[Anthropgrad] Anthropology seminar 26 March

[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/