Anthropology - Visiting Scholars
June-August 2009
Prof Anke Niehof and Dr Roy Jordaan - Visiting Scholars in Anthropology in the School of Political and Social Inquiry
Anke Niehof holds the Chair of Sociology of Consumers and Households, Department of Social Sciences, Wageningen University in the Netherlands. She is an anthropologist and demographer by training and obtained her PhD at Leiden University, published as "Women and Fertility in Madura, Indonesia", 1985. At Wageningen University she supervises a large research project on the role of women in food systems in sub-Saharan Africa and impacts of HIV and AIDS (the so-called AWLAE Project) in the framework of which 19 women scholars from 11 African countries are doing their PhD at Wageningen University. A book on the findings of the AWLAE Project is in preparation, to be published by Earthscan and edited by Anke Niehof together with Gabriel Rugalema and Stuart Gillespie. While at Monash, Prof Niehof will present a seminar on her work, "Women and Household Food and Nutrition Security - with particular reference to insular Southeast Asia".
Roy Jordaan is author of "Imagine Buddha in Prambanan: reconsidering the Buddhist background of the Loro Jonggrang temple complex", Leiden: Vakgroep Talen en Culturen van Zuidoost-Azie en Oceanie, Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden, 1993; and the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies Working Paper, "Exploring the Role of the Sailendras in Early Eastern Javanese History", Monash Asia Institute Press, 2007. He is also editor of the volume "In Praise of Prambanan", Leiden: KITLV Press, 1996. His paper ‘The bridge of Rama in Southeast Asia; The causeay reliefs of Prambanan and Phimai re-examined’, was recently presented at the international workshop ‘The Old Javanese Ramayana: Text, History and Culture’, Jakarta, 26-28 May 2009. While at Monash, Roy Jordaan presented a seminar on "Candi Prambanan as a Holy Water Sanctuary".
August 2008 - Michael Herzfeld visits and screens 'Monti Moments'
Michael Herzfeld, professor of anthropology at Harvard University, screened his ethnographic film "Monti Moments" at the Monash anthropology seminar series on 14th August, 2008. Herzfeld, the author of nine books and well over one hundred scholarly articles and book chapters, is a repeat visitor to Monash anthropology, having previously presented a seminar paper in 2007 based on his work in Italy. Besides this work, Herzfeld is renowned for his research in Greece and Thailand.
September 2006 - Prof Gillian Cowlishaw
Prof Gillian Cowlishaw, ARC Professorial Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Technology in Sydney is visiting Monash to talk with anthropology undergraduate students studying her work. Prof Cowlishaw is an acclaimed author whose book, Blackfellas Whitefellas and the Hidden Injuries of Race(Blackwell) was awarded the Gleebooks Prize for Critical Writing in the 2005 NSW Premier's Literary Awards.
While at Monash, Prof Cowlishaw is presenting a paper in the Anthropology Seminar series at 3.00pm on Tuesday, 19th September 2006. Her seminar paper is entitled: Erasing Social Trauma: Contemporary Australian History and Ethnography
Later that evening, Prof Cowlishaw will be at Readings Bookshop for the launch of a new book Moving Anthropology: Critical Indigenous Studies, edited by Tess Lea, Emma Kowal and Gillian Cowlishaw.The Judges Citation for her Gleebooks Prize for Critical Writing read as follows:
“In the prologue to this important and engaging book, Gillian Cowlishaw seeks eyewitness reports from townspeople (black and white) affected by the events of the night of 5 December, 1997, when a series of disturbances which became known as The Riot erupted in the main street of Bourke, rural NSW . Their testimony sets the scene for a probing examination of race, identity and racialized violence in Bourke, and beyond, to other settler colonies where Indigenous populations co-exist with a White majority.
Bourke, seen by many as a hellhole of violence and empty lives, is reconfigured by the author's empirical disclosures as a 'site of rich social relations'. With clarity and empathy, Cowlishaw sets out to disturb conventional interpretations of scenes such as The Bourke Riot (whites as mindless racists, blacks as angry victims) through the application of her anthropological eye for the telling detail. We meet a shopkeeper whose windows have been broken, 'It is absolutely over the top, everyone in the town is fed up…'; then segue to Andy, an Aboriginal man facing serious charges, who characterizes the riot as 'just a blue in the main street'. With her cast assembled and speaking their lines, Cowlishaw draws the reader closer and closer to the realities behind media images which shape our perceptions and misconceptions.
In a fine chapter called 'Performance', the author explores the dominant culture's view of the 'aberrant behaviour' exhibited by the Bourke Aborigines who regularly gather at the Post Office Hotel, the 'roughest pub in town'. Cowlishaw reframes this regular gathering, considering it as a performance, an assertion of presence, where an 'audience is required or assumed'. We discover that the December Riot was a 'skirmish in a long-standing homemade war involving contrasting traditions that want to claim the street as theirs'. Viewed by the white population - whose public demeanour is more restrained - the 'boisterous and rough sense of humor of Aboriginal sociality' becomes cause for alarm and disquiet, and, at a deeper level, an overt threat to the sovereignty of the street.
Drawing on critical discussion evoked by her own earlier study, Black White or Brindle (1988) set in the river towns of western NSW, the author repositions white racist voices at the interface of blackfella/whitefella rivalries in Bourke, eschewing the political correctness that seeks to silence racist outbursts. By allowing these voices to be heard, by listening to the full expression of hypocrisy and inconsistency, Cowlishaw exposes and interrogates 'the rivalries between imagined racial identities'.
This book is a finely argued case for alternate readings of received reports of racial violence, and is as pertinent to the recent incidents at Redfern, Sydney, as it is to rural Bourke in 1997. Cowlishaw draws on her strengths as an anthropologist, an ethnographer, and a writer of lively, lucid prose to bring us fresh insights into a vexed and misunderstood, and very timely, issue at the heart of Australian culture.”