Bringing the Art Inside: a Preliminary Analysis of Black Linear Rock-art from Limestone Caves in Erromango,Vanuatu

While surveying and recording rock-art on Erromango over two field-seasons in 1996 and 1997, I had the pleasure of working with Vanuatu Cultural Centre (VCC) fieldworkers Jerry Taki and Sophie Nempan Sei. During this time, both Jerry and Sophie constructed a context of ‘meaning’ for the ‘black linear’ pictures that predominate in the rock-art of the island. Their ideas were highly influential in determining the direction of my research. Jerry spoke of the association of rock-art with warfare and women. Sophie identified certain motifs as clan designs, particularly those located in sites close to where she lives, at Happyland village in the south of the island. The aim of this paper is to understand more about the rock-art of Erromango by combining local knowledge and archaeological techniques of rock-art analysis. I focus on the black linear rock-art, describing its temporal placement and context of production. Temporal information is gleaned from patterns of superimposition among particular rock-art techniques and motif forms, as well as from independent archaeological and ethnographic contexts. It is proposed that black linear rock-art belongs to the most recent period of rock-art production on Erromango, likely within the last 400 years. Rock-art production and use is explored through artistic motifs evident on other items of material culture, including objects which are known, from ethnographic records, to be produced by either women or men. I suggest that black linear motifs were at least in part produced by women, perhaps to register their connection to place during periods of displacement. In accordance with Jerry's statements, ethnographic and archaeological evidence indicates that a salient feature of the island's social landscape over the last 400 years was small and large-scale intra- and inter-island wars. The black linear rock-art is interpreted in relation to this unstable social context.     

Equity, Diversity and Interdependence: Cultural Policy in Northern Ireland

This paper examines the new presence of "culture" within politics in Northern Ireland and attempts by cultural policymakers and community activists to constructively shift the meanings of "identity", "tradition" and "heritage". It focuses on the work of the Community Relations Council and the strategic development of its three principles of equity, diversity and interdependence, in relation to specific controversies about culture in Northern Ireland and wider debates about pluralism and multiculturalism. The distinctive configuration of questions of pluralism and culture in Northern Ireland highlights the ways in which multicultural theory is shaped by its geographies of development and circulation and how ideas of culture and multiculture work in different places and travel with sometimes ambiguous effects. At the same time, the pragmatic combination of optimism, realism, encouragement and critique in cultural policy in a context of continued division and political instability complicates familiar accounts of the geographies and politics of multiculture.     

Border crossings: new approaches to the Irish border

This paper explores and extends recent work on the Irish border that has sought to redress the relative lack of attention to the social, economic and cultural dimensions of the border in contrast to its intense political symbolism. In particular it addresses the theme of border crossing as a way to consider the border in terms of its everyday dimensions and in terms of questions of conventional and reconfigured categories of identity shaped by borderland life. The first section of the paper outlines recent approaches to the Irish border and their relationships to the field of border studies. The second section uses new research material to explore the ways in which the border was experienced on the ground in the lives of those most directly subject to its changing nature over the course of the twentieth century. The final part of the paper addresses recent suggestions that those experiences may form the basis of new cross-border and cross-community ‘border identities’. The term ‘border crossing’ in the paper's title thus stands both for the issue of physically crossing the border whose difficulties and effects have been central to the lives of those who have lived near the border, and for recent arguments that shared experiences of the impact of the border may be the basis for new senses of identity and commonality that imaginatively cross the borders of old categories of religion, culture and political affiliation. Recent efforts to reconceptualise border identities are emerging within a context still dominated by more polarised perspectives on identity and history, but they represent one significant strand of engagement with the Irish border. They suggest possibilities for forms of border identities that co-exist with, run counter to or cross cut old categories of division and difference.     

Household Archaeology in the Andes

Data from domestic contexts can be used to address significant anthropological research questions. Archaeological investigations in the Andes (areas once incorporated into the Inka empire, including northwestern Argentina, highland Bolivia, northern Chile, Ecuador, and Peru), like many parts of the world, rely on ethnohistory and ethnography to interpret the archaeological remains of domestic areas and make inferences about households. In this review I describe the ideas about Andean households that archaeologists are using and how domestic remains are being examined to infer social, economic, and political processes. Household archaeology in the Andes requires ethnoarchaeology and theory-building in order to understand the complex social dynamics at the foundation of ancient Andean societies.