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Ninu. Grandmother's Law: The Autobiography of Nura Nungalka Ward. By Nura Nungalka Ward. Broome, Magabala Books. 2018, Pp: xvi + 144, Price: AUS45. I am really proud of my own [...]

I explore by way of a thought experiment the temporality of waterways in the context of restorative art interventions. As a substance that moves and gives form, and as a medium that retains and discharges, connects and divides, water that flows can make tangible the experiential flow of return and anticipation. Arguably, this bi‐directional structuring of time is pivotal to transformative and reparative action. If restoration means 'going back' to memories of ecologies and places, it does so with a generative thrust forward. This is the life‐enabling orientation of recuperation that I discern connects diverse phenomenological concepts: Deborah Bird Rose's 'multispecies knots of ethical time', the idea of 'afterness' as developed by Gerhard Richter, Gaston Bachelard's 'rhythmic time', and Gerald Vizenor's 'survivance'. I bring these concepts to: (a) artistic water restoration projects that make imaginable, palpable, and real sustainable human‐water relationships, with a focus on the public works in Sydney by Turpin + Crawford Studio; (b) perspectives on water and time that Australian Indigenous thinkers have shared during my ethnographic research; and (c) the re‐naturalization of a river in Germany's postindustrial Ruhr region. I propose that thinking with water ethically and recognizing its temporal diversity opens up perspectives on the deindustrialisation of rivers and other bodies of water. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue is part of a shift in social science and humanities thinking and in public awareness towards planetary water concerns. As societal and scholarly attention to the wet element – and its political import and its cultural constitution – is growing, we ask, how can we rethink our relationships with water in Australia now and into the future? The collection of papers in this issue shows that water responds to human practices which in turn are grounded in cultural imaginaries. Water is thus real in diverse ways, and makes possible diverse material, political and cultural relationships. Taking our lead from the ideas that contributors have developed from this and other questions posed for the issue, our introductory discussion considers three themes that are key to the understanding of water futures in Australia: materialities, temporalities and imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Celia Brickman. Aboriginal Populations in the Mind: Race and Primitivity in Psychoanalysis. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2003. Acknowledgments Pp.vii-viii + 285, notes, bibliog., index. US$66.00 (Hc.), ISBN 0-2311-258-28; […]

Anthropologists increasingly express links between individuals or collectivities through the discursively convenient prefix '-inter'; inter-personal, intersubjective, inter-cultural, inter-textual. However, attempts to describe the psychodynamics that effect the linkings that are integral to human social experience have not held pace. I want to suggest that a regard for the ontogenetic primary forms of encounter--looking, eating, playing--can substantiate the analysis of being a self among other selves within and across the boundaries of social worlds. Engaging a phenomenological and psychoanalytic perspective, this paper examines how We-relationships have been variously structured by Pitjantjatjara Aborigines in encountering others at home and in Germany., Theoretical preliminaries This paper will have achieved its aim if it can contribute to the anthropological understanding of encounter. Anthropological here means the ontology of human psychosocial experience. In my [...]

By Sam D Gill. Melbourne:Oxford University Press. 1998. Pp. xi + 276. Price: AU$34.95 Storytracking. Texts, stories, and histories in Central Australia presents a critical and detailed investigation of ethnographic [...]

Mortality, Mourning and Mortuary Practices in Indigenous Australia Edited by Katie Glaskin, Myrna Tonkinson, Yasmine Musharbash and Victoria Burbank Farnham, UK and Burlington, USA: Ashgate. 2008 Pp. xx + 237 [...]

Sojourn on another planet Nancy Sheppard Gillingham Printers, Adelaide, 2004, 93 pp, ISBN 0646430483 This is an exceptional little book. Its humorous tone, brevity and limited distribution (Adelaide only) can [...]

Wilfried Schroder. Ich reiste wie ein Buschmann. (Zum Leben und Wirken des Australienforschers Erhard Eylmann). Life and Scientific Work of the Pioneer of Australian Culture Erhard Eylmann. Darmstadt: WP Druck [...]

In northern Ghana, the Nankani people describe how disabled or ill children and those whose births coincide with tragic events are spirit children sent from the bush to cause misfortune and destroy the family. Upon identification, some spirit children are subject to infanticide. People often describe spirit children as wanting to kill the same-sex parent to take over the house. Based on discourse alone, one might explain the spirit child in terms of a presumed underlying oedipal dynamic, but such an analysis is partial. When we interpret the spirit child from the bifocal vision of cultural psychodynamics, which links cultural phenomenology and psychodynamic paradigms, we gain a complex understanding of the interactions between Nankani cultural models, moral imaginations, family relations, and parental ambivalence. I interpret families' perceptions of danger and their feelings of fear and hostility toward children and refer to infant alterity, narcissistic injury, scapegoating, and projective processes that link individual sentiments and decision-making with their cultural and material contexts. Cultural psychodynamics illuminates Nankani conceptions of child development, morality, and parental psychologies and offers insights into how and why some parents kill their children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropological Practice: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Method. By Judith Okely. Berg, 2012 Pp: 224 Price: 17.99 [pounds sterling] Effectively reclaiming ethnography for anthropology and showing its strength as an open-ended [...]

The Meeting Place: Maori and Pakeha Encounters, 1642-1840. By Vincent O'Malley. Auckland University Press, 2012 Pp: 320 Price: NZ$45 The Making of New Zealanders. By Ron Palenski. Auckland University Press, [...]

Travelling from my old heimat, Germany, I joined in September 2015 a group of Anangu Pitjantjatjara Bible translators on a two-week long pilgrimage to the Holy Land. This journey offered further probing into Anangu attachments to place that, until then, I had only known through ethnographic research in their desert homelands in northern South Australia. In the present article, I explore how and why the Anangu Christians forged links with biblically inscribed places to which they had no ancestral ties. What they did bring is a deep-seated sense of emotional connection with Jesus abiding in heaven, and here the pilgrimage was a chance to anchor this relationship in his land – to emplace Christ. Notable in this process of shifting the presence of Jesus from heaven to earth was the pilgrims’ moral concern to keep separate the emplaced stories of their ancestral lands on one hand, and the grounded narratives of the Christian Scriptures on the other. In Jonathan Mair and Nicholas Evans’ terms, their approach was one of ‘incommensuration’, a strategy to avoid moral conflict by refusing to make comparisons between religious traditions. My article may thus be read as an ethnographic contribution towards the understanding of an Australian Indigenous ethics of placemaking across borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper examines how Australian Aboriginal children present and re-present experience in their symbolic play. Based on anthropological field research in one location and therapeutic work in another, it reports from a psychodynamic perspective how the Indigenous children create meaning on the personal and social level in two distinctive play forms. These are a traditional sand story game played by Anangu Pitjantjatjara girls in a remote Western Desert community in Central Australia, and the European sand play therapy that was introduced as part of an intervention program in a Tiwi Islands community off the northern coast. In phenomenological terms, both techniques draw on the symbolizing activity of the lived body (Schilder, 1950, 1951; Merleau-Ponty, 1961; Scheler, 1973) or, in the language of organismic-developmental theory, physiognomizing processes (Werner and Kaplan, 1984). These processes are seen to rest on the primary human capacity for imagination (Castoriadis, 1987). However, the schematizing activity that creates a meaningful relationship between symbol and referent (Werner and Kaplan, 1984) is specific to each play form. Set up retrospectively as a comparison, the discussion leads to the observation that the self-directed play in the natural social setting is of a higher symbolic order (re-presentational) than the externally induced play in the artificial social setting that indicates spontaneous linkages between symbol and referent (presentational). It is suggested that this raises certain questions about the potentially therapeutic effect of children's symbolic play. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]