Cirrus@Austlit

'Peter Sutton has been at various times, and sometimes simultaneously, a museum-based anthropologist with a foundational role in raising the profile of Australian Indigenous art, an anthropologist and linguist who has made significant ethnographic, analytical and theoretical contributions to both fields, and to the intersection between them, an expert on native title, and a public intellectual.

'The contributors to More than Mere Words reflect on Sutton's important contribution to linguistics and the study of Australian languages. The first two chapters give a historical perspective on the study of Australia's Indigenous languages.

'There follows a section on language as a reflection of connection to place, and then a set of essays on language in its socio-cultural contexts, spanning prehistory to the present.

'The final part of the book charts the consequences of the colonial encounter through a consideration of language endangerment. The volume's title captures both the complexity of languages as systems embedded in their social contexts through space and time, and a sense that this celebration of Peter's life and career cannot simply be read as 'mere words'.' (Publication summary)

'The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel wrote that ‘the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk’. For Hegel, philosophy arrives late on the scene: the world comes to be apprehended only after the fact, in retrospect. Events and historical processes outrun our ability to think them. In many ways, so-called salvage linguistic and anthropological studies in the south-east of Australia have been similarly backward-looking and caught behind the game. Many have struggled, perhaps none more so than Luise Hercus, to document fragmenting and fading languages and traditions in the face of the massive social disruption and change. This paper is an attempt to think the present by asking what can be done with the results of such studies in the context of Indigenous projects of cultural rejuvenation. The key question is: how does something new emerge? I describe how a group of Wirangu people translate a mythical narrative back into their language by drawing on archival materials and using Luise’s salvage grammar of Wirangu as a key. A third, crucial, ingredient is the everyday lived experience of the translators.'  (Introduction)