The ANU Fulbright Nancy Munn Lecture and Roundtable: Seven Decades Walking with the Warlpiri

Abstract

Professor Françoise Dussart discusses the challenges Professor Nancy Munn - one of the first female Fulbright scholars from America to undertake research in Australia - faced in the 1950s and 1960s when she carried out fieldwork with the Warlpiri people living at Yuendumu, and later with the Pitjantjatjara people at Utju. Following Munn in the field underscores how who anthropologists work with matters and changes through time. Dussart further examines how Munn in her seminal monograph Walbiri Iconography elucidated how the connections between sacred artistic drawings and paintings, the Central Australian Desert landscape and Aboriginal Ancestral Beings represent “stable anchors of identity” for Indigenous people. Show more