Time, indigeneity and white anti‐racism in Australia

Abstract

Time is one mechanism through which Indigenous-modern dichotomies are created and maintained and an enduring trope of difference in the settler-colonial imaginary. This article explores the strange temporality of indigeneity within 'progressive' discourses in Australia. Taking Johannes Fabian's concept of 'allochronism' as a point of departure, and drawing on ethnography of non-Indigenous people working in Indigenous health in the Northern Territory, I show how there is a kind of cultural Lamarckianism in operation. 'Western' individuals are seen to inherit the cumulative cultural knowledge, acquired over centuries, of germ theory and responsible alcohol consumption. By contrast, Indigenous people are seen to struggle with banking and infectious diseases because they have not had sufficient time to develop the appropriate cultural knowledge. Through the anthropomorphising of culture and the culturalisation of individuals, the Indigenous person/culture becomes the 40,000-year history of human occupation of the continent. I point to the limits of this settler-colonial imaginary and potential alternatives.

"Anishinaabe time": temporalities and impact assessment in pipeline reviews

“…Huebener (2015) expands upon this definition to suggest that temporal justice more broadly pertains to any form of equity at stake in the diverse ways time functions as a tool of power. Temporal justice literature has evolved to focus on issues relating to Indigenous rights, discourse and framing, and how temporal modes can be used as a tool of colonial power (Kowal 2015;Love and Tilley 2013;Weir 2013).…”

“…Interview participants express land-based kinship ties that have been disrupted by settler institutions. Family is a basic organizational unit in Anishinaabe society; undermining Anishinaabe temporalities by containing them within settler institutions poses a threat to family functioning by displacing non-linear temporalities (Kowal 2015).…”

Undermining Cosmopolitanism - Cyber-racism Narratives in Australia

“…Australian studies of racism that take an anthropological perspective have explored Indigenous racism and anti-racism, multiculturalism, white paranoia, and colour blindness in the offline world (e.g. Cowlishaw 2000Cowlishaw , 2004Hage 2000Hage , 2014Kowal et al 2013;Kowal 2015;Walton et al 2014) but have not extended to the online world.…”

Silencing and institutional racism in settler-colonial education

“…The requirement that indigenous people fit extant legal and administrative frames to assert individual and collective rights pulls the curriculum and pedagogy structures of state education towards a frozen or fixed view of Māoridom (Kowal, 2015). This paradoxical relationship requires that indigenous peoples prove their indigeneity by necessitating a politics of recognition (Ahmed, 2012).…”

“…Acknowledging and celebrating ways of being Māori that speak to an uncomplicated, pan-tribal, and traditional cultural existence directs those operating in schools away from the consequences of assimilation or structural racial bias (Ahmed, 2012). Pākehā are consequently protected from white fragility and feeling implicated or responsible for the social ills faced by indigenous peoples (Alcoff, 2007;Kowal, 2015). In this way, the presence of a frozen indigeneous temporal existence explains the seemingly contradictory relationship between rational knowledge and ignorance, where whites "clearly 'see' race at the same time that they use colorblind discourse to justify black racial standing" (Leonardo, 2015, p. 93).…”