Social anthropologists have acted as expert witnesses in legal proceedings for many decades, however there has persisted a tension between social anthropologists’ readiness to accept the assignation of ‘expertise’, and the typical manner in which courts and legally empowered bodies characterise such expertise as the forensic specialization of an established scientific field. This paper presents a model for the distinction between forensic social anthropology and expert social anthropology, both of which play important probative roles in a range of legal processes. The key variable in this proposed distinction is the relative degree of independent causal modelling permitted to social anthropologists engaged by courts and other legally empowered bodies. In forensic applications, social anthropologists are called upon to independently detect and explain causal processes that link culturally specific ideas to real-world instances human social interaction. By contrast, in expert applications, social anthropologists are called upon to advise on whether causal models defined by the terms of a given legal process have been substantiated. This distinction brings forensic and expert social anthropology into line with similar distinctions made between forensic and expert applications of physical anthropology in legal proceedings, and offers a useful contribution to the reconciliation of social and physical anthropology as two fields of a single parent discipline.

Australia's distinctive colonial administrative history has resulted in the generation and capture of large quantities of personal data about Indigenous Peoples in Australia, which is currently controlled and processed by government agencies and departments without coherent regulation. From an Indigenous standpoint, these data constitute stranded assets. Established legal frameworks for pursuing recovery of other classes of asset alienated by governments from Indigenous Peoples in Australia, including land, natural resources, and unpaid wages, have not yet been extended to the recovery of Indigenous data assets. This legacy scenario has created a disproportionate administrative burden for Indigenous organisations by sustaining their dependency on government for necessary data, while simultaneously suppressing the value of their own contemporary community-owned data assets. In this article, we outline leading international legal, economic, and scientific frameworks by which an equitable arrangement for the governance of Indigenous data might be restored to Indigenous Peoples in Australia.

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Decades of reports and policy have drawn attention to the significant social and occupational impairment of many young Aboriginal men in Central Australia. However, the role of mental ill‐health as a contributing factor to this impairment, and culturally appropriate intervention targets have received insufficient attention in the psychiatry literature. Despite having the worst health outcomes of any population in Australia, Aboriginal men chronically underuse primary health care services. It's proposed that interventions ensuring cultural continuity through Identity‐strengthening with a particular focus on positive Aboriginal masculinities will address a critical mental health gap for young men. In Central Australian and broader Indigenous populations, tangible and measurable kinship, language, religious and economic (KLRE) activities are catalytic vehicles for restoring traditional knowledge that suffer ongoing pressures as a result of colonization and assimilationist Government policy. By transforming KLRE knowledge content from ethnographic archives, these culturally rich repositories may be utilized to create education and engagement materials that will support young Aboriginal men's efforts to obtain and maintain positive mental health. This proposal focuses on building resilience through the acquisition of KLRE knowledge which young Aboriginal men can utilize as resources for enhancing positive identity and mental health outcomes.