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Shannon Lee Dawdy, Patina: A Profane Archaeology. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016. 216 pp. Patina is a material layer that accrues over time on the surface of an object, congealing [...]

Oceania occupies an intriguing place within anthropology's genealogy. In the introduction to this collection of essays, we examine the role of the ethnography of Oceania in the development of our anthropological perspectives on materialisation, the dynamic process by which persons and things are inter-related. Building upon the recent resurgence of theoretical interests in things we use the term materialisation (rather than material culture or materiality) to capture the vitality of the lived processes by which ideas of objectivity and subjectivity, persons and things, minds and bodies are entangled. Taking a processual view, we advocate for an Oceanic anthropology that continues to engage with things on the ground; that asks what strategies communities use to materialise their social relations, desires and values; and that recognises how these processes remain important tools for understanding historical and contemporary Oceanic societies. Examining these locally articulated processes and forms contributes to a material (re)turn for anthropology that clarifies how we, as scholars, think about things more widely., How can we make any progress in the understanding of cultures, ancient or modern, if we persist in dividing what the people join and in joining what they keep apart? [...]

From the recent efflorescence of anthropological engagements with photography we are by now aware that photography is an embodied practice and that photographs are complex materialisations of the subjective and experiential as well as the objective and evidential. Despite discussions of 'visual repatriation' (e.g. Brown and Peers 2006), and of local responses to colonial photography and other kinds of archival images in the Pacific, little has been discussed regarding the status of photographs as particularly 'Pacific' artefacts--objects that make sense in indigenous terms as well as being understood in terms of the connections to other places that their production and circulation might signify. Following Wright's exhortation to recognise 'the provincial nature of Eurocentric notions of photography and ... suggesting that a certain corporeality and materiality constitute elements of its identity' (2004: 74), I discuss the resonance of historical photographs in Vanuatu, building an analogy with Malanggan--funerary carvings from Northern New Ireland. I do not mean to suggest that photographs are complex ritual artefacts, but rather follow the ways in which Malanggan have been used as anthropological conceits, in order to discuss the representational efficacy and materiality of Melanesian images in facilitating the crystallisation of memory and history (Kuchler 1988), the enchantment of technology (Gell 1998, 1999), and the consolidation of certain kinds of property relations (Strathern 2005b). As my title suggests, I draw on Strathern's combination of Malanggan and Patents to rethink the potential utility of Malanggan as a 'way to think' about the meanings of photographs in Pacific communities., Malanggan are manufactured in such a way as to suggest multiple identities (Strathern 2005b: 96) THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF PACIFIC IMAGES There are many celebrated accounts of 'art' in Oceania, which [...]