Dr Cyril Timo Schäfer Memorial Graduate Student

Conference Presentation Awards

The Dr Cyril Timo Schäfer Memorial Graduate Student Conference Presentation Awards take place at the Association's annual conference. Established in 2015, ASAA/NZ Executive named these awards in honour of Cyril, an inspiring mentor and teacher who passed away in June that year.

The purpose of the awards is to recognise excellence in conference presentation skills by ASAA/NZ graduate student members. Prizes are as follows:

1st place = $100
2nd place = $75
3rd place = $50

If you are a student presenting at the conference and would like to be considered for the award, please ensure you are a current ASAA/NZ member.

Criteria

1. The awards are offered annually to graduate student members of ASAA/NZ who are presenting work at an ASAA/NZ Conference.

2. Students will be considered for the awards if they are currently enrolled in a graduate degree in Cultural or Social Anthropology at a New Zealand University, or have graduated from such a programme in the 12 months prior to the conference.

3. The awards are given for the most outstanding conference presentations (not written papers) and are based on the quality of both content and presentation.

4. First, second, and third place prizes will be awarded.

5. The three winning abstracts will be archived on the ASAA/NZ website.

Procedure

1. The awards will be judged by a panel of ASAA/NZ Committee members during the annual ASAA/NZ Conferences.

2. First, second, and third place winners will be announced at the end of each conference.

2023 winners

2022 winners

2019 winners

2018 winners

2017 winners

2015 winners

Abstracts from the winning presentations at the 2023 “Engaging Anthropology” conference (held at the University of Otago) are below.

1st Prize: 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.

2nd Prize: 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.

Abstracts from the winning presentations at the 2022 ‘EMERGENC(i)ES’ conference (held at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington) are below.

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).

1st Prize: 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.

2nd Prize: 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.

3rd Prize: 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.

Abstracts from the winning presentations at the 2019 ‘Breaking Boundaries’ conference (held in Whāingaroa in November 2019) are below.

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).

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’. 

Abstracts from the winning presentations at the 2018 ‘Improvising Lives’ conference (held in Wellington in December 2018) are below.

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).

1st Prize: 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.

2nd Prize: 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.

3rd Prize: Pauline Herbst (PhD candidate, University of Auckland) and Claire Black (MA candidate, University of Auckland)

Improvised vitality: patient’s storied lives before and after hysterectomy - Pauline Herbst

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.

Memeing LGBTQ lives: Negotiating difference and relatability through shared humour - Claire Black

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 awards panel for the 2017 AAS/ASA/ASAANZ Shifting States Conference - 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. Abstracts from the winning presentations are below.

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 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. The winning abstracts are below.

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.

The photos below were taken by Jessica's research participants in July 2013 as part of a visual ethnographic project they were working on together. You can read more about Jessica's research on New Zealand anthropology blog www.anthsisters.com.

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.

By Ian Frazer, with thanks to Josie Dolan for her assistance

One of Otago’s most promising young academics died suddenly on 26 June 2015. A senior lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Otago, Cyril Schäfer was still in the early stages of his career; yet had already achieved much success as teacher and researcher, and through his contributions to university administration. He was also a very active member of ASAA/NZ, being on the Editorial Board of Sites and serving for a number of years as General Editor of the journal.

Cyril was born in 1976 in South Africa but spent most of his early childhood in different parts of Germany. The family migrated to New Zealand in 1981 and eventually settled in New Plymouth where Cyril got most of his schooling. Having little trouble qualifying for university, Cyril liked the idea of studying in another small city and came south to Dunedin and the University of Otago, where he took up an Arts degree, majoring in Anthropology. One year into his degree he was accepted for Honours and was already showing a strong interest in social anthropology. 
 
A critical turning point in Cyril’s career came in the third year of his Honours degree when he applied to spend a semester as an exchange student studying in the United States. He chose to spend this time at the State University of New York at Oswego and among the courses he selected was a course on Death and Dying taken by Dr Paul Voninski. In the chance way in which course options (and university options) sometimes present themselves, Cyril found an area of interest that, for all sorts of reasons, really excited him. He also found a new friend and mentor who would help him pursue this interest and make a career out of it. Cyril returned to Dunedin for the last year of his degree. By coincidence Paul started fieldwork in Dunedin then and for a short time they worked together, giving Cyril a unique introduction to fieldwork and anthropology at home. Cyril finished his honours degree with a ground-breaking dissertation on the role of funerary celebrants. From there he went straight into a PhD, continuing his research on the history and anthropology of New Zealand funerary practices.
 
Cyril experienced more personal setbacks than most during his doctorate but they were also years in which he began showing his promise as an academic. There was tutoring, part-time teaching, experience in developing his own courses and presentations at international conferences on his New Zealand research. Early on during his doctorate he secured the Ross Fellowship at Knox College, a two year period that was invaluable for doing a lot of the historical research necessary for his thesis. There was also the opportunity to join a research team working on adolescent oral health; an inter-disciplinary research project between the Anthropology Department and the School of Dentistry at the University of Otago. He joined The Association for the Study of Death and Society, and became a regular participant at Death, Dying and Disposal Conferences. This was also the time when he became an active member of ASAA/NZ. 
 
Not long after he completed his PhD thesis – Post-mortem Personalization: An Ethnographic Study of Funeral Directors in New Zealand – a position came up at the University of Otago  which Cyril was fortunate in getting. The timing could not have been better as now he had the opportunity through teaching, supervision and research, to expand his work and launch new projects in what by now had become a rapidly growing field of interest. Among the many new projects he was involved with was the highly successful launching of a trans-Tasman conference series; he was on the organising committee for the inaugural Death Down Under conference at Sydney University in June 2011 and then co-organiser, with Ruth McManus, of the second Death Down Under conference at the University of Canterbury in June 2012.
 
A commendable feature of Cyril’s work during this early period of his career was his strong commitment to collaborative research. Once his work became known, and his contacts expanded, there were numerous opportunities for engaging with fellow-researchers, within New Zealand and internationally.
 
In his short career Cyril left an amazing legacy. He was a popular teacher and supervisor, inspiring and mentoring many students; he was a path-breaking researcher contributing much to the growth of interest in research on death and dying in New Zealand. There was also his work for the Sites Editorial Board, his success as a conference organiser, and the many long hours spent on university committees and workshops. He will be admired and respected for a long time for his contributions to the discipline and to the university where he spent the best years of his life.