Cruising: ‘Moral Panic’ and the Cronulla Riot

In this paper I draw on ethnography I undertook amongst locals in the Cronulla area after the riot of December 2005. A number of the young beach goers I came across had been on a P&O ‘schoolies cruise’ at the time of the riot. For two weeks the students depended on the media for information about what was going on in their suburbs. Sailing back, I was told, a pumped‐up chorus of ‘Shi‐ire!’ and ‘White Pride!’ rang out over Sydney Heads, as expectations climbed high of the ship being met by gangs of Middle Eastern youths, ready for the fight. Back on the beach, months later, bodies baking in the sun try to reconcile the thought of riot with what they know about Australia, and Cronulla, as a place of laid back, leisurely, lazily tolerant people. How can the two scenes of bodily excess be brought together? What are the limits of the ‘moral panic’ idea, in relation to the Cronulla riot? How do the competing truths of major discourses on Cronulla misrepresent the community in question?     

The utopian promise of government

Today academic debate and public discourse about the Pacific often focuses on the collapse of government – on failed nation-states. Yet ever since Self-Government and Independence, Melanesians have experimented with developing their own alternative forms of local government, which have often embraced but also side-tracked official governmental schemes, structures, and practices. Using the Pomio Kivung movement in East New Britain, this article explores how government, together with its projects and promises of sovereignty, civilization, and development, is displaced and re-mediated through the world of the dead. The customary shamanic worlds of dreams and possession are redeployed and merged with the pastoral practices and disciplinary schemes of civilizing projects originally belonging to Western churches and governments.     

Cargo Cults and the Politics of Alterity: A Review Article

This review article is a critical evaluation of recent ethnographic contributions and theoretical debates concerning cargo cults. It examines how Foucault's genealogical and discursive methodologies can be used in a way that undercuts their valuable insights. The recent self‐reflexive turn, where anthropology focuses on the moral politics of its own discourses, can lead to a silencing of the moral political discourses of others. Moreover self‐reflexivity can become an authorising strategy for academics keen to downplay race and resistance in millenarian movements where these are important features.     

Technologies of Visibility: The Utopian Politics of Cameras,Televisions, Videos and Dreams in New Britain

This paper explores how Melanesian villagers have harnessed modern, technological ways of seeing. It begins by analysing the politics and narrative structures of dreams and popular stories about secret photos concerning the dead. These are stories about losing control and regaining hidden, alternative representations of Melanesians. I then analyse how millenarian followers have experimented with ‘constructing’ their own versions of cameras, televisions and videos so as to gain access to the omniscient powers of modern technology and merge them with those of a Christian god and with the gaze of the dead. In the Pomio Kivung movement, ‘televisions' and ‘videos' have even been used to create new forms of moral surveillance for policing and governing communities. Here the customary shamanic worlds of dreams and possession have been modernised and redeployed to re‐mediate the governmental practices and disciplinary schemes of civilisating projects originally belonging to Western churches and government.     

Nationalism,Aesthetic Redemption and Aboriginality

In this paper I analyse some contemporary cultural constructions of the Australian national psyche and how these involve constructions of the otherness of Aboriginality and of modernity. In particular, I am interested in analysing how the spiritualised otherness of Aboriginality is produced and employed within nationalist discourses which are concerned with establishing the cultural integrity and authenticity of Australian culture. Aborigines have became a cultural category to be used within discourses which assign themselves a redemptive function in relationship to curing the ravages inflicted by modernity.     

Humanitarianism and Australian Nationalism in Colonial Papua: Hubert Murray and the Project of Caring for the Self of the Coloniser and Colonised

This paper is about Australian nationalism in Papua at the beginning of the century. It analyses the role of science and humanitarianism in sustaining the colonial project and the white man's identity. Colonialism was formulated as philanthropy operating on a global scale, where the redemption and salvation of humanity involved the ‘higher cultures’ having a ‘sacred trust’ to educate and morally uplift the natives. This duty to pacify and civilise the tribal other was also a process of reworking the boundaries of western identity so as to remove it from too close a kinship with those forms of savage subjectivity over which it claimed moral superiority. Anthropology became part of the ethical task of how to be a good coloniser; it was heavily involved in reforming state power, such that it governed through culture rather than through violence. Indeed, anthropology was used to legitimise new understandings of native culture as something that could not be overly repressed without destroying the natives. A new internal form of colonialism emerged, one which required cultural pluralism and which was worried about the dangers of over-assimilation.     

‘They Always Seem to be Angry’: The Cronulla Riot and the Civilising Pleasures of the Sun

Contemporary ethnic rivalries often deny participation in racism and instead use the language of nationalism to formulate an etiquette of civility as defining national belonging. In contemporary Australia, world events such as the Bali Bombing, the 9/11 attacks and the Global War on Terror have empowered a civilisational logic, which often becomes localised to provide the moral terms for culturally ranking who has the capacity to participate in the pleasures of a modern enlightened nation. A culture of relaxation built around the beach, around the civilised enjoyment of the outdoors, is used as a point of contrast for a renewed Orientalism. It takes up breaches of everyday etiquette to create a psychological portrait of an uncivilised Arab Other who does not know how to relax and be peaceful.     

‘Neither cargo nor cult…’

Neither cargo nor cult: Ritual politics and the colonial imagination in Fiji, by Martha Kaplan. Duke University Press, Durham NC, 1995. ISBN 0–8223–1593–9.