American Ethnologist: Vol. 31, No. 1

Editor's Foreword

This issue of American Ethnologist inaugurates a new era in AAA publishing. It is the first issue of a AAA journal to be produced in partnership with the University of California Press. It also represents the first step toward the full-fledged development of AnthroSource, the ambitious electronic anthropological resource project-spearheaded by AAA Publications Director Susan Skomal, AAA Executive Director Bill Davis, and the entire AAA Executive Board-that will greatly enhance the availability of AAA's scholarly journals to anyone with access to the Internet. We at AE are delighted to serve as the official "guinea pigs" in this transition.  read more »

Table of Contents -- AE 31(1)

Table of Contents Coming Soon....

Abstracts -- AE 31(1)

Contemporary Art Worlds and Their Productive (In)stabilities

Ontologies of the image and economies of exchange The 2003 Presidential Address to the American Ethnological Society
Fred Myers
In the early 1970s, the Aboriginal artist and activist Wandjuk Marika asked the Australian government to investigate the unauthorized use of Yolngu clan designs on a variety of commodity forms, inaugurating a process of recognizing Indigenous ownership of "copyright" in such designs. This treatment of design-and of culture-as a form of property involves understandings and practices of materiality and subjectivity that differ from those informing indigenous, Aboriginal relationships to cultural production and circulation. In this article I explore the significance for material culture theory of recent work on and events in the development of notions of cultural property. One of my main concerns is the relevance of local understandings of objectification, or objectness, and human action-as embedded in object-ideologies. I discuss the limited capacity of legal discourses of cultural property to capture and reflect the concerns of Indigenous Australians about their own relation to culture, to creativity, and to expression.  read more »