Anthropology

Current Issue An anthropologist hits the skids in Cape York

The Aurukun blues of Peter Sutton

By Catherine Ford

In October 2012, Peter Sutton, the Adelaide anthropologist, linguist and author, flew into Cairns en route to Aurukun, Far North Queensland, as a guest of the Cape York Land Council. The following day, the Federal Court would sit in the small town to deliver its fifth and final native title determination to the Wik people of western Cape York, thus settling the longest-running native title cl

April 2013

The World Until Yesterday. Jared Diamond

By

The Monthly Book: Jared Diamond discusses his new book The World Until Yesterday with Ramona Koval. Diamond is an American scientist and author, and his previous books include The Third Chimpanzee, Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse. Buy the book here.

John Strehlow’s 'The Tale of Frieda Keysser'

On a Mission

By Peter Sutton

Among a right-thinking crowd you can still get a laugh with a missionary joke. At the 2008 conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth in Keele, the doyenne of British anthropology, Professor Marilyn Strathern, brought the house down with one such joke during her keynote address. In the coffee queue afterwards I asked her how many people’s lives she thought had been saved by missionaries in the c

The Toyota HiLux and the Tradie’s New World

Riding High

By Don Watson

Climb into a Toyota HiLux and at once you feel “the commanding outlook”. It’s just as the brochure says. Nissan Navara lacks very little in this regard, though Nissan calls it a “commanding presence”. The Toyota is “unbreakable”, “relentlessly tough and reliable”, “unstoppable”. The Nissan is “tough as nails”; it “looks tough, pla

'Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory' By Patrick Wilcken

By Michelle de Kretser

In 1938 an obscure French anthropologist, sporting a topee and with a monkey clinging to his boot, led an expedition into deepest Brazil. Part scientific enterprise, part youthful lighting out for the territory, its fieldwork was patchy, impressionistic and la

Who’s Afraid of Marcia Langton?

By Peter Robb

Marcia Langton has a longer and more various history than Pearson, and is a lot harder to place. She is 14 years older, a grandmother several times over, and she will turn 60 this year. She describes herself as “now an academic and writer” – which is not

'The Many Worlds of RH Mathews: In Search of an Australian Anthropologist' By Martin Thomas

By Henry Reynolds

With The Many Worlds of RH Mathews, Martin Thomas has brought back anthropologist Robert Hamilton Mathews from almost total obscurity. Thomas has pursued his man with forensic intensity, and astutely located him in time and place. This alone is a significant achievement

The Blast Zone

By Nicolas Rothwell

Stalker, which was made under the Soviet Union’s studio system in 1979 with limited resources, tells a science fiction tale in stylised fashion. The stalker of the title is a professional guide, who leads two pilgrims into a forbidden “Zone” where the la

From Berlin to the Bush

By Ken Inglis

After eight weeks at sea, the internees were disembarked: some in Melbourne, en route to a camp in Tatura, in northern Victoria, but most in Sydney, where they were then taken on a 19-hour train journey to the town of Hay and marched into two camps. There the internees

Noel Pearson’s "Up from the Mission"

Here I Stand

By Peter Sutton

Most Australians probably know Noel Pearson in just one or two of his aspects: as the regional leader, lawyer and activist from Cape York Peninsula, or as the national media commentator on Indigenous policy and politics. But his complexities, his gifts and pos

WEH Stanner & "An Appreciation of Difference"

The Good Soldier

By Inga Clendinnen

WEH (‘Bill') Stanner, 1905-1981, Australian anthropologist, is known to most of us through his 1968 Boyer Lectures, titled After the Dreaming. Those lectures were and remain electric, charged with anger for the physical and psychological misery inflicted on

On Fragments and Dust

By Nicolas Rothwell

Thoughts of this kind would always come to me after I had driven the narrow, ill-maintained highway through the Syrian Desert, towards the Euphrates Valley, the Iraqi border and Anbar Province beyond: I used to break my journey round sunset, at Tadmor, beside the ruins

‘Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All’ by Christina Thompson

By Zora Simic

The Voyage of Globalisation’s Forefather

In the Wake of Magellan

By Simon Leys

First, though Magellan was indeed Portuguese, he sailed for Spain - personally commissioned by Charles V. His foreign origin provoked suspicion and resentment among his Castilian officers; some of them detested him, and their hostility was to climax in a mutiny that nearly brought the entire expedition to a premature end.Secondly, Magellan died halfway through the voyage, killed in an absurd fight

Making Sense of the Flores Find

Lovely Bones

By Ashley Hay

This something took three days to extricate. It was a skeleton, so tantalisingly conserved that some of its sections were still joined, and so fragile that it had the consistency of wet blotting paper. The researchers thought it was a pre-modern child; they to

Keith Windschuttle and Robert Edgerton: a comparison of texts

By Robert Manne

Franchise Nation

By Alice Pung

"I had never worked in a better restaurant." That was what my uncle told us about one of the first jobs he had after arriving in Australia. He wore gloves and a uniform to work; the kitchen was stainless-steel sterile and everything ran like clockwork. If you were a str

Not All Black & White

By Craig Sherborne

If you think Australia and New Zealand are peas in a pod, you are mistaken.In social justice, New Zealand has, for most of its modern history, been advancing the lantern into the future's blank mist, where Australia has been hesitant to venture. In indigenous land rights, most obviously. For 33 years, reconciliation has officially been underway. Tribes and the Crown are hammering out reparation de