Biopolitics meets Terrapolitics: Political Ontologies and Governance in Settler-Colonial Australia

Crises persist in Australian Indigenous affairs because current policy approaches do not address the intersection of Indigenous and European political worlds. This paper responds to this challenge by providing a heuristic device for delineating Settler and Indigenous Australian political ontologies and considering their interaction. It first evokes Settler and Aboriginal ontologies as respectively biopolitical (focused through life) and terrapolitical (focused through land). These ideal types help to identify important differences that inform current governance challenges. The paper discusses the entwinement of these traditions as a story of biopolitical dominance wherein Aboriginal people are governed as an “included-exclusion” within the Australian political community. Despite the overall pattern of dominance, this same entwinement offers possibilities for exchange between biopolitics and terrapolitics, and hence for breaking the recurrent crises of Indigenous affairs

AvatarMe: realistically renderable 3D facial reconstruction "in-the-wild"

Over the last years, with the advent of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), many face analysis tasks have accomplished astounding performance, with applications including, but not limited to, face generation and 3D face reconstruction from a single "in-the-wild" image. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, there is no method which can produce high-resolution photorealistic 3D faces from "in-the-wild" images and this can be attributed to the: (a) scarcity of available data for training, and (b) lack of robust methodologies that can successfully be applied on very high-resolution data. In this paper, we introduce AvatarMe, the first method that is able to reconstruct photorealistic 3D faces from a single "in-the-wild" image with an increasing level of detail. To achieve this, we capture a large dataset of facial shape and reflectance and build on a state-of-the-art 3D texture and shape reconstruction method and successively refine its results, while generating the per-pixel diffuse and specular components that are required for realistic rendering. As we demonstrate in a series of qualitative and quantitative experiments, AvatarMe outperforms the existing arts by a significant margin and reconstructs authentic, 4K by 6K-resolution 3D faces from a single low-resolution image that, for the first time, bridges the uncanny valley

The Thomas Souls Ministry - onto-praxis, dividualism, and charismatic Catholicism at Lake Chambri, Papua New Guinea

The Thomas Souls Ministry is a prayer group founded by Catholics from the middle Sepik. It is led by a spirit of the dead called Thomas who takes possession of a Nyaura (West Iatmul) woman to preach, prophesy, counsel, and heal. While a prominent debate within the Anthropology of Christianity argues for radical change and rupture with the pre-Christian self and society, I suggest that continuity within change is found in the way my interlocutors have made Christianity their own. I argue that the local concept of the person defined by aspects of dividualism and reflecting ontological premises of people's lifeworld has strongly influenced the way Christianity was appropriated. In current religious practices people put these premises into action and reinforce them in intersubjective encounters with the divine other. Analysing people's 'onto-praxis', I argue that the Thomas Souls Ministry can be understood as part of a re-empowerment process that re-appropriates local meanings, spirits, and practices despite, and in fact against, the influence of the Catholic mission proselytizing in the region