‘Morning tea with Tiwi Ladies’ is one of the attractions for tourists visiting Bathurst and Melville Islands in northern Australia. Indigenous graveyards and the production of arts and crafts are part and parcel of the itinerary. The islands have a history of one hundred years as a ‘destination culture’ (Kirshenblatt- Gimblett 1998) for tourists and anthropologists alike. From the early years of the twentieth century onwards museum interests have been a steady factor in shaping the islanders’ interrelationship with the wider world. Items of material culture were collected here in great quantities and ended up in museums all over the world. The current urge of metropolitan museums to set up a dialogue with source communities concerning collections assembled in the past, as well as indigenous people’s reclaiming their dispersed cultural heritage, has gained considerable attention in the museum-studies literature (e.g., Simpson 1996; Peers and Brown 2003). Although local mu...
]]>To follow this idea I am going to, very simply, show you a press review, and sentences which are for me the main focus of the articles about Australian art. And, mainly I am going to talk about the reception of the Quai Branly project and the exhibition that we closed Sunday night (Aux sources de la pei...
]]>This presentation has for aim to give you a glimpse, only a glimpse of manifestations of Aboriginality in a settlement in Central Australia where I have worked for the past 30 years. I address here in a truncated manner how what is now often called “indigeneity” become locally and globally rooted and routed through particular public performances. By examining various performances, which engage publically cross-cultural audiences, I highlight different repertoires of indigeneity:
Somethat privilege more traditional forms of identity politics, Others, which privilege newer forms of identity politics, forms which overlap but do not compete overtly with the more “traditional” expressions, And others which privilege forms of identity which reshape and at times reject traditional expressions. In this paper I argue that tracking the significance of public performances —ceremonies grounded in classical Aboriginal religion, acrylic paintings, and Evangelical church meetings...
]]>My ethnogr...
]]>The Kimberley Region of north-West Australia hosted an important amount of anthropological research during the 20th century. Some of this early research took as subject Australian indigenous temporality, and in particular the dynamic local responses to colonization, through ritual performances (including, songs, paintings and body movements). Some of these ritual performances later developed into independent art forms that circulated internationally within the art...
]]>In Dalabon, the body-part most closely acquainted to emotions in the belly (kangu). The belly is sometimes treated as the locus of emotions, especially inter-personal emotions. It is involved in a network of metaphors. The most widespread metaphor describes the belly as malleable or resista...
]]>Thirty years ago, almost exactly, I argued in my PhD thesis that, among the Tiwi, dance was kinship-in-action, not so much because it reflected kinship practices in other social domains - which it did - but because I observed on the dance floor kinship relationships being explored and new ones being generated. As I put it then ‘the kinship dances are not models of, but rather models for kinship practices’ (Grau 1983: 333).
The anthropologist Jane Goodale coined the term ‘kinship dances’. In her book Tiwi wives, she described them as ‘special types of dance performed by individuals or groups of kin who have a particular relationship to the deceased’ (Goodale 1971: 300). It is important to note here that among the Tiwi, almost all dance performances are dedicated to someone, dead in the context of mortuary rituals, alive in the modern contexts of celebrations for weddings, birthdays, or graduations. The bereavement term and status given to an individual becomes by exte...
]]>So, we’ll start with André Grau, who worked in Tiwi island, and I know her as someone as the anthropology dance, but today she’s switch hitting as a kinship bias here, and she’ll talk about a quality of being, embodied kinship amongst the Tiwi of Northern Australia.
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