Properly Warumungu: Indigenous future-making in a remote Australian town [microform]
- Bib ID:
- 3417007
- Format:
- Book and Microform
- Author:
- Christen, Kimberly
- Description:
- 384 p.
- Summary:
-
This dissertation examines cultural preservation and innovation in practice. Based on fieldwork in Tennant Creek, Northern Territory, Australia, I explore one community's entanglements with national land rights legislation, transnational interests in mining, and shifts in cultural tourism. In this network of sometimes-unlikely partners, I trace the emergence of coexisting forms of aboriginality-through material objects, cultural performances, and unexpected alliances. Within these collaborations---old and new---the Warumungu sense of "properness" recasts contested sets of actions and events that align with---but don't necessarily recreate---an ideal notion of the past. New partnerships and mutually beneficial projects, although not devoid of power imbalances, are a necessary part of the community's future.
Each chapter confronts the web of issues involved in these future-making activities: refraining performance as part of commercial ventures, creating new cultural products, rearticulating generational and land-based relationships, effectively engaging with consultants to display Warumungu culture, and re-narrating painful as well as joyous pasts for commercial benefit. These local concerns intersect with and redefine global indigenous debates over commercial land use, cultural reproduction, intellectual property rights, and non-Aboriginal access to Aboriginal cultural knowledge.
- Notes:
-
- (UnM)AAI3135050
- Chair: James Clifford.
- Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-05, Section: A, page: 1840.
- Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 2004.
- Reproduction:
- Microfiche. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International.
- Subject:
- Other authors/contributors:
- University of California, Santa Cruz
- Copyright:
-
In Copyright
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Copyright status was determined using the following information:
- Material type:
- Literary Dramatic Musical
- Published status:
- Unpublished
- Creation date:
- 2004
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