Challenging Audiences: Critical Ethnography in/for Oceania

The key thread I use to weave these contributions together is the politics of reception (or ‘audience’). Consequently, I invite readers to treat my contribution (somewhat unconventionally) more as a sample reading than as the collection’s conclusion. Following this thread, I hope to encourage you to resist approaching the foregoing arguments as separate and self-contained. Much is gained by ‘reading across’, whether or not an author makes reference to the others. A contribution’s explicit citations are only one of its inevitably sociable frames of reference (reflecting, perhaps, its author’s more conscious concerns). Other frames also influence readers’ interpretations. Clearly, the editors’ arrangement of the articles highlights particular relationships among them that might otherwise pass unremarked. But readers also bring interests and experiences to bear that authors and editors cannot anticipate. In any event, while persuasive readings are by no means ‘free’, they are underdetermined by particular authors’ intentions. I first survey the sense of critical ethnography in/for Oceania that informed my response to the papers when they were presented at meetings of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania and when I read them together for this collection. The second and third sections suggest what I gleaned from reading across.