Caging the Rainbow: Places, Politics and Aborigines in a North Australian Town
... The young women in my research were living in a town where non-Indigenous people were in the majority; they attended school, engaged with Western media and used the Western health care system. As such, they cannot be regarded as isolated and independent from their surroundings (Merlan 1998). Moreover, the fact that there is no word in Aboriginal languages that means health in the Western sense does not mean that people do not think about issues that are generally regarded as being in the domain of health and sickness. ...
... This study was conducted in Katherine, a small town with a population of about 6,300 people in the Northern Territory, about 300 km south of Darwin on the Katherine River (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2018; Merlan 1998). Katherine has an elongated shape, with Northside and Southside situated along the river and Eastside a little further away along the Stuart Highway. ...
... Several Aboriginal communities surround Katherine, such as Kalano on the western side of the river, and Rockhole, which is located 15 km to the south-east. Katherine's climate is subtropical with a wet and a dry season and average daily temperatures from 25°C-35°C, 2 It is important to recognise, however, that the relationships are characterised by inequality, resulting in the experience of marginality by Aboriginal people (Merlan 1998(Merlan , 2005. although 40°C days are not uncommon. ...
Australia has made no treaties with its Indigenous peoples. Despite that, over the past five decades (the ‘land rights era’ of the title), Australia has granted proportionally more land area to Indigenous interests than have other, treaty‐making Anglo settler colonies (Canada, the United States, New Zealand). Despite complexities of comparison by area, an order of difference is clearly discernible. After comparing these countries, this article examines legal and political changes involved in the transformation from no ‘Indigenous estate’ in Australia to a comparatively large one, and sketches the role anthropologists have played in land and native title claims which has enlarged the Indigenous estate. Subsequent articles in this issue treat the kinds of change that anthropologists, in their commitment to close ethnographic work, have been observing at this intersection of law and anthropology. This article concludes by considering directions in which land and native title claims seem to be moving.
This chapter is based on the results of my 2010–2016 ethnographic research project involving interviews with about 60 key bureaucratic players in the 2008 shires reform and around 830 residents (mainly Indigenous) of communities directly affected by the reform, and also my own experience as a Northern Territory bureaucrat. In NT bureaucratic circles the 2008 shires reform was widely perceived as a necessary, rational solution to intractable flaws in the previous community council system. I develop a counter argument, identifying the 2008 reform as an example of bureaucratic violence. The violence of the reform was displayed firstly by bureaucracy’s naming of ‘dysfunction’ and ‘crisis-events’ within the community council sector. Secondly, violence was manifested in the gap in ‘interpretative labour’ between bureaucrats and their policy referents in understanding the motivations and outcomes of the reform. Finally, statistical evidence was a key tool in the production and reinforcement of bureaucratic violence and unequal power relations. The chapter is not positioned as polemic. I intend it to open new analytical avenues. It provokes an understanding of this policy reform as part of an assemblage of power, rather than an instrumental or necessary policy response to practical issues. This radically recasts how reform outcomes can be assessed.
Gija people in the East Kimberley community of Warmun (Western Australia) negotiate their engagement with pastoralism with varying degrees of primacy. Through ethnography and oral histories, I explore how Gija people manage pastoralism and its effects through acts of accommodation, adoption, refusal and innovation. I begin by outlining the development of the colonial pastoral industry in Western Australia, state and federal legislation that withheld and underpaid wages to Aboriginal pastoral workers and cattle-killing practices and protective measures. I use ‘Kila’, the bovine species killed for local consumption, as an entry point to explore intercultural relations and Gija relative autonomy within this context. Analysing Kila etymologically and through an ethnographic case study involving its procurement, dissection, and distribution, I find that cooperation is implemented to enable the Kila event. Kila emerges as both a nexus for intercultural mutuality and as a facilitator of distinct opportunities for Gija social and cultural maintenance and recreation.
Rejecting nature‐culture dualism, contemporary anthropology recognises the mutually constitutive processes that create shared human and non‐human lifeworlds. Such recognition owes much to ethnographic engagement with diverse indigenous cosmologies many of which have, for millennia, upheld ideas about indivisible worlds in which all living kinds occupy a shared ontological space and non‐human species and environments are approached respectfully, with expectations of reciprocity and partnership. As many societies confront the global chaos caused by the anthropocentric prioritisation of human interests, anthropologists and indigenous communities are therefore well placed to articulate alternative models in which the non‐human domain is dealt with more equitably and inclusively. This paper is located comparatively in long‐term ethnographic research with indigenous communities in Australia, alongside the Mitchell River in North Queensland and the Brisbane River in South Queensland. It draws more specifically on involvement in legal claims for water rights by Māori iwis in New Zealand; in land claims by the Kunjen language group in Cape York; and in a recent ‘sea country’ case brought against a major multi‐national by the Tiwi Islanders in Australia's Northern Territory. It also makes use of a major comparative study of water beings in diverse cultural and historical contexts, and considers the central importance of water beings such as Māori taniwha and the Australian Rainbow Serpent in such legal conflicts, and in broader debates about human and non‐human rights. Like other water deities around the world, these beings personify the generative (and potentially punitive) powers of water and its co‐creative role in shaping human and non‐human lives. They are resurfacing today with an important representational role in contemporary conflicts over land and water.
Amid a renewed push to extract water for agriculture and mining, Indigenous advocacy in northern Australia has resulted in the introduction of a new water allocation mechanism: a reserve of water to be retained for the use and benefit of Indigenous communities. Our socio‐legal analysis of the Oolloo Water Allocation Plan shows that the Strategic Aboriginal Water Reserves carry essential hallmarks of neoliberal property relations and are founded in the modernist mode of regulating extracted water as a commodity divisible from land, amenable to partitioning and disarticulated from socio‐cultural relations. Informed by ethnographic material from the Daly River region gathered over almost a century, we describe the hydro‐social relations that are created through customary traditions and practices, water planning and licencing, and the interaction between different scales of water movement and decision‐making by both the state and Traditional Owners. The paper contributes in several ways to research that has identified ontological conflicts as central to disagreements over water and pointed to the difficulty of articulating theoretical framings of ontological difference with the practical work of water negotiations. It shows how the new Indigenous water rights discourse that coincided with the commodification of water in wider Australia shaped the way in which Aboriginal people of this region have more recently articulated their relationships to the Daly River and the limits to state recognition of those relationships. We find that the Reserve model is unable to recognize the capacity of water to connect and unify people and other beings, as well as to define boundaries between them. Within a regime that facilitates resource extraction, a limited opening has been created for Aboriginal people to benefit from this model of economic development, yet we argue that there is reason to fear that the divisions the Aboriginal Water Reserve enacts between waters and land presents significant socio‐cultural risks.
Fire management is a right and responsibility shared by all land managers in Cape York Peninsula, far north Australia, bringing together Aboriginal traditional owners, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service rangers and settler-descended cattle graziers. The landscape of Northern Australia has been socialised by fire over millennia, resulting in a fire-adapted and fire-dependent landscape. While fire knowledge originated with Aboriginal traditional owners, decades of engagement in the multi-ethnic pastoral industry have resulted in contemporary burning practices that have been interculturally mediated. The Australian government’s carbon sequestration scheme has further transformed local burning practices, precipitating new forms of burning and new forms of critique. Through examining the burning practices and perspectives of Aboriginal traditional owners, Park rangers, and – in particular – cattle graziers, the ideological underpinnings of different fire regimes emerge. These insights disrupt some of the accepted wisdom around fire management and cultural burning in Australia.
Drawing on fieldwork in an Aboriginal community in Western Australia, this article chronicles the life of a collection of Indigenous art and material culture through archival research, ethnography, observation, and interviews. Moving from a school to community keeping spaces, through a natural disaster, to an art center and a university conservation center, this examination reveals how entanglements between people and the collection play out in the local context. The moving and returning of the collection signifies various trajectories that articulate with different value systems and demonstrates that negotiating differences between groups and individuals is an inevitable and necessary part of maintaining and caring for collections in source communities. The article attests that time is needed at local levels to support Indigenous‐led processes which include value creation, cultural protocols, change, continuity, and the (re)valuation of objects.
This paper examines the classification of the landscape, both biota and terrain, in Wagiman, a language of northern Australia. There is considerable debate as to the comparative roles of cognitive and cultural factors in the analysis of landscape terminologies. Any analysis of terminologies necessarily involves consideration of meaning. There are many approaches to the analysis of meaning and analysis of Wagiman landscape classification requires at least two approaches. One approach involves necessary and sufficient conditions for connotation, and the other involves prototypes. The comparative roles of cognitive and cultural factors vary depending upon the approach to meaning, with cognitive factors playing a greater role in connotation and cultural factors playing a greater role in prototypes. The current research literature on Australian languages examines behavioural and morphological oppositions, material make‐up, shape, size as cognitive factors and affordance and human usage as cultural factors. This paper provides evidence that there is another cultural factor which plays a central role in prototype classification, mental maps of the landscape involving zonal oppositions. Prototypes for many terms do not have an individuated reference but rather have an unindividuated reference to typical zones of occurrence.
Tropical northern Australia is a region of high linguistic diversity, with dozens of language varieties each spoken by a small number of people. Traditionally, this level of diversity has been supported by egalitarian linguistic ecologies, where Aboriginal people use multiple languages alongside one another in each local region. In this study, I explore new types of multilingual practices that are emerging in Darwin, the only major city in the area. Aboriginal people from the homelands often visit Darwin, and some become permanent residents, which provides the context for new types of multilingual encounters. Kriol and English are also used as a ‘fall-back’ languages to mitigate gaps in understanding, which allows multilingual interaction to occur between people who have only partial knowledge of eachothers’ languages. I characterise these practices as ‘linguistic exchange’, used by speakers to establish their links to kin and country, while also showing respect for their interlocutor’s social connections. Linguistic exchange also supports the distinctive Aboriginal mode of demand-driven resource sharing. Aboriginal language use in Darwin suggests that urban mobility is not necessarily detrimental to the future vitality of the region’s rich linguistic heritage.
Service providers commonly understand development projects in Indigenous Australia to play out at the intersection of a pre‐existing binary between Indigenous and non‐Indigenous groups. It follows that effective development practice is seen to depend on building partnerships across the ‘intercultural’ divide. Instead of taking this assumption as a baseline from which analysis proceeds, I draw on Karen Barad's theory of ‘intra‐action’ to show how an Indigenous/non‐Indigenous binary is continually produced in the context of a development NGO working in Central Australia. Based on fieldwork as a volunteer within this NGO, I demonstrate how the ‘intra‐action’ of community development process produces forms of difference and relatedness for non‐Indigenous NGO staff, and for the Aboriginal community. I argue that in spite of calls for deeper engagements, the community development apparatus continually performs separateness as the ethical framework on which the project proceeds. The paper contributes to debates around ‘intercultural’ anthropology and presents a non‐normative account of development practice in Australia.
In the Australian coal mining region of the Hunter Valley, a political contest is taking shape around the mine final voids, the large holes that are left in the ground after mining has finished. This article describes an effort led by the coal lobby to fill the voids with imaginative and hopeful futures, described as a process of techno‐speculative deferral. In contrast, local environmentalists (Indigenous and non‐Indigenous) are drawing on dispossession and ongoing extractivism to craft an affective politics of loss around these spaces. The article considers the particular issues around the mine final voids as metonyms of the Anthropocene in order to caution against approaches which celebrate the hopefulness of ruins. Instead, the void's negativity presents an alternative analytical starting point for a politics of the Anthropocene, one which derives from Indigenous dispossession and expands to counter ongoing ruination.
Across Cape York Peninsula, the cattle grazing industry has declined in recent decades due to falling cattle prices, shorter wet seasons and land tenure changes. Remaining graziers perceive their status in the region as increasingly marginal and explain this precarity with the ‘locking up’ of Cape York land regimes and environments by National Parks and Aboriginal interests. Based on 14 months of ethnographic research in south‐east Cape York conducted in 2018–2019, in this article I describe and analyse how graziers construct their claims to belonging in the region in response to land tenure changes. Drawing on recent scholarship on non‐Indigenous forms of belonging in settler states and using the case study of one particular grazing family, I discuss how graziers position themselves as those who ‘know the intimacies of the soil’, as one grazier stated, due to multigenerational work on the land. Their claim to belonging tends to ignore prior Aboriginal occupation and instead emphasises their long‐term relationships with local Aboriginal families, while the third main stakeholder in the region, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, is perceived as a kind of dispossessor representing non‐local ‘Green’ ideologies and interests.
Nigeria is one of the world’s most vulnerable countries to extreme weather conditions and natural disasters linked to climate change, the impacts of which are exacerbated by rapid population growth, a fragile economy, high dependence on rain-fed agribusiness, and the country’s weak adaptive capacity. The lack of or poor application of environmental communication in a strategic approach is critical to all of these. Using a thematic conceptual review of existing literature, this chapter shows that strategic environmental communication can be applied more easily to mitigate the impacts of climate change and
environmental degradation through the use of well-established communication strategies and instruments to save the environment for socio-economic development
The Jeraeil, a young men’s initiation ceremony of the GunaiKurnai
people of Gippsland, Australia, ceased to be performed toward the end of the
nineteenth century. Eager to witness and document the ceremony, anthropologist
A. W. Howitt arranged for a performance of the Jeraeil in 1884. His published
accounts of the Jeraeil have since been used as evidence of a distinctive type of
ceremonial practice in southeastern Australia that was readily embraced by the
GunaiKurnai as a vital part of their cultural heritage. This article describes the
events that led to Howitt’s documentation of the ceremony, the key roles played
by Aboriginal people in enabling this event to take place, and the authors’ recent
rediscovery of the site of the last Jeraeil ground. Returning to the site more than
134 years later, the authors reflect on the significance of the place and how the
site might be reinscribed in light of recent archival discoveries.
Using an ethnographic approach, this research assesses common assumptions in rock art research in terms of their validity for Aboriginal rock art sites in the Barunga region of the Northern Territory, Australia. In particular, we assess the potential and limits of the commonly held assumption that open or restricted access to sites and/or the meaning of motifs can be assessed by determining the visibility of the site or image within the landscape. This research calls into question some assumptions that are core to contemporary archaeological method and theory. Our results challenge the notion that a secluded location, or difficulty of access, is needed to restrict access to a site. “Hidden” sites do not need to be hidden, as site access is controlled by a plethora of cultural rules. Moreover, sites that appear to be hidden within the landscape may be open access sites, although access may be restricted for periods of time. Conversely, sites that are visible and accessible from a landscape perspective can be subject to restricted access, regulated through social rules. In addition, the results question the notion that the control of secret information in rock art sites is determined by the visibility and location of motifs and sites. Hidden meanings are not necessarily related to hidden locations or the low visibility of the art, since cultures can have many other ways of hiding meaning. Finally, the results of this study challenge the commonly held dichotomy between sacred/restricted access and secular/open access.
en This paper presents a case study of an Aboriginal heritage assessment conducted with the Esperance Nyungars in southern Western Australia. The study incorporates contemporary social significance with archaeological assessment to form a holistic cultural significance statement for the landscapes surrounding the Munglinup River. The results are analysed with reference to the currently proposed legislative reform of the Western Australian Aboriginal Heritage Act . The analysis has relevance for archaeological assessment methodologies, cultural heritage management, legislation reform and administration of the current and future Western Australian Aboriginal Heritage Act . This case study demonstrates the value of incorporating social significance into archaeological assessments, including custodial responsibilities, cultural landscapes and the links between ecology and cultural heritage.
RÉSUMÉ
es Cet article présente une étude de cas d'une évaluation du patrimoine Autochtone réalisée avec les Esperance Nyungars dans le sud de l'Australie Occidentale. L'étude intègre une signification sociale contemporaine à une évaluation archéologique pour former un énoncé de signification culturelle holistique pour les paysages entourant la rivière Munglinup. Les résultats sont analysés en référence au projet de réforme législative de la loi sur le patrimoine Aborigène de l'Australie‐Occidentale. L'analyse est pertinente pour les méthodologies d'évaluation archéologique, la gestion du patrimoine culturel, la réforme de la législation et l'administration de la loi actuelle et future sur le patrimoine Aborigène de l'Australie Occidentale. Cette étude de cas démontre l'intérêt d'intégrer l'importance sociale dans les évaluations archéologiques, y compris les responsabilités de conservation, les paysages culturels et les liens entre l'écologie et le patrimoine culturel.
Claimants and industry professionals frequently view conflict that arises in the course of a native title claim as a detriment to timely claims resolution. I argue instead that disputation itself may constitute an integrative social process through which participants define, delimit and reproduce community. I show also how ethnographic analysis of disputation can provide useful insights into broader social and cultural practices and normative value systems. Drawing on theoretical and methodological concerns with human agency and the integrative and constitutive role of conflict that challenges consensus models of community, I develop a practice‐centred approach that is attentive to the ways that participants in a dispute articulate and contest the definition of community. The possibility of viewing 'culture' and group cohesion as contingent and emergent through disputation should assist anthropologists working in the native title field to incorporate conflict as a productive aspect of social and cultural practice.
Can native title, across remote, rural and urban settings, complement and overlap with current and future Australian senses of belonging? This is to explore a form of cultural coexistence that is potentially in tension with a sharp and mutually exclusive categorical distinction between those who embrace Indigenous identity and others. Can such cultural coexistence reinforce legal and economic achievements of land justice for the Indigenous minority yet also contribute to rich senses of place and belonging across the broader Australian society? While anthropology as a social science has a substantial and important practical research role in negotiations for, and outcomes of, particular native title claims, a further challenge is understanding the extent to which post‐claim coexisting identities and interests might enrich Australia's trajectory in resolving legacies of colonialism.
This paper examines the opportunities for Indigenous communities to share cultural knowledge in tourism by increasing the use of digital knowledge-sharing with various technological platforms. The research was conducted with residents of Pine Creek in the Northern Territory (Australia). In-depth semi-structured interviews were held with representatives from both the Wagiman Aboriginal community and non-Aboriginal residents. The findings reveal that by combining both traditional and modern means of sharing knowledges, digital tourism products can empower local Indigenous communities involved in tourism and educate locals and tourists to conserve such knowledges for the long term. However, digital products of local culture can only be sustainable if all stakeholders involved in the tourism product development have an understanding of how to use the platform and have access to knowledge. This paper examines the skill-sets for technological application of knowledge among the Wagiman and non-Aboriginal residents of Pine Creek.
As part of the Cape York Welfare Reform Trial (CYWRT), which has been running in the remote Aboriginal towns of Aurukun, Hope Vale, Mossman Gorge and Coen since 2008, Family Responsibilities Commissioners have the unprecedented ability to quarantine welfare payments. Critics claim these “BasicCards,” which cannot be spent on alcohol, tobacco, pornography or gambling, brings shame to Aboriginal people – marking them as dependants, deemed incapable of responsible spending. Evaluations of the CYWRT paint a more complicated picture. While many of the “spectators” of the CYWRT report “welfare reform stigma,” the “subjects” themselves are more positive. This paper draws on ethnographic research in Hope Vale to argue that these categories overlap with loosely defined, porous social groups that developed during the town's mission past, described as the “engaged” and “embedded” Hope Valers, respectively. The engaged group tends to be more aware of and sensitive to the views of the dominant society and to subscribe to its “ideology of respectability.” Meanwhile, the latter group tends to adhere to a more egalitarian “ideology of relatedness,” and do not experience the shame, even when their own welfare is quarantined, because the behaviours that trigger quarantining are normalised within their highly circumscribed domain.
This article compares the concurrent development of Edward Spicer’s theory of ‘enduring peoples’ and his political support for the federal recognition of the Pascua Yaqui Indians of Southern Arizona. This case illustrates how dynamic conceptions of acculturation and indigeneity dissipate in the face of recognition and more politically expedient narratives.
This chapter considers how the operation of the “third space” (Bhabha 1994) between the Global South and the Global North is enlivened to deepen Indigenous place-based and place-centred forms of political, social and legal organisation. It asks whether sentencing—as a site of punishment, rehabilitation and integration—can do more than further objectives of state law and order, and instead augment Indigenous social orders? Can Indigenous innovations in sentencing embody inter-cultural struggle and negotiation or are they at the mercy of state control? It suggests that Indigenous Law and Justice planning, rather than sentencing, exhibits indicia of inter-cultural struggle that countermands the dictates of the state and white laws. Whatever its form, inter-cultural spaces remain fragile to the colonial project and its persistent drive for hegemony.
This chapter tests the boundaries between mainstream justice and Indigenous justice. We suggest that Restorative Justice and Indigenous justice have to be understood as distinct and fundamentally different projects. Restorative Justice, at least in its present incarnation, may not survive a decolonising turn because, despite claims to the contrary, it is a modernist, Euro-north American concept concerned with reforming what remains an essentially Western paradigm of justice reform. By contrast Indigenous justice adopts a decolonising stance and is concerned with transforming relationships between settler colonialism and Indigenous peoples.
This paper considers themes of species maintenance and place engagement in Yanyuwa country, northern Australia. It traces the complexity of interpretations and relational contexts involved in places that are commonly – and we argue – misleadingly, referred to as increase and magic sites. Examining one specific place, at which people carry out maintenance rituals, we explore the complex bonds that unite Yanyuwa with the geography that is the Ancestral Hill Kangaroo. Not content with the classificatory habit of declaring actions either increase oriented or hunting magic, this research more fully explicates the relational substance of places that play a key role in ecological health. This is achieved by asking how might the profundity of a place of relational importance, such as a maintenance site, be better understood and written of in ways that convey an Indigenous ontology and epistemology?
This article argues that colonialism needs to be explicitly foregrounded in analyses of urban processes in settler colonial cities. Urban settler colonialism is an ongoing process that affects urban indigenous subjects, a force that builds on the longue durée of settler colonialism that has dispossessed them for centuries. My article draws on ethnographic research conducted with a group of indigenous Pangcah/Amis people who have migrated to the Taipei region in Taiwan over the last forty years. While paying attention to the long history of settler colonialism on the island and specifically in the Taipei region—the erasure of indigenous Ketagalan heritage in northern Taiwan, indigenous land dispossession in rural villages, and a consequent post‐WWII influx of indigenous people into Taipei, and the displacement of urban indigenous squatter settlements since the 1990s—I will ethnographically focus on a group of indigenous public housing residents who have continued to face urban settler colonialism. I discuss how they have negotiated with surveillance and policing from their on‐site housing management team, charges of incivility from Han state agents and neighbors, and displacement from urban redevelopment.
Aboriginal youth with Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) are overrepresented in the justice system. FASD results from prenatal alcohol exposure, and may lead to cognitive, social and behavioural difficulties that increase susceptibility to contact with the justice system. This paper explores the potential contribution of restorative justice in creating diversionary options for Aboriginal youth with FASD, and related cognitive impairments, to prevent enmeshment in the justice system. The lesson from work in Australia and New Zealand is that restorative justice and Indigenous justice are different, but not irreconcilable, projects. We suggest that there is the potential for creating rich intercultural engagement spaces ‘in between’ restorative practices and Indigenous processes: provided that restorative justice – as an essentially Eurocentric paradigm of the Global North – does not attempt to colonise Indigenous justice. An appropriate model would have Aboriginal people engaged in the planning and management of diversionary options, with greater focus on diversion into place-based, Aboriginal owned and managed services. Restorative justice needs to engage with the historical demands of Indigenous peoples for their land and their way of life; though constantly imperilled by forces of neo-liberalism and colonialism, Indigenous peoples remain resilient and provide a vision of an alternative to Euro-modernity.
This chapter draws upon ethnographic research with an international NGO working with Indigenous communities in the central desert of Australia. International NGOs have often relied upon the commodification of children in the Global South as the face of their brands, in order to raise funds. I argue that humanitarian imagery is produced according to particular norms that aim at cultivating the “immaterial labor” (Hardt and Negri 2004) of a consumer, inviting them to self-identify with the position of a donor. However, the Indigenous people in my study, when drawn into humanitarian brand discourse, problematize the recognizable frames of the brand by resisting the adoption of standardized humanitarian postures, subsequently breaking with the North–South divide upon which the brand usually relies, and identifying with the position of donor and not recipient. I thereby consider the ways in which the humanitarian brand does not simply link the positions of donor and recipient, but also constitutes and enacts those positions in a productive network.
Central Australia is widely characterised as a frontier, a familiar trope in literary constructions of Australian identity that divides black from white, ancient from modern. However, recent anthropological and literary evidence from the Red Centre defies such a clear-cut representation, suggesting more nuanced ‘lifeworlds’ than a frontier binary can afford may better represent the region. Using walking narratives to mark a meeting point between Aboriginal and settler Australian practices of placemaking, this paper summarises and updates literary research by the author (2011–2015), which reads six recounted walks of the region for representations of frontier and home. Methods of textual analyses are described and results appraised for changes to the storied representation of Central Australia from the precolonial era onward. The research speaks to a ‘porosity’ of intercultural boundaries, explores literary instances of intercultural exchange; nuances settler Australian terms for place, including home, Nature and wilderness; and argues for new place metaphors to supersede ‘frontier’. Further, it suggests a recent surge in the recognition of Aboriginal songlines may be reshaping the nation’s key stories.
Western ideologies of imperialism conceptualise time as heterogeneous in that they assume that colonised lands are outside of historical time. In this respect, the discursive construction of an empty frontier has been crucial to colonial dispossession. Yet colonial discourses become dominant through their circulation, and so the savage spaces they imagine take on a life of their own when they are revoiced. Papuan Times, a newspaper published by graduates of an industrial mission school at Kwato Island in the colonial Territory of Papua and New Guinea after the Second World War, produces subaltern agency in its reports on the pacification of the Highlands. While its news articles reproduce the heterogeneous chronotope of colonial discourse, articles describing the missionary work of former Kwato students in the Highlands reimagine the Highlands frontier as a horizon of social transformation. The Papuan Times strategy reflects the fact that a community's pursuit of the good exists in relation to others which constrain it, and, more generally, that an anthropology of the good is also an anthropology which recognises the fraught coexistence of a plurality of values.
In this article, four women engage, talk, and write about Indigenous sovereignty in Australia's southeast—the region of Australia most devastated by colonial incursion and the site of vibrant cultural activism in the present day. We are two non‐Indigenous academics (Sabra Thorner and Fran Edmonds) working together with two Indigenous artist‐curators (Maree Clarke and Paola Balla) in a process of collaborative, intercultural culture‐making. We mobilise two ethnographic examples—Maree Clarke's backyard and the 2016–2017 Sovereignty exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art—to assert that decolonising is an ongoing process which requires that non‐Indigenous peoples acknowledge their own privilege, learn Aboriginal histories, imagine both difference and coexistence; and that the goals of decolonisation are as diverse as the activists calling for it. In both contexts, art/culture‐making, alongside storytelling, are crucial forms of Indigenous knowledge production, led by Aboriginal women via their engagements with the artworld(s) in Melbourne and beyond.
This article explores a contemporary politics of recognition as it relates to Ngarinyin Aboriginal people of the Northern Kimberley region of Western Australia. I focus on the reflections and experiences of a Ngarinyin man, ‘the Alchemist’, who was involved in a native title claim across the region during the 2000s. Through ethnographic examples drawn from along the Gibb River Road, I show that time on country is animated by unexpected encounters imbued with interpersonal recognition and indeterminacy. These encounters involve non‐Aboriginal people (including tourists) and non‐human animals: allies who are co‐opted at a time when people's intimate knowledge of country is becoming further attenuated. This article contributes to a growing literature on Aboriginal people's perceptions of and experiences in country in post‐native title contexts.
This paper traces the history of ‘caring for country’ tropes in writing about indigenous Australian land and land management. While ‘caring for country’ initially referred to dynamic land use and ownership practices, it progressively became a less historical, more primordial, conception of indigenous land ownership, use, and management. In reviewing constructions of ‘land’ in scholarly literatures and policy debates, I seek to explain how they interact with local indigenous practices and idioms. Drawing on examples from the cultural and linguistic fields of Aṉangu, speakers of Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, I examine a variety of concurrent uses of ‘country’, ‘caring’, or ‘nurturance’ and ‘caring for country’. A cross‐linguistic perspective on these objectifications – in English, Aboriginal English, and central Australian indigenous languages – shows how they may attend selectively to the historical specificity of indigenous experience. But this, I argue, may be the key to their efficacy in intercultural projects. Coded messages in bilingual documents reflect a kind of agency whereby Aṉangu choose to leave equivocal histories unstated and thereby reconstitute government projects in terms that work for them. The referential flexibility around idioms of land and nurturance is a kind of alchemy in language and social life that is the condition of the success of actual land management activities. Terms including ‘country’ and ‘caring for country’ elide the socio‐political dynamics that otherwise complicate actual rights and uses of land. That is why they can form the social basis of common activities, the production of ‘congeniality’ both within Aṉangu social life and at the interface with outsiders, in land management and other fields.
This article takes its starting‐point from an elderly Bardi woman's observation that elders ‘used to frighten’ younger generations with stories about various spirit beings. The beings she referred to are a group of malevolent beings inhabiting particular locations in her country, located in the northwest Kimberley region of Western Australia. Beginning with her observation that this is something that ‘used’ to happen, I consider the relationship between persons and different kinds of spirit beings amidst historical impetus for change. Political, economic, ecological, technological, and other impacts have occurred within the shifting context of progressive engagements with Western colonialism, capitalism, and the market economy, with implications for local ontologies. I suggest that these spirit beings are becoming less differentiated and consider the implications of this in terms of personhood and the constitution of the social, arguing that the disappearance of some of these beings is suggestive of a contraction of temporal and spatial extensions of personhood, with implications for relations with country.
In pre-contact times, the Gummingurru Aboriginal stone arrangement site on Queensland’s Darling Downs was a complex locale of motif creation and constant maintenance, social alliance formation, male initiation and cultural education. Since European settlement, the arrangements have undergone a raft of changes, yet the site remains a place of constant narration based around regular recreation of motifs, alliance-making and sharing of cultural experiences. As a consequence, the site was and is constantly changing. How do we, as archaeologists, represent such a site, ensuring the rigour required of archaeological place characterisation and yet avoid the ‘fixity’ that comes with conventional archaeological place recording? In this paper, we demonstrate some of the opportunities available to archaeologists to document both the tangible and the intangible elements of an ever-changing, constantly evolving site like Gummingurru. We evaluate different counter-mapping strategies, and technologies ranging from computer-based maps and programs, to 2D and 3D animations. The aim is to explore the relevance of these approaches for archaeology and heritage place representation.
Advances in hydraulic fracturing (aka “fracking”) technologies and horizontal drilling have enabled the extraction of previously unviable unconventional oil and gas resources. However, as global environmental concerns have become more prominent and unconventional oil and gas developments have moved ever closer to residential centers, public scrutiny of the industry and its methods and impacts of extraction have increased. Water impacts feature prominently among the contemporary societal concerns about fracking. These concerns include the large water requirements of the process itself, as well as concerns about the potential pollution of groundwater and the (underground) environment more broadly. Anthropologists have undertaken qualitative field research on unconventional gas developments in a variety of settings, largely among local communities in regions of extraction. The perspectives employed by anthropologists are commonly drawn from the broader social science literature, including the anthropology of water and natural resources, science and technology studies, studies of social movements, and studies which examine the energy‐society nexus. Based on the shortcomings of the published anthropological accounts, interdisciplinary research collaboration with hydrologists, engineers and economists, as well as a more fulsome engagement with the variety of hopes, fears and dreams of fracking and unconventional gas, is recommended. WIREs Water 2018, 5:e1272. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1272
This article is categorized under:
• Engineering Water > Sustainable Engineering of Water
• Science of Water > Water Quality
• Human Water > Methods
The surface of the Arnhem Land Plateau, northern Australia, contains numerous rock outcrops of varying size and geomorphic complexity. Erosion of these isolated outcrops has led to the development of discrete clusters of rockshelters that have become foci for Aboriginal use (site complexes). The clusters stand as islands within an archaeologically sparse sand plain. Here we investigate the distribution and patterns of use of rockshelters within 36 site clusters on the plateau. We established that their pattern of use is similar to that found in many other areas of Australia: a major site within a suite of smaller satellite sites. We also found that the quantity of rock art varies greatly between complexes, generally in proportion to the number of shelters present, and that local concentrations tend to occur where surface erosion is greatest. It is argued that, over the past 14,000 years at least, the larger rockshelters with high-motif numbers were the most frequently used and also that they lay along well-travelled pathways across the plateau. The role and uses of the smaller shelters, while clearly different from the main art shelters, remains unclear.
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 political perspectives in Indigenist anthropology, despite some individual attempts to blaze new trails. Demands for specialised work related to land rights and native title has meant the survival of anthropological classicism and a failure to explore basic questions concerning Indigenous conditions in Australia.
When an Aboriginal family group called ‘Aunty Joan Mob’ travel ‘out bush’, they make contact with awe- and fear-inspiring country. In attempting to make sense of their wonder, I would be ill-served to rely too heavily on a kind of culturalism, which might attribute the source of this wonder to ontological precepts long shared by these (and other) Aboriginal people. Instead I seek to engage a ‘critical’ anthropological perspective in arguing that a range of factors are all crucial to understanding why Aunty Joan Mob engage in “wonder discourse”, through which they consider the primordial Aboriginal past and the alterity embodied by their own ancestors. I outline the role of settler colonial history, national political developments and the liberal promise of the recognition of Indigenous cultural difference, bitter local intra-Aboriginal conflicts, and the subordination of Aboriginal people within rural Australia’s racial schema. Taken together, these factors help explain that the bush today acts as a repository for latent powers, which are both marveled at and feared. Out bush Aboriginal people seek to escape the white gaze: this is a place where Aboriginal’s ability to survive, independent of white foodstuffs, is conjured up and relished. Wonder attends to Aunty Joan Mob’s experience of being in the bush, which becomes, albeit temporarily, a politically transformative imaginary space.
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 Australia. New forms of Aboriginal social life and politics created by changing 'post-colonial' conditions largely escaped ethnographic attention, but anthropology was rescued from irrelevance with the emergence of opportunities to assist the courts and Aborigines with land retrievals. By examining selected ethnographies and exceptions to the discipline's main trajectory, I hope to encourage reflection and expansion so that the discipline might realise its potential as the most radical and critical of the social sciences.
This review brings anthropological accounts of place and placemaking into dialogue with the concepts of precarity and precariousness. In recent years, precarity has become a widespread empirical and theoretical concern across the humanities. The article traces the simultaneous rise alongside precarity of network and ontology as post-place-based frameworks for anthropological analysis. Although these new frames facilitate anthropological explorations in the spirit of the times, this review argues that both network and ontology lack the capacity to identify what is being transformed and what is at stake when and where precarity takes hold. To see models of placemaking as spaces of transformative possibility requires an account of coexisting, qualitatively distinctive forms of relationship to places. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 46 is October 21, 2017. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
This paper considers the relationship between anthropology and public policy by looking at differences between national-level discourses about indigenous relationships to land and their informing of public policy and the view that one gets of indigenous relations to land as an anthropologist, gathered from familiarity with particular situations and people. In view of the clear disparities, how may anthropology contribute to public policy? Anthropology's principal posture should remain a contributory one, rather than one of policy-readiness, based on the discipline's particular combination of ethnographic immersion and critical perspective.
ABSTRACT Since the 1970s, “self-determination” has been the dominant trope for expressing national aspirations for Indigenous Australians. Through the principles of self-determination, the liberal multicultural state has attempted to deliver postcolonial justice to its first peoples. In this new century, the sheen of the self-determination era has faded. Once heralded as the antidote to the racist assimilation era, it is now depicted as the cause of social ills. In this article, I draw on an ethnographic study of White antiracists working in Indigenous health in northern Australia to analyze the brand of liberal rationality that dominated the discourse of the self-determination era. By engaging with a “tribe” of White people who identify with the aims of the self-determination era, we can decipher the logic of self-determination as an instrument of the liberal state and better understand the internal contradictions and ambiguities that have led to its recent demise.
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