Seven Decades Walking with the Warlpiri

To give priority to dialogue this event is open to a small audience through registration. Priority will be given to post-graduate students and early career researchers whose field of research aligns with the themes of the Roundtable. Please register by Friday 15 November. 

Seven Decades Walking with the Warlpiri - Roundtable

While Nancy Munn’s career provides the opportunity to animate her central Australian experience to chart the provenance of ANU’s central Australian research, this also provides the opportunity to consider, with our Warlpiri colleagues and guests, the critical role that women have played in evolving the field of anthropology conceptually through gendered analysis, and adaptive field research methods and relationships. The Roundtable provides Warlpiri participants in particular with the opportunity to share their experience and contribution to this evolution, their increasingly important agency in collaborative research and the connection with their leadership and work for the community.

Warlpiri Guests
Enid Nangala Gallagher
Lorraine Nungarrayi Granites
Nancy Nungarrayi Collins
Lee Nangala Wayne

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.