Dr. Rupert Stasch

Biography

I am a sociocultural and linguistic anthropologist with a strong commitment to anthropological theory and its elaboration through close dialogue with ethnography. My research focuses on social relations mediated processes of representation, particularly visual representations and visual acts. I work on vision and allied communicative perceptual channels, aiming to improve anthropological understandings of processes of representation and the levels of practice typically examined through tools of semiotic symbolic theory. My regional interests include Indonesia, Melanesia, and the Pacific, and I have long-term fieldwork experience with the Korowai people of West Papua, Indonesia, where I became involved in the internationally famous mass media tourism industry. I write ethnographies on encounters between the Korowai, tourists, filmmakers, and magazine journalists. My book, 'Society Kinship Mourning West Papuan Place' (2009), is an ethnography that centers on the relations of the Korowai and makes forms of otherness a central focus of social bonds. I have explored topics such as landownership, political egalitarianism, domestic architecture, and various aspects of interpersonal relations. I engage with comparative theorization on levels of social life, looking into tourism and new articulations of indigenous societies in relation to national and international institutions. My work examines the culturally distinctive ways people understand otherness and the transformative processes of social life.

Research Interests