Mutual Conversion? The Methodist Church and the Yolgnu, with particular reference to Yirrkala

A history of the Methodist Overseas Mission in Arnhem Land has yet to be written. The resources for such a task are immensely rich, including archival sources and the writings of the missionaries themselves. While not possessing its own historian, as the Anglican missions do in the person of Reverend Keith Cole, 1 the Methodist Church produced a number of educated and passionate superintendents who wrote detailed accounts of their times and experiences

Seeing Aboriginal art in the gallery

One of the great embarrassments confronting the art world in the postcolonial context is the recent history of the exclusion of much of the world’s ‘artistic’ production from the hallowed walls of the fine art galleries of the West (Sally Price’s ‘civilised places’). One might ask: how was it that it was excluded for so long and who is to blame for keeping all this art out? However, rather than attributing blame, it is much more interesting to analyse the historical process of its inclusion

Fear and anthropology: a view from 1995

In broad terms the agenda of this paper is set by its title: by linking anthropology with fear, a concept with assumed general applicability, we are inevitably posing questions about the nature of cross-cultural categories. We have to confront the danger of imposing a Western concept on data from other societies. Any anthropological consideration of the human emotions must be concerned with the question of universality; with the relationship between the biological inheritance of humans and the autonomy of culture