Associate Professor Yasmine Musharbash
Areas of expertise
- Social And Cultural Anthropology 160104
- Aboriginal And Torres Strait Islander Cultural Studies 200201
- Studies Of Aboriginal And Torres Strait Islander Society 169902
- Family And Household Studies 160301
Research interests
Anthropology of the Everyday, Life in the Colony, Settler-Colonial Studies and Indigenous/Non-Indigenous Relations, Human/Other-than-Human Relations, Monster Anthropology, Animal/Human Relations, Central Australia, Warlpiri Studies, Anthropology of Place and Domestic Space, Anthropology of Emotions, Embodiment, Boredom Studies, Personhood, Sociality and Relatedness, Anthropology of Death and Grieving, Anthropology of Sleep and the Night.
Biography
since 2023: Associate Professor in the School of Archaeology & Anthropology, CASS
2020-2023: HoD (ANTH) in the School of Archaeology & Anthropology, CASS, ANU
2019-2023: Senior Lecturer in the School of Archaeology & Anthropology, CASS, ANU
2009-2019: The University of Sydney (Lecturer, Future Fellow, Senior Lecturer)
2009: Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority (Anthropologist)
2004-2008: University of Western Australia (Postdoctoral Fellow)
2003-2004: Torres Strait Regional Authority (Native Title Anthropologist)
1999-2003: The Australian National University (PhD)
1997: Copenhagen University ERASMUS Summer School of Anthropology
1993-1994: Monash University (exchange, Anthropology & Inidgenous Studies)
1989-1997: Freie Universität Berlin (M.A. in Social Anthropology and English)
Researcher's projects
Ethnographically, my work is located in central Australia and mostly centred on Yuendumu, an Aboriginal community about three hours northwest of Alice Springs. I have been conducting fieldwork there annually since 1994, originally focussing on everyday life as it unfolds in Warlpiri homes and country. One of the biggest joys I know is to see where anthropological fieldwork takes me and, following incidents, events, questions, ideas, and experiences from the field, my research has branched out in a number of directions:
One such cluster is concerned with sleep, the night, ideas of safety and threat, and an inter-related one has taken me into the domains of the anthropology of emotions and embodiment. Here, I focussed especially on fear, but also on grief and loneliness, and then moved on to studying laughter and boredom. In all these endeavours I have always emphasised comparison, radical difference, and cultural relativity.
Social relations, sociality, and notions of the person, and of self and other are themes I return to from various directions, e.g. by studying birthday parties or fighting, childhood socialisation, intergenerational relations, and, especially, the ways in which Warlpiri people relate to others: to non-Indigenous people, to strangers, to enemies, but also to animals, plants, the weather, smoke, the underground, and to monsters. In this vein, I had an ARC Future Fellowship specifically looking at ‘bad relations’.
The research on monsters has blossomed into an on-going inter-disciplinary and comparative project that brings together anthropology and monster studies. Under the umbrella term ‘monster’ my co-editors and I have gathered ethnographic analyses from all over the world, that look at human/other-than-human engagements from a variety of angles (in instances of social change and transformation, for example, or as explorations of the different ways in which people ‘live with’ the monsters that haunt them.)
Another aspect of my focus on 'bad relations' is my collaboration with Warlpiri people in the aftermath of the shooting of Kumanjayi Walker in Nov 2019. This has entailed organising the 'court lawns' for the Parumpurru Committe and in conjuntcion with CASS, RSHA, and SoAA Social Justice Initiatives to provide a safe space for Warlpiri people to witness the unfolding of legal proceedings. I have also edited a Special Issue on Settler-Colonial Violence in Contemporary Australia https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/17576547/2022/33/S1 and am currently finalising my mansucript on Everyday Life in the Colony.
Available student projects
If you are interested in undertaking a PhD in any of my areas of expertise and research interests, please contact me directly.
Current student projects
Louise Nisbet's PhD research explores how long-established residents of New Orleans’s public housing projects maintain safety from community violence in a vastly altered public housing landscape, pre- and post-Hurricane Katrina. This project seeks to understand the ways in which residents conceptualise and move within their houses – particularly at the liminal ‘edges’ of the house such as windows, doors and the front porch – in order to anticipate, mitigate, and ultimately stay safe from, the violent extensions of neighbourhood politics.
Philip Weinstein looks at how people of different cultural backgrounds interpret monsters differently, using two case studies: the Bunyip, an Australian Aboriginal water being; and the Tasmanian Tiger, an allegedly extinct marsupial believed by some to still roam the Australian wilderness. He is examining recent models of monster change in particular.
Kylie Dolan is undertaking research in Manigrida, Arnhem Land, where she is conducting research into the multiple ways in which Yolngu relate to salt, from salt as it appears in Dreamings, via the multiple meanings of salt as mineral, as shimmering material, as food, as gift and trade good and so forth, to salt in colonial and contemporary settler-colonial contexts.
Ruonan Chen is currently writing up her thesis about medical professionals in two public hospitals in Tibet, one cohort practicing Western medicine the other Tibetan medicine. Her thesis is focused on different types of precarity experienced by these parctictioner and is informed by a phenomenological approach.
Past student projects
Patrick Horton’s PhD (2023) examines the ways hyper-incarceration impacts everyday life in remote Aboriginal communities. Indigenous people in Australia are among the most incarcerated populations in the world, and the Northern Territory imprisons more of its constituents than any other Australian jurisdiction. Framing the prison as an institution, an industry and a feature of settler colonialism, this project seeks to understand the realities that hyper-incarceration creates in a remote central-western Northern Territory town.
Joanne Thurman’s PhD (2023) is an analysis of contemporary Warlpiri life through the lens of material culture. Her thesis asks questions not only about materiality from the perspective of a Warlpiri life-world – about the role of things in Warlpiri relatedness, or the logics of order of Warlpiri domestic space – it also takes ‘things’ as a productive site for revealing the differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of seeing and being in the world, and the asymmetrical power dynamics at the intersection of that difference.
Gil Hizi (PhD 2018): My dissertation focused on pedagogic programmes for self-improvement in urban China, exploring individuals’ experiences of social change. By combining theories of personhood, affect and modernity I analysed the ideal of the person practised and experienced through ‘soft’ skills workshops in Jinan. My findings suggest that self-improvement does not simply ‘produce’ new capitalist subjects, but is rather pursued in ways that contrast and critique everyday social norms and reproduces contradictions in Chinese individuals' experience of modernity. Gil’s dissertation can be accessed here.
Belinda Burbidge’s PhD project was based on research about kinship and relatedness with Wiradjuri people in central west New South Wales, particularly focussing on economic, social and emotional relatedness and generational change. Her thesis is an examination of of the ways in which the moral and emotional order of relatedness governs relatedness, where daily lived experience of shared emotional states can be understood in terms of a language for the self and moral framework within a shared Wiradjuri and non-Wiradjuri world. Belinda now works at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) as a Research Fellow.
I was the associate supervisor for Eve Vincent's PhD thesis about Aboriginality, identity and native title on the Far West Coast of Australia, submitted in 2012. This PhD became the book 'Against Native Title: Conflict and Creativity in Otback Australia', published by Aboriginal Studies Press in 2017. Eve is also the co-editor of 'Unstable Relations: People and Environmentalism in Contemporary Australia' (University of Western Australia Publishing, 2016) and 'History, Power, Text: Cultural Studies and Indigenous Studies (UTS E-Press, 2014). Eve joined the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University in 2014, where she currently is Senior Lecturer.
Publications
- Musharbash, Y & Gershon, I, eds, 2023, Living with Monsters: Ethnographic Fiction about Real Monsters, Punctum books, Brooklyn, New York.
- Musharbash, Y, ed., 2022, Settler-Colonial Violence In Contemporary Australia.
- Musharbash, Y & Presterudstuen, GH, eds, 2020, Monster Anthropology. Ethnographic Explorations of Transforming Social Worlds Through Monsters, Bloomsbury, London and New York.
- Dennis, S & Musharbash, Y, eds, 2018, Smoke and Anthropology (Guest Editors: Simone Dennis and Yasmine Musharbash).
- Musharbash, Y & Presterudstuen, GH, eds, 2014, Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
- Musharbash, Y 2008, Yuendumu Everyday: Contemporary life in remote Aboriginal Australia, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, Australia.
- Glaskin, K, Tonkinson, M, Musharbash, Y et al, eds, 2008, Mortality, Mourning and Mortuary Practices in Indigenous Australia, Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Farnham UK.
- Musharbash, Y 2023, 'On the Prowl', in Yasmine Musharbash, Ilana Gershon (ed.), Living with Monsters: Ethnographic Fiction about Real Monsters , Punctum books, Brooklyn, New York, pp. 81-95.
- Musharbash, Y & Gershon, I 2023, 'Here Be Monsters', in Yasmine Musharbash, Ilana Gershon (ed.), Living with Monsters: Ethnographic Fiction about Real Monsters , Punctum books, Brooklyn, New York, pp. 15-30.
- Musharbash, Y 2022, 'An introduction in 3 parts: Anthropological perspectives on the shooting of Kumanjayi Walker', Australian Journal of Anthropology, vol. 33, no. S1, pp. 3-16.
- Musharbash, Y 2021, 'Monsters', Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, vol. Online, pp. 1-16.
- Musharbash, Y & Presterudstuen, GH 2020, 'Introduction: Monsters and Change', in Y Musharbash & G H Presterudstuen (ed.), Monster Anthropology: Ethnographic Explorations of Transforming Social Worlds Through Monsters, Bloomsbury, London and New York, pp. 1-27.
- Musharbash, Y 2020, 'Pangkarlangu, Wonder, Extinction', in Y Musharbash & G H Presterudstuen (ed.), Monster Anthropology: Ethnographic Explorations of Transforming Social Worlds Through Monsters, Bloomsbury, London and New York, pp. 59-74.
- Musharbash, Y 2020. 'No Story Is My Story.' Fictions, Fieldsights, October 29.
- Musharbash, Y 2020, 'The Hairies: Cleverman (Griffen, 2016-2017)', in Simon Bacon (ed.), Monsters: A Companion, Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern, pp. 137-145.
- Musharbash, Y 2019, 'A Story in and on Signs: Making Resistance and Acquiescence Legible as Forms of Resilience', in Laurent Dousset & Melissa Nayral (ed.), Pacific Realites: Changing Perspectives on Resilience and Resistance, Berghahn Books, New York, pp. 23-43.
- Musharbash, Y 2018, 'Yuendumu Dog Tales', in Natalie Porter and Ilana Gershon (ed.), Living with Animals: Binds across Species, Cornell University Press, USA, pp. 17-28.
- Musharbash, Y 2018, 'Predicaments of Proximity. Revising Relatedness in a Warlpiri Town', in Diane Austin-Broos and Francesca Merlan (ed.), People and Change in Indigenous Australia, University of Hawaii Press, United States of America, pp. 44-58.
- Musharbash, Y 2018, 'Yulyurdu: Smoke in the Desert', Anthropological Forum, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 116-125.
- Dennis, S & Musharbash, Y 2018, 'Anthropology and Smoke: Editors' Introduction to the Smoke Special Issue', Anthropological Forum, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 107-115.
- Musharbash, Y 2017, 'Telling Warlpiri Dog Stories', Anthropological Forum, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 95-113.
- Musharbash, Y 2017, ''Country', 'community' and 'growth town': Three spatio-temporal snapshots of Warlpiri experiences of home', in Justine Lloyd and Ellie Vasta (ed.), Reimagining Home in the 21st Century, Edward Elgar Publishing Inc., USA, pp. 72-86.
- Musharbash, Y 2016, 'Evening Play: Acquainting Toddlers with Dangers and Fear at Yuendumu, Northern Territory', in Hideaki Terashima & Barry S Hewlett (ed.), Social Learning and Innovation in Contemporary Hunter-Gatherers: Evolutionary and Ethnographic Perspectives, Springer Japan KK, Tokyo, pp. 171-177.
- Musharbash, Y 2016, 'A Short Essay on Monsters, Birds, and Sounds of the Uncanny', Semiotic Review, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 1-11.
- Musharbash, Y 2016, 'The Triangle: A Narrative Portrait of Place-Gathered Monstrousness', in Erin Vander Wall (ed.), Edgelands: A Collection of Monstrous Geographies, Inter-Disciplinary Press, UK, pp. 31-40.
- Musharbash, Y 2014, 'Monstrous Transformations: A Case Study from Central Australia', in Yasmine Musharbash & Geir Henning Presterudstuen (ed.), Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp. 39-56.
- Musharbash, Y 2014, 'Introduction: Monsters, Anthropology, and Monster Studies', in Yasmine Musharbash & Geir Henning Presterudstuen (ed.), Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp. 1-24.
- Musharbash, Y 2014, 'Here be Kurdaitcha: Towards an Ethnography of the Monstrous on the Margins of a Central Australian Aboriginal Town', in C Douglas, R Monacella (ed.), Places and Spaces of Monstrosity, Inter-Disciplinary Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 117-124.
- Musharbash, Y 2013, 'Night, sight, and feeling safe: An exploration of aspects of Warlpiri and Western sleep', Australian Journal of Anthropology, The, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 48-63.
- Musharbash, Y 2013, 'Embodied Meaning: Sleeping Arrangements in Central Australia', in Katie Glaskin and Richard Chenhall (ed.), Sleep Around the World: Anthropological Perspectives, Palgrave Macmillan Ltd, New York, pp. 45-60.
- Musharbash, Y 2011, 'Warungka: Becoming and Un-becoming a Warlpiri Person', in Ute Eickelcamp (ed.), Growing Up in Central Australia: New Anthropological Studies of Aboriginal Childhood and Adolescence, Berghahn Books, New York, pp. 63-81.
- Musharbash, Y & Barber, M, eds, 2011, Ethnography & the Production of Anthropological Knowledge: Essays in Honour of Nicolas Peterson, ANU Press, Canberra, Australia.
- Musharbash, Y 2010, ''Only whitefella take that road': Culture seen through the intervention at Yuendumu', in Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson (ed.), Culture Crisis: Anthropology and Politics in Aboriginal Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney, pp. 212-225.
- Musharbash, Y 2010, 'Marriage, Love Magic and Adultery: Walpiri Relationships as Seen by Three Generations of Anthropologists', Oceania, vol. 80, no. 3, pp. 272-288.
- Musharbash, Y 2010, 'Warlpiri fears/whitefella fears: Ways of being in Central Australia seen through an emotion', Emotion, Space and Society, vol. 3, pp. 95-102.
- Musharbash, Y 2008, 'Perilous Laughter: Examples from Yuendumu, Central Australia', Anthropological Forum, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 271-277.
- Carty, J & Musharbash, Y 2008, 'You've Got to be Joking: Asserting the Analytical Value of Humour and Laughter in Contemporary Anthropology', Anthropological Forum, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 209-217.
- Musharbash, Y 2008, ''Sorry Business is Yapa Way': Warlpiri Mortuary Rituals as Embodied Practice', in K. Glaskin, M. Tonkinson, Y. Musharbash and V. Burbank (ed.), Mortality, Mourning and Mortuary Practices in Indigenous Australia, Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Farnham UK, pp. 21-36.
- Musharbash, Y 2007, 'Boredom, time, and modernity: An example from Aboriginal Australia', American Anthropologist, vol. 109, no. 2, pp. 307-317.
- Musharbash, Y 2004, 'Red Bucket for the Red Cordial, Green Bucket for the Green Cordial: On the Logic and Logistics of Warlpiri Birthday Parties', Australian Journal of Anthropology, The, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 12-22.
- Musharbash, Y 2001, Indigenous families and the welfare system: The Yuendumu community case study, Stage Two.
- Musharbash, Y 2001, 'Yuendemu CDEP: The Warlpiri work ethic and Kardiya staff turnover', The Indigenous Welfare Economy and the CDEP Scheme: Autonomy, Dependence, Self Determination and Mutual Obligation, ed. F. Morphy and W. Sanders, Australian National University, Canberra, pp. 153-165.
- Musharbash, Y 2000, 'The Yuendemu Community Case Study', in Smith, D. (ed.), Indigenous Families and the Welfare System: Two Community Case Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, pp. 53-84.