All required readings for this unit are available via iLearn. Extended readings have been placed on reserve in the library.

iLearn login is via: https://ilearn.mq.edu.au/ Students are required to have regular access to a computer and the internet. Mobile devices alone are not sufficient. For technical support go to: http://mq.edu.au/about_us/offices_and_units/informatics/help For student quick guides on the use of iLearn go to: http://mq.edu.au/iLearn/student_info/guides.htm

Week 1: August 5. Indigenous identities

This class will provide an introduction to the unit, its scope and aims, and an explanation of requirements and assessment tasks. We will then turn our attention to critical issues surrounding Indigenous identities, representation and definitions of Indigeneity. We will discuss the 'three part' definition of Indigeneity that has prevailed in Australia since the 1980s, and which replaced definitions based on 'race'. Anthropology's role in these questions will be considered.

Background Readings

1. Dodson, Michael. 2003 The End in the Beginning: Re(de)finding Aboriginality. In M. Grossman, ed. Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 25-42.
2. Anderson, Ian. 1994 Black Bit. White Bit. In RePublica, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 113-122
3. Paradies, Yin. 2006  Beyond Black and White: Esssentialism, Hybridity and Indigeneity. Journal of Sociology 42(4), 355-367.
4. Yuriko Yamanouchi. 2012 Managing 'Aboriginal selves' in South-Western Sydney, Oceania, vol. 82, no. 1, 62-73.

Week 2: August 12. Foundations 1: The human presence in Australia

In this week we embark on the first of three weeks dealing with foundational concepts in the anthropology of Indigenous Australia. We will discuss the history of human inhabitation of the continent, and of mobile hunter gatherer resource use. We will consider the usefulness of terms such as 'nomadic' and 'hunter gatherer'.

Required Readings

1. Gammage, Bill. 2012 The Closest Ally (Chapter 6.) In The Greatest Estate on Earth. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 157-186.
2. Berndt, Catherine and Ronald. 1982 The Basis of Economic Life. In The World of the First Australians, revised edition, Sydney: Lansdowne Press,107-134. (This is an older style text, which provides a good background but we will be testing some of its key assumptions in class.)
3. Povinelli, Elizabeth. Labor’s Lot: The Power, History, and Culture of Aboriginal Action. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994. (Chapter Four)

Extended Reading

• Myers, Fred. 1982  Always Ask:  Resource Use and Landownership among the Pintupi of Central Australia. In N. Williams and E. Hunn, eds., Resource Managers: North American and Australian Hunter-Gatherers. Boulder: Westview Press.
• Memmot, Paul. 2007 Gunya, Goondie + Wurley: The Aboriginal Architecture of Australia, St Lucia, Qld.: University of Queensland Press.

Week 3: August 19. Foundations 2: Land-based cosmology

Having established the economic basis of hunter-gatherer life in the previous week, we now turn towards the Aboriginal world-view or cosmology, and its embodiment and objectification in ritual and social relations. As Aboriginal people strongly assert, and anthropologists have long identified, the living land created by ancestral beings is the cornerstone of their self-understanding. Anthropologists speak of a totemic system or the Dreaming. What exactly is meant by the terms ‘totemism’, 'country’ and ‘Dreaming’? How do these concepts help us to understand different understandings of emplacement, belonging, and social relations?

Required Readings

1. Stanner, W.E.H. 2009 (1953) The Dreaming. In R. Manne, ed. The Dreaming and Other Essays. Melbourne: Black Inc, 172-224.
2. Swain, Tony and Gary Trompf. 1995 Tradition. In their The Religions of Oceania, London and New York: Routledge, 19-47.
3. Dussart, Françoise. 2005 Big Businesswomen. In Max Charlesworth, Françoise Dussart, Howard Morphy, eds, Aboriginal Religions in Australia, Ashgate, 93-112.
4. Munn, Nancy. 1970 The transformation of subjects into objects in Walbiri and Pitjantjatjara myth. In Ronald Berndt, ed, Australian Aboriginal Anthropology: modern studies in the Social Anthropology of the Australian Aborigines, Nedlands, W.A.: University of Western Australia Press, 141-163. (This is a tough reading, we will go over it closely in class.)

Extended Reading

• Swain, Tony. 1993 Worlds to Endure. In A Place for Strangers: Towards a history of Australian Aboriginal Being, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1-68.

Week 4: August 26. Foundations 3: Kinship

This week we shift the focus from people-land relations to people’s relationships to each other. We will learn that social relations can be understood, using Myers, when we consider people’s rights and relationships to ‘objects’, including land. Further, we will explore the way kinship concepts are activated in urban and regional settings today as we ask: What does it mean to be ‘family’?

Required Readings

1. Myers, Fred. 1989 Burning the Truck and Holding the Country: Pintupi Forms of Property and Identity. In E. Wilmsen, ed We are Here: Politics of Aboriginal Land Tenure, Berkeley: University of California Press, 15-43.
2. Babidge, Sally. 2010 Family Affairs: Relations and Relatedness. In Aboriginal Family and the State: The Conditions of History, Ashgate Publishing, 101-133.
3. Diane Austin-Broos, 2009 Living With Kin (Chapter 5) Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 130-153.

Further Readings

• Peterson, Nicolas. 1993. Demand Sharing: Reciprocity and the Pressure for Generosity among Foragers, American Anthropologist, vol.95, no. 4, 860-874
• Altman, Jon. 2011 A Genealogy of ‘Demand Sharing’: From pure anthropology to public policy. Ethnography & the Production of Anthropological Knowledge: Essays in Honour of Nicolas Peterson. Y. Musharbash and M. Barber, eds, Canberra: ANU E-Press, 630-673.

Week 5: September 2. Conducting Research with Indigenous people

This week we turn our attention to the practical, ethical and political dimensions of conducting research with Indigenous people. We will be looking at examples of innovative research practice as researchers strive to find new ways to work with and write with/about Indigenous communities.

Required Reading:

1. AIATSIS Guidelines for Ethical Research in Australian Indigenous Studies (GERAIS)
2. Cowlishaw, Gillian. 2009 Finding Informants. In The City’s Outback, Sydney: UNSW Press, 38-67.
3. Eickelkamp, Ute. 2014 Formalizing the Interpersonal in Anthropological Field Research. Clio's Psyche, vol. 20, no. 4, 412-417.
4. Rigney, Lester-Irabinna. 1999. Internationalization of an Indigenous Anticolonial Cultural Critique of Research Methodologies: A Guide to Indigenist Research Methodology and Its Principles, Wicazo Sa Review, vol. 14, no. 2, 109-121.

Extended reading:

• Somerville, Margaret. 1994 The sun dancin': People and Place in Coonabarabran. Canberra: Aboriginal studies Press.

Week 6: September 9. Native Title 1: Introduction and critical perspectives

From the early 1970s until the early 1990s, Aboriginal efforts to secure recognition of their prior occupation and status as land owners made strides at state, territory, and national levels, most prominently in light of the Land Rights Act, NT (1976). This week we discuss the Mabo ruling that led to Native Title legislation. The readings introduce critical perspectives on the politics of recognition, the notion of cultural difference, and what it has come to stand for. Why are land rights and sacred sites legislation so important to Aboriginal people? Do you think that Mabo fostered Settler understanding of Aboriginal land tenure? What are some ways we might think of the unintended consequences of native title legislation for Indigenous identities and senses of belonging?

Required reading:

1. Povinelli, Elizabeth. 1998 The State of Shame: Australian Multiculturalism and the Crisis of Indigenous Citizenship, Critical Inquiry, vol. 24, no. 2, 575-610.
2. Vincent, Eve. 2012 ‘Sticking up for the land’: Aboriginality, mining and the lived effects of native title. Australian Journal of Human Rights, vol. 19, no. 1, 155-174
3. Correy, Simon, McCarthy, Diana and Anthony Redmond. The differences which resemble: The effects of the 'narcissism of minor differences' in the constitution and maintenance of native title claimant groups in Australia. In Bauman, T. and G. Macdonald, eds, Unsettling Anthropology: The Demands of Native Title on Worn Concepts and Changing Lives, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra, 41-62.

Extended Reading:

• Asche, Wendy and Trigger, David. 2011 Native Title Research in Australian Anthropology. Anthropological Forum: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Comparative Sociology. vol. 21, no. 3, 219-232.

Week 7: September 16. Native Title 2: Practical perspectives

This week we are joined by an experienced native title anthropologist, Belinda Burbidge, to discuss applied anthropological work and south-eastern claims. Readings TBA.

University Break. September 22nd - October 3rd.

Week 8: October 7. Indigeneity and conservation issues

Mining, nuclear waste, industrial development: these issues concern conservationists and Aboriginal communities alike. In recent years a heated public debate has raged about the naturalised affinity of Indigenous and environmentalists' interests. This week we will look at critical anthropological perspectives on the instability of the so-called 'green-black' alliances.

Required Readings

1. Langton, Marcia. 2013 Introduction and Chapter Three of The Quiet Revolution: Indigenous people and the resources boom (2012 Boyer Lectures), ABC Books / HarperCollins, Sydney.
2. Sackett, Lee. 1991. Promoting Primitivism: Conservationist Depictions of Aboriginal Australians, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2:2, 233-246.
3. Introduction to Altman, Jon and Kerins, Sean, eds, 2012 People on Country: Vital Landscapes, Indigenous Futures, The Federation Press, Sydney.

Extended Reading

• Bird-Rose, Deborah. 2003. Decolonising the Discourse of Environmental Knowledge in Settler Societies' in G. Hawkins & S. Muecke, eds, Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 53-72.

Week 9: October 14. State interventions and Indigenous life

In 2007 then prime minister John Howard declared a national emergency in the Northern Territory. A dramatic state intervention into the lives of Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory was launched. This week we consider some of the crucial questions surrounding the role of the interventionary state in Aboriginal people's lives. Did the Intervention mark a past with more liberal policies aimed at remedial interventions? How does neoliberalism configure Aboriginal difference as a problem? What role have anthropologist played in debates about social distress, disadvantage, cultural difference and remote living conditions?

Required Reading:

1. Altman, Jon. 2007 In the Name of the Market? Coercive Reconcilation: Stabilise, Normalise, Exit Aboriginal Australia. North Carlton, Vic.: Arena Publications, 307-321.

2. Lattas, Andrew and Morris, Barry. 2010 The Politics of Suffering and the Politics of Anthropology. In Altman, Jon and M. Hinkson, eds. Culture Crisis: Anthropology and Politics in Aboriginal Australia. Sydney: UNSW Press, 61-87.

3. Musharbash, Yasmine. 2010 'Only whitefella take that road': Culture seen through the Intervention at Yuendumu. In. Altman, Jon and M. Hinkson, eds. Culture Crisis: Anthropology and Politics in Aboriginal Australia. Sydney: UNSW Press, 212-225

Extended Reading

• Gibson, Paddy. 2009 'Return to the Ration Days: The NT Intervention: grass-roots experience and resistance.' (Discussion paper). Jumbunna House of Learning, University of Technology, Sydney.
• Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011 Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Week 10: October 21. 'Aboriginal art' and the market

Catherine Massola (the Australian National University) will join us this week to talk about working in remote Aboriginal art centres.

Required Readings:

1. Caruana, Wally. 1992 ‘Introduction’ Aboriginal Art, London: Thames and Hudson, 1993, 7-20

2. Kjellgren, Eric. 2002  'Painting for Corroboree, Painting for Kartiya: Contemporary Aboriginal Art in the East Kimberley, Western Australia’, Herle, Anita [et al.], Pacific Art: Persistence, Change, and Meaning, Adelaide, Crawford House Press, 353-369

3. Morphy, Howard 2001 ‘Seeing Aboriginal art in the Gallery’, Humanities Research, vol. 8, no.1, 37-50.

Extended Reading:

• Myers, Fred. 2002 Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Week 11: Research Week (work on individual research projects - no class)

Week 12: November 4. Policing, incarceration and Indigenous communities

We often hear media stories that tell of Indigenous rates of imprisonment. In Western Australia, for example, the rate of incarceration for Indigenous Australians is 20 times higher than for non-Indigenous. From the Australian Bureau of Statistics we can learn that rates of incarceration continuing to rise markedly between 2002 and 2012. How do anthropological analyses help us make sense of this statistical picture? What historical, political and cultural frames shed light on the relationship between Indigenous people, the criminal justice system and correctional institutions?  

Required Reading

1. Morris, Barry. 2013 Postcolonial fantasy and anxiety in the North West. In Protest, Land Rights and Riots, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 98-127
2. Morton-Thomas, Patricia. 2012 My Family is Calling for Justice. NewMatilda.com
3. McCoy, Brian. 2008. Prison: More than a Holiday. In Holding Men: Kanyirninpa and the Health of Aboriginal Men. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 167-189.
4. Langton, Marcia. 1988 Medicine Square. In Keen, I (ed), Being Black: Aboriginal Cultures in 'Settled' Australia. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 201-225.

Extended Reading

• Cuneen, Chris. 2001. Conflict, Politics and Crime: Aboriginal Communities and the Police, Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
• Hooper, Chloe. 2008 The Tall Man. Camberwell, Vic.: Hamish Hamilton.

Week 13: November 11. Shared Worlds: Indigenous-Settler entanglements

Required Reading:

1. Moss, Rod. 2010 Neighbours and The Shedding of Skin. In The Hard Light of Day, St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2-39.