Anthropologist Ton Otto’s visit to ANU: Material and archival collections, film, and research engagement at the ANU

Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Aarhus University, Denmark, Ton Otto, visited ANU from 13 to 22 October 2025. Ton Otto, born in the Netherlands, is Professor of Anthropology and Ethnography at the University of Aarhus. He has conducted fieldwork in Papua New Guinea (PNG), especially in Manus Province, since 1986 with a focus on issues of social and cultural change. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the Australian National University (ANU) in 1991 under the supervision of Roger Keesing, Michael Young and Margaret Jolly. Since his first fieldwork in PNG, he has used video as part of his research and teaching but also as a means of exchange with the people he collaborates with in his studies.

Ton’s visit included a film screening of his co-directed film On Behalf of the Living. The film is part of a highly acclaimed trilogy of films focussed on Baluan Island, Manus Province, that also includes his own relationship with Baluan people. An interview with Ton Otto about the film can be read here. The ANU screening was followed by a Q&A with Ton. The film has been acquired for the ANU Library collection and it is available for use by staff and students through the ANU library. He presented a lively and well-received seminar in the Anthropology seminar series, titled The temporal ambiguities of Win Neisen. Transformations of historicity in the Paliau Movement (Manus, Papua New Guinea). Ton also engaged in several small group sessions with ANU staff. He met with Nayahamui Rooney on her project on gendered and relational historicity in relation to Manus culture and society, focussing on video recording and analysing mortuary time and her parents’ archival materials. Ton took part in a small group discussion led by Rose Faunce, Curator of the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific (CAP) Art and Artefacts Collection, alongside Matt Tomlinson, Director of the ANU School of Culture, History and Language (CHL), Nayahamui Rooney, CHL Lecturer, and Kari James, Executive Officer of the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau. The session centred on the background and provenance of a pair of sandals that Ton had donated to the Collection when he was a PhD student. He provided important context, explaining that the sandals had been worn by Karl Alexander Adelaar (b. 1953), a specialist in Austronesian languages and then a Research Fellow in Linguistics at the Australian National University, following his return from fieldwork in Borneo in 1989. The sandals were specially made for Adelaar and customised to accommodate unequal leg lengths, with a thicker left heel. At the time, Ton displayed the sandals alongside other fieldwork accoutrements in an exhibition designed to prompt reflection on the physical demands of research, particularly the extensive walking it often entails.

Another outcome of the CAP Collections discussion was that Prof Otto recalled providing detailed descriptions of photographs of unknown provenance that were on loan to the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau for microfilming when he was a PhD candidate at the ANU. The two albums include photographs from Manus Province, Baining and Tolai areas of East New Britain, Rabaul, Kokopo, Port Moresby and Samarai. The photographs were taken c.1916 but the photographer remains unknown. They were gifted to Jill Clingan, who had served as a nurse at the Tinsley Hospital in the Baiyer River region in the early 1970s. The original photo albums have since been donated to the National Library of Australia.