Australian Journal of Anthropology最新文献

Bandung is bustling with the activities of young people organised in komunitas. These social formations display a striking variety in terms of size, coherence, activity, mediatisation, institutional background, internal hierarchies, gender and age composition. Despite this heterogeneity, they capitalise on similar values, like peer solidarity, creativity or friendship. By attending to the formation of specific groups—so called komunitas perdamaian, literally peace communities—I pursue a genealogy of Bandung's komunitas, seeking to uncover the social and discursive evolution of this phenomenon. Drawing on ethnographic data from 1-year of fieldwork in Bandung, I argue that there are at least four variants of komunitas that became salient in distinct historical moments informing the ways these social formations are signified today: (a) punk/indie collectives that produced the style of the 1998 reform movement; (b) groups of young entrepreneurs that popularised creativity as Bandung's trademark in the 2000s; and (more recently) (c) Islamic proselytisation; and (d) peace movements, both of which epitomise creativity and solidarity, yet on different scales and to different ends.

Theories of vulnerability are most often seen in the anthropology of disaster studies, where socio-economic and political inequalities produce environmental vulnerabilities, and the people situated in these locations are positioned as vulnerable and dependent 'Others'. Rather than reproduce vulnerability as a concept denoting weakness, this paper seeks to examine the generative capacities of vulnerability practised in parallel in ethnographic and community spaces. As a form of witnessing and participating in and out of differing social worlds, anthropology engages in different vulnerabilities with and between multiple actors. This paper examines how a community program working with families identified as 'disadvantaged' in South Australia strategically uses vulnerability as a productive resource and a practice of care. In theorising vulnerability through parallel practices in both ethnographic approaches and this community program, we argue that vulnerability can be leveraged away from negative welfare discourses towards alternative politics of radical care and social change.

This article presents an analysis of an Aboriginal songline in South-eastern Australia that has not been previously recorded. As part of a project examining the astronomy and songline connections of the Saltwater Aboriginal peoples of the New South Wales coast, the Black Duck Songline was identified that may have links to the Pleiades star cluster. The Pleiades, known by many peoples as the Seven Sisters, is one of the most important elements of Aboriginal cosmologies across Australia, and features in songlines and oral traditions, as well as being a resource calendar identifier. Aboriginal songlines are a unique development of Aboriginal culture that celebrate the travels of the Creator Ancestors as they shaped the landscape. The identification of the Black Duck Songline and its possible connection to the Pleiades is an example of the potential reawakening of other long-distance songlines in Australia and their connection to the cosmology of their communities.

The importance of embodied religious practice to public Islam in Indonesia is easily underrated. This article undertakes an empirical examination of two domains of public Islam in Indonesia: women's piety and formal Islamic party politics. Based on research with women's groups in West Java, the author argues that Islamic party politics rely upon fragmentation resulting from different understandings of embodied practices, while the consensus supporting women's piety requires suppression of this fragmentation. Political actors locate themselves in a male-dominated political sphere by aligning within a matrix of different meanings of practices. Yet the national consensus that sustains support for the majelis taklim (women's study groups) encourages an undifferentiated approach to practice, in which motherhood metaphors serve as the basis for the public legitimacy of women's pious practice. However, in actual practice, many women, notably Muslim feminists, differentiate practices, thereby bringing them into the field of public contest.

This article focuses on the properties of Paiwanese aesthetic expression and their contributions to the system of social values. My analysis examines the rituals and the accoutrement of an aristocratic wedding ceremony. The generation of Paiwanese aesthetic expression is related to the group's hierarchical social system as well as its ancestral past. Aesthetic expression strengthens the social status inherited from ancestors and memorialises the ancestral past. Certain artifacts, such as headdresses, manifesting aesthetic attributes and social significance will be discussed.