Paper short abstract:

In this paper, we engage with lived experiences, embeddedness, spatiality and narratives of inbetweeness conceived as liminality in Khartoum, Sudan. We do so through a conversation with a writer of South Sudanese origins who was born and lived most of her life in Khartoum, Stella Gaitano.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we engage with lived experiences, embeddedness, spatiality and narratives of inbetweeness conceived as liminality in Khartoum, Sudan. We do so through a conversation with a writer of South Sudanese origins who was born and lived most of her life in Khartoum, Stella Gaitano. We explore her life through the everyday use of language, her embodied experiences, but also the way she uses language in her novels to shed light on the complexities of the everyday experience of her inbetweeness in Khartoum and in Juba, in her experiences and choices she has made as a result of displacement and prolonged conflict in South Sudan.

Building on spatial anthropology (Roberts 2018), this paper engages with the way sociocultural practices and multiple geographies in the life and the writings of Stella have shaped the experiential dynamics of liminal spaces such as Khartoum and Juba. These dynamics shape her writings through which she renders loss and displacement, contradictions of belonging and exclusion in the two nations of Sudan and South Sudan.

Based on our long-term fieldworks researching displacement of South Sudanese in Sudan and South Sudan, we explore the concept of inbetweeness as a space, both a physical and emotional, allowing for the different manifestations of geographies, negotiating identity and notions of belonging. Stella's cultural background and the use of Arabic as a language of creative expression represents the crux of inbetweeness of identity and belonging. This meeting of two cultural components creates a poignant framework to examine inbetweeness as both liminal and transformative.

Paper short abstract:

A conversation between a senior Indigenous artist and a German anthropologist, this paper explores the histories and futures of a mid-19th-century collection of Indigenous Australian art and material culture at the Ethnological Museum Berlin.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on a small yet highly significant collection of Indigenous Australian art and material culture that was assembled on Gunditjmara Country by the influential colonial landscape painter, Eugene von Guérard. Held at the Ethnological Museum Berlin, the collection embodies an overlooked history of exchanges between Indigenous Australians, and German-speaking artists and anthropologists whose work was profoundly indebted to the environmental theories of Alexander von Humboldt.

The collection's contemporary value and "social life" are owed to the long-standing efforts of Indigenous artists like Maree Clarke and Vicki Couzens. Through community-based arts practice and intercultural knowledge exchange, their work has successfully reclaimed historical Indigenous objects as vital constituents of contemporary culture-making in South-Eastern Australia.

In the spirit of the Living Archive, this paper results from conversations between senior Gunditjmara artist Vicki Couzens and Anna Weinreich, whose doctoral research focuses on Indigenous collections in Germany. Informed by Couzens' deep cultural knowledge of the objects and the Country from which they were taken, our research interrogates von Guérard's archival correspondence, translated and returned to Australia 140 years after the objects were sent to Berlin. At a time when German museums are undergoing highly politicized transformations, we ask: How might we understand the collection's contemporary value, its entangled history, and contested presence in an international institution from an Indigenous perspective? As "digital access" and international collaboration are promising to change the governance of Indigenous collections in Germany, what is the potential of these efforts to shape a "decolonial" future?

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the relationship between national representation and multicultural states, and the responsibility of heritage institutions to hold collections about, and reach out to, ever diversifying communities.

Paper long abstract:

National identities are fluid, they move and shape with new local and global events of significance. Changing demographics, popular culture and political rhetoric all shift the way national identity is collectively understood, and how this identity is framed and displayed. However they don't always shift together and for some their understanding of national identity develops as a reaction against changing demographics. With ideas of 'native' and 'alien' at play, aspects of cultural behaviour are ascribed to racial identity, religious beliefs, sexuality and gender in a manner intrinsically linked to the land in which one was born, giving way to ideas of cultural essentialism.

This paper will integrate what responsibility is held by public institutions who work under the constraints of impartiality, integrity and objectivity, to their increasingly diverse communities. How can historical collections that were created as a means of maintaining law, order and surveillance in a state that excluded some as citizens with equal rights, in an inclusive way? How can national identities be constructed in a way that blurs geographical boundaries, to be permissible for people to hold multiple, layered identities in a non-contradictory manner? Using evidence held within the archives we can explore various responses by the state to changing demographics and idea of an evolving national identity.