by Fred R. Myers (1986)
The Pintupi, a hunting-and-gathering people of Australia's Western Desert, were among the last Aborigines to come into contact with white society. Despite their extended relocation in central Australian settlements, they have managed to preserve much of their traditional culture and social organization. This book presents a comprehensive ethnographic interpretation of the ways in which Pintupi politics, cosmology, kinship systems, nomadic patterns, and social values reinforce and sometimes contradict each other.
Paul Havemann
Provides a contemporary contextual survey and analysis of the legal and political interaction between the British 'settler' states of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, and the indigenous peoples whom they dispossessed.
H.C. Coombs
After more than two hundred years of white colonisation, one of the most important moral issues facing Australian society remains the need for reconciliation with indigenous Australians. In these essays H.C. Coombs reflects on the nature of Aboriginal identity and the ongoing importance of autonomy for contemporary Aboriginal society. He also suggests strategies by which self-determination meaningful to Aboriginal people might be achieved in practice. Some of the chapters have been written especially for this volume, including one in which Dr Coombs makes a thoughtful and provocative contribution to the Mabo debate, linking the High Court's historic decision to prospects for Aboriginal autonomy. Dr Coombs writes with the conviction that 'mainstream' Australia stands to gain as much as Aboriginal people, if not more, from the fulfillment of Aboriginal aspirations. It is a personal and passionate plea for a just society, from one of Australia's most influential and eloquent advocates of the rights of indigenous people.
Mitchell Dean and Barry Hindess
Inspired by Foucault's discussion of governmentality, this book makes a major contribution to our understanding of government. The book is interdisciplinary in approach, and combines theoretical discussion with empirical focus. It includes a substantial introduction by the editors, and contains work critiquing the central notion of governmentality. This book will be essential reading in political science, sociology, law, philosophy, education and economics.
E. R. Leach
"For the first time a modern type of sociological analysis has been applied to the rich ethnographic material of northern Southeast Asia in this book. While making full use of the techniques which social anthropologists had developed during the previous decade, mainly on the basis of African materials, this book marked a departure from then current orthodoxies and has come to be recognized as constituting an outstanding development in the field of anthropological theory."--Back cover.