Department of social anthropology seminar with James Leach

The Department of Social Anthropology has the pleasure to invite you to this week's seminar. Prof. James Leach, Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, will present the following paper:

The Death of the Slit-Gong. Abstraction/Connection on the Rai Coast

Abstract
Slit-gong drums, made and used as part of affinal exchange relations on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea, are said to have a ’voice’ and thus carry gravitas; they demand respect as a kind of person. Further, they are so closely tied to the person and position of their owners that they are said to be their voice. Thus slit-gongs cannot be (meaningfully) extracted from the relations in which they came into being, and in which they have their on-going effect, except on death (and the rituals of deconstruction of the person that those entail).
In 2010, in an unprecedented event, a large slit-gong made for and used by the local Community School in Reite village was attacked during a dispute. In this paper, I examine what it meant to make a slit-gong for the school (and not for a particular person), and the implication, in the attack, that the relation the school had to its slit gong was not quite the same as that implied in affinal exchange. Attending to the suggestion that rights to property are a kind of relational corollary to kinship obligations, the paper explores what the event might imply about the changing status of slit-gongs, and thus on-going transformations in how objects and persons are linked on the Rai Coast.

Bionote
James Leach is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. His research focuses on creativity, knowledge production, and ownership; on art, science, and collaboration; on Papua New Guinea; and on the development of new technologies and their implications for social form (see Projects for a selection). After studying Social Anthropology at Manchester University (B.Soc.Sci 1992, PhD 1997), he spent nine years on Research and teaching Fellowships in Cambridge (Dept. of Anthropology, Darwin College, Kings College).
Published works reflect these interests with books and articles focused on kinship, creativity, place/landscape and art in Papua New Guinea, on creativity and the person, intellectual and cultural property, knowledge production and exchange in cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary contexts, on gender and free software, and on the relation of law (specifically intellectual property law) to artistic and collaborative practice.

All are welcome!