PhD student
Research Field(s):
- Australia
- Aboriginal and Torres Stait Island (ATSI) Australia
- Indigenous Australia’ histories and cultures
- Society-environment relationships
- Rock Art / Traditional Ecological Knowledge
- Systemics / Structuralism / Ontological Turn
- Civilisation : history/ethnology/archeology + environmental studies
Period(s):
“Prehistoric” / Colonial / Contemporary Australia
Degrees:
- Master Degree in Cultural Studies : English-speaking World.
- Bachelor’s degree in English Studies.
Research Project:
Under the supervision of Pr. Matthew GRAVES : “A systemic approach to Australian rock art: structures, properties and models of the ideal and material dimensions of an object-subject of history”
Abstract:
Since the late 1960s, Australian history and historiography have been questioning how to construct a narrative of the continent that does not reproduce a ‘cult of forgetfulness’. Attention has therefore turned to the increased and systematic integration of the unwritten history of the continent’s various Aboriginal populations in a process aimed at purging the discipline of its past stigmas. The research conducted here focuses on a twofold question concerning the incorporation of rock and cave art, also known as “rock art”, into the production of Australian history. The aim is therefore to characterise the use of rock art, as material with no fixed meaning, within the historical and historiographical approach, while contextualising Australian history as revealed by the analysis of regional rock art. The approach proceeds in three stages through the application of a variety of literature drawn mainly from archaeology, ethnology, history and semiotics, in addition to certain Australian legislative texts, as well as through the analysis of a corpus of Australian iconography. Rock art is thus initially situated in a historicising perspective as an object of research and a subject of society from the time of its ‘discovery’ by the colonial society of the time, and then better contextualised as a dual entity: an archive and a place of narrative(s) for Aboriginal communities. Finally, rock art is characterised in its ontology as a sociocultural practice and element of a dual semiotic and memory system, the morphology of which is proposed through models linking material and ideal entities. This multiple approach thus presents the preliminaries to a work that should enable the introduction of an analytical methodology for archives characterised by their “multivocality”, such as rock art, based on the formalisation of the properties and characteristics of Australian rock art and their complex treatment through incrementation within human ideal and material systems.