Essays & reportage
The American clever man
Martin Thomas
5 June 2025
How an Arnhem Land community distilled the 1948 American–Australian Scientific Expedition into a figure with unusual powers
Books & arts
Complex questions, simple answers
Martha Macintyre
28 March 2025
Can “tribal impulses” really be harnessed for the greater good?
Books & arts
Reframing Gauguin
Kate Fullagar
17 July 2024
Nicholas Thomas asks new questions about the women and cultures represented in the French artist’s work
Books & arts
Making a meal of it
Martha Macintyre
22 January 2024
How technology, migration and population transformed crops, foods and ways of eating
From the archive
Revisiting Bloodwood Bore
Shannyn Palmer
17 November 2023
An extract from Unmaking Angas Downs, which has won this year’s Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Australian History
Books & arts
Being human
Martha Macintyre
4 November 2023
An anthropologist sees a radically distinctive humanity among Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples
Books & arts
Other people’s objects
Martha Macintyre
6 September 2023
Adam Kuper’s survey of museums culminates in a plea for “cosmopolitan” institutions
Books & arts
A reservoir of possibilities
Holly High & Joshua O. Reno
28 July 2023
David Graeber’s latest book isn’t his best, but still we love it
Books & arts
Double-sided mirror
Martha Macintyre
25 January 2023
How anthropology flourished as colonialism began its decline
Books & arts
First, learn the language
Martha Macintyre
8 August 2021
Gillian Tett, the woman who predicted the global financial crisis, uses anthropological tools to probe how business works
Books & arts
The trouble with history
Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe
6 August 2021
The authors of Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate respond to Bill Gammage’s “The Great Divide”
Books & arts
Sea of islands
Alison Bashford
16 July 2021
Anthropologist Nicholas Thomas is a skilled and knowledgeable guide to Pacific voyaging
Books & arts
The teller and the tale
Tim Rowse
16 June 2021
What is Indigenous knowledge and who has it? Tim Rowse reviews Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe’s critique of Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu
Books & arts
In the field
Martha Macintyre
16 May 2021
How five pioneering anthropologists pushed at the boundaries of what it meant to be a woman
Books & arts
Was Derek Freeman “mad”?
Martha Macintyre
28 January 2018
The controversial critic of anthropologist Margaret Mead was a man driven to extremes
From the archive
Communist, scientist, lover, spy
Klaus Neumann
3 October 2015
The personal and the political are bound up in the life of anthropologist, Stasi informer and one-time Canberra resident Fred Rose
Essays & reportage
Friend or foe? Anthropology’s encounter with Aborigines
Gillian Cowlishaw
19 August 2015
Anthropologists might have been implicated in colonial policies and practices, writes Gillian Cowlishaw, but for many decades theirs was the only scholarly discipline…
Summer season
The strange career of the Australian conscience
Dean Ashenden
10 June 2010
The remarkable collaboration of anthropologists Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen, “bearers, shapers and captives of the Australian conscience”
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