[Anthropgrad] Research School of Humanities- Work-in-Progress Seminar - Diana Young

[Sharon Komidar]

Dear All, would you please circulate the following on your email lists.
Apologies for cross posting. Many Thanks, Sharon.

 

The Research School of Humanities presents,
A WORK-IN-PROGRESS SEMINAR

1-2.30 pm, Friday 6th June, 2008, Theatrette, Old Canberra House.

 

Looking Back: Ernabella Arts Archive.

Dr Diana Young

Visiting Fellow, Research School of Humanities, ANU.

 

This paper is part of the last chapter of a book entitled 'A Desire for
Colours' concerning the materiality of consumption practices following
colonisation in a Western Desert society, that of Pitjantjatjara and
Yankunytjatjara people (Anangu) around Ernabella in South Australia. The
book is about how Anangu set about remaking their world through material
things during a time of cataclysmic change.

 

This last chapter is informed by an ongoing collaborative project with
Ernabella artists Renita Stanley and Alison Carroll about the 60 year
history of Ernabella Arts that is funded by AIATSIS. The 'craft room'
was set up by the Presbyterian Mission in late 1948 at Ernabella to
provide employment for women and girls.  Here and in school, they
created work that is unique among Indigenous cultures. Their art is much
neglected by outsiders because it does not conform to the
representations of the sacred found in other Western Desert art schools.


 

Dr Young's recent archival research, undertaken with Ernabella artists
on old photographs made by Mission staff, and using those photographs
taken during her doctoral fieldwork a decade ago, has led her to re
evaluate her understanding of this art production.  The Ernabella
women's work was propositional and less a continuum of pre contact
practices than a performance, an open ended response to life at the
Mission at Ernabella, one of the means of redefining themselves within a
new social order.  In the photographic portraits of themselves that
Anangu regard as successful there is a 'looking back' that is also to be
found in their art. This engagement is a visual mode of knowing about
the world in its broadest way, being embodied, multi sensed and non
discursive. 

 

Diana Young was educated as an anthropologist at University College
London where she specialised in material and visual culture. Since 1996
she has worked with Anangu at and around Ernabella in South Australia.
She is currently a Visiting Fellow at the RSH

 

Convenors: Ken Taylor and Stephen Foster
For general enquiries please contact: 
Phone: 6125 2434
Email: administration.rsh at anu.edu.au 
Web: http://rsh.anu.edu.au/


All Welcome

Please Circulate Widely