culture‐making: performing Aboriginality at the Asia Society Gallery

Abstract

This article presents and analyzes the construction and performance of Australian Aboriginal cultural practice, a sandpainting, at a major art exhibition at the Asia Society in New York. Drawing on an ethnography for which anthropological knowledge is part of the event itself, I examine the multiple constructions of Aboriginal identity in the performance. Such intercultural performances represent an important form of cultural production and constitute salient contexts for the contemporary negotiation and circulation of indigenous peoples' identities. The focus of the analysis is on the unsettled and pragmatic quality of the performance as a form of social action, emphasizing the goals and trajectories of the differing participants and the specificities of context and discourses involved. [Australian Aborigines, performance, intercultural, identity]

Sacred Psychotherapy in the “Age of Authenticity”: Healing and Cultural Revivalism in Contemporary Finland

“…The ÄI -Lamenters' threefold emphasis on a particular cultural-historical tradition, psy-oriented healing, and a hybrid (whether we call it -postmodern‖ [15,73] or -New Age‖ [74,75]) of traditional and -post-secular‖ religion-rural Karelian folk Orthodoxy, Finnish civil religion, and -the sacred-authentic‖-is unique. New spiritualities and the courses that help propagate them tend to be eclectic, rather than borrowing-as ÄI -Lamenters do-from one -local‖ tradition (the problematique of -locality‖ having being discussed above).…”

Cruise Ships and Prison Camps: Reflections from the Russian Far East on Museums and the Crafting of History

“…In 1998 in a context where the museum no longer received government monies of any significance, it was not surprising that the institution was formulating a different type of message in its exhibitions. Just as Fred Meyers (1994) noted in reflecting on Australian Aborigines performing at the Asia Society in New York, the "performance of aboriginality" was a key element in this museum. In the case of the Provideniia Museum, the "performance of aboriginality" only became a conscious and essential aspect of the revenue for the museum in the early 1990s; by extension, cultural performance or "cultural tourism" became a new feature of subsistence practice for the broader Yupik Eskimo and Chukchi communities and continues to be important.…”

The Rhetorics of Urban Aboriginal Place-Making: Studying Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal Relationship Building in the Intercultural Speaking Event

“…Anthropologists such as Fred Myers (1991Myers ( , 1994Myers ( , 2013 and James Clifford (1988) have done quite significant work in drawing attention to what Myers calls "the rules of the production and reception" of cultural difference as it concerns the art world and museum curation (Myers 1994:679). Here sociolinguistic work can play an important role extending and deepening this work, establishing the rules of the production and reception of cultural difference as they are realized in the public talk, the most recent iteration of a tradition of staging Aboriginal culture for non-Aboriginal consumption.…”