Professor Andrew Lattas

Department of Social Anthropology
University of Bergen
P.O. Box 7800
N-5020 Bergen
NORWAY
E-mail: andrew.lattas@sosantr.uib.no

Qualifications
BA (Honours in Anthropology), University of Adelaide, 1979
Doctor of Philosophy (Anthropology), University of Adelaide, 1987.

Research Specialisation
Professor Lattas has done extensive fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, mainly on the island of New Britain where he has studied and written on millenarian movements, secrecy and trickery, sorcery, myths, modern folklore, gender relations and race relations. He has also written extensively on race and ethnic relations in Australia. His PhD was on Australian newspapers between 1803 and 1830 in the convict colony of New South Wales. His publications include one book, 2 edited collections, 33 refereed articles and 25 book reviews. Currently, Lattas is finishing a new manuscript entitled “Dreams, Madness and Fairy Tales in New Britain,” which is an ethnography of the politics of creativity in rural Papua New Guinea.

Current Research Projects

Government, Religion and the Problem of Moral Order in Contemporary Papua New Guinea
Religion and the regrounding of sovereignty in Papua New Guinea
Logging, corruption and protest in PNG
Race and ethnic relations in Australia
Migration and ethnicity in rural Greece

Published articles in anthologies (Book chapters)

Lattas, Andrew 2009
Cargo Cults, Christianity and Politics: The dynamics of creativity in Pomio Kivung rituals (submitted and in press) In Religion and Retributive Logic: Essays in Honour of Professor Garry W. Trompf. Carole M. Cusack and Christopher H. Hartney (eds). Leiden/Boston/Tokyo: Brill Academic Publishers: 101-129

Lattas, Andrew 2006
‘Reviewing the reviews: intellectual fields, the liberal state and the problem of alterity’. In Double Binds: Critical Indigenous Studies edited by Lea, T; Cowlishaw, G; and Kowal, E., pp. 185-202. Darwin: Charles Darwin University Press: 185-202

Lattas, Andrew 2001.
The Underground Life of Capitalism: Space, Persons and Money in Bali (West New Britain), in Emplaced Myth, A. Rumsey and J. Weiner (eds). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press: 161-188.

Lattas, Andrew 2000.
Colonising the Other: Dreaming, Aboriginal Painting and White Man's Search for a Soul, in Picturing the ‘Primitif,’ J. Marcus (ed). Sydney: LHR Press.

Articles in refereed journals

Lattas, Andrew (in press)
From Turko to Lebo: the Cronulla Riot and the Politics of Greekness. In Lines in the Sand, ed. Greg Noble. Sydney: Institute of Criminology, 2008

Lattas, Andrew 2007
“They always seem to be angry”: the Cronulla Riot and the Civilising Pleasures of the Sun. TAJA,18 (2): 301-320

Lattas, Andrew 2007.
Cargo Cults and the Politics of Alterity. Anthropological Forum, 17 (2); 149-161.

Lattas, Andrew 2006.
Reseeing processes of seeing: the material poetics and politics of cameras, television, videos and dreams in New Britain. TAJA, 17 (1): 15-31.

Andrew, Lattas 2006
‘Technologies of Visibility: The Utopian Politics of Cameras, Televisions, Videos and Dreams in New Britain’, Australian Journal of Anthropology, 17 15-31.

Lattas, Andrew 2006.
The utopian promise of government. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS), 12 (1): 129-150.

Lattas, Andrew 2005.
Capitalizing on Complicity: Cargo Cults and the Spirit of Modernity on Bali Island (West New Britain). Ethnohistory 2005, 52 (1): 47-80

Lattas, Andrew 2001.
Redneck Thought: Racism, Guilt and Aborigines. UTS Review, 7 (1): 106-124

Lattas, Andrew 2000.
Telephones, Cameras and Technology in West New Britain Cargo Cults. Oceania, 70 (4): 325-344

Lattas, Andrew 2000.
Racist beliefs versus Nationalist practices? Oceania, 70 (3): 272-74.

Lattas, Andrew 1999.
Neither Cargo nor Cult.’ Anthropological Forum. 1999, 9 (1): 107-112

Book reviews, shorter debate pieces, and editorial material in scientific journals

Andrew, Lattas 2007.
Book Review. Cargo, Cult, and Culture Critique. TAJA, 18 (3): 234-5

Andrew, Lattas 2006.
Book Review. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. TAJA, 17 (2): 367-9

Andrew, Lattas 2006.
Book Review. Cargo Cult as Theatre: political performance in the Pacific by Billings, Dorothy K. Lanham: Lexington Books, TAJA, 17 (1): 111-112.

Andrew, Lattas 2005.
Book Review. Secrecy and Cultural Reality: Utopian Ideologies of the New Guinea Men's House, The Contemporary Pacific, Spring, 17 (1): 240-43

Andrew Lattas 2003.
Book Review. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Oceania, 74 (1/2): 153-55.

Film

(Royal Anthropological Institute Prize 2005) Koriam's Law - and the dead who govern. (Length 110 minutes. Year of production 2005. A film by Gary Kildea, Andrew Lattas and Andrea Simon. A co-production of Arcadia Pictures, New York and The Ethnographic Film Unit, RSPAS, ANU, Canberra).

Past Research Students

Diamanda Rosso-Buckton, PhD, “Feed a Cold and Starve a Demon: The Poetics of Madness in Kefalonia”. Completed studies December 2006.

Aquart, Helen 2001 The Pomio Kivung Association, East New Britain. PhD diss., University of Newcastle

Organisational Affiliations

1995 – present - Member of Editorial Board of Oceania.

New Manuscript

Dreams, Madness and Fairy Tales in New Britain
This manuscript documents and analyses the imaginary structures and practices through which modernity is relived in rural Papua New Guinea. Drawing on three different fieldwork locations from the island of New Britain, the manuscript focuses on the experiences, narratives and practices of rural villagers. It explores how modernity is embraced, contested and diverted into localising practices, which grappled with modernity’s utopian potential and promises. Like other parts of the Third World, in Melanesia, modernity’s promises of progress have not been evenly realised. In various ways, modernity has been embraced and resisted but also reinvented. Using ethnography that includes dreams, visions, stories, rumours, sorcery, magic, madness, fairy tales and popular forms of Christianity, the manuscript explores the pervasiveness of the practices and the imaginary structures through which villagers remediated the changes they were experiencing.

9th RAI International Film Festival, Oxford University, September 2005

Announcement of the RAI prize by Hugh Brody on behalf of the jury: One of the main thoughts that I’ve had in the course of these days is just how wonderful it is to work in that place where anthropology and film meet; the two most wonderful adventures, I think, one can make creatively and intellectually are anthropology and film and to be able to bring them together is just the most extraordinary privilege and good fortune in life. 

I suppose with new technologies and liberation - to some extent - from television commissions there are now even more opportunities for creativity, adventure and exploration in this fantastically fertile meeting place. I’ve found myself re-excited by the whole anthropology - filmmaking project.

I’m very grateful to all the filmmakers who sent their films and to the RAI for making the experience possible for all of us … It’s my job to announce the RAI prize-winner and I’m very happy to say that it’s a film that has absolutely extraordinary strengths:
‘Koriam’s Law - and the dead who govern’.

Its great strength is the very wide range of intellectual and artistic fields in which it moves. On the one hand, it seems to us a film that explores a very complex anthropological set of puzzles - well known in the literature; well known to anyone who’s worked in that part of the world. And yet it goes beyond anything I’ve ever encountered before in terms of the exploration of the whole puzzle of ‘cargo-cults’; of the colonial shadow and adjustment to colonialism and the significance and symbolism of the power of money. 

But most interesting of all, in terms of the anthropology of the film, is the way it’s prepared to engage with complexity. It doesn’t fear the complicated. It doesn’t fear the difficult debate. It doesn’t fear the word. And it doesn’t fear - one of its most striking characteristics - it doesn’t fear leaving us with puzzles and ‘in’ the difficulties. 

I think that’s an amazing achievement of this long film which I was completely gripped by - we were all gripped by - throughout.

And at the same time I think it’s the only film I’ve ever seen that really shows an anthropologist at work in an unselfconscious and complete way. I think by the end of the film you have a very strong sense of what an anthropologist does; what this particular anthropologist does with remarkable skill. And so we have a film doing two different kinds of things at once and doing both of them extremely well.

And it’s a film that’s really a film. There’s a huge amount of filmmaking in it: wonderful camerawork and very, very clever editing; a beautiful meet between the research and the filmmaking itself.

So we were very happy to see it and very delighted to be able to give it the RAI prize.