I’m happy to announce that the European Society for Oceanists has accepted a panel on Capacity Building, for the 8th ESfO Conference to be held in Sr. Andrews, Scotland in July 5-8, 2010.

Martha Macintyre (University of Melbourne) and I will be selecting up to 10 panelists. We are hoping for a strong mix of academic and practical participants. The panel will have a full day, with participants having up to 30 minutes to present their paper, and with substantial discussion time. We will be encouraging all participants to pre-circulate and comment on first drafts, so as to maximise the quality of the final papers, and the session’s discussions in Scotland.

Our panel’s description and call for papers is included here, and the ESfO Conference Information is included at the bottom of this post.
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Capacity Building : Critical analyses of the new model for knowledge transfer in Pacific Development.
Martha Macintyre and Heather Young-Leslie

Pressures for outside agencies to effect change and demonstrate efficacy to donors have escalated in the last decade. Recipients’ objections to tied aid, liberal ideals of partnership and recipients ‘owning the project’, neo-liberal concerns over external donors’ provision of funds for infrastructure, wages and revenue –all have generated new development objectives that emphasise recipients’ capacity to manage and sustain programs. These objectives are especially prominent in projects, whether bilateral or NGO-sponsored, where previous failures have been attributed to a lack of knowledge, skills and expertise among the local beneficiaries. Corruption, incompetence and other failures of governance, construction and infrastructure building delays, lack of local support, project failure – all may be attributed to inadequate knowledge, skills and/or management expertise.

“Capacity Building” and “Training” are the new standards for most development endeavours. They have gained prominence in aid-projects on law and justice, peace-building, governance, transportation, environmental conservation, HIV, and health systems strengthening . The aim is to enable and inspire selected people to appreciate the particular project’s objectives, to mobilise others to engage in activities required by project implementation plans, to adopt project timelines and accountability structures, and to make the advisors redundant. Likewise, foreign corporations embrace the rhetoric of capacity building in their efforts to localise their workforce. In addition to apprenticeships and training to gain industrial skills and qualifications, companies conduct short courses that encourage workers to adapt to Western employment practices and ideologies. The enthusiasm for capacity building has encouraged AusAID to develop a training program to teach development practitioners how to be Capacity Building Advisors.

This new knowledge transfer-as-development model has yet to receive critical examination. Undoubtedly a medium through which Western ideals of efficiency and efficacy as well as liberal democratic notions of empowerment are meant to be established, in practice, is capacity building significantly different from prior modes of knowledge transfer? How? Does it equalise the power imbalances between counterparts as claimed? How are capacity building advisors experienced by their counterparts? Where is capacity building going, what might it become?

Our session will critically and constructively examine capacity building’s ideals and effects in specific settings. We invite papers from people who have worked on projects where capacity building has been paramount and welcome co-authored papers with capacity builders, their counterparts or donor-partners; papers based on specific project observations and evaluations; papers offering theoretical analyses of the principles and practices of this new model for knowledge transfer.

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European Society for Oceanists, 8th Conference
St Andrews, Scotland, 5-8th July 2010

Conference Announcement
The University of St Andrews Centre for Pacific Studies invites delegates to gather for the 8th Conference of the European Society for Oceanists, to be held on 5th-8th July, 2010.
St Andrews is Scotland’s first university and the third oldest in the English speaking world, founded in 1413. Set on a sandy coast, 50 miles from Edinburgh, St Andrews is a small medieval town with a population of 20,000, a third of whom are students. St Andrews is also, famously, the ‘Home of Golf’, and is well provided with pubs, cafes and restaurants.

Conference Theme: Exchanging Knowledge in Oceania
At the end of the 7th ESfO conference, Verona 2008, a round-table of Pacific Islands academics forcefully urged their colleagues to take seriously the consequences of the theme ‘putting people first’: they wanted academics to acknowledge the obligations activated by their relations in Oceania, and to recognize the responsibilities to Oceanic peoples, to the Academy and to Civil Society that come with the exchange of expert knowledge. Simply put, knowledge transfers work both ways, and they wanted academics to act.
Academics face similar calls from Governments, Research Councils, Industry and Policy-Makers to demonstrate explicitly the usefulness of their expert knowledge, and increasingly, ‘Knowledge Transfer’ or ‘Knowledge Exchange’ activities, such as user relevance and public engagement, are key conditions of research funding. Demand for exchanging knowledge into useful activities from all sides entails new conceptual frames and working relations that derive their force from different rationales. Consequently, the exchange value of academic knowledge is becoming determined by the use value others see in it. These moves risk instrumentalizing knowledge and envision re-making anthropology as a science of prescription, rather than a technique of description that acts through re-writing concepts.

Clearly, the moment creates an opportunity for new kinds of social relations in Oceania for the twenty-first century. But these various calls to act will involve facing up to serious questions in re-imagining the continuities of our own academic traditions, and of our relations in Oceania. Can we imagine new collaborative forms of academic practice? How might we best re-describe anthropological methods, relations and knowledge to respond to the aspirations of the ‘knowledge transfer’ agenda? Whether from a position inside or outside a University, what forms of academic practices, relations, ethics and roles are emerging in contemporary Oceania?

Perhaps we might look for answers by addressing a contemporary dilemma that Oceanic peoples and Oceanist academics share: How to re-describe and transfer knowledge and so make their cultural resources useful, effective and resilient in the contemporary world? We might begin by looking at the kinds of ‘knowledge’ at stake.

Questions arise for peoples in the region over the paths to take in creating social forms relevant to current contexts. Development ambitions and legal terminologies are shaping and eliciting new forms of indigenous social lifeØthrough which people also continue to act out their own social analyses of these encounters. What kinds of cultural connections are being made by Oceanic peoples growing up in such a ‘post-tradition’ epoch? What transfers, transformations and appropriations are people making between old and new sources of cultural knowledge?
Questions also arise for academics who have bodies of traditional cultural resources of their own to deal with. What uses are perceived for detailed literatures when research subjects appear increasingly to share fewer continuities with those peoples, practices or places? What kinds of connections between contemporary theories of social life and the rich ethnographic record are anthropologists claiming?

Knowledge exchange in Oceania has always involved two-way traffic. In asking about the emergent properties of reciprocity, responsibility and obligation constituted in academic research relations with Oceanic peoples, what leads and lessons can we draw from the solutions that Oceanic peoples are fashioning for themselves out of this contemporary dilemma? Equally, what roles and capacities are Oceanic peoples fashioning for academics who are interested in the region?

ESfO conferences are renowned for gathering together academics based in different regions of the world: Exchanging Knowledge in Oceania aims to put this gathering of inter-personal and conceptual relations to work in examining what kinds of knowledge transfers between bodies of knowledge are currently going on in Oceania, and what kinds of emergent relations are being formed.

Enquiries: email
Dr Tony Crook
Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology
Chair, European Society for Oceanists (ESfO)
8th ESfO Conference, St Andrews, July 5-8th 2010

ESfO 2010 Conference Website
www.besite-productions.com/esfo2010

I came to Ubud to get some writing done. My timing was fortuitous, in that the 6th UWRF began in the week of my arrival. Knowing I was mingling with writers, ranging from Wole Soyinka, Marco Calvani and Shamini Flint to unpublished hopefuls, has been inspiring and excellent for the work ethic. I met some lovely people — artist/designers/jewellers Tisha and Jan Oldham, their journalist friend Margo Lang and Kenyan Shalini Gidoomal shine out — It also gave me the opportunity to take two workshops. My new friend Shelley Keingsberg’s Editing for Writers was a really helpful kick in the pants, reminding me that ‘less is more’ , language should be euphonic, and cliche’s should be avoided like the plague. Oops.

The same themes played through Michelle Cahill’s workshop on poetry. Now comes confession time. I do write poetry. On rare occasions. At least stuff I wanted to have confirmed counted as poetry (or not). Michelle offered clear rules and sensitive feedback: Avoid lazy words (‘beautiful’ ‘lovely’), start with the specific before the abstract, don’t overindulge in intellectual gymnastics and vague referents, don’t be clever or sophisticated for the sake of being sophisticated or clever. And avoid cliches like the plague. Oops.

But when you’ve mastered the rules, she says, then sometimes you can break them.

Breaking the rules appeals to me, and in that spirit, here is the poem I read in the class, that I thought was an example of everything Not To Do, but which instead is, apparently, an example of ventriloquising. Breaking the rules in order to make them work better. Or something like that:

TerGivEr’sation
{with apologies to Eliot, Carson & Cummings}

In the room the women come and go
speaking of Plath and Pollock, or Foucault,
New beginnings (are there any other kind?) are hard.

Beatrice was 17 when Dante was inspired (the 2nd time)
She was 55 when La Commedia was complete. Sappho put it more simply.
Speaking of a young girl she said, You Burn Me.

Deneuve usually begins with herself: Sweater buttoned
almost to the neck, she sits at the head of the seminar table
expounding

“Did you know that Solon introduced coins as substitutes for real value?”
Athenian credit, a currency of promises. My Deneuve refers to disparities of colony, wealth and women’s health while inner monologues swirl

I grow old … I grow old …Shall I wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled?
When I am an old woman shall I wear purple
with a red hat which doesn’t go?

If you asked her, Deneuve would say
Take these days away
pour them out on the ground in another country.

She has a point. Red hats have become too banal to be anymore
a true revolt against yellow fog curling like cats, spilled tea cups, the beauty
of past husbands and etc.

Maybe I will weave baskets and words amid gardens and waves, gaining notoriety in place of popularity, shading my eyes against the glare
of didn’ts, haven’ts, won’ts, can’ts

Perhaps I’ll climb among the up so many dells down,
listening to snowflakes and light bulbs and whistles in mountain
passes of a distant how-town,

No Beatrice I, let me go while I am able,
even though the evening is spread out against the sky
(yeah, just like a patient etherised upon a table)

Let me march against drummers of violent tides, in rhythm with what
– as Marilyn Monroe said to the Etruscans to make them laugh –
Tomorrow will certainly be

I

What is ‘ecography’ and why do we care?

The term ecography refers to “the inscription of human history and agency in a place and its inhabitants, and a mutual reinscription of land, sea, and dwellers into human lives. This is done by way of place names, emplaced stories, ceremonial titles, and remembered ritual” (Young Leslie 2007).

Cross-culturally, many peoples include non-human beings as ’persons’  with whom they
interrelate in emotive, cooperative and/or competitive, and productive ways. These other persons, whether animal, plant or mineral forms, are often conceptualized in ways fundametally different from the post-entlightenment, post-industrial revolution sense associated with contemporary modernity, and Euro-Western science-influenced societies in particular. The pattern in most ecological and environmental thinking of our particular historical era (modernity and post-modernity) is to classify nature as separate from culture, and to categorize humans as cultural beings, part of the wider, ‘natural environment’, embedded in an ecosystem, but of a different order than the other lives in the same ecosystem; This category classifies humans separately from animals, plants, land-forms, etc. In the usual sense of this way of thinking, humans are persons, but other life-forms are not. Humans stand outside of the environment, are free to use it as a resource to be exploited. They also have the right to manage nature, the environment, the ecosystem. Indeed, Judeo-Christian-Muslim adherents have claimed a moral obligation to do so.

This is a historically particular, cultural way of thinking about ‘the environment’, one sort of mythopoetic story we tell ourselves about our place in the living universe. There are other explanatory stories. The anthropologist Marie-Claire Bataille-Benguigui documented  that in Tonga, ocean denizens such as fish, sharks, and turtles should be understood as “partners” rather than prey (1988). Anthropologists working in northern locales have made similar arguments for decades: foraging and hunting peoples, such as the Cree of Quebec (Feit 1995, 1991), the Dene of Northern British Columbia (Brody 1981), or the many nations of the northwest coast of Canada and the United States (see, eg, Gunther 1928; Jenness 1955, 6–9) all describe moose, beaver, salmon, and other animals as sentient beings who give themselves as food to humans, often out of love. Even predators and humans have found that cooperation and respect is mutually beneficial, as Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s work on lions and Ju/’hoansi in the Kalahari demonstrates (2003), and as any Polynesians who count the shark as part of their ancestral genealogy may attest. There is less research on non-animal forms (ie plants and landforms) and human relationships, although the research on ‘place and space’ as understood in Australian Aboriginal nations (Bird Rose 1992, Rumsey and Weiner 2001), miners in Columbia and Bolivia (Taussig 1980), and Inuit using the arctic sea-ice (Aporta 2002, Nuttal forthcoming) compellingly indicates that places can also be understood to have volition, intention and act out of partnership or competition. Faroe Islanders make themselves kin to the landscape through naming (Gaffin 1996), in a process similar to the  tactic of using maternal family surnames as first names in patronymic societies such as Canada and the United States, where children usually take their father’s name as their surname.

However, in today’s world of commercial food mega-farming, where floating factories harvest in waters far from home, affecting local inshore fisheries in unprecedented ways; where harbours, mountain tops and open valleys are militarized for national security or solar science; where global warming and widespread contamination of the planetary ecosystem is denied rather than spook stock markets and jeopardize shareholders’ returns; where speculation on and gentrification of seasides, vistas and other pleasant ‘aspects’ creates homelessness; where aluvial deposits and rain forests are paved and parcelled into housing for urban citizens and relocated humans; In such a new world order,  ’persons’ of all kinds, biota, lifeforms, landforms, sea lanes  and wind routes are evaluated on the basis of their percentage of the overall contribution to national economies and transnational shareholders’ profits. These contemporary geopolitics of desire are transfiguring the ecographies of our present and the mythopoesis of our future. The stories people use to put meaning into place, and places into ourselves are shifting. Ecography is the tactic for documenting and measuring the transfiguations.

References:

Aporta, Claudio 2002: Life on the ice: Understanding the codes of a changing environment. Polar Record 38 (207): 341-354.

Bataille-Benguigui, Marie-Claire
1988. The Fish of Tonga, Prey or Social Partners. Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol 97:185-198.

Feit, Harvey 1991 The Construction of Algonquian Hunting Territories: Private Property as Moral Lesson, Policy Advocacy and Ethnographic Error. In Colonial Situations, edited by George W Stocking, Jr, 109-134 Madison: Wisconsin University Press.

1995 Hunting and the Quest for Power: The James Bay Cree and Whitemen in the Twentieth Century. In Native Peoples: The Canadian Experience, edited by R Bruce Morrison and C Roderick Wilson, 101-128. Second edition. Toronto: Oxford Press.

Gaffin, Dennis 1996. In place: Spatial and Social Order in a Faeroe Islands Community. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press

Gunther, Erna 1928. Further Analysis of the First Salmon Ceremony. (Doctoral Dissertation) University of Washington Publications in Anthropology, 2, 129-173.

Jenness, Diamond, 1955. Faith of a Coast Salish Indian. pp 6-9. Victoria: British Columbia Provincial Museum.

Marshall Thomas, Elizabeth, 2003. The Lion/Bushmen Relationship in Nyae Nyae in the 1950s: A Relationship Crafted in the Old Way. Anthropologica 45 (1): 73–78.

Nuttal, Mark 2007. Paper delivered at the meetings of the CASCA & AES, Toronto, May

Rose, Deborah Bird, 1992. Dingo Makes Us Human: LIfe and land in Aboriginal Australian Culture. Cambridge University Press.

Rumsey and J. F. Weiner (eds), 2001. Emplaced Myth: Space, Narrative, and Knowledge in Aboriginal Australia and Papua New Guinea, pp 233-245. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Taussig, Michael, 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. University of North Carolina Press.

Young Leslie, Heather, 2007. A Fishy Romance; Chiefly Power and the Geopolitics of Desire. The Contemporary Pacific Vol 19(2):tba.

Trees cut in Manoa valley, O’ahu, to improve the view to the ocean.

Part One:

Ethnography is undergoing a remarkable efflorescence, both outside anthropology and within. This is coupled with an increased interest in ethnographic training. In the last few years, the US-based National Science Foundation [NSF] awarded several grants for training in ethnographic methods. I am reporting here about a particular ethnographic field school which, to the best of my knowledge, is unique.

1) exactly how does this field school differ from most ethnographic field schools?

Emphasis on participant observation,
taught (in part) by observing participants:

The Ethnographic Field School: Tonga, was collaboratively designed with the village residents where the field school was to take place.

In the early stages of the project development, I travelled to a village where I have had ongoing and deep relationships for over a dozen years. In town meetings, small group and individual meetings with village elders, and with members of the women’s development committees, we strategized about questions related to pedagogy and content: how and what to teach students who might become ethnographers in the future? I had my own ideas about criteria, but I wanted the hosts of the school, and the people usually relegated to the role of ‘observed’ and ‘interviewed’ to say what and how they wanted the students to learn.

We agreed that the underlying principles of the school should be as follows:

1. Fieldschool would provide an experientially rich entré to doing ethnography in the ‘classic’ sense.
2. Students should enjoy the experience.
3. Village and island residents should enjoy and benefit from the Fieldschool.
4. Students would acquire respect for Tongan culture, society and people.
5. Students would appreciate the covenant of reciprocity and respect that underlies the long-term ethnographic encounter.

Building on these principles, we agreed that key elements of the Fieldschool would be:

1. Cultural orientation and lessons in social etiquette prior to staying in the village.
2. Classes on ethnographic ethics, mapping, kinship, participant observation, interviewing, visual and written field notes, Tongan culture, history, economy, politics, ecology, fishing, farming, textile-making, child-rearing, ceremony and language.
3. Classes in anthropology to be taught by academic professor, classes on Tongan ethnography to be taught by Tongans.
4. Tongan culture experts identified as potential interviewees or invited to teach in their areas of expertise to be paid or offered honoraria.
5. Students homestay in the village; one student per family; they participate in household chores as if a son or daughter of the household.
6. Fieldschool to re-imburse the village, each homestay family, and provide tranlation assistance to students.
7. All ethnographic information recorded by students during the fieldschool to remain unpublished.

Based on these meetings, I drafted a field school proposal, and submitted it to the Study AbroadProgram at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. When the proposal was accepted, and with financial support from the Centre for Pacific Islands Studies, I hired a particularly skilled and well-respected Tongan woman as Field School Assistant, to help make arrangements, coordinate travel, translate documents, and act as curriculum development partner.

Thus, from the outset, the fieldschool was participatory, culturally-sensitive in design and action-research oriented. While the students learned to be participant observers, the villagers learned to be observant participants in the training of ethnographers. In essence, people most used to being the subjects of research were recruited as active educators of a future crop of anthropologists: In addition to acting as home-stay hosts, village residents were active teaching partners, providing guest lectures in the classroom, hands-on lessons in the gardens, reef, fishing boats and weaving houses, and interviews on subjects negotiated between student, villager and instructor. Perhaps most significantly, the villagers acted as evaluators of the students’ performance, contributing to the students’ final grades.
The most radical differences between the Ethnographic Fieldschool: Tonga and other forms of field school training lay in the privileging of local needs, and repositioning of knowledge, pedagogy, curriculum content, and authority to teach to those who are normally constructed as interlocutors rather than instructors.

To be continued in Part Two.