Fred R. Myers

Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines

The Pintupi, a hunting-and-gathering people of Australias Western Desert, were among the last Aborigines to come into contact with white society. Despite their extended relocation in central Australian settlements, they have managed to preserve much of their traditional culture and social organization. This book presents a comprehensive ethnographic interpretation of the ways in which Pintupi politics, cosmology, kinship systems, nomadic patterns, and social values reinforce and sometimes contradict each other.

A history of aboriginal futures

This article addresses the paradox of the persistence, growth, and increasing circulation of work in indigenous media and acrylic painting in Aboriginal Australia, despite the alarming political turn against gains made by indigenous Australians over the last decade, not only by right-wing politicians but intellectuals as well. Indigenous people in settler nation-states have faced a range of dilemmas in imagining their futures. In Australia, debates about the significance of an indigenous presence and history continue to rage. This article reviews the range of policies extended toward Australia’s Aboriginal people (ranging from pastoral care in the face of expected dying out to assimilation to self-determination and beyond), the cultural and political projects through which Aboriginal urban activists and remote communities have attempted to construct their futures, and a consideration of the media through which these futures are imagined.

Social Agency and the Cultural Value(s) of the Art Object

In different, distinctive ways, the essays in this volume can be seen to combine two strands of recent work on the anthropology of art – with the category ‘art’ partially under erasure – as they survey the problem of indigenous art within settler states. We are, of course, indebted to Nelson Graburn for the first real move in this direction. In his original edited collection (Graburn, 1976), Graburn both drew attention to this category of material culture and also gave it theoretical significance as ‘Fourth World art’, insisting that some of its most salient characteristics were comprehensible only through exploration of the distinctive social contexts of its production and circulation. The thrust of these essays, in that tradition, lies with the potential of complex object forms (objects, art, performance) to address strategically the complex boundaries between indigenous and non-indigenous people and cultures within settler societies. The essays refer specifically to the circumstances of Canada, but their historical and geographical ramifications extend more broadly and their interest as instances of the analysis of Fourth World arts is great. The first strand of the current work in the anthropology of art – commemorated for me in the title of the collection’s original American Anthropological Association Panel ‘Beyond Art/Artifact/Tourist Art’ – evokes the Primitivism debates around and after the Museum of Modern Art’s 1984 exhibition. Responding to ”’Primitivism’ and 20thCentury Art’, these debates were cogently articulated in James Clifford’s well-known review (1985) and his subsequent essay ‘On Collecting Art and Culture’ (Clifford, 1988a). The second strand of

Uncertain regard: An exhibition of aboriginal art in France

Abstract This paper is a study of one component of the recent and contemporary circulation of cultural objects, the exhibition of Australian Aboriginal acrylic paintings in a French museum. The author argues that the recent emphases on ‘appropriation ‘ and the primitivizing gaze ‘ are not sufficient to understand what happens when such objects circulate. To ask what does happen in circulation, at the sites of exhibition, is to ask how they are produced, inflected, and invoked in concrete institutional settings, which have distinctive histories, purposes, and structures of their own. The gazes’ (representations) which are discussed in this French example are analyzed within the specific conditions of their production to show how such exhibitions and circulations of culture are produced in relationship to the requirements internal to museums to distinguish themselves from others, to respond to claims placed upon them by their own institutional settings.

Truth, beauty, and pintupi painting

This paper is concerned with the historical development of acrylic painting on canvas for commercial sale by Western Desert Aboriginal people. It is argued that Pintupi paintings should be understood within a special interplay between producer and consumer as one point (among many) of accommodation and/or interpretive struggle between an Aboriginal people and broader Western society. I begin by showing how Pintupi evaluate their productions in a new sociocultural context, stressing its continuity with religious tradition. At one level there is a conflict between Western and Pintupi standards of evaluating visual form—with Westerners emphasizing “beauty” and Pintupi stressing the paintings’ truth value as coming from the Dreaming. But the material conditions of producing, distributing, and appreciating this symbolic form have changed, and new potentials have been generated for form, leading to changes. At another level, however, it is a resistance of Pintupi painting to domination by European forms which m...

Unsettled Business: Acrylic Painting, Tradition, and Indigenous Being

Acrylic painting in Australian Indigenous communities is one of the sites in which the conundrum of “tradition” is faced. While this painting has particularly challenged the conception of cultural traditions as bounded, its status has also been challenged in terms of authenticity; but I argue that a framework emphasizing culture-making is more productive. This article explores the scandals and rumors that have accompanied the movement of acrylic painting into the commercial market, arguing that the circulation of Aboriginal fine art creates a sphere for discussing what Aboriginality and Aboriginal identity might be in relationship to Whites.

Emplacement and Displacement: Perceiving the Landscape Through Aboriginal Australian Acrylic Painting

Aboriginal Australian acrylic paintings have long been considered representations of mythologically invested landscape. This understanding has been made problematic by recent writings on ‘dwelling’. As common usage of the term ‘landscape’ seems to prioritize vision, to suggest that the acrylic paintings are landscapes only strengthens the suspicion that they are artifacts of displacement or distancing, rather than examples of the emplacement emphasized in this ‘dwelling perspective’. However, this paper will demonstrate that the relationship between acrylic painting and the land is more complex than such an interpretation. It will argue that the Aboriginal objectification of their relationship to the land is not inherently a distancing of the land.

Disturbances in the field: Exhibiting Aboriginal art in the US:

This article considers the role of varied agents in the circulation of Papunya art across the relations between the Australian and the international art fields. My analysis follows an exhibition that took place at New York University’s Grey Gallery in 2009, tracing in particular the international circulation of the highly valued ‘early Papunya boards’. By focusing on the unsettled nature of Aboriginal art’s circulation and the problem of producing its value socially in a world that is not consolidated, I consider Bourdieu’s ‘field of cultural production’ as still becoming. Finally, my argument should caution against assuming that ‘antipodean fields’ might be addressed as autonomous from international agents, circuits of distribution and so on. It also questions Bourdieu’s tendency to treat national art fields as independent.

We are not alone : Anthropology in a world of others

The theme of this essay, as of my anthropological history, is ‘Anthropology in a World of Others.’ My beginning seems a long time ago, as far in the past of the present as the Diary of a Country Priest by George Bernanos seemed to me as a student in the Religion Department of a late-1960s rural Massachusetts liberal arts college. Canberra still had the look of a British colony. It was still the Australia of instant coffee, and not the ‘fl at white’ or ‘long black’ of more recent, cosmopolitan days. Some of these memories remain visceral; I can never fl y into Alice Springs and feel the crisp sunny days of a desert winter without a pang of the anxiety, of recognition and expectation, of my fi rst fi eldwork. In a similar fashion, I can no longer think about my career of research and writing without engaging with the (or should I say ‘my’) historical locations and the horizons that shaped my understandings of the Western Desert Aboriginal people I came to know in the early 1970s. My research began at a signifi cant time. It straddled an anthropological moment marked by disputes about kinship and descent theory and an Australian political period dominated by policies of directed assimilation subsequently eclipsed by the period of Aboriginal land rights and self-deterKey Informants on the History of Anthropology

Experiments in self-determination: Histories of the outstation movement in Australia

Overview Outstations, which dramatically increased in numbers in the 1970s, are small, decentralised and relatively permanent communities of kin established by Aboriginal people on land that has social, cultural or economic significance to them. In 2015 they yet again came under attack, this time as an expensive lifestyle choice that can no longer be supported by state governments. Yet outstations are the original, and most striking, manifestation of remote-area Aboriginal people’s aspirations for self-determination, and of the life projects by which they seek, and have sought, autonomy in deciding the meaning of their life independently of projects promoted by the state and market. They are not simply projects of isolation from outside influences, as they have sometimes been characterised, but attempts by people to take control of the course of their lives. In the sometimes acrimonious debates about outstations, the lived experiences, motivations and histories of existing communities are missing. For this reason, we invited a number of anthropological witnesses to the early period in which outstations gained a purchase in remote Australia to provide accounts of what these communities were like, and what their residents’ aspirations and experiences were. Our hope is that these closer-to-the-ground accounts provide insight into, and understanding of, what Indigenous aspirations were in the establishment and organisation of these communities.