Australian Journal of Anthropology最新文献

This audio-visual essay invites readers to enter a new intermedial archive of documentary paintings and stories by a celebrated and prolific multilingual Central Australian Aboriginal woman artist. Addressing our written text to intimate family and audiences from elsewhere, in multiple voices and modes of address, we offer an opportunity to consider the dynamics of creating, keeping and caring for memory through the affordances of digital co-creativity. These include what we term ‘painting remix animation’, a form of what co-author Rosalyn Boko calls mixamilani (‘mixing together’ of different elements). Guided by the artist's vibrant palette and life-expressive practice, visitors to the article can move and rest amongst a variety of standpoints through which to attune to questions of history, memory, pictorial storytelling, love, friendship and joy. We hope that in this way, everyone can sense the world-making powers and poetics of colour and understand how our style of slow research towards digital mixamilani creates a new kind of archive for holding paintings carefully, outside of the art commodity market.

Taonga puoro is a Māori instrumental tradition through which one cultivates an improvisational form of playing with the world. It does not follow musical notation. ‘Instruments’ vary from rocks, to bones, wood and other non-traditional materials, such as glass. They can be found in situ, or carefully crafted and gifted. Each performance is different, new and responsive not only to the riffing soundings of fellow humans but also to the wider worlds of more-than-human sensuous agency with which we attune, respond and participate. In both their materiality and their performativity, taonga puoro draws attention to points of convergence, in which histories, ancestors, human and more-than-human entities mingle as affective co-collaborators in a world already playing in co-composition. Thinking and riffing with this idea of co-composition as a practice of attuning to how I participate in the world that I have come to know, this sound–image–text article is made to revisit and dwell within moments of creative-critical world-making through playing with my close friend Jessica Kahukura (Te Ātihaunui-a-Pāpārangi, Ngā Rauru, Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Tūwharetoa). It focuses particularly on my own practices as a Pākehā (non-Māori New Zealander) researcher-musician by attuning to my creative-critical positionality in relation to a broader politics and ethics of participation and invention.

This article weaves together text, photography, and audio recordings drawn from long-term ethnographic research in northern Australia to ask what fire is becoming as its everyday, urban manifestations are tethered to the diacritics of catastrophic bushfire, on the one hand, and Indigenous expertise and cultural fire, on the other. In exploring both menacing and mundane facets of urban fire in northern Australia, the article and accompanying exegesis offer ways to see and hear fire's capacities spilling beyond these enduring axes of public concern to differently animate and illuminate a city's eco-acoustic vitality, complexity, and Indigeneity.

Ethnographic collections, as material repositories of historical relationships, are powerful bodies of intercultural knowledge and exchange. Indigenous people have been active and influential in the building of these collections and continue today to be critical to the ongoing interpretation and engagement of such repositories. When faced with the tangled, overgrowth of values accumulated around collected objects over time, regenerative processes can offer new life. By applying a metaphorical ‘cool burn’ it is hoped that space can be created where new shoots of knowledge can emerge. This research takes the form of a digital article twinned with an exegetical reflection to extend the notion of Indigenous engagement and so consider some of the regenerative potentials of collection research when Indigenous philosophies and concepts drive research enquiry and more importantly, frame outcomes.

‘Filming jilba’ makes up part of a larger practice-based research project focusing on the body as a site of climate sensitivity and perception. Investigated in collaboration with Bama colleague, Jarramali Kulka (a Kuku Yalanji-Nyungkal man from Australia's tropical Far North Queensland), and his custodial practice jilba (pronounced jil-ba), the article describes the embryotic growth of a performative practice-based methodology that leads with intimate sensing—a generative counter position to remote sensing—and grows it phenomenologically through the field work of a documentary media practice. In attempting to speak across epistemic divides, the project process addresses the exclusionary fictions that conventional climate sensing performs by attuning to ‘a world that already has its own stories’.

‘Hearing Heat: An Anthropocene acoustemology’ is an intermedia composition that meditates on the climate of history, listening to histories of listening from the Papua New Guinea rainforest to nuclear Japan to ancient and contemporary Greece. It proceeds through continual recombinations of visual and sonic media, with photographs, graphics, animation, and cinema dialoguing with ethnographic field recording of Indigenous song, ambient environmental sound, cinema soundtracks, electroacoustic and radio composition, and vocally performed text.

The galvanising aim in curating ‘Epistemic attunements’ has been to reach beyond the infrastructural imaginaries of the corporate publishing regimes that so brutally standardise the form, production, and distribution of research. Yet rather than being wholly enamoured with the pursuit of new publics, or with the kind of reach and influence that our bespoke digital platform affords, we take the idea of ‘reach’ in a different direction. In short, what we propose here is that reaching beyond anthropology offers a way to return the discipline to its core commitments. REACH explores what happens when anthropology and its interlocutors come together to cultivate shared grounds of epistemic care and concerns. It asks, what happens when multiple histories show up in the process? It proposes that therein lies the grounds for a regenerative anthropology.