When looking for anarchy, look to the state: Fantasies of regulation in forcing disorder within the Australian Indigenous estate

Abstract

This article questions the foundational binary 'anarchy-bureaucracy' and the multiple articulations at play in the state's refraction of anarchic qualities onto Indigenous Australians. Launching from the Northern Territory Emergency Response of June 2007, in which the Australian government assumed direct control of 73 Aboriginal communities in the north of Australia, it asks why bureaucracy is considered the antonym of anarchy and not its synonym. In mobilizing accounts of anarchic Aboriginal depravity to authorize an ongoing bureau-professional presence in Indigenous worlds, links to other matters of interest, such as the state's dependence on mining revenues, let alone any account of the affective dimension of policy life, were removed from view. Reconsideration of the anarchy-state binary offers a lens to explore the emotional compulsions that are suppressed in the work of upholding the myth of a rational state and how this suppression further authorizes ongoing (anarchic) interventions into Indigenous worlds.

Out on the Land: Income, Subsistence Activities, and Food Sharing Networks in Nain, Labrador

“…While important, the effect size of household income is generally half that of individual income and employment status, which are themselves unrelated to access to subsistence equipment. These results thus support Stern's [11] findings that intrahousehold sharing represents an accommodation to the imposed bureaucratic forms (which may themselves be underwritten by a particular ideological view of the role of indigenous households in a modern economy, see Lea [41,42]), but this accommodation does not appear to translate into broad community-wide sharing in a way that elevates the importance of the pooling household. Arguing against the latter is the fact that individuals who are simply sharing the wild catch of someone in his/her own household (while continuing to work in the cash economy and support the hunting access of others) would still be likely to have better access to a skidoo, cabin, or boat (i.e., subsistence factor) by virtue of the fact that intra-household/intrafamily sharing is included in the construction of the variable used to measure access.…”

Contemporary Anthropologies of Indigenous Australia

“…Nonetheless, a significant handful of anthropologists made intercultural governmentality the target for sustained ethnographic analysis (for example , Collmann 1988;Cowlishaw 1999;Kowal 2008;Povinelli 2002Povinelli , 2006Sullivan 2008Sullivan , 2011. My own work focused on the circularity of remedial logics and the health bureaucracy's dependency on indigenous ill health for financial and ideological reproduction (Lea 2008). Yet this too remained a local study that bypassed the multiplicity of intersecting realities and interests, including those of supranational capital, that are also inhabited by service bureaucracies.…”

“…In this pursuit, the unifying force was not problem deflation and lack of policy attunement. If anything, it was an unreflexive faith in the state as an external entity to which one might appeal with putatively sound scholarly reason and for assumed indigenous benefit (see Lea 2012). Indeed, far from ignoring policy concerns, efforts to write of what exceeds the functional values of hired labor, myths of state, and monetization have been rare (see Burbank 2006, von Sturmer 1995.…”

Settler colonialism in Australia and the cashless debit card

“…The CDC, whilst the specific subject of this paper, is one programme in a series of policies in Australia, which enforces the uptake and assimilation of norms that underpin settler modes of understanding the world. Although it is not the intention of this study to claim there is a conscious nor homogeneous state or what Tess Lea () calls “organised totality” (p. 111), the trial of the card exposes assemblages of discourses and tropes that guide and normalise decision making and policy by various agencies, governments, and individuals that continue assimilation. The study also does not suggest that the card is only a tool of assimilation, as it is used on non‐First Nations people also which comprises other important theoretical insights relating to the card and class.…”