The Dr Cyril Timo Schäfer Memorial Graduate Student Conference Presentation Awards take place at the Association's annual conference. The purpose of the awards is to recognise excellence in conference presentation skills by ASAA/NZ graduate student members.
A number of graduate students gave high quality presentations at the 2019 ASAA/NZ Breaking Boundaries conference held in Whāingaroa (Raglan) last month. ASAA/NZ is pleased to announce our 2019 student award recipients:
1st Prize: Maria Blanca Ayala (University of Canterbury)
Crosspollinating Methodological Boundaries: Provocations for an Ethnographic glance at Pūtaringamotu (Riccarton Bush)
As plants are rediscovered by science as sentient, intelligent and social beings, new methodologies for their study are being tried. Despite owning a historic collection of ethnographic accounts documenting personhood in plants, only now anthropologists are starting to ask “what kind of people are plants” and if plants can be, in fact, subjects of ethnographic enquiries. To explore possible answers to these questions, this paper will be structured in two parts. The first one is a revision of the classic ethnographic method adapted to plant-life forms. The second part is an ethnography of the only remnant of the ancient podocarp forest that once covered the Canterbury Plains. The conclusion to this theoretical and empirical exercise will be an open invitation to pollinate ethnographic methodologies with transdisciplinary inputs and multi sensorial practices, in order to approach the study of human-plant interactions from a fresh perspective.
2nd Prize: Nicola Manghi (Università di Torino/University of Waikato)
Relocating boundaries: The case of Kioa (Fiji)
In 1946, the island of Kioa (Fiji) was bought by the people of Vaitupu (Tuvalu), allegedly for fears of future overpopulation. In the following decades, around 250 Vaitupuans settled the island and gave rise to a community that has since then slowly grown and developed. Today, Kioa is imagined, both by the people of Vaitupu and in academic literature, as a possible future home for Vaitupuans, in case climate change makes their home island uninhabitable. Climate scenarios and the perspective of future relocation, though, need to be contextualised in the long history of fears, hopes, and expectations that have shaped the relation between the two islands. The history of Kioa is one of boundaries being transgressed and others being established or reinforced - a history that needs to be examined in order to understand how climate futures will fit into it.
3rd Prize (shared): Mona-Lisa Wareka (University of Waikato) AND Brodie Quinn (University of Auckland)
Mona-Lisa Wareka: Te Mauri o Kaitiakitanga - Exploring Te Ao Māori in Environmental Relations through an Ethic of Kaitiaki
My thesis aims to address the importance of indigenous environmental knowledge in the current environmental crisis and conservation efforts. This draws on Te Ao Māori worldview of the natural world, examining the principle and practices of kaitiaki and kaitiakitanga. Through this research, I attempt to illustrate the importance of human and non-human relations, spirituality, and conservation from a Te Ao Māori lens, while observing the parallels between environmental degradation and indigenous oppression. For this project, I have looked into Matapōuri Bay ki Ngātiwai as an ethnographic example of implementing kaitiakitanga and upholding Mātauranga Taiao. The hapū, Te Whānau o Rangiwhakaahu, recently placed a rāhui on Rangitapu and Te Wai o te Taniwha, more popularly known as the Mermaid Pools. This rāhui was implemented due to increased foot traffic and pollution in these areas, which have now been closed from the public to restore the mauri.
Brodie Quinn: Memory, Religion, and the Breaking of Time
The social practice of storytelling is a vital instrument in a community’s toolkit, used to keep alive historical narratives, reinforce worldviews, and uphold individual and collective identities. Drawing from fieldwork among Protestant Christian communities in Northern Island, this paper shows how specific stories are chosen, retold, and venerated, and how this process forms collective memories that conflate historical stories and break temporal boundaries, leading to powerful feelings of spiritual connection and identity. I argue that memory practices that deconstruct temporal and mnemonic boundaries, while promoting historical continuity, are not simply important in tying people to the past, but are fundamental building blocks in religious faith and religious ‘truths’. The repetition of stories, symbols, embodied practices, and highly-visible rituals construct a specific ‘reformed Christian’ identity - an identity that breaks down boundaries between individuals through shared (imagined) memories and theological beliefs, while also constructing new boundaries along lines of ‘reformed/Roman Catholic’, ‘saved/unsaved’.
