A Cautious Silence

Download or read book A Cautious Silence written by Geoffrey G. Gray and published by Aboriginal Studies Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first exploration of modern Australian social anthropology which examines the forces that helped shaped its formation. In his new work, Geoffrey Gray reveals the struggle to establish and consolidate anthropology in Australia as an academic discipline. He argues that to do so, anthropologists had to demonstrate that their discipline was the predominant interpreter of Indigenous life. Thus they were able, and called on, to assist government in the control, development and advancement of Indigenous peoples. Gray aims to help us understand the present organisational structures, and assist in the formulation of anthropology's future role in Australia; to provide a wider political and social context for Australian social anthropology, and to consider the importance of anthropology as a past definer of Indigenous people. Gray's work complements and adds to earlier publications: Wolfe's Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, McGregor's Imagined Destinies and Anderson's Cultivating Whiteness.