Résumé

In this talk I will share some ethnographic work in-progress from ongoing interdisciplinary field research in Vanuatu, much of which focuses on the relationship between demography and culture. I will show how local reproductive values, the politics of kastom (‘traditional lifeways’) and the use and abuse of histry (oral lineage histories) complicate or even contradict foreign researchers’ orientations to history-making and family-making. I will give examples from three ongoing projects that try to understand: (1) indigenous responses to an interdisciplinary population-genetic project we carried out in 2016-2018; (2) the conflicting demands of indigenous and bio-medical reproductive ideologies during the emerging demographic transition to small family sizes, and (3) how infertility mobilises cultural “technologies of reproduction”, and what these reveal about indigenous attitudes to reproduction and demography.

Référence

Heidi Colleran (Max Planck Institute), « Orientations to demography and history in Vanuatu », IAST Lunch Seminar, Toulouse : IAST, 29 juin 2021, 12h45–13h45, salle zoom.