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A collection of Barbara Glowczewski's 40 years of Aboriginal Australian research in conversation with Guattari and Deleuze
This collection of essays charts the intellectual trajectory of Barbara Glowczewski, an anthropologist who has worked with Warlpiri people since 1979. She shows how the ways in which Aboriginal people actualise virtualities of their Dreaming space-time into collective networks of ritualised places resonate with some of Deleuze and Guattari's concepts.
Radical alterity is not about exoticism and exclusion but about imagining how to weave different worlds in respect of their singularities always in becoming, how to recreate outsideness in our minds. This is indigenising anthropology.
Inspired by the art and struggles of different Indigenous people and other discriminated groups, especially women, Glowczewski draws on her own conversations with Guattari, and her debates with various scholars to deliver an innovative agenda for radical anthropology which will open new avenues for research on environmental and social justice based on the value of difference and creative resistance.
Barbara Glowczewski is an anthropologist and a professorial researcher at the French National Scientific Research Center, CNRS. She is the author of Desert Dreamers (Univocal/University of Minnesota Press) and many other books as well as innovative multimedia work.
List of contents
Prelude: The Wooden Egg Made Me Sick by Nakakut Barbara Gibson Nakamarra; 1: Becoming Land; Part I. The Indigenous Australian Experience of the Rhizome: 2. Warlpiri Dreaming Spaces; 1983 and 1985 Seminars with Félix Guattari; 3. Guattari and Anthropology; Part II. Totem, Taboo and the Women's Law: 4. Doing and Becoming. Warlpiri Rituals and Myths; 5. Forbidding and Enjoying. Warlpiri Taboos; 6. A Topological Approach to Australian Cosmology and Social Organisation; Part III. The Aboriginal Practice of Transversality and Dissensus: 7. In Australia, It's 'Aboriginal' With a Capital 'A'. Aboriginality, Politics and Identity; 8. Culture Cult: Ritual Circulation of Inalienable Knowledge and Appropriation of Cultural Knowledge (Central and N-W Australia); 9. Lines and Crisscrossings: Hyperlinks in Australian Indigenous Narratives; Part IV. Micropolitics of Hope and De-Essentialisation: 10. Myths Of 'Superiority' and How to De-Essentialise Social and Historical Conflicts; 11. Resisting the Disaster. Between Exhaustion and Creation; 12. Standing with the Earth: From Exhaustion to Creation; Part V. Dancing With the Spirits of the Land: 13. Cosmocolours: A Filmed Performance of Incorporation and a Conversation with the Preta Velha Vo Cirina; 14. The Ngangkarri Healing Power: Conversation with Lance Sullivan, Yalarrnga Healer; Bibliography.
About the author
Barbara Glowczewski is an anthropologist and a professorial researcher at the French Scientific Research Center, CNRS. She is also a member of the Laboratory of Social Anthropology at the College de France. Last month she was awarded the silver medal of the CNRS. She has dedicated her work to advocating for Australian Aboriginal creativity through a variety of artistic, cinematic and narrative exploration. She is the author of many books in French. Recent publications in English include Desert Dreamers (Univocal, 2016) and Kunga: Law Women from the Desert (Skira Editore, 2012).
