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CHIMERA
Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea

Keir Martin

Lecturer in Social Anthropology
School of Social Sciences
Tel: 0161 2753488
Email: keir.martin@manchester.ac.uk


Research Profile

I am a lecturer in Social Anthropology at Manchester University, currently on research leave at Aarhus University in Denmark.  My main research activity has been in Papua New Guinea (PNG), where I conducted two years of fieldwork, studying the contested politics of 'custom' in the post-colonial state and in particular examining the ways in which differing evaluations of the meaning of 'custom' shed light upon developing forms of social stratification.

One of the meanings of the term custom in PNG is as a reference to forms of cultural heritage, such as particular forms of material culture or ceremonial displays and performances.  Customary performances in contexts such as cultural festivals that are designed, at least in part, as tourist attractions are a growing phenomena in PNG.  Fierce debates are often conducted behind the scenes of such performances as to whether they truly represent custom.  Current leaders who organize such events are contrasted with previous leaders who allegedly would not have sold custom for money.  My research concern is not so much to accept such claims or counter-claims as to the 'authenticity' of cultural heritage performances, but to take such debates as to the authenticity of the custom on display to be highly revealing with regard to what they can tell us about the changing moral evaluations of leaders in PNG.  As such I have an ongoing interest in the politics of authenticity as a political resource to fought over that challenges perspectives that claim either to be able to assign authenticity to particular objects or performances, or to claim that authenticity is no longer an issue of vital concern owing to the impossibility of definitively fixing the nature of the authentic.

I have published on this theme in relation to my field research in the past, and currently have a piece under review comparing the nature of debates as to the authenticity of cultural heritage performances in tourist contexts with critical analyses of the authenticity of cultural heritage displays in museums.


Research Projects

Organised panel at 2007 ASA conference on 'Tourism as Social Contest'

Abstract:  Tourism and tourist sites can become locations of power struggles and contestations between different social groups. In the course of such struggles people create and utilize a variety of oppositions in seemingly contradictory ways, such as global/local, authentic/commercialised, traditional/modern etc. While it is clear that anthropologists cannot unproblematically apply such dichotomies, it is also clear that these and other dichotomies are often continuously recreated in disputes within communities engaging with tourism as they contest its implications and future. Rather than seeking to explain away such contradictions, we need to see them as being at the heart of the process by which local evaluations of the tourist process are formed. The local debates that arise in and around tourism development, while creating tensions on the ground, ultimately inform the experience of living in a tourist destination. In this sense, tourist sites are locally experienced and constituted through these oppositions that are themselves produced and reproduced through debates and contests over tourism development.


Supervision Areas


Relevant publications

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