The inaugural Kings College Australian National Fellows Seminar is
taking place on Wednesday 8 May 2019, 18:00 – 20:00 BST
Kings College London Bush House
Bush House South East
Room (SE) 101
London
WC2B 4BG
Dr. Robyn McKenzie will speak on ‘Such
intimate relations’: on the process of collecting string figures and the
paradigm of participant observation fieldwork
She writes:
The publication of Haddon and Rivers’ article “A method of recording
string figures and tricks” in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute Man in 1902, led to a knowledge of a few types, and
ability to record others becoming part of the anthropologist’s tool kit. Haddon
attributed much of his fieldwork success to his knowledge of string figures as
a medium for interacting with people and creating rapport. This paper focuses
on his 1914 trip to the Torres Strait and New Guinea with his daughter
Kathleen, and her account of her own experiences collecting string figures in
the unpublished manuscript ‘An English Girl in New Guinea’. On this trip the
Haddons visited Malinowski, then on the island of Mailu, occasioning a
comparison between the two men’s approaches in the field.
I argue that the practice of collecting string figures in many ways
confounds distinctions that are made between the surface ethnography of the
nineteenth century survey approach to fieldwork and the depth of the intensive
study as it developed into the classical paradigm of participant observation in
the twentieth century. By looking at just what was involved in collecting
string figures I show how it pre-empts the ‘somatic turn’ in anthropology of
the 1980s when Michael Jackson for example recommended ‘using one’s body in the
same way as others in the same environment’ as a ‘methodological strategy’ for
mediating anthropological insights. Above all, I argue, it established an
immediate intimacy of relationship—a mutual sympathy—the sought-after goal of
the participant observation method.
Dr. Robyn McKenzie is a Research Fellow in the School of Archaeology and
Anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra. She initially
trained in Art History at the University of Melbourne. She has published
extensively on contemporary Australian art. She was art critic on The
Age newspaper in Melbourne for a number of years in the mid-1990s and
from 1996–2002, was editor of LIKE, Art Magazine. Her PhD,
completed in 2016, looked at a collection of mounted string figures made in
Yirrkala in north-east Arnhem Land in 1948, that is in the Australian Museum,
Sydney. Robyn is currently the inaugural Australian National Fellow at the
Menzies Australia Institute, King’s College, London.
