Australian Journal of Anthropology最新文献

The embrace of Donald J. Trump as a presidential candidate in 2016 was not a given for evangelical voters. The thrice married, one-time advocate for abortion, who prided himself on his ability to attract beautiful women did not seem like someone for whom evangelicals would enthusiastically show up to vote. Understanding the need to excite the tepid Evangelical base, evangelical leaders planned a meeting of 1000 pastors on 21 June 2016 in New York City. Mike Huckabee moderated this carefully planned question-and-answer interview with Donald J. Trump. Well-known politically engaged evangelical pastors, including James Dobson, Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell Jr., Tony Perkins and David Jeremiah, asked planted questions to which Donald J. Trump responded. I learned from ethnographic interviews with evangelical advisors to President Trump in 2020 that this meeting was the moment that they, and many other evangelical pastors, moved from scepticism to support of Donald J. Trump. In this article, I will analyse the 2016 meeting to understand how it helped propel Donald J. Trump into the White House. Specifically, I will use the lens of diffusion theory to understand how this meeting served as a rupture and tipping point of change for evangelical pastors' support.

To all intents and purposes, the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, the Brethren of Gamrie, and the Orange Order each claim a monopoly over theological truth, believing that they are right and that everyone else is wrong. Such a position is hardly exceptional – strong versions of pluralism take precisely this same monopolistic stance, calling, in effect, for a rejection of anything that rejects anything. Through an examination of such exceptionalist logics, this article seeks to provoke the anthropology of religion to ask certain questions about the social life of theological truth claims. Importantly, by asking anthropological questions (what makes a truth claim ‘stick’; what difference does it make in the world?), the anthropologist of religion is likely to encounter theological questions posed in response. Where does truth come from? What makes it true? What does such truth demand? While answering a question with another question is not always very revealing, this article suggests that in this case it might be, especially if some genuine attempt is made to answer the latter theological questions as a route to answering the former anthropological ones. More specifically, this article argues that anthropology might learn something about the nature of religious change, and changes to religious beliefs, if it first attempts to makes sense of (in this case, Protestant Fundamentalist) theological critiques of doctrinal change.

This article aims to describe and analyse graffiti arts and tags in the city of Nouméa, the capital of New Caledonia, a multicultural and multilingual city which is home to people who have moved from many different areas of New Caledonia and other countries of the South Pacific. I aim to understand how the citizens of Nouméa use graffiti and tags to construct their plural identities and identify themselves as Nouméens, as residents of Nouméan suburbs, and as people from other regions, with continued attachment and identification to these areas (tribal villages, islands, countries) of origin. How do they express these multiple senses of belonging? Which visual symbols, words, linguistic codes and norms do they use? How can this literacy help younger generations simultaneously reclaim their urban spaces (‘I'm from here and elsewhere’, ‘I have my place in this city!’) and assert their Oceanic identities?

The police shooting of Kumunjayi Walker in Yuendumu in November 2019 instigated an immediate and determined response from Warlpiri families who were shocked and saddened by the death of a loved one in the prime of his life and enraged by this latest event in a long string of colonial injustices. This article collates perspectives as expressed in interviews and public statements from Warlpiri spokespeople who have been on the frontline of the fight for Justice for Walker. Incorporating the initial responses in the days after the shooting, the links to the Coniston massacre in Warlpiri and neighbouring country in 1928, the ongoing horror of Aboriginal deaths in custody and the escalating energy behind the Black Lives Matter campaigns across the world, this article illustrates, through Warlpiri voices, the ways in which people from Yuendumu have expertly used the techniques of activist campaigns in their resolute fight for justice for Walker, for all Aboriginal people across Australia and for Black and First Nations people world-wide.

The residents of Gilbert Camp, an illegal settlement on the outskirts of Honiara, the capital city of Solomon Islands, recurrently declare that life in town is hard. However, they have been migrating there, they keep doing so notwithstanding great challenges, and create the conditions for others to settle too. The apparent contradiction between their ideas and behaviours is resolved by looking at their home-making practices, and interpreting negative statements as commentaries. These commentaries evaluate their efforts to turn Honiara into a home and a place where they can live the “good” life. Home is not just a matter of urban belonging and place-making, neither it is just a matter of surviving in the “hard” urban context; rather it is a complex negotiation between cultural priorities, the specific needs of local communities, and their commitment to create a home away from home.

This article studies the relationships that the Centre des Métiers d’Art de la Polynésie française (CMA—Centre for Arts and Crafts of French Polynesia), five contemporary artists connected to it, and their artworks, have with the city of Pape'ete and its urban environment. The first part analyses the teaching philosophy of the CMA and foregrounds its role as a tool of social mobility for its students and in reinforcing positive representations of Indigenous Polynesians and heritage. The second part examines how the initiatives led by the CMA in Pape'ete are invitations to a shift in mindset. The third part explores how the artists express and reflect on their sense of belonging and highlights how their relationship with urban areas is enriched by their life experiences and their family roots in broader territories.

This paper explores the political economy of Australia's prison industrial complex and its severe impact on Indigenous communities. Taking a historical perspective, the paper moves between a broader analysis of the forced extraction of Indigenous labour by the state and private enterprise and the violence against Indigenous people which accompanies it.

This article examines how the use of mobile phones and associated software creates and sustains regionally diverse urban communities. There is an interdependent connection between music that is highly participatory and locally relevant, and processes involved in sustaining key social relationships across a variety of groupings. Increasingly ubiquitous technologies such as mobile phones are used for musical purposes in ways that specifically put certain processes to work to sustain these social phenomena. This connects people with transnational software-based commerce through social media, local telecommunications companies and phone manufacturers. That results in the navigation of ecologies and economies of data, hardware and software that work in local urban circumstances. In the case of data, we demonstrate how modes of exchange and reciprocity tied to social relationships exhibit similarities with informal economies of tobacco and betelnut. With social groups, the church-based community perspective provides urban examples of communities that cross regions, and extended family networks. This ethnographic perspective shows how increasingly global technologies are used in urbanite Melanesia in ways that sustain longstanding values and practices, while also incorporating identities and associations around changing urban, national and international circumstances.

Vanuatu sand drawing has been listed by UNESCO since 2006 and has both fascinated and puzzled researchers from various disciplines for over a century. The inherent multi-dimensionality of the practice makes analysis complex, and until very recently developing a systematic methodology to study this intangible art form was difficult. This paper aims to contribute to filling this gap with the analysis of a corpus of sand drawings documented on the island of Paama in 2019. A detailed methodological toolkit is proposed to better understand the complex morphology of the drawings and their multi-layered meaning and function. This paper offers the first few steps along a journey toward designing integrated comparative methods of analysis that can not only potentiate unprecedented insights into the cultural practice of Vanuatu sand drawing, but also more broadly help us understand how worldviews, beliefs and societal structures spread across time and space.