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 June 2011

Visual Records

This year’s sabbatical has given me time to work on a collaborative, three-year project with Australian colleagues, “Pintupi Dialogues:  Reconstructing Memories of Art, Land, and Community through the Visual Record.”  Organized between the National Museum of Australia, the Australian National University, and Papunya Tula Artists, the project is first and foremost a work of heritage, involving  the “re-documentation” of 13 hours of 16 mm sync sound footage from 1974 of the early Pintupi homeland community where I did my PhD research.  The footage is doubly significant because it is part of the filmmaking trajectory of Ian Dunlop, and is part of his fabulous corpus of work.  It is, for me, an extraordinary document of the Indigenous sociality and politics of everyday life that continually draw my attention.

This material is also national heritage, representing a moment in the policy towards Indigenous people in remote Australia.  The homeland community of Yayayi, or “outstation” as it was known then, was one of the first such communities in the Northern Territory, an immediate consequence of the Federal government’s adoption of Aboriginal self-determination as its policy.  In the contemporary moment, in which longstanding consensus on Indigenous affairs has collapsed and in which ideological positions dominate the analysis of statistically overwhelming “Indigenous disadvantage,” I am interested in revisiting my own earlier research and positions from a new present.

As part of the research project, funded first by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Studies and now by the Australian Research Council, I am working additionally on a critical history of Yayayi outstation as an example of the early period of “self-determination,” a policy that has recently been attacked as a failure.  I believe that there is actually little understanding of how “self-determination” was enacted and understood on the ground.  The film is a crucial document for this history, combined with my fieldnotes from 1973-75 and archival materials from the Department of Aboriginal Affairs.

But the project is first and foremost a documentation project to produce a heritage for Pintupi of the future, images of their parents, grandparents, and even of themselves at a younger age, in the early stages of their transition from a foraging life in the bush.  We are filming interviews with a number of younger Pintupi men and women and working with them to develop goals for their use of this material, and we are adding further documentation of the material as history – in the form of interviews with the various non-Indigenous people who participated in life at Yayayi.  We hope this archive it will provide a basis for Pintupi people to reflect on their trajectory of recent years.

We have a number of these interviews completed and are now at work translating, transcribing and analyzing them.  Working with people I have known for over 30 years continues to amaze me as I try to understand how they conceptualize our project.  My friend and research consultant Bobby West took us out to visit a waterhole in the hills near Kiwirrkura community, in Western Australia.  Filled by the record rains, the waterhole was more like a swimming pool in the desert, but Bobby had brought us there, to Walawala, for us to film the remains of the temporary Pintupi camp there in 1964, when Ian Dunlop had first met the Pintupi people he returned to film in 1974.  And there, he said, is Yunarupa Nangala.  Sitting under a bough shelter, cooking a goanna, was the daughter of the man who had impressed Dunlop in 1964, who had herself been a baby at Walawala!  I was speechless to see a form of Aboriginal historical memory put before us. 

This engagement with the visual record is leading me into conversations with my colleagues here on issues of “memory” and “history” as well as the significance of “visual archives.”  I am teaching a new undergraduate course next year on “Settler Societies” in light of my thinking about the research project, and I hope to bring some of it into my MAP course, “Indigenous Australia.” 























The Acrylic Painting Movement

My other continuing research commitment is with Aboriginal art, specifically with the acrylic painting movement of Papunya Tula Artists, with whom I remain active.  The exhibition of early paintings from this movement remains somewhat contested, and appropriate protocols for museums and art galleries are in limbo.  Our records of the early paintings are incomplete.  In a way, research on the acrylic painting movement is itself a heritage project, since the early paintings constitute a major legacy of Aboriginal cultural production and Aboriginal views of the world. 
I have been consulting for important collections of this material on local views of what can be exhibited and how, writing on these issues, and working with the upcoming major exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria to develop a respectful installation of early paintings that recognizes Indigenous concerns about paintings that should not be seen by uninitiated Indigenous persons.  I see this issue as a “cultural property” matter, and I have been writing and lecturing about the significance of negotiation as the mechanism for appropriate recognition. 
In the past year, I have taken the opportunity to discuss these issues with various audiences -- in an international symposium on Aboriginal art at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, in a keynote lecture to a conference in Sydney on the relevance/limitations of Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical frameworks for the exhibition of Aboriginal art outside of Australia.  I expect to pick up these threads in my graduate course, Art and Society, in Fall 2011.