Australian Journal of Anthropology最新文献

This audio-visual essay works with the epistemic imperatives of our research subject—the sands and saltwater of a small stretch of coastline in northern Australia. Orchestrating a series of sounds and images together with a gentle rhythm of text-based Yolŋu (human/Indigenous) elaboration, we seek to enable others to attune to a material dynamics of collaboration and co-creation made manifestly palpable in the kinetic zones of coastal life. Rather than either simply telling, or showing, we invite our ‘readers’ to enter into a slow process of attuning to the forms of sensuous instruction offered directly from the wäŋa (land, environment, Country). In this way we orientate towards research as a shared and emergent processes of becoming knowledgeable with more-than-human worlds. The result is a Yolŋu-led digital experiment in sovereign knowledge production: a modelling of a site-specific, participatory onto-epistemics intended to inspire others towards the possibilities of creative, relational modes of more-than-human research.

This essay argues for design as an expression of analytic rigour and ethical commitment. It explores what it might mean to ‘write’ in collaboration with the entities and forces from Country, ancestors, oceans, soil, honeyeaters, sound, wild bores, frogs, fire, ash, sand, trees, and echoes, to colour, code, bitrates, cameras, computers, and archives. Every design decision in ‘Epistemic attunements’ was conceptually-motivated and informed by an anthropologically-attuned sensibilty. It was never simply a case of making things look ‘beautiful’. The analytic force of the design propelled our intermedial arguments forward, but also sideways, down through layers, into shifts of sensation and abrupt moments of pause for specific critical effect.

To nurture and protect even small fragments of liveability, we must get to know the lives of others, human and nonhuman. The Anthropocene collates projects of erasure, and we forget that we need companions. What might it take to bring us back into remembrance? I use the word ‘attunement’ in this essay to refer to attempts to get to know, through alignment, how others express themselves in the world. I'm particularly interested in forms of alignment that refuse Cartesian dreams of minds in contact.

The Fences: A webcomic on collective debt and ruination in Paraguay is a production of the Australian-Paraguayan comics studio CómicsClub comprised of anthropologist and writer Caroline E. Schuster and artists Enrique Bernardou and David Bueno. This webcomic began as an anthropological fieldwork study of climate financing - that is, novel financial arrangements that address the emerging weather-related risks to human communities of global warming, deforestation, and mass extinction. As we enter an era of ‘global weirding’ characterised by strange and extreme weather, insurance companies have welcomed the opportunity to cast themselves as financial ‘first responders,’ offering coverage for drought, floods, bushfires, and other so-called secondary perils that cost billions of dollars annually in property damage and reconstruction costs. The webcomic tells this story through interactive sequential art. Through branching timelines and ‘what if?’ scenarios, the project recuperates a critical speculative imagination and offers alternatives to financial modes of ‘buying the future.’

‘Epistemic attunements – Regenerating anthroplogy's form’ is a collective experiment in expanding the expressive and analytic repertoire of anthropology and related disciplines. It features eleven peer-reviewed research articles published on a standalone website that has been designed, built, and maintained by our editorial collective, independent of Wiley's infrastructure and oversight. The result is a unique off-grid adventure in academic publishing that seeks to contribute to the re-orientation and outward opening of a discipline long committed to finding new ways to apprehend—and respond to—worlds undergoing constant, messy, and often-brutal transformation. In this essay we describe the making of this double special issue of TAJA to make the case for intermedial research and co-design as regenerative praxis.

The south-eastern corner of the Australian continent was once crisscrossed by the nomadic flight paths of the Regent Honeyeater. For hundreds of thousands of years, they winged their way up and down this vast continent. Today, however, the species is listed as critically endangered and is just clinging to existence. This multimedia essay tells the story of this decline, exploring the complex, co-shaping, relationships between individual birds and their flocks, their songs, and their forests. While these are relationships that might be glossed as being social, cultural, and ecological (respectively), and so belonging to separate domains of life, they are in reality delicately interwoven elements of what it is to be a Regent Honeyeater; relationships that, taken together, have been integral to the emergence and ongoing life of this species. In attending to the breakdown of these relationships in our present time, this essay seeks to develop new resources for storying loss in a time of ongoing extinctions. Bringing text into conversation with images and audio, the essay works to draw the reader/viewer/listener into an encounter with an unravelling world. Ultimately, our aim has been to create an essay in which the conceptual ideas, the design, and the biology of the species described, are brought into some sort of alignment that allows them to become mutually reinforcing elements of a storied encounter. Our reflection on the process of creating this essay are provided in the accompanying exegetical commentary.

My work to date explores and plays with bringing the essence of relational Arnya spirituality into new spaces and forms of conveyance, depiction and articulation. I do this by revisitation, re-call and rearticulation of ancient songline eldership Voice teaching. Recall and retrieval from stored memory files articulates the knowledge narrative. The amalgamation of the organic internal filing system, the collective of kinship knowledge offerings ongoing and the digital produces transmutative narratives. Lived experience as inherited bloodline descendent further contextualises and embeds the spirit essence of voice. The body in which I dwell in, with all its parts in function, brings into being a new song vocabulary of Arnya through multi-modal construction and conveyance. In this process, the collective of kinship in all its parts, organic and other, remain embedded in the emergence and continuity of voice and flow.

This project explores bibliographies as cultural landscapes. Taking the Nez Perce term kitkińike (in the direction of) as a gesture that offers new theoretical grounds for considering the categorical power of bibliographies, I argue that bibliographies are more than just sources cited at the end of a publication. A dynamic and interactive interface performatively animates an existing list of texts about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and history with anticolonial purpose, so countering the thinking that Indigenous, Black and Queer authors are objects to be studied rather than academics to be cited. The exegesis defines a bibliography and its many manifestations and provides background on how this project came to being, giving credit to the people and institutions working to combat the erasure of Black, Queer, Indigenous and minority voices. The written piece argues that we need to move in the direction of (kitkińike) including a variety of voices in our citations while the web interface allows for the physical exploration of these concepts. Together, the paired research outcomes invite a novel journey across the cultural landscapes of bibliographic productions.