Recent Graduations

Thiago Oppermann

Emma Young

Growing Up Koori, Growing Up Kids: Aboriginal Families in Griffith, New South Wales

Supervisor: Dr. Gaynor Macdonald
PhD, 2011
Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney

Abstract

My thesis explores the ways in which children and young people have been, and can be, included within anthropological interests and thus as fieldwork participants, focusing on Aboriginal Australia. I draw on my fieldwork with Aboriginal families in the rural agricultural city of Griffith, in south-western New South Wales to respond to the dominance of a dichotomising approach to children and adults’ lives. I found I could not understand the lives of ‘Aboriginal kids’ by conceptualising distinct life stage categories or states of being which were separate or belonging to ‘two worlds,’ a kids’ world and an adult world. According to the specificities of relatedness in an Australian Aboriginal kin-based society, being a ‘kid,’ whether as a life stage or as someone’s kid as offspring confers a mutually constituted identity between child and adult.
These Aboriginal-constituted relations are played out within an intergenerational and interethnic social field that is simultaneously subject to the condemnatory gaze of European-Australians and the state. It was not enough to understand Aboriginal people’s lives through the rubric of kinship; they were also constituted in other, often contradictory, ways. Despite a desire to maintain the profile of Griffith as a harmonious multicultural town, many residents of British/European origin took the view that there was something ‘different’ about Aboriginal kids, with the result that double standards applied when these kids ‘behaved badly.’ Within this wider society of which Aboriginal people are a part, a causal relationship is commonly inferred between the behaviour of kids and the care practices of their parents. This influences the constitution of adults as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ parents, so that condemnatory attitudes held towards children and young people subject Aboriginal adults to the same.
I explore the ways in which Aboriginal people deal with the tensions and disjunctures they experience as they move in and out of social contexts which constitute them in differing ways, including their shared response to the shame experienced as a result of the (predominantly) European-Australian gaze, which constitutes Aboriginal parents as ‘neglectful’ and their kids as ‘unruly.’
My thesis also reflects on the way in which my fieldwork challenged me to rethink my own initially dichotomising approach. I reflect on the importance of stepping aside from pre-conceived ideas when in the field, listening more closely to how people understand their worlds, and allowing their understandings to challenge taken-for-granted models.

Sean Leneghan

The Varieties of Ecstasy Experience. Ecstasy: An Exploration of Body, Mind and Person in Sydney’s Club Culture

Supervisor: Dr. Jadran Mimica
PhD, 2011
Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney

Abstract

This is a phenomenologically grounded ethnographic study of the life-world of ecstasy users in the socio-cultural contexts of raving and clubs in Sydney, Australia. The thesis espouses existential-phenomenology as a framework for describing and understanding these experiences. I argue against and reject the widespread mechanistic-materialist paradigms that inform bio-medical and bio-psychological interpretations of drug-use and non-ordinary states of consciousness.

As an alternative to these dominant reductionist perspectives I draw on a holistic organismic approach and the application of phenomenology to ethnographic field research. More specifically, my exploration of the experiences of ecstasy is based upon a dialogal phenomenology which enabled me to generate a processual morphology of the varieties of ecstasy experience and the users’ mode of being-in-the-world. Through this endeavour I also argue for a phenomenological foundation of the study of drug use and non-ordinary states of consciousness in general.

Sophorntavy Vorng

Status City: Consumption, Identity, and Middle Class Culture in Contemporary Bangkok

Supervisor: Dr Richard Basham
PhD, 2009
Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney

Abstract

I explore social stratification and consumption practices in Bangkok, focusing on shopping malls, markets, and hypermarkets. Critiquing the idea that shopping malls, in particular, work to create a globalised, homogenous, consumer identity, I suggest that they are meaningful in ways that are uniquely local. The socio-spatial configuration of consumption sites in the capital city highlights Thai class relations and the elaborate system of social stratification. Specific attention is directed towards delineating the socially, politically, and economically influential urban middle class, a group that has notoriously eluded comprehensive definition thus far. I further argue that understandings of class are limited unless contextualised within the Thai status hierarchy, and considered in relation to the significance of power, presentation and prestige in Thai social life.

Erin B. Taylor

Abajo el Puente: Place and the Politics of Progress in Santo Domingo

Supervisor: Professor Diane Austin-Broos
PhD, 2009
Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney


Abstract

In recent years there has been substantial research on Dominican migration and transnationalism, yet these studies have largely overlooked both the manner in which globalisation generates new localisations, and the continuing salience of the state as a mediator between the global and the local. Based upon fieldwork in La Ciénaga, a poor barrio of Santo Domingo, this thesis argues that emplacement, rather than transnationalism, is paradigmatic of the experiences of poor Dominicans and provides their primary source of unity. Race, ethnicity, and social class have long been promoted as structuring the experiences of Caribbean people, but my analysis suggests that these operate more as sources of differentiation than of identification in Santo Domingo’s barrios. I examine the strategies and practices residents deploy to create value in place, overcome their localisation, and achieve progreso (progress) within the bounds of the state. These include transforming the material environment and its symbolic meanings, elaborating certain social hierarchies and contesting others, and developing locality-based political organisations.

the Caribbean, it has been usual for studies of cultural oppositions or dualisms to effectively constitute a different genre to studies of class, race, and globalization. My ethnography indicates that this distinction is false. Residents of La Ciénaga deploy cultural oppositions and notion of difference to define a place in the social hierarchies of the barrio and city, while simultaneously recognising the moral value and identical structural position of those around them. Popular politics in Santo Domingo are characterised by this tension between social stratification and the elaboration of cultural value in place. This thesis develops a political and social economy of value that addresses both the bases of stratification in the sphere of production and the ways in which projects of self-creation, such as through consumption, allow for the elaboration of cultural value and meaning for individuals and social groups. Given the importance of locality to popular politics, I argue that this integrated approach is necessary to any assessment of the transformative potential of community organisations and other political movements in Santo Domingo.

Yuriko Yamanouchi

Searching for Aboriginal Community in South Western Sydney

Supervisor: Dr. Gaynor Macdonald
PhD, 2008
Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney

Abstract

This thesis explores how Aboriginal people in the suburbs of south western Sydney develop a sense of being part of a community. Unlike many Aboriginal social contexts, in this urban area they are not connected through kinship ties or place of origin. They do not live in close proximity but are spread through various suburbs. They do not have most of the characteristics thought to be the basis of community. To understand why they nevertheless refer to themselves as a community, the thesis will develops a model which links the notion of social networks to interaction with organisations dealing with Aboriginal issues. People in urban areas are connected and their social networks activated by their participation in activities run by these organisations. These activities create event-places, which are to community what individuals are to an ego-centric network. Interaction in event-places are the nodes of the experience of community. Through their experience at one or more of these event-place nodes, people are recognised as Aboriginal and come to gain their sense of community – an experience which does not rely on community as shared or bounded.

The sense of community in urban Sydney is entangled with the complicated processes of identity negotiation. In addition to people born and raised in all-Aboriginal communities of rural Australia, many of those living in south western Sydney have only recently identified as Aboriginal people. The thesis seeks a way in which to conceptualise the dynamic nature of both community and identity, and in doing so to contribute in two ways. First, it develops an approach which can transcend the tendency in urban anthropology to rely on models originally developed for the study of small-scale communities assumed to be relatively homogeneous, and thus opens up a means through which urban anthropology can better incorporate the ethnography of people who live lives that only intersect from time to time. It uses an ethnographic approach to reposition discussion on the possibility of community in a modern complex society. It then applies this model to the exploration of how an Aboriginal commonality emerges in an urban context which is no longer based on place of origin or kinship.