The ‘Spirit’ of the Thing: The Boundaries of Aboriginal Economic Relations at Australian Common Law

Aboriginal economic relations have been misconstrued as a type of primitive exchange in at least one native title case discussed in this paper. The pursuit by Aboriginal native title claimants of recognition at law of customary economic rights as inherent in, or an adjunct of, native title rights failed in Yarmirr and Others v. Northern Territory of Australia and Others (1998) 156 ALR 370 (the ‘Croker Island case’) for several reasons. The applicant's native title was found to be non‐exclusive of other interests, and a right to trade in resources of the sea was rejected. This case was argued in part by relying on historical material regarding Macassan trading arrangements. The profound alterity of Aboriginal relationships among persons and things, as the Croker Island evidence of property and trade relations demonstrates, have been re‐constituted in legal discourse as an absence of economic relations. In this paper, we argue that there is no sound basis for the distinction made between commercial and non‐commercial native title rights, whether in the Native Title Act 1993 (Commonwealth of Australia), or in recent judicial reasoning. We contend that native title rights and interests constitute a sui generis species of property relations that enable economic rights as conceived in Aboriginal tradition and custom to circulate in the modern market. Aboriginal customary economic relations of and between Aboriginal groupings are markedly distinct from, yet not incommensurable with, the normative conception of economic relations in the Australian market. We argue that a reformulation of the current Australian legal ideas about economic life is necessary for the recognition of Aboriginal economic institutions in native title claims and other economic arenas.     

The social organisation of Wadeye's heavy metal mobs

The heavy metal mobs of Wadeye (notorious in the media as ‘heavy metal gangs’) are a new form of Aboriginal social organisation, almost entirely constituted by collateral kinship rather than descent relations. Dozens of overlapping mobs are each made up of sets of brothers and cousins, and are publicly symbolised by the name of a heavy metal band discovered via mass media. In contrast to recent Australianist anthropology that emphasises the fluidity of social structures and intercultural processes of identity formation, I argue that the metal mobs constitute a highly codified system of social organisation, and one in which non‐Aboriginal cultural influences are quite peripheral.     

The intercultural crafting of real Aboriginal country and manhood in Central Australia

This article explores country music as an important means for Aboriginal men in Central Australia to articulate contemporary forms of manhood and indigeneity. These desert men perceive their own music scene as a last stronghold for real country music. The article demonstrates how such notions of real involve the ongoing intercultural mediation of global and local male aesthetic styles and manhood ideals. In making and performing their country music, desert men continue to draw on enduring ancestral regimes for male demeanour that resonate with global country music imagery and practice, as well as with prominent non‐Indigenous models of manhood in the regional settler history.     

Sterilizing vaccines or the politics of the womb: retrospective study of a rumor in Cameroon

In 1990 a rumor that public health workers were administering a vaccine to sterilize girls and women spread throughout Cameroon. Schoolgirls leapt from windows to escape the vaccination teams, and the vaccination campaign (part of the Year of Universal Child Immunization) was aborted. This article traces the origin and development of this rumor. Theories of rumor and ambiguous cultural response to new technologies shed some light on its genesis and spread, but explain neither its timing nor its content. For this task we need to examine the historical context of Cameroonian experience with colonial vaccination campaigns and the contemporary contexts of the turmoil of democratization movements and economic crisis, concurrent changes in contraceptive policy, and regional mistrust of the state and its "hegemonic project." Drawing on Bayart's politique du ventre and White's thoughts on gossip, we explore this rumor as diagnostic of local response to global and national projects. This response, expressed in this case through the idiom of threats to local reproductive capacity, reveals a feminine side to local-global relations, a politics of the womb.     

Mythologising culture

This second part of Mythologising Culture examines the responses of Aboriginal people in western Sydney to the valorizing of Aboriginality by the Australian nation. As Aboriginal culture has become the object of restitution, regret and reconciliation, Aboriginal people are being called upon to represent and produce Culture in iconic forms such as painting, dancing and other performances and representations. These activities, often depicted as remedial, are seldom initiated and controlled by Aboriginal people, but rather disturb cultural adjustments and established social relations. I discuss a range of responses elicited by these post‐colonial activities, from enthusiastic embrace to the rejection of state sponsored culture. Further, I consider the structural implications of suburban Aborigines being offered the chance to distance themselves from the anonymous suburban poor.     

The appropriation of an Aboriginal landscape in northern New South Wales

The attachment of Australian Aboriginal people to land has not only been amply documented by anthropologists since the late 19^th century, it is also one of their own enduring tropes of differentiation from non‐Aboriginal and “official” Australian state society. In the face of widespread and concerted alteration of the pre‐settlement landscape engendered by industrial and commercial development, Aboriginal people seek to reclaim or reappropriate remnants of a pristine environment untransformed by modern development. Alteration of the landscape, as far as Aboriginal people are concerned, also goes hand in hand with the progressive decimation of Aboriginal populations in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries through violence and disease. Contemporary Aboriginal communities seek to protect the sites of violent death, believed heavily populated with the frustrated spirits of the deceased, from disturbance, particularly by non‐Aboriginal people. In this chapter I discuss some of the anthropological implications of seeing landscape as a terrain of intercultural conjunction in such a bifold society in northern New South Wales, and what levels of transformation are and are not acknowledged by a marginal, minority indigenous population seeking to insulate their historical landscape from development.     

Gypsies,Celts and tinkers: Colonial antecedents of anti‐traveller racism in Ireland

Post‐colonial nationalist ideologies and practices construct an Irish Republic free of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘racism’. The ethnicization of the Irish Travelling People ('itinerants’, ‘tinkers') and the existence of anti‐traveller racism, however, reveal the limitations of this construction. This article focuses upon the antecedents of anti‐traveller ideologies by concentrating on the period that preceded Irish independence in 1922. The history of Irish itinerancy from the middle ages to the mid‐nineteenth century is first described and located within the context of British colonialism. This is followed by a consideration of scholarly, literary and popular representations of ‘tinkers’ during the late nineteenth century. Three interelated discourses, those of the British Gypsylorists, the Anglo‐Irish Celtic Literary Revivalists, and the folklore of the Irish peasantry, are described and linked to British imperialism, Irish cultural nationalism, and agrarian class relations respectively. It is argued that an analysis of these discourses, grounded in political economy, provides a useful historical context for analyses of more recent constructions of Travellers that have arisen in the course of struggles over a state settlement programme initiated in the 1960s. Through documentation and analysis of historical constructions of Travelling People, especially constructions of their origins, this article aims to challenge contemporary essentialist constructions of both ethnic identity and racism by redirecting attention instead towards the economic and political processes and relations of power that produce difference and inequality within the Irish context. Such analysis can also raise broader issues regarding the existence and specificity of racism in the Irish Republic.     

Blackfellas and Whitefellas: the Concepts of Domain and Social Closure in the Analysis of Race-Relations

In presenting data on social relations between Aborigines and Whites at a north Australian Aboriginal settlement, this paper develops the concepts of domain and social closure as important in the study of power and race-relations. Previous Australian studies in this area have not treated adequately, the substantive nature and theoretical significance of spatial and social separation between Aborigines and Whites. I argue that Aborigines retain some autonomy within a ‘Blackfella domain’, through effecting a form of exclusionary social closure.     

Ngadju kala: Australian Aboriginal fire knowledge in the Great Western Woodlands

Indigenous fire knowledge offers significant benefits for ecosystem management and human livelihoods, but is threatened worldwide because of disruption of customary practices. In Australia, the historical prevalence and characteristics of Aboriginal burning are intensely debated, including arguments that Aboriginal burning was frequent across the continent. Frequent burning is supported by contemporary Aboriginal knowledge and practice in some regions, but in southern Australia evidence is typically limited to historical and ecological records. Towards characterizing Aboriginal fire regimes in southern Australia, we collaborated with Ngadju people from the globally significant Great Western Woodlands in south‐western Australia to document their fire knowledge. We used workshops, site visits, interviews and occupation mapping to aid knowledge sharing. Consistent with the established significance of Aboriginal fire in Australia, planned fires were important in Ngadju daily life and land management. However, Ngadju use of fire was characterized by its selectivity rather than its ubiquity. Specifically, Ngadju described only highly targeted planned burning across extensive eucalypt woodlands and sandplain shrublands. By contrast, frequent planned burning was described for resource‐rich landscape elements of more restricted extent (granite outcrop vegetation, grasslands and coastal scrub). Overall, Ngadju fires are likely to have resulted in subtle but purposeful direct effects on the vegetation and biota. However the extent to which they collectively constrained large, intense wildfires remains unclear. Ngadju demonstrated a predictive knowledge of the ecological consequences of burning, including attention to fine‐scale needs of target organisms, and application of diverse fire regimes. These are consistent with the recently proposed concept that Aboriginal burning was guided by ‘templates’ targeting different resources, although diverse regimes predominantly reflect edaphically driven vegetation patterns rather than template‐driven use of fire to create resource diversity. We conclude that Ngadju fire knowledge fills an important gap in understanding Aboriginal fire regimes in southern Australia, highlighting a novel balance between frequent and constrained use of fire.     

Relational autonomy,care, and Jehovah's Witnesses in Germany

Drawing from an ethics of care, relational approaches to autonomy have recently emerged in bioethics. Unlike individual autonomy with its emphasis on patients’ rights, choice, and self‐determination which has been the hallmark of bioethics consistent with the ideology of individualism in neoliberal democracies in Western countries, relational autonomy highlights the relatedness, interdependency, and social embeddedness of patients. By examining the mediating role that male Hospital Liaison Committee members in Germany play in facilitating care that supports Jehovah's Witnesses’ refusal of blood transfusions, this article moves beyond ‘dyadic relations’ and contexts of caregiving. It also contributes to a deeper understanding of care and relational conceptualizations of Witness patients’ autonomy globally.     

Materialising Oceania: New ethnographies of things in Melanesia and Polynesia

Oceania occupies an intriguing place within anthropology’s genealogy. In the introduction to this collection of essays, we examine the role of the ethnography of Oceania in the development of our anthropological perspectives on materialisation, the dynamic process by which persons and things are inter‐related. Building upon the recent resurgence of theoretical interests in things we use the term materialisation (rather than material culture or materiality) to capture the vitality of the lived processes by which ideas of objectivity and subjectivity, persons and things, minds and bodies are entangled. Taking a processual view, we advocate for an Oceanic anthropology that continues to engage with things on the ground; that asks what strategies communities use to materialise their social relations, desires and values; and that recognises how these processes remain important tools for understanding historical and contemporary Oceanic societies. Examining these locally articulated processes and forms contributes to a material (re)turn for anthropology that clarifies how we, as scholars, think about things more widely.     

From Underemployment to Unemployment: The Changing Role of Aborigines in a Rural Economy

The study of Aborigines in south-eastern Australia is a long neglected area of Aboriginal studies. This paper traces the labour history of the Dhan-gadi people of the mid-north coast of New South Wales. Particular stress is placed on the political and economic factors affecting change for the Dhan-gadi after colonial dispossession and the interaction which constituted labour relations between this Aboriginal Reserve community and the local European community.     

Tunnel Vision: Part One – Resisting post‐colonialism in Australian anthropology

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.     

Aboriginal Music and Passion: Interculturality and Difference in Australian Desert Towns

Aboriginal country, rock and reggae music makers in Central Australian desert communities often portray performances in regional white towns as desirable and rewarding occasions for engagements with a non-indigenous ‘mainstream’. Aboriginal popular music is also often understood as a tool for a marginalised minority to ‘talk back’ to non-Aboriginal powers, or for ‘sharing culture’ to achieve greater cross-cultural understanding. This article investigates what actually takes place at local Aboriginal music events in the town of Alice Springs. It shows how they, in fact, become powerful occasions for enacting certain blackfella forms of sociability that reinforce relations of estrangement between non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal people and domains. Addressing the question how to account for the lived experience of racial and cultural formations without resorting to notions of bounded or pre-existing categories, the author proposes an approach to difference as relational at the outset that can accommodate multiple dimensions and inherent contradictions of intercultural lives.     

On the ethics and practice of contemporary social theory: from crisis talk to multiattentional method

Using an approach derived from the anthropology and sociology of knowledge, this article explores the historical emergence of European social theory and its contemporary place in the human sciences. I direct ethnographic attention to a sense of crisis or impasse in social theory’s capacity to frame and to analyze the complexity of contemporary relations in the world. By reanalyzing this crisis talk as a phenomenological reaction to the growing (sub)specialization of social theory, I offer a new way of thinking about social theory in terms of specialized analytical attentions. I also suggest how we can move from crisis talk to a new ethics of theoretical complementarity, inspired by Dilthey, which I term “multiattentional method.”     

Comparison of historical bottleneck effects and genetic consequences of re‐introduction in a critically endangered island passerine

Re‐introduction is an important tool for recovering endangered species; however, the magnitude of genetic consequences for re‐introduced populations remains largely unknown, in particular the relative impacts of historical population bottlenecks compared to those induced by conservation management. We characterize 14 microsatellite loci developed for the Seychelles paradise flycatcher and use them to quantify temporal and spatial measures of genetic variation across a 134‐year time frame encompassing a historical bottleneck that reduced the species to ~28 individuals in the 1960s, through the initial stages of recovery and across a second contemporary conservation‐introduction‐induced bottleneck. We then evaluate the relative impacts of the two bottlenecks, and finally apply our findings to inform broader re‐introduction strategy. We find a temporal trend of significant decrease in standard measures of genetic diversity across the historical bottleneck, but only a nonsignificant downward trend in number of alleles across the contemporary bottleneck. However, accounting for the different timescales of the two bottlenecks (~40 historical generations versus <1 contemporary generation), the loss of genetic diversity per generation is greater across the contemporary bottleneck. Historically, the flycatcher population was genetically structured; however, extinction on four of five islands has resulted in a homogeneous contemporary population. We conclude that severe historical bottlenecks can leave a large footprint in terms of sheer quantity of genetic diversity lost. However, severely depleted genetic diversity does not render a species immune to further genetic erosion upon re‐introduction. In some cases, the loss of genetic diversity per generation can, initially at least, be greater across re‐introduction‐induced bottlenecks.     

INNOVATION AND ANCESTRAL REVELATION: THE CASE OF DREAMS

This article explores aspects of the relationship between tradition and innovation in an Australian Aboriginal society by looking at dreams as a 'traditional' facet of cultural change. In many Aboriginal societies spirits of the deceased, spirit beings, and ancestral figures are said to communicate with and 'reveal' certain things to the dreamer. Some things that are revealed, such as those pertaining to ritual and ceremonial life, are said to have existed 'from the beginning' and are not considered to be 'new'. Here I discuss a case of ancestral revelation relating to a commonplace sphere of Aboriginal life – the card game. Through this I explore something of the complexity of the ways in which 'traditional' beliefs and forms of innovation are dialectically interdependent with contemporary cultural experiences as well as with distinctive historical experiences which have preceded them.     

Reading relations backwards

It would hazardous for an anthropologist to read back from the present to admonitions from nearly a century ago that the whole world is kin or that all forms of life are related. It would be even more hazardous to read back from the present to three centuries ago. None the less, a contemporary issue in social anthropology makes the risk conceivably worth taking. This is to do with the role that generic terms play in knowledge‐making, and specifically in what we know about kinship. Pondering on the adoption of a generic, ‘relation’, in the acknowledgement of kinspersons in England around the time of the scientific revolution, this article points to a precise way in which the generic might have been useful for both kin‐makers and knowledge‐makers. Describing relations without having to specify the entities involved served both. This speculative exercise might be of interest in current contexts where appeals are made to the relational and relationality.     

Sickening Bodies: How Racism and Essentialism Feature in Aboriginal Women's Discourse about Health1

In the last decade there has been much interest in the concepts of ‘racism’ and ‘essentialism’ and the ways in which these notions have been appropriated by Aboriginal people to demarcate a specifically Aboriginal space (Cowlishaw 1986; Lattas 1993; Langton 1981; Morris 1988; Muecke 1992). Central to these concerns is the issue of black/white relations and the specificities of racial oppression. Following these concerns in this article I explore the nexus between the metaphorical dismemberment of self and the corporeal dismemberment of sickness which is reflected in the high mortality rates and disease patterns of Aboriginal people. I extend Fanon's concept that racism has the power to alienate ‘a man of colour’ from his own self-image to argue that it more than metaphorically breaks the human body (Fanon 1991). I provide a window into a much neglected area of research: how notions of illness and social relatedness are constructed in particular socio-historical circumstances. I explore the meanings of illness as expressed at the level of community and as a form of embodiment associated with unequal colonial relations. I focus on indigenous exegeses which articulate Aboriginal women's experience of illness and their sense of identity. I draw on the work of Leder (1990) to foreground a phenomenological view where selfhood is continually confronted by circumstances that make present the ‘body’ as a ‘sharp and searing presence threatening the self’. I also apply Sansom's (1982) model of illness and the significance of carers in an Aboriginal community to demonstrate a world-view of personhood that is diffused with other persons and things rather than a world-view that entails a highly individuated and bounded self. In this world-view adequate healing requires a reconstitution of social relations and a re-ordering of the racialised status quo.