[Anthropgrad] Anthropology seminar Wednesday March 26

[Melinda Hinkson]

Wednesday March 26 Anthropology seminar
9.30 - 11.00 Seminar Room A, ground floor, Coombs Building

Diana Young, Research School of Humanities
Ochre, cloth and diet coke <  on redness
 
This paper forms part of a larger project on the role of things in post
contact Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara (Anangu) society in the north
west of South Australia. Austin Broos has criticised anthropologists and
historians who define Aboriginal culture as a bounded ontology. She,
like
Myers (1988) also construes money and other settler things as disposable
in
the service of relatedness. Here I argue that the particular quality of
some
things, in this case redness, play a central role in sustaining
different
kinds of contemporary sociality on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara
Yankunytjatjara
Lands. Anangu have created an economy of images through things (or
things as
money like as well as money as thing like) that come both from country
and
from industrially produced goods. I argue here that such an economy
depends
on qualia and the manipulation of qualia for its efficacy and potency in
terms of poetics, value creation and desire.
 
Diana Young is a social anthropologist with a particular interest in
contemporary material and visual culture. She is a visiting fellow at
the
RSH, ANU and is currently working on a collaborative project with Anangu
at
Ernabella.
 

____________________________________
Melinda Hinkson
School of Archaeology & Anthropology
A.D. Hope Building
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200

T: +61 2 6125 8246
F: +61 2 6125 2711
W: http://arts.anu.edu.au/AandA/