Showing papers in "The Australian Journal of Anthropology in 2010"
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore theories, discourses, and experiences of globalization, drawing on perspectives from history, anthropology, cultural and literary studies, geography, political economy, and sociology.
Abstract: COURSE DESCRIPTION In popular and scholarly discourse, the term \"globalization\" is widely used to put a name to the shape of the contemporary world. In the realms of advertising, a variety of media, policymaking, politics, academia, and everyday talk, \"globalization\" references the sense that we now live in a deeply and everincreasingly interconnected, mobile, and speeded-up world that is unprecedented, fueled by technological innovations and geopolitical and economic transformations. Drawing on perspectives from history, anthropology, cultural and literary studies, geography, political economy, and sociology, this course will explore theories, discourses, and experiences of globalization.
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TL;DR: The authors argue that the reasons for its exclusion include Christianity's late arrival, its limited fortune in the colonial encounter, and its continued marginal role in organizing the values of Aboriginal life, and that it is precisely because of the rather unremarkable history of conversion in Aboriginal Australia that their volume can inform current debates in the general anthropological literature on Christianity.
Abstract: Despite the substantial Aboriginalist literature on Christianity, Aboriginal Australia has been largely peripheral to the emerging subfield ‘the anthropology of Christianity.’ In the introduction to this collection of essays, we argue that the reasons for its exclusion include Christianity’s late arrival, its limited fortune in the colonial encounter, and its continued marginal role in organising the values of Aboriginal life. However, it is precisely because of the rather unremarkable history of conversion in Aboriginal Australia that our volume can inform current debates in the general anthropological literature on Christianity. As the essays concentrate on Protestant forms of Christianity in remote Australia, we address the ways in which Aboriginal converts experience what are often argued to be the common features of modern Protestantism, namely, transcendence, rupture and belief.
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TL;DR: A reified Aboriginal culture is promoted at institutional sites and in reconciliation discourses that evokes the presence of something precious and mysterious that must be reread into local Aboriginal people, but which assiduously avoids their actual circumstances and subjectivities.
Abstract: In western Sydney, I found an extreme version of what I propose is a national Aboriginal mythopoeia, that is, a powerful system of beliefs and practices in relation to Aboriginal people and culture. A reified Aboriginal culture is promoted at institutional sites and in reconciliation discourses that evokes the presence of something precious and mysterious that must be re-read into local Aboriginal people, but which assiduously avoids their actual circumstances and subjectivities. The awkward relationships and avoidances evident in a western Sydney reconciliation group are posited as a benign example of this mythology, born of a 'sentimental politics' of regret and reparation at work in Australia. Unity between the state and civil society is evident here, thus requiring an analysis that goes beyond a critique of government policies and programmes as intentional and rational, and grasps the nature of the widespread desire for Aboriginality. Through ethnographic attention to the actual relationships of Indigenous people and others, anthropologists can avoid being complicit in this regressive, separatist construction.
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore an ongoing dialogue about Christianity in light of the recent influx of HIV and AIDS into the villages of the Gogodala of Western Province, Papua New Guinea, and argue that a suggestion by a woman in late 2004 to "build a wall" around the region in Western Province in order to stop or slow the spread of HIV/AIDS reflects a recent concern with the sustainability of this rural Christian community.
Abstract: This paper explores an ongoing dialogue about Christianity in light of the recent influx of HIV and AIDS into the villages of the Gogodala of Western Province, Papua New Guinea. I argue that a suggestion by a woman in late 2004 to ‘build a wall’ around the Gogodala region in Western Province in order to stop or slow the spread of HIV/AIDS reflects a recent concern with the sustainability of this rural Christian community, referred to in English as ‘Christian country’. Understanding AIDS to be a threat posed largely from outsiders, whether Papua New Guinean or European, sections of these primarily village-based communities aim to create both a physical and metaphorical boundary between themselves and outsiders. At present, local prevention and intervention strategies concerning HIV and AIDS focus on conservative, evangelical narratives about the preservation of the principles and practices of Christian country, through the repudiation of unrestrained sexuality, for example, which is believed to be increasingly prevalent not only in their own area but throughout urban Papua New Guinea. A growing divide between rural and urban Gogodala, then, has become a major part of the local dialogue about AIDS and represents significant contestation over the practices and ideational basis of Christian country.
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TL;DR: The authors compare Aboriginal responses to Christian cosmology with responses to New Age influences and explore the question of whether a comparison of classical Aboriginal religious thought with New Age ideas and values yields much in the way of similarities or compatibilities.
Abstract: Aboriginal people’s responses to different exogenous religious influences have not been uniform. Here I contrast Aboriginal responses to Christian cosmology with responses to New Age influences. I then explore the question of whether a comparison of classical Aboriginal religious thought with New Age ideas and values yields much in the way of similarities or compatibilities.
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors explored the nature of grief in Lihir, Papua New Guinea, in light of psychological theories of bereavement and grief, including the dual process coping model and the model that proposes resilience as a central concept.
Abstract: This paper explores the nature of grief in Lihir, Papua New Guinea, in light of psychological theories of bereavement and grief. Anthropologists have demonstrated that culture has an impact on both the expression and experience of grief and can offer both a challenge to established theories and new perspectives on the conceptualisations and experiences of the bereaved. Until recently, ‘grief work’ was the foremost model for understanding bereavement as a psychological process and was also used by anthropologists in cross-cultural work. However, since the 1990s, a number of alternative models of normal grief have emerged, including the dual process coping model and the model that proposes resilience as a central concept. These newer models, particularly the one which incorporates resilience, offer more for understanding grief in Lihir. The article argues that grief in Lihir has a phase of sorrow and worry that is dealt with through the sociality and activity of the mourning period, and then a longer phase of active remembering and forgetting of the deceased. The social and cultural context of bereavement is not adequately captured in current psychological conceptualisations of social support, which need to be broadened to encompass cross-cultural material.
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine ideas about eating common types of wildlife in Laos in light of the dialectical contrast between civilised settlements (muang) and the wild forest (pa).
Abstract: Research on wildlife use is strongly associated with conservation and environmental debates. Yet, popular beliefs about wildlife consumption also offer many opportunities for discussing identity and social change. To demonstrate this, I examine ideas about eating common types of wildlife in Laos in light of the dialectical contrast between civilised settlements (muang) and the wild forest (pa). The exclusion of wildlife from the widely practised baci ritual and the popularity of wildlife consumption indicate the potency of these animals as social objects. In a contemporary context of widespread social and environmental change across Laos, the practice of eating wildlife is being constructed as an assertion of Lao identity that blends an idealised tradition with a status-conscious modernity. Ambivalent desires for social transformation draw upon ambiguous symbols to find expression in beliefs as well as in popular social practice.
TL;DR: In this article, a range of Western Arrernte terms employed by missionaries at Hermannsburg to translate the Bible and the Lutheran liturgy and hymns were examined.
Abstract: This article considers a range of Western Arrernte terms employed by missionaries at Hermannsburg to translate the Bible and the Lutheran liturgy and hymns My argument is that initially words were employed as metaphors in order to convey a Christian transcendental and ritual order quite different from the Arrernte one the terms had named previously I examine the events and the Western Arrernte response that, over time, redefined some terms and shaped an Arrernte Christian vernacular
TL;DR: For centuries, the residents of Blue Mud Bay have encountered seafarers landing on their shores, and contacts with these visitors have varied in their regularity, intensity and amity.
Abstract: For centuries, the residents of Blue Mud Bay, the residents of Blue Mud Bay, the Djalkiripuyngu,1 have encountered seafarers landing on their shores, and contacts with these visitors have varied in their regularity, intensity and amity. Currently, the most frequent non-indigenous seafarers are the professional crab and barramundi fishermen who extract resources from the local estuaries. The crab fishermen are recent migrants from Southeast Asia and some sign royalty contracts for access to Aboriginal land to transport their crabs, whilst the wealthy and politically powerful Anglo-Australian barramundi fishermen operate from large boats, do not need land access, and reject formal agreements. Djalkiripuyngu engagements with these respective visitors are shaped by Australian laws and by the different histories, ethnicities, access to power and depths of attachment to places between the various parties. The Djalkiripuyngu have consistently asserted ownership over the coastal seas adjacent to their lands and, in an important recent decision, have had one aspect of that ownership legally endorsed.2 Yet struggles for control over local seas demonstrate more than principles of indigenous and wider Australian law. They also reflect the wider history of Northern Australia, the pitfalls and possibilities of encounters between indigenous Australians and recent migrants, and an array of contemporary Australian identities.
TL;DR: In this paper, the significance of Christian syncretism in Aboriginal relations with place and the inheritance of ancestral connections to 'country' is examined, against the background of relevant academic studies.
Abstract: Various aspects of Christian belief and practice have been documented as significant across Aboriginal Australia. In recent years, many communities have been involved in seeking to achieve traditional rights in land and sea as recognised in Australian law. Asserting and proving these rights entails demonstrating continuity of traditional law and custom since the establishment of British sovereignty. While legal discourse indicates that this does not exclude cultural change, law and custom must continue to derive from pre-sovereignty traditions. This article addresses the extent to which Christian belief and practice have been articulated and researched in applied anthropological work, against the background of relevant academic studies. If a sophisticated theory of cultural change and continuity is germane to researching land claims and native title, what is the significance of Christian syncretism in Aboriginal relations with place and the inheritance of ancestral connections to 'country'? Several case studies are examined. © 2010 Australian Anthropological Society
TL;DR: In this article, an Aboriginal woman has reached a kind of resolution between God and Indigenous spirits: mamu and juwarri (spirits of the dead) are not evil spirits but sinners who will be redeemed in the Last Days.
Abstract: Some Aboriginal discourses in East Kimberley appear to indicate that Indigenous particularities are being universalised by evangelical Christianity. The aim of evangelical Christianity is to bring all peoples under the domain of one God. But counter statements by people of all ages reveal that the Christian universalising project in East Kimberley is an unfinished (and possibly unfinishable) project. Although Indigenous particularities contribute to generational conflict they are not disappearing, while Aboriginal people remain on or near the lands in which their stories are embedded. Locative traditions emphasise genealogical continuities between the living and the dead. Evangelical missionaries, however, direct spirits of the living to heaven and condemn spirits of the dead to follow Satan. One Aboriginal woman has reached a kind of resolution between God and Indigenous spirits: mamu and juwarri (spirits of the dead) are not evil spirits but sinners who will be redeemed in the Last Days.1
TL;DR: Rollason et al. as discussed by the authors worked out abjection in the Panapompom beche-de-mer fishery and discussed race, economic change and the future in Papua New Guinea.
Abstract: This is the accepted version of the following article: Rollason, W. (2010), Working out abjection in the
Panapompom beche-de-mer fishery: Race, economic change and the future in Papua New Guinea. The Australian
Journal of Anthropology, 21: 149–170. doi: 10.1111/j.1757-6547.2010.00076.x, which has been published in final
form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1757-6547.2010.00076.x/abstract.
TL;DR: The themes and practices of Christian performance at the Western Desert Aboriginal community of Warlungurru in 1988, six years after the Pintupi return to their homelands (see Myers 1986, McMillan 1988, Nathan & Japanangka Leichleitner 1983) and the enthusiastic Christian revival experienced in the first years of their return as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: This paper discusses the themes and practices of Christian performance at the Western Desert Aboriginal community of Warlungurru in 1988,1 six years after the Pintupi return to their homelands (see Myers 1986; McMillan 1988; Nathan & Japanangka Leichleitner 1983) and the enthusiastic Christian revival—nightly Gospel singing, a ban on gambling—experienced in the first years of their return. My concern is with how a distinctively Lutheran focus in Pintupi Christianity (in opposition to competing Pentecostal orientations in Central Australia at that time) was grasped by some Pintupi as a structure organising relations between Indigenous people and others in the world, and how specialised knowledge constituted positions of prestige and authority. Thus, I explore certain convergences between prior Indigenous formulations of personhood and relatedness and the way in which Lutheran Christianity was articulated during this period.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that these understandings of region and the past, along with the now widely dispersed artefacts, maintain a lively, albeit transformed, presence in current debates about Aboriginal regional culture, linking assertions of rights to lost and stolen cultural property with notions of large-scale environmental management within the WET Tropics.
Abstract: This paper outlines some of the ways early artefact collecting contributed to the definition of the Australian region now known and marketed as the ‘World Heritage Wet Tropics’. While others have collected in this region, we focus on the collecting activities of Hermann Klaatsch and the work of Norman Tindale to explore some factors that contributed to their claims that certain artefacts represent a region and its history. We argue that these understandings of region and the past, along with the now widely dispersed artefacts, maintain a lively, albeit transformed, presence in current debates about Aboriginal regional culture, linking assertions of rights to lost and stolen cultural property with notions of large-scale environmental management within the ‘Wet Tropics’.
TL;DR: The authors explored the Dalabon roots kangu ("belly") and yolh ("feelings") used to form expressions that describe emotions, revealing a widespread metaphor whereby the belly is viewed as a more or less malleable receptacle of external impacts on the person.
Abstract: This article explores the Dalabon roots kangu ("belly") and yolh ("feelings"), used in Dalabon to form expressions that describe emotions. The semantics of compounds using kangu reveals a widespread metaphor whereby the belly is viewed as a more or less malleable receptacle of external impacts on the person. This metaphor is activated in ritual. On the other hand, the compounds using yolh show that not all emotions originate from external impacts; some stem from the person proper. This semantic division shows that the notion of autonomous self is part of the conceptual landscape of Dalabon speakers.
TL;DR: The authors traces how marriages between brothers and sisters in the Lao and Thai royal families came to be conceptualised as "incest" and therefore taboo over the first half of the twentieth century.
Abstract: This essay traces how marriages between brothers and sisters in the Lao and Thai royal families came to be conceptualised as ‘incest’ and therefore taboo over the first half of the twentieth century. This change was associated with changing royal marriage strategies and changing ideas about the nature of royal persons. The article concludes with some broader theoretical reflections on incest.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors construct a plea for superstition and examine the ways in which contemporary scholars use the term to denote irrational belief and define superstition as the product of an intrasubjective antinomy between orthodoxy and its subversion.
Abstract: In this paper, I construct a plea for superstition and examine the ways in which contemporary scholars use the term to denote irrational belief. ‘Superstition’ has, throughout history, been used as a derogatory term denoting inferior and dangerous beliefs. Examining the process whereby people continue to believe that which they deem irrational, I adopt a reflexive and phenomenological approach. Focussing on the evil eye (għajn) in Malta and the Mediterranean, I redefine ‘superstition’ as the product of an intrasubjective antinomy between orthodoxy and its subversion.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that this debate and conflict is largely the result of globalisation and the resultant interactions between indigenous Buddhists and western converts and, in turn, western moral discourses and feminisms.
Abstract: Recent global linkages have brought about increased cross-cultural encounters between diverse Buddhist groups. While this often results in rich, rewarding relationships, it has also resulted in cross-cultural tensions. This article examines disputes that arose between diverse groups of Buddhists during international Buddhist conferences about proposals to introduce full ordination for Tibetan Buddhist nuns. I argue that this debate and conflict is largely the result of globalisation and the resultant interactions between indigenous Buddhists and western converts and, in turn, western moral discourses and feminisms.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the failure of the Bloomfield River mission was not the result of inept missionisation, but rather of the fact that Lutheranism was at odds with Kuku-Yalanji religious beliefs.
Abstract: Lutheran missionaries from Germany arrived in 1887 to ‘care for’ and to evangelise to the Kuku-Yalanji people of the Bloomfield River area of the north Queensland rainforests. They left fifteen years later without having converted a single soul. Was this failure the result of inept missionisation? Was Lutheranism at odds with Kuku-Yalanji religious beliefs? This paper argues that the answer lies rather at the core of the Kuku-Yalanji worldview and social universe. Using rich historical sources, this paper demonstrates that Kuku-Yalanji people— who have particular socio-territorial ties to the mission lands—instigated an experiment with the missionaries. Their assumption was that the missionaries held a role that was structurally equivalent to that of ‘majamaja’ in their own system—key focal individuals with religious knowledge, power and achieved status operating at the node of a social network on a particular area of ‘country’. The missionaries failed to live up to this expectation and for this and other reasons, Kuku-Yalanji left and the mission failed with no lasting Christian impact. PREFACE It has always interested me that the Kuku-Yalanji people of North Queensland used the term ‘maja’ interchangeably with the word ‘boss’ in English and also for the words ‘God’ or ‘Lord’. This was true in daily parlance; it was true in the discussion of issues around Christianity or church. And the term is also used in the published translations of Bible stories in the Kuku-Yalanji language (e.g. Wycliffe Bible Translators 1972). Similarly, another Kuku-Yalanji word, ‘Jawun,’ was always used for Jesus. Jawun means ‘friend’ or, in other contexts, ‘countryman’. In practice, over the twenty or so years of my active dealings with Kuku-Yalanji people, it has generally been used for Europeans who came, developed a long-term relationship with the area and people and who were interested in or sympathetic to the local Aboriginal culture. Thus the Wycliffe Bible translators, Hank and Ruth Hershberger, who spent almost twenty-five years at Bloomfield translating the Bible, were always referred to as Jawun. I, too, during my fieldwork and afterwards, was often introduced by Kuku-Yalanji to others as ‘Ngananga jawun’ [‘our friend’]. Other more temporary but keen residents (linguists, medical doctors, lawyers and other anthropologists) were also often called jawun.