Nancy Munn in Central Australia: Gendering the field and how what mattered and who mattered changed

Professor Françoise Dussart discusses the challenges Professor Nancy Munn—one of the first female Fulbright scholars from America to undertake research in Australia— faced in the 1950s and 1960s when she carried out fieldwork with the Warlpiri people living at Yuendumu, and later with the Pitjantjatjara people at Utju. Following Munn in the field underscores how who anthropologists work with matters and changes through time. Dussart further examines how Munn in her seminal monograph Walbiri Iconography elucidated how the connections between sacred artistic drawings and paintings, the Central Australian Desert landscape and Aboriginal Ancestral Beings represent “stable anchors of identity” for Indigenous people.

Nancy Munn

Professor Nancy Munn (1932-2020) was the amongst first female Fulbright Scholars to be supported to undertake anthropological research at the Australian National University. In 1956 Nancy carried out her first fieldwork in Central Australia with the Warlpiri people living in Yuendumu to study the place of art in Warlpiri religion. Her monograph Walbiri Iconography has remained paramount to scholars working on Indigenous art in Central Australia and beyond. As the first female tenured professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Chicago, Nancy was a key figure of symbolic anthropology.

Françoise Dussart

Françoise Dussart is a professor of anthropology at the University of Connecticut and received her PhD. from the Australian National University in 1989. She has worked with the Warlpiri people from Yuendumu for over four decades. She is the author of La Peinture des Aborigènes d'Australie, The Politics of Ritual in an Aboriginal Settlement: Kinship, Gender and the Currency of Knowledge, Entangled Ontologies: Interpretations of relations to land in Australian and Canadian neo-settler states (with Sylvie Poirier), and Contemporary Indigenous Cosmologies and Pragmatic Actions (with Sylvie Poirier). Professor Dussart has curated several major exhibitions around the world and recently the very first major presentation of contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts from Australia in Canada, at the Musée de la Civilisation in Quebec City.

Warlpiri Guests
Enid Nangala Gallagher
Lorraine Nungarrayi Granites
Nancy Nungarrayi Collins
Maisie Napurrurla Wayne

This event is brought to you by Fulbright Australia, the ANU Gender Institute, the ANU School of Culture, History & Language and the ANU First Nations Portfolio