Marie Durand

 

Education

2014: Phd in Art History, Sainsbury Research Unit, UEA, UK

2008: MA degree in Social Anthropology and Ethnography, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

2007: BA in Hungarian, INALCO, Paris.

2006: Museology degree, Ecole du Louvre, Paris.

2005: BA in History of Art, Ecole du Louvre, Paris.

Research Interests

Art, History and Anthropology of Vanuatu and more generally of the Pacific, Material Culture, Kastom, Techniques, Anthropology of food, Museum Collections, Archives

PhD Thesis:

The materiality of the kitchen house: histri, laen mo kakae on Mere Lava, northern Vanuatu.

This doctoral project focuses on the material culture related to the kitchen houses on Mere Lava, Banks Archipelago, north of Vanuatu. It draws upon 11 months of fieldwork in Vanuatu, undertaken in 2010-2011, as well as museum collections and historical archives, and hopes to contribute to debates about material culture and gender issues in Vanuatu and Melanesia more generally. Through the study of the technical processes of making and circulating material items linked to the kitchen houses on Mere Lava - food, baskets, wood carvings linked to food preparation, as well as the house in itself - the research is concerned with performative interactions between people and their productions. This will serve to further question the ways in which embodiments of gendered practices and of the related conceptual ideas are achieved, reproduced and continually re-negotiated in light of the broader history of the area. On the other hand, such research aims to contribute to issues surrounding people's management of the multiplicity inherent in material items in Vanuatu through socioeconomics of tambu, the rights and gender restrictions linked to the notion of kastom.

Womens gathering to scrape ne ngie nuts during the preparation of a funeral ceremony, Sere, Tasmat Village.