Dynamics of Difference in Australia: Indigenous Past and Present in a Settler Country - Hardcover

Merlan, Francesca

 
9780812250008: Dynamics of Difference in Australia: Indigenous Past and Present in a Settler Country
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812250001 ISBN 13: 9780812250008
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

In Dynamics of Difference in Australia, Francesca Merlan examines relations between indigenous and nonindigenous people from the events of early exploration and colonial endeavors to the present day. From face-to-face interactions to national and geopolitical affairs, the book illuminates the dimensions of difference that are revealed by these encounters: what indigenous and nonindigenous people pay attention to, what they value, what preconceived notions each possesses, and what their responses are to the Other. Basing her analysis on her extensive fieldwork in northern Australia, Merlan highlights the asymmetries in the exchanges between the settler majority and the indigenous minority, looking at everything from forms of violence and material transactions, to indigenous involvement in resource development, to governmental intervention in indigenous affairs.

Merlan frames the book within the current debate in Australian society concerning the constitutional recognition of indigenous people by the nation-state. Surveying the precursors to this question and its continuing and unresolved nature, she chronicles the ways in which an indigenous minority can remain culturally different while simultaneously experiencing the transformative forces of domination, constraint, and inequality. Conducting an investigation of long-term change against the backdrop of a highly salient and timely public debate surrounding indigenous issues, Dynamics of Difference has far-reaching implications both for public policy and for current theoretical debates about the nature of sociocultural continuity and change.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Francesca Merlan is Professor of Anthropology at Australian National University. She is author of numerous books, including Caging the Rainbow: Places, Politics, and Aborigines in a North Australian Town.

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Preface
Region, Position, and Ethics of Representation

This book is about relationships between indigenous and nonindigenous people in Australia at different points in time and especially about "differences" as detectable and active in those relationships. I take differences to be identifiable forms of being in common, together with some sense of commonly shared values, that contrast with other forms similarly held in common by "others." The aim in each following chapter is to explore kinds of difference and the extent to which difference has served as a mode or pathway of engagement or a delimiting boundary, in the first place between indigenous and nonindigenous actors but subsequently in ways that make those categories more complex and more directly contested. The book's aim is not to examine "culture/s" as if entirely separate but to examine what we understand as cultural by considering difference in indigenous-nonindigenous engagement and its implications. I have found it plausible and indeed illuminating to consider differences over long time spans, so the material in this book moves between moments of early indigenous-nonindigenous encounter and the present.

Many nonindigenous people in southern Australia say that they infrequently meet and do not know any indigenous people. That this is possible is some indication of the relatively peripheral position and small proportion of indigenous people and communities in urban and especially southeastern Australia. Like many who set out to do research with indigenous communities, my intention on coming to Australia was to go north, where indigenous people constitute a much larger proportion of the population and it is unlikely that one would not "see" them. Seeing is different from getting to know, and in this Preface I set out the conditions in which I came to know Australia's north and became involved in the indigenous-nonindigenous relations this book explores.

The book is concerned with historicity but is also ethnographic, based partly on my own ethnographic research, as well as on my search to win ethnographic insights from historical material. The link between ethnography and analysis in the book raises two issues that need to be addressed here. The first is what is nowadays often called in the human sciences "positionality"—the call for us as researchers and authors to reflect on our own position in relation to the people we write about, focusing on issues of relative privilege and our ethical responsibility to avoid exploitative research. The other is the matter of "relationship." The book is about indigenous-nonindigenous relationships, and this account focuses on relationships I came to have with indigenous people and communities over time.

I came from the United States in 1976 to take up a three-year research fellowship in the Top End of the Northern Territory of Australia. I had never been in Australia before. What made me think I could arrive and do this kind of research? I had some personal preparation and inclination. As a child I had spent periods of time in North American Indian communities in which Indians were the majority, and as a Ph.D. student I had done research in communities where relations between Indians and outsiders were marked by a high degree of physical and social separation, but influences from dominant North American society were also pervasive. Both of these things are true of northern Australia too. There had been in my family history some relationships with indigenous people in northern New Mexico where I was born, and I felt a continuing interest in those Native American settings that seemed as interesting as others I knew, including that of the first-generation Italian immigrants in Brooklyn on my father's side of the family with whom I also spent much of my childhood. I cannot, however, recall any personal feeling of nostalgia for traditional lifeworlds other than the ones I found around me (cf. Rosaldo 1989). But I did have a sense from early on of different social milieus, their uprooting and reconfiguration. At the time I set out for northern Australia, I had few specific preconceptions about what life would be like there or the character of relationships between indigenous and nonindigenous people. An entire framework of supported academic research made it all possible.

I had applied for and been granted a research fellowship from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in Canberra, the national capital, to investigate the changing locations and languages of indigenous people in an area of considerable social diversity, three hundred kilometers southeast of Darwin, the Northern Territory's capital. The town of Katherine was the supply center and focus of the region for both indigenous and nonindigenous people, inhabited by about five thousand people when I arrived. A number of Aborigines in the town had long lived there, but they had become a minority among the Aboriginal population as new arrivals came in and stayed, mostly on the town's fringes. Several hundred Aboriginal people were camping on the fringes, many of them recently displaced by changes in the conditions of rural work. Some of these communities were expelled by pastoralists and/or fragmented as Aboriginal people came to be more fully included in an economy of government welfare benefits.


Unknown to me, changes were being set in train in the relations between Aboriginal people and other Australians that were to shape much of my activity for years to come. The biggest was the Australian Parliament passing the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act in 1976, enabling Aboriginal people to claim traditional ownership of territory they regarded as theirs. This law was the product of years of activism by and on behalf of indigenous people, mainly taking place in Australia's urban centers but imaginatively stimulated by remote Australia. Land rights were politically possible on a large scale only in the Northern Territory because as a territory rather than a state it was under the direct control and jurisdiction of the federal government. By the 1970s federal government endorsement of land rights was bipartisan (unlike in the Northern Territory itself, where there was widespread opposition among the non-Aboriginal people who by then composed a majority of the population there).

From Katherine, I also became familiar and lived in some outlying indigenous communities, two of which especially figure in following chapters: Barunga, seventy kilometers southeast of Katherine on the Central Arnhem Road (then largely unpaved, now paved); and Jilgmirn.gan (locally usually spelled Jilkminggan) on Elsey Station about 114 kilometers south and east of Katherine on the Roper Highway. A range of other towns, town fringe camps, stations (ranches), and other locations interconnected with these were all places I spent time, partly because interlinked kindreds whom I came to know lived in a range of different places (see Figure 1). Communities like Barunga (and Beswick to the northeast) had been established or reconfigured in the postwar period, with the administrative intention that Aboriginal people could be contained there and kept away from town. Others like Jilgmirn.gan on Elsey were long-term station communities, places of settlement reconfigured on pastoral properties where Aboriginal people were living on small excision areas of the homelands of at least some members of the community. Many of these station communities had been much larger until around the time of implementation of the minimum wage, phased in from 1966 to 1968, when they were turned off many of those properties or discouraged from living there. The new conditions meant that pastoralists were unwilling to accept the continuing residence of numbers of indigenous people. Indigenous camps on some stations were now greatly reduced or only seasonally occupied. Others...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812250001
ISBN 13 
9780812250008
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
301
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