Recent Comments
» Four East Ar… on The Yirrkala Church Panels: Ki… Alicia Melonie Jones… on The Problem of Papunya From The Streets of… on Streets of Papunya Byron Bayle on Art and Law in Darwin Carol lowe on Earth Works Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.StatCounter
Category Archives: Anthropology
Lives of the Artist: Patrick Tjungurrayi by John Carty
Readers who followed this blog for a long time know already of my admiration for John Carty’s work. John is an anthropologist trained at the Australian National University under Howard Morphy. He has long had an interest in art history, … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropology, Art
Tagged Balgo, John Carty, Papunya Tula, Patrick Tjungurrayi
Leave a comment
Video Culture / Museum Culture
A pair of new exhibitions opened this past week at the University of Queensland Anthropology Museum. One extends established queries about the nature of objects stored in museums and their relationships to the people they purport to represent. The other makes … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropology, Art, Communities, Culture, Film
Tagged Gapuwiyak, Jennifer Deger, Judy Watson, Miyarrka Media, University of Queensland Anthropology Museum, Yolngu
1 Comment
Inside and Outside: an essay
Several weeks ago I wrote about a panel discussion at the Toledo Museum of Art in which the topic of restricted knowledge in Aboriginal painting—what Stephen Gilchrist referred to as “registers of knowledge”—created a degree of consternation among some members … Continue reading
The Lake Where Cultures Meet
A desert lake. Paruku. Lake Gregory. This is the place where the ancestral hero, Kiki, came down from the east, a falling star. Landed in the water and created seeds, grapes, bandicoot, and blue-tongued lizard. This is the place where … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropology, Art, Books, Culture
Tagged Ecology, John Carty, Lake Gregory, Paruku
2 Comments
The Poetry of Geography
I grew up near the ocean. For the first eighteen years of my life a twenty-minute walk would bring me to docks and lapping waves, sand and seaweed and salt air. I didn’t know how much a part of me … Continue reading
Larrakirtj: Encyclopedia of the Yolngu
On our first trip to Australia in 1990, still largely ignorant of Aboriginal art (despite the trip being inspired in large part by the Dreamings exhibition seen at the Asia Society in New York CIty two years earlier), we hit … Continue reading
Riches of the Canning Stock Route
The depth, the wealth, the variety of the material contained in Ngurra Kuju Walyja / One Country One People: stories from the Canning Stock Route (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) are such that I’m almost at a loss to begin describing it all. A … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropology, Art, Books, Culture
Tagged Canning Stock Route, National Museum of Australia
3 Comments
“Manapanmirr” at The Margaret Mead Film Festival
The 36th Annual Margaret Mead Film Festival was held in New York City at the American Museum of Natural History this year from November 29 through December 2. The longest-running showcase for international documentaries in the United States, the … Continue reading
The Djang’kawu Come to America
Last weekend we were back at Dartmouth College to hear Howard Morphy deliver the Montgomery Endowment Lecture as part of the fellowship that has him and his wife, Frances, in residence at the College this semester. He chose as his … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropology, Art, Culture
Tagged Crossing Cultures, Djang'kawu, Exhibitions, Hood Museum of Art, Howard Morphy, Yirrkala, Yolngu
1 Comment
Aboriginal Art & Culture: an American eye 