[Anthropgrad] RMAP ARGUMENT - METHODOLOGY & POLITICS OF GENEALOGY: What is the Fate of Anthropology's Signature Technique in the 21st Century?

[RMAP Seminars]

METHODOLOGY & POLITICS OF GENEALOGY: What is the Fate of Anthropology's 
Signature Technique in the 21st Century?

Panel
** Dr Tom Ernst (Centre for Applied & Public Ethics Programs, ANU)
** Dr Ian Keen (School of Archaeology & Anthropology, ANU)
** Dr John Burton (Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program, ANU)
Moderator
** Dr. James Weiner (Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program, ANU)

Thursday 8 November 2007, 4.30-5.30pm, Coombs Extension Theatre, ANU
Followed by the launching of 'Customary Land Tenure and Registration in 
Australia and Papua New Guinea: Anthropological Perspectives' and 
refreshments.

Abstract
Anthropologists, conducting research among communities engaged in 
large-scale resource development projects in Australia and Papua New 
Guinea, realise that genealogy, once the definitive field technique, has 
been wholly appropriated by indigenous hosts, as they make claims on 
resource rents and landowner status. Anthropologists’ data now must be 
ranged against that of our hosts whose data is often independently 
gathered and driven by prospect of significant economic and social 
advantage.

Early genealogies have become critical charter documents for some 
landowning groups to be contested by those disputing such statuses. Such 
documents have become an integral part of ‘local’ knowledge and its 
continuing production rather than an exogenous corroboration of such 
knowledge. How does anthropology as a discipline continue to theorise 
the place of genealogy in its technique and subject matter in the face 
of such developments?
The panel will discuss the current status of genealogy as a tool of 
social science research and evolving ethnomethodology of our hosts, and 
to comment on the relationship of these two phenomena for our future 
analysis of contemporary Australian-Pacific indigenous societies.

The Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Argument Series will host three 
noted anthropologists with long and detailed first-hand research in the 
theory and practice of genealogical methodology in Papua New Guinea and 
Australia and invite them to discuss their views on the current status 
of genealogy as both continuing tool of social science research and 
evolving ethnomethodology of our hosts themselves, and to comment on the 
relationship of these two phenomena for our future analysis of 
contemporary Australian-Pacific indigenous societies.

Bio

Thomas Ernst was educated at State University of New York, Buffalo (BA 
(Hons); MA Anthropology) and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (PhD 
Anthropology). He has lectured at the University of Papua New Guinea 
(PNG) (1972-74), University of Adelaide (1974-90) and Charles Sturt 
University (1990-2002). In 2002 he became an Honorary Visiting 
Fellow/Affiliated Member of the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public 
Ethics, an Australian Research Council special research centre, (ANU, 
Charles Sturt University, University of Melbourne) at ANU leaving him 
blissfully free to do his own research.
He has been a Visiting Research Professor at Japan’s National Museum of 
Ethnology, Osaka (1998); and a Visiting Scholar at the University of 
Bergen, Norway (2000). His main research interest is PNG, with fieldwork 
episodes beginning in 1969. He has also done research in Port Pirie, 
South Australia, on football, mateship and drinking, and on general 
conceptions of family and relationships and has worked on Australian 
nationalism and ethnicity. In cooperation with Dr Barry Morris and Dt 
Kerry Zubrinich, he carried out a detailed ethnography of the court 
cases deriving from the Brewarrina ‘riots’.

Ian Keen gained a BSc(Hons) in anthropology from University College 
London (1973), and a PhD from the Australian National University (1979). 
He has conducted fieldwork in northeast Arnhem Land and other locations 
in the Northern Territory and Victoria. He is the author of Knowledge 
and Secrecy in an Aboriginal Religion (Clarendon 1994) and Aboriginal 
Economy and Society (Oxford 2004) and edited Being Black (Aboriginal 
Studies Press 1988). After lecturing at the University of Queensland and 
the Australian National University he is currently Visiting Fellow at 
the ANU.

John Burton is a Fellow at RMAP with current research interests in Papua 
New Guinea, Torres Strait and North Queensland. He specialises in social 
mapping, landowner identification and land ownership in Melanesia, the 
social impacts of mining on traditional owners, and Native Title research.

James Weiner gained a PhD in Anthropology from ANU (1984) and has done 
extensive fieldwork in PNG from 1979 to the present. He was Professor of 
Anthropology University of Adelaide (1994-1998) and is currently a 
Visiting Fellow in RMAP and consultant anthropologist in the fields of 
native title and social mapping.

-- 
Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
The Australian National University

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