Fred R. Myers

Ph.D. 1976, M.A. 1972, Bryn Mawr, B.A. 1970, Amherst.

Indigenous people and politics, Aboriginal Australia; exchange theory and material culture; anthropology of art and contemporary artworlds; the production and circulation of culture; in identity and personhood; theories of value and practices of signification.

Books and Edited Volumes:

Experiments in Self-Determination:  Histories of the Outstation Movement in Australia. Edited volume with Nicolas Peterson  Canberra: Australian National University Press. 2016.

Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art. Durham: Duke University Press. 2002

The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture. Edited volume. Santa Fe: SAR Press. 2001


The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Anthropology and Art. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1995

Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines. Smithsonian Institution Press, Wash., D.C. (reprinted in paperback by University of California Press, 1991) 1986.


Film:

Remembering Yayayi. Directors, Pip Deveson, Fred Myers, Ian Dunlop.


Selected Articles and Book Chapters:

2017   “Exhibiting Culture at the Boundary:  The Fetish of Early Papunya Boards.”  In L.Scholes, ed.  Tjungungutja: From Having Come Together.  Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.  

2017    “Whose Story Is It? Complexities and Complicities of Using Archival Footage.”  In J. Anderson and H. Geismar, eds.  The Routledge Companion to Cultural Property.  Routledge Press.  Pp. 168-93.

2016    “Burning the Truck and Holding the Country: Pintupi Forms of Property and Identity.”  HAU – Journal of Ethnographic Theory, vol 6, no. 1: 69-90.  Reprinted from 1989, Wilmsen, We Are Here.

2016    “Doubling.”  In Stephen Gilchrist, ed.  Everywhen:  The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia.  Yale University Press.  New Haven. Pp 52-59.

2016    “The Origins and History of Outstations as Aboriginal Life Projects.”  In N. Peterson and F. Myers, eds.  Experiments in Self-Determination:  Histories of the Outstation Movement in Australia.  ANU Press.  Canberra.  Pp 1-22.

2016    “History, Memory and the Politics of Self-Determination in an Early Outstation”. In N. Peterson and F. Myers, eds. Experiments in Self-Determination:  Histories of the Outstation Movement in Australia.  ANU Press.  Canberra. Pp. 81-103.

2015    “Cultural Anthropology, 1992-1996.” Cultural Anthropology 30, 2:

2015    “Paintings, Publics and Protocols: the Early Paintings from Papunya.” Material Culture Review/ Revue de la Culture Materielle., vol. 79, Spring: 78-91. .

------- and Luke Scholes
2015.   “Powerful Presence: Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri in Presence and in Paint.” In H. Skerritt, ed. No Boundaries: Contemporary Aboriginal Abstract Art from the Debra and Dennis Scholl Collection. Nevada Museum of Art. Pp 132-145. Prestel Publishing.

2014    “Showing Too Much or Too Little:  Predicaments of Painting Indigenous Presence in Central Australia.”  In Glenn Penny and Laura Graham, eds.  Performing Indigeneity.  University of Nebraska Press. Pp. 351-389.

2013    “ Disturbances in the Field:  Exhibiting Aboriginal Art in the US.”  Special Issue,  Journal of Sociology.  vol. 43 (2-3): 151-172
 
2013    “ Emplacement and Displacement:  Perceiving the Landscape through Aboriginal Australian Acrylic Painting.” Ethnos 78, 4: 
 
2012    “Censorship from Below: Aboriginal Art in Australian Museums.  In T. Berman, ed. No Deal:  Indigenous Arts and The Politics of Possession.  Santa Fe:  School of Advanced Research.  

2011    “ Translating Indigenous Protocol.” In P. Batty and J. Ryan, eds.  Tjukurrtjanu.  National Gallery of Victoria.  Pp. ix-xi.

2011    “Intrigue of the Archive, Enigma of the Object.”  In P. Batty and J. Ryan, eds.  Tjukurrtjanu.  National Gallery of Victoria.  Pp 29-42.

2011    “ Fathers and Sons, Trajectories of the Self:  Reflections on Pintupi Lives and Futures."  In Ute Eickelkamp and Pauline Fietz, eds. Growing Up in Central Australia: New Anthropological Studies of Aboriginal Childhood and Adolescence. Berghahn Books, Oxford.  Pp  82-100.

2010    “What Did Paintings Want? – Pintupi Painting at Yayayi in the 1970s.”  In Kasper Konig, W. Falk and E. Evans, ed.  Remember Forward.  Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Pp. 136-145.

2010     “ All Around Australia and Overseas:  Christianity and Indigenous Identities in Central Australia 1988."  For Special issue of The Australian Journal of Anthropology, edited by F. Dussart and C. Schwarz, In Dialogue with Christianities. Volume 21: 110-128.

2009     “The Power of Papunya Painting.”  Aboriginal Art Magazine, volume 1, no. 1: 40-45.

2009     “Graceful Transfigurations of Person, Place and Story: The Stylistic Evolution of Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi.”  In Roger Benjamin, ed.  Icons of the Desert.  Ithaca:  Cornell University Press.  Pp.  51-64.  

2008     Comment on Michael Brown, “Cultural Relativism 2.0,” Current Anthropology vol 49: 376-377.

2007     “A Day in the Life:  Painting at Yayayi 1974”. In Vivien Johnson, ed.  Papunya Painting; Out of the Desert. Canberra:  National Museum of Australia.  5 pages.

------- in collaboration with Jeremy Long
2007   “In Recognition:  The Gift of Painting.”  In Hetti Perkins, ed. One Sun, One Moon: Aboriginal Art in Australia.  Sydney:  Art Gallery of New South Wales.  Pp. 171-180.

2006     " The Complicity of Cultural Production:  The Contingencies of Performance in Globalizing Museum Practices." In Ivan Karp and Corinne Kratz, eds.  Museum Frictions.  Duke University Press.  Pp 505-536. 2006.
 
2006    “ We Are Not Alone: Anthropology in a World of Others.”  Invited essay, Key Informants in the History of Anthropology.  Ethnos 71 (2): 233-264.

------- and Faye Ginsburg
2006    “ A History of Aboriginal Futures.” Critique of Anthropology. 26 (1):  27-45.  

2006    “ ’Primitivism,’ Anthropology and the Category of ‘Primitive Art’.”  In Handbook of Material Culture.  Chris Tilley, Susanne Kuechler, Michael Rowlands, Webb Keane and Patricia Spyer, eds. Sage Press.  Pp 267-284,

2006    “ Collecting Aboriginal Art in the Australian Nation-state:  Two Case Studies.” Visual Anthropology Review, Vol 21, 1 and 2:  116-137.

2004    “ Ontologies Of The Image And Economies Of Exchange.” American Ethnologist, February, volume 31 (1):  1-16.

2000    “Ways of Placemaking.” In Howard Morphy and Katherine Flynt, eds.  Culture, Landscape, and the Environment.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press.  Pps. 72-110.


1999    " Aesthetics and Practice: A Local Art History of Pintupi Painting." In H. Morphy and M. Boles, eds. The Art of Place: Dialogues with the Kluge-Ruhe Collection of Australian Aboriginal Art. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

1994    " Culture-Making:  Performing Aboriginality in the Asia Society Gallery." American Ethnologist 21(4) 679-699.

1991    "Representing Culture:  The Production of Discourse(s) for Aboriginal Acrylic Paintings."  Cultural Anthropology, 6 (1):26-62.  (reprinted in Rereading Cultural Anthropology, G. Marcus, ed. Durham:  Duke University Press. 1992 and in The Traffic in Culture, Marcus and Myers, eds)


1988    " Locating Ethnographic Practice: Romance, Reality, and Politics in the Outback." American Ethnologist, 15: 609-24. 1988.


1988    “Burning the Truck and Holding the Country: Forms of Property, Time, and the Negotiation of Identity among Pintupi Aborigines." In T. Ingold, D. Riches, and J. Woodburn (eds), Hunter- Gatherers, II: Property, Power and Ideology. London: Berg Publishing. (longer version [ In] E. Wilmsen, ed., We Are Here. Berkeley: University of California Press.) 1988.


1986    "Reflections on a meeting: Structure, language, and the polity in a small-scale society," American Ethnologist, 13: 431-447.  

1985    "Illusion and Reality:  Aboriginal Self-Determination in Central Australia."  In C. Schrire and R. Gordon, eds., The Future of Former Foragers.  Cambridge:  Cultural Survival. pp 109-121

------ and Donald Brenneis
1984    "Introduction:  Language and Politics in the Pacific."  In D. Brenneis and F. Myers, eds., Dangerous Words.

1982    " Always Ask:  Resource Use and Landownership among the Pintupi of Central Australia."  In N. Williams and E. Hunn, eds., Resource Managers:  North American and Australian Hunter-Gatherers. Boulder:  Westview Press.  (republished by Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. 1986)

1982    "Ideology and Experience:  the Cultural Basis of Pintupi Politics."  In M. Howard, ed., Aboriginal Power in Australian Society).  Brisbane:  University of Queensland Press.  Pp. 108-52.

1979    " Emotions and the Self:  A Theory of Personhood and Political Order among the Pintupi," Ethos, 7: 343-70.

Updated June 2017

Australian Cultural Fields: National and Transnational Dynamics Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP140101970) – 2014-2017 I have been part of a group project in Australia, funded by the Australian Research Council and directed by Professor Tony Bennett of the University of Western Sydney, that has been collecting data for two years. "Australian Cultural Fields" examines the forces changing contemporary Australian culture. Focusing on art, literature, media, sport, music and heritage, it assesses the influence of transnationalism, digital media, migration and multiculturalism, and the distinctive presence of Indigenous culture, on the relations between culture, class, gender, ethnicity and nation.  Members of the project have developed an extensive survey instrument of taste and cultural consumption that was administered last year and is still being analyzed.  The concept of ‘cultural field’ is taken from the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who developed the idea to investigate how the production and consumption of culture are affected by relations between cultural institutions, policy agencies, and cultural markets. Australian Cultural Fields will develop this perspective in number of ways. It will be the first study to examine transnational forces, new information technologies and the changing salience of migrant and Indigenous cultures in the contemporary Australian context.  Internationally, it will be the first large-scale study to interrogate the relations between the fields of cultural production and consumption. It is a challenge for me to work with new methodologies and kinds of information. 

The most recent part of this project in which I was involved took part during two days in July 2016. Along with Prof. Tim Rowse (Western Sydney University), I convened a workshop at NYU's beautiful Sydney site, funded by the Australian Research Council as part of this Discovery Project Grant.  Entitled "Australian Cultural Fields: the Difference that Identity Makes," the workshop had 21 presenters and focused on Indigeneity across several different Australian fields of cutlural production -- Sport, Media, Visual Arts, Music, Heritage -- and one paper on Taste.  The presenters included academic presentations and also practitioners' reflections in recognition of the importance of participant knowledge of the fields in which they work.  Some of the participants skyped in, but the technology did not fail!!!  Professor Faye Ginsburg skyped in from New York, and PhD student Rowena Potts was able to attend in person. It was a fabulous event and a wonderful coordination between NYU Sydney and Western Sydney University, the home of the research project.  We want to thank the staff at NYU Sydney for all of their support and hospitality and the research manager of the project, Dr. Michelle Kelly for coordinating.

The rationale for the workshop was framed explicitly:

    "We hope that participants will be able to present and share their experience of participating in these fields and their knowledge about how such fields operate. We will draw on social theory, but our workshop will be animated by personal experience and intimate knowledge of working in these fields.

    We believe it is important to think about the terms, within these five Australian cultural fields, in which the Indigenous/non-Indigenous distinction is recognised – whether in terms of Indigenous cultural producers or Indigenous cultural works. In each of the above five fields of Australian culture, it now     makes a difference whether a sportsperson, network, monument, artwork or performance is known as ‘Indigenous’. Indeed, people have, at times, made a great effort to assert that ‘Australian’ culture has Indigenous and non-Indigenous variants – that is, to make ’the Indigenous’ visible, to challenge habits     of thought that allowed ‘the Indigenous’ to be repressed from sight and from memory. To assert the relevance of the Indigenous/non-Indigenous distinction has been, at times, a passionate political cause.

    However, the politics of this ‘difference’ is never simple, and it is clear that power and domination are characteristics of each of these five fields.  We thought it necessary to to pose questions (and asked the participants to raise questions) that pursue a critical, politically aware approach to the politics of     identity. We will hear from a variety of speakers, including both university-based and industry-based commentators.” 

 

We want to thank all of the presenters, who took time off from other work to join us.  Friends and colleagues from many years generously agreed to share their thoughts.

Engaging the global legacy and impact of the Aboriginal Artists Agency.  Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP150104389 – 2015- 2017).  Aaron Corn, Howard Morphy and I are partners in a what is now a third ARC Research grant, this one is aimed at assessing and organizing the collection of documents and interviewing those involved with the Aboriginal Artists Agency- the first national body to administer copyrights for indigenous artists, to create international demand for Australian culture and pioneer ways for Indigenous artists to reach audiences and markets worldwide.  This project extends the previous research histories on cultural production and circulation that all three of us have been doing and our own engagements with Aboriginal Artists Agency.  This project is in its early stages.