2 upcoming Sydney events of interest to anthropologists:

• Traditional Healing at the 4th Sydney Latin America Film Festival

Monday 7 September 6:00pm @ Dendy Opera Quays

The film “La Curacion / Healing” (Ecuador, Spanish and Quechua with English subtitles, 56 minutes) by Yoni Goldstein will screen at 6pm.  After the film, Kalpana Ram, Head of the Macquarie Department of Anthropology, will facilitate a panel of speakers, including practising shamanic healers.  Speakers will include Chris Kavelin of Macquarie University, Byron Serrano from the Tribal Warrior Association, Beata Alfoldi-Askew from Inner Vision Quest, and Violeta Arraya from the Alazan Horse Centre. Entry is first come first served, no bookings.

• Mining and Sovereignty microcinema

Tuesday 8 September, 6pm @ Dendy Opera Quay

Forum discussion after screening of film When Clouds Clear on resistance to copper mining in northern Ecuador.  The forum has speakers who will connect the struggle to Australian Indigenous politics.

For full program details see www.sydneylatinofilmfestival.org.

Rind by keishkakeishka, (c) Creative Commons, some rights reserved.

Below is an announcement about an upcoming lecture by Kathleen Stewart in Sydney.  Scroll on down to wonder at the postmodern abstract for her talk.

Transforming Cultures is pleased to announce that this year the TfC Annual Lecture will be presented by:

Professor Kathleen Stewart (Dept. of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin).

Atmospheric Atunements

Thursday 20th August 2009, 6:00-8:00 pm
University of Technology in Sydney Gallery Function Centre, Level 6, UTS Tower Building.

Abstract:
Something throws itself together. Or sags, shifts tone, or fails. Invisible airs quicken around nascent forms, rinding up like the skin of an orange. Circulating forces waver and pulse, visceralizing the sheer sense of something happening. The ordinary hums with the background noise of all that takes place in moments, scenes, objects, resonances, rhythms. The atmospheric attunes to the sentience of things passing in and out of existence, to the expressivity of what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘whatever being’. This sensing out that attends is itself a labor of worlding, an effort to inhabit a flighty ground.

This writing asks what it takes to live out the worlding of forces rinding up and dissipating. But it also wonders about the significance of accretion itself. The way that an atmosphere accretes for senses in sync with it (or sort it) and the worlding that accrues partially or fully, quickly or slowly, for a time, with habit or shock, in practices or daydreams. A worlding – an attunement – that can be sloughed off, realized, imagined, brought to bear or just born.

I hope to attend so that, if there’s a question and answer session afterward, I can ask, “What is rinding?”

Fresh in the footsteps of Lisa’s post on anthropologists and the U.S. military, I want to signal that it is not the only power that wants to use them. I just finished attending the International Congress of Ethnological and Anthropological Sciences, organised by a relatively obscure global organisation called International Union of Ethnological and Anthropological Sciences and held every five years. This year’s congress was held in Kunming, China, and organised by the Chinese government’s Ethnic Affairs Commission. The chair of the organising committee was the head of the commission, holding ministerial rank; but the conference was opened by a much higher official, Hui Liangyu, a member of the Politburo (the Chinese Communist Party’s highest body) and, judging by his name, a Muslim.

The conference, hailed as the largest anthropology event in the world (with over 4,000 participants) was on China’s national television and front-page news in the local papers. The Kunming city government allocated 5 million yuan (about 500 thousand euro) for it, although as conference fees were quite steep by local standards (I paid 1,400 yuan) and I can’t imagine that the organisers had to pay rent for the venues, it is a question what this was spent on. Perhaps on the extra police allocated to that part of the city: their job included removing all beggars from the streets. They were also heavily guarding the Yunnan University campus that hosted the conference. One had to show one’s pass three times before being allowed into the meeting rooms, and at least one participant I met, from a Chinese NGO, was refused registration (of course, he could get in with someone else’s pass). In order to get a pass, one had to show one’s passport, whose number was taken down along with a range of personal data, including religion (the latter supposedly for catering purposes, but in fact no one checked how many people chose the halal or vegetarian dining halls). When I asked the staff why these measures had been taken, I was at first told that there was a terrorist threat (the event came after the rioting in Xinjiang, and Muslim visitors to China were being visibly scrutinized at Peking Airport when I arrived), and then that it was prevent unqualified but eager Chinese scholars from storming the venue. Both explanations seem unlikely: rather, I think the organisers wanted to make sure that journalists or activists would not disrupt the proceedings, much of which were devoted to China’s “harmonious society.”

Anthropologists from all over the world seemed happy enough to play along with this spectacle of surveillance as well as with the display of happy ethnic minorities in costumes, who were on campus for photo ops. This despite the fact that, last year, the conference was abruptly postponed at about a month’s notice and no explanation when the government decided that it was best not to hold any major events just ahead of the Olympics. No attempt was made to compensate those who had already paid their airfare.

Now, while the Chinese government used this event to boost the standing of its ethnic policy after the events in Xinjiang in Tibet, anthropologists in China may have benefited from this extra attention. After all, it is not often that top political leaders declare that anthropological research is important. And there was a number of interesting panels at the conference, including two on “rewriting culture in Chinese,” organised by Gao Bingzhong from Peking University and Hor Ting, who recently returned from Paris to Xiamen to set up a centre for the anthropology of Western societies.

As I have written earlier on this blog in my review of Xiang Biao’s book Global Body Shopping, I think it is very important for non-Western anthropologists to begin looking in earnest at Western societies. But at these panels there was too much talk about wresting the West’s discursive hegemony away from it and about presenting a “Chinese perspective” and too little about the epistemological need for such research. Overall, the conference displayed a curiously schizophrenic mindset: the — very laudable — desire to establish independent standards and language for a Chinese anthropology came together with a desire to be legitimized by the approval of famous Western figures, some of whom were invited, expenses paid, to chair panels that were entirely in Chinese and of which they understood nothing.

Next month the University of Western Sydney will be launching a new Centre for the Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies.  Here are the details of the Centre and the launch:

Launch of the new Centre for the Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies

The University of Western Sydney is its new Centre for the Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies on the 16th of July, 2009 (Sydney, Bankstown Campus, Lecture Theatre 4, Building 23)

Prof. Jim Beckford (Warwick University, UK), Prof. Riaz Hassan (Flinders University), Prof. Fethi Mansouri (Deakin University), A/Prof. Gabriele Marranci (UWS), and Prof. Bryan Turner (UWS) will be
speaking on the day.

A copy of the program for the launch can be downloaded at

http://tinyurl.com/mqkwrj and the invitation can be found at the following URL http://tinyurl.com/nceisinvite

For more information or to RSVP, please contact Judy Crabb, Executive Officer, College of Arts: j.crabb@uws.edu.au, or (02) 9772 6765.

Attendees are welcome to attend the dinner but bookings for this are essential.

The development of this Centre has been assisted by a Federal Government grant of $8m which established the National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies and brings together the University of
Melbourne, Griffith University, and the University of Western Sydney. Collaboration between these institutions has already established a new undergraduate program in Islamic studies.

The Director of the Research Centre is Professor Bryan Turner,Professor of Social and Political Thought in the School of Humanities and Languages in the College of Arts.

The Research Centre is essentially concerned with the contemporary world and will seek to foster comparative studies of Muslim communities both within and outside Australia.

While I am in announcement mode, here are the details of an upcoming symposium that may be of interest to some CM readers.

SYMPOSIUM:    Sunday 19th of July

CONFERENCE:   Mon-Tue 20-21 July

Under the broad theme of ?Challenging Islamophobia: towards social
justice & inclusion?, National Social Cohesion Conference will explore
the following themes in six plenary sessions.

Muslim experiences, settling in Australia

Media and its Role in Public Hysteria

On the Borderline of Vilification and Freedom of Speech

Politics of Diversity and the Politics of Marginalisation

Muslim Women: Narrated experiences from the margins

Anti-racism: Learning from the past, new strategies

Attached are full conference details and registration form. Please
email filled registration form to info@affinity.org.au, alternatively
you can register online at www.affinity.org.au.

For any other enquiries please email info@affinity.org.au.

We look forward to your attendance and participation in discussions.

On June 20, marking two years of the Northern Territory Intervention, demonstrations will be held across the country in defense of Aboriginal Rights .

See the Youtube promo at

http://www.youtube.com/user/solidtv7#uploads/7/9rHbpKEZVco

Darwin: 11am Raintree Park contact Dave 0407209520

Sydney: 10:30 Belmore Park contact Monique on 0415410558

Brisbane: 11.00am Queen’s park contact Rob 0424265730 or Sam 0401227443

Melbourne: 12pm outside the State Library Cnr Swanston/La Trobe sts.

Perth: 12 noon Wesley Church.

This rally will have a focus on Aboriginal death’s in custody, demanding justice for Mr Ward.

www.rollbacktheintervention.wordpress.com

www.stoptheintervention.org

On 14 May, Alfons van Marrewijk, who has been guest blogger on CM during his recent stay in Sydney, gave his inaugural lecture at the Vrije Universiteit as the newly appointed Professor of Business Anthropology, Especially the Anthropology opf Cultural Interventions in Complex and Public/Private Networks. Such lectures are major public events with considerable pomp (I am already planning my own in November!), and the topic signifies a further step in the academic mainstreaming of business anthropology (although the VU has already been in a special situation, having both a social and cultural anthropology department and one that deals largely with organisational anthropology). The lecture broadly outlined the scope of business anthropology in Alfons’ own practice, in which I found particularly interesting the focus on material culture and spatial settings — from office spaces to project locations — which is close to the interests of one of our PhD students at Macquarie, Melanie Uy, who is doing her research in a small Chinese company.

Corporate anthropology as well as the anthropology of business is increasingly in the news in Europe as well, and the collapse of financial institutions may have given it a boost. The simple idea that managers do not always behave rationally suddenly does not need “selling.” Alfons mentioned that British anthropologist Gillian Tett’s book Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophy (a rather un-anthropological title, I must say) received the British Press Award. The book Gezocht: Antropoloog m/v (Required: Anthropologist [m/f]) and the organisation NAGA (Niet Academisch Gebonden Antropologen, Anthropologists Without Academic Affiliation) are testimony to the emergence of the trend in the Netherlands. Unlike in many other academic settings, at the VU, there is no animosity between academic and applied anthropologists, and the institutional conditions for a close interaction between them are at hand. Yet even here, the training of anthropology students (in either department) has not quite kept step with or been able to drive home the fact that anthropologists are in demand in the workplace — despite the fact that Alfons himself, together with another colleague in his department, runs an anthropology consultancy.

The Society for Applied Anthropology has just released its call for papers for its upcoming conference.  Readers of CM might be interested in attending or presenting.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) invites abstracts (papers and
posters) for the Program of the 69th Annual Meeting in Santa Fe, NM, March
17-21, 2009.  The theme of the Program is ³Global Challenge, Local Action:
Ethical Engagement, Partnerships and Practice².

The Society is a multi-disciplinary association that focuses on problem
definition and resolution.  We welcome papers from all disciplines.  The
deadline for abstract submission is October 15, 2008. For additional
information on the theme, abstract size/format, and the meeting, please
visit our web page (www.sfaa.net, click on ³Annual Meeting²).

If you have a webpage for links, please add the following:

The Society for Applied Anthropology is pleased to announce our 69th Annual
Meeting in Santa Fe, NM, March 17-21, 2009.
For meeting information visit
http://www.sfaa.net/sfaa2009.html

Please contact me if you have any questions.

Melissa Cope
Society for Applied Anthropology
PO Box 2436
Oklahoma City, OK  73101
405-843-5113
405-843-8553 (fax)
melissa@sfaa.net

Here is  a press release regarding a new exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.

Yinalung Yenu: women’s journey

An exhibition celebrating Australian Indigenous women

Discover Indigenous women’s contribution to the Australian community through a new exhibition – Yinalung Yenu: women’s journey – opening at the Powerhouse Museum on 21 March.

Yinalung Yenu: women’s journey will take visitors on a journey into the sometimes unknown and often unexplained world of Indigenous Australian women. A world of people, land, law and ritual, of ceremony and celebration, of social order, language, story, song and dance, art, lore, plants and animals.

Through objects, photographs and personal interviews, Yinalung Yenu reveals the many roles Indigenous women have played in Australian society from traditional times to the present.

The exhibition explores areas where a woman’s influence far outweighed those of Indigenous men, from their everyday activities as educators, child rearers, camp builders and food collectors, to their influential role as decision makers, artists, story tellers, peace keepers and healers.

This history is interpreted through a display of beautiful crafts from the Powerhouse Museum collection, including textiles, posters, ceramics and basketwork, each of which reveal the skill and artistry of Indigenous women.

The exhibition also features the stories of six prominent Indigenous Australian women: doctors and twin sisters Dr Marlene Kong and Dr Marilyn Clarke; artist, designer and businesswoman Bronwyn Bancroft; lawyer and university professor Larissa Behrendt; and respected elders Aunty Beryl Carmichael and Aunty Sue Blacklock.

Be inspired by the strength and expression of these Indigenous women who have become successful in contemporary Australian society and who have become role models for a new generation.

Yinalung Yenu: women’s journey reflects the ways in which Indigenous Australian women’s knowledge and perspectives of their world were often ignored until recent times. Today, they are carving their rightful place in Australia’s Indigenous history and endowing the next generation of women with the knowledge to speak to their future for succeeding generations of women to come.

On View:          Yinalung Yenu: women’s journey

Date:                From 21 March 2008

Address:           Powerhouse Museum, 500 Harris Street, Ultimo, Sydney

Telephone:       (02) 9217 0111 or infoline (02) 9217 0444

Website:           www.powerhousemuseum.com

Hours:              10.00am to 5.00pm (closed Christmas Day)

Admission:       $10 adult, $5 child, $6 concession and $25 family.  Powerhouse Museum members and children under four admitted free.

More Yum Cha, an exhibition featuring several Chinese artists, is currently showing at the Ray Hughes Gallery in Sydney. As this image shows, at least some of the exhibition involves an engagement with China’s relationship to globalisation.

The exhibition is running till 16 February.