Postgraduate Seminars and Research

Welcome to the Department of Anthropology’s postgrad page. We have a prodigious pod of postgraduate research students and we run a lively seminar program. Feel free to join us!

Semester 2, 2008
Thursdays 1.30-3 (Woolley Tutorial Room N208)

Barbara Ellen Baumann (PhD)


The social construction of family and parenting
This project undertakes a culturally-informed investigation into the Aboriginal family and more precisely child-rearing techniques and related parenting practices and experiences in Redfern, the inner-city of Sydney. It aims at understanding the cultural conceptions among urban Aboriginal people and the ways in which people do, or do not, feel able to meet these expectations and why.

Issues concerning Aboriginal parenting and ‘unhealthy’ or ‘dysfunctional’ families are a popular topic in public discourse. Since the Prime Minister John Howard and Minister for Indigenous Affairs Mal Brough declared a ‘national emergency’ intervention in the Northern Territory on 21 June 2007, researchers form various disciplines, politicians, family support organizations and policy makers are searching for solutions to ‘normalize’ Aboriginal Australia, creating safe and ‘healthy’ environments for Aboriginal children (Altman & Hinkson (eds.) 2007). Although this intervention received a lot of attention from the public eye, issues regarding parenting and questions of autonomy and state interventions in Aboriginal families are not restricted to remote Australia.

The proposed research will address discourses of power and practices of intervention (state and NGO) in Aboriginal parenting and how these affect Aboriginal practices and understandings of family and child-rearing.

Key concepts: anthropology of policy and bureaucracy; citizenship; how assistance is linked with surveillance and how family’s need is used to bind them into the power system; discourses of power; governmentality; agency and autonomy; social engineering

Supervisor: Dr Gaynor Macdonald

Paul Coe (PhD)
Justice Not Trinkets

Land Rights of indigenous people is the most fundamental of all human rights in the colonized world. It is thought the principle of land that one can measure any form of justice among the conquers and the conquered. One of the best illustration of this point is the New South Wales, Australia Aboriginal Land Rights (NSW) Act (ALRA) 1983. Theoretically rights to land were acknowledged in the year 1983 for Aboriginal People in New South Wales is illustrative of the treatment of Australian indigenous people. The claims were such that this Act would radically improve living standards, give back purpose to Aboriginal Peoples, and enhance respect and dignity for Aboriginal Peoples. Twenty five years later have such claims assessed for their policy implications?

This thesis is based on a policy analysis framework and it aims to provide a policy analysis of the ALRA based on the expectations of Aboriginal and non Aboriginal groups involved in the Act’s introduction. The study will examine 1) original stakeholder objectives and expectations associated with the introduction of the ALRA; 2) the extent to which these expectations are perceived to have been realized; and, 3) the main factors influencing the extent to which the ALRA has achieved expected outcomes and opportunities to reform approaches to Aboriginal land rights and governance, in ways that enable coexistence with Western forms of regulation and land management, rather than subordination. The methodology for the research involves an in depth policy narrative, focusing on the experience of the Wiradjuri people in central western NSW (Roe, E. (1994). Narrative Policy Analysis: Theory and Practice. Durham: Duke University Press.)

In my research I will use in depth interviews with Wiradjuri community members, Local Aboriginal Land Council representatives, NSW Aboriginal Land Council leaders, other Aboriginal stakeholders will be undertaken. The views of non Aboriginal policy makers and legislators will also be sought, both through face to face interview (where possible).will also use the Roe approach to examine policy documents, parliamentary transcripts, media articles, and other documentary sources of primary evidence.

Supervisor: Dr Gaynor MacDonald

Helen Fewster (PhD)


Continuity and Change in a New Guinea Lifeworld

Kenazi speakers comprise clans who originally hailed from Angan and Eastern Highland [Fore/Gimi] language groups in Papua New Guinea. This thesis traces the migration of these clans into the territory that they presently occupy and the concomitant problems arising from the coalescing of disparate cultural traditions. Approximately 40-50 years ago the advent of Christiantity caused further modifications in the cultural understandings of Kenazi speakers. Many traditional beliefs and practices have been discontinued or exist only in an attenuated form.

Hopes and aspirations have also been affected by globalising forces.The disjuncture where past and present conflate and inform cultural perceptions and understandings in areas such as sexuality, familial relations and child socialisation will be investigated. The thesis will include an analysis of dreams in order to cast light on the implicit understandings and motivations of my main informants.

Key concepts: Melanesia, psychoanalytical anthropology, child socialisation and sexuality.

Supervisor: Dr Jadran Mimica

Marianne Hoyd (PhD)


My research in a rural community in NSW was to observe the interaction between European Australians and the Wiradjuri People as well as the beliefs held by European Australians about Aboriginal People. My thesis aims to examine this in conjunction with the relationship between Aboriginal People and the State, to gain understanding of how racism should be conceptualized and how this articulates with theoretical models currently being debated. This ethnography will thus contribute to an understanding of the role of government, to the anthropology of state power, policy and race relations.

Sean Leneghan (PhD)


My research into drug use in Sydney seeks to explore through the methodologies of existential-phenomenology and psychoanalytic anthropology the varieties of altered states of consciousness and 'recreational' drug use. Initially my interest was primarily focused on the family of substances known in common parlance as Ecstasy - although I subsequently broadened my interest to include polymorphous drug use (LSD, DMT, Speed, Marijuana, Vics, 5-HTP etc.).

Although my major aim is to describe and interpret the Life worlds of drug users in the Sydney Mega-politan milieu, other areas of interest include: negotiating multiple states of reality, a critique of mechanistic Cosmo-ontologies of drug use, narcissistic hedonism and a case for an organismic understanding (based on philosophical and phenomenological anthropology) of altered states.

Supervisor: Dr. Jadran Mimica

Thiago Oppermann (PhD)


My project is to develop a historical anthropology of the Halia, the largest language group in northern Bougainville. This society is distinguished from nearby Melanesian societies for its elaborate, hereditary political hierarchy. This hierarchy is centred on Tsuhana clan houses, a versatile institution that has been adapted by the local people to fulfil a number of different roles.

Supervisor: Dr. Jadran Mimica

Pia Panopolous (PhD)


My thesis topic “Supernatural Migrants and Divine Homes” is an ethnography of religion in the analysis of migration. In particular it is a phenomenological study of transnational Christianity, by exploring religious experience as a home building process.

It aims to reveal a cosmological underpinning of the ways people deal with migration; their subsequent transnational connections; and any confluence between religious and secular conceptualisations of the self and how is this impacted upon by migration to a more secular society. My ethnographic area is the transnational Greek Orthodox community between Australia and the Greek island of Kythera, a place strongly marked by migration.

Initially, following Austin-Broos’ critique of the anthropology of religion (1989), I will position religion as an entrenched social institution on a par with political economy, and as a system of order equivalent to western rationalisms and secularism. Continuing from this point my approach to the study of religion will draw on a combination of social scientific, phenomenological and practice theories. These will also be applied to the study of transnational religious life, which unlike transnational economic and political practices, has not been widely studied.

Finally, the study of a Greek Orthodox transnational religious community will contribute to an anthropology of Christianity, which is in need of developing as a “self-conscious, comparative project” (Robbins: 2003).

Jennifer Sattar (MA)


I am interested in Pacific, mainly Fijian ethnohistory and historical anthropology. Looking at some of the issues that trouble Fijian society and culture today, it is clear that some of these problems are not of recent origin. Nor can they be attributed to the processes of modernisation or post colonialism. My project examines some of the reasons as to why Fijian society today is not united and is in fact very divided, along ethnic, tribal and racial lines. To discover why these cleavages exist I take a journey through time from Lapita to modern times looking at factors which have helped Fijian society get to this stage.

Erin Taylor (PhD)


Abajo el Puente: Place and the Politics of Progress in Santo Domingo

I conducted my PhD fieldwork in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. My interests include poverty and inequality, urban studies, space and place, moral geographies, globalisation and transnationalism, experiences of modernity, the historical imagination and aspirations for the future. My dissertation explores how residents of Santo Domingo¹s poor barrios respond to their poverty and low social status through placemaking. While the middle class experience increasing mobility resulting from skill demands and capital flows, the poor remain bound to their social position and locality. Although the city offers greater mobility for the poor than the countryside, it is also the site at which socioeconomic stratification is most profoundly experienced. I examine how residents who have limited material and symbolic resources invest value in place to survive in the urban milieu and attain a measure of socioeconomic mobility. I argue that control over space and the ability to invest it with value is essential to the poor in their attempts to contest a stratified global order as well as find a place within it.

Key concepts: Space and place, poverty, social stratification, mobility and progress, political economy, dualism, material culture, race and ethnicity, nationalism, modernity.

Supervisor: Emeritus Professor Diane Austin-Broos

Kylie Tobler (PhD)


Locas e Internacionalés: Subjectivity and Social Relatedness in Mexico City.

This study uses a phenomenological and psychoanalytic anthropological approach to compare and contrast the experiences of subjectivity and social relatedness of locas ('feminised male homosexual transvestites' from the 'clases populares') and internacionalés ('middle class gays'), in Mexico City.

The study has two mutually informing dimensions: the primary innovation addresses the current lack of comparative ethnographic research between two groups of men who identify as having sex with men (MSM) from different socioeconomic areas, the secondary innovation will incorporate detailed ethnographic data from the experiences of their respective families, which is also hitherto largely missing from the anthropology of Latin American gender and sexuality. As a result it is hoped that this research will develop an analysis of the interplay between the social and cultural construction of the gendered body, selfhood and the modes of expression and visibility available to locas and internacionalés. Furthermore, using an ethnographic focus that includes the subjective experience of the family, the study will enable an empirically based examination of popular discourses that surround the rubric of social integration of MSM within Mexico City.

Key concepts: Latin American gender and sexuality; transsexualism; tranvestitism; homosexuality; phenomenological and psychoanalytical anthropology; Mexico; family; social relatedness; embodiment; identity and subjectivity.

Supervisor: Dr. Jadran Mimica

Sop Vorng (PhD)


Class and Consumption in Bangkok

I explore social stratification and consumption practices in Bangkok, focusing on shopping malls, markets, and hypermarkets. Critiquing the idea that shopping malls, in particular, work to create a globalised, homogenous, consumer identity, I suggest that they are meaningful in ways that are uniquely local. The socio-spatial configuration of consumption sites in the capital city highlights Thai class relations and the elaborate system of social stratification. Specific attention is directed towards delineating the socially, politically, and economically influential urban middle class, a group that has notoriously eluded comprehensive definition thus far. I further argue that understandings of class are limited unless contextualised within the Thai status hierarchy, and considered in relation to the significance of power, presentation and prestige in Thai social life.

Key concepts: Thailand, Southeast Asia, social stratification, religion (particularly variants of Buddhism), consumption, urban anthropology, philosophy, and social theory

Supervisor: Dr Richard Basham (retired)

Emma Young (PhD)