24 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 20 NO 3, JUNE 2004 AUSTRALIAN ANTHROPOLOGY AND HINDMARSH ISLAND BRIDGE A response to Peace, AT19(5) Adrian Peaces editorial does not so much comment on the anthropological issues of the Hindmarsh Island Bridge affair as illustrate yet again how Australian anthropologists  with but a handful of exceptions  have refused to reclaim analysis of the case in anthropological terms. Peace hardly even hints at what these anthropological issues were  inter alia, the distribution of restricted knowledge in Aboriginal communities, the contemporary dimensions of family-based factionalism in sedentary peri-urban Aboriginal communities, the idea of the sacred site as an arena for Aboriginal-Australian contestation over rela- tions to land, and the conditions under which consultant anthropologists produce analyses in highly charged situations where a number of competing interests converge. Some anthropol- ogists such as Robert Tonkinson, myself, Diane Bell and Ron Brunton have debated these issues vigorously in academic journals both in Australia and abroad. 1 Others, such as Gaynor McDonald, Tim Rowse and the histo- rian Dick Kimber have conscientiously reviewed Diane Bells book-length defence of the womens business that was at the ethno- graphic heart of the controversy. These indi- viduals evidently spent time reading ethnography, transcripts and submissions, of which the volume, even apart from the consid- erable amount of material that is still not accessible to the public, is nevertheless vast. It is true, as Peace points out, that few anthropologists commented in the national media on this issue while it was still news. But it was not easy for an academic to make the opinion pages of The Australian, the major daily of the country at the time. Although I myself had one opinion piece and a couple of letters published, several other contributions I submitted on the issue to The Australian were not accepted for publication. And while I remain the only anthropologist to have responded to Ron Bruntons initial critique  in the pages of this journal, as a matter of fact  it was Bruntons opinions that were regularly reported in the Australian news media and not those of other anthropologists. It could be that we failed to render the complex issues con- cerning culture, fabrication and innovation into acceptably simple terms for a lay audience, while Brunton maintained the far simpler and far more newsworthy theme of scheming Aborigines and their anthropologist henchmen cooking up a factitious sacred site claim. If, as we have seen in recent native title cases, even Federal and High Court judges in Australia are having difficulty grasping these notions, this may not be hard to understand. Or it could be that the newspaper preferred to highlight the sensational and titillating aspects of the affair. In the latter case, is it really to anthropologys discredit that many chose not to write about it in such terms? My point, however, is that anthropologists, with the exception of those mentioned above, failed to give adequate space to discussion and debate of the issue among themselves, in their own terms and in their professional venues. Surely this is essential before anyone in the discipline can represent the issue to the lay public? The majority of anthropologists in Australia, including Peace, having little knowledge of this material and knowing little more than what they had read in the newspapers and heard in conversation, chose not to publish an opinion on the matter. This seems to me a matter of prudence more than anything else, since the competence and professionalism of a lecturer in anthropology had publicly been called into question. It was this prudence and caution, rather than merely the fear of litiga- tion, that curtailed the extent of public com- mentary by anthropologists on Hindmarsh Island. Chiding anthropologists for not responding to the disparagement of their disci- pline by those who knew next to nothing about it, he offers no substantive insight into the problems that the Hindmarsh Island affair cre- ated for the discipline. He refuses to consider the essential point  that anthropologys image in the Hindmarsh Island affair is related to the nature and quality of the anthropology that contributed to it. ! James F. Weiner Visiting Fellow Australian National University james.weiner@anu.edu.au 1. Some of the papers presented at an Australian Anthropological Society-sponsored forum on the implications of the Federal Court case Chapman v. Luminis (including those by anthropologists Francesca Merlan and Mary Edmunds) can be found on the website http://www.aas.asn.au/Hindmarshconf/. DEBATING THE EU A response to Shore and AbØlLs, AT20(2) I enjoyed the discussion with Cris Shore and Marc AbØlLs concerning an anthropology of the EU. Their work is very welcome, and interestingly dissimilar. Shores work draws largely on texts and interviews, but AbØlLs own fieldwork inside the European Commission manages to extract for us one of the core difficulties of the Union: making daily sense of relativism. Like AbØlLs, I cannot agree with Shore that the EU can be reduced to the work of a self- serving elite. At the same time, whilst both note some of the challenges that EU enlarge- ment will bring, changes in the EU institutions should not be forgotten. It is not enough, how- ever, to imagine that this simply means tack- ling the parallel system of administration said to be working inside the European Commission, nor to elide this, as Shore and other scholars tend to do, with perceived cor- ruption; such a slip results in misunder- standing. Shore is right to suggest that anthropologists might ask What exactly is the EU and what is it for?, but this is a question asked also by EU officials. If we want to ask this question anthropologically, we will need to ask it in a rather more fundamental way than he allows. There is much in the comments from both Shore and AbØlLs which is valuably competi- tive with political science commentary  but it could be argued that the fundamental assump- tions of the EU are left untouched, as is the nature of the political which these anthropol- ogists would make their own. Foucault and feminism have conspired to make everything analytically political and most anthropolo- gists are suddenly doing political anthro- pology. As AbØlLs acknowledges, what we need now from those studying politics is an ethnography of the political rather than simply commentary from somewhere within it. ! Maryon McDonald, Robinson College, Cambridge mem26@cam.ac.uk Maryon McDonald has carried out fieldwork inside EU institutions, and has completed several internal reports for the European Commission both on its own workings and problems, and on the EU and anthropological issues more generally. Her comments here are a prelude to a longer article by the author to appear in a future issue of AT. DECLINING ANTHROPOLOGY? A response to Mars, AT20(1) Gerald Mars is right to express anxieties over what he describes as the terminal decline in anthropology, and to impress upon us the importance of developing a survival strategy. For Mars, the solution to falling course enrol- ment, diminished publishing opportunities and an image of being irrelevant and intellectually moribund lies in luring back to the centre the applied anthropologists we have cast off to other disciplines and locations. While he cer- tainly has a point, also fundamental is the need to ensure that the anthropology students, researchers and early career anthropologists that we still have feel they have a future and something to contribute to the discipline. Anthropology Matters (www.anthropology- matters.com), since 2002 the official post- graduate network of the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA), is building up post- graduate researchers into an active community crucial to our rejuvenation. Vibrant post-grad- uate networks that cut across departmental boundaries are far more effective in producing an intellectually energised new generation of comment