Tom Powell Davies

  • Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Tom Powell Davies

Contact

About

I am an anthropologist working at the intersection of political, economic and existential anthropology, who studies how subaltern cultural models for ordering society can operate as political tools for resisting and reshaping broader macro-structural orders. I have conducted long-term ethnography in Papua, Indonesia, engaging with my interlocutors’ attempts to balance the competing demands of ancestral ritual, missionary Catholicism, and the Indonesian state. 

My research, disseminated through both academic publications and museum exhibitions, examines Indigenous visions of autonomy as negotiated through adoptive kinship, art, and infrastructure/ritual. My work asks broad-scale questions about the politics of sharing in inter-ethnic settings, and what desires for ‘order’ are produced by social change.  

I am currently a Leverhulme Trust / Isaac Newtown Trust Early Career Fellow. Prior to this, I was an Associate Lecturer at the University of Queensland (2022-2024). I earned my PhD and MRes in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and convened the ‘Risk and Renewal in the Pacific’ research network at the university’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, following a BA (Hons) in Anthropology and Film Theory at the University of Sydney. 

In addition, I have produced research collections for several ethnographic museums in the UK, Netherlands, and Indonesia. I co-edited a special issue on the darker side of ethical life entitled 'Negative Ethics' (with the journal L'Homme), and curated the exhibition Church and the ancestors: Sacred pir mats from Asmat, Papua, Indonesia at the University of Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. I have an ongoing advisory role at the Asmat Museum of Culture and Progress, located in the Asmat area. I am also the Managing Editor of Oceania journal.

Research

Research interests

  • Adoption
  • Childhood
  • Kinship
  • Ritual
  • Feasting
  • Social relations
  • Space and time
  • Custom
  • Catholicism
  • Christianity
  • Cosmology
  • Semiotic mediation
  • Anthropology of art
  • Wood carving
  • Museums
  • Digital repatriation
  • Demand sharing
  • Village formation
  • State formation at the periphery
  • Ethics and morality
  • Melanesia
  • The Pacific
  • Indonesia
  • The Malay World

Indigenous children are a key focus of state intervention worldwide, and their fate is a flashpoint for anxieties about the future of settler societies. My current project examines how Indigenous adoption mediates state politics and missionisation both historically and today in the Asmat area of Papua, Indonesia. I study how adoption reshapes inter-ethnic hierarchy, functioning paradoxically as both a site of exploitation and a source of Indigenous political agency.

More broadly, my study of how Asmat people attempt to negotiate the competing demands of more-than-human ancestral spirits, missionary Catholicism, and the state is composed of three separate but mutually-informing research strands. During my master’s, in collaboration with a local Indigenous museum, I explored how art and visual representation (centred around Asmat woodcarving) mediates inter-ethnic and multi-species relations in museum worlds. 

For my PhD, I examined the relationship between national infrastructure development and the time and space of Indigenous ritual, examining Asmat attempts to blend the two as a means of controlling broader forces. My postdoctoral project expands into the field of kinship politics, examining how child adoption reshapes macro structural orders. Studying Indigenous concepts of autonomy as negotiated through art, infrastructure/ritual, and now adoptive kinship, I develop models of political power, resilience, and creativity.

 

Publications

  • 2025: ‘Carving time: Axes and ancestrality in Asmat, Indonesian Papua’. In D. Gaffney and M. Tolla (eds), West New Guinea: Social, Biological, and Material Histories. Canberra, ANU Press, pp. 317-331. 
  • 2022a:  'Hunger in a World without Scarcity: Clashing Ethical Perspectives and the Spacetime of Immoral Food Sharing in Asmat, Indonesian Papua'. L'Homme 243-244: 95-128.  
  • 2022b:  'Negative Ethics: Taking the Bad with the Good. An Introduction' [with C. Howland]. L'Homme 243- 244: 5-30. 
  • 2022c: 'Bad Binaries and Negative Strategies. A Brief Reply to Didier Fassin and Marilyn Strathern' [with C. Howland]. L'Homme 243-244: 217-222.  
  • 2021: ‘Sago Versus Rice and the Reorganisation of Ritual Spacetime: Competing Modes of Dependency in an Age of Decentralisation in Asmat, Indonesian Papua’. Oceania 91(2): 216-235.  
  • 2020a: ‘From the bubble to the hearth: Social co-presence in the era of COVID-19 in Asmat, Indonesian Papua’. Oceania 90(S1): 14-20.
  • 2020b: ‘Church and the ancestors: Sacred pir mats from Asmat, Papua, Indonesia’. Exhibition Brochure. [with S. Hopmeier] Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.