[Anthropgrad] Work-in-Progress Seminar - Friday 19 September - Howard Morphy

[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,
 Work-in-Progress Seminar Series 

1- 2.30 pm, Friday 19th September, Theatrette, Old Canberra House

Rewriting Ron berndt 

Professor Howard Morphy

Director, Research School of Humanities, College of Arts and Social
Sciences, ANU

 

The title of this seminar sets its dialogic structure. Ron Berndt's
writing at times obscured the core insights that he had about Yolngu
society and partly as a consequence Australian anthropology has not yet
made the best use of the immense richness of his ethnographic legacy.
And yet in retrospect in many areas of their research the Berndts were
pioneers, perhaps because their work picked up on themes and topics from
anthropology's past that had been for too long ignored. And in doing so
they opened up new fields of study and in many ways the focus of their
research and interests redressed some of the imbalances associated with
functionalism the dominant paradigm of their early years as
anthropologists. In this seminar Professor Morphy will look at two areas
of Berndt's writings where the insights contained within have not been
fully appreciated by later researchers. These are the analysis of Yolngu
social organization and the analysis of Yolngu sexual symbolism. In both
cases Berndt had a sense from his absorption in Yolngu ethnography that
his predecessors had overlooked important themes of Yolngu society, yet
in both cases his analysis was less than convincing.

 

Howard Morphy is the Director of the Research School of Humanities, ANU.
>From 1999 to 2007 he was the Director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural
Research, ANU. He is also honorary Curator of Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford
and Adjunct Curator of the Kluge-Ruhe Research Centre, University of
Virginia. His areas of research and interest entail the anthropology of
art and aesthetics, material culture, landscape, visual anthropology and
ethnographic film, globalisation, museums and performance,
cross-cultural categories, aboriginal religion, kinship, human
adaptation and the evolution of culture, the history of anthropology and
anthropological history.

 

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