Areas of Research/Interest

Research with Aboriginal people in Australia, concentrating on Western Desert people. He is interested in exchange theory and material culture, the intercultural production and circulation of culture, in contemporary art worlds, in identity and personhood, and in how these are related to theories of value and practices of signification.

Publications

The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Anthropology and Art. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1995

"Locating Ethnographic Practice: Romance, Reality, and Politics in the Outback." American Ethnologist, 15: 609-24. 1988.

"Burning the Truck and Holding the Country: Forms of Property, Time, and the Negotiation of Identity among Pintupi Aborigines." In T. Ingold, D. Riches, and J. Woodburn (eds), Hunter- Gatherers, II: Property, Power and Ideology. London: Berg Publishing. (longer version [In] E. Wilmsen, ed., We Are Here. Berkeley: University of California Press.) 1988.

Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines. Smithsonian Institution Press, Wash., D.C. (reprinted in paperback by University of California Press, 1991) 1986.

Current News / Projects
Updated July 2009

 I had a wonderful year.  Last summer’s visit to the National Museum of Australia cemented the group of us working on a collaborative project to repatriate culturally and document 10 hours of historical film footage from the 1974 Yayayi community of my original research with Pintupi people.  We are calling ourselves the Yayayi Film Project, and our group includes Peter Thorley, a curator from the National Museum of Australia, Ian Dunlop, the renowned filmmaker who shot the footage, Pip Deveson, his editor and Research and Media Project Officer at the Australian National University’s Research School of the Humanities, and me – with advice and further collaboration with my old friend and colleague, anthropologist Howard Morphy.  We received a small grant to make a better, color-corrected digital copy of the footage, and we are waiting on news of other grant proposals to proceed with further consultation with the Pintupi communities.  It’s very exciting, although proceeding slowly.
 This year saw a number of Aboriginal art events in the area.  In January, I had the chance to speak in a massive event at Donna Karan’s Urban Zen Center, organized by Lisa Fox as part of Australia’s “G’Day USA” promotion.  This event, however, was a fund-raiser for a proponent of Aboriginal children’s health, Fiona Stanley – a former Australian of the Year.  Quite an extravaganza, really, with Hugh Jackman flying in to host the fundraising dinner, Geoffrey Gurrumul singing a song for us, and Baz Luhrmann speaking about the making of his film epic, Australia.  A noted Australian fashion photographer, Russell James, put together a collaboration with a Broome-based Indigenous artist, Clifton Beudurry, that was the mainstay of the event.  The events were a demonstration of the ways in which Indigenous art is embedded in politics, health, and cultural respect, so while I gave a lecture as part of this event, I felt I had never left the ever-globalizing world of Indigenous art’s circulation, which has been my subject of study!!  I gained a good deal of cultural capital from students with being part of Baz Luhrmann’s scene, merely a side benefit.

 In February, this Australian visitation continued.  The exhibition of early Papunya Tula painting, “Icons of the Desert,” opened at the Herbert Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell.  I went there to give a lecture, but just as much to hang out with some of my first Pintupi friends – Bobby West Tjupurrula, Joseph Tjaru Tjapaltjarri, Ray James Tjangala.  They are all now painters for the Papunya Tula Artists cooperative, but they were boys and young men when I first met them, and we’ve known each other now for 36 years.  Lucas Bessire took some time off from his dissertation writing and came up to Cornell to help me document the men’s visit and their production of a ground-work installation for the Cornell exhibition.  Danny Fisher, who is on a post-doc up there, did the sound.  The production took three days, and was quite spectacular.  After the symposium and opening of the exhibition, the Pintupi painters and the Papunya Tula entourage who came to help them all stayed at the Washington Square Hotel, and Bobby, Joseph and Ray got to meet my daughter for the first time.  To them, of course, she is Napangarti – based on her kinship classification through me.  It was an honor to share the stage with Bobby in Ithaca, but a greater pleasure to be able to return some hospitality after all these years.  Lucas was given a kinship designation as well, since he was so simpatico with Aboriginal style.
 I just finished editing the footage from that trip to use in the upcoming exhibition of the “Icons” at the Grey Gallery.  With help from a friend who is a professional editor, since everyone else here is busy on their own work, we produced a ten-minute installation that provides an Indigenous voice for the works of the exhibition – tying the historical works that are in the exhibition to the contemporary painting that emerged with the next generation of people from these communities, and also connecting painting practice to the ground work of Ithaca, a beautiful but temporary installation.  This is all the better since Papunya Tula Artists has decided to bring some of their contemporary work and display it at 80 WSE Gallery.  I’m very grateful to my NYU colleagues for helping get that venue, just down the block from the Grey.
 We are still working out the programming for the exhibition in the Fall.  I have been working with the wonderful Grey Gallery staff, with NYU colleagues from Art History, the Center for Religion and Media, the Tisch Film School, and Digital Imaging and Photography.  When you do this kind of work, you realize what extraordinary resources we have at NYU, colleagues who have such an open stance to new forms.  It seems as if Pintupi culture and art grabbed me all those many years ago and has dragged me into one new interesting experience after another.  That their painting will be exhibited in this way in New York City is a great satisfaction to me, and I’m only hoping I am able to do justice to their accomplishments.
 On a more personal note, I was honored to receive the J.I. Staley Prize for Painting Culture: the Making of an Aboriginal High Art.  I was particularly moved by the many students and colleagues who joined in the celebration; for me, it was a celebration of the memory of a generation of Pintupi people who made that book possible.  Fortunately, that has not been the end of the story.