Contact tracing: The materiality of encounters

ABSTRACT

This article introduces the special issue on ‘Material Encounters’ by addressing the praxis of materiality across time, disciplines, areas of study, and technologies. We use the metonyms of track and trace and the distinction of objects and things to disentangle ways in which materials and understandings of the material mediate dynamic encounters with specific people or places, particularly in Oceania. These material encounters generate diverse, unstable forms of knowing on all sides, through the uneven flux of human embodiment (in encounters) and embodied materialization (in object, inscription, representation, memorialization). We juxtapose the assumed, if increasingly challenged priority of materials in object-oriented fields such as archaeology and museology; the reflective revival of material culture studies and the ‘material turn’ in anthropology from around 1990; and the belated recognition of the salience of materials and materialities by historians, whose craft depends on present material traces of the pasts they seek to elucidate. With reference to the agency of persons, places, time, or things, we stress the plurality of materialities and their related ontologies, and the qualities of movement, instability, and incompletion inherent in all encounters.

KEYWORDS:

• Materiality
• history
• encounter
• embodiment
• trace
• track

Acknowledgements

We thank the National Library of Australia for hosting the symposium of 4–6 February 2015, at which the papers in this collection were first presented, and Graeme Whimp for his assistance in the organization of the symposium.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Specific references to the 1934 wood chips come from interviews by Chris Ballard with Kewage Barabia (17 March 1991), Bole Pimbirali (18 March 1991), Gela Leme (20 March 1991), Yaliduma-Dai (11 April 1991) and Bari-Wayama (21 June 1991).

2 In addition to Baowa Ngawe, others who recalled the boot prints include Hamburi Awe (29 May 1991), Magaya Dimbabu (11 March 1991), Balua Lendebe (4 April 1991), Hondomo Baiyulia (4 June 1991), and Andagali Giwa (15–16 August 91).

3 Apart from the contributors to this special issue, the following scholars delivered papers to the ‘Material Encounters’ conference: Felix Driver, Philip Jones, Helen Gardner, Elena Govor, and Jude Philp. Those by Driver (2020) and Philp (2021; Lilje and Philp 2021) have resulted in separate publications.

4 To fix materials at the centre of conference discussion, we took advantage of the National Library’s spectacular collection to stage a viewing of historical items nominated by participants. They included the earliest map of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands (Jode 1593); a coconut said to have been ‘carved by sailor’ on James Cook’s Endeavour (Anon 1668–71); a Presbyterian missionary’s translation of Jenesis (Genesis) into the Kwamera language of Tanna, in modern Vanuatu (Watt 1883); an annotated copy by the missionary-anthropologist Lorimer Fison of an offprint of his seminal article ‘Australian Aborigines’ (Fison 1872); and a selection of Myanmar Supreme Court files.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [grant numbers DP110104578 and DP1094562].