All required readings for this unit are available via the library site for this unit or via iLearn. The Week 2 reading, Nguly Gu Yahoo Mai (Our Good Food), will be available for purchase in Week 1 for $15; all proceeds go to the booklet's authors.

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: Monday August 1. 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.

Required Reading

• Excerpts from: Carlson, B. 2016 The Politics of Identity: Who Counts as Aboriginal Today? Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.  

Extended Reading

• Paradies, Yin. 2006  Beyond Black and White: Esssentialism, Hybridity and Indigeneity. Journal of Sociology 42(4), 355-367.
• Yamanouchi, Yuriko. 2012 Managing 'Aboriginal selves' in South-Western Sydney, Oceania, vol. 82, no. 1, 62-733
• Barwick, D. 1988 Aborigines of Victoria. In: Keen, I (ed) Being Black: Aboriginal Cultures in 'Settled' Australia. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 27-32.
• Cowlishaw, G. 1987 Colour, Culture and the Aboriginalists. Man, New Series 22: 221-237.

Week 2: Monday August 8. 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 Reading

1. Marcina Coleman Richards and Sue Coleman Haseldine, 2012. Nguly Gu Yadoo Mai (Our Good Food)
2. Bruce Pascoe, 2014 Agriculture inDark Emu. Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? Broome, Western Australia Magabala Books. 
3. Povinelli, Elizabeth. 1994 'Today We Struggle' in Labor’s Lot: The Power, History, and Culture of Aboriginal Action. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. 

Extended Reading

• Gammage, Bill 2011 Fire in 1788: the closest ally. Australian Historical Studies 42: 277-288.
• Berndt, Catherine and Ronald. 1982 The Basis of Economic Life. In The World of the First Australians, revised edition, Sydney: Lansdowne Press,107-134. 
• 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. (This book is available in the library)

Week 3: Monday August 15. 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 Reading

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 The Religions of Oceania, London and New York: Routledge, 19-47
3. Munn, Nancy. 1971 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

• Dussart, Francoise, 2004 Shown but not Shared, Presented but not Proffered: Redefining Ritual Identity among Warlpiri Ritual Performers, 1990–2000. Australian Journal of Anthropology 15, 253-266.

Week 4: Monday August 22. Foundations 3: Being kin

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 Reading

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.

Extended Reading

• 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: Monday August 29. Early colonial contact; early anthropological concerns

For the next two weeks we will learn some vital historical context, beginning with the moment of invasion, and moving to the earliest anthropological endeavours. We will discuss Patrick Wolfe's characterisation of settler colonialism.

Required Reading

1. Langton, Marcia. 2008. They made a solitude and called it peace. In Perkins, R and M. Langton, eds. First Australians, pp. 3-20, 25-61. Miegunyah Press.
2. Trigger, David. 1992 'Wild Time': a history of coercion and resistance. In Whitefella Comin, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 17-37
3. Wolfe, Patrick. 1999 White Man's Flour. In Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, London: Cassell, 9-42

Week 6: Monday September 5  From the bark petition to native title

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 Aboriginal Land Rights Act, NT (1976). This week we the 1963 bark petition, the ALRA, and 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 Australian 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. Merlan, Francesca. 1988 Caging the Rainbow, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 149-181. 
2. Correy, Simon, McCarthy, Diana and Anthony Redmond. 2011 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.
3. Povinelli, Elizabeth. 1998 The State of Shame: Australian Multiculturalism and the Crisis of Indigenous Citizenship, Critical Inquiry, vol. 24, no. 2, 575-610.

Extended Reading

• Eve Vincent, 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 

Week 7: Monday September 12 Indigeneity and Environmentalism

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 Reading

1. Rose, Deborah Bird. 2014 Decolonising the Discourse of Environmental Knowledge in Settler Societies. In: Neale T, McKinnon C and Vincent E (eds) History, Power, Text: Cultural Studies and Indigenous Studies Broadway, NSW: UTS e-Press, 208-228
2. Weir J. 2008 Connectivity. Australian Humanities Review.
3. Sackett, Lee. 1991. Promoting Primitivism: Conservationist Depictions of Aboriginal Australians, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2:2, 233-246.

Extended Reading

• Vincent E and Neale T. (2016) Unstable Relations: A Critical Appraisal of Environmentalism and Indigeneity in Contemporary Australia. The Australian Journal of Anthropology
• Introduction to Altman, Jon and Kerins, Sean, eds, 2012 People on Country: Vital Landscapes, Indigenous Futures, The Federation Press, Sydney.

Mid-semester break: Monday September 19-Sunday October 2

Week 8: Monday October 3 (PUBLIC HOLIDAY--NO CLASS)

Week 9: Monday October 10 Koori Sydney

Required Reading

1. Norman, Heidi. 2012 A Modern Day Corroborree - the New South Wales Annual Aboriginal Rugby League Knockout Carnival, Sport in Society, vol. 15, no. 7, 997-1013.
2. Norman, Heidi 2009, 'Land Rights at Last!', Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 1, no. 2/2009, pp. 142-165.
3. Cowlishaw, Gillian. 2009 Finding Informants. In The City’s Outback, Sydney: UNSW Press, 38-67 

Week 10: Monday October 17 Institutionality and State Effects​

Guest lecturer: Drew Anderson

This week we consider some of the crucial questions surrounding the role of the interventionist and bureaucratic state in Aboriginal people's lives. 

Required Reading

1. Lea, T., and P. Pholeros, 2010. This Is Not a Pipe: The Treacheries of Indigenous Housing, Public Culture 22(1): 187–209
2. J Collmann, 1979. Fringe camps and the development of Aboriginal administration in Central Australia, Social Analysis 2, September

Extended Reading

• Rowse, Tim, 1987 'Assimilation and After', in Australians From 1939, edited by Ann Curthoys, A.W. Martin and Tim Rowse, Fairfax, Syme and Weldon Associates, Sydney.

Additional readings regarding the 2007 Northern Territory 'Intervention':

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

Week 11: Monday October 24 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. McCoy, Brian. 2008. Prison: More than a Holiday. In Holding Men: Kanyirninpa and the Health of Aboriginal Men. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 167-189.
3. Anthony T. 2013 Before the High Court: Indigenising Sentencing? Bugmy v The Queen. Sydney Law Review 35.

Extended Reading

• Langton, Marcia. 1988 Medicine Square. In Keen, I (ed), Being Black: Aboriginal Cultures in 'Settled' Australia. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 201-225.
• Consult work by Chris Cunneen for excellent historical accounts of Aboriginal-police relations

Week 12: Monday October 31 Warlpiri art-making today

The Art Gallery of NSW is currently showing 'Yuendemu', which features some of the grand collaborative canvases painted in the community in 1995 and 1997 (see http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/yuendumu/). This is a free exhibition: we will meet at the gallery on Sunday October 30 to view these works, and will discuss them on Monday evening in addition to the Melinda Hinkson reading.

Required Reading

• Hinkson, M. 2013. Back to the future: Warlpiri encounters with drawings, country and others in the digital age, Culture, Theory, Critique 54 (3): 301 – 317.

Extended Reading

• Biddle, Jennifer 2014 Breasts, Bodies, Art: Central Desert Women's Paintings and the Politics of the Aesthetic Encounter. In: Neale T, McKinnon C and Vincent E (eds) History, Power, Text: Cultural Studies and Indigenous Studies Broadway, NSW: UTS e-Press, 425-448.
• Morphy, Howard 2001 ‘Seeing Aboriginal art in the Gallery’, Humanities Research, vol. 8, no.1, 37-50

Week 13: Monday November 7 Conducting Research with Indigenous people

As we conclude we will 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. (We will look at excerpts in class)