A K Hermkens
Biographic Data
| ID | 12073 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A K Hermkens |
| GIVEN NAMES | A K |
| FAMILY NAME | Hermkens |
| SIGNATURE | HERMKENS A K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Macquarie University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2401-3845 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 39 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Making relations, making worlds
Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
Mobilizing Presence across Borders: Devotion to Papua New Guinea's Blessed Peter To Rot in Australia
This article engages with the conjunctures between migration and religion by focusing on the celebration of Papua New Guinea's ‘National Patron Saint’, the Blessed Peter To Rot, in the Australian diaspora. Both in Sydney and Brisbane, Catholic Papua New Guinea (PNG) migrants have been ‘relocating’ PNG shrines, regalia, relics and ritual celebrations to Australia to celebrate their Blessed Peter To Rot. As shown, by relocating spiritual material a…
Mother Mary and ‘Crisis of Time’ in post-conflict Bougainville
Most national myths of origin in Europe and elsewhere in the world begin with some transcendent or sacrificial story of violent revolution, warfare or liberation, like the French Revolution. This is also true for the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, a region in Papua New Guinea traumatized by a decade-long secessionist war (1988–1998), struggling to become an independent nation by 2027. In this article, I will draw upon François Hartog’s concep…
Of blood and stone: The emplaced reality of Marian statue devotion in Bougainville
AI as guru or conjurer
This commentary examines how artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes scholarly authorship through Fredrik Barth's figures of the guru and the conjurer. The guru instructs within moral and scholarly frameworks, while the conjurer mystifies through spectacle. AI embodies both roles: promoted by publishers like Wiley as a guru offering clarity and scope, it performs more like a conjurer, producing dazzling outputs that obscure their origins and evade …
Christian Temporalities: Living Between the Already Fulfilled and the Not Yet Completed
Ophir: Decolonise. Revolutionise
Introduction: Living Between the Already Fulfilled and the Not Yet Completed
Maisin is Tapa”: Engendering Barkcloth Among the Maisin of Papua New Guinea
This paper explores the interplay between gender and barkcloth, or tapa, among the Maisin people living along the shores of Collingwood Bay in Papua New Guinea. Tapa features in Maisin economic, political, social, and spiritual life as an object of wealth that is both alienable and inalienable. It constitutes beliefs and values about gender relations and identity, mediating relations between the individual and the social. At the same time, tapa c…
Climate Change and The Production of Knowledge
In this review essay, I consider two recent works on climate change in the Pacific, one monograph ( Engaging Environments in Tonga ) by an anthropologist and keeper of Oceanic collections in Oslo, and one edited volume ( Managing Climate Change Adaptation in the Pacific Region ) by a sustainability and climate change management specialist from Hamburg. I situate these two very divergent studies in relation to broader debates and trends in studies…
Memorabilia of Colonial Violence and Death: The Collection of Jean Louis Henri Beijens (1835-1914), a Former Military Officer in the Netherlands East Indies
Nineteenth-century, private collections of ethnographic artefacts have a bad reputation in anthropology. Appearing to comprise 'a haphazard assemblage of junk' (Gathercole 1978:276), anthropologists and others interested in ethnographic objects and collecting have ignored private collections for some time. While Jean Louis Henri Beijens's collection resembles at first glance a haphazard assemblage not worthy of attention, a closer inspection reve…
Gender Equality Theology and Essentialism: Catholic Responses to Gender‐Based Violence and Inequality in Papua New Guinea
This paper addresses how Christianity, and in particular Catholicism, is deployed in response to gender‐based violence (GBV) in Papua New Guinea. It provides insights into the various ways the Catholic community, Church, and its clergy respond to and manage GBV. Focusing on a case study in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, the article reveals how Gender Equality Theology is used and received to address GBV in this region.…
Rosaries and Statues: Mediating Divine Intervention in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea
In the Autonomous Region of Bougainville (ARoB) in Papua New Guinea, the changes of Vatican II led to significant Church reform, creating "Liklik Kristen Komuniti" (small Christian communities) that gave more responsibility to the laity. Moreover, as elsewhere in the world, Charismatic Catholicism was introduced and embraced. At the same time, private devotions, and in particular devotions to Mary, became immensely popular and powerful in Bougain…
Charismatic Catholic Renewal in Bougainville: Revisiting the power of Marian devotion as a cultural and socio‐political force
This article explores the interplay between culture and Christianity by detailing the history, experience, and impact of the Charismatic Catholic Renewal in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea (PNG). In 1985, the PNG Catholic Bishops' Conference approved the charismatic movement as one of the authentic movements for spiritual renewal of the Catholic Church in PNG. However, the conference stressed this renewal not to be made …
Gender and Material Culture
Despite the fact that both gender and material culture have been crucial to the articulation of anthropological debates and theory, their relationship has received relatively little anthropological attention. Only in the 1990s did there arise a renewed interest in material culture informed by theoretical concerns with issues such as gender. Before this period, scholars mainly focused on non‐Western “art” made by men, with women's creative product…
Marists, Marian Devotion, and the Quest for Sovereignty in Bougainville
Christianity and politics seem to be intrinsically linked. In Central Bougainville, which is part of the autonomous region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea ( PNG ), the Catholic faith introduced by Marist missionaries has been instrumental in building a national Bougainville identity and sustaining the political struggle for sovereignty. Although the first missionaries were often cautious not to disrupt socio-political organisations, Marists h…
Compte rendu de Unwrapping Tongan barkcloth. Encounters, Creativity and Female Agency par Fany Wonu Veys
Barkcloth, an unwoven cloth-like material made out of the bark of specific tree species, has long aroused the interest of both haphazard and professional collectors, the general public, and academic scholars. European explorers encountered this “native cloth”, which has been generically referred to as “tapa”, during their voyages into the Pacific, but it is also known and used in other parts of the world, such as in Latin America, Africa and Asia…
Sinuous Objects: Revaluing Women’s Wealth in the Contemporary Pacific
The Mothers’ Union goes on strike: Women, tapa cloth and Christianity in a Papua New Guinea society
This paper explores the story of the formation and subsequent activities of a church women's group in Maisin villages and women's experiences of Christianity more broadly, in relation to the changing production and uses of traditional bark cloth ( tapa ), a signature women's product which has become a marker of Maisin identity. While the influence of the local Mothers’ Union has waxed and waned over the past 60 years, tapa cloth has had a continu…
Marian Movements and Secessionist Warfare in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea
This article focuses on the enigma of Catholic Marian revolutionary movements during the decade-long conflict on the island of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea at the end of the twentieth century. These religious movements embody the legacy of a colonial history as well as people’s responses to poorly monitored resource extraction, social and economic displacement, regional factionalism, and years of fighting by Bougainvilleans against the Papua Ne…
Mediations of Cloth: Tapa and Personhood among the Maisin in PNG
Tapa (or barkcloth), which is made from the outer bark of specific trees, is intimately interwoven with past and present socialities across O ceania. The cloths have been used to decorate, wrap, cover, protect, and carry the human body, as exchange valuables and commodities, in land claims, and as indexes and embodiments of ancestral power. This article explores the complexities of personhood in O ceania by focusing on the making and ceremonial u…
The Gendered Politics of Witchcraft and Sorcery Accusations among the Maisin of Papua New Guinea
This article investigates yafuni ('witchcraft' or female sorcery) accusations among the Maisin people living in Collingwood Bay, Oro Province, Papua New Guinea. It takes as its primary case a public meeting at which two women were accused of killing a man. During the meeting, reasons for the victim's unexpected death and why he was subjected to 'witchcraft' were questioned and explored. While sorcery and witchcraft accusations might have violent …
Like Moses Who Led His People to the Promised Land: Nation‐ and State‐Building in Bougainville
This article focuses on indigenous religious beliefs and practices in relation to nationalism and state‐building in conflict and post‐conflict Bougainville. Since the early seventies, people of the island of B ougainville have sought to secede from P apua N ew G uinea and constitute a separate sovereign state. The almost ten year long secessionist struggle between the B ougainville R evolutionary A rmy ( BRA ) and the PNG D efence F orce ( PNGDF …
Becoming Mary: Marian Devotion as a Solution to Gender-based Violence in Urban PNG
This chapter deals with how, in the urban setting of Madang in Papua New Guinea, Marian devotion is deployed in response to gender-based violence, including in the context of HIV. 1 While providing insight into the lived religious experiences of Catholic women and, in particular, female members of the Legion of Mary, this chapter shows how women seek help from Mary and God in order to find a solution to the everyday violence they face. The experi…
Light Intervention. Lessons from Bougainville
n Contains fulltext :\n 101206.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access)\n
Religion in War and Peace: Unravelling Mary's intervention in the Bougainville crisis
The role of religion in generating violent conflict and peace is a major topic in public, political and scholarly debates. However, despite a burgeoning field of literature, this relationship remains inadequately explained. In general, social and religious studies tend to focus on macro-analyses, resulting in essentialist and even ethnocentric notions of religion, violent conflict and peace. By using the Bougainville crisis as a case study, this …
Church Festivals and the Visualization of Identity in Collingwood Bay, Papua New Guinea
n Contains fulltext :\n 39825.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access)\n
The Gendered Politics of Witchcraft and Sorcery Accusations among the Maisin of Papua New Guinea
This article investigates yafuni ('witchcraft' or female sorcery) accusations among the Maisin people living in Collingwood Bay, Oro Province, Papua New Guinea. It takes as its primary case a public meeting at which two women were accused of killing a man. During the meeting, reasons for the victim's unexpected death and why he was subjected to 'witchcraft' were questioned and explored. While sorcery and witchcraft accusations might have violent …
Gendered objects: Embodiments of Colonial collecting in Dutch New Guinea
n Contains fulltext :\n 39762.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access)\n
The power of Mary in Papua New Guinea
n Contains fulltext :\n 56046.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access)\n
Marists, Marian Devotion, and the Quest for Sovereignty in Bougainville
Christianity and politics seem to be intrinsically linked. In Central Bougainville, which is part of the autonomous region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea ( PNG ), the Catholic faith introduced by Marist missionaries has been instrumental in building a national Bougainville identity and sustaining the political struggle for sovereignty. Although the first missionaries were often cautious not to disrupt socio-political organisations, Marists h…
Religion in War and Peace: Unravelling Mary's intervention in the Bougainville crisis
The role of religion in generating violent conflict and peace is a major topic in public, political and scholarly debates. However, despite a burgeoning field of literature, this relationship remains inadequately explained. In general, social and religious studies tend to focus on macro-analyses, resulting in essentialist and even ethnocentric notions of religion, violent conflict and peace. By using the Bougainville crisis as a case study, this …
Gendered objects: Embodiments of Colonial collecting in Dutch New Guinea
n Contains fulltext :\n 39762.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access)\n
Divergent pathways in Melanesian ethnography
Holger Jebens, Pathways to heaven: Contesting mainline and fundamentalist Christianity in Papua New Guinea. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2005, 256 pp., ISBN 1-84545-005-1 (hardback). James Leach, Creative land: Place and procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2004, 256 pp., ISBN 1-57181-693-3 (paperback
The power of Mary in Papua New Guinea
n Contains fulltext :\n 56046.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access)\n
Church Festivals and the Visualization of Identity in Collingwood Bay, Papua New Guinea
n Contains fulltext :\n 39825.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access)\n
Josephine's Journey: Gender‐based Violence and Marian Devotion in Urban Papua New Guinea
This article deals with how, in the urban setting of Madang, Papua New Guinea, Marian devotion is deployed in response to domestic and gender‐based violence. While providing insight into the lived religious experiences of Catholic women living in Madang, this article shows how Mary empowers her followers to resist violence, yet, at the same time, paradoxically, is instrumental in sanctioning women to tolerate violence. Josephine's ‘journey of vio…
Rejoinder to Drid Williams' Discussion
This discussion is a rejoinder to Drid Williams' discussion of the article “Church Festivals and the Visualization of Identity in Collingwood Bay, Papua New Guinea” [Hermkens 2007 2007 Church Festivals and the Visualization of Identity in Collingwood Bay, Papua New Guinea . Visual Anthropology , 20 ( 5 ): 347 – 364 .[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]]
Becoming Mary: Marian Devotion as a Solution to Gender-based Violence in Urban PNG
This chapter deals with how, in the urban setting of Madang in Papua New Guinea, Marian devotion is deployed in response to gender-based violence, including in the context of HIV. 1 While providing insight into the lived religious experiences of Catholic women and, in particular, female members of the Legion of Mary, this chapter shows how women seek help from Mary and God in order to find a solution to the everyday violence they face. The experi…
Light Intervention. Lessons from Bougainville
n Contains fulltext :\n 101206.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access)\n
Reconciliation and Architectures of Commitment: Sequencing Peace in Bougainville/Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands
n Contains fulltext :\n 101271.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access)\n
Like Moses Who Led His People to the Promised Land: Nation‐ and State‐Building in Bougainville
This article focuses on indigenous religious beliefs and practices in relation to nationalism and state‐building in conflict and post‐conflict Bougainville. Since the early seventies, people of the island of B ougainville have sought to secede from P apua N ew G uinea and constitute a separate sovereign state. The almost ten year long secessionist struggle between the B ougainville R evolutionary A rmy ( BRA ) and the PNG D efence F orce ( PNGDF …
Marian Movements and Secessionist Warfare in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea
This article focuses on the enigma of Catholic Marian revolutionary movements during the decade-long conflict on the island of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea at the end of the twentieth century. These religious movements embody the legacy of a colonial history as well as people’s responses to poorly monitored resource extraction, social and economic displacement, regional factionalism, and years of fighting by Bougainvilleans against the Papua Ne…
Mediations of Cloth: Tapa and Personhood among the Maisin in PNG
Tapa (or barkcloth), which is made from the outer bark of specific trees, is intimately interwoven with past and present socialities across O ceania. The cloths have been used to decorate, wrap, cover, protect, and carry the human body, as exchange valuables and commodities, in land claims, and as indexes and embodiments of ancestral power. This article explores the complexities of personhood in O ceania by focusing on the making and ceremonial u…
The Gendered Politics of Witchcraft and Sorcery Accusations among the Maisin of Papua New Guinea
This article investigates yafuni ('witchcraft' or female sorcery) accusations among the Maisin people living in Collingwood Bay, Oro Province, Papua New Guinea. It takes as its primary case a public meeting at which two women were accused of killing a man. During the meeting, reasons for the victim's unexpected death and why he was subjected to 'witchcraft' were questioned and explored. While sorcery and witchcraft accusations might have violent …
The Mothers’ Union goes on strike: Women, tapa cloth and Christianity in a Papua New Guinea society
This paper explores the story of the formation and subsequent activities of a church women's group in Maisin villages and women's experiences of Christianity more broadly, in relation to the changing production and uses of traditional bark cloth ( tapa ), a signature women's product which has become a marker of Maisin identity. While the influence of the local Mothers’ Union has waxed and waned over the past 60 years, tapa cloth has had a continu…
Sinuous Objects: Revaluing Women’s Wealth in the Contemporary Pacific
Gender and Material Culture
Despite the fact that both gender and material culture have been crucial to the articulation of anthropological debates and theory, their relationship has received relatively little anthropological attention. Only in the 1990s did there arise a renewed interest in material culture informed by theoretical concerns with issues such as gender. Before this period, scholars mainly focused on non‐Western “art” made by men, with women's creative product…
Marists, Marian Devotion, and the Quest for Sovereignty in Bougainville
Christianity and politics seem to be intrinsically linked. In Central Bougainville, which is part of the autonomous region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea ( PNG ), the Catholic faith introduced by Marist missionaries has been instrumental in building a national Bougainville identity and sustaining the political struggle for sovereignty. Although the first missionaries were often cautious not to disrupt socio-political organisations, Marists h…
Compte rendu de Unwrapping Tongan barkcloth. Encounters, Creativity and Female Agency par Fany Wonu Veys
Barkcloth, an unwoven cloth-like material made out of the bark of specific tree species, has long aroused the interest of both haphazard and professional collectors, the general public, and academic scholars. European explorers encountered this “native cloth”, which has been generically referred to as “tapa”, during their voyages into the Pacific, but it is also known and used in other parts of the world, such as in Latin America, Africa and Asia…
Charismatic Catholic Renewal in Bougainville: Revisiting the power of Marian devotion as a cultural and socio‐political force
This article explores the interplay between culture and Christianity by detailing the history, experience, and impact of the Charismatic Catholic Renewal in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea (PNG). In 1985, the PNG Catholic Bishops' Conference approved the charismatic movement as one of the authentic movements for spiritual renewal of the Catholic Church in PNG. However, the conference stressed this renewal not to be made …
Rosaries and Statues: Mediating Divine Intervention in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea
In the Autonomous Region of Bougainville (ARoB) in Papua New Guinea, the changes of Vatican II led to significant Church reform, creating "Liklik Kristen Komuniti" (small Christian communities) that gave more responsibility to the laity. Moreover, as elsewhere in the world, Charismatic Catholicism was introduced and embraced. At the same time, private devotions, and in particular devotions to Mary, became immensely popular and powerful in Bougain…
Gender Equality Theology and Essentialism: Catholic Responses to Gender‐Based Violence and Inequality in Papua New Guinea
This paper addresses how Christianity, and in particular Catholicism, is deployed in response to gender‐based violence (GBV) in Papua New Guinea. It provides insights into the various ways the Catholic community, Church, and its clergy respond to and manage GBV. Focusing on a case study in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, the article reveals how Gender Equality Theology is used and received to address GBV in this region.…
Maisin is Tapa”: Engendering Barkcloth Among the Maisin of Papua New Guinea
This paper explores the interplay between gender and barkcloth, or tapa, among the Maisin people living along the shores of Collingwood Bay in Papua New Guinea. Tapa features in Maisin economic, political, social, and spiritual life as an object of wealth that is both alienable and inalienable. It constitutes beliefs and values about gender relations and identity, mediating relations between the individual and the social. At the same time, tapa c…
Climate Change and The Production of Knowledge
In this review essay, I consider two recent works on climate change in the Pacific, one monograph ( Engaging Environments in Tonga ) by an anthropologist and keeper of Oceanic collections in Oslo, and one edited volume ( Managing Climate Change Adaptation in the Pacific Region ) by a sustainability and climate change management specialist from Hamburg. I situate these two very divergent studies in relation to broader debates and trends in studies…
Memorabilia of Colonial Violence and Death: The Collection of Jean Louis Henri Beijens (1835-1914), a Former Military Officer in the Netherlands East Indies
Nineteenth-century, private collections of ethnographic artefacts have a bad reputation in anthropology. Appearing to comprise 'a haphazard assemblage of junk' (Gathercole 1978:276), anthropologists and others interested in ethnographic objects and collecting have ignored private collections for some time. While Jean Louis Henri Beijens's collection resembles at first glance a haphazard assemblage not worthy of attention, a closer inspection reve…
Sociology (23 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (15 works) · History (15 works) · Political science (15 works) · Law (14 works) · New guinea (14 works) · Ethnology (12 works) · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies (12 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works)