An Appreciation of Difference: WEH Stanner and Aboriginal Australia

Melinda HINKSON and Jeremy BECKETT (eds)

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Reprinted 2010, October 2008, pb, 230x152mm, 312pp, b/w illus
RRP $39.95 incl. GST
ISBN 9780855756604

…the chapters of this volume flow with remarkable grace through personal and institutional history, anthropological reflections on land and religion, and assessments of what it meant in the middle years of the last century to be an anthropologist and a public intellectual...The authors — significant scholars themselves — have done him proud. They reflect in diverse ways on his legacy — and also on what has happened since. Events go backwards as well as forward. We are not done yet, nor is his vision, nor is his professional hesitation. I congratulate you, editors, authors and publisher! — Professor Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge

WEH Stanner was a public intellectual whose work reached beyond the walls of the academy, and he remains a highly significant figure in Aboriginal affairs and Australian anthropology. Educated by Radcliffe-Brown in Sydney and Malinowski in London, he undertook anthropological work in Australia, Africa and the Pacific.

Stanner contributed much to public understandings of the Dreaming and the significance of Aboriginal religion. His 1968 broadcast lectures, After the Dreaming, continue to be among the most widely quoted works in the field of Aboriginal studies. He also produced some exceptionally evocative biographical portraits of Aboriginal people. Stanner’s writings on post-colonial development and assimilation policy urged an appreciation of Indigenous people’s distinctive world views and aspirations.

Hinkson and Beckett have drawn together some of Australia’s leading academics working in Aboriginal studies to provide an historical and analytical context for Stanner’s work, as well as demonstrating the continuing relevance of his writings in the contested field of Aboriginal affairs.