Anthropology: A Science of the Non-event?

Hamish Morgan

doi:10.5130/csr.v16i2.1696

Cultural Studies Review 16.2 September 2010 Critical Proximity

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v16i2.1696

Keywords:

Indigenous Cultures, Event, Australian Anthropology, Jean-Luc Nancy, Community

Hamish Morgan

Combined Universities Centre for Rural Health

Abstract

This essay explores the notion of the ‘event’ and it relevance to ethnography and community. It has developed from research work with Aboriginal people, especially the Jackman family, in central Western Australia. The essay sketches the possibility of developing another kind of ethnographic writing, one attuned to the relation with others, one that involves being-in-common with others. It focuses on developing a writing practice that is exposed to interruption, to fragments, to little happenings and encounters, to those shared events that happen in community. The essay sees community as the place of interruption: that to be with others is to be taken off, shown something else, exposed to unique turnings of the world that others give light to trace.

Issue

Vol. 16 No. 2 (2010): Critical Proximity

Section

Articles (Peer Reviewed)

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Author Biography

Hamish Morgan, Combined Universities Centre for Rural Health

Hamish Morgan has recently moved to the small Aboriginal community of Ululla with his young family to live more fully, to be more connected. He works part-time with the Combined Universities Centre for Rural Health in Geraldton on a number of cross-cultural exchange projects for students and academic staff in and around Wiluna. He was awarded his PhD from UTS's Trans/forming Cultures Centre in 2008. He also runs a small consultancy business called Narrative Connections.

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Hamish Morgan, Combined Universities Centre for Rural Health