F Merlan
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 8273 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | F Merlan |
| NOMBRES | F |
| APELLIDO | Merlan |
| FIRMA | MERLAN F |
| AFILIACIONES | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2740-1379 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 71 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 390 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 71 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1976 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 10 |
Introduction to ‘Anthropology and change over the land rights era’
This collection of papers arose from a conversation among several of us contributors with long-term experience of working as anthropologists in land and native title claims. We felt that we and others with such involvement had written relatively little about our observations at this intersection of anthropology and law, but that we all had a sense of issues and changes throughout the ‘land rights era’. By that we mean the last 50 years since the …
Anthropology and change over the ‘land rights era’
Australia has made no treaties with its Indigenous peoples. Despite that, over the past five decades (the ‘land rights era’ of the title), Australia has granted proportionally more land area to Indigenous interests than have other, treaty‐making Anglo settler colonies (Canada, the United States, New Zealand). Despite complexities of comparison by area, an order of difference is clearly discernible. After comparing these countries, this article ex…
Vale, Basil Sansom
Questions of Continuity and Change
Kowal, Emma
Comment to Stephen Baines' article
I appreciate having been asked to comment on the career of Stephen Grant Baines. However, I must say clearly at the outset that my knowledge of the Brazilian anthropological scene is limited. I have been a researcher, teacher, head of department and professor in Australia with long-standing research experience with Indigenous Australian people, communities, and issues inside and outside the academy, a broader interest in Indigenous peoples world-…
Part Four. Punishment and Personal Dignity
Postcolonial politics of elimination
A common view is that states formulate and administer policy. However, there is much in the classification and administration of persons that is not narrowly governmental. As an example, this article traces long-term developments in Australia and the United States which have made possible recent broadening and “de-racializing” of governmental formulations of Indigenous identity. This most recent phase has seen emergent kinds of “new politics,” he…
Australia's First Nations
Since the 1990s, the term "nation" for Indigenous Australian groups has emerged, along with an increasingly common phrase "First Nations," used both by Indigenous groups in self-reference and by others in reference to them. This article examines the multiple sources of nation and its emergence in Australia as a contemporary form of Indigenous political discourse. Following a history of repeated dismissal of representative organizations by the Aus…
Reading and Remembering the Anthropologist James F. Weiner
à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés
Ku Waru Clause Chaining and the Acquisition of Complex Syntax
How do children learn to understand and use complex syntactic constructions? In English, Diessel (2004) shows that they do so in two different ways. Complex sentences with dependent clauses (e.g., ‘Peter promised that he would come’) develop out of simple sentences that are gradually expanded into multi-clause ones. Complex sentences with coordinate clauses (e.g., ‘He tried hard, but he failed’) develop by integrating two independent sentences in…
Malinowski as ancestor
Jarillo et al. present evidence showing that Trobrianders today do not espouse rebirth, contrary to Trobriand views as described by Malinowski. Closer attention to Malinowski, however, shows that Jarillo et al.'s reading of him does not take account of a suggestive theoretical and anthropological framework concerning ideological variability and susceptibility to change which he was attempting to develop
Ghost twitter in Indigenous Australia
By distinguishing between attributions of sentience and agency we begin to take crucial analytical steps to consider ontological and cosmological differences between groups. Scholars in New Animist and Actor-Network Theory camps sometimes expound broadly generalized notions of agency, thus overlooking the ways in which characterizations of different kinds of beings-and the implications of these characterizations-may apply to aspects of environmen…
Obituary
After growing up in New York City James (Jimmy) Weiner attended Franklin and Marshall College, in Lancaster Pennsylvania (the heart of Amish country), where he was awarded a BA degree, cum laude, i
Gender and Human Rights
This entry considers human rights as a central category of international modernity and the elevation of gender and gender equality to the center of that global agenda. It reviews a series of world conferences central to that elevation; feminist contestation of the public/private distinction as potentially dangerous in preserving a sphere of nonintervention by the state; the diffusion of human and gender‐related rights; and the intersection of hum…
Dynamics of Difference in Australia
Francesca Merlan examines the dynamics of difference that have existed between the settler majority and indigenous minority of Australia, from the events of early exploration to the present, shedding light on their unequal and changing relations over time
Caging the Rainbow
Caging the Rainbow explores the lives of Aborigines in the small regional town of Katherine, Northern Territory, Australia. Francesca Merlan combines ethnography and theory to grapple with issues surrounding the debate about the authenticity of contemporary cultural activity. Throughout, the vulnerability of Fourth World peoples to others' representations of them and the ethical problems this poses are kept in view.
Obituary
We knew Tom Ernst over the last three decades of his life. Our fondest memories of him are of a medium-sized bear of a man with rounded shoulders, bushy moustache and wirebrush grey mop of hair, lo...
Women, warfare, and the life of agency
Agency’ entered anthropological discourse as a key word from the 1970s in renewed social-philosophical theorizations (e.g. ‘structure and agency’) as major deterministic theories (e.g. Marxism, structuralism) became less persuasive. It came to play an increasing role in ethnography. Though agency, too, has been partly replaced in some of its earlier semantic range, it has been more fully retained in some areas of usage than others, especially in …
Change and Continuity in Anthropology
Afterword
This afterword presents a view of key contributions of the issue's articles, positions those contributions in relation to precedent work, and suggests the need to place heightened emphasis on fundamental asymmetry and differential power to determine context on the part of participants to primitivist tourist encounter
Recent Rituals of Indigenous Recognition in Australia
Recognition has become a global theme, part of a broader politics of reparation focused on indigenous and other colonized and subordinated peoples, and includes practices of apology and reconciliation. In Australia, recognition implies expansion the of relationship between categories of people who have been on unequal, distant, and (at some levels) negligible terms as settlers and natives, colonizers and colonized. Practices of recognition are th…
Theorizing Relationality
Anthropology and Policy-Preparedness
This paper considers the relationship between anthropology and public policy by looking at differences between national-level discourses about indigenous relationships to land and their informing of public policy and the view that one gets of indigenous relations to land as an anthropologist, gathered from familiarity with particular situations and people. In view of the clear disparities, how may anthropology contribute to public policy? Anthrop…
Anthropology, Public Policy and Social Process in Indigenous Australia
Additional informationNotes on contributorsFrancesca Merlan Francesca Merlan is Professor in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University Nicolas Peterson Nicolas Peterson is Professor in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University
Indigeneity
The term indigenous, long used to distinguish between those who are "native" and their "others" in specific locales, has also become a term for a geocultural category, presupposing a world collectivity of "indigenous peoples" in contrast to their various "others." Many observers have noted that the stimuli for internationalization of the indigenous category originated principally from particular nation-states-Anglo-American settler colonies and S…
Land, Language and Social Identity in Aboriginal Australia
Views of pre-contact Aboriginal social groupings have ranged from those which posit a linguistically-defined, homogeneous 'tribe' to others which, more recently, have asserted that language plays little or no role in Aboriginal constructions of social identity. Given the obvious, different degrees of linguistic diversity in different parts of the continent, it seems of interest to look at native linguistic ideologies and the ways in which notions…
Recent Rituals of Indigenous Recognition in Australia
Recognition has become a global theme, part of a broader politics of reparation focused on indigenous and other colonized and subordinated peoples, and includes practices of apology and reconciliation. In Australia, recognition implies expansion the of relationship between categories of people who have been on unequal, distant, and (at some levels) negligible terms as settlers and natives, colonizers and colonized. Practices of recognition are th…
Australian Aboriginal Conception Beliefs Revisited
This article revisits earlier interpretations of Australian Aboriginal conception beliefs, particularly those associating such beliefs with a denial of the male role in procreation. It argues that the widespread acceptance of such interpretations rests on a misconstrual of Aboriginal thought patterns, specifically on the failure to recognize the possibility of a conceptual disjunction between physical and social paternity. Drawing on ethnographic…
Stop contrasts in languages of Arnhem Land
A number of languages in the Northern Territory are unusual amongst Australian Aboriginal languages in showing contrasts between two types of stops, the most salient feature of which is apparently duration of constriction. After placing the present work in context through discussion of analyses of neighbouring languages, this paper reconsiders the contrast in Jawoyn. Examination of the phonetic features that are correlated with the contrast indic…
Ku Waru
The highlanders of New Guinea are renowned for their elaborate systems of ceremonial exchange. Although much has been written about them, previous accounts have concentrated far less on the conduct of exchange events than on the structure of exchange systems. This 1991 book deals centrally with the conduct of particular exchange events, and shows through examination of them how larger social structures are reproduced and transformed. As part of t…
Indigenous Movements in Australia
The metaphor of "movement" has been applied in limited measure to indigenous action in Australia, and more to recent events (∼1960s and afterwards) than to earlier ones. This review characterizes movement in social-semiotic terms that allow consideration of such a notion over a longer time span and range of social circumstances than is usual in Australianist literature. Examination of a limited number of relatively well-documented cases from diff…
Noun Incorporation and Discourse Reference in Modern Nahuatl
Caging the Rainbow
Caging the Rainbow explores the lives of Aborigines in the small regional town of Katherine, Northern Territory, Australia. Francesca Merlan combines ethnography and theory to grapple with issues surrounding the debate about the authenticity of contemporary cultural activity. Throughout, the vulnerability of Fourth World peoples to others' representations of them and the ethical problems this poses are kept in view.
Male-Female Separation and Forms of Society in Aboriginal Australia
The objectification of 'culture
A Mangarrayi representational system
It is common enough for aborigines in many parts of Australia to regard environmental features as visible signs of world-forming activities of totemic creator figures. The relationships between individuals, social groups, and the creator figures are cast in complex ideologies that express the ties between men and locality. In the Northern Territory along the Roper River, an aboriginal group, the Mangarrayi, also use vast numbers of environmental …
Women, warfare, and the life of agency
Agency’ entered anthropological discourse as a key word from the 1970s in renewed social-philosophical theorizations (e.g. ‘structure and agency’) as major deterministic theories (e.g. Marxism, structuralism) became less persuasive. It came to play an increasing role in ethnography. Though agency, too, has been partly replaced in some of its earlier semantic range, it has been more fully retained in some areas of usage than others, especially in …
Beyond Tradition
Liberal multiculturalism as practised in Australia makes demands upon Indigenous minorities to demonstrate their traditionality. Taking examples from recent Australian land and native title claims, the paper illustrates notions of ‘tradition’ generated and applied in these processes. It explores the demand for tradition as an aspect of a liberal economy of values, showing that limitations of liberal perspectives in regard to the recognition of in…
Australia's First Nations
Since the 1990s, the term "nation" for Indigenous Australian groups has emerged, along with an increasingly common phrase "First Nations," used both by Indigenous groups in self-reference and by others in reference to them. This article examines the multiple sources of nation and its emergence in Australia as a contemporary form of Indigenous political discourse. Following a history of repeated dismissal of representative organizations by the Aus…
Some functional relations among subordination, mood, aspect and focus in Australian languages
Theorizing Relationality
Afterword
This afterword presents a view of key contributions of the issue's articles, positions those contributions in relation to precedent work, and suggests the need to place heightened emphasis on fundamental asymmetry and differential power to determine context on the part of participants to primitivist tourist encounter
Anthropology and Policy-Preparedness
This paper considers the relationship between anthropology and public policy by looking at differences between national-level discourses about indigenous relationships to land and their informing of public policy and the view that one gets of indigenous relations to land as an anthropologist, gathered from familiarity with particular situations and people. In view of the clear disparities, how may anthropology contribute to public policy? Anthrop…
Vectoring anthropology
(1995). Vectoring anthropology: A critical appreciation of Basil Sansom's work. Anthropological Forum: Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 161-178
Anthropology and change over the ‘land rights era’
Australia has made no treaties with its Indigenous peoples. Despite that, over the past five decades (the ‘land rights era’ of the title), Australia has granted proportionally more land area to Indigenous interests than have other, treaty‐making Anglo settler colonies (Canada, the United States, New Zealand). Despite complexities of comparison by area, an order of difference is clearly discernible. After comparing these countries, this article ex…
Reading and Remembering the Anthropologist James F. Weiner
à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés
Ghost twitter in Indigenous Australia
By distinguishing between attributions of sentience and agency we begin to take crucial analytical steps to consider ontological and cosmological differences between groups. Scholars in New Animist and Actor-Network Theory camps sometimes expound broadly generalized notions of agency, thus overlooking the ways in which characterizations of different kinds of beings-and the implications of these characterizations-may apply to aspects of environmen…
Economies of abandonment
Povinelli is concerned to explore and theorize current forms of liberal governmentality, and ethical bases for the kinds of 'distributed misery' (p. 162) that she finds characteristic of contempora
Making people quiet’ in the pastoral north
Station has been a familiar name to most Australians since the 1908 publication of Jeannie Gunn's popular We o f the never-never. She came to the Elsey in 1902 as the wife of the newly-appointed station manager Aeneas Gunn, and much of her narrative describes her rather uncommon situation as a woman in the man's world of the pastoral north. Her attitude toward the Aborigines who lived and worked at Elsey Station was plainly one of sympathy, and a…
Noun Incorporation and Discourse Reference in Modern Nahuatl
On the Prehistory of Some Australian Verbs
Mangarrayi Semi Moiety Totemism
Directions in Australian Linguistics
Handbook of Australian Languages by R. M. W. Dixon and B. J. Blake (Eds) Canberra, The Australian National University Press, 1979. Pp. i‐xviii and 1–390
Some functional relations among subordination, mood, aspect and focus in Australian languages
A Grammar of Diyari, South Australia . Peter Austin
A Mangarrayi representational system
It is common enough for aborigines in many parts of Australia to regard environmental features as visible signs of world-forming activities of totemic creator figures. The relationships between individuals, social groups, and the creator figures are cast in complex ideologies that express the ties between men and locality. In the Northern Territory along the Roper River, an aboriginal group, the Mangarrayi, also use vast numbers of environmental …
Miwuyt Marriage
Linguistics
Australian Aboriginal Conception Beliefs Revisited
This article revisits earlier interpretations of Australian Aboriginal conception beliefs, particularly those associating such beliefs with a denial of the male role in procreation. It argues that the widespread acceptance of such interpretations rests on a misconstrual of Aboriginal thought patterns, specifically on the failure to recognize the possibility of a conceptual disjunction between physical and social paternity. Drawing on ethnographic…
The objectification of 'culture
The Sixtieth Anniversary Index
Ku Waru
The highlanders of New Guinea are renowned for their elaborate systems of ceremonial exchange. Although much has been written about them, previous accounts have concentrated far less on the conduct of exchange events than on the structure of exchange systems. This 1991 book deals centrally with the conduct of particular exchange events, and shows through examination of them how larger social structures are reproduced and transformed. As part of t…
Women, Productive Roles, and Monetisation of the ‘Service Mode’ in Aboriginal Australia
Anthropological discussions of the creation of social value have tended to be exchange‐ and object‐centered. Recently, however, some Australianists have been trying to develop ethnographically more appropriate formulations of ‘value’ among Australian Aboriginal people. This paper suggests that part of what is required is a critical and comparative perspective on the status of valued ‘things’ compared to other forms of value. It suggests a ‘servic…
The Limits of Cultural Constructionism
Ku Waru
Male-Female Separation and Forms of Society in Aboriginal Australia
Ku Waru; Language and Segmentary Politics in the Western Nebilyer Valley, Papua New Guinea
‘Narratives of Survival in the Post‐Colonial North’
Scholars have recently paid more attention to narratives of colonial contact in Australia, as elsewhere (cf. Hill 1988). Western elements and characters (such as Captain Cook) have been widely documented in Australian Aboriginal narratives which nevertheless are clearly not close accounts of past events. This has promoted reconsideration of the distinction between ‘myth’ and ‘history‘. If we follow Turner's (1988) suggestion that myth is the form…
The Regimentation of Customary Practice
The Regimentation of Customary Practice
Vectoring anthropology
(1995). Vectoring anthropology: A critical appreciation of Basil Sansom's work. Anthropological Forum: Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 161-178
New Guinea ‘Classificatory Verbs’ and Australian Noun Classification
Caging the Rainbow
The Space of Encounter
Book reviewed in this article: Gillian Cowlishaw . Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas: A Study of Racial Power and Intimacy in Australia
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