ANTH1001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Ethnography
8 May 2018
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Week 1: CULTURAL DIFFERENCE: AN INTRODUCTION (2)
• Ownership is always about use and embedded in cultural projects
• Gadigal/Cadigal - references to a group of people, a clan or system.
• A clan is based on a relationship to ancestors, virtues of socially recognised descents through
kinship organisations
• People in relation to place
• Nation is a cultural claim to people to place and language, a claim that people are embedded
to other clans, capacity to manage political relationships and mediate
• Unpacking Acknowledgement of Country
o Language (Symbolic - Shared)
o Nation (Politics - A form of integration)
o Custodianship (Knowledge - Learned)
o Custodianship (Livelihood - Material)
o Transmission of Knowledge (Continuity and Process)
• A working definition:
o Allows anthropologists to organise their observations
o Allows you to ask questions
o Allows you to organise your reading and take notes
o Allows us all to identify different aspects of what is a unified process
o Allows anthropologists to compare different cultures
o Culture is a process
• Operationalising a Definition of Culture:
o Allows a more detailed description of a cultural process
o Opens up questions about the relationship between aspects of a cultural process
o Allows the potential improvement or modification of the definition itself.
o All of these are the tasks of anthropology
• Why begin with the ethnography of Pitjantjatjara car ownership and use?
o Ethnography is the description and analysis of a culture based on a participants
observation
o To see the culture concept in use
o To recognise the continuity of different indigenous cultures in Australia
o To use something that people from most cultural backgrounds would think they were
familiar with to allow us to see that difference
• How will the Pitjantjatjara use of cars link with our working definition?
o Cars are shared: relationships are formed through the use of cars
o Cars are symbols: they stand for other aspects of Pitjantjara life
o Cars are learned: people acquire and transmit knowledge about cars
o Cars are material: cars enable people to move through space
o Cars demonstrate the integrated nature of Pitjantjatjara culture
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