Symposia

• Jean Guiart: L’ethnographie comme marathon d’une vie/Ethnography as Life’s Marathon​​

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Working Sessions

• 2022-2032 International Decade of Indigenous Languages: Pacific Languages
• Being and Belonging: Technologies of Reproduction
• Decolonising Sea of Islands 
• Growing Old in the Pacific
• Mana Moana: Protecting Sacredness
• Proliferation of Models
• Race and Power in Oceania
• Rethinking Decolonization in Papua New Guinea
• "The Soul and the Image": The Story of Film in the Pacific
• Vā Moana: Space and Relationality in Pacific Thought and Identity​

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​​Informal Sessions

• Being Pacific Islander Pasifika, Māori, Indigenous Australian during the Era of Black Lives Matter 
• Complexities of Collaboration on Climate Change
• 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
• Museums and Repatriation
• Pacific Island Politics, Populism, and Democracy
• Pacific Perspectives: The Fluidity of Time, Space and Relations
• Possessing the Pacific City: A Comparative Dispossessions Working Group
• Slouching towards Christian Theocracy in Western Polynesia
• Trust and Care in Pacific Health Systems
• Talanoa on "The Healer and the Psychiatrist"​

Informal Session: Ends of Oblivion: Continuities and Discontinuities in Oceania’s Pasts 

Organizers: Serge Tcherkezoff, Matteo Aria, and Alex Mawyer

This informal 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 <matteo.aria@uniroma1.it>  / Alexander Mawyer <mawyer@hawaii.edu> / Serge Tcherkezoff  <stcherk@pacific-credo.fr>