Francesca Merlan

• Australian National University

A common view is that states formulate and administer policy. However, there is much in the classification and administration of persons that is not narrowly governmental. As an example, this article traces long-term developments in Australia and the United States which have made possible recent broadening and “de-racializing” of governmental formu...

Since the 1990s, the term “nation” for Indigenous Australian groups has emerged, along with an increasingly common phrase “First Nations,” used both by Indigenous groups in self‐reference and by others in reference to them. This article examines the multiple sources of nation and its emergence in Australia as a contemporary form of Indigenous polit...

How do children learn to understand and use complex syntactic constructions? In English, Diessel (2004) shows that they do so in two different ways. Complex sentences with dependent clauses (e.g., “Peter promised that he would come”) develop out of simple sentences that are gradually expanded into multi-clause ones. Complex sentences with coordinat...

This introduction provides coverage of anthropological theorization of personhood, and Australianist work on personhood. In doing so it identifies major works, their contribution, and changes in the historical conditions shaping personhood and certain major on-going transformations. It provides a concise introduction to each of the following chapte...

Since the advent of European settlement, indigenous Australians have been subject to continual change and entrenched inequality. This has been their shared experience even as regional histories have diverged. These essays address the lives of indigenous Australians through a focus on the person. Various contexts are described including family and c...

This book presents a collection of chapters on the nature, flexibility and acquisition of lexical categories. These long-debated issues are looked at anew by exploring the hypothesis of lexical polycategoriality –according to which lexical forms are not fully, or univocally, specified for lexical category– in a wide number of unrelated languages, a...

'Agency' entered anthropological discourse as a key word from the 1970s in renewed social-philosophical theorizations (e.g. 'structure and agency') as major deterministic theories (e.g. Marxism, structuralism) became less persuasive. It came to play an increasing role in ethnography. Though agency, too, has been partly replaced in some of its earli...

This volume offers a state-of-the-art survey of linguistic, anthropological, archaeological and historical work focused on Cape York Peninsula and the Gulf Country, in Australia’s northeast. The volume also honours Bruce Rigsby, emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Queensland, whose work has inspired all of the contributors. The...

This afterword presents a view of key contributions of the issue's articles, positions those contributions in relation to precedent work, and suggests the need to place heightened emphasis on fundamental asymmetry and differential power to determine context on the part of participants to primitivist tourist encounter.

In this article, I examine the recent emergence in Australia of two small, and now regularly enacted, rituals: Acknowledgments and Welcomes to Country. These are expressions of recognition, or response to perceived neglect and injustice. Recognition has become a global theme, part of a broader politics of reparation focused on indigenous and other...

In November and December 2013 a controversy erupted in Papua New Guinea when the speaker of the national parliament, Theodore Zurenuoc, a devout Christian, tried to rid Parliament House of what he described as 'ungodly images and idols' . Zurenuoc had already begun by removing the carvings from a lintel above the entrance to Parliament House, but p...

This paper considers the relationship between anthropology and public policy by looking at differences between national-level discourses about indigenous relationships to land and their informing of public policy and the view that one gets of indigenous relations to land as an anthropologist, gathered from familiarity with particular situations and...

"Intertwined Anthropologies" My invited response David Trigger's Article Anthropology Pure and Profane: The Politics of Applied Research in Aboriginal Australia (previous issue)

La legislation sur la propriete fonciere indigene remonte en Australie a 1976 et une nouvelle etape a commence en 1993 avec le cas Mabo. Ces deux lois sont a la fois semblables et differentes. A travers l'exemple de la revendication territoriale de la ville de Katherine, l'A. montre que quelle que soit la formulation legislative des droits fonciers...

Book reviewed in this article: Gillian Cowlishaw . Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas: A Study of Racial Power and Intimacy in Australia.

'Transforming Economies, Changing States' were the themes of the annual confer- ence of the Australian Anthropological Society, held in Canberra at the Australian National University from 30 October to 2 November 2007. We were fortunate that our keynote speaker, Prof. Anna L. Tsing, addressed both conference themes directly in her stimulating addre...

It is common enough for aborigines in many parts of Australia to regard environmental features as visible signs of world-forming activities of totemic creator figures. The relationships between individuals, social groups, and the creator figures are cast in complex ideologies that express the ties between men and locality. In the Northern Territory...

The term indigenous, long used to distinguish between those who are "native" and their "others" in specific locales, has also become a term for a geocultural category, presupposing a world collectivity of "indigenous peoples" in contrast to their various "others." Many observers have noted that the stimuli for internationalization of the indigenous...

This paper explores variation and change in Aboriginal people's connections to places, and place-related identity, as a function of their differential historical relationship to a town. Among Aboriginal people who have lived for some decades in camps around Katherine, Northern Territory, descendants of those who appear to have the most clearly disc...

Consideration of verbal taboo provides perspectives upon the relation of linguistic and nonlinguistic practices in the structuring of communicative situations in ways that directly index elements of them as special or attention-worthy; the kinds of repertoires or registers (Agha, 1999) involved, both linguistic and other, within languages as well a...

Liberal multiculturalism as practised in Australia makes demands upon Indigenous minorities to demonstrate their traditionality. Taking examples from recent Australian land and native title claims, the paper illustrates notions of ‘tradition' generated and applied in these processes. It explores the demand for tradition as an aspect of a liberal ec...

The metaphor of “movement” has been applied in limited measure to indigenous action in Australia, and more to recent events (∼1960s and afterwards) than to earlier ones. This review characterizes movement in social-semiotic terms that allow consideration of such a notion over a longer time span and range of social circumstances than is usual in Aus...

The following comment was written in response to conference presentations by John Clammer and Raymond Apthorpe. In his paper, ‘Development Futures and Cultural Choices’ (in this issue as ‘Culture, Development and Social Theory’), Clammer traced recent emphases in conceptualisations of ‘culture’, in order to ask whether these better serve an integra...

This paper is an attempt to develop the notion of the 'intercultural' suggested in Caging the Rainbow (Merlan 1998), a book which dealt with the situation of Aboriginal people in a north Australian town. I explore possible implications for this notion of work done in the name of structural history; of some of the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu; and of V....

A number of languages in the Northern Territory are unusual amongst Australian Aboriginal languages in showing contrasts between two types of stops, the most salient feature of which is apparently duration of constriction. After placing the present work in context through discussion of analyses of neighbouring languages, this paper reconsiders the...

Scholars have recently paid more attention to narratives of colonial contact in Australia, as elsewhere (cf. Hill 1988). Western elements and characters (such as Captain Cook) have been widely documented in Australian Aboriginal narratives which nevertheless are clearly not close accounts of past events. This has promoted reconsideration of the dis...

Anthropological discussions of the creation of social value have tended to be exchange- and object-centered. Recently, however, some Australianists have been trying to develop ethnographically more appropriate formulations of ‘value’ among Australian Aboriginal people. This paper suggests that part of what is required is a critical and comparative...

The highlanders of New Guinea are renowned for their elaborate systems of ceremonial exchange. Although much has been written about them, previous accounts have concentrated far less on the conduct of exchange events than on the structure of exchange systems. This 1991 book deals centrally with the conduct of particular exchange events, and shows t...

Australian Aboriginal 'spirit child' conception beliefs are a classical topic in anthropology, but most of the debate has been about their relation to indigenous understanding of physiological parentage, especially paternity. In this article it is assumed that, at least in many Aboriginal societies, some notions of physiological parentage co-exist...

Views of pre-contact Aboriginal social groupings have ranged from those which posit a linguistically-defined, homogeneous ‘tribe’ to others which, more recently, have asserted that language plays little or no role in Aboriginal constructions of social identity. Given the obvious, different degrees of linguistic diversity in different parts of the c...

Handbook of Australian Languages by R. M. W. Dixon and B. J. Blake (Eds) Canberra, The Australian National University Press, 1979. Pp. i-xviii and 1-390.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of New Mexico. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 253-257).