Women’s work: Making discoveries in the Australian collection

Posted on by rae.hackler

Appeared orginally on the Bristol Museum blog

My research focuses on material culture from Australia and the Pacific Islands – an understudied part of the collection at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. In 2022 I undertook a placement at the Museum and my aim was to focus on the documentation for these collections.
During a 1970s storage move the curatorial team created index cards with information for each object and small black and white photographs were added to some cards.  

I systematically worked through approximately 2000 objects from across Oceania. It was a good way to ‘see’ the collection and I was able to add information to many existing records. The aim was to find objects that (although entered into the Registers) did not have a corresponding record on the database Ke Emu. In total I found 182 objects which would not come up in a database search. Most of these objects are from Papua New Guinea and New Zealand and include many important Maori cloaks.  

 I also made two exciting discoveries. 

 Firstly, this bag currently stored in the New Guinea collection had ‘no history’ (E1023). Looking at a photograph, I could see that this is a looped and knotted bag made in eastern Australia. The striking diagonal pattern indicates it is from the region from northeast New South Wales to southeast Queensland. Made by Aboriginal women in the mid-nineteenth century who soaked, dried and hardened fibres over ashes. These fibres were then knotted together diagonally. Some bags included coloured fibres of the plant which resulted in a graduating pattern. In a certain light, this bag has a pinky tone. 

Looped and knotted bag from northeast New South Wales or southeast Queensland. Acquisition details unknown
Looped and knotted bag from northeast New South Wales or southeast Queensland. Acquisition details unknown. Bristol Museum and Art Gallery (E1023), © Bristol Culture

Secondly, this shell necklace on the database as Solomon Islands can now be identified as a traditional necklace from Tasmania (Ea11010).  

I contacted Dr Ben Rowson, Senior Curator of Terrestrial Mollusca at the National Museum of Wales. He agreed that the shells are very likely Phasianotrochus irisodontes (known as rainbow kelp or maireener shells). They are found in the waters around southern Australia. 

Dr Gaye Sculthorpe (Research Professor at Deakin University) showed photographs of the Bristol necklace to two authorities – Pakana curator Zoe Rimmer and artist Julie Gough. They were excited by the discovery confirmed the shells to be maireener shells. 

 Maireener shells were harvested and polished by Pakana women who made necklaces by threading them onto plaited vegetable fibre cord or kangaroo sinew. The Bristol necklace is strung onto a black, plaited cord – which could be horsehair, making this particular necklace unusual.  

These necklaces are evidence of luna tunapri, women’s knowledge of natural history, the environment and the surrounding ocean. Made in large numbers in the nineteenth century, and sold and gifted to white visitors, they were relished for their fragility and beauty. They quickly became a commodity. They are a testament to the skill of women whose lives were being eradicated through colonial conquest and dispossession.

Maireener shell necklace made in Tasmania. Acquisition details unknown.
Maireener shell necklace made in Tasmania. Acquisition details unknown. Bristol Museum and Art Gallery (Ea11010, transferred from E3895) © Bristol Culture

Elsewhere in the South West, at The Box in Plymouth there is a variety of shell necklaces collected by explorer Gertrude Benham in 1905. At the time of Benham’s visit, non-Aboriginal people were making shell necklaces for sale in a similar style. One maireener shell necklace presented to Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum in 1905 is said to have belonged to one of the famous Aboriginal women, Truganini. This necklace returned to Tasmania in November 1997. 

 

Remnants of pierced shells have been found in burials dating back to the third century AD. Today women are once again stringing shells. This revitalisation of women’s cultural tradition ensures continuity and lineage. It is important to note that such shells are becoming harder to find as changing seas and climate are affecting their distribution. 

The bag and the necklace are both rare objects in museum collections. They are two examples of female and they show the skill and technical ability needed to produce aesthetically beautiful belongings. They also reveal a complex and deep knowledge of resources and an inherited understanding of the rhythms of Country.  

Although their provenance is still undiscovered, the good news is that they can now be made available for study.  

 Author

Polly Bence is a PhD researcher in archaeology at the Universtity of Bristol and the University of Exceter. Her PhD research is funded by the South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership. Thanks to Lissant Bolton, Tony Eccles, Julie Gough, Lisa Graves, Zoe Rimmer, Ben Rowson and Gaye Sculthorpe. 

 

Something a Little More Intimate: Citizenship, the State, and Making Things Personal

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Intimate Citizenship 

Commonplace phrases are rarely as simple as they seem, especially when they have hefty legal implications to go with them. The term “citizenship” is one of these. Deceivingly tricky and complicated for its common place use, “Citizenship is a contested and a normative concept…[that] usually refers to full membership in a national state. [However] There are no authoritative definitions,” partially because different nation states – and the policy makers, factions, and people that make up those states – have different ideas of what citizenship entails. 

In our modern world, citizenship is closely tied to the idea of democracy.  Legally speaking, a citizen is somebody who has certain rights and obligations to a nation state. These are defined by the state they “belong” to – often thought practically as your passport state among transnational travelers. Citizens have certain obligations to that state and the national, political, or local community, and in exchange (supposedly) have certain rights provided by the state. Ideally, in democratic thought, citizens have voting rights or participation rights in choosing the leaders of the state and the laws that they are to abide by.  However, citizenship is not as simple as such a legal definition implies (and there is no one universal legal definition). As always, the world doesn’t exist in simple, definitive binaries. Things are messy.  As Meehan notes,  

“[o]n the one hand, people who are co-nationals of the same state may be denied the same citizenship rights as one another. On the other hand, residents in a state who are not nationals of it may be granted some of the same rights of citizenship that are enjoyed by those who are nationals.”   

Having a passport, birth certificate, or other paper documentation that claims you’re a citizen of somewhere – that you “belong” somewhere – doesn’t always guarantee the actual right to remain, the right to vote, to work, to live. On the flip side, lacking citizenship, official, documented belonging, doesn’t necessarily exclude you from some citizenship rights. Plenty of people own property in countries they’re not citizens of. International migrant workers work and live in countries they don’t “belong” to. I, as an international student in the UK, am given the right to work (20 hours a week), rent, and remain for the duration of my studies. I have been granted limited rights of citizenship under specific conditions (I’m studying in the UK). 

Due to the complex nature of the state and societies’ relation to culture and individuals’ lives, the term “citizen” has come to have more meaning than just a basic (yet still contested) legal one. To reflect this, social sciences have asserted that there are many different types of citizenship, including: cultural citizenship, urban citizenship, sexual citizenship, and intimate citizenship. These differentiations of citizenship allow for nuanced understandings of people’s experiences of belonging.  Let’s focus on one of these types of citizenship, intimate citizenship.  

Defining Intimate Citizenship 

Intimate citizenship explores how the state and societal norms mediate and at times regulate aspects of an individual’s “private life.”  As Plummer notes, “intimacy is often restricted to our romantic and sexual life; but I [Plummer] use the term to refer to an array of arenas in which we ‘do’ the personal life – doing body work, doing gender, doing relationships, doing eroticism, and doing identities.” This concept of “doing work” and “doing relationships” – of the daily activities of people’s lives is the intimacy that I am interested here. Plummer continues: 

“Applied to intimacies, citizenship implies the rights and obligations surrounding different intimate life styles, the participation of different intimate groupings and the recognition of people’s different intimate identities. Ideas around intimate citizenship have been increasingly placed on the political agenda. In much of the western literature on this, the great emphasis has been placed on citizenship as the right to choose: to choose your partner, your sexual activities, whether you have a child or not, or what you do to your body…Yet whilst recognizing the growing importance of this, there is also a need for intimate citizenship debates to focus upon the more traditional role of inequalities in considering citizenship” (Plummer 2004, para. 16). 

As a concept, intimate citizenship highlights the inequalities experienced in access to the claimed rights of a citizen, and where lacking (full) citizenship affects people’s private, personal lives.  Not all citizenship is the same or equal, and looking into how ideas and experiences of citizenship, or lack thereof, offer new insight into people’s lives, choices, and experiences.  Intimate citizenship looks at the experiences and lives of an individual on the daily and personal level, and how these are interwoven with social and legal definitions of citizenship and belonging to a particular community.   

The ability to participate in, or choose, particular lifestyles or “intimate groupings” and the (often) inequalities surrounding these choices is just one example of how intimate citizenship can nuance understandings of belonging, identities, and individual’s interactions with the state. A classic example, one that verges into the very related but more specific concept of sexual citizenship, would be laws surrounding same sex relationships. Whom a person engages sexually with in general, is largely considered personal, private business. However, in countries where same sex relationships are illegal or do not qualify for marriage (official recognition by the state), the state is affecting personal lives/matters. Another example is that of migrant/transnational families, where visa restrictions and legal right to remain affect family unification.  

Case Study: Citizenship Mediated Through Family 

The dilemma between wanting to be physically present for your children and the economic needs of providing a child with the best possible future is common among many transnational parents (Madianou 2014).  Issues of citizenship – particularly the citizen’s right to remain in a particular country – complicates this farther.  Many migrant domestic workers do not make enough money to sponsor their entire family and bring them over to the country in which they work.  However, the economic benefits of working abroad are too strong for many to go back home. 

Citizenship, or lack thereof, affects and mediates the possibilities for intimate ways of being.  Lacking the citizenship that you need to unify your family gets in the way of personal choice of having a family.  This is particularly true, for example, in the experiences of undocumented Mexican migrant parents constantly at risk of deportation, even while their children are US citizens.  Many of these parents struggle with whether they should risk being separated from their children, should they be deported, by raising them in the United States. The alternative is to be separated from them always, sending their children – even though some of them are American citizens – to Mexico to be raised by family. The intimate, daily lives of these families, of the citizenship(s) of these children, are full of shifting levels of belonging both in the United States and in Mexico.  It is not uncommon for young children who, though they are citizens of the United States, are deported with their parents back to Mexico. Their own citizenship is revoked or ignored because of the citizenship status of their parents.  Even legal citizenship, or particularly legal citizenship, affects the intimate lives of families. Not only an individual’s citizenship, but the status of other family members can also influence whether or not a person has access to the rights of their own legal citizenship.   

Past the individual level, citizenship here is tied to the family unit, and particularly to parents, adding another layer to parent-child relationships.  The experience of citizenship for these children is practically null compared to their peers with citizen parents.  Their right to remain in the country they supposedly “belong” to and are members of renegotiates definitions of citizenships to accommodate for personal (intimate) family relations and another individual’s citizenship. 

Conclusion 

To return to Plummer’s discussion on intimate citizenship:  

“Applied to intimacies, citizenship implies the rights and obligations surrounding different intimate life styles, the participation of different intimate groupings and the recognition of people’s different intimate identities”  

The ability to participate in, or choose, particular lifestyles or “intimate groupings,” and the choices and, often, inequalities surrounding these is just one example of how intimate citizenship can nuance understandings of experiences of identity and belonging.  Among migrants and transnational families, intimate citizenship can be used to frame how aspects of personal, daily life are affected by your – and sometimes your intimate relations’ – identities. Access to the rights of a citizen, of ‘belonging’ to the community you live in, are negotiated and curbed by the state through elements of your personal, private life.  In the case of undocumented Mexican migrants and their American citizen children, it become apparent that legal citizenship can be renegotiated through social and cultural citizenship, all in relation to intimate familial relations.  This is only the tip of the iceberg. Intimate citizenship highlights the inequalities inherent in ‘rights’ of belonging. Regardless of how much you contribute to the community you live in, if you pay taxes, are a good neighbor, worker, friend, family, citizen – how you portray yourself in the public sphere – aspects of your personal sphere can and are used to determine how much and when you can be a citizen. 

 Author

Rae Hackler is a 2nd year PhD student in Anthropology studying tea, identity, and citizenship among diasporas.

 

A Search for Activism in the Attention Economy

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We pay a price for the time we spend on social media, though not with money. Minutes of scrolling that turn into hours engender capitalist profit-generation and manipulation, leaving our attention spans frazzled – in return, we seem to receive little more than bursts of amusement, curiosity or disgust. My experience of running the Instagram of an environmental campaigning group, however, led me to consider whether social media can afford more than momentary stimulation for the price we pay. I’ll begin this post by accounting my initial scepticism towards social media as a platform for activism and some of the anthropological work that validates it. I’ll then explore my subsequent change of heart. More than short-lived amusement, Instagram provided new ways for my group to inform and connect. I was pushed to consider Instagram as an unlikely, but promising, way to sustain activism that often questioned the very economic system responsible for the platform’s design.  

In 2021, I volunteered with Friends of the Earth Exeter (FoEE hereafter) – an environmental activist group associated with the climate justice movement, often critical of the role of capitalism in the current climate crisis. I envisioned partaking in meetings humming with dissent and passionate protests, but to my dismay ended up spending equal measures of time running the group’s Instagram. I felt a gulf between the latter – producing sleek, eye-catching posts and stories, from photographs of wildlife to technicolour infographics – and the former, which I considered the ‘real’ activism. Any time spent producing such posts surely aligned me with the logic of neoliberalism’s attention economy, striving to catch users’ attention for a brief moment, before they scrolled on to the next flicker of stimulation? Worse still, it made the infinitely small global minority of Mark Zuckerbergs out there richer, turning the cogs of the very economic system the group so readily criticised for its ecological destruction.  

Figure 1: (2023) Capitalist style over activist substance?

Though it isn’t an objective one, users pay a price for their social media use and this paints a gloomy picture for digital activism. When using social media, our data is leaked and sold, generating an immense profit for a global minority. Using social media as a platform to criticise neoliberalism – which FoEE certainly did – might be considered hypocritical in this light. The data traffic it generates fuels Instagram’s profit mechanism. Social media not only undercuts anti-capitalist activism but activism more generally, through exposing its users to manipulation. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is a notable example of this, users’ data being used to manipulate their voting behaviour, their feeds being individually tailored to present them with “a picture of the world which [was] so emotionally compelling that it [was] beyond debate.” This phenomenon is not limited to such scandals. Algorithms, after all, govern the content made available to us daily to secure our enduring attention, suspending us in an echo-chamber-like environment simply because it is profitable. An environment where our most intimate views can be exploited, or our existing ones fed back to us merely to keep us hooked, seems a barren one for activism. It threatens to undermine the potential of activist groups to attract new members, or even to keep current ones.  

Social media further undermines the potential for users to engage in digital activism through fragmenting our attention. Paradoxically, this links to one of the few things Paasonen concedes that social media affords us. Despite being labelled the attention economy, information passes through us so quickly on social media that the concept of attention disintegrates – we live at a time where “we can share a family photo, a recipe, an amber alert… in the space of sixty seconds, and without any emotional variance.” An excerpt from Petit’s class on ‘emotions and the Internet’ is another fitting illustration of this: a student describes how their digital time consists of moments of “bored, not bored, bored, not bored, bored.” Did FoEE’s Instagram activism stand a chance if the attention users pay to posts is so short-lived? Ironically, the potential for affective intensity – flutters of interest, amusement, disgust – that drives us fleetingly from one post to the next, is suggested by Paasonen as one of the few things users gain from social media. Overall, this paints a bleak picture for FoEE’s efforts to engage in activism on Instagram. As my time volunteering with the group went on, however, I questioned whether it was really that simple.   

As my time progressed at FoEE, I found it harder to separate my time spent running the Instagram account with the ‘real’ activism that I imagined to exist only outside of the digital world. The team did carefully select alluring photographs to post, but not merely to inspire moments of compassion or curiosity. Rather, they housed links to petitions, informing users of sustained ways to act. Similarly, eye-catching graphics that the group meticulously matched to the colours of the group logo afforded more than a momentary peak in their viewers’ interest. Such posts carved out new pathways for sustained sociality. They broadcast details of upcoming meetings – much better attended thanks to their presence. The posts following these often celebrated the assembly’s success, their comments section a chance for attendees to further amplify morale (“well done everyone!” “so grateful for such important work!”) The glossy aesthetic of FoEE’s Instagram page, on the surface, appeared aligned with the logic of capitalism’s attention economy. But these aesthetics encouraged and maintained engagement that was more sustained: invites to act, to meet likeminded people and to celebrate steps in the team’s desired direction – albeit small ones. In doing so, Instagram fuelled an activist group which often criticised capitalism’s misdoings, rather than simply restricting them to perpetuating its continuance. 

Figure 2: (2023) A new form of connection

Campbell’s ethnographic account of Thailand’s Mae Sot industrial zone parallels mine – though it is situated outside of the realms of digital capitalism, it similarly suggests that capitalism can be challenged through exploiting its contradictions. Factories in the region increasingly employed migrant workers. Though North Atlantic narratives deem this kind of labour flexibilization to cause class fragmentation, in this context it appeared to have socially constitutive effects. As workers were placed in factory dormitories, close bonds formed – some even marrying. Co-workers helped each other to break factory rules discreetly and engaged in protests in a mix of everyday and open, collective defiance. The practices by which companies sought to create low-wage, flexible workforces – paradoxically – enabled new forms of sociality for workers. The resulting social cohesion allowed workers to question the very economic system that had dictated these conditions in the first place. In a similar way, Instagram – a platform defined by the pursuit of profit – provided an environment with novel possibilities for FoEE to further their activism, which frequently consisted of questioning the capitalist system that shaped the platform’s design.  

This phenomenon seems echoed in the theories of numerous scholars – perhaps the best-known being Marx. His notion of class recomposition suggests that capitalist restructuring results in occupational and demographic changes in the working class, but simultaneously creates new conditions of possibility for cohesion through collective struggle. This similarly highlights how new forms of sociality can develop not in spite of, but because of, changes made in the capitalist pursuit of profit. Mason brings this theory up-to-date, from a time of industrial capitalism to our free-market capitalist era. Neoliberal capitalism has unleashed exponential advancement in information technologies but it has simultaneously created a “route out” of itself. Why? Because in doing so, millions of networked people have been created, “financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away.” Platforms like Instagram might harvest our data for profit, but exploitation is not the whole story. In return for the price we pay to use such platforms, we are not just afforded fleeting amusement, but the possibility to educate ourselves and to connect at a scale that was not possible before. Seen in this light, my experience of FoEE’s Instagram presence seems no more at odds with ‘real’ activism than the protests and meetings I originally put on a pedestal.   

Social media appears an unlikely environment for activism to thrive – indeed, we all pay a price for our use of these platforms. However, my experience at FoEE suggested to me that this isn’t the whole picture. Beneath the surface of the aesthetic photographs and technicolour infographics of FoEE’s Instagram page lay new ways for activists to inform and connect. From the bleak conditions of the attention economy sprung new possibilities for a movement which called out capitalism’s misdoings. What this means for the future is unclear. The ethnographic instance explored here might be a drop in the ocean, or it might be something more – an indication of “swathes of economic life… beginning to move to a different rhythm.”   

Developed from coursework in Anthropology and Contemporary Capitalism unit at the University of Bristol Department of Anthropology and Archaeology 

Author 

Hannah Wright is a second-year student of the BA Anthropology course and am interested in economic, political and legal anthropology – particularly in relation to the topic of climate change. 

Anthropology for the Study of Drugs and Society

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Anthropological Research

Image 1

Anthropology is the study of human communities, their history, behavior, patterns, and diverse social functionalities.

Because of this focus and methodology, anthropology is a valuable discipline to study the communities created around legal and illegal drug use and illegal drug markets.

The research in anthropological drug studies can focus on gender perspectives of drugs, on theoretical approaches, history, and others.

However, we believe that anthropological theories, such as ethnography, can support different approaches to our current anti-drug policies and can, for example, help with the demystification of drug use. Or, as stated by Carlson et al, ethnographic research on drug users also contributes to understanding and improving public health.

Ethnographical Drug Research

Ethnographic research on drug communities is mostly focused on real-life interactions of the drug markets or users‘ culture.

However, because of its illegal status, there are enormous challenges in researching groups that are involved with drug communities.

Image 2

Online Drug Culture

More recently, Anthropology has started to focus on online cultures.

One example on the Surface Web is the research made by Lisa Krieg, in which they examine the virtual community on Erowid – a drug education website –  through Big Data sources.

However, there is a new focus on online academic research: the drug markets on the Dark Web.

Image 3

Masson and Bancroft did ethnographical research using interviews and non-participant observation in crypto forums. They aimed to understand how users claim the crypto market as a space of morality, empathy, trust, reciprocity, knowledge transfer, harm-reduction, and self-limitation.

Rachael Ferguson also discusses methods and the differences in online versus offline concerns and risks. The author concludes that these sites offer access to far larger data than we could obtain in offline ethnographical fieldwork.

Conclusion

Anthropological research on the drug communities is beneficial for society because it can help us to understand how people get involved with it, how strong their bond with the community, and how policies can support them.

Developed from coursework in the Drugs and Society unit at the University of Bristol Department of Anthropology and Archaeology

Author

Rafaela Carvalho is a master’s student in Anthropology. She is an international student and has an undergraduate degree in International Relations from the Universidade Paulista. Her research interests include the illegal drug market, illegal drug policies, and the dark web.