AIATSIS seminars are held at 2.30 pm in the Macintosh_Room, Acton
House. All interested people are welcome.
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Thursday 8 October 2.30pm - 4.00pm
Speaker: Dr Peter Sutton, Independent
Anthropologist/Linguist
Topic: Realism, Pluralism and Materialism: Competing
Myths of Origin for Australian Languages
There has long been a very firm cultural closure between
Aboriginal traditions and academic theories, especially those
concerned with origins of cultural institutions. Dr Sutton
compares different accounts of how the diversity of Aboriginal
languages arose and suggests that mythic/theoretical accounts by
Aboriginal people enshrine principles that academic theorists
ignore to their own disadvantage.
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Thursday 15 October 2.30pm - 4.00pm
Speaker: Marcia Langton, Lecturer in Aboriginal Studies
in Anthropology, Macquarie University
Topic: On the politics and aesthetics of
Aboriginal film and video making
Marcia Langton will present part of a larger study, commissioned
by the Australian Film Commission, which attempts to find
appropriate critical theoretical stances for understanding
Aboriginal film and video making.
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Thursday 22 October 2.30pm - 4.00pm
Speaker: Don Baker, Visiting Fellow, History, Arts Faculty,
ANU
Topic: Major Mitchell and the Aborigines
of the Darling and Murray
Don Baker is writing a biography of Thomas Mitchell, whose
expedition journals are a rich but tricky source for understanding
Aboriginal life in the Murray-Darling basin in the 1830s. He will
concentrate on two passages describing how members of his
exploring expeditions killed Aboriginal people, on the Darling in
1835 and on the Murray in 1836. He will bring in other evidence
in an attempt to reconstruct the events as both sides may have
viewed them.
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Thursday 29 October 2.30pm - 4.00pm
Speaker: Dr Dany Adone, College of Cognitive
Science, University of Hamburg
Topic: Creole Languages as identity markers
Dr Adone, a native speaker of Mauritian Creole who is now studying
Australian Kriol, will look at patterns in the use of both
languages in order to compare their possible futures.
Mauritian Creole, which coexists with French and a number of
Indian languages, is now gaining recognition as the de facto
national language of Mauritius. Across parts of northern
Australia Kriol coexists with standard and Aboriginal varieties of
English and with ancestral Australian languages. It too is
gaining in strength. What part does asserting a distinctive
cultural identity play in the strength of each?
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Thursday 5 November 2.30pm - 4.00pm
Speaker: Michael Cooke, Lecturer, Centre for Australian
Languages and Linguistics, Batchelor College
Topic: The politics of court interpreting
in a cross-cultural cross-examination
Michael Cooke acted as Djambarrpuyngu interpreter in the coronial
inquest into the police shooting of an Aboriginal man on an Arnhem
Land beach in 1990. In a courtroom setting where two cultures
meet on one culture's terms, Aboriginal witnesses who speak
English as a second language face issues of miscommunication, and
their testimony is liable to linguistic manipulation. Michael
Cooke illustrates and discusses these issues and the responses of
barristers to the participation of an interpreter.
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Thursday 12 November 2.30pm - 4.00pm
Speaker: Margo Smith, AIATSIS Grantee
Topic: The Significance of Birthplace in Determining
"Country" and Person/Place Relationships in Finke,
NT
Margo Smith is a grantee of the Institute and a doctoral candidate
at the University of Virginia. She has just completed 15 months
of fieldwork in the Aputula community, Finke, NT.
Ms Smith has researched changes in birthplace over time and the
impact of such changes on personal relationships to "country".
She also has examined the role of missions, medical services and
alternative birthing centres in centralising birthing in the
Northern Territory.
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Enquiries: (06)2461111, 2497310(fax), peg:aiatsis
AIATSIS, GPO Box 553, Canberra ACT 2601