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This paper examines the classification of the landscape, both biota and terrain, in Wagiman, a language of northern Australia. There is considerable debate as to the comparative roles of cognitive and cultural factors in the analysis of landscape terminologies. Any analysis of terminologies necessarily involves consideration of meaning. There are many approaches to the analysis of meaning and analysis of Wagiman landscape classification requires at least two approaches. One approach involves necessary and sufficient conditions for connotation, and the other involves prototypes. The comparative roles of cognitive and cultural factors vary depending upon the approach to meaning, with cognitive factors playing a greater role in connotation and cultural factors playing a greater role in prototypes. The current research literature on Australian languages examines behavioural and morphological oppositions, material make‐up, shape, size as cognitive factors and affordance and human usage as cultural factors. This paper provides evidence that there is another cultural factor which plays a central role in prototype classification, mental maps of the landscape involving zonal oppositions. Prototypes for many terms do not have an individuated reference but rather have an unindividuated reference to typical zones of occurrence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Service providers commonly understand development projects in Indigenous Australia to play out at the intersection of a pre‐existing binary between Indigenous and non‐Indigenous groups. It follows that effective development practice is seen to depend on building partnerships across the 'intercultural' divide. Instead of taking this assumption as a baseline from which analysis proceeds, I draw on Karen Barad's theory of 'intra‐action' to show how an Indigenous/non‐Indigenous binary is continually produced in the context of a development NGO working in Central Australia. Based on fieldwork as a volunteer within this NGO, I demonstrate how the 'intra‐action' of community development process produces forms of difference and relatedness for non‐Indigenous NGO staff, and for the Aboriginal community. I argue that in spite of calls for deeper engagements, the community development apparatus continually performs separateness as the ethical framework on which the project proceeds. The paper contributes to debates around 'intercultural' anthropology and presents a non‐normative account of development practice in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Larrakia terminology is a member of the very small class of asymmetric terminologies in Australia, but it is the most poorly described. There are a number of documentary sources, and this paper considers principled bases for the comparative evaluation of sources in order to produce a well‐founded description which can contribute to theories of kinship both in Australia and more generally. In terms of general kinship theory, the reconstructed Larrakia terminology raises issues for the analysis of Omaha skewing as a category. The prototype equation for Omaha skewing is MB = MBS, with equations such as MMB = MMBS being extensions. The Larrakia kin terminology is unusual among kin terminologies in having the extension equation MMB = MMBS but not the prototype equation. This raises a question as to the sufficiency conditions for membership of the Omaha category and the implications of the inclusion or exclusion of the Larrakia terminology in debates over the Omaha category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Barwick (1990) finds that, in Central Australian performance, whilst text and melody in isolation are relatively fixed, 'there is immense variability in their combination, which is accomplished by what may be crudely characterised as a process of expansion and contraction of the melody to accommodate texts of different lengths' (Barwick 1990:61). Following musicological examinations by both Barwick (Barwick 1989, 1990 and 1995) and Keogh (Keogh 1995) which focus on identifying principles that underlie this process of expansion and contraction, the paper presented here looks at songs of the junba genre, composed and performed by Ngarinyin elder, Scotty Martin, in the North central Kimberley. In addition, it is suggested in this paper that the style of musicological analysis developed by Barwick and Keogh has relevance beyond the discipline of musical analysis, as its results allow the analyst and reader to begin to trace relationships between creative processes active in the moment of performance with 'patterns and rules' evident in other aspects of the music-makers' ways of being in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid a renewed push to extract water for agriculture and mining, Indigenous advocacy in northern Australia has resulted in the introduction of a new water allocation mechanism: a reserve of water to be retained for the use and benefit of Indigenous communities. Our socio‐legal analysis of the Oolloo Water Allocation Plan shows that the Strategic Aboriginal Water Reserves carry essential hallmarks of neoliberal property relations and are founded in the modernist mode of regulating extracted water as a commodity divisible from land, amenable to partitioning and disarticulated from socio‐cultural relations. Informed by ethnographic material from the Daly River region gathered over almost a century, we describe the hydro‐social relations that are created through customary traditions and practices, water planning and licencing, and the interaction between different scales of water movement and decision‐making by both the state and Traditional Owners. The paper contributes in several ways to research that has identified ontological conflicts as central to disagreements over water and pointed to the difficulty of articulating theoretical framings of ontological difference with the practical work of water negotiations. It shows how the new Indigenous water rights discourse that coincided with the commodification of water in wider Australia shaped the way in which Aboriginal people of this region have more recently articulated their relationships to the Daly River and the limits to state recognition of those relationships. We find that the Reserve model is unable to recognize the capacity of water to connect and unify people and other beings, as well as to define boundaries between them. Within a regime that facilitates resource extraction, a limited opening has been created for Aboriginal people to benefit from this model of economic development, yet we argue that there is reason to fear that the divisions the Aboriginal Water Reserve enacts between waters and land presents significant socio‐cultural risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue is part of a shift in social science and humanities thinking and in public awareness towards planetary water concerns. As societal and scholarly attention to the wet element – and its political import and its cultural constitution – is growing, we ask, how can we rethink our relationships with water in Australia now and into the future? The collection of papers in this issue shows that water responds to human practices which in turn are grounded in cultural imaginaries. Water is thus real in diverse ways, and makes possible diverse material, political and cultural relationships. Taking our lead from the ideas that contributors have developed from this and other questions posed for the issue, our introductory discussion considers three themes that are key to the understanding of water futures in Australia: materialities, temporalities and imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers themes of species maintenance and place engagement in Yanyuwa country, northern Australia. It traces the complexity of interpretations and relational contexts involved in places that are commonly – and we argue – misleadingly, referred to as increase and magic sites. Examining one specific place, at which people carry out maintenance rituals, we explore the complex bonds that unite Yanyuwa with the geography that is the Ancestral Hill Kangaroo. Not content with the classificatory habit of declaring actions either increase oriented or hunting magic, this research more fully explicates the relational substance of places that play a key role in ecological health. This is achieved by asking how might the profundity of a place of relational importance, such as a maintenance site, be better understood and written of in ways that convey an Indigenous ontology and epistemology? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This paper examines a recent dispute generated by the Queensland State Government proposal to build the Traveston Crossing Dam on the Mary River in southeast Queensland, Australia. It is particularly concerned with the ways in which interrelated issues of belonging, community identity, and social diversity were negotiated during the anti-dam campaign. As an unusual alliance of farmers, environmentalists, urban retirees, some Aboriginal people and others, it takes a view of the anti-Traveston Crossing Dam campaign as a fluid network of people and approaches the notion of community identity as the symbolic construction of similarity. Locally specific, the paper describes pertinent aspects of community politics in the context of rural socioeconomic change, and the mobilisation of heritage. With regard to local senses of belonging, it also discusses the involvement of Aboriginal people during the campaign. More broadly then, this paper attempts to make an ethnographic contribution to the study of environmental disputes and the politics of alliance in peri-urban areas of settler-descendant societies such as Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the marginalization of consultant anthropology within the field of Australian anthropology. It talks on the democratic-political values of egalitarianism, neo-liberal conservatism and the politics of anti-politics. It mentions the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act justified by some anthropologists. It also discusses the impartial humanitarian claims of anthropological consultancy.

This paper intervenes in the hidden history of Aboriginal art in south eastern Australia. I argue that for Aboriginal people living in the assimilation era engagement with tourism represented an important means of cultural survival. Working across anthropology and art history this paper focuses on the boomerangs and other artefacts produced by Gunai in Gippsland, Victoria for their own use and for exchange with tourists. The findings from this paper show that, far from being a sign of commodification and a capitulation to capitalism, this cultural production was carried out in opposition to authorities who viewed it as potentially disruptive and counter to assimilation policies. It was this history of cultural practice which contributed to the resurgence of Koorie culture in the 1970s and 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I address the important yet under-examined role of charismatic Protestant Christianity in the reconfiguring of personhood and social relations in the remote Yolngu settlement of Galiwin'ku. I focus in particular on the ways in which this form of Christianity, locally articulated, brings together indigenous concepts of personhood with those introduced by the market, the state, and evangelism to produce what I refer to as Christian individuality and Christian relatedness. These dialectical tendencies in postcolonial settlement life call attention to the ways Yolngu converts use their Christian practices both to continue kin-based moralities in the present and to engage (if selectively) modern individualism. This paper addresses post-colonial conditions where demands of state institutions and modern governance interact with changing ideas of personhood and sociality. It contributes to the growing anthropological literature on Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This two part paper considers the experience of a range of magico-religious experiences (such as visions and voices) and spirit beliefs in a rural Aboriginal town. The papers challenge the tendency of institutionalised psychiatry to medicalise the experiences and critiques the way in which its individualistic practice is intensified in the face of an incomprehensible Aboriginal 'other' to become part of the power imbalance that characterises the relationship between Indigenous and white domains. The work reveals the internal differentiation and politics of the Aboriginal domain, as the meanings of these experiences and actions are contested and negotiated by the residents and in so doing they decentre the concerns of the white domain and attempt to control their relationship with it. Thus the plausibility structure that sustains these multiple realities reflects both accommodation and resistance to the material and historical conditions imposed and enacted by mainstream society on the residents, and to current socio-political realities. I conclude that the residents' narratives chart the grounds of moral adjudication as the experiences were rarely conceptualised by local people as signs of individual pathology but as reflections of social reality. Psychiatric drug therapy and the behaviourist assumptions underlying its practice posit atomised individuals as the appropriate site of intervention as against the multiple realities revealed by the phenomenology of the experiences. The papers thus call into question Australian mainstream 'commonsense' that circulates about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people which justifies representations of them as sickly outcasts in Australian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Morgan and his informants' interpretation of Australian social categories as 'marriage classes' has survived in Dumont's (and Viveiros de Castro's) distinction of a 'local' (Dravidian systems) and a 'global' (Australian systems) formula. This paper explains that the 'global formula' is neither a necessary nor an applied device in Australian kin category determination, even when genealogical memory is short and when there is a non-limitation of range in the extension of categories. Instead, a heuristic model, which is called the relational triangle, is proposed. This model depicts the procedure through which Australian people pragmatically determine and extend kin categories. Moreover, it also offers a visualisation of the cognitive schema and processes framing discourse and behaviour in relation to kinship and draws some parallels with Greenberg's hypotheses on markedness in kinship classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an ethnographic exploration of the assertion of a 'Barkindji style' art: why this matters and to whom it matters. Focusing particularly on the Darling River area of Wilcannia and on the period from the 1980s to the present, the increasing interest in art-making by local Aboriginal people is considered. Through a dialogue with artists, artworks, and others, the work examines the changing form, design and content of art and the rote of art in defining ideas of Barkindji Aboriginal culture and tradition. Invocations by key cultural brokers to produce work that is seen to 'belong to us' is explored in terms of the cultural, political, and personal work that this involves; particularly as this intersects with ideas of artistic freedoms versus artistic direction by cultural brokers. The paper discusses the personal considerations and tensions that come to bear in the processes connected with production of art and its making. In so doing, this paper engages with, and extends, the work of Tacon et al. (2003), Cooper (1994), Kleinert (1994) and Morphy (2001) as this pertains to art 'styles' and material culture from what is widely referred to as south-eastern Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the kinship terminologies and marriage practices of Oenpelli Kunwinjku (Gunwinggu) owners/speakers. These terminologies and marriage practices have been presented as symmetrical, the standard pattern in Australia. This paper shows that first preference marriages are asymmetrical, which is rare in Australia. It further demonstrates that first preference marriages do not produce a transitive terminology, which is even rarer in Australia. Though these patterns are unusual, this paper shows that the Oenpelli Kunwinjku marriage practices accord in a number of important aspects with the marriage practices of owners/speakers of other languages with asymmetrical terminologies, such as the Yolngu (Murngin) terminologies. These common aspects to marriage practices and terminologies are to be understood in light of a more general analysis of the correlations between kinship terminologies, marriage practices, and the construction of ranges and regional identities in Australia. There is significant variation in Australia as to whether people express a predilection for narrow or wide ranges. This paper shows that there are non-random correlations between predilections for particular types of range, marriage preferences, and types of terminologies. It also shows that terminologies and marriage preferences have a role in the construction of regional identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contains a discussion of an unpublished essay by TGH Strehlow concerning the historic wax cylinder recordings of songs from Central Australia made by Walter Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen in 1901. The manuscript, written by Strehlow in 1968, begins with an explanation of the historical context of the song recordings, and the distribution of song and dance traditions across the Australian inland. Strehlow elucidates the content via information imparted to him by a number of Arrernte and Luritja men, who first heard these recordings over 50 years after they were made, in 1960. Their explanation of these songs reveals further information on the diffusion of song verses across vast regions in Central Australia (including Warumungu, Anmatyerr, Arrernte, and Warlpiri country), and the incorporation of European words and themes within altharte (public) songs in which men sing and dance. I have expanded Strehlow's information on Spencer's recordings further with additional information from other ethno-historical sources and my own contemporary fieldwork. Combined, this research deepens the anthropological understanding of some of the earliest ethnographic sound recordings ever made in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Taibobo' is the name the Torres Strait Islanders give to the style of singing and dancing that they learned from the Rotuman sailors who worked in the marine industry in the late 19th century. The Islanders of Eastern Torres Strait continued to practise them long after the Rotumans had gone, as a part of a repertoire of songs and dances, old and new. Beckett recorded Taibobo in the 1950s. When a Rotuman researcher came to Torres Strait in 2004, Islanders could still sing the songs which, as it eventuated, only the oldest people in Rotuma could remember. The paper will place the Torres Strait adoption of the songs and dances in historical context and describe Taibobo - both the songs and the dances -as one of us encountered it in the 1950s, and later in 2004. Finally the response of contemporary Rotumans on hearing Taibobo recordings from the Torres Strait is documented, as well as the Islander responses to the re-establishment of contact after so many years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Australia's Northern Territory, the Larrakia have been involved in a decades-long effort to gain recognition as traditional owners through Land Rights and Native Title legislation. From one perspective, their claims have failed to achieve the entitlement and recognition grounded in these governmental regimes (Scambary 2007; Povinelli 2002). However, over the past decade the Larrakia Nation Aboriginal Corporation ( LNAC) and the Larrakia Development Corporation ( LDC) have emerged as locally powerful corporate bodies that pursue programs and exercise forms of power on behalf of the Larrakia that can be understood in terms of state and governmental practice. Through suburban development, a night patrol, educational and vocational training, a radio station, and through forms of policy research and statistical enumeration, the Larrakia nation have emerged in the eyes of many as a de facto Aboriginal 'state' in the Darwin region. This paper explores the intra- Indigenous relations through which these practices have emerged, and analyses the extent to which the LNAC might be understood as a kind of 'state' within a state, responsible for world-shaping activities of knowledge production, housing and health outreach, vocational training and education, and policing. Focussing on the forms of 'stateness' that accrue to the Larrakia Nation in Darwin through its policing, knowledge production, and outreach programs for Aboriginal campers, the article explores the differential articulation of Aboriginal groups with the state. It concludes by asking how such differences matter in contexts of planned urbanisation in the Northern Territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The ethnographic study of Western environmental activism opens up the prospect of studying subjectivities formed in opposition to dominant Western ideas and values, and yet encapsulated within Western societies and democratic polities. One of the directions in which it points the anthropologist, which is pursued in this article, is towards the study of the political lifeworlds of activists, their self-identity as citizens and their embeddedness in the wider society. Environmental politics can be an emergent activity in citizens' lives, as expressed in John Dewey's concept of 'the public' as citizens who organise themselves to address the adverse consequences of situations that they experience in common (Dewey 1991[1927]). This paper focuses on a middle ground of social action between habitual daily practice, and the domain of institutional politics: groups of people in small voluntary organisations in the heavily coal-mined Hunter Valley, Southeast Australia, who are moved to collective action to address the threatening aspects of anthropogenic climate change. Action group members variously articulate their reflexive understandings of the structural contradictions of environmentalism in corporate capitalist societies where values of consumerism and processes of individualization corrode collective concerns of citizenship-based politics. These understandings inform activists' personal motivations, values and ideals for a 'climate movement', diverse modes of political action and striving for wider political intelligibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is some 40 years since Australia officially re-indigenised its Aborigines, at the same time giving rise to cultures of indigenism in the community at large. For those who lived in the closely settled areas, re-indigenisation entails a new positioning vis-à-vis what can be recovered of traditional practices and places, but also vis-a-vis non-indigenous people involved in indigenism. The paper recounts the response of one such indigenous group to the possibility of learning secrets that had long been known to white people, but not to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the northern Kimberley (WA) Aborigines and Europeans living and working on pastoral leases have improvised means of staving off, incorporating and generally managing the other's demands on their psychophysical resources. Local racial politics configure a hierarchised social field around a few central figures: founding European lease-holders and their male children by non-local, mixed-descent Aboriginal women, mixed descent head-stockmen born of a European leaseholder and a local Aboriginal woman, and then local Ngarinyin people who constitute most of the work-force. In this paper, I analyse the intercultural dynamics of this social field employing R.D. Laing's notion of the 'family phantasy'. The subject-matter also entails theoretical reconsideration of questions concerning the relative openness or otherwise of Indigenous Australian socio-cultural categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to develop the notion of the 'intercultural' suggested in Caging the Rainbow (Merlan 1998), a book which dealt with the situation of Aboriginal people in a north Australian town. I explore possible implications for this notion of work done in the name of structural history; of some of the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu; and of V.N. Voloshinov (and/or M.M. Bakhtin). All these approaches were developed against the background of structuralism, and all struggle with problems of conceptualizing process and the dynamics of interaction. I suggest that especially Voloshinovian notions of the fundamentally dialogical aspects of interaction offer some interesting perspectives for our treatment of central issues of difference, boundedness and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores from a psychoanalytic point of view some of the many ethnographic references to cannibalistic figures in Aboriginal societies of the Central and Western parts of Australia. The purpose is to show how dynamics of splitting originating in early infancy (love-aggression, incorporation-expulsion, inside-outside, self-other) continue to exist in culture-specific expressions of cannibalistic fantasies and incestuous desires. On a continuum where communication becomes sociality, which in turn becomes predation and incorporation, aggression has no fixed place. It cannot be defined in an absolute fashion, for it is cultural factors that order this continuum and, in each particular case, establish the thresholds differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The formal study of kinship was introduced to the South Pacific Islands and the Australian colonies by Methodist missionary Lorimer Fison who distributed schedules and collected kinship data from around the region in collaboration with the founder of Anthropology in America, Lewis Henry Morgan. This article is a sequel to H. Gardner, 2008 'The origins of kinship in Oceania', Oceania, 78:2, 137-150. It traces Lorimer Fison's return to the Australian colonies from his mission post in Fiji and the subsequent spread of kinship schedules to settlers, missionaries and administrators around Australia. Based on unpublished correspondence, the article investigates Fison's gradual disillusionment with Morgan's evolutionist hypothesis of the development of the human family and his disdain for the speculation of much metropolitan anthropology in the 1870s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "A Cautious Silence: The Politics of Australian Anthropology," by Geoffrey Gray is presented. The book is about the relationship between Australian-based anthropologists and colonial and Indigenous administrations from 1925 to 1960. The author discusses such topics as anthropologist A.P. Elkin, the relations between anthropologists, and policy related to Indigenous Australians.

Argues that the power gained by Australia's Aboriginal Belyuen songmen over ghosts is attributable to the replication of the melodies, rhythms, words, and the voice of the song-giving ghost. Songmen's receiving of the 'Wangga' songs from ghosts in dreams; Power to conduct the ghost of the recently dead away from human society; Facilitation in the adaptation of new patterns of residency.

An advocate of human rights education, Holcombe wants human rights to be multi-cultural. Such Indigenous agents espouse "good governance", and they are the topic of Holcombe's seventh and final chapter 'International human rights forums and (east coast) Indigenous activism'. Whereas some Indigenous persons have become adept at presenting themselves as bearers of rights (individual and collective), in the Central Australian communities with which Holcombe is familiar, the circulation of human rights discourse has "barely begun" (p. 260). [Extracted from the article]

This essay concerns two experimental governmental interventions undertaken in Ceduna, far west South Australia. The first scenario involves a local council initiative, which I argue was designed to expunge public spaces of the presence of disturbing Indigenous bodies, which elicited local disgust. The second case involves a current federal government trial of stringent welfare reform measures. I argue that this case was framed primarily in terms of suffering, which arouses compassion and demands intervention. Thus the essay explores how disgust and respectability, suffering and compassion, as well as alterity, circulate and come to settle on different Indigenous bodies. Focussing on the governing of Indigenous people, I use these two policy experiments to track the state's penalization and abandonment of, interventions into, and concern for Indigenous lives in a single setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governing Natives: Indirect Rule and Settler Colonialism in Australia's North - By Ben Silverstein Indeed, to the extent that Silverstein's framing of the story of 1930s policy-making is tilted towards the secular (see above), Cook should be a more ideologically sympathetic character for Silverstein than he finds Cook to be. Silverstein refers to Cook's 'unwillingness to contemplate the survival of Aboriginal communities' (p. 117) and that Cook was "celebrating Aboriginal demise" (p. 124). [Extracted from the article]

Radcliffe-Brown introduced the concept of a 'Kariera' type of kinship system in proposing his highly influential typology of Australian social organization, building on his earlier reports of fieldwork in the Pilbara of northern Western Australia, in which the Kariera (Kariyarra) people were taken to represent a widespread type. Radcliffe-Brown's and other typologies of Australian kinship have generally disregarded the universalist categorizations (going back to Fison and Howitt's assignment of Kariera-type systems to the Dravidian category), in favour of a scheme based on Australia alone. In the spirit of Radcliffe-Brown's typology, we propose a diagnostic pattern of kinship term equivalences for grandkin such as FF = MMB ( father's father is equivalent to mother's mother's brother), which can be operationalized in search-map routines of a database known as AustKin and closely approximates to the set of systems generally recognized as 'Kariera'. However another property of many Kariera grandkin systems which has been claimed to be criterial by some scholars - equivalence between grandkin and grandchild generations (+2 and −2), or Alternate Generation Equivalence - is shown to be more widespread than Kariera and independent of it. With regard to the −1 generation (children and niblings), the pattern among the Kariyarra and more generally in the western Pilbara and Western Desert (where 'son' and 'daughter' are distinguished) is radically different from the pattern found in the other 'Kariera' systems across the rest of the continent, (where 'woman's child' vs. 'man's child' is the prime distinction). This prompts analysis of the child patterns as independent of the Kariera system. This article also shows how the Kariera system is independent of the four-section system with which it has been claimed to be related functionally, with sections being a later development. We also encounter overlaps, where more than one equivalence pattern intersect in one language, and overlays, where the variation between more than one equivalence also has social contextual functions. Examples of overlaps analysed here are (1) between Kariera and Aluridja (the Western Desert pattern with cross-parallel neutralization); and (2) between Kariera and a more radical kind of Alternate Generation Equivalence, where parallel grandkin and grandchildren kin-types are called siblings (generation 0). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists working in the field of Australian native title are required to piece together the early laws and customs of claimant groups and assess the degree to which these have continued since the assumption of British sovereignty. The former task is often difficult in south-eastern Australia because of a lack of good quality early records. I suggest here that there are general principles of Aboriginal land tenure that can be recovered from elsewhere in Aboriginal Australia, where the ethnography is of a better standard, and these can be used as a guide for working with the patchier materials characteristic of the south-east. The principles mainly cohere around the organic relationship between patrilineal descent and complementary filiation, and are shown to be relevant to the modelling of contemporary south-eastern tenure, where people speak of 'bloodlines' identified with ancestral lands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Socio-cultural and ecological literature about Australian Indigenous groups reveal that fishing is a vital part of everyday life for many groups who have customary and recreational fresh and salt-water affiliations. This vitality exists and has meaning for families and communities in the Kimberley's Fitzroy Valley region of Northern Aboriginal Australia. Less well known, however, is the central part that fishing plays in jaminyjarti, a ritual that relies on close kin regularly catching, cooking and sharing fish for bereaved family members during the 'sorry business' time that emerges after the death of a loved one. What becomes evident is that while fishing is undoubtedly intertwined in the everydayness and sociality of life, it is also central to comforting the bereaved during and after the grieving process that accompanies death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnographic research concerning Aboriginal social life in the earlier settled areas of the continent has formed a minor strand within the body of Australian anthropological research. Yet these studies speak directly to the current national discourse concerning distressing conditions in many Aboriginal communities in the north. The kind of anthropology generated in South East Australia has always sought to do more than simply depict particular collective worlds-it also addresses how they are made, particularly in conditions of upheaval, relocation and engagement with state institutions and the nation's ideologies. By drawing attention to one kind of border, that between cultural/social worlds we hope to overcome another boundary, that between ethnographies of the north and the south. To this end, we draw attention to the process of boundary making that has been a crucial dynamic within the changing historical and social configurations that have shaped Aboriginal experiences of the social world. Thus, instead of reporting on the significance of cultural characteristics, this collection shifts attention to relationships with others, with the state and the encompassing society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is now commonplace for some anthropologists, and others, to say that for Aboriginal Australians in the remote regions, the landscape is 'sentient', however, what that means is not always clear. Are the anthropologists using this term metaphorically or do they understand Aboriginal people to be animists? The 'new animists' have no doubt that the anthropologists are describing what they call the 'new animism'. Much of this literature refers to the Warlpiri or their near neighbours. Here I examine the evidence for whether Warlpiri speakers are animists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In remote Aboriginal communities in Australia, researchers cast health beliefs and treatments as belonging to either an Aboriginal or biomedical system, which are considered to be irreconcilable and in conflict. Warlpiri people also speak of two distinct traditions that, they claim, are able to heal only specific classes of illness. Nevertheless, both Aboriginal and biomedical systems can be used simultaneously. An examination of two illness episodes will illustrate the complexity of how both Aboriginal and biomedical diagnoses and treatments are employed in a similar manner. I argue that while diagnosis is often stressed in statements regarding illness, it is only one of many factors that influence the treatment choices of individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In native title cases a judge must determine the extent to which the current practices of applicants for native title relate to the practices of their forebears at sovereignty. It is proposed that evidence of the continuity and preservation of tradition from the time of sovereignty must be derived from records and/or expert opinion. This is so because brief historical recall is instituted in Aboriginal societies and cultures and, therefore, Aboriginal witnesses cannot testify to continuities that belong to what, for them, is time immemorial. Relevant observations are cited from the literature to establish the quiddities of brief recall and the editing of histories of deviation. Aboriginal hunter-gathers are then compared with the peoples of feuding corporations, blood-debt and the heritable grudge in order to answer the question: Why in Aboriginal Australia is there an instituted and rapid onset of temps perdu? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses some conflicts between kin- and market-based society as they are reflected in the lives of Western Arrernte in and around Ntaria (Hermannsburg). Both political economy and cultural analysis provide accounts of concomitant 'problems about work' and training initiatives in remote communities. Neither brings together, however, the issues of economic marginalisation and a history of cultural difference with its own transformations. This discussion takes its departure from the Arrernte's attempts to reconcile kinship service ('working for') and paid employment ('working') in everyday practice. It demonstrates that this attempt is part of broader change concerning the ways in which hunter-gatherer people in Australia have been compelled to adapt to a world of cash and commodities, and waged employment. In this discussion, the focus is on remote indigenous Australians today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from the litigation around the Hindmarsh Island Bridge (especially Chapman v Luminis Pty Ltd 2001) this article provides an analysis of judicial responses to anthropological expertise. Sensitive to the institutional responsibilities of judges, as well as rules of evidence, procedures and legal causes of action, it examines the strategic representation and appropriation of anthropological knowledge and practice. In exploring the relations between law and expertise the article illustrates how their combination shapes outcomes. In the process it explains how the judge could have produced a range of (in)consistent outcomes through the modulation of legal categories and their relations with prevalent images of anthropological expertise. This analysis positions the article to critically reflect on some of the implications for anthropologists working in and around legal or quasi-legal settings as well as those commenting on that participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tins, cardboard boxes and albums hold one of the most prized and jealously guarded of all Wiradjuri Aboriginal 'material' possessions, the family photos. They are used to tell and recall stories, introduce people to kin, as items of exchange and as important statements of identity and belonging in the spatial and temporal politics of kinship. In this ethnographic study of Indigenous photo collections in south-east Australia, I argue that photos have the capacity to extend the face-to-face nature of kin-relatedness through time and space; they are important in negotiations of sociality; and they validate the past in contexts in which recourse to both myth and history have been constrained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study which focused on the inter-cultural meanings and assumptions which have arisen in the interpretation of heritage and its conservation in Australia. Discussion of the conflicting views of heritage conservation; Significance or cultural value of objects; Conclusions.

A general theory of epic emotions is proposed. After providing terms to frame discussion, the author considers Aboriginal discourses of landed association to yield an account of the significance accorded to emotions by Aborigines during events that are attendant on situations of ultimate reference. The necessary association of specified emotions with culturally defined situations of ultimate reference is held to be a defining quality of emotions of the epic kind. In the Aboriginal case, the cultural register of emotions is brief to the point that recognised emotions are all epic emotions. Such emphasis on elemental forms has implications for the study of the development of social institutions. It is suggested that, world-wide, the words for inner states proliferate only when two conditions are fulfilled. The two loosely related variables are: (i) increments in social scale and (ii) the invention of ontologies of the divided self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the dilemmas in the author's shifting roles as helper/friend/member of the Katherine Indigenous community in the Northern Territory of Australia, and then, as anthropologist. Interpretations of indigenous calls for land rights in terms of the bourgeois law; Division of Australia's indigenous people due to the struggle for recognition.

Introduces four articles relevant to the relationship among anthropology, indigenous people and the Australian nation. Elements of anthropology's history; Conditions and criticisms of anthropology.

The article presents a speech by artist William Brian 'Badger' Bates delivered at a conference on aboriginal people in south-east Australia wherein he discusses the role of anthropologists who are working with aboriginal people and about his being a Paakantyi as well as on the relation of his being an artist and an aborigine.