Australian Journal of Anthropology最新文献

What is the relation between Israel and the colonial West today? There are abundant folk, journalistic and academic views on that matter. They oscillate between seeing Israel as acting out the West's interests in the Middle East and seeing it as a more autonomous national actor influencing Western nations through 'Zionist lobbies.' In this piece I argue that there is much to be gained by viewing the Western-Israeli colonial assemblage as an instance in the West's struggle to shield itself from the social and ethical pollution that is generated by colonial war and violence. I explore the ways in which this pollution has been historically dealt with, whether by purification rituals, something that anthropology has much to say about, or by the assignment of the function of warriors to specific categories of people deemed 'pollutable.' I examine the ways such an approach helps us shed new light on the violence we are witnessing today in Gaza.

In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow suggest that almost all modern features of social structures— cities, religious rituals, kingships, accounting practices, rational arguments, private property, and so on—date to epochs prior to the neolithic revolution. They question the characterisation of the introduction of agriculture as a ‘revolution’. This paper distils Graeber and Wengrow's contribution into two core theses. The first is that all social structures are underpinned by a common and universal consciousness based on the quest for both freedom and identity, which explains the continuity of the same basic consciousness throughout history. This undermines stadial evolutionary theories. The second thesis is that the state, starting with the Pharaoh's civilisation, ushers in a special stage in history, as it suppresses various cherished freedoms. While this paper welcomes Graeber and Wengrow's first thesis, it finds the second thesis to be problematic. The suppression of freedom occurs also in pre-Pharaoh social structures. Of more importance, their second thesis advances a stadial theory, which is inconsistent with the first thesis. This paper puts forward an alternative account of the origin of the state based on Franz Steiner's theory of slavery. While Graeber and Wengrow highly commend Steiner's theory, they appear not cognisant of the fact that it challenges their second thesis.

This article investigates the importance of Turkish film and television in preserving Turkishness among the Turkish-Australian diaspora. Turkish film and television are found to be crucial to diversifying constructions of Turkishness in the diaspora. Turkish media plays an important role in how Turkish-Australians perceive and imagine the homeland, as well as how they perceive and imagine their cultural identity as Turkish-Australians. In recent years, the consumption of Turkish film and television has become popular, particularly among the younger generation. There has been very little scholarly research done on the role that Turkish film and television play in constructing and reconstructing diverse Turkish identities. In this article I attempt to address this.

Under the extraordinary circumstances of COVID, some health workers in China ruthlessly killed pet dogs and cats, which were thought to be dangerous virus vectors. Heart-wrenching images circulated widely on social media, where some social media commentators used them as a basis to make accusations about generalised Chinese brutality towards animals. At the other end of the spectrum, my Chinese interlocutors went to extraordinary lengths to care for their pets and those of others during extended and very strict lockdown periods. In this paper, I draw on the idea of a reciprocal gaze held between animals and humans that begets mutual respect and commingled being. I use this key idea to explore how Chinese citizens living in COVID lockdowns navigated the regulations regarding animal lives and reconciled the state's protection of humans from the virus with their own desires to protect their pets.

Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK) plays an important role in the sustainable conservation of biodiversity, relying on local social values and practices to conserve biodiversity. This article addresses the role of these and other social mechanisms in LEK for biodiversity conservation in the Simien Mountains National Park (SMNP). Based on qualitative research, including in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and observations, our study reveals that the idea of conservation among stewards and faith groups in the SMNP area lies amidst the imposition of western-oriented conservation practices by international agencies. In particular, local taboos and other aspects of the local worldviews enable the successful application of LEK in the conservation efforts in SMNP. Interestingly, the recent revocation of the SMNP from the UNESCO list of endangered sites in 1996 is the result of the effectiveness of the social mechanisms of LEK. In this article, we argue that the conservation ethos guiding the management of the Simien Mountains should incorporate LEK-based strategies to avoid conflict and ensure sustainability.

As claims under the Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act 1976 (ALRA) have drawn to a close, the work of ‘agreement making’ between Indigenous groups and developers has accelerated to become the primary function of land councils. In this paper, we trace dynamics of continuity and change in Indigenous and Western institutional lives across two ethnographic surveys in the stone country of western Arnhem Land. These surveys were conducted by the authors for the Northern Land Council (NLC) in the years 2000 and 2022 over identical tracts of land as part of the NLC's agreement-making procedure under Part IV of the ALRA. The 22-year interval between the surveys offer a lens to attend to historical trends in Indigenous intergenerational knowledge transmission, state and corporate development agendas, and applied anthropological practice itself. The article illuminates benefits of the agreement-making process for Indigenous peoples in western Arnhem Land not previously accounted for in the literature on mining negotiations under the ALRA. We highlight the need for greater reflexivity on the part of land councils in considering how the priorities of their constituents might be brought to the forefront of agreement-making procedures.