Anthropology's involvement with Australian Indigenous people seeking to obtain legal rights, particularly in the context of the Native Title Act, has been subject to considerable critique both within and outside of the academy. The collected papers in this volume provide a constructive case for best approaches in this applied anthropological research, given the apparent constraints of the legal environment and the necessity to retain professional anthropological integrity. Issues of cultural change and identification of the relevant traditional 'law and custom' continuing through time are among a range of matters at the intersection of Australian and Aboriginal customary law. This collection assembles papers that demonstrate the relevance and significance of applied research in this area.
Various aspects of Christian belief and practice have been documented as significant across Aboriginal Australia. In recent years, many communities have been involved in seeking to achieve traditional rights in land and sea as recognised in Australian law. Asserting and proving these rights entails demonstrating continuity of traditional law and custom since the establishment of British sovereignty. While legal discourse indicates that this does not exclude cultural change, law and custom must continue to derive from pre‐sovereignty traditions. This article addresses the extent to which Christian belief and practice have been articulated and researched in applied anthropological work, against the background of relevant academic studies. If a sophisticated theory of cultural change and continuity is germane to researching land claims and native title, what is the significance of Christian syncretism in Aboriginal relations with place and the inheritance of ancestral connections to ‘country’? Several case studies are examined.
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