Paper short abstract:

How has Australian anthropological scholarship addressed the relationship between the institutionalization of Indigenous media and the media artefacts and forms of circulation that such institutions have made possible?

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the distinctive relationship between Australian anthropological research and Indigenous media production. Since the late 1970s anthropologists and ethnomusicologists have been active interlocutors, as both analysts and advocates, in institutional worlds of Aboriginal art and media. Keenly aware of the 'Faustian' character ascribed to the Indigenous embrace of media, and attuned to the ironies of its governmental subvention, such work of necessity took shape in dialogue with specific institutional possibilities and Australian anxieties. This scholarship has also, to a somewhat lesser degree, embraced the formal exploration of Indigenous media makers and pursued an analytical project attuned to the power of expressive practices and media artifacts to make sensible both historical and emergent worlds. This paper thus canvases the ways that media scholars negotiate a tension between an institutional domain geared towards representation and recognition and those new forms of formal exploration and creative play that have accompanied the efflorescence of Indigenous media. To suggest how formal and material aspects of Indigenous media worlds offer some ground for critical reflection, the presentation draws from an ethnographic archive of extra-institutional, unauthorized media artifacts. The formal characteristics of this work, and its extra-institutional derivation, make it a privileged site from which to reexamine the recent history of Australianist anthropology in its relation to Indigenous media.