Journal articles on the topic 'Pedagogical discourse in Papua New Guinea'

What started as a movement to demand a distributive justice in mining revenue in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, the conflict turned into the struggle for secession. From 1970’s the demand for secession have been rife and despite early agreement for more autonomy and more mining revenue for the autonomous region, the demand never faded. Under Francis Ona’s Bougainville Revolutionary Army, the movement take a new heights. Bougainville Revolutionary Army took coercive measure to push the government to acknowledge their demands by taking over the mine at Panguna. Papua New Guinean government response was also combative and further exacerbate the issue. Papua New Guinean Defense Force involvement adding the issue of human rights into the discourse. This paper will seek to analyze the normative question surrounding the legitimacy of the right to secession in Bougainville Island. The protracted conflict has halted any form of development in the once the most prosperous province of Papua New Guinea and should Bougainville Island become independent, several challenges will be waiting for Bougainvilleans.

Abstract A phenomenon often termed “optional ergative marking” is found in a number of genetically unrelated languages. Yali, a Trans-New Guinea language spoken in West Papua, shows striking similarities to optional ergative systems as described in the literature. This paper focuses on the relation between agentivity and discourse prominence, and argues in favour of a systematic distinction between semantic and syntactic contexts as conditioning factors for optional ergative marking. It further provides new evidence for the close interplay of ergative marking and what has been termed “discourse prominence” in descriptions of some other languages and shows that in Yali, optional ergative marking operates on both the global and the local level of discourse.

AbstractOwnership is often understood merely as a function of social relations, that is, it emerges merely because of the relations between people with respect to the things that they own. Concomitantly ownership is also seen as being dependent upon creativity to bring its force into motion. Far from dismissing such a view of ownership, it is acknowledged that such a view possibly comes from a world that is preoccupied with creativity. This discussion aims to show a particular kind of dialectic between creativity and ownership that underlies discourses about intellectual property especially in countries like Papua New Guinea. Through an ethnographic concern with personal names and their attendant claims to ownership and creativity, this paper aims to show how two trajectories of ownership co-exist in a Papua New Guinea society.

INTRODUCTION: Social work education was introduced in the early 1970s in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and is still developing. Subsequently, its teaching and learning approaches have developed and, significantly, applied with greater flexibility than a standardised format although contemporary western methods predominate. METHOD: The centrality of the PNG context for culturally relevant social work education and the paradigms of pedagogy in field education are discussed. PNG worldviews of teaching and learning have links to similar educational and practice perspectives from the Melanesian region, Pacific and other relevant non-western contexts.CONCLUSIONS: PNG’s ways of teaching and learning are yet to become formally integrated into contemporary social work education due to issues of credibility, relevance and quality assurance regarding professional social work values. The article argues for substantial integration and utilisation of traditional PNG-specific methods of teaching and learning in the delivery of social work education at the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) as important steps in developing the profession in the country. Indigenous local knowledge and practices of teaching and learning should become integrated into formal classroom pedagogical strategies in social work.

AbstractScripted as a sustainable alternative to terrestrial mining, the licence for the world’s first commercial deep-sea mining (DSM) site was issued in Papua New Guinea in 2011 to extract copper and gold from a deposit situated 1600 m below the surface of the Bismarck Sea. Whilst DSM’s proponents locate it as emergent part of a blue economy narrative, its critics point to the ecological and economic uncertainty that characterises the proposed practice. Yet, due its extreme geography, DSM is also profoundly elusive to direct human experience and thus presents a challenge to forms of resistance against an industry extolled as having ‘no human impact’. Against this background, this paper analyses the ways in which ‘blue degrowth’—as a distinct form of counter-narrative—might be ‘performed’, and which imagined (and alternative) geographies are invoked accordingly. To do this it critically reflects upon 2 years of participatory research in the Duke of York Islands focusing on three, community-developed methods of resisting DSM. Practices of counter mapping, sculpture and participatory drama all sought to ‘perform’ the deep-ocean environment imagined as relational whilst simultaneously questioning the very notion of ‘economy’ central to the discourse of ‘blue growth’.

There is no denying that human rights play an integral role in our social and legal existence. However, contemporary developments of rights-based discourse have become preclusive to cultural accommodation. Drawing on a case-study of the application of Western conceptions of human rights in Papua New Guinea, this work will illustrate Mutua’s argument that the dissemination of rights-based discourse through hegemonic voices can undermine the universality and effective application of rights-based doctrines in non-Western contexts. This article will thus argue that informing rights-based discourse with local-cultural circumstances and social values is necessary for the genuine achievement of ‘universal’ human rights.

Indigeneity is becoming a more important way for the rural communities of Papua New Guinea (PNG) to represent identity, as it is in many other parts of the world. Anthropologists have largely been critical of the essentialism of indigenous identities, and describe indigeneity as an emerging consciousness of the denial of sovereignty. I argue that Dumont’s distinction between dialectic and differentiation as alternative ways to think about social wholes helps to sort through contemporary discussion of the emergence of indigeneity. An account of indigenous peoples’ claims as a dialectic of recognition leaves many questions unanswered; Dumont explains why and suggests an alternative path. The case of Auhelawa, a society of PNG, illustrates how a self-conception rooted in territory involves a transformation of the cultural construction of personhood. Auhelawa indigenous identity not only draws upon colonial discourses of race, but upon a distinct ideology of names as individuating labels. The discourse of kinship, by contrast, provides a context for people to imagine a wide-ranging network of relationships between groups based on the power of lineage names to connect people to remote relatives in other places. This conflict of discursive frameworks indicates a deeper conflict between different concepts of the person, an issue highlighted by Dumont as well as his forebears, Mauss and Durkheim.

This paper uses the engagement system of appraisal theory to analyze the news about APEC summit held in Papua New Guinea from the Washington Post, in which the proportion of dialogue expansion and dialogue contraction of engagement resources is 47 and 53, and the contraction resources are slightly higher than the expansion resources. In order to explain that in news discourse, the author refutes other viewpoints while actively expressing his views on the incidents, and also extracts other viewpoints that have reached the objective and reliable information, thus convincing potential readers.

This paper examines the role of literacy as it is practiced in a multilingual community on the Gazelle Peninsula in East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea. Ethnographic observational fieldwork and semi-structured interviews reveal how literacy plays out in six common domains of everyday life: public discourse, home, school, church, health care, and government. Following Street (1984, 1995), an ideological framework is used to explore the unique cultural context of literacy in this community. It is found that: (a) the community venerates external standards of literacy, at the expense of local practices; nevertheless, (b) literacy practices reflect the multilingual skills of the general population; and (c) literacy events provide an opportunity for oral discourse and social bonding. It is also argued that the community would benefit if local literacy practices were recognised and validated on their own merit.

As the Global North experiences a real or manufactured crisis in asylum, deterrence has become the central plank in border control policies. Following a resurgence of boat arrivals and faced with serious overcrowding in detention centers and a spate of drownings, the Australian government returned to the use of offshore detention for asylum seekers. In this article, the official media releases of the major political parties from the period surrounding the reopening of detention facilities on Nauru and Papua New Guinea are subject to systematic discourse analysis. This reveals a range of deterrence scripts that we have labeled “neoliberal deterrence,” “classical deterrence,” and an “ethic of care.” The resuscitation of the deterrence script in this second incarnation of Australian offshore processing arguably reveals increasingly nuanced and combative elements. The article details how these scripts make an important contribution to global immigration governance, which is presently incapable of thinking beyond deterrence in its various forms.

This article is primarily a theoretical piece that uses a model of mobile learning, the FRAME model (Koole 2009), to explore a mobile teacher-training project that took place in Papua New Guinea: the SMS Story. The author takes a sociomaterial perspective, drawing upon Barad's agential realism and Sørensen's multiplicity perspective. As the author explores the “intra-actions” of the social, learner, and technological aspects of the FRAME model, diffraction patterns arise; in other words, spaces of social and material possibilities, constraints, and tensions come into view. New ethical questions emerge regarding whose perspectives and whose practices should come to matter in pedagogical practices. This article is intended for qualitative researchers, teachers, and teacher educators who are interested in alternative ways of thinking about the entanglement of mobile technology, humans, and materialities in educational contexts.

AbstractThis paper explores the role of oral language and representations in negotiating mathematical understanding. The data were gathered from two Indigenous Australian classrooms in Northern Queensland. The first classroom, a Year 6/7 consisted of 15 students whose ages range from 10 years to 12 years with eight being Aboriginal, six from Torres Strait and one from Papua New Guinea. The second classroom, a Years 4/5/6 classroom consisted of 14 Year 3/4/5 students, with eight being Aboriginal and six of Torres Strait Island origin. Both teachers had been working in this context for up to five years and were perceived by both the school community and local educational consultants as exemplary teachers of Indigenous Australian students. Data were gathered from conversations with the two teachers, and from videos of their lessons especially designed to illuminate issues they negotiate on a day-to-day basis when teaching mathematics. The results indicate that explicit consideration needs to be given to the careful development of precise mathematical language and concrete mathematical materials, the use of questioning in establishing classroom discourse, and the recognition that many of these classrooms are bilingual.

The Australian government has spent over a billion dollars a year on managing offshore detention (Budget 2018–2019). Central to this offshore management was the transference and mandatory detention of asylum seekers in facilities that sit outside Australia’s national sovereignty, in particular on Manus Island (Papua New Guinea) and Nauru. As a state-sanctioned spatial aberration meant to deter asylum seekers arriving by boat, offshore detention has resulted in a raft of legal and policy actions that are reshaping the modern state-centric understanding of the national space. It has raised questions of sovereignty, of moral, ethical and legal obligations, of national security and humanitarian responsibilities, and of nationalism and belonging. Using a sample of Twitter users on Manus during the closure of the Manus Island detention centre in October–November 2017, this paper examines how asylum seekers and refugees have negotiated and defined the offshore detention space and how through the use of social media they have created a profound disruption to the state discourse on offshore detention. The research is based on the premise that asylum seekers’ use social media in a number of disruptive ways, including normalising the presence of asylum seekers in the larger global phenomena of migration, humanising asylum seekers in the face of global discourses of dehumanisation, ensuring visibility by confirming the conditions of detention, highlighting Australia’s human rights violations and obligations, and challenging the government discourse on asylum seekers and offshore detention. Social media is both a tool and a vehicle by which asylum seekers on Manus Island could effect that disruption.

- Peter Boomgaard, Christine Dobbin, Asian entrepreneurial minorities; Conjoint communities in the making of the world economy, 1570-1940. Richmond: Curzon Press, 1996, xiii + 246 pp. [Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Monograph Series 71.] - Ian Brown, Fukuda Shozo, With sweat and abacus; Economic roles of Southeast Asian Chinese on the eve of World War II, edited by George Hicks. Singapore: Select Books, 1995, xii + 246 pp. - Ian Brown, George Hicks, Chinese organisations in Southeast Asia in the 1930s. Singapore: Select Books, 1996, xv + 168 pp. - Matthew I. Cohen, Laurie J. Sears, Shadows of empire; Colonial discourse and Javanese tales. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1996, xxi + 349 pp. - J. van Goor, Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the age of commerce 1450-1680. Vol. II: Expansion and crisis. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1993, xv + 390 pp. - J. van Goor, Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the age of commerce 1450-1680. Vol. I: The lands below the winds. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1988, xvi + 275 pp. - David Henley, Saya S. Shiraishi, Young heroes; The Indnesian family in politics. Ithaca/New York: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1997, 183 pp. [Studies on Southeast Asia 22.] - Gerrit Knaap, P. Jobse, Bronnen betreffende de Midden-Molukken 1900-1942. Den Haag: Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis, 1997. 4 volumes. Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatiën, Kleine Serie, 81, 82, 83, 84. Volume 1 bewerkt door P. Jobse, 2 en 3 door Ch.F. van Fraassen, 4 door Ch.F van Fraassen en P. Jobse. xii + 578, xii + 578, xii + 711, x + 655, xi + 261 pp., Ch. F. van Fraassen (eds.) - Indro Nugroho-Heins, Clara Brakel-Papenhuyzen, Classical Javanese dance; The Surakarta tradition and its terminology. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1995, xi + 252 pp. [Verhandelingen 155.] - László Sluimers, Shigeru Sato, War, nationalism and peasants; Java under the Japanese occupation, 1942-1945. Armonk, New York: Sharpe, St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1994. xx + 280 pp. [ASAA Southeast Asia Publication Series.] - Karel Steenbrink, P.N. Holtrop, Een bundel opstellen over de Zending van de Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland ter gelegenheid van de honderdjarige hedenking van de Synode van Middelburg 1896. Kampen: Werkgroep voor de Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Zending en Overzeese Kerken, 1996, 199 pp. - Jaap Timmer, Aletta Biersack, Papuan borderlands; Huli, Duna, and Ipili perspectives on the Papua New Guinea Highlands. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995, xii + 440 pp., bibliography, index.

This extended abstract details the process of constructing an annotated XML corpus suitable for quantitative analysis of morphosyntactic and phonetic phenomena in the Eibela language of Papua New Guinea. Preliminary results will also be included, which investigate the semantic, phonetic, and discourse correlates of argument realization. The goal of this paper is to illustrate how legacy materials can be enriched and investigated using computational methodologies including forced alignment of phonetic segments using bulk processing of data in Python and R, the Montreal Forced Aligner (MFA), and morphosyntactic annotation developed as part of the Multilingual Corpus of Annotated Spoken Texts (Multi-CAST).

Food porn dalam dua sampai tiga tahun terakhir ini terhitung sejak 2014 menjadi sangat viral disosial media. Food porn merupakan hashtag yang dibuat di Instagram untuk menandai foto yang menampilkan makanan dengan teknik photography yang menampilkan kelezatan makanan tersebut dari dekat. Food porn menjadi sebuah tema yang diangkat dalam pembuatan karya seni keramik ekspresi ini dengan mengambil objek donat dan bulu babi yang juga mengkhawatirkan keadaannya akibat eksploitasi yang terlalu berlebihan sehingga keberadaannya hampil punah. Kedua objek tersebut menjadi perwakilan yang akan digabungkan dengan bentuk-bentuk coral. Kelautan Indonesia yang sangat luas dan memiliki keindahan coral yang sangat luar biasa menjadikan Indonesia sebagai target spot penyelaman paling indah didunia, sama halnya seperti yang dikatakan Kall Muller (1999: 15) “The Island of Indonesia spread in a wide arc, more than 5.000 kilometer long, from mainland Southeast Asia to Papua New Guinea. Dotted with volcanoes, covered with thrick tropical vegetation and bright green rice fields, and surrounded by coral reefs, the Indonesian archipelago is one of the world’s most beautiful places”. Wacana-wacana ini menjadi latar belakang paling mendasar yang kemudian akan diolah dan dijadikan bahan ide pembuatan keramik ekspresi.Pembuatan karya seni ini dimulai dari pengeksplorasian wacana, bentuk, dan konsep yang kemudian diolah dan dijadikan sketsa rancangan. Selanjutnya untuk mewujudkan karya seni, pemilihan bahan menjadi aspek paling penting untuk kelangsungan prosesnya. Pembuatan karya ini menggunakan tanah stoneware Sukabumi dan Pacitan yang dicampur dengan perbandingan 1:1 untuk mendapatkan kekuatan dan warna yang cerah. Kemudian pengerjaan selanjutnya adalah membuat model yang akan dibuat untuk cetakan. Cetakan dibuat dengan gpsum dan dilakukan slip casting dengan tanah yang sudah diolah sebelumnya. Pendekorasian dilakukan dengan teknik krawang, pilin dan pinch untuk selanjutnya dikeringkan dan dibakar biskuit. Selanjutnya glasir dicampur dengan stain dan diaplikasikan kedalam badan keramik dengan teknik semprot menggunakan spraygun dan kompresor lalu dibakar glasir dengan suhun 1200o C. Penciptaan karya seni ini juga diperkuat dengan beberapa teori seperti : teori penciptaan, ekspresi dan art and synesthesia.Hasil karya ini merupakan sebuah perspektive challenging dari seniman untuk dipublikasikan kepada audience. Penguatan teori dengan art and synesthesia merupakan sebuah cara untuk membuktikan bahwa karya seni ini tidak hanya bisa dinikmati dengan satu indera saja, namun keterikatan antara atu indera dengan indera lainnya. Sehingga apabila hal ini secara maksimal mampu ilakukan kemudian dapat diterapkan sebagai media untuk terapi penyembuhan trypophobia karena sedikit banyak tekstur yang diaplikasikan merupakan perwujudan dari trypophobia. Since 2014, foodporn phenomena became famous and going viral on social media. Food porn is one of Instagram’s hashtag that showing a close up mesmerizing food photography. Foodporn being adapted as a theme for this expression ceramics artwork with doughnut and almost extinct sea urchins as the main objects. The condition of sea urchins are very endanger because of excessive exploitation. Those two objects will be represent as a coral shape.Indonesia became the most huge maritime nation that having a billion beautiful coral. Indonesia became a most beautiful diving spot, Kall Muller said (1999:15) “The Island of Indonesia spread in a wide arc, more than 5.000 kilometer long, from mainland Southeast Asia to Papua New Guinea. Dotted with volcanoes, covered with thrick tropical vegetation and bright green rice fields, and surrounded by coral reefs, the Indonesian archipelago is one of the world’s most beautiful places”. The text above write as fundamental background and basic idea to making this expression ceramics artwork.This artwork start with discourse exploration, shape, and concept that elaborate into sketch design. On second step, material become the most important aspect to creating this artwork. This artwork utilize a Sukabumi and Pacitan’s stoneware soil. It mixing with ratio 1:1 to have a strong and bright color. Third step is making a model for the mold. Mold made by gypsum and slip casting with a soil mixing. Decorating conducted with cire perdue technique, coil, and pinch and then be drained and bisque firing. On the next step, glaze will be mixed with stain and applied in to ceramic’s body with a spraygun and compressor. Then glaze burned with 1200o C. This artwork also strengthed by some theory, namely; the theory of creation, expression, art and synesthesia.This artwork is a form of artist’s challenging perspective for being publish to the audience. Strengthed by art and synthesia theory, this artwork is one of the way to prove that artwork can be felt not only one sense, but connection between one with another senses. Thereby, if this artwork can be applied maximally, it might have a chance to be a new theraphy methodology for a trypophobia healing, because most texture that applied in this artwork is the embodiment of trypophobia. Keyword : Foodporn, Expression Ceramics, Texture

IntroductionThe debate about the responsibility of museums to respect Indigenous peoples’ rights (Kelly and Gordon; Butts) has caught our attention on the basis of our previous research experience with regard to the protection of the tangible and intangible heritage of the San (former hunter gatherers) in Southern Africa (Martin and Vermeylen; Vermeylen, Contextualising; Vermeylen, Life Force; Vermeylen et al.; Vermeylen, Land Rights). This paper contributes to the critical debate about curatorial practices and the recovery of Indigenous peoples’ cultural practices and explores how museums can be transformed into cultural centres that “decolonise” their objects while simultaneously providing social agency to marginalised groups such as the San. Indigenous MuseumTraditional methods of displaying Indigenous heritage are now regarded with deep suspicion and resentment by Indigenous peoples (Simpson). A number of related issues such as the appropriation, ownership and repatriation of culture together with the treatment of sensitive and sacred materials and the stereotyping of Indigenous peoples’ identity (Carter; Simpson) have been identified as the main problems in the debate about museum curatorship and Indigenous heritage. The poignant question remains whether the concept of a classical museum—in the sense of how it continues to classify, value and display non-Western artworks—will ever be able to provide agency to Indigenous peoples as long as “their lives are reduced to an abstract set of largely arbitrary material items displayed without much sense of meaning” (Stanley 3). Indeed, as Salvador has argued, no matter how much Indigenous peoples have been involved in the planning and implementation of an exhibition, some issues remain problematic. First, there is the problem of representation: who speaks for the group; who should make decisions and under what circumstances; when is it acceptable for “outsiders” to be involved? Furthermore, Salvador raises another area of contestation and that is the issue of intention. As we agree with Salvador, no matter how good the intention to include Indigenous peoples in the curatorial practices, the fact that Indigenous peoples may have a (political) perspective about the exhibition that differs from the ideological foundation of the museum enterprise, is, indeed, a challenge that must not be overlooked in the discussion of the inclusive museum. This relates to, arguably, one of the most important challenges in respect to the concept of an Indigenous museum: how to present the past and present without creating an essentialising “Other”? As Stanley summarises, the modernising agenda of the museum, including those museums that claim to be Indigenous museums, continues to be heavily embedded in the belief that traditional cultural beliefs, practices and material manifestations must be saved. In other words, exhibitions focusing on Indigenous peoples fail to show them as dynamic, living cultures (Simpson). This raises the issue that museums recreate the past (Sepúlveda dos Santos) while Indigenous peoples’ interests can be best described “in terms of contemporaneity” (Bolton qtd. in Stanley 7). According to Bolton, Indigenous peoples’ interest in museums can be best understood in terms of using these (historical) collections and institutions to address contemporary issues. Or, as Sepúlveda dos Santos argues, in order for museums to be a true place of memory—or indeed a true place of recovery—it is important that the museum makes the link between the past and contemporary issues or to use its objects in such a way that these objects emphasize “the persistence of lived experiences transmitted through generations” (29). Under pressure from Indigenous rights movements, the major aim of some museums is now reconciliation with Indigenous peoples which, ultimately, should result in the return of the cultural objects to the originators of these objects (Kelly and Gordon). Using the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA) as an illustration, we argue that the whole debate of returning or recovering Indigenous peoples’ cultural objects to the original source is still embedded in a discourse that emphasises the mummified aspect of these materials. As Harding argues, NAGPRA is provoking an image of “native Americans as mere passive recipients of their cultural identity, beholden to their ancestors and the museum community for the re-creation of their cultures” (137) when it defines cultural patrimony as objects having ongoing historical, traditional or cultural importance, central to the Native American group or culture itself. According to Harding (2005) NAGPRA’s dominating narrative focuses on the loss, alienation and cultural genocide of the objects as long as these are not returned to their originators. The recovery or the return of the objects to their “original” culture has been applauded as one of the most liberating and emancipatory events in recent years for Indigenous peoples. However, as we have argued elsewhere, the process of recovery needs to do more than just smother the object in its past; recovery can only happen when heritage or tradition is connected to the experience of everyday life. One way of achieving this is to move away from the objectification of Indigenous peoples’ cultures. ObjectificationIn our exploratory enquiry about new museum practices our attention was drawn to a recent debate about ownership and personhood within the context of museology (Busse; Baker; Herle; Bell; Geismar). Busse, in particular, makes the point that in order to reformulate curatorial practices it is important to redefine the concept and meaning of objects. While the above authors do not question the importance of the objects, they all argue that the real importance does not lie in the objects themselves but in the way these objects embody the physical manifestation of social relations. The whole idea that objects matter because they have agency and efficacy, and as such become a kind of person, draws upon recent anthropological theorising by Gell and Strathern. Furthermore, we have not only been inspired by Gell’s and Strathern’s approaches that suggests that objects are social persons, we have also been influenced by Appadurai’s and Kopytoff’s defining of objects as biographical agents and therefore valued because of the associations they have acquired throughout time. We argue that by framing objects in a social network throughout its lifecycle we can avoid the recurrent pitfalls of essentialising objects in terms of their “primitive” or “traditional” (aesthetic) qualities and mystifying the identity of Indigenous peoples as “noble savages.” Focusing more on the social network that surrounds a particular object opens up new avenues of enquiry as to how, and to what extent, museums can become more inclusive vis-à-vis Indigenous peoples. It allows moving beyond the current discourse that approaches the history of the (ethnographic) museum from only one dominant perspective. By tracing an artwork throughout its lifecycle a new metaphor can be discovered; one that shows that Indigenous peoples have not always been victims, but maybe more importantly it allows us to show a more complex narrative of the object itself. It gives us the space to counterweight some of the discourses that have steeped Indigenous artworks in a “postcolonial” framework of sacredness and mythical meaning. This is not to argue that it is not important to be reminded of the dangers of appropriating other cultures’ heritage, but we would argue that it is equally important to show that approaching a story from a one-sided perspective will create a dualism (Bush) and reducing the differences between different cultures to a dualistic opposition fails to recognise the fundamental areas of agency (Morphy). In order for museums to enliven and engage with objects, they must become institutions that emphasise a relational approach towards displaying and curating objects. In the next part of this paper we will explore to what extent an online museum could progressively facilitate the process of providing agency to the social relations that link objects, persons, environments and memories. As Solanilla argues, what has been described as cybermuseology may further transform the museum landscape and provide an opportunity to challenge some of the problems identified above (e.g. essentialising practices). Or to quote the museologist Langlais: “The communication and interaction possibilities offered by the Web to layer information and to allow exploration of multiple meanings are only starting to be exploited. In this context, cybermuseology is known as a practice that is knowledge-driven rather than object-driven, and its main goal is to disseminate knowledge using the interaction possibilities of Information Communication Technologies” (Langlais qtd. in Solanilla 108). One thing which shows promise and merits further exploration is the idea of transforming the act of exhibiting ethnographic objects accompanied by texts and graphics into an act of cyber discourse that allows Indigenous peoples through their own voices and gestures to involve us in their own history. This is particularly the case since Indigenous peoples are using technologies, such as the Internet, as a new medium through which they can recuperate their histories, land rights, knowledge and cultural heritage (Zimmerman et al.). As such, new technology has played a significant role in the contestation and formation of Indigenous peoples’ current identity by creating new social and political spaces through visual and narrative cultural praxis (Ginsburg).Online MuseumsIt has been acknowledged for some time that a presence on the Web might mitigate the effects of what has been described as the “unassailable voice” in the recovery process undertaken by museums (Walsh 77). However, a museum’s online engagement with an Indigenous culture may have significance beyond undercutting the univocal authority of a museum. In the case of the South African National Gallery it was charged with challenging the extent to which it represents entrenched but unacceptable political ideologies. Online museums may provide opportunities in the conservation and dissemination of “life stories” that give an account of an Indigenous culture as it is experienced (Solanilla 105). We argue that in engaging with Indigenous cultural heritage a distinction needs to be drawn between data and the cognitive capacity to learn, “which enables us to extrapolate and learn new knowledge” (Langlois 74). The problem is that access to data about an Indigenous culture does not necessarily lead to an understanding of its knowledge. It has been argued that cybermuseology loses the essential interpersonal element that needs to be present if intangible heritage is understood as “the process of making sense that is generally transmitted orally and through face-to-face experience” (Langlois 78). We agree that the online museum does not enable a reality to be reproduced (Langlois 78).This does not mean that cybermuseology should be dismissed. Instead it provides the opportunity to construct a valuable, but completely new, experience of cultural knowledge (Langlois 78). The technology employed in cybermuseology provides the means by which control over meaning may, at least to some extent, be dispersed (Langlois 78). In this way online museums provide the opportunity for Indigenous peoples to challenge being subjected to manipulation by one authoritative museological voice. One of the ways this may be achieved is through interactivity by enabling the use of social tagging and folksonomy (Solanilla 110; Trant 2). In these processes keywords (tags) are supplied and shared by visitors as a means of accessing museum content. These tags in turn give rise to a classification system (folksonomy). In the context of an online museum engaging with an Indigenous culture we have reservations about the undifferentiated interactivity on the part of all visitors. This issue may be investigated further by examining how interactivity relates to communication. Arguably, an online museum is engaged in communicating Indigenous cultural heritage because it helps to keep it alive and pass it on to others (Langlois 77). However, enabling all visitors to structure online access to that culture may be detrimental to the communication of knowledge that might otherwise occur. The narratives by which Indigenous cultures, rather than visitors, order access to information about their cultures may lead to the communication of important knowledge. An illustration of the potential of this approach is the work Sharon Daniel has been involved with, which enables communities to “produce knowledge and interpret their own experience using media and information technologies” (Daniel, Palabras) partly by means of generating folksonomies. One way in which such issues may be engaged with in the context of online museums is through the argument that database and narrative in such new media objects are opposed to each other (Manovich, New Media 225). A new media work such as an online museum may be understood to be comprised of a database and an interface to that database. A visitor to an online museum may only move through the content of the database by following those paths that have been enabled by those who created the museum (Manovich, New Media 227). In short it is by means of the interface provided to the viewer that the content of the database is structured into a narrative (Manovich, New Media: 226). It is possible to understand online museums as constructions in which narrative and database aspects are emphasized to varying degrees for users. There are a variety of museum projects in which the importance of the interface in creating a narrative interface has been acknowledged. Goldblum et al. describe three examples of websites in which interfaces may be understood as, and explicitly designed for, carrying meaning as well as enabling interactivity: Life after the Holocaust; Ripples of Genocide; and Yearbook 2006.As with these examples, we suggest that it is important there be an explicit engagement with the significance of interface(s) for online museums about Indigenous peoples. The means by which visitors access content is important not only for the way in which visitors interact with material, but also as to what is communicated about, culture. It has been suggested that the curator’s role should be moved away from expertly representing knowledge toward that of assisting people outside the museum to make “authored statements” within it (Bennett 11). In this regard it seems to us that involvement of Indigenous peoples with the construction of the interface(s) to online museums is of considerable significance. Pieterse suggests that ethnographic museums should be guided by a process of self-representation by the “others” portrayed (Pieterse 133). Moreover it should not be forgotten that, because of the separation of content and interface, it is possible to have access to a database of material through more than one interface (Manovich, New Media 226-7). Online museums provide a means by which the artificial homogenization of Indigenous peoples may be challenged.We regard an important potential benefit of an online museum as the replacement of accessing material through the “unassailable voice” with the multiplicity of Indigenous voices. A number of ways to do this are suggested by a variety of new media artworks, including those that employ a database to rearrange information to reveal underlying cultural positions (Paul 100). Paul discusses the work of, amongst others, George Legrady. She describes how it engages with the archive and database as sites that record culture (104-6). Paul specifically discusses Legrady’s work Slippery Traces. This involved viewers navigating through more than 240 postcards. Viewers of work were invited to “first chose one of three quotes appearing on the screen, each of which embodies a different perspective—anthropological, colonialist, or media theory—and thus provides an interpretive angle for the experience of the projects” (104-5). In the same way visitors to an online museum could be provided with a choice of possible Indigenous voices by which its collection might be experienced. We are specifically interested in the implications that such approaches have for the way in which online museums could engage with film. Inspired by Basu’s work on reframing ethnographic film, we see the online museum as providing the possibility of a platform to experiment with new media art in order to expose the meta-narrative(s) about the politics of film making. As Basu argues, in order to provoke a feeling of involvement with the viewer, it is important that the viewer becomes aware “of the plurality of alternative readings/navigations that they might have made” (105). As Weinbren has observed, where a fixed narrative pathway has been constructed by a film, digital technology provides a particularly effective means to challenge it. It would be possible to reveal the way in which dominant political interests regarding Indigenous cultures have been asserted, such as for example in the popular film The Gods Must Be Crazy. New media art once again provides some interesting examples of the way ideology, that might otherwise remain unclear, may be exposed. Paul describes the example of Jennifer and Kevin McCoy’s project How I learned. The work restructures a television series Kung Fu by employing “categories such as ‘how I learned about blocking punches,’ ‘how I learned about exploiting workers,’ or ‘how I learned to love the land’” (Paul 103) to reveal in greater clarity, than otherwise might be possible, the cultural stereotypes used in the visual narratives of the program (Paul 102-4). We suggest that such examples suggest the ways in which online museums could work to reveal and explore the existence not only of meta-narratives expressed by museums as a whole, but also the means by which they are realised within existing items held in museum collections.ConclusionWe argue that the agency for such reflective moments between the San, who have been repeatedly misrepresented or underrepresented in exhibitions and films, and multiple audiences, may be enabled through the generation of multiple narratives within online museums. We would like to make the point that, first and foremost, the theory of representation must be fully understood and acknowledged in order to determine whether, and how, modes of online curating are censorious. As such we see online museums having the potential to play a significant role in illuminating for both the San and multiple audiences the way that any form of representation or displaying restricts the meanings that may be recovered about Indigenous peoples. ReferencesAppadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986. Bal, Mieke. “Exhibition as Film.” Exhibition Experiments. Ed. Sharon Macdonald and Paul Basu. Malden: Blackwell Publishing 2007. 71-93. Basu, Paul. “Reframing Ethnographic Film.” Rethinking Documentary. Eds. Thomas Austin and Wilma de Jong. Maidenhead: Open U P, 2008. 94-106.Barringer, Tim, and Tom Flynn. Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum. London: Routledge, 1998. Baxandall, Michael. "Exhibiting Intention: Some Preconditions of the Visual Display of Culturally Purposeful Objects." Exhibiting Cultures. Ed. Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine. Washington: Smithsonian Institution P. 1991. 33-41.Bell, Joshua. “Promiscuous Things: Perspectives on Cultural Property through Photographs in the Purari Delta of Papa New Guinea.” International Journal of Cultural Property 15 (2008): 123-39.Bennett, Tony. “The Political Rationality of the Museum.” Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture 3 No.1 (1990). 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/3.1/Bennett.html›. Bolton, Lissant. “The Object in View: Aborigines, Melanesians and Museums.” Emplaced Myth: Space, Narrative and Knowledge in Australia and Papua New Guinea. Eds. Alan Rumsey & James Weiner. Honolulu: U of Hawai`i P. 2001. 215-32. Bush, Martin. “Shifting Sands: Museum Representations of Science and Indigenous Knowledge Traditions.” Open Museum Journal 7 (2005). 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://archive.amol.org.au/craft/omjournal/volume7/docs/MBush_ab.asp?ID=›.Busse, Mark. “Museums and the Things in Them Should Be Alive.” International Journal of Cultural Property 15 (2008): 189-200.Butts, David. “Māori and Museums: the Politics of Indigenous Recognition.” Museums, Society and Inequality. Ed. Richard Sandell. London: Routledge, 2002. 225-43.Casey, Dawn. “Culture Wars: Museums, Politics and Controversy.” Open Museum Journal 6 (2003). 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://archive.amol.org.au/omj/volume6/casey.pdf›.Carter, J. “Museums and Indigenous Peoples in Canada.” Museums and the Appropriation of Culture. Ed. Susan Pearce. London: Athlone P, 1994. 213-33.Carolin, Clare, and Cathy Haynes. “The Politics of Display: Ann-Sofi Sidén’s Warte Mal!, Art History and Social Documentary.” Exhibition Experiments. Eds. Sharon Macdonald and Paul Basu. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. 154-74.Cooper, Jonathan. “Beyond the On-line Museum: Participatory Virtual Exhibitions.” Museums and the Web 2006: Proceedings. Eds. Jennifer Trant and David Bearman. Albuquerque: Archives & Museum Informatics, 2006. 8 Oct. 2008 ‹www.archimuse.com/mw2006/papers/cooper/cooper.html›.Daniel, Sharon. “The Database: An Aesthetics of Dignity.” Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow. Ed. Victoria Vesner. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. 142-82.Daniel, Sharon, and Casa Segura. “Need_ X_ Change.” 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://arts.ucsc.edu/sdaniel/need/›.Daniel, Sharon. “Palabras” 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://palabrastranquilas.ucsc.edu/›.Daniel, Sharon, and Erik Loyer. “Public Secrets.” Vectors. Winter (2007). 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://vectors.usc.edu/index.php?page=7&projectId=57›.Dietz, Steve. “Curating (on) the Web.” Museums and the Web 1998: Proceedings. Eds. Jennifer Trant and David Bearman. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics, 1998. 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://www.archimuse.com/mw98/papers/dietz/dietz_curatingtheweb.html›.Dietz, Steve. “Telling Stories: Procedural Authorship and Extracting Meanings from Museum Databases.” Museums and the Web 1999: Proceedings. Eds. Jennifer Trant and David Bearman. New Orleans: Archives & Museum Informatics, 1999. 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://www.archimuse.com/mw99/papers/dietz/dietz.html›.Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1998.Geismar, Haidy. (2008) “Cultural Property, Museums, and the Pacific: Reframing the Debates.” International Journal of Cultural Property 15: 109-22.Ginsburg, Faye. “Resources of Hope: Learning from the Local in a Transnational Era.” Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World. Ed. Claire Smith & Graeme Ward. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 2000. 27-47.Goldblum, Josh, Adele O’Dowd, and Traci Sym. “Considerations and Strategies for Creating Interactive Narratives.” Museums and the Web 2007: Proceedings. Ed. Jennifer Trant and David Bearman. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics, 2007. 8 Oct. 2008 ‹www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/goldblum/goldblum.html›.Guenther, Matthias. “Contemporary Bushman Art, Identity Politics, and the Primitive Discourse.” The Politics of Egalitarianism: Theory and Practice. Ed. Jacqueline Solway. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006. 159-88. Harding, Sarah. “Culture, Commodification, and Native American Cultural Patrimony.” Rethinking Commodification: Cases and Readings in Law and Culture. Ed. Martha Ertman and Joan Williams. New York: New York U P, 2005. 137-63.Herle, Anita. “Relational Objects: Connecting People and Things through Pasifika Styles.” International Journal of Cultural Property 15 (2008): 159-79.Hoopes, John. “The Future of the Past: Archaeology and Anthropology on the World Wide Web.” Archives and Museum Informatics 11 (1997): 87-105.“South African National Gallery.” Iziko: Museums of Cape Town. 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://www.iziko.org.za/iziko/ourname.html›.Jones, Anna. “Exploding Canons: The Anthropology of Museums.” Annual Review of Anthropology 22 (1993): 201-20. Kelly, Lynda, and Phil Gordon. “Developing a Community of Practice: Museums and Reconciliation in Australia.” Museums, Society and Inequality. Ed. Richard Sandell. London: Routledge, 2002. 153-74.Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Ed. Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1986. 64-91. Kreps, Christina. Theorising Cultural Heritage. Indigenous Curation as Intangible Cultural Heritage: Thoughts on the Relevance of the 2003 UNESCO Convention. Washington: Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, 2005.Langlois, Dominique. “Cybermuseology and Intangible Cultural Heritage.” Intersection Conference 2005. York U: Toronto, 2005. 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://yorku.ca/topia/docs/conference/langlais.pdf›.“Life after the Holocaust.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/life_after_holocaust/›.Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT P, 2001.———. Making Art of Databases. Rotterdam: V2_Publishing/NAi Publishers, 2003.Martin, George, and Saskia Vermeylen. “Intellectual Property, Indigenous Knowledge, and Biodiversity.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 16 (2005): 27-48. Martínez, David. “Re-visioning the Hopi Fourth World: Dan Namingha, Indigenous Modernism, and the Hopivotskwani.” Art History 29 (2006): 145-72. McGee, Julie. “Restructuring South African Museums: Reality and Rhetoric within Cape Town.” New Museum Theory and Practice: An Introduction. Ed. Janet Marstine. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 178-99.McTavish, Lianne. “Visiting the Virtual Museum: Art and Experience Online.” New Museum Theory and Practice: An Introduction. Ed. Janet Marstine. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 226-45.Morphy, Howard. “Elite Art for Cultural Elites: Adding Value to Indigenous Arts.” Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World. Ed. Claire Smith and Graeme Ward. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 2000. 129- 43.Paul, Christiane. “The Database as System and Cultural Form: Anatomies of Cultural Narratives.” Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow. Ed. Victoria Vesner. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. 95-109.Pearce, Susan. Museums and the Appropriation of Culture. London: Athlone P, 1994.Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. “Multiculturalism and Museums: Discourse about Others in the Age of Globalisation.” Theory, Culture & Society 14. 4 (1997): 123-46.“Ripples of Genocide: Journey through Eastern Congo.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 8 Oct. 2008 ‹www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/congojournal›.Salvador, Mari Lyn. “‘The Kuna Way’: Museums, Exhbitions, and the Politics of Representation of Kuna Art.” Museum Anthropology 18 (1994): 48-52. Samis, Peter. “Artwork as Interface” Archives and Museum Informatics 13.2 (1999): 191-98.Sandell, Richard. “Museums and the Combating of Social Inequality: Roles, Responsibilities, Resistance.” Museums, Society and Inequality. Ed. Richard Sandell. London: Routledge, 2002. 3-23.Seaman, Bill. “Recombinant Poetics and Related Database Aesthetics.” Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow. Ed. Victoria Vesner. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. 121-41.Sepúlveda dos Santos, Myrian. “Museums and Memory: The Enchanted Modernity.” Journal for Cultural Research 7 (2003): 27-46.Simpson, Moira. Making Representations. Museums in the Post-Colonial Era. London: Routledge, 2001.Skotnes, Pippa. “The Politics of Bushman Representations.” Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa. Ed. Paul Landau and Deborah Kaspin. London: U of London P, 2002. 253-74.Sledge, Jane. “Stewarding Potential.” First Monday 12.7 (2007). 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_7/sledge/index.html›.Solanilla, Laura. “The Internet as a Tool for Communicating Life Stories: A New Challenge for Memory Institutions.” International Journal for Intangible Heritage 3 (2008): 103-16.Stalbaum, Brett. “An Interpretive Framework for Contemporary Database Practice in the Arts.” (2004). 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://www.cityarts.com/paulc/database/Database_Stalbaum.doc›.Suzman, James. An Introduction to the Regional Assessment of the Status of the San in Southern Africa. Windhoek: Legal Assistance Centre, 2001.Stanley, Nick. “Introduction: Indigeneity and Museum Practice in the Southwest Pacific.” The Future of Indigenous Museums: Perspectives from the Southwest Pacific. Ed. Nick Stanley. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. 1-37. Strathern, Marilyn. Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. London: Athlone, 1999. The Gods Must Be Crazy. Dir. Jamie Uys. Mimosa Films, 1980.Tomaselli, Keyan. “Rereading the Gods Must be Crazy Films.” Visual Anthropology 19 (2006):171-200.Trant, Jennifer. “Exploring the Potential for Social Tagging and Folksonomy in Art Museums: Proof of Concept.” New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 12.1 (2006). 8 Oct. 2008 ‹www.archimuse.com/papers/steve-nrhm-0605preprint.pdf›.Vermeylen, Saskia. “Contextualising ‘Fair’ and ‘Equitable’: the San’s Reflections on the Hoodia Benefit Sharing Agreement.” Local Environment 12.4 (2007): 1-14.———. “From Life Force to Slimming Aid: Exploring Views on the Commodification of Traditional Medicinal Knowledge.” Applied Geography 28 (2008): 224-35.———. Martin, George, and Roland Clift. “Intellectual Property Rights Systems and the ‘Assemblage’ of Local Knowledge Systems.” International Journal of Cultural Property 15 (2008): 201-21.———. “Land Rights and the Legacy of Colonialism.” Community Consent and Benefit-Sharing: Learning Lessons from the San Hoodia Case Ed. Rachel Wynberg and Roger Chennells. Berlin: Springer. Forthcoming.———, and Jeremy Pilcher. Indigenous Cultural Heritage and the Virtual Museum. Conference Paper. International Conference on the Inclusive Museum. Leiden, The Netherlands. 8-11 June 2008.Walsh, Peter. “The Web and the Unassailable Voice.” Archives and Museum Informatics 11 (1997): 77-85.Weinbren, Grahame. “Ocean, Database, Recut.” Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow. Ed. Victoria. Vesner. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. 61-85.Weiner, James. “Televisualist Anthropology: Representation, Aesthetics, Politics [and Comments and Reply].” Current Anthropology 38 (1997): 197-235.“Yearbook 2006.” 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://www.y06.org/›.Zimmerman, Larry, Karen Zimmerman, and Leonard Bruguier. “Cyberspace Smoke Signals: New Technologies and Native American Ethnicity.” Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World. Ed. Claire Smith & Graeme Ward. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 2000. 69-86.

By the 12th century, coffee was extensively cultivated in Yemen, and qawha and cahveh, hot beverages made from roast and ground coffee beans, became popular in the Islamic world over the next 300 years. Commercial production of coffee outside Yemen started in Sri Lanka in the 1660s, Java in the 1700s, and Latin America in 1715, and this production has associations with histories of colonial expansion and slavery. Introduced to Europe in the 17th century, coffee was described by Robert Burton in the section of his 1628 Anatomy of Melancholy devoted to medicines as “an intoxicant, a euphoric, a social and physical stimulant, and a digestive aid” (quoted in Weinberg and Bealer xii). Today, more than 400 billion cups of coffee are consumed each year. Coffee is also an ingredient in a series of iconic dishes such as tiramisu and, with chocolate, makes up the classic mocha mix. Coffee production is widespread in tropical and sub-tropical countries and it is the second largest traded world commodity; second only to oil and petroleum. The World Bank estimates that more than 500 million people throughout the world depend on coffee for their livelihoods, and 25 million of these are coffee farmers. Unfortunately, these farmers typically live and work in substandard conditions and receive only a small percentage of the final price that their coffee is sold for. The majority of coffee farmers are women and they face additional challenges, frequently suffering from abuse, neglect, and poverty, and unable to gain economic, social, or political power in either their family’s coffee businesses or their communities. Some farm coffee under enslaved or indentured conditions, although Fair Trade regimes are offering some lessening of inequalities. At the opposite end of the scale, a small, but growing, number of high-end producers market gourmet sustainable coffee from small-scale, environmentally-aware farming operations. For many in the West today, however, coffee is not about the facts of its production; coffee is all about consumption, and is now interwoven into our contemporary cultural and social habits. Caffeine, found in the leaves, seeds, and fruit of the coffee tree, is an addictive psychoactive substance, but has overcome resistance and disapproval around the world and is now unregulated and freely available, without licence. Our gastronomic sophistication is reflected in which coffee, brewing method, and location of consumption is chosen; our fast-paced lifestyles in the range of coffee-to-go options we have; and our capitalist orientation in the business opportunities this popularity has offered to small entrepreneurs and multinational franchise chains alike. Cafés and the meeting, mingling, discussions, and relaxing that occur there while drinking coffee, are a contemporary topic of reflection and scholarship, as are the similarities and differences between the contemporary café and its earlier incarnations, including, of course, the Enlightenment coffee house. As may be expected from a commodity which has such a place in our lives, coffee is represented in many ways in the media—including in advertising, movies, novels, poetry, songs and, of course, in culinary writing, including cookbooks, magazines, and newspapers. There are specialist journals and popular serials dedicated to expounding and exploring the fine grain detail of its production and consumption, and food historians have written multiple biographies of coffee’s place in our world. So ubiquitous, indeed, is coffee, that as a named colour, it popularly features in fashion, interior design, home wares, and other products. This issue of M/C Journal invited contributors to consider coffee from any relevant angle that makes a contribution to our understanding of coffee and its place in culture and/or the media, and the result is a valuable array of illuminating articles from a diverse range of perspectives. It is for this reason that we chose an image of coffee cherries for the front cover of this issue. Co-editor Jill Adams has worked in the coffee industry for over ten years and has a superb collection of coffee images that ranges from farmers in Papua New Guinea to artfully shot compositions of antique coffee brewing equipment. In making our choice, however, we felt that Spencer Franks’s image of ripe coffee cherries at the Skybury Coffee Plantation in Far North Queensland, Australia, encapsulates the “fruitful” nature of the response to our call for articles for this issue. While most are familiar, moreover, with the dark, glossy appearance and other sensual qualities of roasted coffee beans, fewer have any occasion to contemplate just how lovely the coffee tree is as a plant. Each author has utilised the idea of “coffee” as a powerful springboard into a fascinating range of areas, showing just how inseparable coffee is from so many parts of our daily lives—even scholarly enquiry. In our first feature article, Susie Khamis profiles and interrogates the Nespresso brand, and how it points to the growing individualisation of coffee consumption, whereby the social aspect of cafés gives way to a more self-centred consumer experience. This feature valuably contrasts the way Starbucks has marketed itself as a social hub with the Nespresso boutique experience—which as Khamis explains—is not a café, but rather a club, a trademarked, branded space, predicated on highly knowledgeable and, therefore, privileged patrons. Coffee drinking is also associated with both sobriety and hangover cures, with cigarettes, late nights, and music. Our second feature, by Jon Stewart, looks at how coffee has become interwoven into our lives and imaginations through the music that we listen to—from jazz to blues to musical theatre numbers. It examines the influence of coffee as subject for performers and songwriters in three areas: coffee and courtship rituals, the stimulating effects of caffeine, and the politics of coffee consumption, claiming that coffee carries a cultural and musicological significance comparable to that of other drugs and ubiquitous consumer goods that are often more readily associated with popular music. Diana Noyce looks at the short-lived temperance movement in Australia, the opulent architecture of the coffee palaces built in that era, what was actually drunk in them, and their fates as the temperance movement passed into history. Emma Felton lyrically investigates how “going for a coffee” is less about coffee and more about how we connect with others in a mobile world, when flexible work hours are increasingly the norm and more people are living alone than any other period in history. Felton also introducess a theme that other writers also engage with: that the café also plays a role in the development of civil discourse and civility, and plays an important role in the development of cosmopolitan civil societies. Ireland-based Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire surveys Dublin—that tea drinking city—and both the history of coffee houses and the enduring coffee culture it possesses; a coffee culture that seems well assured through a remarkable win for Ireland in the 2008 World Barista Championships. China has also always been strongly associated with tea drinking but Adel Wang introduces readers to the emerging, and unique, café and coffee culture of that country, as well as some of the proprietors who are bringing about this cultural change. Australia, also once a significant consumer of tea, shifted to a preference for coffee over a twenty year period that began with the arrival of American Servicemen in Australia during World War II. Jill Adams looks at the rise of coffee during that time, and the efforts made by the tea industry to halt its market growth. These strong links between tea and coffee are reflected in Duncan Barnes, Danielle Fusco, and Lelia Green’s thought-provoking study of how coffee is marketed in Bangladesh, another tea drinking country. Ray Oldenberg’s influential concept of the “third place” is referred to by many authors in this collection, but Anthony McCosker and Rowan Wilken focus on this idea. By using a study of how Polish composer, Krzysztof Penderecki, worked in his local café from 9 in the morning to noon each day, this article explores the interrelationship of café space, communication, creativity, and materialism. Donna Lee Brien brings us back to the domestic space with her article on how the popular media of cookery books and magazines portray how coffee was used in Australian cooking at mid-century, in the process, tracing how tiramisu triumphed over the trifle. By exploring the currently fashionable practice of “direct trade” between roasters and coffee growers Sophie Sunderland offers a fresh perspective on coffee production by powerfully arguing that feeling (“affect”) is central to the way in which coffee is produced, represented and consumed in Western mass culture. Sunderland thus brings the issue full circle and back to Khamis’s discussion, for there is much feeling mobilised in the marketing of Nespresso. We would like to thank all the contributors and our generous and erudite peer reviewers for their work in the process of putting together this issue. We would also like to specially thank Spencer Franks for permission to use his image of coffee cherries as our cover image. We would lastly like to thank you the general editors of M/C Journal for selecting this theme for the journal this year.References Oldenburg, Ray, ed. Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories about the “Great Good Places” At the Heart of Our Communities. New York: Marlowe & Company 2001.Weinberg, Bennett Alan, and Bonnie K Bealer. The World of Caffeine. New York and London: Routledge, 2001.