Senior Research Seminar with Professor Rupert Stasch (University of Cambridge)

Professor Rupert Stasch (University of Cambridge)

Since the 1990s, Korowai of Indonesian Papua have been globally iconic subjects of primitivist tourism and television, due to foreigners’ idealization of them as living outside capitalist consumer culture. This talk looks at what Korowai think is most important about tourism, which is the payments they receive for their work and hospitality. I outline ways Korowai reception and use of tourists’ payments is structured by kinship sensibilities. This unity of kinship and payment contrasts with tourists’ idea that money-seeking reflects corruption by modernity. Part of what I explore is how in these kinship sensibilities, modes of relation and modes of exchange are each not stable, independent types, in simple direct correlation. For example, payment or aggression are often linked to situations of relational plurality, such as event sequences of injury and repair. This reflects the makeup of the kinship sensibilities themselves as complexly mixing values of relatedness, autonomy, and equality.

My research focuses on how social relations are mediated by processes of representation. Most of my writing has been based on fieldwork since 1995 with Korowai people of West Papua. My book Society of Others (2009) examined patterns of otherness-centered relating across Korowai practices of landownership and residential dispersion, political egalitarianism, linguistic person reference, face-to-face bodily interaction, domestic architecture, attachment between parents and children, spousal love, affinal obligations, experiences of death and mourning, and ways of relating to deities or monsters. In my current work on tourism and other new articulations between indigenous societies and national or international institutions, I have examined culturally distinctive ways in which people understand otherness and change to be routine, productive aspects of social life. I have looked at how these forms of cultural openness and multiplicity are often central to historical processes of cross-societal interaction and transformation, complicating questions of different actors’ causal agency in their meetings. I also study popular primitivism in the practice of tourists and in global media. Additionally, I am working on an archival and oral historical study of a 1936 Dutch-led overland survey expedition in southern New Guinea, which locates the social order of the trekking party and Papuan responses within the wider political order of the Dutch East Indies colony. Before joining Cambridge in 2015, I taught at Reed College and University of California-San Diego.