Daryll Forde Lecture
28 November 2018, 6:00 pm–7:30 pm
This lecture is presented by Dr Diane Losche on the occasion of an exhibition of materials drawn from the personal papers and field notes of Phyllis Kaberry, a member of UCL Anthropology from1949 until her death in 1977.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Organiser
-
UCL Anthropology
Location
-
Archaeology LT14 Taviton StreetLondonWC1H 0BW
Phyllis Kaberry in the Archive: Figure in an Expanded Field
Dr Diane Losche
Since the archival turn of the 1990s, document collections have become a significant conceptual domain in anthropology as in other disciplines. While this framework has proven a powerful lens for new research, it has produced its own hegemonic mythologies. These tenets suggest that such collections contain only traces, fragments and fictions, reflecting absence and incompleteness. To highlight the problems with such assumptions Diane Losche reflect on her own experiences in the archives of Phyllis Kaberry. Borrowing from Rosalind Krauss’s iconic 1979 essay, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, the second part of her lecture situates the archival Kaberry as a ‘figure’ in an expanded field of disciplines and practices. This framework, borrowed from the formal analysis of art objects, mines a methodology known as figure/field configuration. Losche illustrate this approach through the lens of the Kaberry papers and field notes to demonstrate how it can address problems brought about by the premise that archival research can produce only fragmentary and fictional forms of knowledge.
Head image ©http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/55459266/4610578: A drawing depicting Kaberry during her fieldwork in the Kimberley (Australia, 1936)
About the Speaker
Dr Diane Losche
Dr Diane Losche was a founding member of the School of Art History and Theory at the University of New South Wales where she was a member of the academic staff for 26 years. She currently teaches at Macquarie University and is an Associate at the University of Sydney where she recently completed an exhibition about Phyllis Kaberry. Dr Losche received her PhD from Columbia University (1982) based on fieldwork in the Abelam area of the Sepik region, Papua New Guinea, where she followed in the footsteps of Phyllis Kaberry, who is the subject of this lecture and a forthcoming UCL exhibition.