Ute Eickelkamp, PhD

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Before joining the department as Honorary Associate and casual lecturer, Ute Eickelkamp was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (funded by the Australian Research Council) in the School for Social and Policy Research at Charles Darwin University (2004–2009).

Her earlier fieldwork with Anangu Pitjantjatjara speakers in the Central Australian community Ernabella, begun in 1995, includes projects on the social and aesthetic history of the local women’s art style, cannibalistic imagery, and Anangu representations of kinship. More recently, she has studied Anangu children's social imagination and emotional dynamics through a traditional form of sand storytelling, after therapeutic Sandplay work with Tiwi children in Australia’s north.

She studied anthropology and sociology at Marburg, Berlin and Heidelberg, where she was awarded the PhD degree in 2001. She gained a Graduate Diploma in Infant and Parent Mental Health at Melbourne University in 2008. Ute compiled the bilingual book Don’t Ask for Stories: The Women of Ernabella and Their Art (Aborginal Studies Press, 1999); she co-edited with Gary Robinson, Jacqueline Goodnow and Ilan Katz the book Contexts of Child Development: Culture, Policy and Intervention (CDU Press, 2008), and she edited Growing Up in Central Australia: New Anthropological Studies of Aboriginal Childhood and Adolescence, to be published by Berghahn.

Research interests: art, children and childhood, family dynamics, life-stages, social reproduction/change, modernisation, cultural notions of nature and life, mental health and transcultural psychiatry, policy issues.

Fields of scholarship: social anthropology, history and methods of the social sciences, developmental psychologies, psychoanalysis, phenomenology and philosophical anthropology

This is something about anthropology that I especially like: its attentiveness to things big and small – the existential human condition and ethnographic detail. To produce knowledge and understanding in both directions has been the lasting achievement of major thinkers and the bedrock of our discipline. And it is those very foundational contributions by Boas, Rivers, Radcliffe-Brown, Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss et al. that have made anthropological thinking and practice relevant across the disciplines and outside academia. If small by number, anthropology has created a cultural map of the world in its endeavour to answer fundamental questions about the nature of human existence. This tradition of knowledge and critical thinking that also recognizes the deep histories of cultural life-worlds, sustains us in our dealings with current issues and concerns.

My special interest is in symbolic productions of sorts - art, play, ritual, dreams – with a view to understanding what Castoriadis has called the ‘social imaginary’. I subscribe to that: Without imagination there is no reality. This begs certain questions, such as: what is the structure of the imagination in particular cultural life-worlds? How does it come into being historically and with each individual anew? How do thought and deed intersect in concrete situations? Put differently, I seek to discern links between human development, social practice, and cosmo-ontology. Social and cultural change and modernising processes, it seems to me, are also best examined from this tripartite perspective, which can be pitched at various levels. My approach centres on people’s experience; it engages psychoanalytic concepts because of the significance of mental life and the unconscious in human motivation. I also consider the import of what phenomenologists call the ‘natural attitude’ - enduring our world as if it had to be what it is. However, to bring in methods and concepts from other disciplines can create problems; I also agree with Durkheim that social facts can only be explained by other social facts. But, notwithstanding my view of the universal relevance of anthropology, I think our techniques of interpretation need to be re-assessed. More recently, I have tried to ameliorate the problem - analysis of individual experience versus analysis of social process - by working towards a person-centred anthropology.

Given that anthropology remains a niche-subject, my interest in psychodynamic theories - a niche within the niche - could do well with a further comment: Seeing people and interactions with a psychodynamically trained eye is like wearing glasses that you cannot take off. The same holds true for the comparative lens of the ethnographer-anthropologist. This, of course, is no impairment; to think about the unconscious dimension of human action is not reductive. On the contrary, it means adding another layer to everything else that anthropologists do - not unlike researching children’s lives, which requires that society as a whole is brought into focus.

Recent Publications