Individual Projects

• Death, Materiality and the Origin of Time

Ida Nicolaisen,  senior researcher, NIAS

Death, Materiality and the Origin of Time is a collaborative, interdisciplinary research program between Department of Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics, AU, Moesgaard Museum and NIAS headed by professor Rane Willerslev and funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research/Humanities. The project period is 2011-2014 and will include one workshop held at NIAS.

The project stipulates that death is the overarching horizon for how human beings perceive of and sense time. Time permeates everything, but except for time itself, all things are perishable. Yet, it is through the perishable material world that we experience time. Both when it comes to the development and decay of the body as well as the anticipation of death. With a starting point in anthropological and archaeological studies, the project investigates how social technologies have been and are implemented to avoid death, delay death, embrace death or communicate with the dead in the past as well as the present. The project questions the meaning, which the materiality of death has for our understanding of time. Since death and time are materially embedded in bodies, objects and physical space, the project will develop and make use of user-driven ‘design experiments’ localized at Moesgaard Museum. The aim with the experiments is to facilitate dialogue between researchers, informants, curators and audiences, which will develop new forms of knowledge and representation in the intersection of death, materiality and time. The aim is furthermore to build an international research network with the long-term goal of establishing the first ‘Centre for Methodological Innovation’ in Europe at Aarhus University.
 

• Harmony Through History: conflict management during the colonial era in Cambodia

Alexandra Kent, 
Senior researcher, Affiliated Researcher NIAS

Using data from the French overseas archives in Aix-en-Provence and National archives in Phnom Penh, this study investigates the interplay between colonial and customary processes of justice in historical context in Cambodia. The aim is to explore how aspects of Khmer cosmological order and moral coherence have responded to foreign intervention over time. Individual cases found in official documents and letters are used to identify discrepancies and tensions between the French bureaucratic approach to conflict or offences and that of Cambodian customary justice. This study is relevant to today’s international efforts to create a culture of peace in war-torn settings; recent research and policy for healing fractured society often lack a diachronic perspective and thus overlook the relationship between today’s justice interventions and historical principles of order in the target society. When it misrecognises or disrupts the long-standing indigenous models of order that guide locals, externally driven ‘normalisation’ may inadvertently generate new vulnerabilities. Together with findings from my parallel study of contemporary social healing, the results of this study are intended to enhance understanding of cultural persistence and change.

• Visible and Invisible Realities – Nature, Sexuality and Changing Identities among the Punan Bah of Central Borneo

Ida Nicolaisen,  senior researcher, NIAS

The project is based on a huge data base generated by the author over the past 40 years through long-term and in-depth fieldwork in Sarawak, Malaysia, supplemented with on-going data collection among young people here during annual field visits. The work will be published as a monograph.
 

• Women as agents of violence in contemporary Japanese cultural expressions

Gitte Marianne Hansen, 
PhD candidate, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge
Associated PhD student NIAS
Visiting researcher, Organization for Asian Studies, Waseda University

Gitte’s PhD research focuses on women as agents of violence in contemporary Japanese cultural expressions. She is particularly interested in connections between normative notions of femininity and women’s violent acts – both internally directed violence such as eating disorders, self-harm and suicide as well as externally directed violence such as murder, child and partner abuse. Drawing on both sociology and literary theory, the study deals with diverse cultural expressions, such as Murakami Haruki's, Kanehara Hitomi's, and Kirino Natsuo's literary works, as well as Miyazaki Hayao's animation and artwork by Aida Makoto, among others.