[Anthropgrad] Anthropology seminar 2 April

[Melinda Hinkson]

Anthropology seminar, 9.30  am Wednesday 2 April, Seminar Room A, Coombs
Building

ŒSoon we will be spending all our time at funerals¹: change and its
consequences in Yolngu mortuary rituals
 
Frances Morphy (Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, ANU) and
Howard Morphy (Research School of Humanities, ANU)
 
In his fieldnotes in the 1930s Donald Thomson wrote that if you fully
understood the mortuary rituals for a senior leader you would understand the
nature of Yolngu society. Today Yolngu mortuary rituals are equally
informative about some of the changes that have occurred in the interim and
the values of contemporary Yolngu society. As representations of social
structure and religious beliefs they show remarkable continuities over time.
Yet they also show many influences from the outside world ‹ borrowings from
Pacific Island culture, Christianity, the use of photographs and motor
vehicles, and so on. It is tempting to see them as a hybrid adjustment to
the present world with history sedimented productively in expressive
culture. Observed over a period of thirty years they can be seen to be in a
state of almost constant change affected by changing conditions of existence
‹ encapsulation in the nations state, the introduction of new technologies,
economic transformation and perpetual changes in government policy. A
historical perspective enables us to see a society responding creatively and
contingently to new circumstances and opportunities, but a society in which
life is on the edge of being out of control, in an environment in which the
expression of values in new ways can have unintended consequences that
threaten to breakdown the society.
 

____________________________________
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/