Chandra Jayawardena and the Ethical ‘Turn’ in Australian Anthropology

Abstract

The Sri Lankan-born anthropologist, the late Chandra Jayawardena, was a pivotal figure in the development of Australian anthropology. He arrived at the University of Sydney in the late 1960s, a period of dramatic intellectual and political change. In the 1970s, he was at the centre of the ethical debate about the involvement of anthropologists in the Tribal Research Centre, a dispute which pitted him against W.R. Geddes. The article draws on his archived papers, including a previously unpublished essay on ethical practice, and locates the 1970s debate – which came at a crucial time in the development of Australian anthropology – in relation to contemporary debates about ethics and anthropological engagement.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.