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Accepted Paper:

Anthropology, Resource development and the appropriation of knowledge  
Kathryn Robinson (Australian National University) Andrew McWilliam (Western Sydney University)

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses ownership and appropriation of anthropological knowledge and practice in applied research around issues of property ownership (land and mineral wealth) and capital intensive resource development. We ask, can we mediate the contradictions between different anthropological ethical discourses to fulfil expectations of local benefit and anthropological praxis.

Paper long abstract:

The history of anthropological practice reveals contradictory and countervailing discourses about the appropriation of knowledge in the exercise of ethnography. Discourses associated with varying historical paradigms continue to circulate and inform debates around ethical anthropological researhc practice. A recent on-line debate conducted on the ASAO listweb is a case in point. An advertisement for a three year Research Fellowship in anthropology at the Australian National University (ANU) funded by mining company Rio-Tinto and directed towards ethnographic 'baseline' social research in preparation for a nickel mine development in Indonesia, prompted a lively and critical discussion over the ethics and limits of such collaboration. Issues ranged from criticisms of working with powerful agents where 'inevitably' anthropological knowledge would be tainted, manipulated or appropriated by the mining company against indigenous interests, through to perspectives that 'applied' anthropology of this kind was now a legitimate aspect of anthropological practice and subject to its own discourses and ethics. This paper discusses ownership and appropriation of anthropological knowledge and practice in the context of research around issues of property ownership (land and mineral wealth) and capital intensive resource development. We ask where anthropological practice fits in the complex intersections that arise between local, indigenous, regional, national and corporate entitlements ands responsibilities.

Panel P10
Claiming and controlling need: who owns development and philanthropy?
  Session 1