Paige West Attacked By Baby Pig In PNG Outhouse!!
Strong is Thomas Strong, lecturer in the department of anthropology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He has previously held teaching and/or research posts at the University of Helsinki, the University of California, San Francisco, the University of Wisconsin, and (oddly enough) the American Academy of Ophthalmology. His publications include essays on the symbolism of blood and body in the U.S. and elsewhere, new cross-disciplinary work on kinship, and ideas of culture loss and bodily detumescence amongst the Dano-speakers of Papua New Guinea's eastern highlands province. His on-going research in PNG concerns transformations in sociality, gender relations, and personhood following the mid-twentieth-century repudiation of the traditional men's cult in the upper Asaro valley. His other interests include 'brand' as an ethnographic and analytic concept, HIV/AIDS (especially in the U.S. gay male community), and celebrity/fame.
“Outhouse Pigs Are Our Government Now”
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This, you see, is the fruit of taking very funny and very smart college students to PNG with you.
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Interesting video. Does anyone who knows something about PNG care to provide a bit of ethnographic insight? Was the dancing guy doing something culturally familiar? My impression of the whole scene–without any real ethnographic basis for evaluation–was that the white guy transformed the event into something more like a sports match, which seems a very different genre of performance than the one that the dancing guy started out with. But I’d be curious to know the take of somebody who has a sense of the relevant performance genres in PNG.
On another note, while we’re posting strange videos featuring anthropologists. Here’s David Price rocking the Tonight Show. I kid you not.
http://www.nbc.com/The_Tonight_Show_with_Jay_Leno/video/#mea=91791
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There isn’t a whole lot of occult cultural coding. I think it might be better to decribe this as ‘disco’ than ‘sports match’. The soundtrack is by O-Shen.
Uh… personally if it were me I wouldn’t post fieldwork films on YouTube (does that guy know that he will be on the Internet?) because of privacy issues, but different strokes for different folks I guess.
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Yes, I was thinking the exotic Melanesian performance genre enacted here is ‘goofy disco dancing.’ Most of my highlands friends are brilliant dancers. In the eastern highlands (near Kainantu), there are lots of innovations in singsing performance that include various forms of clowning. Can’t speak for what’s hot in Enga though…
Rex, maybe we should discuss sometime here on SM the topic of video, the internet, fieldwork, new publics, privacy, etc. Not now! I’m too busy… but I have been AMAZED by the random stuff you can find on YouTube pertaining to Melanesia, or wherever. Alas, I was looking for good Moses Tau videos the other day and couldn’t find any.
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For me it raises the question of what students do with video that they take ‘in the field’ that is not ‘field work’ at all. This was a trip that was taken on a day off from ‘field work.’ It was taken on the road between Goroka and Kainantu at a rather creepy road block. It was posted by the guy dancing in the video, who is a film maker and not an anthropologist.
So is it ‘the field’ just because it is PNG even if it is not part of any research being done or actually shot in West’s field site?
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To be honest my moral concerns with whether the video should be posted are not really about whether they were made ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the field, but just whether the PNG guy dancing in the video (or Paige for that matter) knew when it was being made that it was going to be posted for everyone with an internet connection to see. These are just issues about privacy, publicity, and consent which have to do with living online, not what constitutes ‘the field’.
I also have a set of practical concerns with posting these movies on the internet that are more ‘fieldwork’ issues — to wit, what visa was it made under, and will immigration flip out if they know this sort of thing is being done?
Of course for all I know none of these issues are relevant to this particular case and all of these questions were answered to the satisfaction of all concerned. But personally, I wouldn’t have posted that video publically. But then again, I never use my wife’s true name on my blog, so I clearly have Issues that most people don’t have.
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