AustLit

'By analyzing one of the world's greatest collections of Indigenous song, myth, and ceremony--the collections of linguist/anthropologist T. G. H. Strehlow--Ceremony Men demonstrates how inextricably intertwined ethnographic collections can become in complex historical and social relations. In revealing his process to return an anthropological collection to Aboriginal communities in remote central Australia, Jason M. Gibson highlights the importance of personal rapport and collaborations in ethnographic exchange, both past and present, and demonstrates the ongoing importance of sociality, relationship, and orality when Indigenous peoples encounter museum collections today. Combining forensic historical analysis with contemporary ethnographic research, this book challenges the notion that anthropological archives will necessarily become authoritative or dominant statements on a people's cultural identity. Instead, Indigenous peoples will often interrogate and recontextualize this material with great dexterity as they work to reintegrate the documented into their present-day social lives.

'By theorizing the nature of the documenter-documented relationships this book makes an important contribution to the simplistic postcolonial generalizations that dominate analyses of colonial interaction. A story of local agency is uncovered that enriches our understanding of the human engagements that took, and continue to take, place within varying colonial relations of Australia.' (Publication summary)

'For most Australian Aboriginal people, the impact of colonialism was blunt—dispossession, dislocation, disease, murder, and missionization. Yet there is another story of Australian history that has remained untold, a story of enterprise and entrepreneurship, of Aboriginal people seizing the opportunity to profit from life at sea as whalers and sealers. In some cases participation was voluntary; in others it was more invidious and involved kidnapping and trade in women. In many cases, the individuals maintained and exercised a degree of personal autonomy and agency within their new circumstances. This book explores some of their lives and adventures by analyzing archival records of maritime industry, captains’ logs, ships’ records, and the journals of the sailors themselves, among other artifacts. Much of what is known about this period comes from the writings of Herman Melville, and in this book Melville’s whaling novels act as a prism through which relations aboard ships are understood. Drawing on both history and literature, Roving Mariners provides a comprehensive history of Australian Aboriginal whaling and sealing.' (Source: Amazon website)

'Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls examines the bizarre and fascinating range of gender portrayals in film at the end of the twentieth century. In order to view the screened face of gender in bold new ways, the contributors cover a wide variety of cinematic forms and styles–from the boy-girls of Hong Kong cinema to the on-screen modesty of post-revolutionary Iran to the New Hollywood's treatment of homosexuality, female power, and male intellectuality. Throughout, the works of important filmmakers are analyzed, including Ridley Scott, David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmusch, Woody Allen, Rakhshan Banietemad, Kathryn Bigelow, Bertrand Tavernier, Roman Polanski, and many others.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.