L'antropologia in Australia e nel Pacifico occidentale

A close historical analysis shows that Australia and its colonies played a key role in the making of the anthropological discipline between nineteenth and twentieth centuries: from the ‘science of race’, to the Cambridge Torres Strait Expedition, till the classic Malinowskian formulation of participant observation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Australia intellectually and institutionally hosted figures of the discipline’s history canon such as Radcliffe-Brown, who founded the first anthropology department in the country backed by the Governor of the Australian colony of Papua who wanted to establish a curriculum to train colonial officers. Since its inception, then, Australian anthropology has configured as a science applied to colonial government and focused its ethnographic efforts on Australian Aboriginal and Western Pacific communities, with a keen eye to questions of governance for the colonial and neo-colonial liberal state. These origins left a deep imprinting on the practice of the discipline in the former British colony, especially in its applied aspects. In this chapter the authors sketch the landscape of Australian anthropology focusing on its theoretical contributions to the wider discipline in the last thirty years, paying particular attention to the socio-political movements pertaining to issues of Indigenous sovereignty. The authors explore how Australia has become a locale mediating academic centres and fields-peripheries, arguing that the centrality of some Indigenous communities had for Western grand-theories is inversely proportional to their political marginality.