‘[The Sydney school] seem[s] to view the Aborigines as forever unchanging’: southeastern Australia and Australian anthropology
Year: 2011
Type: article
Abstract: From 1926 onward research into the culture of the Aborigines and into problems of con tact was undertaken systematically.The aim was primarily to learn all we could before it was too late, because all this was changing rapidly through contact with settlers, administrations and missions.3 1 Birdsell 1970:116.2 This is a revised version of the paper originally presented to the collegium 'Aboriginality in the Southeast', held at the Humanities Research Centre and the Centre for Cross-cultural Research, Australian National University, 18-19 June 1997.1would like to dedicate the paper to Jeremy Beckett in whose honour the collegium was held.I would like also to thank Jeremy for all those enjoyable conversations some of which were about the southeast; Christine Cheater and Fiona Paisley for their ideas about the problem of history and anthropology, and Ian Keen and Christine Winter, as well as the two unnamed referees, for their editorial advice.Elkin 1963b: 34. 3. 6 See McGregor 1998.Ronald and Catherine Bemdt, who worked with Aboriginal people at Murray Bridge and in Adelaide in the early 1940s, described these as 'memory cultures'; see Introduction.Bemdt and Bemdt with Stanton 1993; also Chase 1981:4-8.8 More work needs to be done on the changing categories of blood and caste and the persistence of race in the ethnographic literature.Anthropologists generally reflected current beliefs and concomitantly developed a lexicon of blood and caste to help identify degrees of Aboriginality based on lifestyles.See, however, Cowlishaw 1986, 1989; also Goodall 1996 and especially 1982.9 See Rowley 1972a,b.10 Perhaps a more workable division of anthropological Australia is a tripartite one: the north, the desert and the south.Nevertheless, regional differences are hard to classify.See also Keen 1988.
Source: Aboriginal History Journal
Author: Geoffrey Gray
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2249602177