Search titles
Displaying results 121 to 130 of 130.
The Aranda's Pepa »
An introduction to Carl Strehlow’s Masterpiece Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien (1907-1920)
Authored by: Anna Kenny
Publication date: December 2013
The German missionary Carl Strehlow (1871-1922) had a deep ethnographic interest in Aboriginal Australian cosmology and social life which he documented in his 7 volume work Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien that remains unpublished in English. In 1913, Marcel Mauss called his collection of sacred songs and myths, an Australian Rig Veda. This immensely rich corpus, based on a lifetime on the central Australian frontier, is barely known in the English-speaking world and is the last great body of early Australian ethnography that has not yet been built into the world of Australian anthropology and its intellectual history.
The German psychological and hermeneutic traditions of anthropology that developed outside of a British-Australian intellectual world were alternatives to 19th century British scientism. The intellectual roots of early German anthropology reached back to Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), the founder of German historical particularism, who rejected the concept of race as well as the French dogma of the uniform development of civilisation. Instead he recognised unique sets of values transmitted through history and maintained that cultures had to be viewed in terms of their own development and purpose. Thus, humanity was made up of a great diversity of ways of life, language being one of its main manifestations. It is this tradition that led to a concept of cultures in the plural.
Macassan History and Heritage »
Journeys, Encounters and Influences
Edited by: Marshall Clark, Sally K. May
Publication date: June 2013
This book presents inter-disciplinary perspectives on the maritime journeys of the Macassan trepangers who sailed in fleets of wooden sailing vessels known as praus from the port city of Makassar in southern Sulawesi to the northern Australian coastline. These voyages date back to at least the 1700s and there is new evidence to suggest that the Macassan praus were visiting northern Australia even earlier. This book examines the Macassan journeys to and from Australia, their encounters with Indigenous communities in the north, as well as the ongoing social and cultural impact of these connections, both in Indonesia and Australia.
A Good Life »
Human rights and encounters with modernity
Authored by: Mary Edmunds
Publication date: May 2013
This book is a story. It’s a story about ordinary people in very different parts of the world dealing with rapid change in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It’s about times of turbulent and violent social upheaval and rupture with the past. It’s about modern times. It’s also about being human; what it is to be human in a modernising and globalising world; how, in responding to the circumstances of their times, different groups define, redefine, and attempt to put into practice their understandings of the good and of what constitutes a good life. And it’s about how human rights have come to be not abstract universal principles but a practical source of consciousness and practice for real people.
Drawing on the author’s experience as an anthropologist, the book examines different groups over the last three decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first: Thai factory workers over a period of two coups in the 1970s; Spanish nuns in the 1980s, in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council and the end of the Franco dictatorship; Aboriginal people in the remote Pilbara region of Western Australia dealing with the impact of late colonialism and moves towards self-determination, from the 1980s to the present. Each of these groups has its own stories, illuminating ways in which, despite the assault of modernisation on deeply held traditional beliefs and practices, particular cultural understandings and practices continue to shape people’s responses to their novel circumstances. The very diversity of the studies presented in the book raises some of the most compelling moral and social questions of our time and invites the reader, both academic and lay, to focus on what it is that makes us human; whether there are human universals as well as cultural particularities; whether human rights provide universal norms and practices; what unites as well as divides us; and where morality, and understandings of a good life, can be sourced in a secular modern world.
“This is a book about hope, the hope that we have ways to live together in a rapidly changing world which will enable us to ‘live a good life in the modern world.’”
Hon. Fred Chaney AO.
Survey Analysis for Indigenous Policy in Australia »
Social Science Perspectives
Edited by: Boyd Hunter, Nicholas Biddle
Publication date: November 2012
Indigenous policy is a complex domain motivated by a range of social, cultural, political and economic issues. The Council of Australian Governments ‘closing the gaps’ agenda for addressing Indigenous disadvantage in Australia now includes six targets with well defined and measurable outcomes for policy action. In this context there is a continuing and pressing need for robust debate to understand how meaningful improvement in Indigenous outcomes might be achieved.
This monograph presents the peer-reviewed proceedings of the 2011 CAEPR/ABS conference on ‘Social Science Perspectives on the 2008 National and Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander Social Survey’. It is the fourth CAEPR monograph since 1992 to reflect on national surveys of Indigenous Australians. The conference covered topics including child development, crime and justice, culture, wellbeing, the customary economy, demography, education, employment, fertility, health, housing, income and financial stress, mobility, poverty, social exclusion, and substance abuse. The papers summarise the strengths and limitations of the 2008 NATSISS, discuss the types of policy-relevant questions it can inform, and consider future survey design.
A social survey such as the NATSISS can ultimately never tell those responsible for developing public policy what to do, but it can provide useful information to inform policy decisions. This volume will be useful for researchers and policy makers, and relevant to the wider national debate and, in particular, Indigenous communities and organisations.
Peopled Landscapes »
Archaeological and Biogeographic Approaches to Landscapes
Edited by: Simon G. Haberle, Bruno David
Publication date: January 2012
This impressive collection celebrates the work of Peter Kershaw, a key figure in the field of Australian palaeoenvironmental reconstruction. Over almost half a century his research helped reconceptualize ecology in Australia, creating a detailed understanding of environmental change in the Late Pleistocene and Holocene. Within a biogeographic framework one of his exceptional contributions was to explore the ways that Aboriginal people may have modified the landscape through the effects of anthropogenic burning. These ideas have had significant impacts on thinking within the fields of geomorphology, biogeography, archaeology, anthropology and history. Papers presented here continue to explore the dynamism of landscape change in Australia and the contribution of humans to those transformations. The volume is structured in two sections. The first examines evidence for human engagement with landscape, focusing on Australia and Papua New Guinea but also dealing with the human/environmental histories of Europe and Asia. The second section contains papers that examine palaeoecology and present some of the latest research into environmental change in Australia and New Zealand. Individually these papers, written by many of Australia’s prominent researchers in these fields, are significant contributions to our knowledge of Quaternary landscapes and human land use. But Peopled Landscapes also signifies the disciplinary entanglement that is archaeological and biogeographic research in this region, with archaeologists and environmental scientists contributing to both studies of human land use and palaeoecology. Peopled Landscapes reveals the interdisciplinary richness of Quaternary research in the Australasian region as well as the complexity and richness of the entangled environmental and human pasts of these lands.
— Prof. Peter Hiscock, The Australian National University
Exploring the Legacy of the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition »
Edited by: Martin Thomas, Margo Neale
Publication date: June 2011
In 1948 a collection of scientists, anthropologists and photographers journeyed to northern Australia for a seven-month tour of research and discovery—now regarded as ‘the last of the big expeditions’. The American–Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land was front-page news at the time, but 60 years later it is virtually unknown. This lapse into obscurity was due partly to the fraught politics of Australian anthropology and animus towards its leader, the Adelaide-based writer-photographer Charles Mountford. Promoted as a ‘friendly mission’ that would foster good relations between Australia and its most powerful wartime ally, the Expedition was sponsored by National Geographic, the Smithsonian Institution and the Australian Government. An unlikely cocktail of science, diplomacy and popular geography, the Arnhem Land Expedition put the Aboriginal cultures of the vast Arnhem Land reserve on an international stage.
Indigenous Participation in Australian Economies »
Historical and anthropological perspectives
Edited by: Ian Keen
Publication date: December 2010
This volume seeks to contribute to the body of anthropological and historical studies of Indigenous participation in the Australian colonial and post colonial economy. It arises out of a panel on this topic at the annual conference of the Australian Anthropological Society, held jointly with the British and New Zealand anthropological associations in Auckland in December 2008. The panel was organised in conjunction with an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Grant project on Indigenous participation in Australian economies involving the National Museum of Australia as the partner organisation and the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at The Australian National University.
The chapters of the volume bring new theoretical analyses and empirical data to bear on a continuing discussion about the variety of ways in which Indigenous people in Australia have been engaged in the colonial and post-colonial economy. Contributions cover settler capitalism, concepts of property on the frontier, Torres Strait Islanders in the mainland economy, the pastoral industry in the Kimberley, doggers in the Western Desert, bean and pea picking on the South Coast of New South Wales, attitudes to employment in general in western New South Wales, relations of Aboriginal people to mining in the Pilbara, and relations with the uranium mine and Kakadu National Park in the Top End. The chapters also contribute to discussions about theoretical and analytical frameworks relevant to these kinds of contexts and bring critical perspectives to bear on current issues of development.
Power, Culture, Economy »
Indigenous Australians and Mining
Edited by: Jon Altman, David Martin
Publication date: August 2009
Research over the past decade in health, employment, life expectancy, child mortality, and household income has confirmed that Indigenous Australians are still Australia’s most disadvantaged group. Those residing in communities in regional and remote Australia are further disadvantaged because of the limited formal economic opportunities there. In these areas mining developments may be the major—and sometimes the only—contributors to regional economic development. However Indigenous communities have gained only relatively limited long-term economic development benefits from mining activity on land that they own or over which they have property rights of varying significance. Furthermore, while Indigenous people may place high value on realising particular non-economic benefits from mining agreements, there may be only limited capacity to deliver such benefits.
This collection of papers focuses on three large, ongoing mining operations in Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory under two statutory regimes—the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 and the Native Title Act 1993. The authors outline the institutional basis to greater industry involvement while describing and analysing the best practice principles that can be utilised both by companies and Indigenous community organisations. The research addresses questions such as:
What factors underlie successful investment in community relations and associated agreement governance and benefit packages for Indigenous communities?
How are economic and non-economic flows monitored?
What are the values and aspirations which Indigenous people may bring to bear in their engagement with mining developments?
What more should companies and government do to develop the capacity and sustainability of local Indigenous organisations?
What mining company strategies build community capacity to deal with impacts of mining? Are these adequate?
How to prepare for sustainable futures for Indigenous Australians after mine closure?
This research was conducted under an Australian Research Council Linkage Project, with Rio Tinto and the Committee for Economic Development of Australia as Industry Partners.
Origins, Ancestry and Alliance »
Explorations in Austronesian Ethnography
Edited by: James J. Fox, Clifford Sather
Publication date: October 2006
This collection of papers, the third in a series of volumes on the work of the Comparative Austronesian Project, explores indigenous Austronesian ideas of origin, ancestry and alliance and considers the comparative significance of these ideas in social practice. The papers examine social practice in a diverse range of societies extending from insular Southeast Asia to the islands of the Pacific.
Assessing the Evidence on Indigenous Socioeconomic Outcomes »
A focus on the 2002 NATSISS
Edited by: Boyd Hunter
Publication date: June 2006
This monograph presents the peer-reviewed proceedings of the CAEPR conference on Indigenous Socioeconomic Outcomes: Assessing Recent Evidence, held at The Australian National University in August 2005. It presents the latest evidence on Indigenous economic and social status, and family and community life, and discusses its implications for government policy.
The main focus of this volume is on analysing the 2002 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey (NATSISS) outputs and issues about how to interpret the data. It also offers some assessment of changes in Indigenous social conditions over time and examines how Indigenous people fared vis-à-vis other Australians in other statistical collections. The discussion of the broad Indigenous policy context by three prominent Indigenous Australians—Larissa Berhendt, Tom Calma, and Geoff Scott—explores different perspectives.