Joshua Bell

Since 2005 I have been a lecturer in Pacific art and anthropology at the Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the University of East Anglia in the UK. After completing a BA at Brown (1996), I went to the University of Oxford and obtained an M.Phil in Ethnology and Museum Anthropology (1998) and a D.Phil in Social and Cultural Anthropology (2006). For my D.Phil I combined long-term ethnographic fieldwork with research in museums and archives to look at the shifting relationships between artefacts, history, and resource rights in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea. Currently, I am working on a monograph derived from my D.Phil on the memories and contemporary reverberations of the Tom Kabu Movement (1946-69), a modernization and iconoclastic movement in the Papuan Gulf. In my publications to date I have looked at the construction of colonial and indigenous histories, the informal economies and speculations around industrial logging in the Purari Delta, Hawaiian architecture, as well as the role of photography in field research. I have been a member of ASAO since 1996 and have participated in and organised several sessions. Over the last 12 years I have found ASAO to be a productive and supportive forum for sharing ideas, and networking with colleagues working in the Pacific. If elected to the board, I look forward to helping to continue ASAO's informal ethos, while also working to help increase links with Pacific islanders whose increased involvement is critical to ASAO's long-term success.

Rochelle Fonoti

Talofa lava!

My name is Rochelle Fonoti and I am a doctoral student in the sociocultural anthropology program at the University of Washington. I am a diasporic Samoan; born in Auckland NZ, raised in both American and Western Samoa but now based in the U.S. For the last two years, I have co-organized the working session "Articulating Indigenous Anthropology in/of Oceania" and am ecstatic about the groundbreaking work many of our indigenous Pacific Islander anthropologists and scholars are engaged from within their respective communities and homes. I am truly grateful to ASAO and the Pacific Islander Scholar Fund and would be honored to serve as a board member within this esteemed organization.

Ma lou faaaloalo lava,

Rochelle

Elfriede Hermann

Elfriede Hermann has engaged in multi-sited field research, first with the Ngaing of Papua New Guinea, focusing on emotions and historicity in respect of the Yali movement, and later with the Banabans on Rabi Island (Fiji) and on Banaba Island (Kiribati), where she studied constitutings of self and ethnicity. She holds degrees from the University of Tubingen (MA and PhD) and from the University of Gottingen (Habilitation), where since 1995 she has taught and researched at the Institute of Cultural and Social Anthropology. Since 2005 she has been a research fellow with the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Hawai'i, cooperating on an interdisciplinary project on interactions and transformations of cultural traditions in Oceania. Among her recent publications is "Relations in Multicultural Fiji: Transformations, Positionings and Articulations", a special issue of Oceania (75:4, 2005), on which she teamed with Wolfgang Kempf as guest editor. From July 1999 to July 2008 she served on the board of the European Society for Oceanists (ESfO). A member of the ASAO since 1993 and contributor to various ASAO sessions over the last eight years, she greatly appreciates the opportunity these meetings furnish not only to exchange research results on the cultures of Oceania but also to touch base with scholars from that region. If elected to the board, she will work to advance ASAO's engagement with Oceania and its peoples.