We warmly invite you to the final seminar in the Department of Anthropology Seminar Series for 2021. This seminar is a featured panel to close off an exciting year of speakers on our theme ‘The relevance of anthropology in the contemporary world’.

Breaking in or tapping out of the ‘cabinet of curiosities’? Settled Aboriginal Australia and the relevance of anthropology | Panel

Join via Zoom:  https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/86258063964

Speakers:   Dr Julie Andrews, Assoc Prof Kathleen Butler, Suzanne Ingram and Kado Muir

Discussant:   Dr Peter Sutton

From amateur collectors to professional practitioners, anthropology conducted over the past two and a half centuries in Australia has produced a substantial reserve of information on Aboriginal people. Today, the discipline includes a growing number of Aboriginal anthropology practitioners, scholars and teachers whose contributions to this collection bring new insights and knowledge. But what is the relevance of this collection of work and the ongoing practice of anthropology in Aboriginal Australia? Working with non-Aboriginal anthropologists is not the same as working with knowledge-claiming and knowledge-producing institutions such as universities and repositories like the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) or National Native Title Register. This seminar is an opportunity for discussion about the relationship between Aboriginal people and anthropology, methods, interdisciplinary paradigms, interpretation, history, care for country, activism and keeping places. The panel of Aboriginal researchers, along with distinguished discussant, Dr Peter Sutton, consider ethnography and autoethnography amid ‘indigenisation’ and the current crisis in arts and social sciences from neoliberalist managerialism. Drawing on their lived experiences from the west and east coasts of Australia, they discuss their work along the binary ‘remote/urban Aboriginal Australia’ faultline, and real life applications in a post-pandemic world.

About the speakers:

Dr Julie Andrews, LaTrobe University, Woiwurrung and Yorta Yorta woman, Dr Andrews is convenor of Aboriginal Studies, Chair of Aboriginal Studies Indigenous Strategy Committee and anthropologist. She teaches on knowledge systems, history and contemporary lives of Aboriginal Australia

Associate Professor Kathleen Butler, University of Newcastle, an Aboriginal woman belonging to the Bundjalung and Worimi peoples of coastal NSW, is a social sciences researcher and lecturer and an active member of her Local Aboriginal Land Council and Regional Aboriginal Education Consultative Group (AECG)

Suzanne Ingram, University of Sydney, is an Aboriginal woman of the Wiradjuri and is Teaching Fellow at the Department of Anthropology where she is undertaking her PhD on health communication and the Aboriginal person

Kado Muir, Marnta, is a Ngalia language speaker, researcher and entrepreneur. Mr Muir is Chair of the National Native Title Council and Co-Chair of the First Nations Heritage Protection Alliance, which incorporates NSW Aboriginal Land Council, and recently presented to the United Nations critiquing destructive cultural heritage laws and the West Australian Aboriginal Heritage Bill.

About the discussant:

Dr Peter Sutton FASSA is an Australian social anthropologist and linguist who has, over more than 50 years, contributed to recording Australian Aboriginal languages, mapped Australian Aboriginal cultural landscapes, and increased society’s general understanding of contemporary Australian Aboriginal social structures and systems of land tenure. Dr Sutton is co-author, with Dr Kerryn Walshe, of ‘Farmers or Hunter Gatherers?’ (2021) and is working on his latest book.