Francesca Merlan

Francesca Cordelia Merlan is an American-born Australian anthropologist and linguist known for her ethnographic research in northern Australia, Papua New Guinea, and Germany. She is Emerita Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University (ANU) and Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Her work has focused on Indigenous-settler relations, social transformation, land claims, gender, and linguistic documentation.

Early life and education

Merlan completed her MA and PhD in anthropology at the University of New Mexico in 1975, conducting doctoral research on Native American and settler communities in the North American Plains.

Career

In 1976, Merlan was awarded a research grant from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, bringing her to northern Australia for fieldwork that lasted from 1976 to 1979 and has continued to the present. The research focused on the changing locations and languages of Indigenous people in the Katherine region of the Northern Territory, where she documented several previously undocumented Indigenous languages.

She joined the Australian National University as Professor of Anthropology in 1995 and has since been appointed Emerita Professor. She has held a visiting fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton (2015–16). In 2003 she was awarded the Centenary Medal (Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Australia).

Research

Merlan's research spans three primary geographic regions. In northern Australia, she has investigated the effects of Aboriginal people's movement into regional towns; Indigenous-settler relations; Aboriginal languages, their maintenance and socio-cultural significance; and land claims, as well as native title claims.

This work resulted in her book Caging the Rainbow: Places, Politics and Aborigines in a North Australian Town (1998), which examined the lives of Aboriginal people in Katherine, Northern Territory.

Her later book Dynamics of Difference in Australia: Indigenous Past and Present in a Settler Country (2018) explored relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians from first contact to the present.

Since 1981, Merlan has conducted fieldwork in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea with her husband and colleague Alan Rumsey.

Their co-authored work Ku Waru: Language and Segmentary Politics in the Western Nebilyer Valley, Papua New Guinea (1991) examined segmentary sociality, language, and politics. Her more recent research in the region has focused on the re-emergence of warfare and the changing roles of women in conflict; and, with Alan Rumsey and others, on child language socialization.

Beginning in 1999, Merlan initiated field research in southern Germany on agrarian transition, rural change, and questions of belonging and indigeneity in Bavaria.

Merlan has also produced major linguistic works, including Mangarayi (1982), Ngalakan Grammar, Texts, and Vocabulary (1983), A Grammar of Wardaman (1993), and a set of dictionaries, text collections, and works on flora and fauna documentation with Indigenous research associates, some of these on Jawoyn, a language of southern Arnhem Land.

Selected publications

Books

• Merlan, Francesca (January 1982). Mangarayi - LDS, Lingua Descriptive Studies. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company.
• Merlan, Francesca (1 January 1983). CRCL (ed.). Ngalakan grammar, texts and vocabulary. Pacific Linguistics. doi:10.15144/PL-B89.
• Merlan, Francesca; Rumsey, Alan (29 March 1991). Ku Waru. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-32339-0.
• Merlan, Francesca C. (12 May 2011). A Grammar of Wardaman: A Language of the Northern Territory of Australia. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-087137-1.
• Merlan, Francesca (1 May 1998). Caging the Rainbow: Places, Politics and Aborigines in a North Australian Town. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 978-0-8248-2045-9.
• Reay, Marie Olive; Merlan, Francesca (15 December 2014). Wives and Wanderers in a New Guinea Highlands Society: Women's lives in the Waghi Valley. ANU Press. ISBN 978-1-925022-16-2.
• Merlan, Francesca (2016). Tricksters and Traditions: Jawoyn Stories and Story-tellers of Southern Arnhem Land. Asia-Pacific Linguistics. ISBN 978-1-922185-33-4.
• Austin-Broos, Diane; Merlan, Francesca (30 November 2017). People and Change in Indigenous Australia. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 978-0-8248-7333-2.
• Merlan, Francesca (22 May 2018). Dynamics of Difference in Australia: Indigenous Past and Present in a Settler Country. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-5000-8.

Journal articles

• Merlan, Francesca (2009). "Indigeneity: Global and Local". Current Anthropology. 50 (3): 303–333. Bibcode:2009CurrA..50..303M. doi:10.1086/597667. PMID 19827331.
• Merlan, Francesca (2014). "Recent rituals of indigenous recognition in Australia: Welcome to Country". American Anthropologist. 116 (2): 296–309. doi:10.1111/aman.12089. ISSN 0002-7294.
• Merlan, Francesca (2016). "Women, warfare, and the life of agency: Papua New Guinea and beyond". The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 22 (2): 392–411. doi:10.1111/1467-9655.12405. ISSN 1359-0987. JSTOR 43908006.
• Merlan, Francesca (4 July 2020). "Ghost twitter in Indigenous Australia: Sentience, agency, and ontological difference". HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 10 (1): 209–235. doi:10.1086/707641. hdl:1885/293427. ISSN 2049-1115.
• Merlan, Francesca (6 November 2022). "Postcolonial politics of elimination?: A view from Australia and the United States". HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 12 (2): 453–467. doi:10.1086/720788. ISSN 2049-1115.
• Merlan, Francesca (2025). "Anthropology and change over the 'land rights era': Towards treaties?". The Australian Journal of Anthropology. 36 (1): 19–39. doi:10.1111/taja.12541. hdl:1885/733751986. ISSN 1757-6547.