Re-analysing the Baining: The Mytho-Poetics of Race, Gender and Art

This article criticises primitivist caricatures of the Baining in Melanesia as a society that lacks exegesis, symbolic logics, religion, structures of power and control, and even an interest in play. The mytho-poetics of gender and procreation in Mali Baining society are documented by focusing on how art and sexuality are traced onto each other. The formative power of painting, barkcloth, dancing masks, netbags and music are merged with the formative power of women. Art and sexuality are made to inform each other's generative potential, and even each other's aesthetic charm. These fertile mytho-poetic practices also underpin Mali political practices. Mali indigenous identity is celebrated as local control over the original powers of creation, which continue to reside in the earth, in the local landscape and, above all, in that which underpins all creation, women's procreative bodies with their creative potential to bring forth something new. The Mali localise creative processes so as to empower and revalue themselves within a culture of resistance to the hegemony of colonialism, modernity, settlers and regional ethnic elites.publishedVersio

Capitalizing on complicity: cargo cults and the spirit of modernity on Bali Island (West New Britain)

Using the cargo cult movement of Dakoa on Bali Island (West New Britain), this article explores the relationship between history and the other forms of human time articulated in cult practices, beliefs, and myths of origins. This relationship often entails the collapsing of historical time into biographical time. It involves Dakoa's cult taking up Western notions of kingship and the Christian figures of God, Jesus, and Moses-all of whom are merged with the heroic structure of traditional myths. New mythological figures have emerged who encompass multiple identities and who resurface at key historical moments so as to give a mythic-magical quality to the transformative processes of government, mission, and commerce. Many of the cult's new important spirit beings are extensions of the cult leader Dakoa, whose personhood embodies a history and provides a model for a new, pacified Melanesian self capable of reincorporating the globalizing processes of modernity

Telephones, cameras and technology in West New Britain cargo cults

The A. explores the creative practices of cargo cult followers in the Kaliai bush of West New Britain. He focuses on how rural villagers reworked their experiences of meaning and sociality through their appropriations of western technology. In particular, bush Kaliai cult followers frequently used telephones and cameras in idiosyncratic ways that mapped out a new and redisclosed the spaces occupied by a racialised human existence. Through their novel use of western technology, cult followers struggled to resituate and overcome the new distances and cleavages of modernity by unearthing other ways of being white that came from their customary past and ancestral homelands

The new panopticon : newspaper discourse and the rationalisation of society and culture in New South Wales, 1803-1830 / Andrew Lattas

Bibliography: leaves 647-681xv, 681 leaves ; 30 cm.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, 198

Re-analysing the Baining: The Mytho-Poetics of Race, Gender and Art

This article criticises primitivist caricatures of the Baining in Melanesia as a society that lacks exegesis, symbolic logics, religion, structures of power and control, and even an interest in play. The mytho-poetics of gender and procreation in Mali Baining society are documented by focusing on how art and sexuality are traced onto each other. The formative power of painting, barkcloth, dancing masks, netbags and music are merged with the formative power of women. Art and sexuality are made to inform each other's generative potential, and even each other's aesthetic charm. These fertile mytho-poetic practices also underpin Mali political practices. Mali indigenous identity is celebrated as local control over the original powers of creation, which continue to reside in the earth, in the local landscape and, above all, in that which underpins all creation, women's procreative bodies with their creative potential to bring forth something new. The Mali localise creative processes so as to empower and revalue themselves within a culture of resistance to the hegemony of colonialism, modernity, settlers and regional ethnic elites

Reviewing the reviews: intellectual fields, the liberal state and the problem of alterity

Australian Aboriginal Anthropology had an ambivalent response to Elizabeth Povinelli's book The Cunning of Recognition. Lattas situates the reviews in an intellectual field among other anthropological contributions that were marginalised through being ignored or through hostile critiques. The reactions to Povinelli's book are analysed, not just as individual scholarly opinions, but as part of strategic intellectual alliances and oppositions that have a traceable genealogy as academics attempt to defend and create intellectual parameters. Coming from overseas and well versed in contemporary international discussions about post-colonial identities, power, the state and law, Povinelli's work unsettles as it violates and redraws many kinds of territorial borders. She raises the politics of alterity and it's acknowledgment in a way that requires a rethinking of anthropological approaches to the state and anthropological participation in the legal system

Technologies of visibility: the utopian politics of cameras, televisions, videos and dreams in New Britain

This paper explores how Melanesian villagers have harnessed modern, technological ways of seeing. It begins by analysing the politics and narrative structures of dreams and popular stories about secret photos concerning the dead. These are stories about losing control and regaining hidden, alternative representations of Melanesians. I then analyse how millenarian followers have experimented with ‘constructing’ their own versions of cameras, televisions and videos so as to gain access to the omniscient powers of modern technology and merge them with those of a Christian god and with the gaze of the dead. In the Pomio Kivung movement, ‘televisions’ and ‘videos’ have even been used to create new forms of moral surveillance for policing and governing communities. Here the customary shamanic worlds of dreams and possession have been modernised and redeployed to re-mediate the governmental practices and disciplinary schemes of civilisating projects originally belonging to Western churches and government

The politics of suffering and the politics of anthropology

This essay begins by analysing the ideological structure of Peter Sutton's recent book The Politics of Suffering and its use of anthropology to support the federal government's Intervention into Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory.' Later, the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben is drawn upon to offer an alternative anthropological analysis of the Intervention as part of the incorporation of 'culture' into neoliberal forms of racial governance, which seek to depoliticise racial power by reframing it as part of the state's sovereign obligation to deliver care and biosecurity. Recently, Agamben has applied Carl Schmitt's definition of sovereignty to analyse the way the 'provisional and exceptional measure is turned into a technique of government'. But whereas Agamben believes this process has expanded greatly in the modern world, we believe that Australia's Indigenous peoples have always provided a symbolic opposite, an arena where power can be articulated through creating states of exception, which also depend upon creating truths about what it means to be human and to have social order