[SydPhil] CHOP Research Seminar - Stephen Muecke (UNDA) “Operation Totem: Modernity Explodes Indigenous Myth, or Does It?”

[Paul Zaki]

Hi there,

I hope this email finds you well.

I was sad to miss the seminar today. Is there any chance that it was recorded, and that I might be able to be granted access to that recording?

Thank you!

Kind Regards
Paul Zaki

From: SydPhil <sydphil-bounces at mailman.sydney.edu.au> on behalf of Catherine Wesselinoff via SydPhil <sydphil at mailman.sydney.edu.au>
Date: Monday, 15 June 2026 at 15:58
To: Ryan Cox via SydPhil <sydphil at mailman.sydney.edu.au>
Subject: [SydPhil] CHOP Research Seminar - Stephen Muecke (UNDA) “Operation Totem: Modernity Explodes Indigenous Myth, or Does It?”
The Notre Dame Centre for the History of Philosophy warmly invites you to this Research Seminar.

TIME: Thursday June 18, 1 - 2:30 pm, Sydney time

IN PERSON: University of Notre Dame Australia, Broadway/Sydney Campus, NDS23/102

ONLINE: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_ZjA5ZGZiYjgtNDdjZC00MWY5LWJkZDctZDYzMTI4MjhkZGVm%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22c93ebcc3-e84c-45c4-9c7e-8607adc072ec%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22d57c9f6e-4977-4ef4-ab54-cde3631e83ed%22%7d

PASSCODE: jY3Hz6fZ

________________________________

SPEAKERS: Stephen Muecke (UNDA)

TITLE: Operation Totem: Modernity Explodes Indigenous Myth, or Does It?

ABSTRACT: Operation Totem 1, the first nuclear test on the Australian mainland, was carried out on Aṉangu Country, Emu Field in the Great Victoria Desert, North-Western South Australia on 15 October 1953.
Why ‘totem’? I started by wanting to write about Indigenous totemism as a philosophical system, to explain how it works as a perfectly reasonable way of managing the complex relations that living things have in their places (Deborah Bird Rose). Explain it? As if totemism is sitting out there in a field of knowledge, independent, and not in relation to the Moderns who started by wanting to blow it up along with all other ‘primitive’ concepts they fetishized? (Bruno Latour)
Perhaps ‘totemism’ doesn’t ‘exist’ at all as a system or a singular concept. I therefore hypothesize that it is a philosophy of relations, an open-ended network of attachments forming and reforming in a particular territory, a living ecology among plants, animals, people, rivers, mountains and spirits. That is an anthropological definition, but totemism may also be locked into another kind of relation, a dialectical one with destructive modernity (Adorno & Horkheimer). The Moderns saw it, and still see it, as one of the primitivisms that has to be banished in order for modernity to purify its own mythic power (Gusterson).
Historically, the concept migrated from the Ojibwe in the US, catapulted via Baldwin and Spencer, Frazer, Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss into Australia. And it became the defining anthropological feature characterizing Australian animist cultures.  Because of their relation to modern social sciences, Australian cultures became pervasively ‘totemic’ at the same time as they were subdued and racialized.
Australian totemism can nevertheless be seen a ‘solution’ to one problem in a philosophical way of life and deserves to be liberated from the modern social sciences to the extent that they are complicit with the exploding of Indigenous myths. Cloaked in new power, it can perform an ecological critique of the modern conceptual architecture that enabled explosive performances like Operation Totem in 1953, and therefore contribute to the emerging field of Indigenous Australian Philosophy.

BIO:

Stephen Muecke is a Senior Research Fellow in the Nulungu Research Institute of the University of Notre Dame Australia, Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and Emeritus Professor at the University of New South Wales. He is a cultural theorist and has worked at the University of Technology Sydney, the University of Western Australia, the University of Adelaide and Flinders University. He has collaborated for many years with the Goolarabooloo people of the Kimberley region in Western Australia. An early result of that collaborative work was the book Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology (1984), co-authored with Krim Benterrak and Paddy Roe, which explored the meaning and politics of place through Aboriginal narratives, songs and paintings. More recently, again with Paddy Roe, he published The Children’s Country: Creation of a Goolarabooloo Future in North-West Australia (2021) and with Jennifer Eadie (eds., 2025) Living in Critical Zones: Environmental Humanities in South Asia. He is also a creative writer (The Mother’s Day Protest and Other Fictocritical Essays was published in 2016) and has translated several books from French into English, notably Another Science is Possible (2018), by Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers, The Wandering Souls (2019), by French ethnopsychiatrist Tobie Nathan, and Our Grateful Dead: Stories of Those Left behind, (2021) by Belgian ethologist Vinciane Despret.

Dr Catherine Wesselinoff
Lecturer | School of Philosophy and Theology
Lead, Strategic Programs and Partnerships | Institute for Ethics and Society (IES)
The University of Notre Dame Australia.
Book a meeting with me<https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/DhJKCJyBrGf1kj52kiVfMcypXKq?domain=outlook.office.com> <https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/DhJKCJyBrGf1kj52kiVfMcypXKq?domain=outlook.office.com>

Recent Publications:
"Beauty's Comeback", Debates in Aesthetics, Vol 19. No. 2, 2025, pp 35-45.
"Apophatic Beauty in the Hippias Major and the Symposium", The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 82, Issue 1, 2024, pp 36-44.
The Revival of Beauty: Aesthetics, Experience, and Philosophy, Routledge, 2023.

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