MOA’s Lévi-Strauss Lectures invite visiting scholars to present their research concerning structural or symbolic anthropology, mythology, visual or performative culture, or critical museology.

Moving Performances—manikay in America

In 1983 at a roundtable at the Festival d’Automne in Paris, Claude Lévi-Strauss asked the leaders of two groups of Aboriginal singers and dancers from Australia about their experiences performing in a different cultural context so far from home. At the heart of his question lies a concern for the fragility of local worlds confronted by global processes.

In this lecture, Howard Morphy explores Lévi-Strauss’s questions again, focusing on the performances of one of the groups—the Yolngu dancers from Yirrkala who performed their manikay (songs with accompanying dances) in America.

Morphy looks at different contexts for the performance of some manikay themes, from ceremonial spaces in Arnhem Land in Australia to public arenas in America. Each performance is an instance of a process of engagement, through song and dance, to connect people to natural, social and spiritual environments in a symbolic universe.

The manikay represent a body of knowledge and way of being in the world that, while dynamic and resilient, is threatened to be subsumed by global forces.

Howard Morphy is an Emeritus Professor in the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at The Australian National University and Head of the Centre for Digital Humanities Research. He is an anthropologist with a particular focus on art, museums and visual anthropology who has undertaken research with the Yolngu people over a period of 40 years.