Uncommon Things
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3138/anth.59.2.t07Keywords:
ontological turn, material culture, digital heritage, Māori, recursive ethnographyAbstract
Uncommon things – those that challenge or unsettle; that evoke surprise, curiosity, even bewilderment; things that resist appropriation and may call our deepest assumptions into question – these are key to anthropology's recent (re)turn to questions of ontology. Recursive approaches in particular seek to explore how analysis is shaped by the forms in which what we study comes to command ethnographic attention. The “digital taonga” generated by a recent project in New Zealand with the Māori group Toi Hauiti offer a fertile example of how uncommon things can demand different qualities of ethnographic attention, transforming academic subjectivity into something more than, or other than, itself.
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