Recent Rituals of Indigenous Recognition in Australia: Welcome to Country

Merlan, Francésca

doi:10.1111/aman.12089

Cited by 31 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Much of the work of this past year examined the practices that make possible a sense of shared qualities across collective subjects. From issues of citizenship contorted by contestations around ethnicity, immigration, and displacement (Byrd 2014;Oka 2014;Shneiderman 2014;Thiranagama 2014) and revised understandings of relatedness across borders, through ancestral homes, and via fictive kin terms (Bovensiepen 2014;Cole 2014a;Nakassis 2014) to renegotiations of race and indigenous recognition within settler colonial contexts (Ives 2014a; Jacobsen-Bia 2014; Merlan 2014;Sturm 2014;Wroblewski 2014) and science as authority in ethnic belonging (Tamarkin 2014), as well as practice through which reflexive identity might be assembled (Droney 2014), articles this past year show the myriad ways a sense of communal immediacy might be built, be contested, or fail. Here too of note is a Current Anthropology special issue on Christianity, showcasing a variety of situations in which Christianity becomes the idiom through which immediacy across groups is expressed and contested (Robbins 2014).…”

Section: Immediacymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ends of Anthropology: 2014 in U.S. Sociocultural Anthropology

Hankins

2015

American Anthropologist

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In this essay, I trace the operations of a moral optimism and a skepticism that lie, uneasily, at the foundation of sociocultural anthropology. As other authors of year-in-review pieces have noted, anthropology is motivated by a moral optimism pointing toward the possibilities of an ethically and politically better life. Equally as fundamental, I argue, is a rigorous skepticism interrogating the shifting conditions that give life to anthropology's possibility. Here, I follow the productive tension between these two stances through the sociocultural anthropology of 2014, loosely grouping that work under the rubrics of "ends," "immediacy," "ecology," and "refusal." Throughout, I make a push for increased attention to our ethic of skepticism as means of tempering the discipline's moral optimism. [optimism, skepticism, immediacy, connection, year in review, sociocultural anthropology] RESUMENEn este ensayo, delineo las operaciones de un optimismo moral y un escepticismo que yacen, incómodamente, en la fundación de la antropología sociocultural. Como otros autores de los artyículos del año en revisión lo han notado, la antropología está motivada por un optimismo moral señalando hacia las posibilidades de una vidaética y políticamente mejor. Igualmente fundamental, argumento, es un escepticismo riguroso interrogando las condiciones cambiantes que dan vida a la posibilidad de la antropología. Aquí, sigo la tensión productiva entre estas dos posiciones a través de la antropología cultural del 2014, agrupando en líneas generales ese trabajo bajo las rúbricas de "fines", "inmediatez", "ecología", y "rechazo". A lo largo, presiono por una atención creciente a nuestraética de escepticismo, como un medio de temperar el optimismo moral de la disciplina. [optimismo, escepticismo, inmediatez, conexión, año en revisión, antropología sociocultural] ON SKEPTICISM AND OPTIMISMIn this essay, I review work in U.S. sociocultural anthropology from 2014. At the same time, I argue for attention to a skepticism that lies at the heart of our discipline, frequently overshadowed by the equally longstanding moral optimism that fuels our discipline's forward tilt. Michel de Montaigne begins his 16th-century essay "On the Cannibals" by questioning the chauvinistic tendency for anyone to call "barbarous anything he is not accustomed to" (1991:231). He argues, in counterpoint, for seeing the barbarism of the "we": "Those 'savages' are only wild in the sense that we call fruits wild when they are produced by Nature in her ordinary course: whereas it is fruit we

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Section: Immediacymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ends of Anthropology: 2014 in U.S. Sociocultural Anthropology

Hankins

2015

American Anthropologist

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“…In this context, one option for dormant language communities seeking to shore up their legitimacy is to revive a version of their heritage language that can be used for emblematic display. K. Everett (), for example, describes how Darug people in Australia, whose legal land claims have been unsuccessful in court, are nevertheless able to achieve a kind of compensatory symbolic recognition by performing “welcome to country” speeches at public functions (see also Merlan ). While there are no native speakers and little documentation of the Darug language, Darug people have developed a version of their heritage language based on historical word lists and family memories to use in welcome to country speeches.…”

Section: Recognition and Resistancementioning

confidence: 99%

The Predicament of Language and Culture: Advocacy, Anthropology, and Dormant Language Communities

Schwartz

2018

J Linguistic Anthropol

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A growing literature in linguistic anthropology critically examines the rhetoric of endangered language advocacy. A number of themes remain underexplored, however, including the invocation of “culture” to justify language preservation, the interests of communities without fluent heritage language speakers, and anthropology's contribution to potentially problematic advocacy tropes. Discourses like “language is the core of culture” and “when a language dies, a culture dies” are widespread in language activism even though they undermine communities’ efforts to maintain distinctive cultural identities in the wake of language shift and put dormant language communities in a double bind. While Boasian anthropology contains anti‐essentialist and counter‐nationalist perspectives on language, culture, and race, some Herderian advocacy tropes are borrowed from the (also Boasian) tradition of linguistic relativity in its popular Whorfian iteration. Drawing on my research on Chiwere language politics, I identify two forms of agency available to endangered and dormant language communities: one form of agency resists language loss but accepts dominant ideologies of national difference that make heritage languages essential to indigenous cultural identities, while another form of agency accepts language loss but resists Herderian nationalist expectations that authentic indigenous communities speak their traditional languages. [advocacy rhetoric, dormant language communities, language and culture ideologies, agency, Chiwere]

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“…The centrality of dance – and the possibilities it creates thanks to its ambiguity – is also well illustrated by ‘welcome to country’ rituals that are regularly performed at a growing number of formal and informal public events thus occupying the highly and ever contested diplomatic space of belonging and recognition in indigenous and non‐indigenous relations (see Everett ; Merlan ).…”

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confidence: 99%

A Space and Time for a Generation to React: The Gattjirrk Cultural Festival in Milingimbi

Tamisari

2016

Oceania

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This article deals with the annually held Gattjirrk Cultural Festival organised in Milingimbi, a Yolngu\ud community in Northeast Arnhem Land, and has the objective of analysing its socio-cultural and political\ud meaning. Although this event is considered an amusement (wakal), it nevertheless constitutes an arena\ud to negotiate postcolonial realities in which Yolngu people are forced to live. Focusing on the organisers’\ud overall frame of ‘sharing culture’ and youths’ interpretations of hip-hop dances as ‘performative\ud tactics’, I suggest that the Milingimbi Festival creates a space in which generational perspectives within\ud the community as well as the tension between Yolngu people and the non-indigenous (balanda) world\ud may be displayed and mediated. While the Festival has been mainly conceived as a space for encountering\ud and ‘sharing culture’ with other groups and people both within the community and with the\ud balanda world, it is also seized as an opportunity by young people to generate new ways to engage with\ud and challenge others. By weaving together elements of Yolngu heritage and pop culture, I argue that fun\ud or burlesque dances (wakal bunngul) are ‘tactics of cultural remix’ that through laughter and irony\ud demand a witnessing: a mutual recognition, engagement, and responsibility to participate and to\ud respond. It is thus in their own ways that these performances produce new connections and relationships\ud bringing together old and young, Yolngu and balanda in an effective although fleeting encounter

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Recent Rituals of Indigenous Recognition in Australia: Welcome to Country

Cited by 31 publications

References 17 publications

The Ends of Anthropology: 2014 in U.S. Sociocultural Anthropology

The Ends of Anthropology: 2014 in U.S. Sociocultural Anthropology

The Predicament of Language and Culture: Advocacy, Anthropology, and Dormant Language Communities

A Space and Time for a Generation to React: The Gattjirrk Cultural Festival in Milingimbi

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