I keep thinking of this American Chopper meme and why it makes me laugh but also bugs me. The argument of the moustachioed man is one that is familiar to me but I find it to be naive. When such pure standards are set for decolonisation, the baby is inevitably thrown out with the bath water. As Graeber and Wengrow put it: “To say Mi’kmaq thought is unimportant would be racist; to say it’s unknowable because the sources were racist, however, does rather let one off the hook.”

Anthropology may never be decolonised but that fact shouldn’t be taken as permission to avoid dealing in complexity (or dare I say ‘entanglement’) altogether. Anyone who works seriously with archival materials knows that knowledge is distorted by the power dynamic producing it, but it is never completely in its thrall. It has its own mercurial logic that very often eludes the structure that hopes to contain it. Edward Said is easily invoked by those who want to bring the news about how orientalist anthropology is, while his call to action is conveniently ignored. Said’s methodological program is all about how to do the the liberating work of reanalysis, knowing that this work will never be perfect and never be finished. Denying any possibility of reading against the grain, or finding the countersign (per Bronwyn Douglas), is to take colonial discourse at its word and to hand it all the easy power that it pretends to have already.

It’s also a neat pretext for denying Indigenous voices simply because you don’t like the packaging they arrive in, per Graeber and Wengrow’s critique. And quite apart from being a bit self-satisfied and activist-splainy, this denial amounts to accusing black and Indigenous anthropologists of double consciousness, or of being duped, rather than being much better informed about the dynamics of knowledge and interpretation than you are.

To paraphrase Said himself, “read a fucking book” (Said 2004 ,’The return to philology’). OK, well not exactly but that’s the gist.

Years ago, during the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, I asked a professor of philology at the University of Cape Town how it was that some non-white students like himself were able to graduate at all under the apartheid regime. He said that it was simple: racist ideology loves to project itself as totalising but it never fully succeeds. This is just the kind of gritty optimism that should precede the troubling task of reading colonial texts.

This list gets smaller each year, a sure sign that my idle reading time is diminishing. It was a year of endless pandemic chores, grant-chasing and depression. But I now have job security for 6 years and it feels like a great reprieve.

One piece needs a special mention, just because it was so surprising. This is John Semley’s account of the US postal service that somehow ends up talking about everything that ails us in this scary political moment: America, Ex Post Facto. Also, loved Sharon Old’s poem First Thanksgiving, written 16 years ago but it was new to me and it hit me very hard.

Academia

• The problems of not showing enough love for academic work (opinion) | Inside Higher Ed
• Toxic Academic Career Advice and the Wrong Answers to- ‘Why didn’t I get the job?’ — Home
• Feminist Mentors can be Misogynist Colleagues – Edge for Scholars
• Sexism in the Academy

America

• The Hour of the Barbarian
• America, Ex Post Facto | John Semley

Anthropology/ethnography

• ‘There was a prophecy I would come’: the western men who think they are South Pacific kings
• Explainer: the myth of the Noble Savage
• The “Uluru prophecy” and New Age conspiracy: Between a rock and a golden age

Ethics & the examined life

• The Problem with Pema Chödrön
• ‘My Man Friends Make Me Sad’​
• How to Stay Young Forever

Funny

• The Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime Bear Expanded Universe
• The Only Possible Poems – McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
• By God! This Is Simply a Gorgeous Crevasse

Years ago when I was contributing to a report for a native title claim in the Pilbara, I came across this passage written by Émile Clement over a century ago:

The phrase I enjoy the most is: “[t]he Emu, being a very inquisitive bird…”. Emus certainly have a funny way of looking at you sidewise like a chook calculating the odds that you will drop part of your sandwich. As a child, my sister was about to bite into a whole tomato when an inquisitive emu approached her from behind and snatched the tomato out of her hand. She turned to see a tomato-shaped bulge travelling slowly down its neck.

It’s much smaller list this year, probably because of all the madness: Covid, homeschooling, a book manuscript, grant applications, illness. For all these reasons I did a lot less of my usual idle and aimless reading. The stand-out article is Married (Happily) With Issues (even though it was published yonks ago), and I loved the poem Good Bones by Maggie Smith. 

Academia

• The glut of prizes is undermining the true value of research and teaching
• Hindsight’s hoard: What academics most wish they had known earlier
• On Quitting Academia
• Jan Blommaert: Looking back: What was important?
• Keep doing what you love – Essay – Twentieth-century history & later – TLS

Anthropology/ethnography

• COVID 19: The Apocalypse and African Dimensions of Victory, by… | CenSAMM
• ABC Religion & Ethics: The relevance of Aboriginal political concepts: Autonomous selfhood 
• Gender Is What You Make of It – Issue 88: Love & Sex – Nautilus
• Racialization, language science, and nineteenth century anthropometrics

Continue reading →

I’ve been terrible at updating this blog this year, for obvious reasons, but I’m going to spell them out anyway as succinctly as possible: pandemic, homeschooling, book manuscript, funding applications.

A round-up of recent news:

• My paper on message sticks in the Journal of Material Culture has finally been let out of its pre-print holding pen and into the real world. Thanks to the Max Planck it’s open access: “Australian message sticks: Old questions, new directions”
• I’m applying for another round of research funding. Read about my Messiah complex here.
• The one-and-only Ingrid Piller interviewed me about my message stick research. For both of us it was our first experience of podcasting and you can listen to the result here. Ingrid also wrote an excellent accompanying blog post: ‘What can Australian message sticks teach us about literacy?“
• I’m on the look-out for MA or Hons students here

Over and out.

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