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
• Ends of Oblivion: Continuities and Discontinuities in Oceania’s Pasts
• Food Sovereignty in the Pacific
• 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
• ​Complexities of Climate Change
• ​Misinformation, Social Media, and the Anthropocene
• Museums and Repatriation
• Pacific Biculturalities​
• Pacific Sisters at the Crossroads of Discrimination
• 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: Ends of Oblivion: Continuities and Discontinuities in Oceania’s Pasts 

Organizers: Matteo Aria (matteo.aria@uniroma1.it)
​Co-Organizer: Alexander Mawyer (mawyer@hawaii.edu)

This working session aims at examining the transmission of the past in insular Oceania. As a conceptual starting point we seek to examine transmission as a non-linear process in which both dynamics of continuity as well as discontinuities and ruptures coexist. Instead of perceiving contradiction in such a robust view of transmission, we ask how memories can be understood as moving elements connected to the whole environment, including the invisible forces that inhabit it, and appear, disappear, and reappear under particular historical circumstances. When do particular memories and their forms of expression represent the doors through which one can access those “other realities” that contribute to the transmission process hinged to Indigenous ontologies and cosmologies? When does knowledge about the past run out and “get lost” behind particular rhetorical forms or policies? When do Oceania’s pasts rest in a state of quiescence ready to be reactivated? In light of its mobility, transmission is a fundamental part of the relationships that Oceanian societies entertain with their own history, and it thus a fundamental aspect of Oceania’s historicities. During this session, our goal is to reflect, specifically, on the mediums that, on the one hand, support transmission and, on the other hand, foster the preservation of knowledge of the past. We anticipate discussion in this session engaging a variety of entangled issues: how knowledge of the past concerns the choice to speak or to remain silent; ritual performance (ancient or modern); new and ancient technologies (writing, audio/video/photo, stone signs, tattoos); the role of place; visions and fortuitous encounters including between the human and non-human; specific biographies or institutions. Contextualized by numerous on-going structural transformations in Pacific societies and globally, this session joins others at recent ASAOs in seeking to understand rhetoric on and practices around the “loss” of knowledge and the dynamics related to them (i.e. nostalgia, safeguarding, conservation, enhancement), and at the same time reengage notions such as that of “authenticity” and “heritage.” For more information or to join this session, please reach out to Matteo Aria / Alexander Mawyer / Serge Tcherkezoff at:
matteo.aria@uniroma1.it / mawyer@hawaii.edu / stcherk@pacific-credo.fr