The Practice of an Expert: Anthropology in Native Title

This paper provides a perspective on the practice of anthropology as a discipline in the context of providing expert evidence in court cases. I consider the nature of anthropological expertise in relation to method, knowledge and theory. I evaluate the contribution that anthropological expertise can make, taking into account such factors as time pressures and the extent of the anthropologist's prior knowledge of a particular society—factors that often act as a constraint on what it is possible to know or find out in a given situation.     

Native Religions and Cultures of North America: Anthropology of the Sacred

Native Religions and Cultures of North America: Anthropology of the Sacred. Lawrence E. Sullivan. ed. New York: Continuum, 2000. 249 pp.     

Folk Art Potters of Japan: Beyond an Anthropology of Aesthetics

Folk Art Potters of Japan: Beyond an Anthropology of Aesthetics. Brian Moeran. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997.272 pp.     

Distinguished Lecture in General Anthropology: The Anthropology of Trouble

This essay was presented as the Distinguished Lecture in General Anthropology at the 91st Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, December 4, 1992, in San Francisco, California.     

Boas, Foucault, and the "Native Anthropologist": Notes toward a Neo-Boasian Anthropology

This article proposes the possibility of a neo-Boasian anthropology conceived at the intersection of Foucauldian genealogy, Boasian historicism, and the epistemic rethinking of the discipline's Self/Other binary. Shifting from a perspective of posing the ethnographic object as Other toward a Boasian conception of the past as the principal site of inquiry, the piece thus advocates an anthropological project grounded in the history of the present. This conception, it is argued, can overcome several of the dilemmas currently facing the discipline, the awkward status of "native anthropology" foremost among them.