bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Stories of Gender and Ethnicity: Discourses of colonialism and resistance in Burma1
Authors: Lwyn Tinzar
Published: February 2009

This paper charts the discursive shift between colonial and ‘post’ colonial discourses about gender and ethnicity in Burma, and attempts to counter such representations by offering alternative stories to those colonialist rumours which have established their status as ‘truth’. The first part deals with missionary discourses in colonial Burma; the second with ‘post’ colonial discourses on Burmese women; and the final section offers stories told by women involved in the political struggles of contemporary Burma. The aim of the paper is to attempt to de‐territorialize Burma as a site of colonialist knowledge.
Postcoloniality, National Identity, Globalisation and the Simulacra of the Real
Authors: Srivastava Sanjay
Published: February 2009

The focus of this paper is a famous boys' boarding school in the North Indian city of Dehra Dun. The Doon School was founded in 1935 and was soon hailed by a wide cross section of post‐colonial Indian intelligentsia as the site for the production of the ‘modern’ Indian citizen. The discussion below suggests that contemporary social analysis needs to focus on specific sites of the production of the discourses of the nation and citizenship rather than simply announce their dissolution as an ‘inevitable’ by‐product of ‘globalisation’; this seems to be the stand taken by certain strands of theorisation in the so‐called globalisation debate and in particular versions of cultural studies. I argue that rather than having simply dissolved, the ‘national’ emotion, at least in the Indian context, may have been transformed into the production of ‘post‐coloniality’ as a differentiating category to distinguish the ‘progressive’ populations of the nation‐state from its ‘backward’ counterparts. I employ Baudrillard's concept of the ‘real’ in order to argue for situated analyses of the contemporary global condition where analyses of the relationship between nation‐states and of the asymmetries within them continue to be important political tasks.
`Loggers are Environmentalists Too‘. Towards an Ethnography of Environmental Dispute, Rural New South Wales 1994–19951
Authors: Peace Ade
Published: February 2009

The discourse of environmentalism is now more integral than that of any other new social movement to national political debate in Australia. One of the most important consequences of this has been the intensity of political dialogue focussed on the timber industry, especially recent exchanges over the exploitation of native forests for woodchipping. One of the more intriguing results has been the resort of avowedly apolitical loggers, timber contractors, sawmillers, and others to mass protest. This article aims to show how an anthropological perspective can illuminate the various cultural factors which are transforming the landscape of forest politics.
The Right Kind of Women Things: Changing Compositions of Gendered Subjectivity in New Caledonia
Authors: Johnson Helen
Published: February 2009

Drawing upon life histories compiled in New Caledonia, this article examines the ways in which some women inscribed and contested their gendered subjectivities. Anchored in the perception that ‘gender’ can be recognised as historically and culturally constituted in contingent human practices, it proffers testimonies to reason that women's composition and expression of their lived experience can be understood as modes of embodied consciousness. By situating each woman's discursive strategy into the complex interplay of historical processes, structured social organisations, and the anomalies, ambiguities and contradictions revealed through their conversations, the relationships and practices which inscribed the self‐making of some Kanak and Caledonienne women are explored.
Going Feral: Authentica on the Edge of Australian Culture1
Authors: St John Graham
Published: February 2009

In a study of an Australian ‘alternative lifestyle gathering’, I investigate the authentica (the multiplicity of discourse and practice valued as ‘true’, ‘natural’, ‘pure’) championed and performed on‐site. Using emic description, the article details the authentica of ‘play’ (ludic exploration via alterity, especially indigeneity), ‘earth’ (ecological consciousness) and ‘tribe’ (the search for belonging in community) which are axiomatic to ConFest (Conference/Festival), one of Australia's principal sites for the celebration of alternative (‘edge’) culture. In this counter‐space, an outsider status I call ‘ferality’ is conditioned. A repository of authenticity for many ConFesters, the ambivalent category feral, with its particular subcultural traits, is realised in a hyper‐liminal zone on the margins, the cultural hinterland, of Australian society. Using the work of Turner (on ‘liminality’) and Maffesoli (on ‘neo‐tribalism’), I seek to throw light on the (re)production of alternative culture in an analysis of an event where new frontiers in the fields of leisure, health, environment, religion and community are explored.
Urban Kampongs in Ambon: Whose Domain? Whose Desa?
Authors: Mearns David
Published: February 2009

A devastating fire in a poor quarter of the city of Ambon, Eastern Indonesia, provided the context in which a number of the social, cultural and historical factors shaping the lives of the city's residents came to the fore. The paper argues that to comprehend the experiences of people whose lives were touched by the fire, and to appreciate its significance, the meanings ascribed to the event, it is necessary to comprehend those multiple factors in all their complexity and interpenetration. The paper argues that the symbolic construction of urban space and its constitution as ‘place’ are continuously emergent out of processes which appear in transformational moments, such as this fire. Physical changes to the quarter through time are examined to demonstrate their relevance to understanding the contemporary social processes and their local interpretations. The migratory origins of the people; continuing divisions between Christian and Muslim populations; the ongoing relevance of ancestral spirits and magic; the role of colonial and postcolonial states, and Ambon's strategic position, are all argued to be important to understanding the meaning of the place and the use of space in the city. The implications of the intersection of at least four clusters of ideas about space and place are considered critical to any adequate account of the contemporary lives of Ambonese and to explaining how it comes to be that some residents can become permanently displaced. The argument emphasises the processual nature of the understandings of space in the urban context.
The Consequences of Being a Gift
Authors: Bloustien Gerry
Published: February 2009

The issues of dislocated identity are epitomised in Mary's story. Brought from Papua New Guinea to Australia at a very young age as a ‘gift’, she grew up in a series of foster homes in Adelaide, South Australia. Now, as a teenager, Mary constitutes her identity through her body, emphasising her distinctive physical features, through idealised memories and through representations—photographs, cultural icons and people who ‘look like me’. The self she creates in this way sits uneasily along side another self; the Western adolescent self in trouble with the law, the self who struggles to be ‘one of the boys’ on the streets, one who ‘runs amuck’. This paper explores the process of ‘self‐making’, the ‘serious play’ that Mary has employed to constitute her identity through her juggling of and reappropriation of cultural symbols. As a participant in a wider ethnographic study into Australian youth and representation, Mary portrayed the complexities of her growing up between worlds, embedded in neither and desperate to belong to her past.
Nature, Work and ‘the Environment’: Contesting Sentiments and Identities in the Southwest of Western Australia
Authors: Trigger David
Published: February 2009

Contesting discourses about natural resource development present a rich arena for ethnographic investigation. This paper focuses on interviews with environmental activists and forest industry defenders to document a struggle over the meaning of land, work and nature in the southwest of Western Australia. While Green activists condemn what they regard as crimes against nature, this moral challenge to rural communities from urban‐based environmentalism is inverted by those working in the industry, such that local cultural practices are celebrated in the face of what is seen as emotional and non‐scientific rhetoric. Conflicts about resource development are thus driven in significant respects by identity politics. The paper argues for the importance of cultural analysis, focused particularly on concepts of identity and ‘place’, in the study of contesting moral claims about what should be done with ‘the environment’.
The Magic in the Magic Pudding
Authors: Eipper Chris
Published: February 2009

This paper offers a narrative interpretation of Norman Lindsay's remarkable children's story, The Magic Pudding. Entering into the spirit of the tale, it seeks to evoke its magic as well as understand it, advocating an approach to the analysis of narrative that is as celebratory as it is critical. Making reference to James Clifford's discussion of ethnographic allegory, it draws on Michael Taussig's analysis of commodity and other forms of fetishism to argue that the pudding can be construed as a fetish object expressive of concerns and tensions haunting the Australian imaginary. The paper addresses such things as the interplay of class, race and sex in Lindsay's story, equality and exclusion, wealth without work, beards and hats and whatnot. In doing so, it responds to the humour and metaphorical play that is the source of the tale's popular appeal by offering the reader a little of its own—not a whole pudding's worth perhaps but at least enough to whet the appetite.
Anthropology at Home in Australia
Authors: Morton John
Published: February 2009

This introductory essay takes ‘anthropology at home’ to refer to the conduct of fieldwork and other kinds of anthropological research in or about communities which Australian anthropologists regard as culturally familiar. In that sense, anthropology at home raises two interrelated questions: 1) ‘What is an appropriate anthropological object?’ and 2) ‘What are the appropriate methods for studying that object?’ I argue that anthropology remains overdetermined by its colonial heritage and that it is still overly concerned with the study of ‘the other’ through long‐term fieldwork. My feeling is that we should displace the idea of ‘the other’ in favour of an anthropological object construed in terms of self‐other relationships. This not only implies that anthropology at home should cease to appear as an oxymoron, but also suggests that a more comprehensive employment of various study methods should displace long‐term fieldwork as metonymic of the discipline.
Home‐town Anthropology
Authors: Madden Raymond
Published: February 2009

As I undertake fieldwork in my home‐town area, I experience the familiar and the unfamiliar colliding, overlapping and interrelating in a critically productive, yet tense, dialectic. Questions arise for me such as: What is the field? What is home? When am I an anthropologist? When am I a local? By looking at the relationship between Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal people in my home‐town area, I am able to briefly explore these questions and come to a position where 1 sense the need for anthropology to look to comparative strategies (whereby difference and similarity are seen in relation to each other). This I see as a corrective to an overly contrastive approach which prioritises the representation of difference between cultural groups.
Swimming in and out of Focus: Second Contact, Vietnamese Migrant Others and Australian Selves
Authors: McKenzie Peter
Published: February 2009

Anthropologists and others have always used the Other to define themselves. Using Michael Taussig's idea of ‘second contact’, I argue that this is inappropriate and that the imagined borders between us and them in relationships between Vietnamese and other Australians are less than stable, continually losing their polarity and swimming in and out of focus. In light of the Vietnamese migrant case, I argue that similar ethnographic research projects cannot rely on stable boundaries between the host and the migrant community to organise explanations. Rather than simply registering ‘cultural contacts’, we have to engage the interplay between the strange and the familiar in specific contexts. Furthermore, my reading of Vietnamese migrant identity obliges us to listen to Vietnamese Australian voices as they attempt to respond to the fluctuating interstices of an intercultural borderland. This implies the mutual anthropological interrogation of both self and other.
The Howl and the Pussy: Feral Cats and Wild Dogs in the Australian Imagination
Authors: Smith Nicholas
Published: February 2009

This paper looks at recent attention given to feral cats in Australia, particularly focusing on their symbolic status in eco‐nationalist discourses. Australian eco‐nationalism is a specific blend of environmentalist and patriotic sentiments which, in an exaggerated way, positions the feral cat as a rapacious European invader predating on native wild life. This vilification of the cat can be related to much earlier forms of (mainly European) symbolism associating the creature with femininity and evil, which I illustrate by looking at the manner in which the feral cat is opposed to the masculinised Australian wild dog—the dingo. I argue that the recent surfacing of this totemic opposition between ‘the howl and the pussycat’ is related to an eco‐nationalist sense of place which simultaneously recognises and denies that the human colonisation of Australia was (and is) a form of feral invasion.
Open for Inspection: Problems in Representing a Humanised Wilderness
Authors: Lancashire Dianne
Published: February 2009

Historically, a large percentage of non‐indigenous Australians have obtained knowledge of Aboriginal people through channels which provoke an aesthetic response (paintings, film, literature, etc.). More recently, inhabited national parks, such as Kakadu and Uluru, have offered a supposedly more direct engagement with contemporary Aboriginal life, yet this engagement is also filtered through a number of aesthetic discourses. The necessity for any social group to construct representations of itself arises out of the complexities and contingencies of the political landscape. Although such representations can and do reflect a number of political perspectives, Aboriginal people occasionally have the opportunity to convey their own view of the social and historical circumstances which continue to impinge upon their lives. Although national park boards of management often encourage this indigenous voice, I argue that the resulting aesthetic representations tend to elide and suppress the untidy moments which gave rise to them. This, I further suggest, presents problems for any attempt to represent the contemporary social and cultural reality of a particular group of people.
Rejecting Suburban Identity on the Fringes of Melbourne
Authors: Newton Janice
Published: February 2009

This paper concerns a community, Valinda, on the suburban fringe of Melbourne. It considers the processes by which the community has acted to reject the perceived attributes of suburbanisation. Optimistic aims of progress in the 1940s and 1950s have been replaced by more nostalgic points of view in the 1970s and 1980s, a transition I document in a number of different areas. The paper concludes with an examination of key agents in the anti‐suburban discourse and the genealogy of that discourse. Valinda's search for an ecological spirituality, I suggest, particularly resonates with David Tacey's popular Jungian work Edge of the Sacred, published in 1995.
Fire, Heroes and the Cosmic: Aesthetic Resonances of Fire‐walking in Northern Greece
Authors: Kondos Vivienne
Published: February 2009

In the Greek village of Mavrolefki in Thrace, a small number of women and men. about ten in number, once a year, on the feast day of St. Constantine, undertake a series of rites, ranging from dancing to the icons, blood sacrifice, to the most spectacular fire‐walking (pyrovasia). It is the last which brings spectators from all over Greece and further afield. The principal participants, however, are known as the anastenarides (shakers, tremblers). Several concerns are addressed in the paper. Given the peculiar mix of proceedings, the first is to lay out the components of the affair, asking what's going on? Furthermore, there are the conceptual issues. What aesthetic is being implicated? What emotions are being brought into play? What does the event amount to? In addressing such questions the paper draws on certain aesthetic formulations of the Hindu rasa theory.
Journeying Between Desire and Anthropology: A Story in Suspense
Authors: Lundberg Anita
Published: February 2009

Anthropology is a discipline based on the motif of the journey and ‘the myth of the eternal return’. This is the journey out to the ‘other’in order to return to constitute ‘self, and this movement is a movement of desire. The desire is for wholeness, for self‐presence, for a unified self. It is a desire for origins. And this desire is evident in anthropological practices as it is in myths and fairytales—all tell stories that speak of the desire for a separate, an original, self. Yet ‘the myth of the eternal return’reveals that the enactment of the story is itself originating. The origin is not a thing to be hunted down and appropriated—it is no thing. Like the archetypes which flow through stories, it is alive in the telling.

The story I tell in this paper is about my own desires. It speaks of the desire to undergo the rite of passage of anthropology, and of how this journey was interrupted by the anthropologist who always journeys before me. And yet. it is through the inextricable relations with the writings of the “other‘ anthropologist that alluring moments of different desiring are fleetingly revealed. In the end. my relations with anthropology tell of a paradox: of the desire for a transcendental journey in order to constitute self and the seductive desire for immersion—to lose self, the story remains in suspense.
Fijian Business—a Bone of Contention. Was it One of the Factors Leading to the Political Crisis of 2000?
Authors: Williksen‐Bakker Solrun
Published: February 2009

In this paper I seek to cast light on a particular aspect of the background for the political crisis in Fiji in 2000. Before and during this crisis politicians and media kept hammering on the theme of Fijians' inferior position in the economic life of the country. The public argument in Fiji further emphasised the success of the Indians and that this in turn further marginalised the Fijians. It was frequently asserted that the Fijians needed affirmative action in order to get on in the modern business world and that the new Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry was favouring the Indians.

The theme of this article is that the rhetoric used prior to and during the crisis was a reiteration of a longstanding discourse in Fiji. Similar arguments were used in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly as a means of legitimating the coup in 1987, and during the regime of Rabuka in the 1990s. My primary concern here is not to document the success or failure of Fijians in modern business enterprises, but rather to make clear how the dichotomy of business‐vanua comprises a variety of concerns and doubts related to modernisation, urbanisation, ethnicity, belonging, values and choices. By constantly discussing and exposing the interface between business and vanua, money and land, people seek to make sense of complex urban situations. The ongoing debate may be looked upon as a ‘work of coherence’ in Hannerz’ terms, and as such is a debate on modernity.
Maori Sport and Cultural Identity in Australia
Authors: Bergin Paul
Published: February 2009

Sport is an important aspect of cultural identity for New Zealand Maori migrants living in Australia. Maori sporting endeavours, especially at festivals such as the Taki Toa Tournament in New South Wales, often reveal distinctive Maori features of cultural performance, in the rituals prior to a game, in the spirited manner with which a game is played, and in the whânau (large/extended family) spirit of belonging and celebration that is encouraged after a game.

However, notwithstanding the occasional Maori tournament or festival, Maori sporting participation in Australia is not restricted to an ‘ethnic ghetto’. Widespread Maori involvement in sport has provided an important avenue for Maori migrants to mix socially with Aboriginal and other Australians in their local communities, and to gain acceptance, respect and, in some cases, economic advancement.

Many first‐generation Maori migrants display a keen sense of a New Zealand rather than an Australian identity when it comes to trans‐Tasman international sport. Transnational links are also important for Australian Maori who visit New Zealand with sporting teams and stay on various marae (tribal meeting places). The experience of ‘Maori culture’ and hospitality offered by their New Zealand kinsfolk may have a significant influence upon the sporting visitors' subsequent development of Maori cultural identity.
Home and Away: The Grounding of New Football Teams in Perth, Western Australia
Authors: Jones Roy
Published: February 2009

Metropolitan sporting, and particularly football, competitions were established in all of Australia's colonial state capital cities about a century ago. Typically, they were comprised of teams from and were supported by the inhabitants of working‐class, inner suburbs. These competitions were the primary foci of Australians' sporting interest and loyalty for almost a century. But, with the shift of public attention and private capital to national competitions, the former stadia of many local clubs have become redundant spaces in what are now gentrifying inner suburbs. Simultaneously new, and even old, national league teams have sought larger, more modern (near) city centre venues for their operations. In this context, two new national league teams in Perth—Fremantle Dockers and Perth Glory—have experienced considerable challenges in establishing both physical ‘homes’ and local identities. These have included both the supplanting of traditional local clubs and the placating of new kinds of inner suburban residents.
Globalisation and the Genesis of Values
Authors: Austin‐Broos Diane
Published: February 2009

This talk was delivered as an Inaugural Lecture in Anthropology at the University of Sydney on the evening of August 22, 2001. It was sponsored by the Arts Association of the University of Sydney. In it I present an overview of my career, noting the consistencies between my work in philosophy and in anthropology, and between what may appear as two quite disparate field sites, urban Jamaica and central Australia. A method that involves a sociology of value, and an historical anthropology, brings these research areas into interesting relations, as does a growing concern with women's roles in the course of change.
Surrender to the Market: Thoughts on Anthropology, The Body Shop, and Intellectuals1
Authors: Bastin Rohan
Published: February 2009

The direction of anthropology over the last century is tied to the shifts from colonialism to postcolonialism and from modernism to postmodernism. These shifts have seen the thoroughgoing incorporation of the world population into the economic, political and juridical domain established through the last throes of colonialism and the transmutations of capitalism and the State. Anthropology, a discipline whose history shows close and regular links with colonial government, also transforms in association with the world it describes and partly creates. Two dominant trends in contemporary anthropology—applied consultancy and historicist self‐reflexivity—are compared for the ways they represent the transmutation, which is characterised, following Fredric Jameson as ‘the surrender to the market’. In this way it is asserted that just as the discipline had hitherto revealed its links to colonialism, it now reveals its links to globalisation through a form of commodified self‐obsession. To illustrate this quality the paper considers the global chain of cosmetics stores, The Body Shop, as an example of ‘late capitalism’ and the moral juridical framework of globalisation. Finally, it treats these developments in anthropology as more generally affecting intellectuals and knowledge production through the promotion of intellectual ‘silence’.
The Law of the Land: A Review Article
Authors: Weiner James F.
Published: February 2009

This is a review article of the book Native Title Corporations: A Legal and Anthropological Analysis from the point of view of anthropology. I begin by highlighting the development of Anglo‐Australian social anthropology from such figures as Radcliffe‐Brown and Fortes, who were heavily influenced by regulatory and normative models from the domain of legal and judicial scholarship and speculate on the contemporary conditions by which this original social anthropological metaphor has apparently achieved a new literalisation. I criticise the legalistic appropriation of anthropological and ethnographic methodology that this book makes explicit, and finally, I express scepticism for the future success of the prescribed body corporate, as described in the Native Title Act (1993), as a model for the possession, transmission and elaboration of indigenous rights to country.
When the Starship Pintupi Meets the Klingons of Policy
Authors: Smith Diane
Published: February 2009

Ralph Folds. Crossed Purposes: The Pintupi and Australia's Indigenous Policy.
Guardians of Culture: The Controversial Heritage of Senegalese Griots1
Authors: Hearn Adrian H.
Published: February 2009

The low‐caste Griots of Senegal's Wolof community, traditionally employed as singers of histories and praises, earn their keep today by playing sabar drums at private women's dance parties. Although these gatherings are publicly scorned for the sexually expressive dances they involve, they are nevertheless immensely popular behind closed doors. Many Griot drummers justify their participation in sabar performances by linking the activity with the work of their historically marginalised ancestors, though this connection is disputed by elderly Griots, who view it as departure from their occupational tradition. While sabar is criticised for subverting both Griot heritage and public standards of decency, the ethnographic data suggest that it nevertheless reproduces traditional patronage relationships based on the interdependence and mutual benefit of the low‐status (caste) and high‐status (noble) sectors. Research is based on eleven months of participant observation in Senegal in 1996 and 1997, during which time the author trained as a sabar drummer in Dakar and Saint‐Louis.
What's in a Dedication? On Being a Warlpiri DJ
Authors: Hinkson Melinda
Published: February 2009

This article reports on the operation of the Pintupi Anmatyerre Warlpiri radio network, established by the Warlpiri Media Association in the north‐west of Central Australia in late 2001. It traces the history out of which the network emerged and considers the distinctive approach taken to broadcasting by a group of young Warlpiri women. In exploring the on‐air invocation of particular forms of social relations, I argue that radio has come to play an important role in facilitating expressions of Warlpiri sociality across an expanding social field. At once a driver of social transformation and the transcendence of localism, as well as the glue that might bind people to each other in a changing world, the activity occurring around the Warlpiri Media Association provides a window onto the multiple challenges and choices faced by Warlpiri people in the present. This article is most particularly interested in how Warlpiri youth are negotiating these challenges and choices. The final section considers whether this new radio network might be understood in terms of the emergence of a new public sphere.
Rationality Run Amok
Authors: Evans Grant
Published: February 2009

Book reviewed in this article:

Steven Pinker.
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.

Melvin Konner.
The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit. Second Edition, Revised and Updated.
Nietzsche's Pendulum: Oscillations of Humankind
Authors: Rapport Nigel
Published: February 2009

Oscillations have been famously treated by anthropologists at the level of social structure. Rites of passage: dynamic equilibrium: binary exchange. Employing a Nietzschean trope of the Apollonian and Dionysian, this article treats oscillations more existentially. Between cultural belonging and truth, between symbolic form and experience, between poetry and biology—the article disinters certain motilities of being and becoming that exemplify universals of human capacity and can be claimed to be ubiquitous in human experience. Tensions are intrinsic to the human condition, the article argues, and knowledge of the human is also to be foundbetween:between the orderly and formal on the one hand, and the gratuitous, random and free on the other. For instance, in an oscillation between cultural belonging and scientific truth, Ernest Gellner acceded to knowledge of a possibly universal, rational morality. Oscillating between the psychically intensive methodology and the extensive, George Devereux advocated knowledge of the potentialities of the human psyche as such. Oscillating between ideal‐typical, conceptual and symbolic schemata and the motile sensorium, between the biochemical conditioning of individual embodiment and the creative imagination, Edmund Leach and James Fernandez claimed knowledge of the connection between culture and society and bodily experience. Embracing oscillation one may approach an appropriately flexible and transitory knowledge of humankind, accepting the irony that it is ‘forms of movement’ that best give onto an appreciation of the human condition.
‘Native’ Culture and Self‐advocacy
Authors: Paine Robert
Published: February 2009

Book reviewed in this article:

Takashi Irimoto and Takako Yamada (eds). Circumpolar Ethnicity and Identity.
`Blue Lagoons and Coconut Palms‘: The Creation of a Tropical Idyll in Australia
Authors: Pocock Celmara
Published: February 2009

The Great Barrier Reef is regarded as an ‘Australian icon’. It is an internationally recognised World Heritage site managed for its ‘natural’ values. However, it is a location where visitors rarely enjoy Australian landscapes. This paper contrasts the sensuous engagement of past visitors with contemporary tourist experiences. Analysis of historic and contemporary visual and written materials suggests that tourist landscapes of the Reef have been transformed significantly during the 20th century. In particular, experiences of Reef islands characterised by Australian bush have been displaced by those of a generic Pacific location. The coconut palm, as a symbol of earthly paradise, has played an important role in realising both an imagined landscape and the physical transformation of tourist locations. Whereas the tourism industry is often regarded as responsible for the promulgation of such generic images, this study suggests that they are the product of a shared imagination to which both the tourism industry and tourists subscribe.
Crisis of Meanings: Divergent Experiences and Perceptions of the Marine Environment in Victoria, Australia
Authors: King Tanya J.
Published: February 2009

The oceans of the world are regularly depicted as under threat from human exploitation with the problem portrayed as being of ‘global’ concern. In a world market characterised by the division of labour, many of those who eat fish do so without directly experiencing the ocean as a domain of productive utility. Rather, their encounters are with representations that depict the ‘natural’ world as an aesthetic object of contemplation, and environmentalist discourses that identify human activities as threatening marine ecosystems. So prevalent is this experience that tangible institutions, such as state fisheries management bodies, have emerged, acting to reinforce the ontology of this ‘contemplated’ ocean, giving weight to the illusion that humans can, and should, appreciate it only from afar. In this representation, commercial fishers are regularly depicted as transgressing a ‘natural’ boundary between humans and the environment. It is when the world is simultaneously encountered as an object of consumptive utility and aesthetic utility that the human role in the environment becomes ambiguous and a sense of crisis arises. This paper investigates disjunctions in experiences and understandings that contribute to environmental anxiety, and debates over the appropriate use of the ocean.
Water Works: Agency and Creativity in the Mitchell River Catchment
Authors: Strang Veronica
Published: February 2009

This paper outlines some of the theoretical developments in cultural anthropology that have been particularly useful in elucidating human engagements with land and resources. It examines some of the meanings and values encoded in water by a range of water using groups along the Mitchell River in northern Queensland, and their diverse ideas of what constitutes environmental ‘productivity’. Exploring some of the cultural and sub‐cultural beliefs and practices within the catchment area, it considers how these intersect with ecological issues; social issues; and with local conflicts over the ownership, control and management of water.
The Flexible Feminine in Vietnam: ‘Ordinary’ Goddesses and Extraordinary Ethnography
Authors: Lilley Rozanna
Published: February 2009

Book reviewed in this article:

Philip Taylor. Goddess on the Rise: Pilgrimage and Popular Religion in Vietnam
European Settlement and the Making and Unmaking of Aboriginal Identities
Authors: Merlan Francesca
Published: February 2009

This paper explores variation and change in Aboriginal people's connections to places, and place‐related identity, as a function of their differential historical relationship to a town. Among Aboriginal people who have lived for some decades in camps around Katherine, Northern Territory, descendants of those who appear to have the most clearly discernable long‐term relationship with the area in the vicinity of the town do not relate to places, nor conceptualise them, in stereotypically ‘traditional’ terms. Their relationships to town and nearby places tend to be of an ideologically unelaborated, homely sort. Kinds of territorial relationships their antecedents can be shown to have had to the area have undergone dissolution. The paper seeks to develop discussion of such variation and the historical and sociological processes involved. The Katherine case brings the social and historical significance of ‘towns’ as sites of Aboriginal/non‐Aboriginal interrelationship into focus, and also requires a critical view of notions of ‘group’ that have tended to dominate recent public process and understanding in Australia.
A Study in Neo‐conservative Populism: Richard Trudgen's Why Warriors Lie Down and Die
Authors: Mowbray Martin , Senior Kate
Published: February 2009

First appearing in 2000, and with 20,000 copies sold as it entered its sixth printing in 2004, Richard Trudgen's Why Warriors Lie down and Die is a minor publishing phenomenon. Although scholarly forums have generally ignored the book, Christian media outlets, the popular press and neo‐conservative political activists have enthusiastically received and promoted it. An examination of the merits of Why Warriors Lie down and Die suggests that its popularity is only partly explained by original observations or insights on the part of the author. The most important explanation, and implication, of the book's remarkable take‐up lies in the opportune way in which it corresponds with now ascendant neo‐conservative political perspectives on indigenous policy.
The Contest of Moralities: Negotiating Compulsory Celibacy and Sexual Intimacy in the Roman Catholic Priesthood
Authors: Anderson Jane
Published: February 2009

Religions can claim moral fixity while experiencing moral fluidity, a contradiction that produces social tensions. By going behind the facade of a fixed morality, found in the official teaching on compulsory celibacy for Roman Catholic priests, this article explores how respective moralities have been constructed and negotiated by the papacy of John Paul II and priests who have sexually intimate friendships. In examining social processes that are used in the production of moralities, I show how the papacy constructs etymologies to establish its claim that celibacy is an essential tradition, which are concomitantly rhetorical representations of a fixed morality. I then analyse the idiomatic constructions of priests with ‘friends' in which they informally challenge the etymological ploys of the papacy with alternative readings of tradition, representations that, in turn, create new moralities. Features of this contest of moralities are then examined, which suggest that the tension between moral fixity and moral fluidity constantly tests a religion's readiness for change.
‘The Miserablest People in the World’: Race, Humanism and the Australian Aborigine
Authors: Anderson Kay , Perrin Colin
Published: February 2009

This paper considers how an idea of the Australian Aborigine impacted upon the development of racial thinking throughout the nineteenth century. We distinguish three phases of this development. Against the background of what was considered to be a distinctly human capacity to rise above nature, our central argument however is that the extreme and irremediable savagery attributed to the Aborigine led to the mid‐nineteenth shift to a polygenist, or an innatist, idea of race. The first part of our discussion, covering the early 1800s, elicits a specifically humanist puzzlement at the unimproved condition of the Aborigines. But, as we will show in the central part of our discussion, it was not only the Aborigines' inclination but their capacity for ‘improvement’ that came to be doubted. Challenging the very basis upon which ‘the human’ had been defined, and the unity of humankind assumed, the Aborigine could not be accommodated within a prevailing conception of racial difference as a mere variety of the human. The elaboration of polygenism may therefore be understood as arising out of this humanist incomprehension: as an attempt to account for the ontologically inexplicable difference of the Australian Aborigine. In the final part of our discussion, we trace the legacy of the Aborigine's place within polygenism through the evolutionary thought of the late nineteenth century. Despite an explicit return to monogenism, here the Aborigine is invoked to support the claim that race constitutes a more or less permanent difference and, for certain races, a more or less permanent deficiency. And as, in these terms, the anomalous Aborigine became an anachronism, so Australia's indigenous peoples came to embody the most devastating conclusion of evolutionary thought: that in the human struggle for existence certain races were destined not even to survive.
Anthropology and the Dialectic of Enlightenment: A Discourse on the Definition and Ideals of a Threatened Discipline
Authors: Kapferer Bruce
Published: February 2009

The knowledge practices of social and cultural anthropology can be conceived as undergoing constant methodological reconsideration or reformulation as a consequence of internal critique and of institutional change effected in the larger educational and political environment. Neo‐liberal shifts affecting the institutional context may have influenced a deepening of the crisis in anthropology where the nature of its project has become less certain or has threatened a reconfiguration of such proportion that anthropology may be losing sight of its direction. This essay explores some of the Enlightenment roots of social and cultural anthropology. It is presented as very much an idea that embodies and reflects what Adorno and Horkheimer discussed as the dialectic of Enlightenment. The argument presented is less pessimistic claiming that the distinction of anthropology is in its pursuit of Enlightenment ideals that it has maintained and rehoned as a consequence of its own routine internal critique. The vital implication of the discussion is that anthropology is in a situation of serious threat in largely a post‐Enlightenment world. In such a context, the methodological ideals that emerged as integral to the spirit of anthropology are well worth maintaining rather than abandoning. The ideals that are addressed are conceived to be integral to the importance of anthropology as critique and as a knowledge practice capable of sustaining a profound contribution to the understanding of the potential that is human being.
Introduction: Reconsidering Agency—Feminist Anthropologies in Asia
Authors: Hilsdon Anne‐Marie
Published: February 2009

The five articles in this Special Issue are introduced by contextualising them broadly within feminist poststructuralist, postcolonial and anthropological approaches. After a brief exploration of methodologies that link ethnography with poetics and historical analysis, a general theoretical critique of modern Western forms of agency, especially liberal notions of autonomous rational choice, is offered. Western philosophy and theory, argues the author, have implications well beyond social formations in the West and she outlines their impacts on the agency of women in Asian societies. While cautioning against the pitfalls of both under and overvaluing agency, the author then offers a reconsideration of its analytical utility. Agency needs to address the gaps between everyday reflection and practices and hegemonic discourses or symbolic structures. In this gap, where women who fall outside the parameters of dominant notions of womanhood are considered ‘unstable’, both resistance and constraint are possible. Dominant discourses certainly have durable effects but their tools and symbols have been reinscribed to produce agency in hybrid forms. Agency is thus thought to arise from within existing societal discourses and symbolic structures rather than in opposition to them. In this process multiple positionings for women, all of which are performative, are created. These reconsiderations of agency are mirrored in the articles which follow. Agency in its modern forms is deemed inadequate by these authors to explain the agency of women in Asia. Rather than proposing a hierarchy of agency in its significant and insignificant forms, the authors in this Issue provide much needed accounts of socially and culturally situated agency, significant in both their breadth and depth.
Just Choices: Representations of Choice and Coercion in Sex Work in Cambodia
Authors: Sandy Larissa
Published: February 2009

In global discourses about sex work, the image of the ‘sex slave’ has been influential in constructing the view of women working in the sex industry in developing countries as ‘victims’. This paper examines the perpetuation of such discourses through powerful lobbying groups and socially conservative governments. It argues that frameworks that situate women working in the Cambodian sex industry through a singular identity of ‘victim’ or ‘agent’ are inadequate in informing our understandings of sex work in the country. Based on ethnographic research and interviews with sex workers in the port city of Sihanoukville, Cambodia, this paper questions prevailing stereotypes of ‘trafficking victims' and the image of ‘defiled’ or ‘duped’ women and girls central to such frameworks. It examines the intricate intertwining of elements of individual choice and coercion in women's lives and illuminates how, in the transition to a market economy, women's choices are constrained by hierarchal structures such as gender, class and socio‐cultural obligations and poor employment opportunities.
Moving Statues and Moving Images: Religious Artefacts and the Spiritualisation of Materiality
Authors: Eipper Chris
Published: February 2009

This paper addresses the spiritualisation of materiality integral to the expression of religious experience by devotees. It focuses on the ‘objective correlatives' of emotion‐imbued faith. Although primarily concerned with the aesthetics of contemporary Catholic mysticism, the aim is to suggestively allude to the implications for comparative analysis. Beginning with devotion to the rosary, it addresses the ‘moving statues' phenomenon, which in the mid‐1980s in Ireland led to numerous visionaries experiencing apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Arguing that sensory analogues are indispensable to the expression of feelings and thoughts, it directs our attention to the tensions implicit in the process, i.e., to the way humans (in this case, religious devotees) need to find and fix upon an adequate and appropriate sensory equivalent. It stresses that such tensions are integral to the formulation and communication of meaning. Further consideration of the imaginative power of material representations leads into a discussion of the influence now exerted by the moving image. The depiction of penitential suffering in The Passion of the Christ is then used to illustrate how film can function as an objective correlative, in this case by articulating notions of penance and redemption shared by Irish visionaries and their disciples.
Shifting Egalitarianisms and Contemporary Racism in Rural Victorian Football: The Rumbalara Experience
Authors: Tynan Michael
Published: February 2009

This article builds on our understanding of racism towards Aboriginal people in Australia through an examination of discriminatory belief structures pervasive in the mainstream community as evidenced through the important social field of country football in regional Victoria. It analyses the power and pervasiveness of the racial stereotyping that exists in some segments of the community by using Langton's (1997) notion of ‘iconic images' as well as discussing the importance of particular ideological motivations around values such as ‘egalitarianism’. This is achieved through analysing the views of players, supporters and officials of mainstream clubs towards the Aboriginal Rumbalara Football Netball Club. This analysis is structurally situated within a broader understanding of Australian national identity, in particular looking at the intersection of the powerful cultural domains of sport and evolving expressions of whiteness and egalitarianism.
Cruising: ‘Moral Panic’ and the Cronulla Riot
Authors: Lattas Judy
Published: February 2009

In this paper I draw on ethnography I undertook amongst locals in the Cronulla area after the riot of December 2005. A number of the young beach goers I came across had been on a P&O ‘schoolies cruise’ at the time of the riot. For two weeks the students depended on the media for information about what was going on in their suburbs. Sailing back, I was told, a pumped‐up chorus of ‘Shi‐ire!’ and ‘White Pride!’ rang out over Sydney Heads, as expectations climbed high of the ship being met by gangs of Middle Eastern youths, ready for the fight. Back on the beach, months later, bodies baking in the sun try to reconcile the thought of riot with what they know about Australia, and Cronulla, as a place of laid back, leisurely, lazily tolerant people. How can the two scenes of bodily excess be brought together? What are the limits of the ‘moral panic’ idea, in relation to the Cronulla riot? How do the competing truths of major discourses on Cronulla misrepresent the community in question?