Fred Myers

Fred Myers is the Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University. He was past editor of the journal Cultural Anthropology and President of the American Ethnological Society. Myers has been involved in research with, and writing about, Western Desert Aboriginal people since 1973. His work over the last fifteen years has been focused principally on studying and explaining the significance of art and material culture as a point of articulation – aesthetic, political, developmental — between the values and expectations of Indigenous people and institutions of the outside world.

His books include Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines (1986) and his more recent book on the acrylic painting movement, Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art (2002). Edited volumes include the ground-breaking The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Anthropology and Art (co-edited with George Marcus, 1995), The Empire of Things (2001), and Experiments in Self-Determination: a History of the Outstation Movement in Australia (2016).