Postgraduate Seminars and Research
Welcome to the Department of Anthropology’s postgrad page. We have a prodigious pod of postgraduate research students and we run a lively seminar and workshop program. Feel free to join us!
Postgraduate seminars and workshops
Postgraduate seminars and workshops take place during semester. Anthropology students from other universities are most welcome to attend. For more information on the current program, please contact the Postgraduate coordinator,
Postgraduate research projects
Barbara Ellen Baumann (PhD Candidate)
The social construction of family and parenting
This project undertakes a culturally-informed investigation into the Aboriginal family and more precisely child-rearing techniques and related parenting practices and experiences in Redfern, the inner-city of Sydney. It aims at understanding the cultural conceptions among urban Aboriginal people and the ways in which people do, or do not, feel able to meet these expectations and why.
Issues concerning Aboriginal parenting and ‘unhealthy’ or ‘dysfunctional’ families are a popular topic in public discourse. Since the Prime Minister John Howard and Minister for Indigenous Affairs Mal Brough declared a ‘national emergency’ intervention in the Northern Territory on 21 June 2007, researchers form various disciplines, politicians, family support organizations and policy makers are searching for solutions to ‘normalize’ Aboriginal Australia, creating safe and ‘healthy’ environments for Aboriginal children (Altman and Hinkson (eds.) 2007). Although this intervention received a lot of attention from the public eye, issues regarding parenting and questions of autonomy and state interventions in Aboriginal families are not restricted to remote Australia.
The proposed research will address discourses of power and practices of intervention (state and NGO) in Aboriginal parenting and how these affect Aboriginal practices and understandings of family and child-rearing.
Supervisor: Professor Gillian Cowlishaw
Belinda Burbridge (PhD Candidate)
Interaction through industry in the Parkes Shire, NSW: Cultural heritage and the Peak Hill Wiradjuri people
My research will be part of an ARC Linkage Project that focuses on Indigenous Cultural Heritage and brings together anthropologists and archaeologists with local Wiradjuri people in Parkes Shire. My contribution will be to examine the history of interactions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, through industries such as pastoralism, the development of Aboriginal organisations, and the contemporary cultural heritage industry. I aim to develop an economic profile of these interactions so as to bring a different light to current politically-oriented models of colonial interaction. I also want to develop ethnographic understandings of notions such as culture, heritage and Aboriginality, amongst both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people living in the Shire. My overall project will be situated within the anthropology of the nation state, on one hand, and, on the other, the potential for increased interdisciplinary engagement between historical anthropology/ethnohistory and archaeology.
Key concepts: Wiradjuri, historical anthropology, industrial interaction, power and state, cultural heritage
Supervisor: Gaynor Macdonald
Mikiko Chono (PhD Candidate)
Growing Up Problem Kids: child disability in Kimberley cultural context
This ethnographically-grounded research explores how Kimberley Aboriginal family members interpret and act on differences/disabilities affecting their children, and the extent to which their beliefs and practices may differ from those conventionally held by medical/health professionals. It starts from the anthropological premise that culturally-shared understandings of difference/disability in human expression stem from culturally-constituted notions of personhood. Anthropologists have frequently observed the characteristic tolerance of Australian Aboriginal peoples for a wide range of social behaviours within the scope of ‘normal’ but how this influences understandings of difference/disability is not well known. Reports of increasing disabilities among Aboriginal children indicate the significance of culturally-informed understandings required to inform effective responses.
A strong relationship between culture and interpretations of and attitudes to “disability” has been found in recent anthropological research but this has not previously been extended to Aboriginal Australia. This project will both critique and contribute to that corpus as well as providing culturally-specific information to complement medical/health research and practice. In doing so, it also contributes to the anthropology of health and illness, and to ‘closing the gap’ of Aboriginal well-being in Australia.
Supervisor: Dr Gaynor MacDonald
Sascha Fuller (PhD Candidate)
The Local Cultural Implications of Global Climate Change: A critical anthropological study of climate change impacts in the Nepal Himalaya
In recent years climate change has been given an unprecedented visibility and sense of urgency. At the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Copenhagen in December 2009, the “global climate change community”, came together to form a “global climate policy”. In response to the global nature of climate change discourse this research will highlight the local cultural implications of climate change and global warming while exploring if and how global expertise has become linked with local social concerns. Using an ethnographic approach this research will focus on the production of meaning as well as the conditions and context of both climate change and cultural change in contiguous mountainous communities in Nepal. The research, through the narratives, definition and imaginings of local residents will be concerned with climate change as an emplaced cultural experience.
Nepal, as one of the poorest countries in the world and with an incredibly diverse landscape (it is home to eight of the fourteen highest mountain peaks in the world and over six thousand rivers and streams), is highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The scientific and development communities have tended to focus their research on the effects of climate change for human kind in Nepal on climate change mitigation, adaptation and resilience. To date, there has been little anthropological engagement in understanding societies’ relations with climate change. My research aims to address this gap.
Key concepts: Climate change, global warming, culture, discourse, development, ethnography, emplacement, Nepal
Supervisor: Prof. Linda Connor Associate Supervisor: Dr. Neil McLean
Samantha Hall (PhD Candidate)
The Body, the Aesthetic and the Burden: The World of the Australian Ballet
An understanding of the world of ballet from the perspective of its‘insiders’ has not previously been the focus of anthropological research. Drawing on anthropological insights into the concept and use of the body, aesthetics, performance and ritual, and the body and health, this project will bring alive the experiences of the various people who make up this world, with dancers themselves as its focus. The components of this project are: an examination of the dancer as practitioner, an examination of the dancer as a person, a self, the influence of ‘the audience’ as well as the more general politics of the ballet world. Together these themes will allow me to address the question of ‘what is ballet?’ and how it can be understood. What is it about ballet that draws people into it as performers and spectators? This will include looking at how ballet is funded, marketed, supported and cultivated within the wider society of which is a valued part of the art world.
The ballet dancer’s struggles with their image of self are almost a taboo subject because of the perceived obsession with perfection and the ways in which this pursuit of perfection is carried out through diet and exercise. The image of self and the pursuit of perfection pervade the mind of the dancer. Anthropologists researching dance have touched only lightly on issues regarding artists in general, but the ballet dancer¹s view of self remains largely unexplored. Through my research I plan to explore what is understood as the ballet dancer¹s obsession with perfection, how this ‘obsession’ is understood, and how it is augmented through the rituals of the ballet world, not only in the ballet studio and theatre, but in the dancer’s life outside of the barre and stage.
Key concepts: ballet, performance, ritual, the body, aesthetics and embodiment
Supervisor: Gaynor Macdonald
Diana McCarthy (PhD Candidate)
Give and take: getting along on the mid-north coast of NSW
My abiding interest is in the minutiae of social relations. Even after many years of thinking about my existence as a social being, of study and working as a social anthropologist, I have many unanswered questions about the means by which social experience and forms of consciousness are brought into being, and how these give rise to and are shaped by shared more or less enduring social structures. It is the elusive relationship between the social world as a lived experience and the world as a set of overlapping structures for organising power and wealth that intrigues me. I will aim to explore this broad topic in relation to one very small place and group of people. My field-site in north coastal NSW has been my on and off home for over twenty years. While it is a place that I love wholeheartedly, it also has an enduringly violent history and present, profoundly shaped by relative isolation and endemic poverty, and subject to constantly simmering and sometimes explosive tensions within and between the Koori and non-Aboriginal communities. By utilising anthropological techniques, drawing upon phenomenology, psychoanalysis and history, and by engaging in 18 months fieldwork in a site that I have known well but must now reopen to critical scrutiny, I will attempt to describe the mutual inducements, pressures, pleasures and miseries that are the stuff of life in a very small, yet strongly divided social field, in order to critically explore the relationship between this place as a micro-social field and the broader socio-political structures in which it is embedded. My work in native title has given me an abiding respect for those early ethnographers whose diligent and systematic attention to detail allows their work to be utilised today, despite the radically shifting theoretical paradigms through which it is read. My aim is to produce a work that will stand the test of time in this way: a detailed, accurate, historicised, objective and methodologically transparent account of the people of a particular place, at a particular moment in time. Although the goal is to produce a historicised ethnography rather than to make a particular theoretical point, my intention is to return to native title practice upon completion of this project with a set of new insights into the underlying social processes which feed into the constitution of claimant groups in heavily settled Australia. Native title processes focus upon the data pertaining to a continuous existence of a society over time at the expense of sufficient attention being afforded to innovations and transformations into different societal forms. My thesis is that this topic is best described by integrating phenomenological data with the social structural data commonly produced for evidentiary purposes.
Key concepts: Aborigines—NSW; Rural Australia—NSW; Historical ethnography—NSW ; NSW ; Native Title; Race; Phenomenology
Supervisor: Dr. Gaynor Macdonald
Associate Supervisor: Dr. Jadran Mimica
Zevic Mishor (PhD Candidate)
Forests, Mountains and Finding G-d: The Natural Environment in Jewish Religious Practice
This study will investigate the role of the natural environment in current Jewish religious practice. The Chassidic tradition in particular, since its inception in 18th century Europe, emphasises the importance of nature as a manifestation of G-d, and as one possible means for bringing oneself closer to G-d. Thus, for example, pious Jews from the Breslov Chassidic group, located particularly in the two holy cities of Jerusalem and Safed (Israel), may perform late-night rituals in deserted forests, in which they cry and pour out their hearts before the Almighty. Such a setting, and the nature of the practice itself, bears similarities to shamanic practices found in other parts of the world, yet little work has been done in applying the anthropological shamanic discourse to Judaism, nor visa versa. This ethnographically-based research will seek to bridge some of that gap.
Supervisor: Dr Jadran Mimica
Associate Supervisor: Prof Allan Snyder
Associate Supervisor: Dr Dennis McKenna
Wendy Risteska (PhD candidate)
Making a Life out of the Worship of Death: a psychodynamic examination of the phenomenology of experience of La Santa Muerte in Mexico City.
La Santa Muerte (Saint Death) came into international consciousness about a decade ago when she was spotted in the tattoos and pendants of Mexico’s prisoners and reported on by the media. She was ‘violently introduced’ to the public by ‘one of the most infamous kidnapper’s in the country’s history,’ as police raided Daniel “el Mochaorejas” (the Ear Chopper) Arizmendi López’s house and found an altar dedicated to her (Chestnut 2012: 16). Since Felipe Calderón took the Mexican presidency in 2006 and declared war on the drug cartels, he has simultaneously launched an attack on La Santa Muerte, employing the army to bulldoze over thirty of the shrines dedicated to her on the U.S.-Mexico border in March, 2009. This relationship came to define the way in which she was perceived in the popular imagination as ‘The Patron Saint of Crime and Criminals.’ (Freese 2010)
By focusing on the everyday reality of the people in the poor barrio (neighbourhood) of Mexico City which is said to have “given birth” to the contemporary manifestation of the saint, I aim to throw light on the cultural-historical factors, and the psycho-sexual and death-drive dynamics that gave rise to her, thereby challenging this common perception. To this end, I will examine how meaning is constructed around the saint, how she is being negotiated as a symbol of life, and what implications this has on the ways in which people perceive, rationalize, and negotiate the conditions of their life-world, especially those living at the socio-economic margins of Mexican society.
Key concepts: psychoanalytic anthropology, analytical psychology, phenomenology, Jungian archetypes, marginalisation, folk religiosity, gender, Santa Muerte, death-drive.
Supervisor: Dr. Jadran Mimica
Associate Supervisors: Professor Linda Connor, Dr. Vek Lewis, Dr. Sebastian Job
Kylie Tobler (PhD Candidate)
Locas e Internacionalés: Subjectivity and Social Relatedness in Mexico City.
This study uses a phenomenological and psychoanalytic anthropological approach to compare and contrast the experiences of subjectivity and social relatedness of locas ('feminised male homosexual transvestites' from the 'clases populares') and internacionalés ('middle class gays'), in Mexico City.
The study has two mutually informing dimensions: the primary innovation addresses the current lack of comparative ethnographic research between two groups of men who identify as having sex with men (MSM) from different socioeconomic areas, the secondary innovation will incorporate detailed ethnographic data from the experiences of their respective families, which is also hitherto largely missing from the anthropology of Latin American gender and sexuality. As a result it is hoped that this research will develop an analysis of the interplay between the social and cultural construction of the gendered body, selfhood and the modes of expression and visibility available to locas and internacionalés. Furthermore, using an ethnographic focus that includes the subjective experience of the family, the study will enable an empirically based examination of popular discourses that surround the rubric of social integration of MSM within Mexico City.
Key concepts: Latin American gender and sexuality; transsexualism; tranvestitism; homosexuality; phenomenological and psychoanalytical anthropology; Mexico; family; social relatedness; embodiment; identity and subjectivity.
Supervisor: Dr. Jadran Mimica
Nayeli Torres-Montenegro (M.Phil. Candidate)
Who's in, Who's Out? Connection Research in the Pilbara.
This thesis explores the impacts that Native Title connection research has had on the Abroriginal community of the Pilbara. The notion of "connection" is problematized in terms of Native Title connection research by disentangling the term from its legal assumption in the Native Title Act and applying it to anthropological theory and methodology. The negative connotations embedded within the Native Title process in relation to social change are taken into account explored in terms of the static cultural model which is at times favoured by Native Title professionals. The conjectures about kinship within native title connection research are unpacked and their use as assertions of identity in order to satisfy the assumptions made through the interpretation of the Native Title Act are examined.
The disputes over the ‘authenticity’ of the genealogical information submitted to the State in support of native title claims are problematized in terms of the over-reliance on ethno-historical evidence. A series of ethnographic interviews with Pilbara Aboriginal community members (both accepted and disputed) is used to determine the impacts of genealogical evidence collected for Native Title purposes. The presentation of genealogical information to the State is contrasted with the presentation of the oral histories by Aboriginal community members. The thesis also considers the quantum organization of societies and unpacks the ideas within the onus of proof in the native title context as applied to genealogical evidence while considering the impacts inflicted upon kinship and kin relations of the Aboriginal community in the Pilbara region of Western Australia.
Supervisor: Dr. Gaynor Macdonald
Associate Supervisor: Dr. Jadran Mimica
Eve Vincent (PhD Candidate)
My thesis centres on biannual 4WD trips undertaken to visit sacred rockholes in the mallee scrub northwest of Ceduna, a small town on the edge of the Nullabor Plain in far west South Australia. A charismatic Aboriginal woman I call ‘Aunty Joan’ takes members of her family group, along with city-dwelling ‘greenies’, out on to her country to introduce them to special places; to maintain the traditional cultural practice of cleaning out the rockholes and restoring them to health; and to build up an anti-mining support base: the country visited is currently subject to a number of mining exploration leases.
Initially my research focused on the relationship between Aboriginal trip hosts and their greenie guests – I planned to write ‘an ethnography of an encounter’. However after undertaking a year of rich and intensive fieldwork my focus has been enlarged. This study now deals with contemporaneous life-worlds – that of my anti-mining Aboriginal friends, of greenies, and of Ceduna whitefellas whose lives, families and histories are enmeshed with Aboriginal lives, families and histories. I hope to bring all these to life via ‘thick description’, the use of interview transcripts and an evocation of the density and texture of an intensely storied sociality.
Supervisor: Gillian Cowlishaw