Abstract
In this chapter I sketch the colonial milieu of Australian anthropology, focusing in particular on the historical roots of the bifurcation between Aboriginalist and Melanesianist ethnography. Following an historical overview which highlights the politico-economic background for the emergence and academic establishment of anthropology in Australia, I offer a selective discussion of some important contributions to the wider discipline that emerged from Australian academia. The specific case study of Australian anthropology provides ground for wider reflections on the not straightforward entanglement between the theoretical disciplinary concerns and colonial (and neo-colonial) interests and forms of governance.
A previous Italian version of this chapter was co-authored with Franca Tamisari in a volume in press. I acknowledge this initial collaboration with Franca, whose expertise on Australian Aboriginal ethnography has informed some of the views I express here. I am solely responsible for any shortcomings.
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Notes
- 1.
When the term ‘New Guinea’ is used in this essay without any further qualifier, I refer to the territories of the contemporary nation-state of Papua New Guinea and the Indonesian province of West Papua. Given the complex history of colonial domination of New Guinea, in this chapter I use the historically appropriate names when referring to the various colonial territories.
- 2.
Murray’s brother, Gilbert, was Professor of Greek at Oxford University.
- 3.
It is instructive to look at the impressive list of anthropological publications in just over a decade of the Department’s life listed in Elkin, 1943.
- 4.
- 5.
A valuable retrospective on this period can be found in Hays, 1992.
- 6.
With independence, the NGRU became, after a few changes of name, Papua New Guinea’s National Research Institute (see May, 2013).
- 7.
An agile and informed overview can be found in Pouwer, 1999.
- 8.
It is important to signal the existence of a north/south regional variety within Aboriginalist ethnography; as Cowlishaw and Gibson (2012, p. 4) aptly noted, ‘Work among Aboriginal people in the south of the continent […] has always attended to the disruptions and changes to what anthropologists had mostly represented as a coherent, unified entity called Aboriginal culture’.
- 9.
A common feature to Australian Aboriginalist and Melanesianist ethnography is the relative absence of class analysis.
- 10.
- 11.
Leading figures of the “Melbourne Group” were Inga Clenninden, Greg Dening, Rhys Isaac, and Donna Merwick.
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Di Rosa, D. (2023). Australian Anthropology in Its Colonial Context. In: D'Agostino, G., Matera, V. (eds) Histories of Anthropology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21258-1_18
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