Australian Journal of Anthropology最新文献

{"title":"Narrative reconstruction of the self: Living funerals as rituals of trauma and transformation","authors":"Yuen-Ki Tang","doi":"10.1111/taja.70073","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/taja.70073","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Living funerals mark a radical reconfiguration of contemporary engagements with mortality, transforming death from an imposed ending into an actively authored narrative. This study examines the practice in Hong Kong's hybrid sociocultural landscape, where traditional Chinese death rituals collide with neoliberal selfhood and globalised memorialisation practices. Through an ethnographic analysis of a living funeral ceremony, centred on entrepreneur Ms D and involving 12 participants, we reveal how these rituals function as liminal narrative spaces, destabilising binaries between life/death, mourner/deceased, and past/future. Drawing on narrative identity theory and ritual studies, we argue that living funerals enact three transformative mechanisms: (1) narrative sovereignty, where participants reclaim agency over their life stories, challenging Confucian and Christian norms that cede death narratives to communal authority; (2) communal catharsis, wherein shared affect (laughter, tears, silence) generates what participants termed ‘grief that builds rather than buries’; and (3) liminal objects, repurposed funeral artefacts that serve as cultural palimpsests, erasing and rewriting traditional death ways. Ms D's ceremony, featuring anticipatory eulogies, inverted ritual roles, and a courtroom-like confrontation with her past, exemplifies how these rituals address existential anxieties while fostering closure and unresolved relational repair. Yet these innovations provoke narrative friction. The celebratory ethos of living funerals clashes with Cantonese mourning's structured solemnity, exposing generational rifts and cultural symptoms: practices that lay bare societal struggles to reconcile filial duty with neoliberal self-reinvention. Older participants reported feeling ‘ritual homelessness’, while younger attendees embraced the DIY ethos as existential democracy, a collaborative reimagining of life's final chapter. Ultimately, living funerals do not reject tradition but stretch its forms, rendering visible what all mortuary rituals are: not conclusions, but acts of narrative courage.</p>","PeriodicalId":45452,"journal":{"name":"Australian Journal of Anthropology","volume":"37 2","pages":"364-383"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2026-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/taja.70073","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149177237","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"When brokers fail, brokers proliferate! Generational change and the failure of development in remote Papua New Guinea","authors":"Monica Minnegal,&nbsp;John Cox","doi":"10.1111/taja.70102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/taja.70102","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Recent efforts to secure development by Febi and Kubo people in Papua New Guinea's Western Province reveal a patterned history of failing brokers, incomplete projects and wasted money. Within this longer trajectory, three overlapping waves of brokerage can be discerned, each emerging in response to the limitations of its predecessors. These waves differ in brokers' social positioning, the bases on which they claim representative legitimacy, and the forms of capital—material, social or symbolic—they seek to accumulate. Shifts in brokerage practice reflect generational change and increasing engagement with governance, financial management and service-delivery systems previously experienced as remote. Our analysis centres on the second wave, situating it between earlier and nascent formations. Taken cumulatively, these waves of brokerage mediate structural gaps and facilitate Febi and Kubo incorporation into provincial, national and global regimes that promise future advancement, even as they deepen entanglement in clientelistic relations.</p>","PeriodicalId":45452,"journal":{"name":"Australian Journal of Anthropology","volume":"37 2","pages":"285-301"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2026-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/taja.70102","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149177695","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Brokering Pacific labour mobility: Relation, constraint and aspiration at the interstices of supply chain capitalism","authors":"Victoria Stead","doi":"10.1111/taja.70103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/taja.70103","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Since 2008, temporary labour migration schemes have brought growing numbers of Pacific Islanders to work on Australian farms. The space between these workers and the farmers for whom they labour is organised through a complex ecology of brokerage relations, entailing diverse actors, processes and institutions. While the role of corporate labour-hire agencies and the technocratic strictures of labour and migration regimes shape the brokerage of Pacific labour mobility in distinctly contemporary ways, ethnographic analysis highlights the enduring significance of personalised and intimate relations. Dialogue between the anthropological literature on brokerage, which emerged originally in the context of the disorganisation of the late colonial period, and recent literature on contemporary capitalist supply chains, offers insight into the nature of this multi-scalar field and how power operates within it. Here, brokerage functions to segregate—that is, to create the distinct niches of supply chain capitalism—but can also yield defiant connections.</p>","PeriodicalId":45452,"journal":{"name":"Australian Journal of Anthropology","volume":"37 2","pages":"336-352"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2026-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/taja.70103","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149177678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reframing indigenous biography","authors":"Anna Neumann","doi":"10.1111/taja.70076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/taja.70076","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45452,"journal":{"name":"Australian Journal of Anthropology","volume":"37 2","pages":"450-451"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2026-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149176923","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Emergency in transit: Witnessing migration in the colonial present","authors":"Rowan Hunnam","doi":"10.1111/taja.70071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/taja.70071","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45452,"journal":{"name":"Australian Journal of Anthropology","volume":"37 2","pages":"441-443"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2026-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149177140","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"CSR officers as heterodox brokers in Kanaky New Caledonia: Travelling models and spatialising effects","authors":"Séverine Bouard,&nbsp;Valentine Boudjema,&nbsp;Pierre-Yves Le Meur","doi":"10.1111/taja.70107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/taja.70107","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Nickel extraction and processing have profoundly shaped Kanaky New Caledonia's social, political and colonial/decolonial trajectory over the past 150 years. This activity has transformed material and mental landscapes while generating intermediary officers whose roles evolved over time. Since the 2000s, the arrival of transnational corporations introduced ‘travelling models’, such as impact and benefit agreements (IBA), corporate social responsibility (CSR) and social licence to operate (SLO), which mediate global discourses and reshape local arenas. This paper focuses on CSR officers as development brokers, a relatively unexplored theme in CSR and mining anthropology. It advances two hypotheses: first, CSR officers differ from traditional brokers by structurally working toward corporate local anchoring (or ‘social acceptability’) and brokering not only development but also compensation, social peace and institutional design, thus also endorsing a diplomatic role; second, they contribute to defining mining impact and influence perimeters and arenas at both local and New Caledonian levels. Drawing on research conducted between 2008 and 2022, particularly the social biographies of CSR officers across firms and sectors, the analysis highlights the spatialising effects of brokerage and strategic role in transforming minescapes.</p>","PeriodicalId":45452,"journal":{"name":"Australian Journal of Anthropology","volume":"37 2","pages":"250-266"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2026-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/taja.70107","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149176910","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Good Enough Life","authors":"Kathleen Openshaw","doi":"10.1111/taja.70070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/taja.70070","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45452,"journal":{"name":"Australian Journal of Anthropology","volume":"37 2","pages":"444-447"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2026-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149177141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Kinship and reproduction: A perspective of the Akha in Laos","authors":"Vanly Lorkuangming","doi":"10.1111/taja.70081","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/taja.70081","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Drawing on fieldwork among the Akha people in Phongsaly District, Phongsaly Province, northern Laos, this paper examines Akha patrilineal kinship and its links to reproduction. The Akha people's reproductive decisions and behaviours are shaped by patrilineality, ancestral connections and cultural–spiritual perceptions of reproduction, which produce both continuity and contradiction in kin relations. Patrilineal kinship plays a crucial role in shaping reproduction by defining the number and gender of children, as well as assigning the duties and responsibilities of women and men. Reproduction is a means through which kinship is negotiated, defining women's values and contributions to sustaining patrilineage. However, far from being inferior, Akha women demonstrate agency by actively upholding patrilineal values. After relocation, Akha cultural practices concerning kinship and reproduction are subject to state policies and interventions aimed at integrating the Akha into national development. While the Akha informants expressed a willingness to change some cultural practices, such as the abandonment of infanticide, they were also firm in upholding the values of producing sons. This suggests that, despite their integration, Akha communities have negotiated to preserve their kinship, highlighting its continued centrality in guiding reproductive decision-making and reinforcing social belonging in the post-relocation context. In turn, reproduction remains fundamental to maintaining patrilineage, despite the alternative of adoption.</p>","PeriodicalId":45452,"journal":{"name":"Australian Journal of Anthropology","volume":"37 2","pages":"400-416"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2026-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/taja.70081","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149177482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Brokerage, bridewealth and benefits on a resource frontier in Papua New Guinea","authors":"John Cox,&nbsp;Monica Minnegal","doi":"10.1111/taja.70101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/taja.70101","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this paper, we examine tensions over intermarriage and resource sharing between two groups on a Papua New Guinean resource frontier. These tensions are mediated by a ‘brokerage fix’ led by Febi clan heads responding to financial demands from their Pangia neighbours and sometime affines. Here social and financial debts have become entangled in the shadow of much-anticipated resource rents. In the ethnographic case study considered here, tensions over unpaid (cash) bridewealth—successfully resolved through cultural brokerage—reflect not only the debt itself, but broader questions about the relationship between the two groups. In this case, we argue that the dynamics of brokerage from within involve shifting modes of relational and transactional exchange across competing temporalities. The task of the broker emerges as being the re-establishment of the grounds for a relational mode of sharing, with future long-term benefits foregrounded over demands for repayment of past debt.</p>","PeriodicalId":45452,"journal":{"name":"Australian Journal of Anthropology","volume":"37 2","pages":"302-317"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2026-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/taja.70101","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149177599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Bornéo à coeur: Hommage à Bernard Sellato, Argonaute de la forêt tropicale. Borneo at heart: A tribute to Bernard Sellato, argonaut of the tropical rainforest","authors":"Laura P. Appell-Warren","doi":"10.1111/taja.70075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/taja.70075","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45452,"journal":{"name":"Australian Journal of Anthropology","volume":"37 2","pages":"452-458"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2026-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149177477","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}