Contemporary Anthropologies of Indigenous Australia

Abstract

This review covers sociocultural ethnographies of indigenous Australia from the 1970s to the present. It explores three trends: ethnographic reckonings with indigenous encapsulation within a liberal-settler state; the influence of international theoretical emphases; and movements toward an anthropology of the otherwise. The advent of land repossession, and the ethnographic and employment opportunities this created, indelibly shaped the discipline. With their immersion in land rights and native title, anthropologists were also embroiled in the state adjudication of indigeneity. Beyond the courts, the discipline struggled to shake the strictures of area studies and its ongoing, if unrecognized, imbrication in statist cultural logics. Consequently, indigenist anthropologies have not shifted, but perhaps helped affirm, the West's sense of being the apex of modernity. Emergent approaches, which refuse the ossifications of statist logics using forms of immersion and multimedia ethnography, show signs of ways forward. 187 Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012.41:187-202. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by University of Wisconsin -Madison on 10/12/12. For personal use only.

Love and the stranger: Intimate relationships between Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal people in a very remote Aboriginal town, northern Australia

“…The growing number of relationships between Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal people and of anthropological characterisations of Aboriginal people as ‘intercultural’ may falsely suggest seamless integrations of non‐Aboriginal people into Aboriginal social schema. There are few who have undertaken fieldwork which pays attention to the experiences of non‐Aboriginal people who are co‐resident with Aborigines (Cowlishaw : 11; Lea : 188). On Mornington Island it may be the case that as McKnight (: 142) observed: ‘Aboriginal women often took the leading role in establishing a relationship with a European Australian’, and as he put it, ‘that they did so (and do so) for a variety of complex economic and social reasons’.…”

Karrabing: An Essay in Keywords

“…Particularly in Australia, where bureaucratized apperception of Indigenous possibility reigns even within anthropological circles (Lea ), there is an ongoing demand that Aboriginal people adhere to reifications of their traditions. In terms of content, Indigenous sufferers must be obligated by their responsibilities to country, and be thwarted by an uncaring State, in particularly recognizable ways.…”

Unstable relations: a critical appraisal of indigeneity and environmentalism in contemporary Australia

“…Merlan seems compelled to distance herself from its increasingly routine use to describe shared spaces, suggesting instead that she was oriented originally to modes of action and processes and focused upon the inter , seeing subjectivity ‘as always fundamentally under construction, and always fundamentally relational’ (2005: 169; 2013). Tess Lea (: 191) has pointed to important limitations of this term's usage, highlighting that ‘only one side of the colonial relation is intercultural,’ as attention is typically directed towards Aboriginal people's imbrication with settler society, and not the reverse. Lea's criticism directs us to emphasise two principles for future research.…”