes with migrant settlers. By transforming the landscape into a territorialized space as a plantation, Kairak-speaking Baining hoped to gain actual landownership status and control over their land, which in turn, they believed, could bring them the development they had long dreamed of. I argue that Kairak conceptions about the plantation as a tool to reveal their landownership and remove the settlers drew on Melanesian notions about covering and revelation, changing perceptions of value, and discourse around ‘settlerhood’ and ‘nativism’, and show how agribusiness capital expansion strategies leverage regional politics of identity and autochthony. By illustrating how the plantation expansion unfolded differently in this region, the material offers new insights on the Plantationocene, global land grabs, dispossession and migration, and reaffirms the consequences reported elsewhere in the world where enclosures of exclusion lead to forceful rearrangements of people's social and economic lives, leaving their hopes and plantation promises unrealized.</p
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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