Some Aspects of Continuity and Change Among Anthropologists in Australia or ‘He-Who-Eats-From-One-Dish-With-Us-With-One-Spoon’ Jeremy Beckett	127-138

Since the future of anthropology in Australia is clouded, the address takes a look at where it has been coming from. Rather than a distinctive regional school, the discipline in Australia has been part of anthropology in the UK and the USA. In common with anthropology elsewhere, it lacks a distinctive theoretical stance, but draws on the theory current in the other social sciences. Recognising that what makes anthropology ‘special’ is the field work experience, the address reflects on the history and nature of this practice.

Mines and Monsters: A Dialogue on Development in Western Province, Papua New Guinea Alison Dundon	139-154

This article analyses an internal debate between Gogodala villagers, Western Province, Papua New Guinea, in which they explore the concept of development through a dialogue that revolves around ela gi or ‘way of life’. The analysis focuses on two developmental projects: the Ok Tedi gold and copper mine, which affects eight Gogodala villages on the lower Fly River, and a test oil drill carried out among northern Gogodala villages in 1995. I propose that it is through ela gi, a lifestyle that encompasses an evangelical Christianity as well as the actions of the first ancestors and is based on a bodily experience of the environment, that community development is envisaged and debated. Whilst the oil drill in the north is discussed in terms of approval, villagers on the Fly River to the south are increasingly concerned about changes to their lifestyle and landscape. They explore this ambivalence through a discussion of the movements and moods of ancestrally-derived ‘monsters’ or ugu lopala, creatures who patrol the waterways of both north and south villages. At the same time, Gogodala from both communities are articulating what the transition from ‘living on sago’ to a lifestyle based on money might mean. This dialogue foregrounds an ongoing debate about the roles that the environment, village practices, the ancestral past and Christianity play in the constitution of the Gogodala way of life, and how these factors may initiate a certain kind of development.

The ‘Thailand Controversy’ Revisited Peter Hinton	155-177

The so-called ‘Thailand controversy’ divided the anthropological communities of Australia and the US in the early 1970s. In the heat of opposition to the Vietnam War, allegations were made that some anthropologists and institutions, particularly the Tribal Research Centre in Thailand, had worked hand in glove with the military/intelligence establishment and contrary to the interests of the minority peoples who lived in the hills of north Thailand, who were the subjects of research. The author was one of those so accused and the paper presents his view of the episode. It traces the genesis of the Tribal Research Centre, the publication of an inflammatory article in the US, and the subsequent escalation of the controversy there. It then details its impact on the Australian anthropological community, with particular reference to the Sydney University Department. Finally, it describes the climax of the controversy in the Australian Association of Social Anthropologists, and the American Anthropological Association.

The Field of Art Production and Western Desert Acrylics Caroline Holmstrom Hoban	178-190

Following the logic of Bourdieu’s notion of ‘field’, acrylic art production in the Western Desert of Australia is positioned as a sub-field in the field of Western art production. The significance of the cultural identity of the producer subordinates Western Desert acrylic art within the field and the shift in the criteria of legitimation constitutes it as a sub-field. The capital at stake in the sub-field of Western Desert acrylic art is differentiated and contingent upon legitimation of authenticity as defined by the Western field of art production. This capital is constituted through the positioning of Western Desert acrylics within the field of art production and is a manifestation of the struggle to maintain domination within the field.

Beyond Malinowski and After Writing Culture: On the Future of Cultural Anthropology and the Predicament of Ethnography George E. Marcus	191-199

Following out certain implications of the 1980s Writing Culture critique, this paper envisions a future for anthropology that remains focused on innovations in the ethnographic research process. A sense of change in the world, conceived in the 1980s as postmodernity and now widely discussed as globalisation, suggests the need for an alternative paradigm of ethnographic practice, different in significant ways from that which shaped social-cultural anthropology over the previous eighty years. Based on working through the implications for the norms and forms of both fieldwork and ethnographic writing of the multi-sited design of many current research projects, this paper outlines such an alternative paradigm. Further, the paper argues that the explicit disciplinary dynamic driving such innovation in ethnography is, in contrast to the so-called crisis of representation of the 1980s, a more urgent crisis of reception for anthropology.

Moving Histories: An Analysis of the Dynamics of Place in North Ambrym, Vanuatu Mary Patterson	200-218

Recent writing on the ethnogeography of Vanuatu has identified mobility and primordial connection as two counterpoised aspects of connection to place that have a long history in the archipelago. These themes are taken up in this paper in the specific case of north Ambrym, an island community in north-central Vanuatu in which the accidental geography of active volcanoes has fostered an equally active interest in making connections outside the island. In the post-contact period, Ambrymese were more mobile than many of their neighbours, as they recruited vigorously in a labour trade taking them to distant destinations and facilitating a fragmentation of the local population, already decimated by introduced disease. In addition, conversion of a large proportion of the population to Christianity brought local movement. The named domains, with their primordial connections to ancient sites replete with cosmo-mythic significance, were reconstituted as villages of one denomination or another, containing members of many different origin sites. Cash-cropping became characteristic of coastal, Christian settlements whose residents saw themselves as opposed to their ‘heathen’ neighbours. For the bush-folk, kastom was both symbolic of their identification with the past and their justification for exclusive access to its popular manifestations in the artefact trade, in the present. In the pre-Independence 1970s, local politics and pressure on productive resources including kastom, forced a radical re-emphasis on primordial connection at the expense of the more ‘rhizomatic’ attachments inside and outside domains, the boundaries of districts and even the island itself that had been, until then, more characteristic of Ambrymese place-making.

‘Writing in the Eye of a Storm’: Response to Gaynor Macdonald’s Review Article in Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarin Diane Bell	219-223
Obituary to Raymond W. Firth, 1901-2002	224-229
Obituary to Annie Margaret McArthur, 1919-2002	230-231
Book Review Essay
Michael Jackson Minima Ethnographica: Intersubjectivity and the Anthropological Project [Chris Eipper]	232

Book Reviews

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