Studying aborigines: Changing canons in anthropology and history

Access and Accessibility at ELAR, a Social Networking Archive for Endangered Languages Documentation

“…They produce a naturalized and homogenized ethnobotany, for example, as an unreflexive body of knowledge which exists outside of both the specific historic moments of its production, and the many and varied relationships between the scientists and the Aborigines and the contexts of their interactions (McConaghy, 2000, p. 26-7). This process silences the discordant and independent voices of those recorded, and should be understood as much as sites of multiple expulsions as of liberation (Cowlishaw, 1992;Muecke, 1992). The exclusions at work here are congruent with the wider project of western science which values knowledge to the very extent that it is divorced from the object of its 9 manifestations.…”

(Re)presenting Indigeneity

“…This engagement with anthropology, however, was not unproblematic. While anthropology is steeped in a self-identified colonial past (Cowlishaw, 1992), I reasoned that transformative action from within might facilitate Indigenous empowerment in a number of domains.…”

Unsettling pasts: reconciliation and history in settler Australia

“…this racism' by presenting 'a view of our own past that fills [settler Australians], as readers, with horror as the same time as it distances us from it'. 27 Sharing histories 'Shared history' can be contrasted with another, subordinate theme in the Council's history work, that of 'sharing histories'. The assumptions informing 'sharing histories' differ in significant ways to those underpinning the concept of 'shared history'.…”