The 2009 post-election violence on the streets of Tehran was brought to world attention by the im... more The 2009 post-election violence on the streets of Tehran was brought to world attention by the image production and distribution activities of Iranian citizens. This paper considers the communicative potential of these images as they are encountered by distant observers. Beginning with George Herbert Mead’s concept of a generalised other that establishes the ground for intersubjective person formation and the moral basis of self–other relations, I build a critical framework for considering the limits and potentiality of self–other encounters in mediated contexts. Arguing that communication presupposes a shared cultural attitude to images, I explore the distinctive cultural frame and image-encounters that the Internet establishes for its users, before turning attention to the activity occurring on the other side of the screen. Setrag Manoukian has observed that in the 2009 Iranian situation the once distinct categories of action and mediation collapsed together; “everyone was acting and reporting” simultaneously. I shall examine the claims for a new reflexivity associated with this situation. Turning again to the perspective of the distant observer, I explore some of the constraints on the functioning of the Iranian images as communicative acts. In conclusion I briefly consider what work is required on the part of the viewer to build a context for empathetic regard.
When I first sat down to draft this essay, the latest copy of The New York Review of Books carrie... more When I first sat down to draft this essay, the latest copy of The New York Review of Books carried an essay by Sue Halpern on 'the Internet of Things':1In the world of the Internet of things, your car, your heating system, your refrigerator, your fitness apps, your credit card, your television set, your window shades, your scale, your medications, your camera, your heart rate monitor, your electric toothbrush, and your washing machine - to say nothing of your phone - generate a continuous stream of data that resides largely out of reach of the individual but not of those willing to pay for it or in other ways commandeer it.2Not so long ago this was the stuff of science-fiction fantasy. Now it is reportage. Information can no longer be imagined innocently, as an autonomous source of entertainment, enlightenment or deception presented 'freely' to citizens of democratic societies via a range of media and institutions. 'Data-ization' as a comprehensive process no...
WEH Stanner was a public intellectual whose work reached beyond the walls of the academy, and he ... more WEH Stanner was a public intellectual whose work reached beyond the walls of the academy, and he remains a highly significant figure in Aboriginal affairs and Australian anthropology. Educated by Radcliffe-Brown in Sydney and Malinowski in London, he undertook anthropological work in Australia, Africa and the Pacific. Hinkson and Beckett have drawn together some of Australia's leading academics working in Aboriginal studies to provide an historical and analytical context for Stanner's work, as well as demonstrating the continuing relevance of his writings in the contested field of Aboriginal affairs.
tag=1 data=Making meaning of the Yuendumu Doors. by Melinda Hinkson tag=2 data=Hinkson, Melinda t... more tag=1 data=Making meaning of the Yuendumu Doors. by Melinda Hinkson tag=2 data=Hinkson, Melinda tag=3 data=Arena, tag=5 data=5 tag=6 data=1995 tag=7 data=5-15. tag=8 data=ABORIGINAL CULTURE tag=10 data=In 1983 a group of senior Warlpiri men were commissioned to paint the Yuendumu school doors with jukurrpa - dreaming - designs. tag=11 data=1996/2/1 tag=12 data=96/0038 tag=13 data=CAB
This paper draws on research with Aboriginal women of the Central Australian desert who are livin... more This paper draws on research with Aboriginal women of the Central Australian desert who are living in the metropolitan centre of Adelaide 2000 km south of their homelands. It explores the complex conjunction of trauma and pleasure in situations of exile and hones in on the vital role of digital visual mediation in the creative work of making oneself at home in foreign circumstances. In exile, memory and digitisation of images, sounds and interactions enable distinctive socialities and ways of relating to places to be stretched across space. Yet other images are encountered as sites of contested identification and coercive governance. Separation from kin and country is intensely felt but also made bearable when their images are held in close company. In exploring these unsettling circumstances the paper reflects upon the uneven terrain of visual culture and the evolving place of the digital visual in research concerned with transformations in what it is to be human.
In See How We Roll Melinda Hinkson follows the experiences of Nungarrayi, a Warlpiri woman from t... more In See How We Roll Melinda Hinkson follows the experiences of Nungarrayi, a Warlpiri woman from the Central Australian desert, as she struggles to establish a new life for herself in the city of Adelaide. Banished from her hometown, Nungarrayi energetically navigates promises of transformation as well as sedimented racialized expectations on the urban streets. Drawing on a decades-long friendship, Hinkson explores these circumstances through Nungarrayi's relationships: those between her country and kin that sustain and confound life beyond the desert, those that regulate her marginalized citizenship, and the new friendships called out by displacement and metropolitan life. An intimate ethnography, See How We Roll provides great insight into the enduring violence of the settler colonial state while illuminating the efforts of Indigenous people to create lives of dignity and shared purpose in the face of turbulence, grief, and tightening governmental controls.
The last decade has witnessed a significant shift in the terms through which Indigenous people ar... more The last decade has witnessed a significant shift in the terms through which Indigenous people are rendered visible in public debate in Australia and Canada. In observing the long and recursive history of colonial visual regimes, this paper argues that contemporary politics of Indigenous representation are nevertheless distinctively marked by a regime of neoliberal primitivism. Tracing the features and operations of this regime across a selection of images and discursive imaging practices in Australia and Canada, the paper identifies three tropes that are centrally involved in imaging contemporary Indigenous crises: the suffering child, the silenced woman and the dysfunctional landscape. The visual regime of neoliberal primitivism operationalises these tropes in relation to each other and plays a vital role in the neoliberal turn in Indigenous governance. While bringing attention to the very real forms of damage and distress with which Aboriginal individuals and communities must contend in the present, paradoxically, the paper argues, this regime works to occlude from view the constellation of forces at work in those very circumstances.
As displacement and dislocation become increasingly widespread human experiences, the future-focu... more As displacement and dislocation become increasingly widespread human experiences, the future-focused analytic of becoming is gaining considerable traction in anthropological theorising. This article explores what an emphasis on becoming precludes from view. As anthropologists chase fine-grained understandings of human life on the move, while also attempting to account for the discipline’s colonial legacy, it is increasingly common to find place-based alterity dismissed as no longer relevant, or to find it reduced to little more than abstract products of colonial imaginaries, forms of domination and totalising social theory. Ethnography of Warlpiri displacement describes vigorous practices through which people creatively draw forth, refashion and deploy place-based certainties of the past to tackle the pressing challenges of the present. Exploring this ethnography against diverse settings of displacement, I argue that a fully engaged contemporary anthropology would attend to the ways in which people under duress continue to draw upon distinctively place-based concepts, principles and associations to endure and reimagine the circumstances of their lives.
This review brings anthropological accounts of place and placemaking into dialogue with the conce... more This review brings anthropological accounts of place and placemaking into dialogue with the concepts of precarity and precariousness. In recent years, precarity has become a widespread empirical and theoretical concern across the humanities. The article traces the simultaneous rise alongside precarity of network and ontology as post-place-based frameworks for anthropological analysis. Although these new frames facilitate anthropological explorations in the spirit of the times, this review argues that both network and ontology lack the capacity to identify what is being transformed and what is at stake when and where precarity takes hold. To see models of placemaking as spaces of transformative possibility requires an account of coexisting, qualitatively distinctive forms of relationship to places.
Stanner contributed much to public understandings of the Dreaming and the significance of Aborigi... more Stanner contributed much to public understandings of the Dreaming and the significance of Aboriginal religion. His 1968 broadcast lectures, After the Dreaming, continue to be among the most widely quoted works in the field of Aboriginal studies. He also produced some exceptionally ...
A Warlpiri woman is exiled from her community in Australia's Central Desert and pursues a new lif... more A Warlpiri woman is exiled from her community in Australia's Central Desert and pursues a new life in metropolitan Adelaide. The state promises that Aboriginal people will have better life prospects beyond their remote territories, but the grueling disruptions of their relationships to place shows otherwise. To be caught between alternate and transforming subjectivities associated with the desert and the city is to inhabit a particular kind of exile. Under contemporary conditions, exile acquires new ambiguities and intensities, as anxious mobility and digital communication enable people to participate in aspects of life from which they have been physically separated, albeit in attenuated ways. Exile is a contradictory experience of liberation and entrapment that generates, but ultimately withholds, new possible selves and lives.
This review brings anthropological accounts of place and placemaking into dialogue with the conce... more This review brings anthropological accounts of place and placemaking into dialogue with the concepts of precarity and precariousness. In recent years, precarity has become a widespread empirical and theoretical concern across the humanities. The article traces the simultaneous rise alongside precarity of network and ontology as post-place-based frameworks for anthropological analysis. Although these new frames facilitate anthropological explorations in the spirit of the times, this review argues that both network and ontology lack the capacity to identify what is being transformed and what is at stake when and where precarity takes hold. To see models of placemaking as spaces of transformative possibility requires an account of coexisting, qualitatively distinctive forms of relationship to places.
The 2009 post-election violence on the streets of Tehran was brought to world attention by the im... more The 2009 post-election violence on the streets of Tehran was brought to world attention by the image production and distribution activities of Iranian citizens. This paper considers the communicative potential of these images as they are encountered by distant observers. Beginning with George Herbert Mead’s concept of a generalised other that establishes the ground for intersubjective person formation and the moral basis of self–other relations, I build a critical framework for considering the limits and potentiality of self–other encounters in mediated contexts. Arguing that communication presupposes a shared cultural attitude to images, I explore the distinctive cultural frame and image-encounters that the Internet establishes for its users, before turning attention to the activity occurring on the other side of the screen. Setrag Manoukian has observed that in the 2009 Iranian situation the once distinct categories of action and mediation collapsed together; “everyone was acting and reporting” simultaneously. I shall examine the claims for a new reflexivity associated with this situation. Turning again to the perspective of the distant observer, I explore some of the constraints on the functioning of the Iranian images as communicative acts. In conclusion I briefly consider what work is required on the part of the viewer to build a context for empathetic regard.
When I first sat down to draft this essay, the latest copy of The New York Review of Books carrie... more When I first sat down to draft this essay, the latest copy of The New York Review of Books carried an essay by Sue Halpern on 'the Internet of Things':1In the world of the Internet of things, your car, your heating system, your refrigerator, your fitness apps, your credit card, your television set, your window shades, your scale, your medications, your camera, your heart rate monitor, your electric toothbrush, and your washing machine - to say nothing of your phone - generate a continuous stream of data that resides largely out of reach of the individual but not of those willing to pay for it or in other ways commandeer it.2Not so long ago this was the stuff of science-fiction fantasy. Now it is reportage. Information can no longer be imagined innocently, as an autonomous source of entertainment, enlightenment or deception presented 'freely' to citizens of democratic societies via a range of media and institutions. 'Data-ization' as a comprehensive process no...
WEH Stanner was a public intellectual whose work reached beyond the walls of the academy, and he ... more WEH Stanner was a public intellectual whose work reached beyond the walls of the academy, and he remains a highly significant figure in Aboriginal affairs and Australian anthropology. Educated by Radcliffe-Brown in Sydney and Malinowski in London, he undertook anthropological work in Australia, Africa and the Pacific. Hinkson and Beckett have drawn together some of Australia's leading academics working in Aboriginal studies to provide an historical and analytical context for Stanner's work, as well as demonstrating the continuing relevance of his writings in the contested field of Aboriginal affairs.
tag=1 data=Making meaning of the Yuendumu Doors. by Melinda Hinkson tag=2 data=Hinkson, Melinda t... more tag=1 data=Making meaning of the Yuendumu Doors. by Melinda Hinkson tag=2 data=Hinkson, Melinda tag=3 data=Arena, tag=5 data=5 tag=6 data=1995 tag=7 data=5-15. tag=8 data=ABORIGINAL CULTURE tag=10 data=In 1983 a group of senior Warlpiri men were commissioned to paint the Yuendumu school doors with jukurrpa - dreaming - designs. tag=11 data=1996/2/1 tag=12 data=96/0038 tag=13 data=CAB
This paper draws on research with Aboriginal women of the Central Australian desert who are livin... more This paper draws on research with Aboriginal women of the Central Australian desert who are living in the metropolitan centre of Adelaide 2000 km south of their homelands. It explores the complex conjunction of trauma and pleasure in situations of exile and hones in on the vital role of digital visual mediation in the creative work of making oneself at home in foreign circumstances. In exile, memory and digitisation of images, sounds and interactions enable distinctive socialities and ways of relating to places to be stretched across space. Yet other images are encountered as sites of contested identification and coercive governance. Separation from kin and country is intensely felt but also made bearable when their images are held in close company. In exploring these unsettling circumstances the paper reflects upon the uneven terrain of visual culture and the evolving place of the digital visual in research concerned with transformations in what it is to be human.
In See How We Roll Melinda Hinkson follows the experiences of Nungarrayi, a Warlpiri woman from t... more In See How We Roll Melinda Hinkson follows the experiences of Nungarrayi, a Warlpiri woman from the Central Australian desert, as she struggles to establish a new life for herself in the city of Adelaide. Banished from her hometown, Nungarrayi energetically navigates promises of transformation as well as sedimented racialized expectations on the urban streets. Drawing on a decades-long friendship, Hinkson explores these circumstances through Nungarrayi's relationships: those between her country and kin that sustain and confound life beyond the desert, those that regulate her marginalized citizenship, and the new friendships called out by displacement and metropolitan life. An intimate ethnography, See How We Roll provides great insight into the enduring violence of the settler colonial state while illuminating the efforts of Indigenous people to create lives of dignity and shared purpose in the face of turbulence, grief, and tightening governmental controls.
The last decade has witnessed a significant shift in the terms through which Indigenous people ar... more The last decade has witnessed a significant shift in the terms through which Indigenous people are rendered visible in public debate in Australia and Canada. In observing the long and recursive history of colonial visual regimes, this paper argues that contemporary politics of Indigenous representation are nevertheless distinctively marked by a regime of neoliberal primitivism. Tracing the features and operations of this regime across a selection of images and discursive imaging practices in Australia and Canada, the paper identifies three tropes that are centrally involved in imaging contemporary Indigenous crises: the suffering child, the silenced woman and the dysfunctional landscape. The visual regime of neoliberal primitivism operationalises these tropes in relation to each other and plays a vital role in the neoliberal turn in Indigenous governance. While bringing attention to the very real forms of damage and distress with which Aboriginal individuals and communities must contend in the present, paradoxically, the paper argues, this regime works to occlude from view the constellation of forces at work in those very circumstances.
As displacement and dislocation become increasingly widespread human experiences, the future-focu... more As displacement and dislocation become increasingly widespread human experiences, the future-focused analytic of becoming is gaining considerable traction in anthropological theorising. This article explores what an emphasis on becoming precludes from view. As anthropologists chase fine-grained understandings of human life on the move, while also attempting to account for the discipline’s colonial legacy, it is increasingly common to find place-based alterity dismissed as no longer relevant, or to find it reduced to little more than abstract products of colonial imaginaries, forms of domination and totalising social theory. Ethnography of Warlpiri displacement describes vigorous practices through which people creatively draw forth, refashion and deploy place-based certainties of the past to tackle the pressing challenges of the present. Exploring this ethnography against diverse settings of displacement, I argue that a fully engaged contemporary anthropology would attend to the ways in which people under duress continue to draw upon distinctively place-based concepts, principles and associations to endure and reimagine the circumstances of their lives.
This review brings anthropological accounts of place and placemaking into dialogue with the conce... more This review brings anthropological accounts of place and placemaking into dialogue with the concepts of precarity and precariousness. In recent years, precarity has become a widespread empirical and theoretical concern across the humanities. The article traces the simultaneous rise alongside precarity of network and ontology as post-place-based frameworks for anthropological analysis. Although these new frames facilitate anthropological explorations in the spirit of the times, this review argues that both network and ontology lack the capacity to identify what is being transformed and what is at stake when and where precarity takes hold. To see models of placemaking as spaces of transformative possibility requires an account of coexisting, qualitatively distinctive forms of relationship to places.
Stanner contributed much to public understandings of the Dreaming and the significance of Aborigi... more Stanner contributed much to public understandings of the Dreaming and the significance of Aboriginal religion. His 1968 broadcast lectures, After the Dreaming, continue to be among the most widely quoted works in the field of Aboriginal studies. He also produced some exceptionally ...
A Warlpiri woman is exiled from her community in Australia's Central Desert and pursues a new lif... more A Warlpiri woman is exiled from her community in Australia's Central Desert and pursues a new life in metropolitan Adelaide. The state promises that Aboriginal people will have better life prospects beyond their remote territories, but the grueling disruptions of their relationships to place shows otherwise. To be caught between alternate and transforming subjectivities associated with the desert and the city is to inhabit a particular kind of exile. Under contemporary conditions, exile acquires new ambiguities and intensities, as anxious mobility and digital communication enable people to participate in aspects of life from which they have been physically separated, albeit in attenuated ways. Exile is a contradictory experience of liberation and entrapment that generates, but ultimately withholds, new possible selves and lives.
This review brings anthropological accounts of place and placemaking into dialogue with the conce... more This review brings anthropological accounts of place and placemaking into dialogue with the concepts of precarity and precariousness. In recent years, precarity has become a widespread empirical and theoretical concern across the humanities. The article traces the simultaneous rise alongside precarity of network and ontology as post-place-based frameworks for anthropological analysis. Although these new frames facilitate anthropological explorations in the spirit of the times, this review argues that both network and ontology lack the capacity to identify what is being transformed and what is at stake when and where precarity takes hold. To see models of placemaking as spaces of transformative possibility requires an account of coexisting, qualitatively distinctive forms of relationship to places.
Stanner contributed much to public understandings of the Dreaming and the significance of Aborigi... more Stanner contributed much to public understandings of the Dreaming and the significance of Aboriginal religion. His 1968 broadcast lectures, After the Dreaming, continue to be among the most widely quoted works in the field of Aboriginal studies. He also produced some exceptionally ...
Aboriginal s-*, O i A guide to important places of the past and present PLEASE NOTE Sites which h... more Aboriginal s-*, O i A guide to important places of the past and present PLEASE NOTE Sites which have been identified as containing Aboriginal heritage values are protected in New South Wales under the National Parks and Wildlife Act, 1974 and subsequent amendments. It is an ...
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