PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES OF CRITICAL THOUGHT - 2004: ABSTRACTS

29 July: Writing the History of the Body in Japan

Professor Vera Mackie
(Foundation Professor of Japanese Studies at
Curtin University of Technology and Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, ANU)

Abstract: What would it mean to write a history of the “body”? In some ways this is a nonsensical question. Bodies are differentiated according to sex, age, and the experiences of work and leisure, wellness and sickness. There is no single archetypal representative of the human body or human experience. To write the history of the “body”, then, is to write the history of an infinite variety of human experiences. Nevertheless, the embodied experiences of individuals are linked through structured relationships of gender, class, ethnicity and sexuality. How would we go about writing a history of the body? No matter how closely we observe the bodies of others, we can never really know what it is like to inhabit another's body. We will always be reliant on the writings, speech and language of others, their testimonials, their literature and poetry, their autobiographies and memoirs, their works of art. In this sense, any history of the body is necessarily a “cultural history”, a history of cultural representations. In this paper I will explore some theoretical and methodological questions involved in embarking on “a cultural history of the body in modern Japan”.

26 August: Discourses of the Public in Post-Reformasi Indonesia

Professor Philip Kitley
(University of Wollongong)

Abstract: In 1998 President Soeharto resigned, handing over to his Vice President, Dr Habibie. The resignation was hailed as a victory for democratically-minded citizens and groups who had been working towards a less oppressive, less authoritarian government in Indonesia. Formally, then, 1998 was the beginning of reform (reformasi) in Indonesia. Reform ushered in a wide range of political, social and political changes. It also ushered in a lot of unruliness that worried authorities in Indonesia and caused some nervousness in Australia. I saw the unruliness as a corollary of change and believed that many of activities and movements for change promised to restore or reinstate the public in the political life of Indonesia. I designed a research project that would focus on looking for the public, looking for signs of the public and publicness in reform Indonesia. In the Friday discussion, I will talk about how I thought the research could proceed—what methods might be appropriate, and where I might find discursive representations of the public.

30 September: Global ethnography and the global cultural economy

Professor Jane Kenway
(Monash University)

Abstract: This paper links ideas associated with Burawoy et al's notion of “global ethnography” to Appadurai's discussions of the media scapes of the global cultural economy. Global ethnographies are often multi-sited and are particularly concerned with multiple global connections. Appadurai is concerned with the social life of the imagination and the “possible lives” made available through media scapes. This paper will point to the benefits and difficulties of blending these two methodological orientations. The book on which the paper is based is called Masculinity beyond the Metropolis and it draws on two major sources; original global/local ethnographic studies of place, identity and globalisation in Australia and global media representations of out-of-the-way places, identity and globalisation. The methodologies adopted for this study allow for a rich consideration of the ways in which young males shape themselves and are shaped through their relationship to the “globalising local” but they also pose conceptual and practical issues for ethnography and ethnographers. These will be discussed.

28 October: Tapa and Text: trading technologies in the Pacific

Associate Professor Paul Sharrad
(University of Wollongong)

Abstract: This paper arises from the collaboration between Arts and Creative Arts and takes a literary critic into areas of anthropology, history and museology. It begins with the Captain Cook Waistcoat, held in the Mitchell Library and tracks connections through to contemporary Pacific Literature using textile images as symbols of tradition authorising new cultural practices.

Biography: Paul Sharrad has worked in postcolonial studies for many years, with particular interests in India and the Pacific. He was part of an ARC Discovery team grant working on textiles and texts that held a successful exhibition “Fabrics of Change𔄭, and will publish a collection of conference papers, Reinventing Textiles: Postcolonial Readings later this year. He is currently looking at the spread of eucalyptus from Australia to India as part of a Linkage International grant.

24 November (Wednesday): Thinking Through Images: a Deleuzian cultural politics of audiovisual media

Dr Jo Smith
(University of Auckland)

Abstract: Gilles Deleuze suggests that we are witnessing a shift from societies based on discipline and hierarchy (that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries) to a networked society characterized by more dispersed forms of control. According to Deleuze, the confined spaces of a disciplinary society (schools, prison, the factory) break down or open out in control societies (into continuing education, home detention, network business). The central logic prevailing in these more dispersed forms of control is that “you never finish anything” (1990, 179). Deleuze warns that we are only catching glimpses of what these control societies will produce. Through a survey of a range of images drawn from Photoshop technologies, the Internet, DVDs and advertising this paper investigates the role played by audiovisual media in the emergence of societies of control. The incompleteness and logic of continuous variation that drives control societies is also a characteristic of audiovisual media such as DVD technologies and home entertainment systems. DVD versions of feature films refashion, extend and upgrade earlier modes of cinematic production, so much so that one is “never finished” with the cinematic text as theatrical display and continues the experience in the quasi-public space produced by home entertainment systems. Such audiovisual events have a specific mode of address designed to capture and augment a media consumer's attention. It is to the temporal and spatial aspects of attention that media scholars must look to examine how DVDs contribute to the industrialization of contemporary audiovisual culture and hence, to shifts to control societies.