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On February 13, 2009, Bruce Emery was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for the manslaughter of 16 year old Pihema Cameron. Emery, catching Cameron ‘tagging’ his garage in Manurewa, South Auckland, chased him down the street, eventually stabbing him with a fishing knife. A heated public debate ensued, uncovering a range of conflicting moral stances. Emery was a national hero for some, and a dangerous killer to others. In this paper, the furore surrounding tagging provides the backdrop to explore the emergence of a new phenomenon in New Zealand: anti-graffiti volunteering. Why and under what conditions have anti-graffiti volunteer groups come into existence?
I contextualise such groups within the broader rise of the voluntary sector which has been facilitated by increasing neoliberalisation and its ‘rolling back of the state’ programme. The 2008 government strategy, Stop Tagging Our Place (STOP), is an example of legislation which places less emphasis on the role of the state and more on that of communities and local authorities in the ‘war against tagging’.  I argue that such a climate of neoliberalism has enabled the construction of new subjects: ‘active citizens’ or volunteers. Various discourses have been mobilised around these new figures, centring around notions of ‘empowerment’ and ‘self-help’ (Hyatt 2001), ‘charity’ and ‘compassion’. Volunteers are positioned as constituting a new moral community, one that exists to serve ‘the common good’. However, if this is the case, how do anti-graffiti volunteers fit in to such a moral community? Anti-graffiti volunteer groups and community patrols cast a repressive gaze over public spaces through promoting discourses of zero tolerance which border on moral vigilantism. Hence I ask: in the moral community of volunteers, what kinds of repressive practices are being subsumed under the guise of ‘the common good’? Does anti-graffiti volunteering exemplify what Fassin (2005) terms a dialectic between compassion and repression?

"What a Controversy, Batty Boy Get Boasy”: Homophobia and Moral Communities in Jamaica

Most Jamaicans locate themselves within a moral community that excludes homosexuals. Analysis of written contributions to newspapers and websites shows that increasing pressure on Jamaica by foreign gay activists advocating boycotts reinforces the boundaries of the moral community, as Jamaicans entrench themselves in opposition to unwelcome outsider interference. Anti-homosexual beliefs therefore become a shibboleth of Jamaicanness and a manifestation of resistance to foreign domination. The articulation of shibboleth, authenticity and community through homophobia also occurs on the inter-personal level, as there is also danger to the moral community within the nation. Observation and interviews reveal that, in response to what some interpret as a homosexual aesthetic among young men and an increase in the profile of homosexual activity, some men perform “anti-homosexual heterosexuality” by establishing new linguistic rules as a shibboleth of authentic Jamaican masculinity. Language defines this community, and articulates a moral hierarchy. Thus are two related moral communities established, so that notions of authentic Jamaicanness and Jamaican maleness are made clear through boundaries at the macro- and micro-levels. This paper discusses the variation of community experiences in a place; its theoretical perspective considers moral communities as less about ethical obligations and concerns about communal welfare than about creating idealised models of behaviour as criteria for entrance or exclusion, and resisting the pressure of powerful forces. It also belies the assumption that from shared residence arises common identity, in fact revealing the divisions among people in a shared space. The phrase "What a Controversy, Batty Boy Get Boasy" from the paper title points to lyrics by a popular Jamaican singer: “…homosexuals have become boastful/arrogant.”

Dr Robyn Andrews

The Anglo-Indians of Lower Circular Road Cemetery:
Erasure of Eurasians

The Lower Circular Road Christian cemetery in Calcutta is the favoured final resting place of the city’s Anglo-Indians. In December 2007, I attended a burial service at this cemetery and during discussion with others present learnt that in certain circumstances graves may be re-used after a period of time has elapsed. Re-using the graves involves the replacement or re-use of the headstones identifying the grave sites. Anglo-Indians represent only a very small proportion of the city’s Christian population so a foreseeable effect of the migration of Anglo-Indians on the physical characteristic of the cemetery is that their names will gradually be replaced by the names of Bengali Christians. If this occurs it will represent the erosion of Anglo-Indian presence on yet another aspect of the cityscape. Notions of palimpsest or re-imaging of the community are suggested. In November 2009, I spent time in the city seeking to understand the process of grave re-use and exploring the repercussions of such re-use. In this paper I will present and discuss some of the findings of that investigation.

Dr Martha Bell

Modes of mobility: An interdisciplinary search for bodies in action

This paper explores the paradox of the promotion of access and inclusion through mobility for those who experience an impaired mobility as a valued and preferred sensory experience of self in action.  This investigation draws together the literatures on the sociology of the body, the sociology of action and the sociology of mobility and the aim is then to ask how the body in social anthropology is a mobile body.  I hope to illustrate the interdisciplinary connections between sociological and anthropological views of sensual embodiment, ritualised modes of mobility and cultures of movement.

Professor Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich

Migrants on campus: local academic communities and global workspaces

New Zealand Universities have the highest numbers of migrant academics in the world but still cater mostly for local students. The ruling paradigm seems to rank and locate universities inside an unquestioned international network of Higher Education; but why is a global education market seen and valued as an a priori good and what are the consequences? The paper explores the construct of the culturally safe campus, the mostly un-reflected and unspoken policy of hiring ‘international excellence’ and the consequences for University life on the ground

Rachael Burke

Do you see what I see?:
 reflections on using video in New Zealand and Japanese early childhood centres

In the 1980s and again in 2009, a group of researchers lead by anthropologist Jay Tobin undertook ethnographic fieldwork in preschools in Japan, China and the United States. Inspired by anthropologist Linda Connor and film-makers Timothy and Patsy Asch, their aim was to stimulate a ‘multivocal text’ through the use of videotape. Daily interactions at centre were filmed as a means of stimulating analysis by participants and audiences from both ‘insider’ and ‘outside’ positions in each of the three cultures. The resulting films and ethnographies, Preschool in Three Cultures and Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited, present comparative views of Japanese, Chinese and American preschools through the eyes of teachers empowered to speak as anthropologists. Members of each culture are (re)filmed as they critically analyse both their own country’s preschool practice and make judgements about the other two preschools in the study. This method views film not as data but as a way of encouraging dialogue, which in turn illuminates culturally informed philosophies and practices of early childhood education within wider social patterns. Such an approach also removes the anthropologist from the powerful role of ‘all seeing narrator’ common in early ethnographic film, yet recognises the subjective nature of edited videotapes. This paper is based on initial fieldwork carried out in 2009 which applies Tobin’s methodology to kindergartens in New Zealand and Japan.

Emily Burns

Understanding Community Through Guesthood

The Twelve Tribes is a New Religious Movement originating in the USA in 1974 by Eugene Elbert Spriggs. The group has twelve ‘tribes’ around the world, including North and South America, Europe and Australia. Australia’s tribe is the ‘Asher’ tribe and is located in Katoomba and Picton NSW. The group worships Jesus Christ, under the Hebrew name Yashua, and describes itself as the Commonwealth of Israel. Members believe that the emerging global, multicultural society is dissolving the moral standards embedded in our true nature, and aim to purify themselves for the eventual return of Yashua to Earth, at which time Armageddon will commence. While beginning my relationship with the Twelve Tribes community, I have been a regular guest at their farm in Picton. As a newcomer to anthropological fieldwork, and at the early stages of my PhD, I have come to highly value my role as a guest as an important stepping-stone in rapport building. According to Harvey (2004), guesthood as a methodological tool examines the complex series of social enactments, including the performances of hospitality and gratitude, which turn strangers into guests. This paper will discuss my early fieldwork and the process of becoming a guest in the Twelve Tribes community.

The everyday practice of care is increasingly in the spotlight, particularly as it relates to people with severe disability. There are depressing commonalities in the circumstances surrounding this care in general, with some notable exceptions. One such exception occurs in New Zealand through its no fault compensation system (ACC). This allows family members to be paid as carers, following a landmark judgement (1995). Some family carers have now been paid for almost 15 years and this has brought about a community of practice. It is a community of practice both in the sense of a shared culture in which the payment is made and in the development of a mature practice by these carers. This paper reports on an ethnographic study of five families caring for an adult with severe brain injury. It describes the culture within which these payments have occurred and also the kinds of outcomes in terms of care practice. It also comments and summarises arguments about payment of family carers in the light of a recent (2008) Human Rights Tribunal case (Atkinson v. MOH).

Real Neighbors VS “Imagined Communities”:
South Asians in a Chinese Temple Fair in Hong Kong

The Hong Kong Government has been promoting Hong Kong as a cosmopolitan city that welcomes cultural diversity. However, the general conclusion of the major works on the ethnic minorities in Hong Kong is that they are subject to institutionalized discrimination and social exclusion. This paper explores this contradiction by looking into the active involvement of South Asian women and children in a Chinese Temple Fair, where they were the only non-Chinese. This is remarkable since it not only renders the transcending of both ethnic and religious boundaries, but also challenges the gender stereotype that South Asian women are generally excluded from the public sphere. According to the 2006 by-census, 95 per cent of the whole population in Hong Kong is Chinese. South Asians, including Indians, Nepalese and Pakistanis, comprise about 13.9 per cent of the ethnic minorities population with a total of 47,505. This number seems negligible among the population of seven million, but the South Asians concentrate in certain districts where they make up a significant number. Yau Tsim Mong is a district with the highest proportion of South Asians. Based on the research on the participation of South Asian women and children in a Chinese Temple Fair in Yau Tsim Mong, I seek to delineate how the South Asians and the Hong Kong Chinese, as real neighbors with diverse cultures, position each other in their “imagined communities.”

Assuming Emerging Hybrid Identities: An Embodied Autoethnography of a Doctor-Anthropologist

This paper reports on a study that uses an auto-ethnographic approach to construct my embodied learning experiences as both the subject (myself as medical student) and the researcher (myself as anthropologist). In New Zealand, many of the embodied skills of medicine are learnt by medical students within real clinical contexts in a public and often high stakes environment. During clinical training, medical students are gaining these skills for the first time and are hyper-alert to the active work involved in their acquisition. However, little research examining the embodied nature of this type of learning has been conducted. This study reflects on the embodied work involved in becoming a doctor through analysis of the journaling of my learning experiences while a fourth year (first year clinical) medical student on both general practice and surgical ward rotations. I then reflect on these experiences as a first encounter with the ‘practice’ of anthropology, fieldwork, to examine how this too is embodied work. I explore the challenges and rewards of using the lens of embodiment to explicate this ‘hybrid’ position.

Applied anthropology traverses physical spaces, social places and their associated networks of social relations. Applied anthropologists are on the move across spaces, places, times and relationships and accomplish this mobility through membership of multiple communities - locally, nationally and internationally. Raewyn Good personified the anthropologist on the move, constantly spinning stories, asking questions, sharing information, connecting here and there. I offer my story about how she worked, with whom and in what ways as she traversed social science professional networks/communities. I recall her passionate commitment to the relationship between research and policy, academia and the public service; and her advocacy of plurality and innovation in research practice. I re-member Raewyn Good as an dynamic member of advisory boards and committees and the way she made the innovative research practices she advocated accessible, not just locally and nationally, but also internationally.

Commemorating The Contributions Of Raewyn Good - Applied Anthropologists And Their Communities Of Practice

The culturalism debate in tertiary teaching: Privacy, bureaucracy, Pasifika learning styles and lost opportunities for community.

This paper is inspired by a rapid intervention into student learning conducted between the Pacific Islands Centre at Otago and the Anthropology Programme which involved ‘tracking’ the sub group of absentee Pasifika students from the broader subgroup of Pasifika students in our first year anthropology classes and sending them a text message (via the Pacific Islands Centre) asking them to return to class when their absence was noticed. Subsequent to this initiative,  a larger scale cooperative grant was proposed to investigate this style of intervention into student’s lives which raised murmurings within the university administration around the possibly deleterious effects of the intervention on student privacy. Simultaneously, literature searches revealed an earlier North Island study by Nakhid (2006) which had trialled a similar approach at AUT with mainly negative responses to the initiative from staff members who argued against specific student learning interventions linked to ethnicity as an infringement of privacy, the providing of unfair advantage to a select few in any class, or an example of pastoral care which was not a requirement for lecturing staff to deliver.  By and large the lecturers appeared to perceive certain negativities with this practice which allied it with Openshaw and Rata’s (2007) discussion of what they term the ‘ideology of culturalism’, a concept which they suggest is now pervading New Zealand universities. This paper deconstructs Openshaw and Rata’s proposed elements of an ideology of culturalism and in doing so makes reference to the published literature on Pasifika learning styles, the effects of absenteeism on “minority” groups, and Bourdieu’s work on cultural capitals and the purpose of universities. 

Community, as an ideal, seems now to be equated with popular sovereignty:  rule of the people by the people, whereby the ruler and the ruled are one. Popular sovereignty, in turn, is presumed to be manifest in the liberal democratic nation-state.  In and through such polities the people are to find equality and fraternity, i.e., communitas.  In this paper I offer a theoretical exploration of how political theology engages popular sovereignty by asking “what defines ‘a people'?’”  From the perspective of political theology, this question is not answered adequately by the models that the human sciences have favored, namely, the people are defined by (i) labor (homo economicus) and/or (ii) sociability (homo hierarchicus) and/or (iii) language (homo symbolicus – which some also equate with homo sapiens sapiens).  Rather, political theology suggests, our understanding of what makes a people a people must focus on the principle of sovereign will.  The cultural logic of sovereign will foregrounds the frightful fact that liberal nation-states can, and do, declare states of emergency (states of “exception”), founded on the figure of homo sacer.  In a revealing paradox, the need to “secure” sovereign will trumps the people’s putative right to authorize such action; here sovereignty is no more “popular” than it was in the “medieval” era with its divine-right-of-kings.  But “the people” are also increasingly logged-on, i.e., digitized “netizens.”  Do the spatio-temporalities of Cyberia, and the transcendence it apparently offers, subvert or support the political theological critique adumbrated above?

Bryonny Goodwin-Hawkins

The Shapeshifting Post Office Incident: Revisiting a Community as a Research Site

On the last day of my year of residence in a Yorkshire village one of the local notables told me she was sorry to see me go because “I’d just got used to you”.  In his 1980s fieldwork in Cumbria, North West England, Nigel Rapport came to treasure belonging, seeking out experiences, contacts, and knowledge that would make him a member of the community.  My own residence was not as an anthropologist; as I contemplate my return to Yorkshire for research, that is about to change.  I must rethink community in a practical as well as theoretical sense.  As I reflect on my own experiences, on my contacts and social spots, my ‘home’ village begins to shift, taking on the new identity of ‘research site’.  Noel Dyck asks “what costs will face the ethnographer who opts to study the ostensibly familiar and intimate settings of home?” (2000:48).  In this paper I will reflect on the process of re-envisioning ‘Rosemoor’ as a site of academic knowledge.  As social incidents, moments in the Post Office, and special occasions morph from my personal memory to become ethnographic reflections, are they still mine?  Rosemoor and I had got used to each other within one group of identities; as a fieldworker, I will assume a new identity.  Will I – can I – still belong to the community? 

As an Anthropologist and Gender Studies scholar who recently moved to New Zealand from the United States, I have been surprised by the (limited) power and visibility of a relatively narrow discourse of feminism that appears to dichotomize gendered experiences.  This paper explores essentialist concepts of gender within feminist thought and activism, concepts which arguably re-appear in a different form within men’s movements and are the focus of feminist critique.  What possibilities for dialogue and rapprochement might open up between feminist and men’s movements if understandings of gender are shifted for both “sides”?  What have been the effects of postcolonial and indigenous struggles on “alternative” and activist gendered community formation in the New Zealand context?  This presentation will propose both ethnographic and theoretical approaches to addressing these questions, with the aim of stimulating new ideas in the preliminary stages of a long-term research project.     

Cultural Intimacy and Local Language Acquisition: Indian and South Korean encounters within the Transnational Buddhist Community

(VLOG -- available also on ASAANZ conference youtube channel)

Dr. Peter J. Howland

I teach a 12-week social science bridging course (UP016) at VUW. The course is essentially a mix of introductory anthropology and sociology, and is affectionately known as ‘Anth -101’ by participant students. UP016 students are either direct from secondary school (80%), or have been in the work-force, ‘chilling out’ etc, with approximately 10% being special admission students (i.e. 20 years+ and qualified for direct entry into university). The course is concept driven and aims to (i) introduce students to the fundamental ideas (e.g. culture, society etc) on which 100-level social science papers are based; and (ii) develop their critical thinking and analytical capacities. This optional course, although attracting large numbers of students, has been beset with high failure rates (approximately 50%). In an attempt to improve this situation I introduced a Team Based Learning (TBL) component that accounts for 20% of individual student’s total grade. Students are randomly assigned to Tutorial Assignment Groups (TAGs), which complete four assignments worth 5% each. The assignments are related to specific course readings and all have creative, material and presentation aspects (e.g. a tourism poster exoticizing the mundane aspects of everyday life in New Zealand). Students retain a percentage of their TAG marks on a pro-rata basis linked to their attendance at TAG tutorials, and sit four tests (worth 20% in total) based on course readings to assess individual knowledge and understandings. The initiative has been very successful with 78% (93/ 119) of students successfully passing in T1, 2009. Moreover, the TAG assignments have had a positive ‘knock-on’ effect, with essays and pass rates for the final exam also improving dramatically. I will discuss the approach, benefits and evolution of the TAG assignment/ assessment regime and its possible application in 100-level anthropology papers.

Teams are a key modus operandi of clinical work. They are generally described as relatively small groups of health professionals who work together with the implicit common goal of patient care. Medical education is oriented around teamwork, and medical students are constantly exhorted to consider themselves members of ‘the team’ during their clinical attachments. But what is ‘the team’? What does team membership mean? The medical literature implies links with professionalism through attributes, values and behaviours. Similarly, attributes of functionality, cooperation, and communication are implicit in effective teamwork. From an anthropological perspective, the clinical team is interesting for what it implies about the social organisation of health care; multidisciplinary relationships, professional jurisdictions, hierarchies, and gendered roles. Wenger’s communities of practice offers another way of examining the social organisation of clinical work. Specifically it is within the community of clinical practice that workplace identities are taken up, and that clinical repertoires are acquired. Membership within such communities is contingent upon participation. Also, it is at this level that the actualities of patient care articulate organisational, institutional, and professional guidelines and protocols. This paper reports on previous research examining the micro level of clinical work and represents preliminary theorising toward clarifying the nature of clinical communities involved in patient care.

Olive Jones

In the preface to their  study of Intentional Communities in New Zealand, Sargisson and Sargent noted that New Zealand communities ‘are striking because they often contradict what the literature on intentional communities leads us to expect’. For example, they point out, ‘anarchist communities do not generally last, but they do in New Zealand’ (2004, xv). This paper presents an analysis of one such anarchist community that has lasted for more than 30 years, with particular attention to how its foundation structure and philosophical idealism has influenced the way it has evolved over time. This community does not fit into most definitions of intentional community and, in many respects, could be described as a circumstantial rather than intentional community, with its residents not recognising its founding principles in the praxis of their everyday lives. However, it continues to support a stable population, with several of its adult children now resident in dwellings built by their parents, and rearing their own children. This would suggest a presence of cooperative practices, albeit ad hoc in nature, which can provide a structural frame for defining intent and purpose for the people living there.

Dr Des Kahotea

In 2001 the Ngapotiki Resource Management Unit registered a waahi tapu under the Historic Places Act 1993. The source of the waahi tapu information was a kaumatua informant in 1995. The informant’s childhood experience and memory of a waahi tapu, was translated to fit a statutory definition under the Historic Places Act 1993 for hapu heritage objectives The waahi tapu was the place where an elderly fighting chief was killed in 1836 and this location became a tribal boundary in 1845 between Ngaiterangi of Tauranga and Te Arawa of Maketu. In 2005 a developer took an appeal against the waahi tapu registration on his property to the Environment Court. Professor Doug Sutton was the expert witness for the developer and stated in his evidence that the registered waahi tapu was not a waahi tapu location. His argument was following anthropological conventions of attributing authenticity to an academic writing standard that emphasises the acknowledgement of sources. This paper examines the status and authority of Maori knowledge for contemporary heritage purposes.

In Search Of Remedies:
The Impact Of The Treaty Claim Process On Claimants

Bon-Giu Koo, Changzoo Song, Associate Professor Julie Park

Choosing nations: how immigrants develop a sense of belonging to the host society

This paper examines the ways in which immigrants develop a sense of belonging to the host society. Adaptation theories have described immigrant incorporation into the host society as a gradual, linear and passive process. In this paper, however, we argue that immigrants accept membership of the host society through an active decision making process with key turning points.  This paper is developed from part of the first author’s doctoral research. Examining the Korean international migrants’ transnationalism between Korea and New Zealand, the research described that many participants experienced a decisive turning point in their lives in New Zealand in terms of their relationship with the host society. Initially most Korean immigrants had been ambivalent about their immigration decision and satisfaction with the lives in New Zealand compared with their previous lives in Korea, but some immigrants recognised that New Zealand is a much better place to live when they became the recipients of the social/welfare system. After such decisive turning points, these immigrants developed a new way of living which is clearly distinguished from their previous mode. These findings have implications in immigration studies not only for how immigrants who may not have any intimate social networks in the host society develop a sense of belonging, but also for how relationships between states and individuals are transformed in this transnational era.

Preserving the memory of community; indigenous protest at a designated Whanganui river campsite

Tourists who canoe down the Whanganui river purchase a pass from the Department of Conservation that allows use of designated campsites.  Tieke Marae is marked as one of the sites.  DoC requests canoeists to follow the protocol of the Marae if the Whanau is in residence when they stop.  If that is the case one receives a welcome and then has the privileges that go along with the status of guest of the tangata whenua. When I made this trip last summer it was interesting to see how tourists made sense of the situation.  Some realized that this was the site of an indigenous protest over land that had been contested for a long time.  Others thought it was a kind of cultural experience that was supported by the government.  In fact, the accommodation between Doc and local people is a rare development.  Both parties have agreed to let the other continue using the area while competing claims to it are ironed out. This paper describes a research project about the development of the situation at Tieke Marae and how it is understood by the various parties to it.  I will discuss how the model of parallel management at Tieke compares with other attempts (for example at Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming) to iron out problems of competing claims and uses of indigenous lands in national parks.  The situation on the Whanganui also recalls work on the erasure of the memory of former communities in Europe (e.g. by Bartov in the contemporary Ukraine).  Although Bartov's evocative descriptions of cemeteries turned into marketplaces, synagogues into dumps and memorials to collaborators in genocide may strike us as extreme in comparison with Whanganui, Te Whanau o Tieke is also concerned with how Whanganui National Park may lead to New Zealand suppressing the memory of the people who inhabited the region in the past and still live nearby.  

Most anthropologists were trained, until the 1980s, by a combination of reading the classic ethnographies and an informal mentoring process via immersion into the distinctive cultures and practices of their own departments, as students, tutors and junior colleagues – a model that might nowadays be described as a “community of practice” or a “community of learning”. Such communities/cultures have since been severely run down as a consequence of changes to funding and management of universities and research as well as wider socio-economic changes. Many of us now work in relative isolation under continuous workload pressures and lament the lack of opportunities for collegiality and a departmental culture linking postgraduate students with research and teaching staff. At the same time however, developing communication technologies have opened up new possibilities for new forms of collegial interaction and community beyond the confines of local departments.  The questions, more practical than theoretical, this panel seeks to explore include: 1. Have we really lost our community of practice? 2. Do we want to rebuild it? 3. (if so) How best can we do it? What I think we can most usefully do in this panel is to present concise, focused statements identifying issues and suggesting strategies, leaving time for workshop/discussion toward inter-departmental or even national-level initiatives. However other suggestions are also welcome.

My reasoning has stretched from membership of the Freemasons movement (Dan Brown move over, an insider’s perspective) to being an assistant with a group of People First—where are the connections (only someone with intellectual disability can be a member of People First). This is a presentation on communities of practice. I’m not just a committee junkie: I’m linking the dots, this is an explanation from meetings and support groups to self-efficacy. Beyond academia, applying my anthropology to applied anthropology—the field is always out there. Central to Freemasonry is the idea of entering into an apprenticeship, a term taken from Operative Masons and they all still practice it. Was Vygotsky a Freemason? I doubt it. But his ideas help in the analysis of what has been, since time immemorial, the tried and tested way of passing on information and skills on the job. Vygotsky was a child psychologist and showed that culture of learning and where the apprentice becomes the Master through participation. Freemasons and People First, the implications of the formal meetings and food they share; I’ll compare and contrast these along with drawing on the neo Vygotskian social anthropological scholar Jean Lave. I use other anthropologists using the ideas of apprenticeships to show how the participants of their studies made meaning in their lives.

Albert Einstein once said that people could not solve problems by using the very same kind of thinking as that which had previously led to their causation. Accordingly, when an established discourse consistently fails to provide effective solutions to escalating problems, it is time to develop new ways of thinking that are more congruous to the then immediate realities of existence. International health policy goals to achieve ‘health for all’ by and beyond the year 2000 have not been met, and now appear unlikely to be attained through the application of conventional biomedical thought. The factors that contribute to these failures are numerous, wide-ranging, ever changing, and thus highly complex. Health researchers are increasingly reliant on specialized knowledge drawn from a diverse spectrum of natural, social, and human scientific disciplines in their search for innovative solutions to seemingly impenetrable societal health problems. This report outlines the experience of a multidisciplinary graduate during the first year of an interdisciplinary PhD that aims to contribute to transdisciplinary re-imagining of the human anatomical form. Here I present preliminary insights gained during this period; and discuss how these contribute to the development of a project that will trouble contemporary scientific understandings of the human body, and might perhaps contribute to a more useful way of thinking about the body in the twenty-first century.

Empowering Study for Refugee Background Students

‘Empowering Study for Refugee Background Students’ is a research project designed to gather information about the experiences of students from refugee backgrounds studying at Victoria University, and to work with participants to identify support systems that may improve the experience and academic outcomes for them.  There are three parts of the project: a census of refugee background students at VUW, interviews on experiences of coming to VUW, and a longitudinal study that follows students through their university career and into employment.  Census data is being collected over three terms by a team of volunteers from Global Remix (a club formed by students from refugee backgrounds), the VUW [Staff] Network to Support Refugee Background Students, and students from the Anthropology and Geography programs, several of whom are also involved with mentoring and peer support for this group. In this paper, members of the census team discuss initial results on three fronts:  findings about refugee background students in tertiary study, additional outcomes through participation of a cross-section of members of the university community; and academic outcomes for students involved in the project.

Dr Diane O’Rourke, Carla Rey Vasquez, Ryan O’Byrne, Lara Bell, Kate Yesburg,  Sarah Caffey

Choosing Community—or Not

The experience of being a refugee unmakes and remakes community identities and practices in a range of often conflicting ways.  When people enter New Zealand as refugees, it is common practice to identify them as members of  communities, labelled in national or ethnic terms.  For example, Changemakers Refugee Forum, an NGO run by refugees, describes itself as a human rights organisation supporting refugee-background communities in New Zealand.  Anecdotally we have observed (and participated in) this labelling in everyday conversations at agencies involved with refugees, and with refugee-background people themselves when they talk about their networks and experiences.  One young man, in talking about the formation of an Ethiopian youth group, told us a major motivation was that the adults in the Ethiopian community are divided, and this group wants to promote unity within the community, but also pride in individual ethnic heritages: Oromo, Amharic, Tigray.  In our academic terms, they aim to create a Pan-Ethiopian community that unites across, while appreciating, ethnic difference.  ‘Communities’ arriving in New Zealand often include people with different ethnic, religious, political, and class identities, people who in some cases had loyalties on opposite sides of the conflicts that made them refugees.  In what conditions do people unify across divides from the past?  When, why and how do they synthesize new communities?  What divisions arise in the newly created communities?In this paper we discuss the insights into labelling and practice of refugee communities that are developing out of our work on the Empowering Study for Refugee Background Students, originally set up to identify difficulties faced by these students at Victoria and ways the university can provide a more supportive learning environment.  The conceptual outcomes of this initially pragmatically-oriented project promise to require a fundamental re-thinking of ‘community’ both in and out of the academy.

Rebecca Oxley

Postpartum Depression and the Chaos of Moral Parenting

This paper explores the shared and personal experiences of postpartum depression (PPD) for five families in the lower east South Island, New Zealand. Despite the idealized accounts of recovery and community reintegration following depressive episodes which mark New Zealand’s mental health awareness public campaigns, these families, whilst officially ‘recovered’, continue to live with the effects of postpartum depression and moral uncertainty over their ability to safely parent once more. They recount a fundamental ‘trigger’ of PPD as the inconsistency experienced between expectations of parenting as projected via the commoditised world of the ‘huggies family’ advertisements versus its reality of broken dreams encountered via its lived experience. These disjunctions lead families towards classical scenes of biographical disruption in which they experienced existential disturbances to identities, life histories, family dynamics and ideas of reproduction and from which they argue they have never fully recovered. The performance of moral parenting after such an experience requires a policing of the uncertainty over exactly what caused PPD and whether it will return once more; a somatic mode of attendance which  remains arduous given the self ascribed ‘bizarre’, multi-aetiological character of PPD.

When the American investment bank Bear Stearns failed in 2007, triggering a credit crunch (which helped precipitate the global financial crisis) its subprime mortgage backed hedge funds were operating in Cayman Islands.  It took the bank’s own employees three weeks of solid investigation to find out exactly how much money had been sent offshore as ‘toxic assets’, only to discover that they had been underestimated by US$1 billion (Keeler 2009). While Offshore Finance Centres (OFCs), or tax havens did not cause the current global financial crisis, which has resulted in total worldwide losses of US$4.1 trillion, they have nevertheless been directly implicated in it.   Hedge funds, Special Purposed Entities (SPEs) and mutual funds, which have suffered some of the most drastic losses in the wake of the global financial crisis maybe devised in key financial hubs such as London and New York, but they invariably operate out of OFCs.  For example, until the global financial crisis, 75 percent of American mutual funds were based in OFCs such as Cayman Islands, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands and Bahamas. This paper examines the relationship between debt, offshore structures and the transnational character of money.  It argues that understandings of the current global financial crisis can be enhanced by anthropological approaches to money, and specifically the ability of elite actors in the financial services sector to blur the boundaries between debt and equity, mediating innovations in capital markets on the one hand with risky speculation on the other.         

During the early 2000s, as a strategy of New Zealand’s centre-left government, a ‘tertiary education sector’ was brought into being. This was different from Australia, where there continues to be a sharp divide between universities and polytechnics, though that too is being diluted in the wake of the recent Bradley Report. Despite the differences in their national governments’ proclaimed political positions, however, both these tertiary systems are under growing threat from neo-liberal ideologies and free-market forces, as corporate management models are imposed on public institutions and the delivery of educational services is devolved to private entrepeneurs. As someone who has been involved in tertiary education over several decades – variously as a student, lecturer, administrator, and governor, and now as an officer of the country’s main tertiary staff union – I have decided to produce a kind of stakeholders’ guide to the sector, as a small contribution to stemming what otherwise might become a flood. But how should this text be conceptualised? Clearly, it is not being written by an historian, sociologist, economist, political scientist, or educational pedagogist. By both temperament and training I am an anthropologist, and the hallmarks of this work-in-progress definitely are anthropological. How might I define them? The term ‘de-sited ethnography’ especially springs to mind…

Mary Theberge

Much has been written about the use of web 2.0 technologies in the classroom and the digital literacy levels of students.  With these themes in mind I implemented student blogging as an experimental element in the second year Anthropology course I co-taught during the first trimester of 2009. This presentation will situate student course-blogging within a broader discussion of trends in collaborative learning, democratising knowledge, and the role of weblogs in higher education.  More specifically for this Anthropology course, student blogging was implemented in the hopes that it would facilitate open communication between students as well as between the students and the professor.  The experience was also intended to provide a platform where students could begin to develop their own public voice while writing for an audience and exploring different modes of textual and visual expression.  In the process students gained a better grasp of negotiating tensions between public and private domains online.  They also developed a deeper appreciation of the various types of information accessible on the web.  These topics will be covered alongside some of the more specific details involved in creating and implementing course-blogging.