Experimental Boat and Ship Archaeology: Principles and Methods

The need for experiments to study physical aspects of craft of the past is stated, as well as the necessity for them to have clear aims and to follow the established principles of scientific enquiry. These principles are discussed in this joint paper by ten maritime archaeologists and others, together with methods and some points of management critical to their application in this field.     

The Refusal of Holy Engagement: How Man‐making Can Fail

ABSTRACT Among Aboriginal Countrymen of the Darwin hinterland, a youth can be ceremonially circumcised only to emerge from the ceremony physically altered but unchanged in himself. Man‐making can thus fail. To explain both the possibility and the consequences of crashing failure, the analyst attends to: (1) politics attendant on the maturation of males, (2) the relationship between the failed rite and the total structure for the performance of all ‘Men's Business’; and (most importantly) (3) the relationships between Dreamings and humans as players in the socio‐religious formation (a concept derived from application of the Thomas theorem) in which there is human engagement with the holy. Argument establishes that (in logic) ontology precedes structure because the structure for holy engagement is built to accommodate prior constructions of both the human person and the personified Power that is a Dreaming.     

Doing business in Macedonia: Greek problems in British perspective (1912–1921)

British financial concerns in Greek Macedonia in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars were four: the status of the port and the city of Salonica after the partition of its hinterland and under Greek law; the regular conduct of trade; the sufficient provisioning of the allied expeditionary forces (from the fall of 1915 onwards) under the auspices of the Greek Provisional Government of Eleftherios Venizelos; and business, not necessarily related directly to the war effort. None of these cares was an isolated target nor were they the consequent stages of a single plan. They were simply aspects of a global financial interest which aimed to restore British influence in the region as well as to safeguard the spoils of victory against Bulgaria. After considerable difficulties in the region, foreign interest failed to take the shape of British investments. Moreover, the inability of the Greek state to provide sufficiently for the development of the Macedonian economy and the integration of its society led to diplomatic confrontations with its neighbours.     

Irruptions of the Dreamings in Post‐Colonial Australia

This essay is written round four ‘funny stories’ from Northern Australia. Metamorphosis instigated by a Dreaming is central to all four stories and this is why the stories are counted as ‘funny,’ and received with glee. The analysis illuminates a topic that has been attracting attention in recent contributions to Aboriginal ethnography: how Dreamings irrupt into contemporary histories and act in ways that have political significance, contesting whitefella paradigms and re‐asserting the world‐view of the original Australians.     

Looter of the Dreamings: Xavier Herbert and the Taking of Kaijek's Newsong Story

In his novels and stories of the Australian frontier, Xavier Herbert distances himself from anthropologists whom he resents because they have professional licence to act as looters of the Dreamings. Yet, as ‘artist’, Herbert is unable to admit the extent to which his own story‐forms are taken from Aboriginal productions. In those writings completed after Capricornia and before he finally turns to compose Poorfella my Country, he keeps much of his borrowing secret and his deceptions lead both to a guilty preoccupation with looting as a theme and to the production of stories with missing middles. (Interventions of the Dreamings are left out of the printed versions.) While he acts as cultural broker, honest broking is impeded by Herbert's Romantic self‐vision (portrait of the ‘creative artist’ as a young dog) and by the universalisation that denies cultural difference spuriously to assert the unity of human artistic experience in its stead. I show how Herbert's authorial practise makes him the very semblance of the anthropologist. He, likewise, is a looter of the Dreamings.     

A Frightened Hunting Ground: Epic Emotions and Landholding in the Western Reaches of Australia's Top End

A general theory of epic emotions is proposed. After providing terms to frame discussion, the author considers Aboriginal discourses of landed association to yield an account of the significance accorded to emotions by Aborigines during events that are attendant on situations of ultimate reference. The necessary association of specified emotions with culturally defined situations of ultimate reference is held to be a defining quality of emotions of the epic kind. In the Aboriginal case, the cultural register of emotions is brief to the point that recognised emotions are all epic emotions. Such emphasis on elemental forms has implications for the study of the development of social institutions. It is suggested that, world-wide, the words for inner states proliferate only when two conditions are fulfilled. The two loosely related variables are: (i) increments in social scale and (ii) the invention of ontologies of the divided self.