Message sticks and German anthropology
Australia has been a site of special interest to German anthropologists since the late 19th century. Such important figures as Adolf Bastian (1826–1905), Hermann Klaatsch (1863–1916) and Helmut Petri (1907–1986), among others, took a great interest in message sticks which they collected and analysed during and after their visits to Australia. While settler-scholars tended to assume that message sticks were merely mnemonic devices, German ethnographers took an expansive approach, an attitude reflected in their more detailed descriptions and theoretical speculations. This project will trace the special contributions that German anthropologists made to the study and collection of message sticks from the 1880s through the two World Wars and the Cold War.

Requirements: The candidate will need to be enrolled at the University of New England (UNE) in Armidale, Australia, or at another Australian university provided that they are able to find a principal supervisor at their home institution. The candidate will require sufficient competence in German to be able to make sense of historical archives, museum registers and journal articles (with the assistance of dictionaries and online translation tools). Travel to Germany is optional since the major sources are digitised; however, the candidate will be expected to coordinate with German archivists and curators to negotiate digital access to additional materials. Candidates at UNE will also have access to any necessary German, Austrian and Swiss journals and may borrow a limited number of books from German libraries through international Inter-Library Loans.