Symposia

• Rethinking Decolonization in Papua New Guinea

Working Sessions

• 2022-2032 International Decade of Indigenous Languages: Pacific Languages
• Documentation as Relation: Experiments with and Challenges to Knowledge
• Dogs and Their Humans
• Food Sovereignty in the Pacific
• Pacific Sisters at the Crossroads of Discrimination
• Trust and Care in Pacific Health Systems

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​​Informal Sessions

• Archiving, Preserving and Sharing Ethnographic Research for the Future
• The After/lives of Pacific Plantations
• Ends of Oblivion: Continuities and Discontinuities in Oceania’s Pasts
• Museums and Repatriation
• Pacific Biculturalities
• Possessing the Pacific City: A Comparative Dispossessions Working Group
• "The Soul and the Image": The Story of Film in the Pacific​
• Stories about Birth, Cultural Celebrations, Cultural Observations
• What Matters Now? Navigating Uncertain Futures from Climate Change to Careers
  

Working Session: Dogs and Their Humans

Organizer: Roger Lohmann, Trent University (rogerlohmann@trentu.ca)

Canine ways of life and relationships with humans have varied across time and space. Over thousands of years, canids have successively joined far-flung human communities across the Pacific. Participants are invited to consider any aspect of dog-human relationships that have occurred in this region. Accounts and analyses of material, behavioral, and attitudinal relationship indicators exhibited by both humans and canines are particularly welcome.

Among the themes that emerged at last year’s Informal Session are dog behavior patterns reflecting human cultures; dogs as active participants with humans in multi-species communities, ecological and social interdependencies between the species, cycles of dog population growth and annihilation on atolls, dogs as exchange partners in ecological settings where they assist in hunting, recurrent ambivalence toward dogs in humans (and possibly also toward humans in dogs), notions of certain dogs as able to transform into humans or to manifest spirit beings, notions of common substance or taboo between certain dogs and certain humans, dog meat as a human food source, and human cruelty and kindness toward dogs in comparison to other animals.

The 2022 Portland Working Session lineup so far is:

• Laurence Carucci “Going to the Dogs with Enewetak/Ujelang Marshall Islanders”
• Lise Dobrin “Talking with Dogs on the Arapesh Coast”
• Rick Feinberg and Cathleen Pyrek “Dogs or Dog-gone? A View from Four (Almost) Dogless Islands”
• Carolina Gallarini “The Impact of the Introduction of Dogs and Other Quadrupeds in Kanaky”
• Roger Lohmann “Cultural Differences in Dogs at Duranmin, Papua New Guinea”
• Noah Pleshet “Anangu Dog-holding Then and Now: Dogs, Dingoes, and Humans of Central Australia”

More participants are welcome! To officially qualify as a Working Session we should have seven presenters, but we currently have only six. Participants should plan to send a title, a draft paper with a 100-word abstract for circulation to the other participants, and confirmation as to whether you will be participating in person, virtually (if this option is available), or in absentia to the organizer by October 30, 2021.