Refugees. Border protection. Ethnic gangs. Terrorism. History wars. Pauline Hanson. Australia's faith in multiculturalism has been shaken by fierce attacks from its enemies and a sense of crisis among its friends. Multiculturalism has become a political tool to win votes and generate community anxiety. What is left of the multicultural ideal?Bob Hodge and John O'Carroll take the pulse of multicultural Australia in the wake of September 11. They investigate the hot spots' of multiculturalism, sho...
This book examines the experience of race and ethnicity in Australia after the withering away of official multiculturalism. The first chapter looks at the formation of the Australian state, the role that multiculturalism has played, and the impact of neoliberal ideas. The second chapter takes nightclubbing in the city of Perth during the 1980s, the peak period for official multiculturalism, to exemplify how diversity and exclusion functioned in everyday life. The third chapter considers the imbr...
Lauga or Samoan oratory is a premier cultural practice in the fa'asamoa (Samoan culture), a sacred ritual that embodies all that fa'asamoa represents, such as identity, inheritance, respect, service, gifting, reciprocity and knowledge. Delivered as either lauga fa'amatai (chiefly speeches) or lauga fa'alelotu (sermons), lauga is captivating and endowed with knowledge, praxis and skill. Lauga is enjoyed by many, but today many Samoan people, especially in the Samoan diaspora, also remain disconne...
The insular Pacific is a region saturated with great cultural diversity and poignant memories of colonial and Christian intrusion. Considering authenticity and authorship in the area, this book looks at how these ideas have manifested themselves in Pacific peoples and cultures. Through six rich complementary case studies, a theoretical introduction, and a critical afterword, this volume explores authenticity and authorship as “traveling concepts.” The book reveals diverse and surprising outcom...
Santa Isabel (British Museum Research Publications)
by Ben Burt and Geoffrey White
This original ethnography brings indigenous people's stories into conversations around troubling questions of social justice and environmental care. Deborah Bird Rose lived for two years with the Yarralin community in the Northern Territory's remote Victoria River Valley. Her engagement with the people's stories and their action in the world leads her to this analysis of a multi-centred poetics of life and land. The book speaks to issues that are of immediate and broad concern today: traditional...
In 2007, a three-story-high tsunami slammed the small island of Simbo in the western Solomon Islands. Drawing on over ten years of research, Matthew Lauer provides a vivid and intimate account of this calamitous event and the tumultuous recovery process. His stimulating analysis surveys the unpredictable entanglements of the powerful waves with colonization, capitalism, human-animal communication, spirit beings, ancestral territory, and technoscientific expertise that shaped the disaster’s outco...
Morning Star Rising (Indigenous Pacifics)
by Lecturer Camellia Webb-Gannon
That Indonesia's ongoing occupation of West Papua continues to be largely ignored by world governments is one of the great moral and political failures of our time. West Papuans have struggled for more than fifty years to find a way through the long night of Indonesian colonization. However, united in their pursuit of merdeka (freedom) in its many forms, what holds West Papuans together is greater than what divides them. Today, the Morning Star glimmers on the horizon, the supreme symbol of merd...
Pacific Spaces (ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology)
Delving into Pacific spaces from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and interpretations, this book looks at how the anthropological and architectural can be connected. The contributors to this book - architectural practitioners, architectural and spatial design theorists, anthropologists and historians - show not only how new theoretical perspectives can arise out of comparing aspects specific to one discipline with their equivalents of another, but also demonstrate how a space of emergenc...
Islands of Hope (Pacific)
Fighters and Singers
The literature on Australian Aborigines is vast, but much of it is strangely silent about the experiences and activities of women. This collection of stories of the eventful lives and strong characters of a number of Aboriginal women offers a more intimate and personal view. Their lives span a century of history in fifteen communities scattered from Cape York Peninsula, Arnhem Land and East Kimberley to the Western Desert, the Centre, South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales.One of these st...
Australian Ways (Studies in society, #30)
This collection, the first of its kind in Australia, illustrates the richness of data and analysis born of the anthropological study of contemporary white Australian society.The studies presented here deal with diverse settings and events, ranging from a community's responses to a bushfire in rural NSW to the messages encoded in a male strip show in Adelaide. Work and leisure, family life and institutional relationships, natural disaster and culturally manipulated violence, the particular experi...
***Longlisted for the inaugural Australian Political Book of the Year Award!***A searing analysis of the idea of Australia and the truth of the nation, its greatest strengths and most important challenges, and how Australia as a country can achieve its potential and become a smart, compassionate, engaged, fair and informed nation.What is the 'idea of Australia'? What defines the soul of the nation? Is it an egalitarian, generous, outward-looking country? Or is Australia a place that has retreate...
Everywhen (New Visions in Native American and Indigenous Studies)
Everywhen is a groundbreaking collection about diverse ways of conceiving, knowing, and narrating time and deep history. Looking beyond the linear documentary past of Western or academic history, this collection asks how knowledge systems of Australia’s Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders can broaden our understandings of the past and of historical practice. Indigenous embodied practices for knowing, narrating, and reenacting the past in the present blur the distinctions of linear time, maki...
Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders (Cambridge Library Collection - Anthropology)
by Edward Shortland
This historical and anthropological account of the Maori of New Zealand was published in 1854 by the English physician and colonial administrator Edward Shortland (1812–93). Shortland was deeply interested in Maori culture, learned the language, and wrote ethnographic studies including The Southern Districts of New Zealand (1851) and Maori Religion and Mythology (1882), also included in this series. In various roles including 'Protector of Aborigines', he often served as interpreter, and played...
A visually striking intercultural exploration of the use of mobile phones in Aboriginal communities in Australia. Yuta is the Yolngu word for new. Phone & Spear: A Yuta Anthropology is a project inspired by the gloriously cheeky and deeply meaningful audiovisual media made with and circulated by mobile phones by an extended Aboriginal family in northern Australia. Building on a ten-year collaboration by the community-based arts collective Miyarrka Media, the project is an experiment in the anthr...
The song line of the Dugong Hunters embodies Yanyuwa knowledge of the sea and the islands of Yanyuwa country, in Australia's Northern Territory. If one knows, it is possible to look out on Yanyuwa country and see the Dugong Hunters, the White-Bellied Sea Eagle and the Tiger Shark - for the song is flowing, running, moving. In Yanyuwa understanding, intelligence of Lawful places is embedded in country and carried by threads of a song that speaks of change and continuity and is still intensely a...
Sociology gives us the tools we need to understand our life and the lives of the people around us. It reveals that our commonsense view of the world isn't always right, and enables us to find out what actually shapes our experiences. In this widely used and very readable introductory text, Judith Bessant and Rob Watts show us how to develop a sociological perspective on what is happening in Australia today. Rapid and far-reaching social changes are taking place which affect us all: globalisatio...
Indigenous Research into Mainstream Australian Culture
by Lorraine Muller
Informed by original ground-breaking research, this book “shifts the lens” of study, identifying how Indigenous Australian values and principles have influenced and contributed to an evolving non-Indigenous mainstream Australian culture. Based on the Indigenous principle of respect, Muller presents a solid research framework to break down the barriers of social differences in a culturally safe space. The text offers an insight into the cultural aspects of modern Australian society that contribu...