Expert on Australian aboriginal art to give University Lecture, April 16

"A History of Aboriginal Futures: The Politics of Indigenous Presence" is the topic of a University Lecture by New York University anthropologist Fred R. Myers on Friday, April 16, at 4:30 p.m. in 165 McGraw Hall at Cornell.

Open to the public at no charge, the presentation by NYU's Silver Professor of Anthropology is expected to be of broad, interdisciplinary interest to anthropologists, scholars of art and performance, cultural studies and social theory, according to P. Steven Sangren, professor of anthropology and Asian studies and one of the Cornell faculty members who nominated Myers for the lectureship. Myers' visit coincides with an April 17 conference, organized by the Department of Anthropology, to honor the retiring Terry Turner, professor of anthropology and a longtime colleague of Myers.

According to Sangren, the April 16 lecture is expected to focus on Myers' path breaking ethnography studies with the Pintupi tribe of Western Australia, their art and its global market, and the relevance of aboriginal art to understanding the social production of value forms in today's emergent, transnational economy/culture. Brett de Bary, the professor of Asian studies and comparative literature who also nominated Myers for the lectureship, called the NYU anthropologist "a leading theorist of what come call 'visual anthropology.'" He credited Myers with linking aesthetic theory to economic and political issues, such as indigenous people's rights, the global traffic in culture and the debate over comparative modernities.

The former editor (1991-95) of the journal Cultural Anthropology, Myers is the author, co-author or editor of six books, most recently, Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art (Duke University Press, 2002). The University Lectures series at Cornell was started by Goldwin Smith, the distinguished historian of English birth who, in Nathaniel Hawthorne's phrase, wanted to "open an intercourse with the world."