University of Sydney / Faculty of Arts / Department of Anthropology / Staff / Associates

Professor Emeritus Diane Austin-Broos

Diane Austin-Broos picture



I took my doctorate in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1974 and soon thereafter returned to teach in Australia. In the course of my career, I have had two major field areas, the Caribbean and Central Australia. Initially, I was interested in class and race in Jamaica, and in Pentecostalism. Later, I studied change using an ethnohistorical approach and a phenomenology of the subject. I have applied this approach in both field areas, most recently among the Western Arrernte at Hermannsburg, CA. I also have particular interests in the relation between culture and economy, fundamentalism, and in the history of anthropology, both in the trans-Atlantic world and in Australia.

Thus far I have published two books in each field area along with three others on various topics in the social sciences. I have published over 50 articles in refereed journals and books. Currently I am working on a book entitled Critical Silences: why academics had not very much to say about a crisis in remote indigenous Australia. I am also pursuing research on race and other forms of invidious distinction as they are manifest in politics of moral order – the process whereby difference is redefined as moral deficit.

I was elected as a fellow of the Australian Social Science Academy in 1990 and served on their executive in the mid-1990s. I have been twice president of the Australian Anthropological Society. I was appointed to the Chair of Anthropology at the University of Sydney in 1997, retiring ‘emeritus’ in 2008. I have received numerous grants for my research and also served on the humanities and social science panel of the Australian Research Council. I have held visiting professorial positions at the University of Chicago, the University of the West Indies and New York University, and delivered papers at numerous universities in Europe, the UK and the USA.

Recent Publications

  • 2009 (forthcoming) Capitalism as Culture, and Economy. The Australian Journal of Anthropology (TAJA) 19.
  • 2009 (forthcoming) Translating Christianity: some keywords, events and sites in Western Arrernte Conversion. TAJA 19.
  • 2009 Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past: Invasion, violence and imagination in Indigenous Central Australia. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
  • 2008 Jamaica, the Caribbean, Africa: Some Oppositions and their Politics. In H. Levy (ed.) The African-Caribbean Worldview in the Making of Caribbean Society. pp. 10-25. Kingston: University of West Indies Press.
  • 2008 Comment: Neoliberal Stories of Racial Redemption. Dialectical Anthropology. 32:249-251
  • 2007 Comment: Creolization, Optimism and Agency. Current Anthropology. 48: 653-655.
  • 2006 Working for and Working among Western Arrernte. Oceania. 76:1-15
  • 2005 Introduction. In D. Austin-Broos and G. Macdonald (eds.) Culture, Economy and Governance in Central Australia. pp. 1-6. Proceedings of a Workshop of the ASSA. Sydney: University of Sydney Press.
  • 2005 The Politics of Moral Order: A Short Anatomy of Race. Social Analysis 49: 182-190.