Abstracts
JEREMY BECKETT Sydney U.: jb526@bigpond.net.au
Anthropology and the People With History
Anthropology, once deemed the study of people without history, is now very much a study of people with history. However, the history is not only the history that is found in documents - but as experienced and articulated by the subjects in a particular setting. Such articulations of historical experience - usually unwritten - are products of the ethnographic moment, which may be long or short, and may very well change. I discuss my uses of documentary and ethnographic history in a longitudinal study of the Torres Strait Islanders.
LEO COUACAUD Melbourne U: l.couacaud@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au
The commodification of mateship in Australian beer and car ads
This paper is a gloss on some important issues that historians may have neglected and highlights the contribution that anthropologists can make to studies of Australian culture. Michael Taussig (1992), explaining the genesis of Australian national identity, suggests the “masculine-half” of this identity is the historical result of constructing difference to the British. Taussig persuasively argues that Russel Ward’s Australian legend and C.E.W. Bean’s glorification of the Anzac tradition represent the literary romanticisation of an Australian working class hero. Drovers, shearers and diggers were the most visibly Other to the British and therefore the most suitable to represent Australian national difference. Media advertisements which continue to portray lower class Anglo men as more characteristically Australian than anyone else show the veracity of this theory. But these discursive and aesthetic representations need to be substantiated through ethnography and the lived reality of peoples’ lives. Ethnographic studies of male and female drinking practices suggest other reasons why a performative style of masculinity associated with lower class Anglo men is still the most representative image of Australianness.
GILLIAN COWLISHAW UTS: gillian.cowlishaw@uts.edu.au
For Ethnography: introductory remarks
The element of advocacy in the title, comes from the desire to rescue and celebrate ethnographic practice in its classic form, in particular writing that is based on extended, empirical field work, the ‘being there’, ‘going elsewhere’, immersing oneself in some other social space with other social subjects in order to change your mind. What I mean by ethnography entails both immersion and intimacy, the attempt to experience the world from another perspective by sharing the social world of others. These others, inititally and importantly, belong to that vast majority outside the academic world to whom we are a strange and marginal minority. Of course field-work practice is limited and hazardous; it is also, I argue, invaluable.
CATHERINE DRISCOLL Sydney U. catherine.driscoll@arts.usyd.edu.au & MELISSA GREGG Queensland University
my profile: the ethics of virtual ethnography
This paper reconsiders academic research in online communities, surveying existing research on ‘virtual ethnography’ and ‘media ethnography’, considering whether this is, in fact, ethnography and the ethical questions raised by online participant observation or even in situ analysis. Our specific examples are livejournal communities, MySpace profiles, and dating sites and we will focus on the tangle of attachments and investments at work in ethnography in such spaces.
One crucial factor here is the greater blurring of work/life boundaries in online culture, which extends across personal scenes and practices, structured and unstructured leisure time, participation in public culture and in publicly visible popular culture, and compulsory as well as less compulsory elements of working life.
These spheres are not separated by time or space or, necessarily, by different behaviours or identities. Ethnography becomes a different kind of problem in such situations when every member of a community has an equaled tangled relation to it as an ethnographer, and yet it remains unclear if any other scholarly method would clarify the situation. Our paper aims to raise new questions about ethnography through the prism of online cultural studies, and new questions about online culture through now well-established debates about ethnographic practice.
MARTIN FORSEY UWA: mforsey@cyllene.uwa.edu.au
Critical Ethnography and the Importance of Studying In-between
In this all too unequal world the orientation of many social scientists towards redressing the imbalances is not at all surprising. Enter the critical ethnographer! Following a research tradition that is committed to addressing unequal distributions of power, critical ethnographers (sometimes referred to as “criticalists”) seem remarkably unprepared for dealing with this issue as a research objective. The major problem explored in this paper arises out of my engagement with critical ethnography in the field of education or school studies, where there is a tendency towards producing accounts of schooling in which teachers are represented as mere cardboard cut-out figures (Forsey 2000). This particular form of ethnographic ‘thinness’ is attributable to the simplistic positioning of teachers as members of the dominant group in the resistance scripts critical ethnographers appear to carry with them upon entering schools. Advocating a mindset attuned to the critical appreciation of social life, I reemphasise the importance of clear and precise documentation of the power-filled social relations characterising any social settings and for the need to position ourselves in ways that allow us to better see, feel and evaluate some of the multitude of interactions that take place in any social field.
MURRAY GARDE Melbourne U.: murraygarde@ozemail.com.au
MARTIN THOMAS Sydney U.: martin.thomas@arts.usyd.edu.au
Media Heritage in west Arnhem Land: Archival evidence as a stimulus for ethnographic inquiry
Our paper is drawn from current research in west Arnhem Land where we are working with traditional owners in interpreting ethnographic films, sound recordings and photographs retrieved from archival collections. The documentation resulted from a visit to the then Oenpelli mission by the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land in 1948, led by ethnologist and photographer C. P. Mountford. The project is concerned with the intersection of history and ethnography at a number of levels—in our own research practice, in the activities of the 1948 expedition, and in the life experiences of contemporary Bininj (a generic term for the Aboriginal people of west Arnhem Land). In this work, to quote from the call for papers, we address the ‘tendency to render the present as almost a direct and unmediated consequence of the past’ by considering the creative and culturally specific ways in which Bininj negotiate with their heritage as it is represented in historic media.
TESS LEA Charles Darwin U: Tess.Lea@cdu.edu.au
Being t/here
As an anthropologist who explores the interconnectedness of institutions, professional communities, state, policy and people, issues of separation, method, selection and ordering have never been straightforwardly settled through appeal to moral politics. One consequence of borrowing from the field one lives in, creating a new form of native ethnography from within professional networks, is that notions of subalternity are more difficult to align with. When the state is no longer outside one’s self, who does the anthropologist champion? or does the question reveal its redundancy in the asking? Arguing for the importance of ethnographic work from within bureaucratic and institutional spaces, this paper argues that bad faith of anthropology when it comes to studying its own cultural forms borrows from and mirrors the cultural habits of institutional fields in unexpected ways.
DAVID MacDOUGALL ANU David.MacDougall@anu.edu.au
Visual Ethnography: Episodes in Children's Lives
David MacDougall will present excerpts from With Morning Hearts, one of the five films in his study of Doon School, India's most prestigious boarding school for boys. The school was established by a group of Indian nationalists in the 1930s to produce a new generation of leaders who would guide the nation after Independence. Since then it has become highly influential in the creation of the new Indian elites and has come to epitomise many aspects of Indian postcoloniality. The film focuses on a group of twelve-year-olds during their first year in one of the 'houses' for new boys. It concerns their attachment to the house but, more importantly, their attachment to one another in a communal life. The title is taken from a school prayer:
Call us up with morning faces
And with morning hearts,
Eager to labour, eager to be happy
If happiness shall be our portion,
And if the day be marked for sorrow,
Strong to endure it.
STEPHEN MUECKE, UTS: Stephen.Muecke@uts.edu.au
Interdisciplinary Effects in Ethnography
Cultural studies is: ‘cultural analysis, but we also add the historical dimension’, as some will say by way of short explanation. A strand of anthropology too has added this historical dimension, especially to perform critique. But is that part of the ethnography or part of the explanation? To what extent can ethnography be autonomous from the disciplines which embrace it?
When rapid (cultural studies) field-work excursions can include texts of various sorts, contingencies, dreams, ironies, affect and discomfort, what is lost or gained in the work of description? How are facts created and made to bear witness? Can ‘radical empiricism’ both ‘purify’ ethnography at the same time as rendering it ‘multimodal’?
KATRINA SCHLUNKE, UTS: katrina.Schlunke@uts.edu.au
Ethnografts
This paper traces some of the relationships between ethnography, cultural studies and history. It looks at the multiple ways ethnography has been understood including practice, style of interpretation and ethos. The paper then interrogates the ways in which ethnography can be used within projects looking at popular phenomenon and scapes of meaning where the ideas of the 'everyday' and 'intimacy' are still crucial but are necessarily represented in styles that may look little like a traditional report upon culture. The texts we make and look through produce a style of meaning and a relationship with what is being seen and experienced that is best described as an ethnograft. These evocations and explanation are both communications about cultures of meaning and inventive of them. They also vivify the possibilities of the ethnographic imagination as an analytic and political tool.
SANJAY SRIVASTAVA Deakin U: sanjay.srivastava@deakin.edu.au
An anthropological project within 'post-colonial' and cultural studies?
This brief presentation is an attempt to think about the role of anthropology within contemporary knowledge formations. In particular, I would like to argue for the necessity of a critical anthropological project within postcolonial and cultural studies. This project can, through an engagement with the messy politics of what people do, problematise the very terms of what passes for, say, the 'postcolonial'. If ‘what is required is to demonstrate another territory of translation, another testimony of analytical argument, a different engagement in the politics of and around cultural domination’ (Bhabha, 1994:32), then the commitment to a serious understanding of multiple modernities must move beyond exhortations to, say, read a Rushdie novel.
JAMES F. WEINER ANU: james.weiner@anu.edu.au
Methodological and Theoretical Dilemmas in Native Title Ethnography
Questions concerning the role of ethnography in the social sciences, including anthropology, have to be simultaneously theoretical and methodological ones. A transformation in ethnographic practice, such as being wrought within an emerging sub-field of anthropology by the demands of the Native Title Act (1993) has both theoretical and methodological dimensions. In this paper, I consider both as effects of the requirements of the legal construction of Aboriginal sociality that is native title in Australia. I consider several aspects of methodology and theory as components of ethnography in native title:
- The theory embedded in current native title thinking of the relationship between behaviour or social action and a theory of society characterized as possessing normative qualities as its most important feature.
- The limited methodological tools that practitioners can bring to bear in the native title process, and specifically, the inability to bring a long-term observational methodology to bear on the elucidation of normativity, which has conventionally been seen to become visible only in field stays of prolonged duration.
- The relationship between laws and customs and so-called incidents of native title, as descriptions of observable social action which is seen to flow directly and in unmediated fashion from the implementation of a set of “laws” normatively construed.
I conclude with a consideration of the impracticality of deploying identifiably anthropological perspectives towards the analysis of contemporary (and historical) Aboriginal social formations in native title ethnography.