Paper short abstract:

Fuctionalism and its opposites have had a long airing in Australia. Driven to distraction by epistemic debates Australian anthropology has neglected the possibilities indigenous intellectual traditions offer to transform the discipline. This paper proposes a redress to this oversight.

Paper long abstract:

Australian Anthropology, and the discipline more broadly, has come under sustained criticism in recent decades both internally and from its former objects of scientific enquiry.

Postmodern criticisms with their analytical "weapons of mass-deconstruction" (Viveiros De Castro, 2015) are by now well known, threatening to paralyse the discipline. In the face of calls that the anthropologist is always too subjective to speak with authority about "others", Australian anthropology has gradually worked itself into its own opposite. From a highly functionalist branch of the discipline it has become misfunctional, seeking to make plain exactly how things don't work for the "others" of the discipline in an effort to "decolonize" conceptual spaces.

However simply replacing functional explanations of indigenous lives with an anti-functional vacuum of analytical practice creates a highly unproductive environment for taking post-colonial criticism seriously, which is to say, theoretically and metaphysically.

My contention in this paper is that both the orthodox and postmodern post-colonial threads of Australian anthropology unduly circumscribe the contributions of indigenous peoples by reducing criticism of the discipline to one of internal epistemic orientation, and in the process fixing the discipline and its "others" to the plane of inter-subjective discursiveness.

In order to move the discipline beyond these self-defeating criticisms and engage with indigenous intellectual traditions seriously, a theoretical operationalisation of post-colonial sentiments into a form of inter-objectivity is required. This paper seeks to make the case for this move in broad terms drawing on key examples from the discipline abroad and at home.