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This paper explores the political economy of Australia's prison industrial complex and its severe impact on Indigenous communities. Taking a historical perspective, the paper moves between a broader analysis of the forced extraction of Indigenous labour by the state and private enterprise and the violence against Indigenous people which accompanies it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I explore approaches in establishing cross‐cultural relations between indigenous people and internal migrants in the district of West Seram (Maluku, Indonesia). According to current data, the number of people from other islands exceeds the local population but the district government neglects the ethnic issues. Emerging inequalities are becoming a challenge for internal migrants, especially in the areas of leadership and land tenure. I argue that the sense of exclusion among 'outsiders' impacts on growing social tensions and creates immobility within the social structures, giving less room for negotiations and dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an early discussion of the ways we are approaching Indigenous Studies in Australian Universities. The focus is on how disciplinary and scholarly issues within Indigenous Studies can be interrogated and yet retain the necessary cohesion and solidarity so important to the Indigenous struggle. The paper contrasts Indigenous Studies pursued by Indigenous scholars to other disciplinary perspectives in the academy. Categories such as the Indigenous community and Indigenous knowledge are problematised, not to dissolve them, but to explore productive avenues. I identify one of the problems that Indigenous studies faces as resisting the tendency to perpetuate an enclave within the academy whose purpose is to reflect back an impoverished and codified representation of Indigenous culture to the communities that are its source. On the other hand, there is danger also in the necessary engagement with other disciplines on their own terms. My suggestion is that we see ourselves mapping our understanding of our particular Indigenous experiences upon a terrain intersected by the pathways, both of other Indigenous experiences, and of the non-Indigenous academic disciplines. My intention is to stimulate some thought among Indigenous academics and scholars about the future possibilities of Australian Indigenous Studies as a field of endeavour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses discussions of the haka (popularly translated as `the war dance of the Maori') in three performative sites in Aotearoa/New Zealand: a national Maori dance competition, touristic `cultural experience' programs in Rotorua, and a secondary school in Wellington. The discussions demonstrate that this dance has come to represent a variety of `identifications' for the speakers. However, while the haka elicits multiple, related and sometimes conflicting identificatory possibilities for Maori-identified discussants (albeit within a limited range of positions), this is not the case for a group of non-Maori men reminiscing about their boyhood performances at school sporting events. Through the comparison of discussions of these three performance sites, this paper argues that haka conversations reveal dynamic creativity in discourses of identifications (intra-indigenous, collective indigenous, and nationalist) of some speakers but not of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The highly visceral ways in which forms of consubstantiality are produced between kin in Indigenous Australian social worlds can be explored through close attention to local understandings of bodily substances and their modes of exchange and transformation. Recalling here Paul Schilder's observation that 'our attitude towards the different parts of the body can be to a great extent determined by the interest other persons take in our body' (1964: 299), this paper traces some of the ways in which images of the self and others are deployed in Euro-Australian ('whitefella') and Kimberley Aboriginal[This paper] ('blackfella') images and practices circulating around the provision, avoidance and consumption of meat which is, of course, nothing if not an assortment of bodily parts which most human-beings have an abiding interest in. The circulation of meat is something which is focal to a great range of Kimberley social relationships and inevitably comes to permeate the organisation of the never-ending stream of meetings with Euro-Australians through Aboriginal land councils and other local government agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous peoples' understandings of climate change are often interpreted through an instrumental prism that privileges the ecologically adaptive nature of belief and practice. This paper explores the limits of this perspective by considering the environmental narratives of self‐blame among households in the uplands of Palawan Island, the Philippines. In the south of the island, indigenous Pala'wan widely suggest that cyclical El Niño Southern Oscillation driven variation in rainfall and related food insecurity is the product of a linear change in climatic patterns occurring over the past several decades. This perceived climate change is explained in reference to the popularity of incestuous relationships and a decline in ritualised executions. Through an ethnographic focus on the politics of climate knowledge, I argue that Pala'wan narratives of self‐blame speak as much to ongoing struggles between indigenous people and the Philippine state over control of the forested uplands as it does to the grounded and empirical qualities of indigenous environmental knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the bipartisan I Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation Act i 1991, Australians have been experimenting with a new civic vocabulary of "reconciliation" - a set of terms that expresses what Australians have in common while simultaneously acknowledging and honouring Indigenous Australian difference. David is drawing our attention to changes in the settler colonists' experience of place. After his thoughtful discussion of resemblance and non-resemblance between non-Indigenous and Indigenous senses of belong to places, David has little to say about "any possible engagement with". [Extracted from the article]

This paper explores variation and change in Aboriginal people's connections to places, and place-related identity, as a function of their differential historical relationship to a town. Among Aboriginal people who have lived for some decades in camps around Katherine, Northern Territory, descendants of those who appear to have the most clearly discernible long-term relationship with the area in the vicinity of the town do not relate to places, nor conceptualise them, in stereotypically 'traditional' terms. Their relationships to town and nearby places tend to be of an ideologically unelaborated, homely sort. Kinds of territorial relationships their antecedents can be shown to have had to the area have undergone dissolution. The paper seeks to develop discussion of such variation and the historical and sociological processes involved. The Katherine case brings the social and historical significance of 'towns' as sites of Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal interrelationship into focus, and also requires a critical view of notions of 'group' that have tended to dominate recent public process and understanding in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the evidence for land succession in western Victoria and considers the fission, fusion, and extinction of some clan groups at the time of contact with non-Aboriginal people in the late 1830s and 1840s. A special study is made of the intriguing scraps of evidence surrounding Knenknenwurrung. This appears to be the case of a cluster of related clans fragmenting and being absorbed into contiguous language groups--some into Djadjawummg, some Jardwadjali, and the majority absorbed into Djabwoirrung. Exactly when this fragmentation and fission occurred is unclear, but certainly within the living memory of Aboriginal people in the early 1840s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the meaning of indigeneity in the southern Gulf country by focusing upon a group of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people who claim as a common ancestor a pioneering non-Aboriginal pastoralist. This early settler established a large cattle property on the Northern Territory/Queensland border at the end of the nineteenth century, where he participating in frontier violence as well as attempts to resolve such violence and promote more peaceable relations through various kinds of exchange, including the common-law marriage of his part-Aboriginal son to the daughter of a local Aboriginal leader. Drawing on Taussig's reflections on the economy of mimesis and alterity in colonial exchange, I analyse the ways in which different kinds of connections to the property in question have been phrased by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal descendants of this man, as well as other local people, from first settlement in the 1860s through to the contemporary moment, when multiple and overlapping assertions of indigenous belonging by Aboriginal people intersect with articulations of an emergent autochthony amongst non-Aboriginal Australians with long histories of residence in the area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent attacks on suspected witches in Telefomin led to several deaths and the flight of families in fear of their lives. This violence has much in common with similar events elsewhere in PNG, but there are important differences as well: accusations do not have a misogynist cast (all the targets were men), and the witchcraft is attributed to non-indigenous sources. As in many PNG instances, the police failed to prosecute homicides arising from witchcraft accusations, a fact that has led to widespread local concern. In this paper I present the Telefol cases with a focus on the relation of perpetrators to their victims and to the community at large. I argue that certain aspects of the regional economy combined with a generic witchcraft discourse and the ineffectiveness of the state have fostered a lethal crisis in the relation between villagers and male youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many central Australian Aboriginal settlements have recently gained access to mobile phones and the Internet. This paper explores ways in which Aboriginal people engage with this technology outside of institutional settings. Drawing on long-term research among Warlpiri, I reflect on people's responses to earlier communication media such as the two-way radio and radio-telephone and compare them to patterns of use emerging around new technologies. Attending to the social landscape surrounding the uptake of new media and the social networking site 'Divas Chat', I consider how transformations in material structures of communication interact with changing demographics, embodied socio-spatial relations, sorcery beliefs and mobility to reinforce, refigure and/or disrupt patterns of conflict and connectedness that hitherto have structured Warlpiri relational ontology. I suggest that the way people engage with these technologies illuminates and intensifies fault-lines arising from contradictions between older established social orders and changing relations with the state and modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, two historical moments in the continual formation of Native American societies are examined: the creation of distinct and bounded 'Indian' societies in the south-eastern colonial United States, and the recent internal differentiation of the Lumbee Indian peoples in North Carolina. Four issues are at stake: the production of difference and inequality within and between Native American societies; the formation and transformation of 'culture' in this context; a re-examination of the concept of class; and the simultaneous production of culture and class among indigenous peoples and perhaps more generally. This leads to a suggestion concerning the problem of hegemony in struggles over inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists increasingly express links between individuals or collectivities through the discursively convenient prefix '-inter'; inter-personal, inter-subjective, inter-cultural, inter-textual. However, attempts to describe the psychodynamics that effect the linkings that are integral to human social experience have not held pace. I want to suggest that a regard for the ontogenetic primary forms of encounter--looking, eating, playing--can substantiate the analysis of being a self among other selves within and across the boundaries of social worlds. Engaging a phenomenological and psychoanalytic perspective, this paper examines how We-relationships have been variously structured by Pitjantjatjara Aborigines in encountering others at home and in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'women's business' on Hindmarsh Island has had spectacular success although vital evidence had been kept secret 'in a sealed envelope'. This paper, drawing primarily on the author's own encounter with the native title claims procedure, discusses various formative processes involved in the contemporary construction of Aboriginal indigeneity in which religious belief is heavily valorised. Subjected to a process of rationalisation for a long time, religious traditions are now being used as a strategic resource in native title claims. In the endeavour to make best possible use of the jurisprudential opportunity offered, the maintenance of secrecy and cloaking of information emerges as an important strategy. Secrecy clearly is an integral part of traditional Aboriginal culture. However, cloaking in fact may not only privilege esoteric contents, but merge with attempts of deliberate deception. Yet, in itself this too might be considered an Aboriginal cultural tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the relations between the discourse of 'multiculturalism' and that of 'indigeneity' in Australia? In problematising these relations this paper explores the affiliations that Latin American migrants and political refugees living in Adelaide have with the notion of indigeneity. For some Latin Americans affiliations with the straggle of Aboriginal people and indigeneity is a product of strong political identification with the political left and the struggle for human rights in their countries of origin. At the same time references to Latin Americans' indigeneity are often evoked within Australian multicultural settings and performances that promote 'cultural diversity' and are consumed by White Australians for their exotic otherness and as forms of cultural enrichment. Such representations work to marginalise further the migrants (and the 'indigenous') into a cultural sphere which marks them as the tolerated ethnic 'Other'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I illustrate the way one Aboriginal artist challenged what he perceived as an essentialised concept of Aboriginality, by rejecting rainbow serpent iconography. The motivations for this rejection were the artist's strong belief in the Christian God as creator and his reaction against New Age representations of Aboriginality in which the rainbow serpent signifies Aboriginal spirituality and is posited as the single creator for all of Aboriginal Australia. A conflict arose at the artist's gallery when he refused to exhibit a rainbow serpent painting by another Aboriginal artist. Publicised in the local newspaper, the rejection of these artworks started a brief public debate about the role of Christianity in Aboriginal culture. The various positions adopted by the Aboriginal protagonists highlight the complex processes of negotiation, dialogue and debate surrounding diverse constructions of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that indigenous dance is a poetic politics of cross-cultural encounter that engages Aboriginal identities with those of the Australian nation. I question the nature of this encounter in terms of a performative dialogue that is both musically and kinesically presented by indigenous communities and 'translated' into political discourse by the government. The sentiments of 'translation' raise questions as to how local ritual expressions of Aboriginal dance can mediate dialogue when presented as national spectacle. What is being meditated? What is happening in the process of evocation? In this performative nexus, I focus specifically on the poetic politics of Yolngu ritual as spectacle; the nature of performative dialogue in terms of shared dance forms between indigenous communities; the problem of the authentication of dance identities; and how corporeal dispositions of indigenous dance genres influence national sentiment by their symbolic power. I pursue these issues through an analysis of how ancestral dances have been repositioned in national performance venues, such as concerts, cultural centres and ritual arenas, as a means of asserting performative statements about indigenous positioning within the nation-state. The nature of this dialogue raises questions of authenticity and processes of authentication. It highlights indigenous concerns to control representations of indigeneity as national event, as well as a desire to convey something of the sentiment and sentience embodied in the poetics of their ancestral performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looks at the discursive construction of the identity of the Mentaiwaians who are purported to inhabit the Mentawai islands in Western Indonesia. Invention of Mentawai; Opposition to essentialism; Result of quasi-structural contradictions; Indigenous conceptions of identity of the people of Rereiket.

Conditions of being left behind in economic and political terms are keenly felt in many areas of Melanesia and the wider Pacific Islands—as is more generally the case in many developing and also developed countries. Insofar as modern expectations portend a future that should be improving, it is unsurprising that modern expectations or entitlements are throttled by economic and political downturns across many cultural and class conditions. Ensuing circumstances are not so much 'post' modern—since ideals of modern progress are not given up—as they are 'reactively' modern in cultural terms. In this context, a poignant and longstanding sense of backwardness in many areas of the insular Pacific arguably provides a cultural bellwether of increasingly widespread perceptions and reactions elsewhere. Among the Gebusi of Papua New Guinea prolonged economic downturn under conditions of marginality and remoteness has thrown people back on their own material and cultural resources. Despite a general absence of cash economy, monetisation or fiscalisation of 'work' increasingly orchestrates social relations. So, too, in the absence of government presence, police, or courts, mechanisms of dispute mediation have become locally developed and effectively elaborated, including through rhetorics of monetary compensation that were previously undeveloped in indigenous contexts of person‐for‐person exchange both in marriage and in death. In selected ways, reactive modernity among Gebusi has features that seem salutary—evoking an 'anthropology of the good'—despite and even because of Gebusi's politicoeconomic marginality. Drawing on work by Ortner, Robbins, and others, the larger relevance of this development reframes the relevance of Dark Anthropology and an Anthropology of the Good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western ideologies of imperialism conceptualise time as heterogeneous in that they assume that colonised lands are outside of historical time. In this respect, the discursive construction of an empty frontier has been crucial to colonial dispossession. Yet colonial discourses become dominant through their circulation, and so the savage spaces they imagine take on a life of their own when they are revoiced. Papuan Times, a newspaper published by graduates of an industrial mission school at Kwato Island in the colonial Territory of Papua and New Guinea after the Second World War, produces subaltern agency in its reports on the pacification of the Highlands. While its news articles reproduce the heterogeneous chronotope of colonial discourse, articles describing the missionary work of former Kwato students in the Highlands reimagine the Highlands frontier as a horizon of social transformation. The Papuan Times strategy reflects the fact that a community's pursuit of the good exists in relation to others which constrain it, and, more generally, that an anthropology of the good is also an anthropology which recognises the fraught coexistence of a plurality of values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I consider why individuals sacrifice their lives for the collective. In the Porgera Valley of highlands Papua New Guinea, young men who are called 'Rambos' engage in sustained tribal conflicts due to increasing social inequalities in an area that is supposedly benefiting from socioeconomic development. The opening of the Porgera Gold Mine in 1990 ushered in an era of anticipated benefits that were hoped to transform the lives of the region's subsistence horticulturalists. Yet, anticipated flows of mining money and social benefits have largely failed to materialise. The abjection experienced by young men eventuated into a series of tribal fights, resulting in deaths, displacements, and the destruction of most infrastructure. I examine the fighting and its aftermath in relation to anthropologies of the dark and the good and argue that these polar opposites can hinder more subtle understandings of value plurality among Porgerans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Dark Anthropology' and its complementary 'Anthropology of the Good' have become influential and debated notions in anthropology in recent years. I here parse distinctive features of these emphases, address their relation to theory and to ethnography, and consider the stakes involved in concretely applying their conceptual designations. I discuss the general shift in anthropology from grand theory to key concept, and the topical delimitation of theory that results. In larger purview, Dark Anthropology and the Anthropology of the Good both have long theoretical genealogies as well as practical contexts of political and social understanding, including vis‐à‐vis recent events in the U.S. and elsewhere. I suggest that considering the relationship between politico‐economically structured inequality and attempts to assert positive meaning and purpose is the most productive way to ethnographically apply their alternative conceptualisations. This brings to greater focus the thorny question of whose understanding of inequality or suffering, or of moral value and positive wellbeing, is being articulated—the sentiments of the people studied, or the concepts of the analyst? It seems vital to examine both analytic and indigenous views of dark times, and of the good, to refine our understanding of both, that is, in order to consider our complementary conceptualisations in relation to both sides of the emic/etic coin. This refines our understanding of local sensibilities and also of the appropriate limit points of our own conceptual associations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From a procedural perspective, and as indicated above, native title claims are conducted in an adversarial, multi-party litigation context where many of those respondent parties, some trenchantly, oppose the connection of native title claimants. Those respondent parties do not bear the burden of proving connection but they have the right to test the claimants' assertions; and they do frequently, noting that their inconsistent rights and interests will always be favoured (see Wik). A paradigm shift is necessary because we currently have 394 native title determinations, many of which are non-exclusive native title rights and interests, which by definition means coexistence. [Extracted from the article]

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was adopted by the United Nations ( UN) General Assembly in 2007 and endorsed by the Australian Labor government two years later. This achievement is an essential element in the global politics of Indigenous recognition and includes unique rights, such as the right to a cultural collectivity and Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property, while reinforcing the right to self-determination. Yet this new Indigenous rights regime is both underpinned and constrained by the UN human rights system, the implications of which include constraint within a secular neo-imperialist liberal paradigm. However, this human rights paradigm can also offer generative potential to challenge existing relations of power. According to Kymlicka, the UN's system of human rights has, after all, been 'one of the great moral achievements of the twentieth century'. How can these tensions between the aspirations to universal secularism and the right to culture, for instance, be accommodated within the Indigenous human rights discourse? And how does this new international legal and norm-setting instrument speak to the glaring disjunct between declaration of rights and social fact in central Australia, the focus of this research? The move toward an anthropology of human rights looks squarely at this conundrum and attempts to locate spaces of continuity and co-option or, conversely, subversion and rejection as local cultures of human rights are articulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a digital divide remains evident in many remote Indigenous Australian communities, individual and collective information and communication technologies practices have developed in accordance with broadband, satellite or WiFi availability. This article examines the ways in which Indigenous youth in remote Australia are 'coming of age' in contexts where digitally-mediated social interaction is a taken-for-granted aspect of social practice, communication and learning. While there are many positive aspects to this rapid development, it can also lead to intergenerational tensions as young people explore new patterns of behaviour, and older people come to terms with new cultural challenges. Drawing on long-term ethnographic observations in Central Australia, the impact of technology and the shift in perceptions, communication modes, and social and cultural practice across the generations in the Western Desert region are traced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many Australian practitioners of alternative spiritualities, 'nature' and the non-human environment are alive with significance: they embody a universal divine 'spirit' that is both independent of, and continuous with, individual subjects. Particular locations within nature also have special value as a font of powerful personal feelings and as a kind of natural resource of spiritual energy. Moreover, the effect of specifically Australian landscapes is frequently understood by reference to a place's Aboriginal history or 'spirit', with recognition of such places both celebrating and laying claim to the land. However, having a feeling for land is not straightforward. Although Aboriginal people often served as a synonym for the land itself and thus were considered intrinsic to much of the land's spiritual and personal value, their prior claims to its ownership also sometimes upset non-Aboriginal feelings of love for the land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary cultural anthropology has been marked by its distance from the analysis of economy. I argue that anthropology as a discipline has suffered from this distance and suggest a form in which these interests can be reconciled for the purposes of ethnographic research. The discussion is divided into three sections. In the first, I trace the 'disappearing' of economy from cultural anthropology. In the second, I propose a schema for bringing economy back. This schema involves adopting a phenomenology of the subject that relies on notions of value drawn from Appadurai and from Heidegger and Marx. Finally, I instance two examples of this schema in my own ethnographic research. One concerns Central Australia and pertains to recent debates about remote indigenous life. The other concerns Kingston Jamaica and references debates about gender, sex and dancehall. Both milieux involve types of change and violence that can bear on modern subjects. My suggestion is that anthropology will address these issues in more interesting ways if economy becomes a part of ethnographic analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The removal of objects from indigenous communities to private ownership, and sometimes to museums was clearly a one-way path, with little consideration given to the effects of this displacement. After all, collection-making was a serious enterprise and collections, as mutable sites, were pivotal in materialising compelling colonial discourses in Aotearoa New Zealand during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Recently, however, museums have engaged in negotiating the passage of object information back to their original communities. In an investigation of two individual taonga from the Mair collection, and in recasting tribal perspectives, surprising networks of interrelations are untangled, which reveal that ancestor agency materialised object-people commitments that continue to be especially poignant for contemporary descendants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spanish and American colonisers ascribed the identity 'Igorot' to the peoples of the northern Philippine mountains, positioning them in the 'tribal slot', somewhere between ordinary peasants and 'backward' primitives. From this marginal position, contemporary Igorot communities have been comparatively successful in formalising their entitlements to land and resources in their dealings with the Philippine State. This success depends on a discourse tying indigenous or 'tribal' culture to particular places. Colonial and, now, local anthropology has been recruited to this process through the mapping of community boundaries, This has allowed groups to secure official status as 'cultural communities' and gain legal recognition of their ancestral domains, ironically, even as ancestral domains are recognised, the municipalities that hold such domains have ceased to be bounded containers for Igorot localities, if they ever were. Participation in global indigenous networks, circular migration, and ongoing relations with emigrants overseas blur the spatial, temporal, and social boundaries of Igorot communities. Transnational flows of people, information, and value are recruited to support the essentialised versions of indigenous identity necessary for negotiations with the state. Here, I show how the specific history of the Igorot 'tribal slot' enables communities to perform essentialised indigeneity and simultaneously enact highly translocal modes of cultural reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The book-review article discusses "Why Warriors Lie Down and Die: Towards an Understanding of Why the Aboriginal People of Arnhem Land Face the Greatest Crisis in Health and Education Since European Contact: Djambatj Mala, " by Richard Trudgen. Topics include Trudgen's popularity and analysis of the indigenous communities and how the book was promoted.