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...
In traditional Maori knowledge, the weather, birds, fish and trees, sun and moon are related to each other, and to the people of the land, the tangata whenua. It is truly an interconnected world - a vast family of which humans are children of the earth and sky, and cousins to all living things. In this richly illustrated book, Maori scholars and writers share the traditional knowledge passed down the generations by word of mouth. It provides a unique window on the relationship of the people of t...
The Cunning of Recognition (Politics, History, and Culture)
by Elizabeth A. Povinelli
The Cunning of Recognition is an exploration of liberal multiculturalism from the perspective of Australian indigenous social life. Elizabeth A. Povinelli argues that the multicultural legacy of colonialism perpetuates unequal systems of power, not by demanding that colonized subjects identify with their colonizers but by demanding that they identify with an impossible standard of authentic traditional culture. Povinelli draws on seventeen years of ethnographic research among northwest coast ind...
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...
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...
Creating Social Cohesion in an Interdependent World examines the ways in which two very different societies, Australia and Japan, have dealt with challenges to their cultural and institutional fabric, as well as the social cohesion arising from the acceleration of global interdependence during recent decades. Deepening globalization has generated great social dislocation and uncertainty about collective identity and to anxiety about how to accommodate apparently unstoppable external influences....
The Echo of Things is a compelling ethnographic study of what photography means to the people of Roviana Lagoon in the western Solomon Islands. Christopher Wright examines the contemporary uses of photography and expectations of the medium in Roviana, as well as people's reactions to photographs made by colonial powers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For Roviana people, photographs are unique objects; they are not reproducible, as they are in Euro-American understandings of...
Arab people first came to Australia in the late nineteenth century. Today more than half a million Australians claim some form of Arab ancestry. They are a diverse group, both socially and economically. New South Wales, for example, appointed Australia's first Lebanese Governor, while at the same time it was labelling groups of economically deprived young people as 'Lebanese gangs'. Victoria's Premier, Steve Bracks, comes from a Lebanese background. Melbourne has an important Arab business commu...
Since the late 1960s Tongans have been leaving their islands in large numbers and settling in many different nations. Tongans Overseas is a timely look at their settlement experiences as they relate to cultural identity, particularly among the younger generations raised outside Tonga. What does being Tongan mean to these young people? Why do some proudly proclaim and cherish their Tongan identities while others remain ambivalent, confused, or indifferent? Helen Morton Lee's innovative research o...
Writing the Australian Beach
Writing the Australian Beach is the first book in fifteen years to explore creative and cultural representations of this iconic landscape, and how writers and scholars have attempted to understand and depict it. Although the content chiefly focuses on Australia, the beach as both a location and idea resonates deeply with readers around the world. This edited collection includes three sections. Forms of Beach Writing examines the history of beach writing in Australia and in a number of forms: scr...
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...
Of Marriage, Violence and Sorcery (Anthropology and Cultural History in Asia and the Indo-Pacific)
by David McKnight
This is a fascinating exploration of the relationship between marriage, violence and sorcery in an Australian Aboriginal Community, drawing on David McKnight’s extensive research on Mornington Island. The case studies, which occurred both before and after a Presbyterian Mission was established on the island, allow McKnight to show how the complexities of kin ties and increased sexual competition help to explain incidences of violence and sorcery, without resorting to psychiatric justifications....
Aboriginal artists today practise in one of the world's longest continuous tradition of art - and perhaps the last to be generally recognised. Widely sought after, aboriginal art has now taken its place in the cozlections of leading museums and galleries. This concise survey looks at the work of Australia's indigenous visual artists from all parts of the continent. Building on traditions that stretch back at least 50,000 years, many of the artists have worked in a variety of contexts, from the s...
The ancestral rain forests for the Wopkaimin people have long been a sacred geography, a place that has allowed them to act out the obligations of the male cult system and social relations of production based on kinship. Today the people and their place are suffering disastrous consequences from the sudden imposition of one of the worlds largest mining projects, which has brought about severe social and ecological disruptions. Based on fieldwork spanning more than a decade, David Hyndmans book t...
'Why don't you check out Papunya? It's the sniffing capital of Australia, it's a Bermuda triangle for taxpayer funds. Nobody in the NT government gives a rats. The council just tossed out World Vision. People are frightened to talk.' For award-winning journalist Russell Skelton a five year journey of inquiry that coincided with one of the biggest shifts in indigenous policy in Australian history began on the day he received this email. Set with the backdrop of Papunya, a Northern Territory Abori...
This fascinating collection of essays asks key questions not only for the future of settler colonial societies like Australia and New Zealand, but also for the future of humanity. The essays trace the relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples and the divisions between immigrants of European, Asian and Pacific origin.
Indians first arrived in Fiji as indentured laborers in 1879. Since the Rabuka coup d'etat in 1987, and three subsequent Fiji coups, Indian-Fijians have been emigrating from the country in earnest. ""Stopover"" is a haunting suite of photographs by New Zealand artist Bruce Connew from the tiny Indian-Fijian sugar cane settlement of Vatiyaka, taken during seven visits between June 2000 and November 2003, placing an extended family inside the story of migration. Connew's narrative captions and a s...
Santa Isabel (British Museum Research Publications)
by Ben Burt and Geoffrey White
Human Biology in Papua New Guinea (Research Monographs in Human Population Biology, #10)
Papua New Guinea shows great diversity in a small geographical area. More than a quarter of the world's languages are found there among less than four million people. It can thus be regarded as a `small cosmos' in which complex interrelationships can be studied within a connected whole. In this book, the human biology of Papua New Guinea is described and studies are presented of the geography, demography, social anthropology, linguistics, and human genetics of the country. These studies are...