Altman Jon C. - Culture crisis: anthropology and politics in Aboriginal Australia

JON ALTMAN is a social scientist with a disciplinary focus on anthropology and economics. He was director of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research which he established at the Australian National University, 1990 to 2010. He has researched Aboriginal development issues since 1976 when he came to Australia. He is currently an ARC Australian Professorial Fellow at CAEPR focusing his research on Aboriginal intercultural futures in the hybrid economy.

DIANE AUSTIN-BROOS is professor emerita at the University of Sydney. She worked in the Caribbean for eighteen years prior to beginning research in Central Australia in 1989. She retains a keen interest in both fields and has published widely. Her most recent book is Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past: Invasion, Violence and Imagination in Indigenous Central Australia.

JEREMY BECKETT is an anthropologist with a particular interest in the place of Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial society. He has worked with Aboriginal people in western New South Wales and Torres Strait Islanders in the Strait and mainland Australia, and also with Muslim Filipinos in Mindanao. Foremost among his many publications are Torres Strait Islanders: Custom and Colonialism and the edited collection Past and Present: The Construction of Aboriginality . He is emeritus associate professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney.

GILLIAN COWLISHAW holds an ARC Australian Professorial Fellowship at the University of Sydney. Her recent publications include Blackfellas, Whitefellas and the Hidden Injuries of Race and The Citys Outback , the latter an adventurous ethnography that pursues Indigeneity in western Sydney.

MELINDA HINKSON teaches social anthropology and is convenor of the Visual Culture Research program in the Research School of Humanities and the Arts, the Australian National University. Among her recent publications are An Appreciation of Difference: WEH Stanner and Aboriginal Australia (co-edited with Jeremy Beckett) and Coercive Reconciliation: Stabilise, Normalise, Exit Aboriginal Australia (co-edited with Jon Altman).

EMMA KOWAL is a cultural anthropologist of White anti-racism and Indigenous governance in Australia, with a background in clinical medicine and public health research. She is the co-editor of Moving Anthropology: Critical Indigenous Studies and her work has been published in American Anthropologist , Social Science and Medicine , The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology and in national and international medical journals. She is currently a National Health and Medical Research Council postdoctoral fellow in anthropology at the University of Melbourne.

MARCIA LANGTON is professor of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne. She is a descendant of the Yiman and Bijarra peoples of Queensland. She is an anthropologist and geographer with degrees from the Australian National University and Macquarie University. Her doctoral thesis concerned the performance of property rights by Aboriginal people of eastern Cape York, Queensland. She is a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences of Australia. She was chair of the Board of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership from 2004 to late 2009 and is chair of the Board of the Museums and Galleries of the Northern Territory.

ANDREW LATTAS is professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway. His PhD in anthropology was on early colonial Australian history. He has published extensively on race relations in contemporary Australia and most recently on the 2005 Cronulla riot. His extensive fieldwork in Papua New Guinea has resulted in two books and numerous articles on masks, gender relations, race relations and millenarian movements. His first book, Cultures of Secrecy , was on cargo cults and his forthcoming book, Dreams, Madness and Fairy Tales , is on everyday forms of utopia and dystopia in Papua New Guinea.

TESS LEA is associate professor of anthropology at Charles Darwin University, where she founded the School for Social and Policy Research to foster applied and theoretical analyses on life in north Australia. She studies the interface between people and things in regional and remote Australia. A former ministerial adviser, she has also studied bureaucracies ethnographically. Her book Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts, Indigenous Health in Northern Australia examines the culture of health policy and service provision from the inside out.

FRANCESCA MERLAN is professor of anthropology at the Australian National University. She has over thirty years familiarity with Indigenous communities and questions of social change and adaptation in the Northern Territory, and researches and writes about these and related issues elsewhere in Australia, in Papua New Guinea and in Europe.

BARRY MORRIS is a senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of Newcastle. He has published widely in national and international journals, is the author of Domesticating Resistance: The Dhan-gadi Aborigines and the Australian State , and co-editor of Race Matters: Indigenous Australians and Our Society ( with Gillian Cowlishaw) and Expert Knowledge: First World Peoples, Consultancy, and Anthropology (with Rohan Bastin).

YASMINE MUSHARBASH spent over three years of participant observation in the Warlpiri camps of Yuendumu, as a postgraduate of the Australian National University and postdoctoral fellow with the University of Western Australia. She is the author of Yuendumu Everyday: Contemporary Life in Remote Aboriginal Australia and is currently a lecturer with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney.

NICOLAS PETERSON is a professor of anthropology in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University. His main areas of fieldwork have been in northeast Arnhem Land and the Tanami Desert. His research interests include economic anthropology, land and marine tenure, fourth world people and the state. Since working for the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Land Rights as its research officer, he has been involved in the preparation of a dozen land and native title claims. Recent publications include the compiled and introduced book Donald Thomson in Arnhem Land , and The Makers and Making of Indigenous Australian Museum Collections , co-edited with Lindy Allen and Louise Hamby.