Intensive study of a particular theme in anthropology, through a combination of lectures, tutorials and prescribed readings.

The TOPIC for this semester will critically engage with Indigenous human rights concepts on a range of levels using an anthropological approach. It will begin by establishing the course context; as emerging from a 4 year research project on the practice of Indigenous human rights in central Australia. This grounds the course as directed by research in progress, as a result it will be topical and provocative, including case study material. The course will trace the history of the emergence of the rights discourse and the 3 generations of rights as emerging post World War II. This will include an analysis of the modern category “Indigenous” and the roles of the United Nations and non-Government organisations.  The course will examine the role of human rights within Australian political and ideological discourse and the intersections between human rights and those that aim to encompass Indigenous specific interests. The opposition between culture and rights (relativism and universalism) is examined, along with the new move in anthropological research to ethnographies of local cultures of human rights. Specific areas of focus will be the analyses of human rights as a normative set of principles from a socio-linguistic perspective and Indigenous women’s rights. Finally, consideration will turn to the potential value of ‘rights’ as an alternative framework to re-evaluate the State’s engagement with remote living Indigenous Australians in terms of the Human Rights-Based Approach to development.