University of Adelaide

In September Ill give a talk at the University of Adelaide titled: “Moving Materialities: Words, Food, and Dance.” Abstract below: Recent anthropological approaches to body situate it as porous in an increasingly global environment of toxicity, ranging from fecal and pesticide exposure to the salt and sugar that permeate most global foods. Anthropologists of Christianity similarly situate the body as porous to God, supernatural forces and human emotions. Indigenous Oceanic epistemologies suggest that the body is a medium of knowledge that collapses material and immaterial dimensions of mediation. In the context of widespread cardiometabolic disorders in Samoa, Pentecostals create a stance towards this porosity by integrating attention to material toxicity and immaterial dimensions of religious life. Pentecostals attune to the body, to develop an explicit stance towards the interactions of immaterial and material to create a body that is a medium of knowledge about the human genesis of suffering. This acute attention to the human origins of sickness revolves around the foundational idea that God is the source of health and sickness is derived from human activity. This stance demonstrates that the body is more than a site of mediation, as notions of porosity suggest, but also a site of knowledge. This also shows enduring binaries between immaterial and material mediation that persist in diverse anthropological approaches to the body.