Contact Us

Description
Welcome to Australian People: Anthropological Perspectives. This unit will combine the best of on and off campus learning through focussed use of DSO and the electronic library reserve. Australian People: Anthropological Insights, is a recent addition to the program, which examines specifically Australian case material. This material relates to a range of people that, together, comprise the Australian people: Indigenous Australian as well as non-indigenous cultures; 'settler' communities as well as more recent migrants. How these people go about making their worlds, relating to each other and relating to their neighbours, as well as how they understand their own place in the nation, is the key focus for the Unit.

For Australian students, the unit will provide an opportunity to reflect on their own society and their place in it from an anthropological perspective. For non-Australians, the unit provides an opportunity to comprehend contemporary Australian issues in an informed manner. The Unit is structured in three learning modules. The first module examines important features of broad or mainstream Australian culture, with an emphasis on the ways in which categories (of race, gender, class and 'belonging') and boundaries (between 'us' and 'them') help to construct past and more recent understandings of what it is to be Australian. The second module draws on the tools developed in the first module to focus on race relations involving principally Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in the regional centre of Bourke, in the State of New South Wales. The third module examines important features of Indigenous Australian cultures, more broadly, specifically kinship and cosmology and their role in linking people and place.