Search Results

After recalling the international context of the contemporary claims to cultural property, Glowczewski discusses the concept of inalienability which, in central and north western Australia, surrounds the ritual circulation of sacred objects and the cults of which they are a part, including rituals of colonial resistance. Afterwards she examines the elaboration of a culture centre which involved in the 1990’s the representatives of a dozen Aboriginal languages and organisations based in the coastal town of Broome; this initiative reflected an attempt to control the representation given of their cultures and to claim the reappropriation of their objects (in Museums) and knowledge in a process of cultural repatriation and political affirmation. First published in 2002.

This chapter concludes the section on silver, and the book as a whole, by applying the translation/mistranslation method developed in earlier chapters to the theories of metallic generation and conversion that informed colonial amalgamation technologies. It begins by reviewing theories of likeness and attraction in classical natural philosophy and early modern European sources, wherein the combination of opposite forces like hot and cold, or male and female, enables matter to come into being or change shape. The chapter next analyzes how colonial miners and metallurgists reinterpreted the lessons of antiquity and made sameness into a source of metallic generation. European writers’ inability to translate these ideas suggests that the ideas that underpinned amalgamation technologies came from Indigenous mining communities.

This chapter introduces the foundational principles of Archaeologies of Listening. It takes the reader back to the genesis of anthropological method as well as the debates that have influenced attitudes toward indigenous knowledge and oral traditions over the last century. It critically examines the failure of “New Archaeology” to employ anthropological methods and proposes a complementary practice that does not eschew science but advocates a broader practice incorporating empirical evidence from those with deep experience with material cultures and landscapes. This chapter brings into focus how a richer interpretative posture occurs when we open our practice to the knowledge of others by employing the principles of apprenticeship and patience when working with communities. By putting into action the principle of epistemic humility, alternative views of the past open as do alternative ontologies that structure how the archaeological record is formed and heritage is performed.