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Paper short abstract:

I believe 'The unexamined discipline is not worth following' — with apologies to Socratic scholars. Intentionally provocative, I ask how and why the discipline has been dominated by a focus on the Aboriginal past, discouraging attention to other Australians and to postcolonial social dramas.

Paper long abstract:

This essay is based on my conviction that Australian ethnography's narrow purview and anthropology's theoretical limitations need exploring and explaining. Given that social life everywhere offers a wealth of phenomena for ethnographers to observe and participate in, the preferred sites and social conditions that attract attention provide evidence of what disciplinary leaders consider valuable, significant, and worthy of study.

While internationally the discipline developed new sites, new theoretical fields and new political ideas in the postcolonial era from around 1970, classicism continued to dominate research in Australia. New forms of Aboriginal social life and politics created by changing 'postcolonial' conditions largely escaped ethnographic attention. Anthropology was rescued from irrelevance with the emergence of opportunities to assist the courts and Aborigines with land retrievals.

I show how, in the 1970s, anthropology and ethnography were defined in ways that refused attention to most Australian social groupings, as well as to incipient political strivings on the other side of the (post)-colonial frontier. Exceptions to the discipline's main trajectory will be cited to indicate the potential of other approaches. These suggest that an active monitoring of the discipline's boundaries took place within the Universities.

I hope to encourage reflection and expansion so that anthropology might realise its potential as the most radical and critical of the social sciences.