Departmental Seminars
The Anthropology Research Seminar provides a forum for anthropologists to present their research to an audience of interested and critical thinkers. We meet each Thursday of semester (apart from the first Thursday of each month). The talk starts at 3, questions at 4, and informal discussion over drinks and nibbles at 5. We meet in room 148 Level 1, RC Mills Building (A26), The University of Sydney. It is an open event: all are welcome.
The coordinator of this series is .
Semester 2, 2011
| Aug 4 - 3 - 5pm | |
|---|---|
| Speaker: | Departmental Meeting, no seminar |
| Title: | |
| Venue: | Room 148 RC Mills, A26 |
| Aug 11 - 3 - 5pm | |
|---|---|
| Speaker: | Rozanna Lilley, Macquarie University |
| Title: | ‘Crying in the park: autism stigma, school entry and maternal subjectivity’ |
| Venue: | Room 148 RC Mills, A26 |
| Abstract: |
In this article I focus on the experiences of mothers of children with autism as they respond to, and are shaped by, encounters with stigmatising practices at primary school entry. Analysing narratives recorded during interviews with 22 mothers of children diagnosed with autism in Sydney, Australia, I argue that Erving Goffman’s theorising around ‘courtesy stigma’ is inadequate to the task of understanding the felt experiences of these women. I propose a reworking of Goffman’s concept, using Arlie Hochschild’s classic work on ‘emotion management’ and Wendy Hollway’s contributions to our understandings of gender and the ethics of care. I propose the notion of ‘attachment stigma’, which more readily does the double work of referring to both the intersubjective mother/child relationship, often intensified and prolonged due to disability, and the role of mothering ideologies, informed in part by lay understandings of psychological discourses, in shaping stigmatising response. Mothers’ school exclusion narratives point to the salience of experiences of stigmatisation in the lives of families of children with autism and to the continuing force of gendered moral rationalities underpinned by punitive notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothering Click here to listen to seminar Podcast |
| Aug 18 - 3 - 5pm | |
|---|---|
| Speaker: | Neil Maclean, University of Sydney |
| Title: | ‘On the Road in Highlands Papua New Guinea: Intimacy and Ethnographic Method’ |
| Venue: | Room 148 RC Mills, A26 |
| Abstract: | Drawing on Schutz’s treatment of the We-relationship and of meaning contexts, and on Michael Jackson’s exploration of the ambiguities of the intersubjective, this article examines the methodological implications of the empathic orientation developed in the context of intimacy for a discipline based on participant observation. I argue that moments of ‘breakdown’, a classic way in which ethnographic questions are revealed, are predicated on the intentional dynamics of intersubjective relationships. I draw on a particular experience of ‘breakdown’ on an overnight truck trip in Highlands Papua New Guinea juxtaposed with expectations of intimacy developed over long-term fieldwork spanning 12 years. Click here to listen to the podcast |
| Aug 25 - 3 - 5pm | |
|---|---|
| Speaker: | Rosemary Wiss, University of Sydney |
| Title: | 'Red Lights: Sex Tourism and Trafficking in a Philippines Community’ |
| Venue: | Room 148 RC Mills, A26 |
| Abstract: | This paper explores the workings of an international sex tourism industry located in the Philippines. An intrinsic part of the commercial sex industry is the routine recruitment and marketing of teenage girls, indeed youth itself, to the desires of much older foreign men. In the Philippines prostitution is illegal, but rarely prosecuted. Commercial sex before the age of consent (18) can be penalised as child sex tourism and trafficking in minors. However, marriage before this age is both legal and common. Local responses to teenage bars girls are primarily based on moral disapproval in regards to premarital sex rather than commercial sex per se. Further, the young women who work in the bars are recruited from outside the area and are therefore outside local kinship relations. This removes them from a sense of local honour - and protection. The paper considers the conditions for prosecutions under anti-trafficking laws and why they can be expected in sex tourism sites. Click here to listen to the podcast |
| Sept 1 - 3 - 5pm | |
|---|---|
| Speaker: | Departmental Meeting, no seminar |
| Title: | |
| Venue: | Room 148 RC Mills, A26 |
| Sept 8 - 3 - 5pm | |
|---|---|
| Speaker: | Alberto Gomes, La Trobe University |
| Title: | 'Soiled blood: Hybridity, syncretism, and identities in Malaysia' |
| Venue: | Room 148 RC Mills, A26 |
| Abstract: | In a recently published paper titled ‘Land Spilled with my blood’, I analysed the nexus between cultural contestations and spatial transformations in Malaysia. The second line of Malaysia’s national anthem, Tanah tumpah darahku, literally means ‘land spilled with my blood’. Interestingly, of the two forms of naturalisms–blood and land or soil–embedded or invoked in nationalist imaginaries, the focus (as evident in the subject-object expressive construction) in the national anthem is on land and not blood. I contend that the privileging of land over blood in Malaysia’s nationalist imaginary underscores contestations ‘grounded’ and articulated in spatial tactics, state projects designed to ‘rewrite landscapes’ and displacements. As a sequel to my previous work, this paper explores how the concept of blood as a naturalistic form of identification is configured in discourses of identity in Malaysia. By adapting Mary Douglas’s analytical frame presented in her work, Purity and Danger to the discussion on identities, my paper will attempt to unpack the different ways blood is invoked and expressed in the interplay between notions of ‘purity’ and ‘impurity’ in the symbolic construction of nativeness and the perceived dangers of hybridity in Malaysia. Click here to listen to the podcast |
| Sept 15 - 3 - 5pm | |
|---|---|
| Speaker: | Chris Houston, Macquarie University |
| Title: | 'The Struggle to Make a City Socialist: Spatial Politics in Istanbul, 1977-1980' |
| Venue: | Room 148 RC Mills, A26 |
| Abstract: | Over the last 15 years it has become accepted wisdom that Istanbul has become a ‘global city.’ What were the pre-conditions of such a development? Inspired by recent anthropological interest in inhabitants’ embodied experiences of the city, their urban knowledge and in their memories of places of trauma, this paper describes key dimensions of urban politics in Istanbul in the critical years that span the 1980 military coup. It explores the violent struggle between the activists of the socialist fractions and the cadres of the ultranationalists to control the city, knowledge about which is indispensable in comprehending both the post-coup restructuring of Turkish society and Istanbul's new urban order. |
| Sept 22 - 3 - 5pm | |
|---|---|
| Speaker: | Basil Sansom University of Tasmania |
| Title: | Drink and the Devil in Oases of the Libyan Sahara (1966-7) |
| Venue: | Room 148 RC Mills, A26 |
| *Oct 6 - 6pm | |
|---|---|
| Speaker: | Linda Connor, University of Sydney Inaugural Lecture |
| Title: | ‘Anthropology in the Time of Climate Change’ |
| Venue: | Nicholson Museum, The University of Sydney A14 RSVP required: arts.inaugurals.rsvp@sydney.edu.au (02) 9351 7454 |
| Abstract: | How can Anthropology contribute to a critical understanding of anthropogenic climate change, a potentially catastrophic process of planetary dimensions? Citizens of a globalized world, enmeshed in a Faustian bargain with nature to achieve transcendence through material wealth and consumer satisfactions, confront the prospect of a warmed, entropic and resource-scarce future. Anthropology’s comparative method of cultural analysis suggests new and productive ways of thinking about humanity’s visioning of immortality, death, survival and politics in the time of climate change. |
| Oct 13 - 3 - 5pm | |
|---|---|
| Speaker: | Heather Horst, RMIT University |
| Title: | ‘Reclaiming Place: The Materiality of Home, Family and Migration in Jamaica’ |
| Venue: | Room 148 RC Mills, A26 |
| Abstract: | This presentation will examine the materiality of place, home and belonging among Jamaican return migrants. Drawing upon long-term ethnographic research among return migrants and their families who migrated to the United Kingdom in the 1950s and 1960s and moved back to Jamaica to retire over 25 years later, I explore the relationship between homes, aspiration and the dreams and realities of return. Through an analysis of the structure, design and use of homes by returnees, I reveal how the home becomes a site for imagining several key relationships in returnees’ lives – relationships that may be closely associated with home, such as family, kin and community, or more diffuse, as in values or ideals such as respectability, the attainment of success or fears of failure and loss. I conclude by reflecting upon how attention to the materiality of the home facilitates an understanding of the multiple processes underpinning return migration and the act of reclaiming place. Click here to listen to the podcast |
| Oct 20 - 3 - 5pm | |
|---|---|
| Speaker: | John Comaroff & Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago |
| Title: | ‘Divine Detection: Crime and the Metaphysics of Disorder’ |
| Venue: | Room 148 RC Mills, A26 |
| Abstract: | Conceptions of crime are inseparable from conceptions of truth. They are integral, too, to modern modes of producing knowledge – and to the very idea of society as a normative order. Durkheim, after all, saw crime as the negative imprint of the law, a vision linked to the rise of the modernist understanding of detection. This was a form of investigation that no less a sociologist than Sherlock Holmes would term the art of “reasoning backwards,” of arriving at the hidden authorship of illegal acts by deciphering the signature they left in the world. But if modern understandings of law, order, and truth rest on the belief that human interaction – even at its most transgressive – can be made sense of in retrospect, even used in the service of social order, what are we to make of situations in which that faith conspicuously wavers? In which ordinary signs have been occulted, and the drama of crime and punishment no longer seems capable of producing an authoritative, ordered reality? An exercise in “criminal anthropology,” this lecture investigates the metaphysics of disorder so palpable in the popular culture of contemporary South Africa, and elsewhere, seeking to decipher the forensic fetishes it conjures in its wake. |
| Oct 27 - 3 - 5pm | |
|---|---|
| Speaker: | John Morton, La Trobe University |
| Title: | ‘Race, Reciprocity, Reconciliation: Stolen Children and the Elementary Structures of Justice in Australia’ |
| Venue: | Room 148 RC Mills, A26 |
| Abstract | Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generations in 2008 was one of the most significant public rituals of Australia’s recent past. As with so many ritual events, the apology’s performative import depended on the convincing telling of a story – specifically the public history of family and kinship that Bain Attwood refers to as ‘the stolen generations narrative’. I treat this narrative as a species of what Peter Sutton calls ‘history as myth’ and assess the effectivity and truth value of the stolen generations myth-ritual complex in terms of ‘the elementary structures of kinship’, particularly insofar as Lévi-Strauss construed such structures as embodying Mauss’s ‘principle of reciprocity’ and ‘total social fact’. There are, I suggest, compelling reasons why the stolen generations narrative finally ‘came true’ in 2008 – multiple reasons which, as Mauss suggested at the end of The Gift, pertain as much to the ‘common life’ of modern nations as to the inclusive tendencies of ‘archaic societies’. |