FIRST PLACE: Shalvi (Panjab University)

Water at the Margins of the Margins: Ecology and Peripherality in Spiti Valley
What does it mean to live on the margins of the margins? This paper examines water scarcity in Rangrik, a high-altitude cold desert village in India’s borderland Spiti Valley, to reveal the layered nature of peripherality—ecological, political, and social. Based on thirty in-depth interviews and participant observation, it shows how declining snowfall and drying springs unsettle irrigation systems and revive allocation hierarchies (for instance, big vs. small households), producing unequal access to water within the community.

The state’s Irrigation and Public Health (IPH) department has introduced motor pumps, but their upkeep and operation fall to villagers. In this work, women are most visible—sustaining agriculture, organizing water distribution, and even holding formal leadership positions such as village headship. Their work demonstrates capability and resilience, even as decision-making power remains unevenly distributed.

Water, however, is never only material. Rituals revere springs and bind villagers to deities and ancestors while they also negotiate scarcity with the state. Scarcity thus activates multiple domains at once—ecological, political, social, gendered, and sacred—making water the medium through which layered peripherality is lived and contested. These intersections suggest a broader framework that will be explored in the paper.

By foregrounding water in this way, the paper shows that Himalayan villages like Rangrik are not simply remote places. These margins are active sites where ecology, governance, gender roles, and ritual beliefs converge, unsettling simple models of center and periphery in anthropology for a more nuanced approach.

JOINT SECOND PLACE: Will Stringer (Maynooth University)

Anticipating collapse: Theorising with activists on the future
Communities across the world are experiencing the unfolding climate and ecological crisis. It is a crisis of food, housing and livelihood insecurity, with increasing weather extremes. Despite this, many liberal democracies are not taking meaningful action. In this context, environmental activists are anticipating collapse – discussing and promoting it as a likely future scenario.

Studies and stories of collapse have long captivated the public imagination, from the downfall of Roman civilisation to the demise of Rapa Nui. Scholarship has often centred environmental reasons for collapse, such as droughts, mini-ice ages and deforestation. Despite the interdisciplinary and popular interest in the topic, collapse proves a difficult and contentious term to define. Questions emerge such as ‘what scale does collapse happen?’, ‘over what time period?’ and the relationship between collapse and transformation.

In this paper, I draw from my current ethnographic fieldwork with climate activist groups along the east coast of Australia. I argue that theorising with these groups brings important contributions to how we can understand the concept of ‘collapse’ in a world facing profound environmental crisis. First, by paying attention to how collapse is used by activists, different qualities come to light. Activists are distinguishing between ‘political’ and ‘environmental’ collapse; where the political is filled with transformative potential, while the environmental represents an ‘endgame’. Second, working with these groups challenges existing definitions of ‘collapse’, moving the concept from a historical-orientation to one of anticipated futures.

JOINT SECOND PLACE: Kēhaunani Springer (University of Waikato)

Ornamental Sustainability: Extractive Economies of Hawaiʻi’s Aquarium Trade
“The habitat is still there, but the reef feels empty in the places we used to fish.” This reflection from the margins highlights how Hawaiʻi’s aquarium trade has taken what was once abundance and turned it into global commodity flows. Millions of reef fish have been shipped to distant markets, the industry cloaks extractivism in the ornamental language of “sustainability” leaning on scientific discourse to legitimize extraction while silencing Indigenous knowledge. For Kanaka ʻŌiwi fishers and communities, the losses are real: depleted cultural species, foreclosed governance rights, and intergenerational stewardship disrupted. State interventions like Cultural Assessments, Environmental Impact Statements, Injunctions, and Moratoria produce what Röpke described as “terminological futility,” reinforcing monopolistic control while profits consolidate elsewhere. This case shows how margins are not just sites of exploitation, but places of struggle, where Kanaka ʻŌiwi unsettle dominant narratives and press for ocean governance rooted in Indigenous stewardship.

THIRD PLACE: Clare Collins (Massey University)

On the edges of food charity: Volunteering as an act of concealed kindness
As humans, we are constantly making and remaking our own worlds. One of the ways some choose to do this is through voluntary labour. Much of the anthropological literature on this topic is focused on reciprocity and ‘the gift’, or the ways in which people form their own identities and gain cultural capital through this form of labour. However, these explanations did not fit so neatly with the motivations of a group of volunteers at a local food rescue with whom I began my research in 2021. The work these volunteers do is not front-line. They do not have direct contact with those they are helping. Instead, it is quiet, repetitive, physical labour, often in solitude or with one other person. Every week they collect heavy boxes and bags of surplus food from supermarkets and deliver it to various community centres, interacting only with the staff there, not with the recipients of the food themselves. They do not receive admiration, reciprocal gifting, or direct appreciation from those they are providing a service to.

Based on participant-observation and semi-structured interviews, I will use theories of the anthropology of the good, and Clara Han’s concepts of concealed kindness, to suggest that there are other ways for us as anthropologists to view altruistic behaviour. We are all making and remaking our worlds, but perhaps we have been underestimating how much those working on the edges are making worlds for others.

SPECIAL COMMENDATIONS FOR VIRTUAL PRESENTATIONS:Fine Brendtner (Aarhus University) for her Shell and Gradient piece in the plenary: “The Shape of Things to Come,” and Angela Wong (University of Sydney) for Flagging the Edges of Diaspora: Symbolic Use of the Republic of Vietnam Flag in the Reconfiguration of the Peripheries of/in Diaspora.

FIRST PLACE: Fern Eyles (Massey University)

Ex Libris Coloniae: libraries as neutral space 
Libraries are one of the only institutions almost wholly perceived of as inherently good, providing information on neutral terrain, staffed by the “check out chicks of culture” (Carroll, White and Coe, 2022). Certainly, professional literature almost uniformly presents libraries as having inherent ‘goodness,’ creating “democracy, learning, and civilization” (Chiu, Ettarh and Ferretti, 2021) simply by existing, and with librarians embodying this by extension. A reverence towards neutrality is central to this premise. Although headway has been made in confronting white supremacy and the library profession in local and temporal contexts, the reverence for neutrality and the belief in inherent goodness is so all-encompassing that the library profession is largely unable or unwilling to grapple with the concept in any meaningful way, particularly outside of the modern age, and so little attention has been paid to the nature of libraries – the uniform settings in which they arise, the reason for their development, and how this circumvents modern reform. This paper will look at the development of libraries, how supposedly modern problems are features not flaws, and the implications reverence for neutrality has in this context amongst a profession that has both an external and internal conception of embodying goodness.

JOINT SECOND PLACE: Ayesha Chaudhry (Australian National University)

“Sirf shaadi zindagi ka sub se ahem hissa nahi hai” (Marriage is not the only important part of life): Performativity, kinship, and the multitemporal experiences of single urban Pakistani Muslim women  
The notion of marriage takes on a complex temporal quality for urban Pakistani Muslim single women. Following patrilocal residence practices, these women are primarily resident with their immediate kin members, and are therefore embroiled in a nuanced web of negotiations, commitments, desires and obligations. These kin-based dynamics, along with the glocalised contexts that these women live in, instigate complex forms of multitemporal experiences. How do such temporal entanglements lead to situations of singlehood among these women? I attempt to answer this question by basing my analysis on data that I collected for my PhD thesis through ethnographic fieldwork conducted among single Muslim women resident in the city of Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Taking inspiration from Judith Butler’s work on performativity, I argue that these women and their kin members are involved in various sets of routinised forms of actions as per their positionalities within the family dynamics. Repetition over time gives these actions a temporal quality, with each set of actions constituting a temporal order. For these women, there is usually a simultaneous preoccupation with multiple temporal orders. Kin members will also be preoccupied with these temporal orders, but the configuration and intensity of involvement with each order will vary according to particular age- and genderbased contexts. Where differing temporal orders intersect, dissonances are evident, which lead to the dysfunctional state of remaining unmarried. These dissonances particularly emerge in the form of variations in subjectivities and mental preoccupations between kin members as influenced by each individual's contextual participation in the multiplicities of temporal orders. 

JOINT SECOND PLACE: Gabriel Urlich Lennon (Stockholm University)

Bounded Ecologies and Shifting Vitalities: Governing Goats in Taranaki
 In many regions of Aotearoa, there are competing ecological spaces and praxes that work toward particular species’ vitalities: that of pastoral agriculture, and that of wildlife conservation. Each features a mode of governing the environment to secure the a particular image of vitality for a specific species-assemblage, and the two realms are spatialised as rigidly apart with intensely (bio)securitised boundaries. Yet, there are increasing tensions between and within these spaces as conservation and agricultural ambitions grow and a greater diversity of actors are involved in the management of more expansive, blurred ecologies. In this paper, I propose to explore some tensions caused by mobile goats in Taranaki. This is a particular species whose mobility challenges the bounded ecologies of pasture and park, and whose governance engages a diversity of actors, such as farmers, conservationists, hunters, whose ideals diverge. I will 29 discuss ideas of invasivity and nativism in regards to non-humans and what species ‘belong’, and explore the complexity around securing the vitality of an ever-changing, contested ecology. This will be primarily a conceptual paper, as I am in the early stages of ethnographic work on this topic, and I eagerly welcome critical feedback and suggestions. 

FIRST PLACE: Willow Forgeson (Massey University)

Engaging with the Everyday: Eating Autoethnography for Dinner
My project revolving around meal kits, morals and motherhood, purposely blurs the line between work and home. As an emerging anthropologist and a mother who uses meal kits, I chose to probe my own life as a site of analysis before engaging with the lives of others. This decision led me on a path of engaging every day with the everyday. Prior to conducting fieldwork with other mothers, I spent a year documenting my own experiences feeding my family using meal kits. What I intend to present is a multisensory representation of my experience of engaging with autoethnography. By simultaneously cooking while I present, I aim to recreate the dualism of having to feed my family every night whilst simultaneously trying to understand what cooking using meal kits means regarding motherhood, care and learnt behaviour. Throughout my research, I engaged with strong sensory experiences that I was unable to express fully within my written thesis. Engaging with an audience in this way allows me to share the olfactory, audio and gustatory experiences integral to my experience and understanding of feeding using meal kits.

SECOND PLACE: Jay Jomar F. Quintos (Te Tumu School of Māori, Pacific, and Indigenous Studies, University of Otago | The University of the Philippine)

Nostalgia and Wayward Lives: The Aestheticized, Brutalized, and Exoticized Visual Cultures in Mindanao and Sulu from 1898 to 1967
In this presentation, I aim to make an excursus that complicates the cinematic renderings and ways enmeshed in the lifeworlds and struggles of the Lumad and Moro, Indigenous peoples of Mindanao and Sulu, Philippines from 1906 to 1967. I lay bare the spectacle of the aestheticized, brutalized, and exoticized visual cultures – which includes photographs, actuality films, and full-length films – on the Lumad and Moro. This presentation behooves us to ask: How does the archiving of life through the cinema on the Lumad and Moro elucidate nostalgia and waywardness in relation to propelling the aspirations for social and ecological justice, radical hope, and decolonization? For the purposes of this presentation, I explore Svetlana Boym’s notion of nostalgia and Saidiya Hartman’s imagination of waywardness to give a new way and approach to the reckless, unwanted, and wayward imaginings of the Lumad and Moro in Mindanao and Sulu.

FIRST PLACE: Sharayne Bennett (University of Waikato)

Building an emergency or a response? A case study of success from Jamaica’s informal construction sector
“We now recognize that informality is the enemy. Informality keeps us from recognizing our true potential.” - Hon Nigel Clarke

The Jamaican minister of finance chides the romanticising of the informal economy. The argument joins a modern trope that the informal economy, an estimated 40% of the overall GDP, needs to be formalised to solve current economic challenges. This aligns with the efforts of disaster capitalism which both creates and responds to “emergencies” in ways that elevate for-profit corporate solutions yet fail individuals and communities (Klein 2007; Adams 2020). Despite endeavours to formalise the economy, informal economic activities remain resolutely in place, providing both security and risk throughout the COVID-19 crisis. Ethnographic data of an informal construction crew paints a more nuanced picture. While national curfews disrupted livelihoods, members of the crew boast having greater financial stability in this period than their formal counterparts. Head mason “David” has joined a cooperative credit union and purchased advanced technology for his children’s schooling. This success in the midst of a global financial crisis strengthens the postulate that the informal economy buffers the society during external economic shocks, reduces unemployment, and decreases poverty; challenging popular notions of economic development.

SECOND PLACE: Etienne De Villiers (University of Otago)

Remaking the trail: The reconstruction of dynamic therapeutic landscapes through communal tramping practices and its significance to the formation of personhood to older trampers in the Waikato
This paper explores how walking practices can respond to contested social meanings around aging—based on work done in the early phases of my PhD. Overall, this research aims to investigate the role place, temporality, and narrative plays in facilitating experiences of social connection among communal tramping groups consisting of older adults in the Waikato region.

This presentation will focus on a review of existing scholarly literature, brought into conversation with some preliminary data from my fieldwork pertaining to the significance of aging to my study. I will be discussing the role of the successful aging movement in the formation of and participation in tramping groups by pre and postretirement trampers. My approach has built on pre-existing critiques of the successful aging movement as a fundamentally neoliberal aging practice that relies on a perceived loss of personhood that coincides with leaving the workforce. I argue that tramping groups consisting of older adults can personally embody the narrative of successful aging in an effort to keep back the threats to personhood associated with a loss of physical mobility and mental activity associated with the later stages of life. Furthermore, I will argue that the tramping trail itself functions as a therapeutic landscape that is always in the process of being created and remade as people adapt the trail to a changing architecture of control. To support this, I will argue that the act of tramping functions as a communal, performative narrative of labour and resistance contributing to the assemblage of the trail.

THIRD PLACE: Imogen Spray (University of Auckland)

Silencing and Centring COVID-19: COVID-19 Conversation and Youth Emergenc(i)es in Pandemic Aotearoa
This paper draws on personal observations and reflections during Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland’s longest “lockdown” between August and December 2021 to examine spaces and times where COVID-19 conversations have been silenced and centred. Conceptualizing youth as a “social shifter” (Durham 2004), I reflect on how youth emerges as a particular category in Pandemic Aotearoa through the enforcement of silences for the protection of young people or gaps in speech. I look at what such silences (and the discourses silences produce) on youth and COVID-19 reveal about cultural understandings of youth, how the category of youth is shaped, and the moral underpinnings that explicit and implicit silences reveal. I suggest that the kinds of emergent futures imagined for youth in Aotearoa—what youth means as a category in the future, the kinds of futures youth today can expect, and the dilemmas (or emergencies) perceived to be facing or embodied by youth—are shaped through discourses and silences of COVID-19. Crucially, these emergent Pandemic (and possible Post-Pandemic) constructions of youth also engage broader questions of “moral action” and responsibility in Pandemic Aotearoa.

SPECIAL MENTIONS

The 2022 Awards panel also decided to make special mention of Alireza Gorgani’s (York University, Canada) film as well as the presentations by Yi Li (University of Otago) and Jordan M Walker (Massey University). Their abstracts can be found in the 2022 conference programme.

The 2022 Awards panel consisted of Susan Wardell (University of Otago), Pauline Herbst (University of Auckland), Fiona McCormack (University of Waikato), Bronwyn Isaacs (University of Waikato), Lorena Gibson (Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington), and conference organisers Courtney Addison (Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington) and Corinna Howland (Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington).

FIRST PLACE: 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.

SECOND PLACE: 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.

JOINT THIRD PLACE: Mona-Lisa Wareka (University of Waikato)

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.

JOINT THIRD PLACE: Brodie Quinn (University of Auckland)

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’. 

The 2019 Awards panel consisted of Susan Wardell (University of Otago), Carolyn Morris (Massey University), Christine Dureau (University of Auckland), Graeme Macrae (Massey University), Sharyn Davies (Auckland University of Technology), and Jane Horan (ASAA/NZ Anthropologists Outside Academia Representative).

FIRST PLACE: Anja Uhlmann (PhD candidate, University of Auckland)

The influence of ‘intimate moralities’ in young Cook Islands women’s relationship construction processes
“Do not ask! The whole last night was a mistake. It was not even planned that I would go out. I wanted to go home after work and sleep but a colleague just persuaded me to go to the club. I even had to borrow clothes from her and then I met that guy. It was not planned! It just happened”, a 22-year old Cook Island woman told me when I asked her where she got her love bite. She spoke in a low voice and I could see how embarrassed and ashamed she was about what she did. At this time, I decided not to ask further questions. It sounded spontaneous, coincidental, an individual case highly loaded with moral perceptions. But, indeed, after hearing this kind of story quite often I started wondering whether casual sexual contacts are really improvised or if they have to appear “planned improvised”.

Drawing on fieldwork in Rarotonga/Cook Islands, I explore how historical patterns and social institutions such as church, state, society and media establish, shape and convey rules, norms, attitudes and therefore moralities. These ‘intimate moralities’ regulate human behavior and promote a social environment in which particular kinds of intimacy are stigmatized, sanctioned or dissolved while others are encouraged. These discourses provide the framework for considerations about how ‘intimate moralities’ inform Cook Islands women’s relationships, how they are negotiated, transformed and challenged by Cook Islands women and how they influence women’s practices of living and negotiation in the planned – “planned improvisation” continuum.

SECOND PLACE: Julie Spray (recent PhD graduate, University of Auckland)

What does resilience look like? Self-harm and sociality in Aotearoa
In psychology, resilience frameworks seek to avoid a deficit model of the relationship between adverse circumstances and poor outcomes by focussing on the protective factors that help young people to mitigate risk and achieve success. Yet exactly what resilience is, and how it can be identified, measured, and fostered, are still subjects of wide debate. An ongoing problem is one of structure and agency; resilience discourses can place responsibility on the individual for their own wellbeing and be co-opted as an ideology that is used to justify inaction, while models that focus on ‘protective factors’ tend to erase agency or risk environmental determinism. Recent socio-ecological models attempt to resolve this tension by viewing resilience as practices of ‘navigating and negotiating resources’ in culturally specific ways (Ungar 2011). However, most resilience research to date has involved large-scale quantitative studies and there are few descriptions of how this socio-ecological version of resilience plays out in the context of daily life. In this paper I ask, how can ethnographic research complicate assumptions about what resilience looks like? Based on fieldwork at a South Auckland primary school, I consider the increasingly common practice of self-harm, which is usually framed as a symptom of dysfunction in contemporary psychology. I analyse how self-harm functioned for these children as a socially recognised embodied expression, and argue that considering children’s practices as ‘accommodations’ may more accurately conceptualise the many improvised social processes that play out in the space between vulnerability and resilience.

JOINT THIRD PLACE: Pauline Herbst (PhD candidate, University of Auckland)

Improvised vitality: patient’s storied lives before and after hysterectomy
Hysterectomy is a term that describes the surgical removal of the uterus and the cervix, and sometimes extends to the ovaries (oophorectomy) and fallopian tubes (salpingectomy). In this paper I examine the experiences of nine women scheduled for two different procedures at a New Zealand hospital: laparoscopic and open hysterectomy. I find that the word ‘hysterectomy’ is more than a catch-all solution to a diagnosis, it is a repository for multiple improvised lives and related storylines that mirror each other. Each houses a ‘different’ hysterectomy, linked to a past and future self, one with the potential to create life and one without. It is also linked to vitality’s opposite, death, in that some hysterectomies are undergone to stem cancer. Vitality is a key theme in women’s stories: they desire the vitality denied by fatigue and constant bleeding, and simultaneously fear an enduring “weakness in the joints” post-surgery which is highlighted in the way they frame the differing procedures. Speaking to women before and after surgery has revealed the uterus as the centre of a spiral of social concerns that radiates outwards, improvised stories that give meaning to a disruption of the social self. I present this paper in conjunction with images drawn by these women illustrating their lives before and after surgery and ask if this disrupts the text or more provocatively, if as ethnographic storytellers and receivers, we intuit and enfold meaning regardless of intent.

JOINT THIRD PLACE: Claire Black (MA candidate, University of Auckland)

Memeing LGBTQ lives: Negotiating difference and relatability through shared humour
From “LOLcats”, images of cats with intentionally misspelled captions, to “planking”, a trend in which people lay flat on various surfaces and posted photos of this online, humorous and often bizarre internet memes are ubiquitous on contemporary social media platforms. These groups of digital items – including images, text, video and audio – are the epitome of improvisation, as they rapidly spread online and proliferate through parody, remix, transformation. Memes are therefore highly social, but meme research has tended to focus on popular memes and their spread rather than on the people who produce and disperse them, with even less attention to how marginalised groups of people use and diffuse memes. I draw on ethnographic research with LGTBQ 16- to 24-year-olds in New Zealand to explore how memes are used in the imagination and negotiation of LGBTQ collectivities and communities. I argue that “relatability” is central to these processes: these young people create and share memes which draw on “shared experiences” to facilitate affective experiences of recognition and connection. However, this raises questions of whose experiences are foregrounded in popular LGBTQ memes, and how people deploy these memes to negotiate between different levels and kinds of LGBTQ communities.

The 2018 Awards panel consisted of Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich (Victoria University of Wellington), Julie Park (University of Auckland), Graeme Macrae (Massey University), Susan Wardell (University of Otago), and Nayantara Sheoran Appleton (Victoria University of Wellington).

FIRST PLACE: Janepicha Cheva-Isarakul (Victoria University of Wellington)

Looking Thai, acting Thai: embodiment of Thainess among stateless Shan youth in northern Thailand
For stateless youth in Thailand, public schools represent both space of normalization and differentiation. On the one hand, school provides a "protected zone" where their identity as students supersedes their statelessness and where in theory they achieve equal status to their Thai peers. On the other hand, school is instrumental in reinforcing state's ideals of Thainess that exclude non-citizens such as themselves. At once space of exclusion and inclusion, school is where the body, mind, and emotions of stateless youth are simultaneously trained to perform citizenship habitus and master "the techniques of the (Thai) body".

Grounded in my 11-month-PhD ethnographic research on the lifeworlds of stateless Shan youth in urban areas in Chiang Mai, this paper conceptualizes the body of stateless youth as both a political locus of state's version of citizenship and a personal expression of agency. In exploring how daily rituals and public performances of citizenship conducted in Thai public schools shape the body, movement and performance of Thainess among stateless Shan youth, I call the attention to the state-crafted "aesthetic citizenship". I also aim to reveal how stateless youth apply these techniques of the (Thai) body acquired in school as strategies for survival and self-protection as they spatially navigate the city. I argue that these strategic performances of "aesthetic citizenship" presents a critical paradox: on a personal level it demonstrates agency but on a macro level, it perpetuates the Thai state's project of exclusion.

SECOND PLACE: Jacinta Forde (University of Waikato)

Kaitiakitanga ki te Toheroa (Guardianship of Toheroa)
Prior to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, Māori collectively owned and controlled the natural resources of New Zealand. The misunderstandings between the two versions of the treaty have given rise to considerable tension between the Crown and Māori in relation to the management of natural resources, fisheries and land. The traditional resource management tool of kaitiakitanga is a cultural institution founded on the principles and processes of kaupapa (principles) and tikanga (custom) and is an indigenous management model that pre-dates European incursion into the country. Since the colonial era, it has been adopted into the Resource Management Act (1991) to mean stewardship/guardianship over a resource and Māori are required to fulfil certain requirements, set by the state, in order to practice their kaitiakitanga rights. I will discuss the tension between Māori and the State in relation to the understanding of traditional resource management, namely kaitiakitanga (including rahui (ban) and translocation), specifically in regards to the management of the taonga (treasured) species, toheroa.

THIRD PLACE: Hina Tabassum Cheema (Massey University)

Illusions and disillusions: dilemmas of anthropological fieldwork
Prior to embarking on fieldwork, over the course of a year I developed and refined my research methodology, attentive to situations where participants might feel uneasy, emotionally disturbed or otherwise uncomfortable. I went through a full human ethics review process to ensure I was alert to every potential situation arising in the field. Over the same period I made time to establish rapport with potential research participants. As a part of my pre-fieldwork preparations, I attended three annual conferences of the Islamic Women National Council (IWCNZ) along with many other events such as mosque visits, Friday prayers, and Eid festivals. I became acquainted with many Muslim women from Auckland. All of them eagerly exchanged their contact details with me and offered themselves as interviewees or directed me to other relevant women for interviews. However, when I finally started my fieldwork nothing occurred as planned. Most of the women either did not respond to my calls or answer my emails and texts or just apologised and refused to participate. A few women said that my research looked very "intrusive" and it was hard for them to free up time to be involved. Other women agreed to interview for just the one sitting. At that juncture my hopes shattered as I questioned my anthropological training, berating myself for being an inadequate researcher. I overestimated my access on the basis of shared religion which was insufficient to confer an insider position. Moreover, complying with institutional ethical procedures from A-Z created a false sense of security not borne out during the research.

The awards panel of Graeme Whimp (Victoria University of Wellington), Carolyn Morris (Massey University), Caroline Bennett (Victoria University of Wellington), Peter Howland (Massey University), Graeme MacRae (Massey University), Fiona McCormack (University of Waikato) and Ruth Fitzgerald (University of Otago) - judged six student presentations.

The inaugural awards were made at the 2015 ASAA/NZ conference. Jeff Sluka (Massey University), Julie Park (University of Auckland), Trisia Farrelly (Massey University), and Catherine Trundle (Victoria University of Wellington) were on the awards panel and judged eighteen student papers.

FIRST PLACE: Jessica Halley (Massey University)

The politics of resettlement: Bhutanese refugees and the problem with ‘community’
New Zealand’s refugee resettlement strategy is focused on fostering a sense of independence and community among refugee groups. Yet for Bhutanese youth, resettlement in Palmerston North has provided fresh cultural texts which shape imagined identities. These imagined identities often conflict with wider Bhutanese community values. Here discourses of a ‘collective Bhutanese community’, promoted within New Zealand’s resettlement process, complicate the experience of growing up in a new country. For the anthropologist at home, exploring the paradoxical nature of ‘community’ (Young 1968) reveals how resistance and conformity are not always opposing actions; rather they can occur simultaneously through everyday behavior.

SECOND PLACE: Sally Raudon (University of Auckland)

Hurry up please, it’s time: conflicting temporalities of Australian constitutional reform
This paper analyses how republicans and monarchists rely on unexamined chronologies in debates about Australian constitutional reform, and who should be the Australian head of state. The Australia Republican Movement’s slogans – “It’s time!” –often imply that a deadline has arrived, and a new constitutional era awaits. This assumes a teleological narrative in which a colonial state’s constitutional order progresses through a series of typical forms of sovereignty, culminating in the apotheosis of the republic. Conversely, many monarchists regard the inheritance of centuries of well-tested monarchical stability as a priceless cultural treasure. However, they assume monarchy is timeless and perpetual when in fact it is, like republicanism, substantially a modern invention.

Both monarchist and republican positions represent diverging examples of temporality, the perception and social organisation of time. I argue that both the republican paradigm of progressive constitutional development, and monarchists’ historicization, disguise deeply emotive positions about how power should operate within Australia. Rendering clearly the distance between republican and monarchist assumptions about time reveals some of the hidden cultural logic operating in this vigorous debate about Australia’s constitutional order.

THIRD PLACE: Jess Bignell (Massey University)

Studying up: The practical parts of doing ethnography with powerful people
In this talk, I will dicuss some of the practical challenges of undertaking ethnographic fieildwork in an ‘upwards’ study. I spent 2013 undertaking fieldwork with four MPs in Aotearoa New Zealand’s Parliament, aiming to understand generational change in the Green Party. I will discuss the challenges I faced, like security, well-practiced narratives, and a lack of koru club membership with a view to considering to what extent it’s possible to underkate completely immersive ethnography while studying up.