Howard Morphy

Rethinking visual anthropology

For many years the field of visual anthropology has been dominated by a focus on the production and study of ethnographic film, leading many anthropologists to dismiss it as of little importance to their work. This book shows that the scope of visual anthropology is far broader, encompassing the analysis of still photography, television, electronic representation, art, ritual, and material culture. Since anthropology involves the representation of one culture or segment of society to another, the authors argue, an understanding of the nature of representational processes across cultures is essential. This book brings together essays by leading anthropologists that cover the entire range of visual representation, from Balinese television to computer software manuals. Contributors discuss the anthropology of art, the study of landscape, the anthropology of ritual, the anthropology of media and communication, the history of anthropology, and art practice and production. Also included are a wide-ranging introduction and a concluding overview. The book should be of interest to anthropologists - even those who have never picked up a camera - and also to those concerned with cross-cultural visual representation in the fields of cultural studies, media studies, and communication theory.

Art as a Mode of Action Some Problems with Gell's Art and Agency

This article is a dialogue with the theoretical arguments of Alfred Gells book Art and Agency. While strongly supporting an action-oriented perspective on art it is argued that Gells argument deflects attention away from human agency by attributing agency to the objects themselves. It is argued that the very properties of art that Gell excludes from his definition of art objects and largely from his analyses — aesthetics and semantics — are integral to understanding art as a way of acting in the world and to understanding the impact that art works have on people.

Tasting the Waters Discriminating Identities in the Waters of Blue Mud Bay

This article focuses on the pattern of sea ownership in the north of Blue Mud Bay in Arnhem Land, north Australia. Detailed research into the specificities of sea and land ownership in the region has revealed a more complex pattern than has previously been supposed to exist. It is nonetheless one that can be accommodated within previous models of estate ownership in Australia. In the article we seek to explain the pattern of ownership observed according to ontological (mythological), ecological and sociological factors. We argue that these factors are relatively autonomous and act as co-determiners of a system that is both flexible and structured. We argue that the Yolngu view that land/sea ownership is ancestrally determined is entirely congruent with evidence of the long-term stability of the system of relationships between groups over time, in particular given that the Yolngu perspective includes ancestrally sanctioned processes of succession. We show how, through the rhetoric of sea ownership and the metaphoric discourse in which relationships between different estate areas are embedded, the land/seascape serves as an underlying template for spiritual and social relationships which simultaneously underlie, and emerge through, social action.

The Practice of an Expert: Anthropology in Native Title

This paper provides a perspective on the practice of anthropology as a discipline in the context of providing expert evidence in court cases. I consider the nature of anthropological expertise in relation to method, knowledge and theory. I evaluate the contribution that anthropological expertise can make, taking into account such factors as time pressures and the extent of the anthropologists prior knowledge of a particular society—factors that often act as a constraint on what it is possible to know or find out in a given situation.

Encounters at the National Museum of Australia: a moment in an ongoing process of engagement

This is not an easy paper to for me to respond to as I took part in the research project associated with the Encounters exhibition and was involved in the curation of Indigenous Australia – Enduring Civilisation at the British Museum. However I did not have any role in the Encounters exhibition itself. Robinson begins by stating that the dual mandate of museums – institutions that preserve, document and research collections as well as providing diverse opportunities for community access – is being substituted by a range of participatory practices. My perspective, perhaps to be judged as naïve, is that the collections and the different ways in which they are valued are likely instead to be at the centre of participatory practice. The research project that led to the two exhibitions was intended to be a stage in a participatory process linking objects in the British Museum with Indigenous communities in Australia, researching the existing evidence about the historical and cultural significance of the objects at the time of their manufacture and their present significance to the descendant communities. The research and the exhibitions could only be stages in the process given the scale of collections and the complexity of the undertaking. Museums provide the resources for reconnecting people with material heritage and also with archival material that can be an important part of the process of reengagement. However it is important not to oversimplify the complexity of reconnection. In many cases the concept of a source community may not be appropriate (see Basu 2015), and locally connections may be highly contested. Reconnection with objects across long periods of time can be difficult, and integrating past practices and values may be problematic in a world that has transformed since the works were originally produced (Isaac 2015; Kramer 2015). The relationships between source communities and museums that house their collections is going to vary greatly according to the time and circumstances of separation and the nature of the colonial encounter (Morphy 2015). Museums are intentionally holders of resources that can generate an almost infinite number of different forms of participation. There have been major initiatives in recent years to provide greater access to collections, and consultations with source communities have become central to museum practice. Exhibitions, publications and on-line catalogues provide some of the ways in which people gain access to knowledge of museum holdings. Many of the sources cited by Robinson come out of the museum community itself and through initiatives that have grown over time between museums and Indigenous communities (Gosden and Knowles 2001; Allen and Hamby 2011; Hutchison 2013). In many of these collaborations the expertise and knowledge of the researchers and curators and their belief in the value of the collections has been the building block of relationships with communities. Robinson creates an artificial divide between the objectives of the researchers and the communities when she writes that the museums aimed to ‘unshackle themselves from the narrow empiricist legacies

Re-reading Ronald Berndt: Exploring the Depths of his Yolngu Ethnography

The title of this essay sets its dialogic structure. Ronald Berndts 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. In retrospect, in many areas of their research the Berndts were pioneers addressing themes and topics that had been for too long ignored. They opened up new fields of study and redressed some of the imbalances associated with functionalism, the dominant paradigm of their early years as anthropologists. In this essay I examine two areas of Ronald Berndts writings in which he had insights that were not fully appreciated at the time: the analysis of Yolngu social organisation and the analysis of Yolngu sexual symbolism. In both cases, his absorption in Yolngu ethnography made him aware that his predecessors had overlooked important themes of Yolngu society, yet in both cases his analysis was less convincing than it might have been.The title of this essay sets its dialogic structure. Ronald Berndts 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. In retrospect, in many areas of their research the Berndts were pioneers addressing themes and topics that had been for too long ignored. They opened up new fields of study and redressed some of the imbalances associated with functionalism, the dominant paradigm of their early years as anthropologists. In this essay I examine two areas of Ronald Berndts writings in which he had insights that were not fully appreciated at the time: the analysis of Yolngu social organisation and the analysis of Yolngu sexual symbolism. In both cases, his absorption in Yolngu ethnography made him aware that his predecessors had overlooked important themes of Yolngu society, yet in both cases his analysis was less convincing than it might have been.