Emplaced Myth: Space, Narrative, and Knowledge in Aboriginal Australia and Papua New Guinea

Australia and Papua New Guinea share a number of important social, cultural, and historical features, making a sustained comparison between the two especially productive. This volume is the first in-depth work to do just that: it situates the ethnography of the two areas within a comparative framework and examines the relationship between indigenous systems of knowledge and "place" -- an issue of growing concern to anthropologists. The essays demonstrate the manner in which regimes of restricted knowledge serve to protect and augment cultural property and the proprietorship over sites and territory; how myths evolve to explain and culturally appropriate important events pertaining to contact between indigenous and Western societies; how graphic designs and other culturally important iconic and iconographic processes provide conduits of cross-cultural appropriation between indigenous and non-indigenous societies in today's multicultural nation states.

Rumsey is Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University.