T Otto
Biographic Data
| ID | 13080 |
|---|---|
| NAME | T Otto |
| GIVEN NAMES | T |
| FAMILY NAME | Otto |
| SIGNATURE | OTTO T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5185-3017 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 219 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Historicities, regimes, and human agency
As an introduction to the special issue Entangled Temporalities: Regimes of Historicity in Melanesia and Beyond this article revisits the concept of historicity by outlining its idea-historical development and critically considering its usefulness for understanding how people engage with the past, present and future in different cultural settings. To push the concept’s analytical purchase further we draw on Melanesian ethnography and François Har…
Kalsa versus kastam in Manus, Papua New Guinea
This article examines the emergence of the term kalsa in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea, as an alternative understanding of cultural heritage in contrast to the older term kastam, and explores whether this shift signals a significant change in people’s orientation in historical time. Drawing on François Hartog’s concept of regime of historicity, the article contrasts kastam, which valorizes the past through traditional exchange practices and ki…
Win Neisen 2020
Win Neisen is a local, indigenously developed church, that is the contemporary manifestation of the well-known Paliau Movement which started in Manus, Papua New Guinea, in 1946. One of its central doctrines is that reality is divided into two spheres, the physical and the spiritual. Win Neisen followers adhere to a millennial vision, that involves the final dissolution of the opposition between the two spheres. In this paper I present recent mate…
No selective integration required
Looming motion is an ecologically salient signal that often signifies danger. In both audition and vision, humans show behavioral biases in response to perceiving looming motion, which is suggested to indicate an adaptation for survival. However, it is an open question whether such biases occur also in the combined processing of multisensory signals. Towards this aim, Cappe, Thut, Romei, and Murraya (2009) found that responses to audiovisual sign…
From Drifters to Asylum Seekers
a Manus-born Papua New Guinean posted on Facebook: "To all the security guards that were involved in the recent altercation at the as Camp, mi laik tok faakin good one stret . . . paitim ol" (I would like to say, fucking good one . . . bash them). This was in response to a confrontation in the Manus Regional Processing Centre in Lombrum, Manus, Papua New Guinea (PNG). This confrontation allegedly occurred between security personnel and asylum see…
My Culture, I Perform It, I Can Change It
In this article I analyze how filming and screening rituals and other cultural performancescan contribute to a process of distancing and reflection for all peopleinvolved-anthropologists, filmmakers, performers and participants. In particular Iaddress the question as to whether such use of the camera can contribute to culturalcritique, here defined as a mode of inquiry and reflection that involves thedevelopment of new concepts to grasp and influ…
Camera, Intervention and Cultural Critique
The key questions of the research project Camera as Cultural Critique, in which all contributors to this section of the issue participated, are outlined here. The overall purpose of the project was to explore how the use of audiovisual media in ethnographic research may contribute to sustained cultural critique. Grounding that critique in a certain understanding of the temporality of the present-as always in a state of emergence and involving ima…
Cargo Cults
The concept of cargo cults refers primarily to millenarian and revitalization movements that have occurred in the Melanesian area in the South Pacific in the wake of Western colonization. In a more general sense, the term is used to criticize the millennial aspects of Western capitalist economy and to denounce misconceived ways of using methods and procedures in science and design that do not produce real results. Anthropological research has gen…
Inventing Traditions and Remembering the Past in Manus
[Extract] Societies remember the past in many different ways. There are historical narratives of various kinds, which keep track of past events that are relevant for the keepers of the histories (for example, descent groups, church groups, religious movements, political units). The past is also remembered in the passing on of ritual practices, social customs, practical knowledge, and material products. Traditions are forms of historical knowledge…
Changing Contexts, Shifting Meanings
This book sheds new light on processes of cultural transformation at work in Oceania and analyzes them as products of interrelationships between culturally created meanings and specific contexts. In a series of inspiring essays, noted scholars of the region examine these interrelationships for insight into how cultural traditions are shaped on an ongoing basis.The collection marks a turning point in the debate on the conceptualization of traditio…
Tradition
Tradition refers to the process of handing down beliefs, institutions, and objects from one generation to the next. In popular usage it denotes cultural continuity and resistance to change. In social theory, tradition was originally used to characterize slowly changing societies in contrast to modern ones, and also to identify conservative institutions and beliefs within modern societies. Later research problematized this dichotomy between tradit…
Transforming Artefacts into Digital Heritage
This paper deals with the possibilities and challenges of the digitisation of artefacts. It argues that artefacts are complex phenomena that consist of the material objects as well as the various forms of categorization and documentation that are connected with the objects. Digitalisation presents a genuine transformation of the artefacts that opens up new possibilities of use. These include providing access to and facilitating the reappropriatio…
Transformations of cultural heritage in Melanesia
In this article, I look at the reverberations of the global discourse about heritage at the margins of the global system in the Pacific. To this end, I analyse the development of indigenous concepts of cultural heritage on Baluan Island, in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea. I discuss how over the past 50 years two different heritage concepts have developed on the island, which have been used to reflect upon and direct cultural and social change. …
Value, Transvaluation and Globalization
Value has been a central concept in anthropology and sociology since the birth of these disciplines (e.g. Marx, Simmel, Weber). In recent decades the concept has seen a revival (e.g. Graeber 2001; Eiss and Pedersen 2002; Pedersen 2008; Otto and Willerslev 2013), but while it has been debated and discussed, assessed and evaluated extensively, there are nonetheless still many things to be said about it. This volume addresses a particular perspectiv…
Times of the Other
Anthropologists working in a culturally unfamiliar field site carry out an experiment in time by interacting with people who do not share a common cultural past with them. Their real time interaction will therefore engender miscommunications and interpretative breakdowns. The 'invisibility' of temporal patterns results from the tendency of human consciousness to focus on difference and forget repetition. This article argues that the methodologica…
Ethnographic artifacts and value transformations
Transactions of ethnographic artifacts between Indigenous producers, European collectors, museums, and the state create and transform multiple notions of value. In this paper we discuss how an artifact's value is generated and transformed through various transactions linked to the documentation and property claims made by scientific collectors, such as Eric Mjöberg, Herman Klaatsch, and Ursula McConnel. Such artifacts have now entered a new dynam…
Design Anthropology
This edited volume provides an introduction to the emerging field of design anthropology from the point of view of anthropologists engaging in its development. Contributors include young anthropologists with experience in the field and leading theoreticians, who combine to articulate the specific style of knowing involved in doing design anthropology. So far design anthropology has been developed mostly in the practice of industry and the public …
Prologue
This debate continues in part two of this special issue, but with new fields of inquiry and objects of analysis. The contributions of part one were largely concerned with aspects of value in exchange theory and with the radical comparison of diverse cultural structures. Part two addresses the relationship between value and action, including actions deemed to occur outside the sphere of reciprocal exchanges. Additionally, part two raises questions…
"Introduction
The introduction addresses the question of whether it is useful or indeed possible to develop an anthropological theory of value. By way of a Socratic debate, two rather conflicting points of view emerge. On the one hand, it is argued that anthropology can make a major and quite coherent contribution to the issue of value in social theory. On the other hand, it is argued that anthropology, as an ethnographically driven discipline, produces an ant…
Ethnographic Film as Exchange
This paper discusses how film impacts on the relationship between researchers/filmmakers and their collaborators in the field. Film can function as a gift that strengthens reciprocal relationships and it is a medium that facilitates dialogue and intercultural exchange. The author argues that film has great potential for eliciting cultural differences and enhancing intercultural communication as people relate to the same visual material from their…
Relations and Products
The relationship between fieldworkers (anthropologists, archaeologists, linguists, historians) and people we have variously called research participants, informants, consultants, collaborators, teachers and friends, lies at the foundation of productive ethnographic research. While there is a plethora of publications on fieldwork methods and on the art of ethnographic writing, here we specifically focus on the products of field research, both tang…
Back to the Village
This paper discusses an aspect of the Melanesian kastom discourse that is demonstrated very cogently in the work of Robert Tonkinson, namely the striking contrast between national and local concepts of tradition. In Manus local notions of objectified tradition have been called kastom in Tok Pisin for about 35 years. Recently, the word kalsa has become popular as well. In this article I show how the meanings of these two terms have bifurcated and …
Anthropology and the Predicaments of Holism
This chapter contains sections titled: Why Bother With Holism? Holism in Anthropological Self-Representation The Abject Heart of Anthropology A Brief History of Holism The Scope of the Book The Structure of the Book: Four Kinds of Experiments in Holism References
Contemporary religiosities
Introduction: Religiosities toward a Future-in Pursuit of the New Millennium Bruce Kapferer, Annelin Eriksen, and Kari Telle Chapter 1. The Politics of Conviction: Faith on the Neo-liberal Frontier Jean Comaroff Chapter 2. Strategic Secularism: Bible Advocacy in England Matthew Engelke Chapter 3. Pentecostal Networks and the Spirit of Globalization: On the Social Productivity of Ritual Forms Joel Robbins Chapter 4. Healing the Nation: In Search o…
What Happened to Cargo Cults? Material Religions in Melanesia and the West
In contrast to a strong tendency in recent studies of Melanesian religious and political movements that want to discard the term 'cargo cult' for reasons of analytical—and ethical—inadequacy, this article argues that the term remains useful to delineate an empirical field for comparative purposes. Further, it suggests that the central moral and existential crisis that underlies cargo cults has to do with pressure on the traditional exchange syste…
Design Anthropology
This edited volume provides an introduction to the emerging field of design anthropology from the point of view of anthropologists engaging in its development. Contributors include young anthropologists with experience in the field and leading theoreticians, who combine to articulate the specific style of knowing involved in doing design anthropology. So far design anthropology has been developed mostly in the practice of industry and the public …
"Introduction
The introduction addresses the question of whether it is useful or indeed possible to develop an anthropological theory of value. By way of a Socratic debate, two rather conflicting points of view emerge. On the one hand, it is argued that anthropology can make a major and quite coherent contribution to the issue of value in social theory. On the other hand, it is argued that anthropology, as an ethnographically driven discipline, produces an ant…
Narratives of Nation in the South Pacific
Prologue
This debate continues in part two of this special issue, but with new fields of inquiry and objects of analysis. The contributions of part one were largely concerned with aspects of value in exchange theory and with the radical comparison of diverse cultural structures. Part two addresses the relationship between value and action, including actions deemed to occur outside the sphere of reciprocal exchanges. Additionally, part two raises questions…
The Paliau movement in manus and the objectification of tradition
Ethnographic artifacts and value transformations
Transactions of ethnographic artifacts between Indigenous producers, European collectors, museums, and the state create and transform multiple notions of value. In this paper we discuss how an artifact's value is generated and transformed through various transactions linked to the documentation and property claims made by scientific collectors, such as Eric Mjöberg, Herman Klaatsch, and Ursula McConnel. Such artifacts have now entered a new dynam…
Informed Participation And Participating Informants
Dans cet article, l'A. propose de revoir la notion d' observation participante pratiquee pendant la recherche ethnographique sur le terrain. Il ne peut y avoir une recherche sur le terrain sans observation et donc participation du chercheur. L'A. expose les conditions necessaires de son observation participante a partir de la recherche ethnographique qu'il mena dans l'Ile Manus de la Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinee. Il analyse tout particulierement les…
Ethnographic Film as Exchange
This paper discusses how film impacts on the relationship between researchers/filmmakers and their collaborators in the field. Film can function as a gift that strengthens reciprocal relationships and it is a medium that facilitates dialogue and intercultural exchange. The author argues that film has great potential for eliciting cultural differences and enhancing intercultural communication as people relate to the same visual material from their…
Baitfish royalties and customary marine tenure in Manus, Papua New Guinea
Feasting and fighting
Camera, Intervention and Cultural Critique
The key questions of the research project Camera as Cultural Critique, in which all contributors to this section of the issue participated, are outlined here. The overall purpose of the project was to explore how the use of audiovisual media in ethnographic research may contribute to sustained cultural critique. Grounding that critique in a certain understanding of the temporality of the present-as always in a state of emergence and involving ima…
Back to the Village
This paper discusses an aspect of the Melanesian kastom discourse that is demonstrated very cogently in the work of Robert Tonkinson, namely the striking contrast between national and local concepts of tradition. In Manus local notions of objectified tradition have been called kastom in Tok Pisin for about 35 years. Recently, the word kalsa has become popular as well. In this article I show how the meanings of these two terms have bifurcated and …
Cargo cults everywhere
Cargo cult: Strange stories of desire from Melanesia and beyond, by Lamont Lindstrom. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1993. xiv, 247pp., references, index, maps and photos. ISBN 0–8248–1563–7 (paperback)
From Paliau Movement To Makasol
L'A. etudie le developpement d'un mouvement millenariste a Manus (Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinee). Il compare les debuts du mouvement Paliau (du nom d'un chef indigene) depuis la fin des annees 1940 jusqu'a sa phase de resurgence sous le nom de Makasol a la fin des annees 1970. Les aspirations millenaristes des deux mouvements s'exprimaient sous la forme de recits historiques qui proposaient une cosmologie historique, une explication aux difficultes c…
My Culture, I Perform It, I Can Change It
In this article I analyze how filming and screening rituals and other cultural performancescan contribute to a process of distancing and reflection for all peopleinvolved-anthropologists, filmmakers, performers and participants. In particular Iaddress the question as to whether such use of the camera can contribute to culturalcritique, here defined as a mode of inquiry and reflection that involves thedevelopment of new concepts to grasp and influ…
Changing Contexts, Shifting Meanings
This book sheds new light on processes of cultural transformation at work in Oceania and analyzes them as products of interrelationships between culturally created meanings and specific contexts. In a series of inspiring essays, noted scholars of the region examine these interrelationships for insight into how cultural traditions are shaped on an ongoing basis.The collection marks a turning point in the debate on the conceptualization of traditio…
Relations and Products
The relationship between fieldworkers (anthropologists, archaeologists, linguists, historians) and people we have variously called research participants, informants, consultants, collaborators, teachers and friends, lies at the foundation of productive ethnographic research. While there is a plethora of publications on fieldwork methods and on the art of ethnographic writing, here we specifically focus on the products of field research, both tang…
Cultural History Between Structure And Contingency
Carrier, James and Achsah Carrier. Wage, trade, and exchange in Melanesia: a Manus society in the modern state. (Studies in Melanesian Anthropology, vol. 7, edited by G.H. Herdt, FJ. Porter Poole and D. Tuzin.) Berkeley: University of California Press. 1989. xvii, 257pp., tables, references, index. ISBN 0 520 06389 9. Carrier, Achsah and James Carrier. Structure and process in a Melanesian society: Ponam's progress in the twentieth century. (Stud…
The Ways Of History
The Ways Of History
The Ways of Kastam
From Paliau Movement To Makasol
L'A. etudie le developpement d'un mouvement millenariste a Manus (Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinee). Il compare les debuts du mouvement Paliau (du nom d'un chef indigene) depuis la fin des annees 1940 jusqu'a sa phase de resurgence sous le nom de Makasol a la fin des annees 1970. Les aspirations millenaristes des deux mouvements s'exprimaient sous la forme de recits historiques qui proposaient une cosmologie historique, une explication aux difficultes c…
The Paliau movement in manus and the objectification of tradition
Cultural History Between Structure And Contingency
Carrier, James and Achsah Carrier. Wage, trade, and exchange in Melanesia: a Manus society in the modern state. (Studies in Melanesian Anthropology, vol. 7, edited by G.H. Herdt, FJ. Porter Poole and D. Tuzin.) Berkeley: University of California Press. 1989. xvii, 257pp., tables, references, index. ISBN 0 520 06389 9. Carrier, Achsah and James Carrier. Structure and process in a Melanesian society: Ponam's progress in the twentieth century. (Stud…
Feasting and fighting
Hard Times on Kairiru Island
This book follows the difficult lives of people living in the village of Kragur in Papua New Guinea. They have been in poverty since European contact and now must find a way to become prosperous
Structure and Process in a Melanesian Society
Cultural Dynamics of Religious Change in Oceania
Developed from papers presented at the first European Colloquium on Pacific Studies this volume addresses the dynamics of contemporary Oceanic religions. In particular, the contributors investigate how indigenous populations have come to terms with the enormous impact of colonization and missionization while maintaining a distinct cultural and religious identity.
Informed Participation And Participating Informants
Dans cet article, l'A. propose de revoir la notion d' observation participante pratiquee pendant la recherche ethnographique sur le terrain. Il ne peut y avoir une recherche sur le terrain sans observation et donc participation du chercheur. L'A. expose les conditions necessaires de son observation participante a partir de la recherche ethnographique qu'il mena dans l'Ile Manus de la Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinee. Il analyse tout particulierement les…
Baitfish royalties and customary marine tenure in Manus, Papua New Guinea
Narratives of Nation in the South Pacific
Cargo cults everywhere
Cargo cult: Strange stories of desire from Melanesia and beyond, by Lamont Lindstrom. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1993. xiv, 247pp., references, index, maps and photos. ISBN 0–8248–1563–7 (paperback)
Cargo, Cult, and Culture Critique
Rethinking Tradition
What Happened to Cargo Cults? Material Religions in Melanesia and the West
In contrast to a strong tendency in recent studies of Melanesian religious and political movements that want to discard the term 'cargo cult' for reasons of analytical—and ethical—inadequacy, this article argues that the term remains useful to delineate an empirical field for comparative purposes. Further, it suggests that the central moral and existential crisis that underlies cargo cults has to do with pressure on the traditional exchange syste…
Exchange and Inequality, Time and Personhood
Comments on: JOHN LIEP. A Papuan Plutocracy: Ranked Exchange on Rossel Island. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2009. Pp. 376. ISBN: 978-87-7934-446-4 This is a book that captures the reader's attention from the start, not only because of its beautiful lay-out and illustrations and the exotic phenomena that it describes, but also thanks to the author's academic assiduousness that transpires through its pages. It is the culmination of more than 35…
Anthropology and the Predicaments of Holism
This chapter contains sections titled: Why Bother With Holism? Holism in Anthropological Self-Representation The Abject Heart of Anthropology A Brief History of Holism The Scope of the Book The Structure of the Book: Four Kinds of Experiments in Holism References
Contemporary religiosities
Introduction: Religiosities toward a Future-in Pursuit of the New Millennium Bruce Kapferer, Annelin Eriksen, and Kari Telle Chapter 1. The Politics of Conviction: Faith on the Neo-liberal Frontier Jean Comaroff Chapter 2. Strategic Secularism: Bible Advocacy in England Matthew Engelke Chapter 3. Pentecostal Networks and the Spirit of Globalization: On the Social Productivity of Ritual Forms Joel Robbins Chapter 4. Healing the Nation: In Search o…
Times of the Other
Anthropologists working in a culturally unfamiliar field site carry out an experiment in time by interacting with people who do not share a common cultural past with them. Their real time interaction will therefore engender miscommunications and interpretative breakdowns. The 'invisibility' of temporal patterns results from the tendency of human consciousness to focus on difference and forget repetition. This article argues that the methodologica…
Ethnographic artifacts and value transformations
Transactions of ethnographic artifacts between Indigenous producers, European collectors, museums, and the state create and transform multiple notions of value. In this paper we discuss how an artifact's value is generated and transformed through various transactions linked to the documentation and property claims made by scientific collectors, such as Eric Mjöberg, Herman Klaatsch, and Ursula McConnel. Such artifacts have now entered a new dynam…
Design Anthropology
This edited volume provides an introduction to the emerging field of design anthropology from the point of view of anthropologists engaging in its development. Contributors include young anthropologists with experience in the field and leading theoreticians, who combine to articulate the specific style of knowing involved in doing design anthropology. So far design anthropology has been developed mostly in the practice of industry and the public …
Prologue
This debate continues in part two of this special issue, but with new fields of inquiry and objects of analysis. The contributions of part one were largely concerned with aspects of value in exchange theory and with the radical comparison of diverse cultural structures. Part two addresses the relationship between value and action, including actions deemed to occur outside the sphere of reciprocal exchanges. Additionally, part two raises questions…
"Introduction
The introduction addresses the question of whether it is useful or indeed possible to develop an anthropological theory of value. By way of a Socratic debate, two rather conflicting points of view emerge. On the one hand, it is argued that anthropology can make a major and quite coherent contribution to the issue of value in social theory. On the other hand, it is argued that anthropology, as an ethnographically driven discipline, produces an ant…
Ethnographic Film as Exchange
This paper discusses how film impacts on the relationship between researchers/filmmakers and their collaborators in the field. Film can function as a gift that strengthens reciprocal relationships and it is a medium that facilitates dialogue and intercultural exchange. The author argues that film has great potential for eliciting cultural differences and enhancing intercultural communication as people relate to the same visual material from their…
Sociology (27 works) · History (18 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (16 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs (15 works) · Anthropology (13 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Political science (13 works) · Art (9 works)