Papers by Diana J B Young
Nyukana (Daisy) Baker; A retrospective., 2009
This illustrated catalogue was published for the exhibition 'Nyukana (Daisy) Baker; A retrospecti... more This illustrated catalogue was published for the exhibition 'Nyukana (Daisy) Baker; A retrospective' curated by Diana Young and held at the Jam factory Adelaide in 2009. The essay discusses Baker's influential career at Ernabella Arts from the 1950s onwards, her multiple skills as a painter, print maker, batik creator, carver and ceramic decorator, and the evolving style of her work. It suggests that Baker was probably the first Indigenous woman to make a professional a career from art.
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My main contribution for this day was to organise and deliver a one hour panel discussion in rela... more My main contribution for this day was to organise and deliver a one hour panel discussion in relation to the exhibition "From Relics to Rights" that I had spent the previous 12 months curating.
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Visual Anthropology Review, 2022
This paper critiques the visual conventions applied to the photography of ethnographic museum col... more This paper critiques the visual conventions applied to the photography of ethnographic museum collection objects. To "think photographically" in a museum collection, I draw a productive parallel between my fieldwork with Indigenous women artists in central Australia, and photography of poorly documented museum collection objects. I explore the presence of an intersubjective affective gaze in the central Australian Indigenous art works which is amplified through photography. This resistance inspired an experimental exhibition entailing photography of sculptural museum objects with faces. The exhibit's aim was to resocialize these objects into the present through photographs of them.
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Colour as the edge of the body Colours as space-time in the east of the Western Desert Diana Youn... more Colour as the edge of the body Colours as space-time in the east of the Western Desert Diana Young Why colour? What does colour do? What do Anangu (Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara) people living in the Western Desert of Central Australia on the Anangu (Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands or APY Lands) conceive that it does? In this chapter I explore these questions through the interrelations of colours to space and locale and the idea of colour as a new material in relation to one artist's painting. I situate that painting's place in a local art history of colour. The painting, called Minyma Kutjara/ Two Women, is by Kunmanara (Amanyi Dora Nyuwara) Haggie (okai) henceforth 'Dora' 1. I discuss one woman's placement of herself, emotionally, physically and spatially through the palette of red, yellow, green, blue and black. This group of colours is divided into 'chords' (red/yellow and blue/ green) to effect both a transformative movement and a contraction and expansion of space. In an insightful paper drawing on the work of Lefebvre, Munn (1996) discusses the basic duality of space for Western Desert people with relevance to areas or locales that are forbidden to individuals. There is firstly the corporeal-sensual field of a person that extends outwards at a
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Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2020
This article discusses the diversity, distribution, and qualities of materials and substances cat... more This article discusses the diversity, distribution, and qualities of materials and substances categorized as red among Pitjantjatjara-and Yankunytjatjara-speaking Western Desert Aboriginal people: Anangu. Valued red materials and substances include elements of the encultured landscape-country-such as ochre, timber, food, blood, and fire, alongside cloth and other industrially produced materials. Previous scholarship defines reds among central Australian Aboriginal cultures only in static symbolic terms as representing blood. Based on long-term fieldwork, this article discusses how Anangu employ a system of analogy across domains which connects together red materials and substances with particular affordances. I argue that Anangu conceptualize these red materials and substances as making visible kurunpa/spirit. This has implications for concepts of health and for constructing the local cultural value of consumer goods and substances found in country. Reds connect the mental and the material. The article contributes to studies of how contemporary Anangu mediate relationships between kin and country and participate in a wider market economy. It addresses anthropological knowledge about, and the importance of, the materiality of colours and the role of coloured materials and substances in shaping local ontologies and epistemologies.
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Colour as the edge of the body, 2018
A chapter in the edited volume 'Rematerializing Colour. From concept to substance'. This paper ... more A chapter in the edited volume 'Rematerializing Colour. From concept to substance'. This paper discusses colours in art works made by an Aboriginal women artist living in the Australian Western Desert. The paper employs Nancy Munn's well known 1970 paper, on the transformation of subjects into objects in Warlpiri and Pitjantjatjara myth to argue for colours as transforming multiple boundaries of the mobile body across space and time.
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Car Cultures, 2001
This chapter is about some aspects of the life and death of cars on the freehold Pitjantjatjara L... more This chapter is about some aspects of the life and death of cars on the freehold Pitjantjatjara Lands in the Western Desert, South Australia. I will argue that Anangu1 use cars as social bodies. The driver of a car must imitate the complex choreography of spatial etiquette of a person on foot. The car is therefore almost a prosthesis of the persons inside and its carefully constructed uses express much about spatial practices in contemporary Anangu culture. Similarly abandoned cars, which rot extremely slowly in the dry desert, are used as spatial markers in country but are also akin to bodies.
Car cultures, edited by Daniel Miller, pp 35-57, 2001
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James Turrell-Night Life, 2019
Essay about light artist James Turrell's architectural work written for QAGOMA Queensland Art Gal... more Essay about light artist James Turrell's architectural work written for QAGOMA Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art.
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The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2018
Although colors are central to our cultural and social interactions with the world, color is a to... more Although colors are central to our cultural and social interactions with the world, color is a topic that has more often been pushed to the periphery of anthropological study. This entry outlines an anthropology of colors by tracing approaches to color, from interests in perception, linguistics, color naming, evolutionary theories, and semiotics through to the more recent resurgence in material culture studies and the sensorial turn in anthropology since the 1990s. Works since the mid‐2000s have attempted to overcome prior challenges posed by considering color as a fixed single hue by instead examining what colors do through their transformation and their relations with other colors, properties, things, and people. This focus has opened up new possibilities—for example, considering how indigenous peoples have resocialized their worlds by using colors in novel ways following experiences of colonialism. A renewed interest in light and the increasing experience of colors as mediated through digital screens indicate future directions for anthropological investigations of colors.
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Introduction to 'Wild Australia. Meston's Wild Australia Show 1892-1893
The University of Queens... more Introduction to 'Wild Australia. Meston's Wild Australia Show 1892-1893
The University of Queensland Anthropology Museum commissioned this exhibition in 2014, based on the collection holdings of some photographs of the Wild Australia Show. The resulting research project was enabled by the digitisation of other museum collections, including the British Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum of Anthropology, enabling separated suites of photographs taken of the Wild Australia troupe over a period of 8 months in 1892-1893 to be re assembled.
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This essay is about colour as beauty and offers a critique of Ingold's ideas about the line elici... more This essay is about colour as beauty and offers a critique of Ingold's ideas about the line eliciting form. There can be making with and knowing through colour practices, and coloured materials offer the possibility to elicit form. Groups of colours form culturally specific palettes. Case studies include the work of American artist Chuck Close, Australian Western Desert artist Ngupulya Pumani, the colours of landscapes and media facades and the market driven colour palettes of some Australian Western Desert paintings. The essay argues for beautiful colour as processual, open ended and dynamic.
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Deaconess Winifred Hilliard arrived at the Presbyterian Ernabella mission craftroom in far north-... more Deaconess Winifred Hilliard arrived at the Presbyterian Ernabella mission craftroom in far north-west South Australia in 1954 to work as a qualified missionary. She was 33.Her job: to work among Pitjantjatjara women as the ‘handcraft supervisor’ at the mission.
The art history of Ernabella (Pukatja) is arguably the last neglected narrative of first-generation, postcontact Indigenous art-making among Australian Western Desert peoples. The history of Papunya Tula artists, a painting movement begun in 1971 by men in association with a white male cultural-broker, has become ubiquitous shorthand for Western Desert art.2
The beginnings and practices of the Hermannsburg watercolour artists, begun by men, has enjoyed a revival of interest. The influence of Ernabella art made by women remains obscure, a mere footnote
to this art history. This paper discusses how the role of its long-serving female art-broker and the influential intercultural brokerage role she carried out is germane to this.
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This chapter addresses the materiality of colours. In using the term materiality to designate col... more This chapter addresses the materiality of colours. In using the term materiality to designate colour I refer to the material stuff of colour, coloured cloth, coloured paper, coloured paints, coloured food etc. I will argue that colour is a crucial but little analysed part of understanding how mate- rial things can constitute social relations. Here, in emphasising their materiality I will consider what it is that colours can do, something which has been neglected even in material culture theory, as it has been in every other branch of anthropology. It is as much for what they do, as well as for what they can mean, that colours are so useful and worth attending to both in images and in things.
In The Handbook of Material Culture, pp173-185
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Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2011
This article details the material colour practices of Anangu (Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara ... more This article details the material colour practices of Anangu (Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people) living in the east of the Western Desert, to show how coloured things have been instrumental in remaking their lives post contact with the colonizers. I argue here that ‘colour’ is a cultural invention. Brightly coloured things, such as cloth and paints, were eagerly appropriated by Aboriginal people when these were imported during the colonization of Australia. Material colours, including consumer goods, have become integral to Anangu’s conception of their own humanity in the contemporary world. For Anangu, colours manifest the mutability of things and sequences of colour transformations are states of becoming.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute NS 17, 356-376, 2011
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Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Jan 1, 2009
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World Views: Environment, Culture, Religion, 2006
Anangu, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people living in the north-western areas of South Aust... more Anangu, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people living in the north-western areas of South Australia conceptualize changes in the surface of land as evincing the presence of ancestral power. Rain is one such catalyst of change, though it is by no means a certainty on the Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands. When it does appear, water does not stay long on the surface: it is shimmering and unstable. This paper examines the nature of various water sources in contem- porary indigenous life, the spatial relationships between earth and sky and the dialectic between life and death that they mediate.
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Indigenous-White relations by Diana J B Young
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Books by Diana J B Young
Rematerializing Colour. From concept to substance, 2018
This is a book about colour as a primary aspect of things. What can we learn if we give colour th... more This is a book about colour as a primary aspect of things. What can we learn if we give colour this respect? In the following essays, colours are materialized as cake icing, railway signals, gravestones, clothing, landscapes and atmospheres, paintings, film and photographs. The colours are 're-materialized' because as material stuff they are part of our everyday lives and not merely the mental concept 'colour' , an idea that belongs to post-Enlightenment European cultures. This is also a book about the socialness of colours. Attaching colour to culture refigures it as part of human society relevant to political economy and aesthetics (Gage 1993; Pinney 2006). Colour can swiftly travel from being merely a consumer choice to a fundamental idea about ordering and classifying the world. Investigating the concept of colour leads to some other key concepts: universality and relativity, cognition, classification, agency and the vitality of things, the colonialism of ideas, the dynamic interaction of people and environment, of subjects and objects. Colour in the singular often refers to the concept of colour, and colours in the plural to practices and substances (Batchelor 2008). over recent years materiality has become important theoretically in anthropology. Cultural theories about things promise that the relationships between people and things (subjects and objects) are central to understanding cosmology, power and multiple facets of a society (Miller 2005). Things have qualities that they bring to bear on humans. one of the purposes of this book is to ask what coloured materials do. It is not novel to write about colour as materialized. There are a multitude of books on colour already in the world. The majority are practical manuals aimed at the consumer, and they provide tips on colouring your home, choosing assemblages of colour in your clothing,
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Papers by Diana J B Young
Car cultures, edited by Daniel Miller, pp 35-57, 2001
The University of Queensland Anthropology Museum commissioned this exhibition in 2014, based on the collection holdings of some photographs of the Wild Australia Show. The resulting research project was enabled by the digitisation of other museum collections, including the British Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum of Anthropology, enabling separated suites of photographs taken of the Wild Australia troupe over a period of 8 months in 1892-1893 to be re assembled.
The art history of Ernabella (Pukatja) is arguably the last neglected narrative of first-generation, postcontact Indigenous art-making among Australian Western Desert peoples. The history of Papunya Tula artists, a painting movement begun in 1971 by men in association with a white male cultural-broker, has become ubiquitous shorthand for Western Desert art.2
The beginnings and practices of the Hermannsburg watercolour artists, begun by men, has enjoyed a revival of interest. The influence of Ernabella art made by women remains obscure, a mere footnote
to this art history. This paper discusses how the role of its long-serving female art-broker and the influential intercultural brokerage role she carried out is germane to this.
In The Handbook of Material Culture, pp173-185
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute NS 17, 356-376, 2011
Indigenous-White relations by Diana J B Young
Books by Diana J B Young
Car cultures, edited by Daniel Miller, pp 35-57, 2001
The University of Queensland Anthropology Museum commissioned this exhibition in 2014, based on the collection holdings of some photographs of the Wild Australia Show. The resulting research project was enabled by the digitisation of other museum collections, including the British Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum of Anthropology, enabling separated suites of photographs taken of the Wild Australia troupe over a period of 8 months in 1892-1893 to be re assembled.
The art history of Ernabella (Pukatja) is arguably the last neglected narrative of first-generation, postcontact Indigenous art-making among Australian Western Desert peoples. The history of Papunya Tula artists, a painting movement begun in 1971 by men in association with a white male cultural-broker, has become ubiquitous shorthand for Western Desert art.2
The beginnings and practices of the Hermannsburg watercolour artists, begun by men, has enjoyed a revival of interest. The influence of Ernabella art made by women remains obscure, a mere footnote
to this art history. This paper discusses how the role of its long-serving female art-broker and the influential intercultural brokerage role she carried out is germane to this.
In The Handbook of Material Culture, pp173-185
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute NS 17, 356-376, 2011
This exhibition and research project offered something glimpsed and partial suggested by the contents of the University's collection. It was not intended as a survey show of Solomon Island work but aims to return the Solomon collection things to an enchanted state (Hillman 1982), one that is alive with new possibilities for shaping the present and the future.
The project was a first step towards adding some layers of meaning to the poorly documented Solomon Islands collection and a way of inviting a response from anyone who has an interest in it.
tell us that colour is an illusion, and a private one for each of us; neither social nor material, it is held to be a product of individual brains and eyes
rather than an aspect of things.
This collection seeks to challenge these assumptions and examine their far-reaching consequences, arguing that colour is about practical
involvement in the world, not a finalized set of theories, and getting to know colour is relative to the situation one is in – both ecologically and
environmentally. Specialists from the fields of anthropology, psychology, cinematography, art history and linguistics explore the depths of colour
in relation to light and movement, memory and landscape, language and narrative, in case studies with an emphasis on Australian First Peoples, but
ranging as far afield as Russia and First Nations in British Columbia. What becomes apparent, is not only the complex but important role of colours in
socializing the world; but also that the concept of colour only exists in some times and cultures. It should not be forgotten that the Munsell Chart, with
its construction of colours as mathematical coordinates of hues, value and chroma, is not an abstraction of universals, as often claimed, but is itself a
cultural artefact.