Informal Session: Refashioning the Body: Building Critical Theory Across the Pacific
Organizers: Lisa Uperesa and Paige West

Historically, people across the Pacific Islands have altered their physical appearance in order to express personal and familial identities, community belonging, and their own subjectivities. They have also produced material objects that when worn adorn the body, express identity, and materialize selves. Since its beginnings, anthropology has been concerned with personal adornment and body modification. In this session we returned to, and drew on, historic conversations about bodies and adornment in anthropology, but we did so with the goal of using contemporary discussions about materiality, indigenous politics, authenticity, and decolonizing methodologies to inform the development of a new way of looking at physicality and materiality in the Pacific. At the same time we worked to hold in tension the critique of the role of anthropology in the formulation of an external gaze of the Pacific and the ways in which it has manifested through clothing, views of Pacific bodies, and commodification of Pacific island adornment for non-indigenous consumers.

We had an excellent session with twenty-five people in attendance. Fourteen of those in attendance will move forward with us to a working session next year. The session began with all of last year’s participants giving a ten-minute presentation about their work and how they have been developing their papers over the past year. Next, new session participants gave five to ten minute descriptions of their work. We then had a formal discussion session where we developed a set of themes that we will use to guide our work together forward. The papers and discussion centered on the following themes: bodies, adornment, and mortality; reading bodies/legibility and bodies; body sovereignty, bodily transformations, and images of bodies; bodies and temporality. Out of these themes we agreed to focus our written papers for next year on:

1. Refashioning (changing/transforming) the body for socio-cultural, political, personal, and economic reasons.
2. Understanding and critiquing the assumed fixity of bodies.
3. Reading bodies, past, present, and future.
4. The fluidity of categories of the body.

Lisa Uperesa, Departments of Sociology and Ethnic Studies, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, 301 George Hall, Honolulu, HI, 96822, USA; tel. 808-956-5354, lisa.uperesa@hawaii.edu

Paige West, Department of Anthropology, Barnard College and Columbia University, New York NY 10027 USA; tel. 212-854-5933; cw2031@columbia.edu