Gillian Cowlishaw

• The University of Sydney

Part One of Tunnel Vision discussed the limited scope of ethnographic attention in Australia in the late 20th century, and the discipline's reluctance to take up post-colonial ideas that were influential elsewhere. In Part Two I examine the challenges faced by apolitical classicism since the 1970s, and the continuing resistance of historical and po...

This essay is based on my conviction that Australian ethnography's narrow purview and anthropology's theoretical limitations need exploring and explaining. While internationally the discipline developed new sites, new theoretical fields and new political ideas in the post-colonial era from around 1970, classicism continued to dominate research in A...

The exposure in 2006 of horrific cases of sexual violence that allegedly characterised Northern Territory Aboriginal communities, evoked responses dominated by a predictable moral panic. Thus the Commonwealth Intervention of 2007 largely missed its ostensible aim of protecting sexually abused children. This essay moves beyond a moralising analysis...

What is the relationship between negative sentiments towards different kinds of people and the actual difficulties posed by people with different habits and practices living close by one another? Such difficulties are a space of fear and silence because, in this multicultural postmodernworld, we are supposed to celebrate difference in all its manif...

The extraordinarily high rates of Aboriginal imprisonment have received much if somewhat baffled attention from criminologists motivated by the desire to solve this social problem. But solutions should be preceded by analysis and analysis should begin with scepticism; we must always ask how a ‘social problem’ has been constructed. 2 A simple exampl...

This essay proposes that a fundamental arbitrariness and absurdity at the heart of culture becomes visible in times of radical social change. As the Australian nation attempts to celebrate and revive Aboriginal Culture, and institutions call upon culture to remedy Aboriginal ills, Aboriginal traditions are also being held responsible for present di...

Ethnographic research concerning Aboriginal social life in the earlier settled areas of the continent has formed a minor strand within the body of Australian anthropological research. Yet these studies speak directly to the current national discourse concerning distressing conditions in many Aboriginal communities in the north. The kind of anthropo...

This second part of Mythologising Culture examines the responses of Aboriginal people in western Sydney to the valorizing of Aboriginality by the Australian nation. As Aboriginal culture has become the object of restitution, regret and reconciliation, Aboriginal people are being called upon to represent and produce Culture in iconic forms such as p...

In western Sydney, I found an extreme version of what I propose is a national Aboriginal mythopoeia, that is, a powerful system of beliefs and practices in relation to Aboriginal people and culture. A reified Aboriginal culture is promoted at institutional sites and in reconciliation discourses that evokes the presence of something precious and mys...

■ On 13 February 2008, the Australian government apologized to the ‘stolen generations’: those children of Aboriginal descent who were removed from their parents (usually their Aboriginal mothers) to be raised in white foster-homes and institutions administered by government and Christian churches — a practice that lasted from before the First Worl...

This article was inspired by ethnographic observation of interaction, arguments and ideologies in Bourke, New South Wales, and the contrast with the nation’s public debates. Whereas the prevailing national orthodoxy accords Aborigines the status of injured victims of history, local Whites claim present injury from these same victims. The former dia...

This essay asks how the remaking of Australian history in the last quarter of the twentieth century has affected the subjectivities and social relations of people who do not make history but who must don new truths about their own past. Aboriginal people, as well as Anglo‐Australians, had to shift their consciousness as the new topic, ambiguously c...

When both the incumbent and prospective Prime Ministers of Australia competed for public applause in April 2004 on 'getting rid of ATSIC' because 'it isn't working', the limited public commentary which followed lacked any sense of history or even of irony at politicians' complacent assertions of failure. Little curiosity was expressed about what 'f...

Public Culture 15.1 (2003) 103-125 Aphorism, origin unknown Recent revelations about extensive disorder, violence, and misery in Australian Indigenous communities dealt a shocking blow to a nation that deploys, with pride and passion, images of Indigenous people in its self-representations. The condition of Indigenous people has often been consider...

This introduction will consider how these four papers mark new boundaries of an expanding anthropological project both in their theoretical aspirations and their empirical reach. While the papers address quite different questions, each is relevant to the contemporary relationship between anthropology, indigenous people and the Australian nation. To...

This article is about an intellectual practice – the rejection of the analysis of race as an operative principle in the social world in favour of a focus on hybrid forms and flexible categories. While grounded in a worthy fear of reinforcing racial categories, there is a squeamishness here that reveals a fear of the body, and of what dealing with a...

This paper is an ethnographic exploration of the process heralded by the progressive policies of Aboriginal self-determination. The discourse of self-determination was based on anti-racist ideals and a break with the past. However, state officials did not divest themselves of their cultural baggage, and proceeded by trial and error to implement a p...

This article draws on my first fieldwork experience in northern Australia in 1975, interpreted through subsequent reflection. I argue that ethnography, in Australia at least, is intimately embroiled in race relations, both because it is generated at the racial frontier of Australian society, and because ethnography is constructed within the cultura...

This paper engages with the arguments which circulated in the public domain in opposition to the recognition of native title, and sets out the ‘truths’ they constructed concerning the nature and position of Aborigines within the Australian nation. These ‘truths’ rely on a nescience in the public domain of Aboriginal cultural forms and of the actual...

This paper seeks to show why there is a need to theorise race relations as a feature of white Australia's culture and as the context of Aboriginal lives. The violent drama of racial politics as glimpsed on the public media and as experienced by black communities all over the country, demands analytic attention. Anthropologists were once the experts...

Raymond Evans, Kay Saunders and Kathryn Cronin, RACE RELATIONS IN COLONIAL QUEENSLAND: A HISTORY OF EXCLUSION, EXPLOITATION AND EXTERMINATION, St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988 (fp.1975), 450 pp., $26.95.Henry Reynolds, WITH THE WHITE PEOPLE: THE CRUCIAL ROLE OF ABORIGINES IN THE EXPLOITATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF AUSTRALIA, Ringwood: Pe...

Aboriginalist' anthropologists in Australia employ the concept of `traditional Aborigines' in a way which has not changed since the study of the Australian race became the study of Aboriginal culture. The focus on tradition and on cultural continuities denies by implication the authenticity of many Aborigines. It also denies the history of those co...

this attachment to inherited names appears much stronger as soon as we consider realities of a less material order. That is because the transformation in such cases almost always takes place too slowly to be perceptible to the very men affected by them. They feel no need to change the label, because the change of content escapes them.

Socialisation can refer to the formation of the individual personality or to the process of producing conformity in growing children. It is argued that both need attention but it is the latter, a largely ideological process, which is fundamental to explaining why women are willing allies in reproducing their own subordination. Ethnographic evidence...

This paper concerns the determinants of fertility of precontact Australian Aborigine women. Emphasis is placed on social organization as well as the physical environment and considerations of adaptation. The key to understanding the fertility of Australian Aborigines is the structural tension evident in male-female relations. Ethnographic data on h...