-
Partager cette page
MARILLA Angelie
Doctorante, aspirante FNRS
 |
Adresse visiteur Laboratoire d'Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains Adresse courrier Université libre de Bruxelles |
Présentation des recherches
Migrating Things: The Alter-Native Lives of People and Things in Motion
This dissertation examines the central paradox of contemporary Igorot life: an indigenous people associated with ancestral land and territorial belonging in the Philippine northern highlands, but whose recent history has been shaped by large-scale Western migration. Drawing on ethnographic research among Igorot communities in Europe (primarily in Belgium) and their village homes in the Cordillera mountains, it follows the migration of people and migrating things between village and diaspora. Western goods sent home materialise migrants’ obligations of return and are indigenised through local systems of value, while native objects travel outward as material traces through which village life is reproduced abroad. Functioning as metonymic object-proxies, these things-in-motion sustain alter-native lives that are simultaneously rooted and routed, enabling migrants to project and generate value from otherness, embody cosmopolitan lifestyles, remit value homeward, and assert cunning claims to place and belonging within an imagined community. By tracing these circulations to and from the village space, the dissertation demonstrates how Igorot migrants sustain their (hyper)presence despite dispersal and absence, and how the village continues to function as the moral and distributive centre of diaspora life. Grounded in indigenous cosmologies of circular value, consumption, distribution, and gift-centred kinship, the study argues that indigeneity is not a static inheritance but an active field of value production shaped through the global movements of people and things.
Keywords: migration – material culture – indigenous people – circulation – value – alterity – absence – moral economies – goods – gifts – highland societies – Igorot
Advisor: Sasha Newell
Thesis Jury:
Inge Daniel (University of Oxford)
Rupert Stasch (University of Cambridge)
Ann Cassiman (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)
Pierre Petit (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
Sarah O’Neill (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
Sasha Newell (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
Travaux sélectionnés
2026. (revision submitted). “Beads in Motion: Contemporary Recirculation of Trade Beads and their Plastic Replicas.” Journal of Material Culture.
2026. (revision submitted). “A Box’s Journey: Un/Packing the Stuff and Im/Mobilities in Migrants’ Packages.” Mobilities.
2023. (with Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot). “Home and Homemaking in Local and Transnational Family Lives.” In P. Boccagni (ed.) Handbook on Home and Migration. Edward Elgar, pp. 215-227.
2022. “Mobile Homes, Mobile Objects: Materiality and Mobility of Vietnamese-Belgian Couples.” In A. Fresnoza-Flot and G. Liu-Farrer (eds.), Tangled Mobilities: Places, Affects, and Personhood across Social Spheres in Asian Migration. New York: Berghahn Books, pp.69-90.
2020. “Migration and the Search for Home: Mapping Domestic Space in Migrants’ Everyday Lives.” Cultural Sociology.
2018. “Dean Worcester’s Fantasy Islands: Photography, Film, and the Colonial Philippines” Visual Anthropology.
2017. “Visualizing Colonial Myth: Revisiting Iconic Igorot Photographs in National Geographic Magazine.” Masaryk University, Czech Republic (master thesis).
2015. “Colonial Visuality: Local History in the Basi Revolt Paintings.” In W. Sucharithanarugse (ed.) Interpretative Studies on Southeast Asian Culture. Bangkok: Institute of Thai Studies, pp. 27-58.