Introduction: Culture Without Cultures: The Culture Effect

Patrick Sullivan                                                                                                           

253-264

Anthropology has often been handmaiden to administrative and political activity that requires bounded social groups mapped onto territories and possessing defining characteristics such as language, values and behaviours. This introductory essay sets the scene for the papers in this Issue which show that actual sets of social relations in their particular places cannot easily be made to conform with this hermetic construct. Acknowledging this, post-colonial theory has been driven to theorise borderlands, hybridisation and metissage, liminal and interstitial social spaces. Yet these necessarily reinforce and privilege primary concepts of the pure and the central, the bounded and situated. This paper places the hermetic view of culture in its formative period, which also saw the emergence of nationalism and scientific atomism. The paper proposes that positing pure and bounded cultures, even as an idealised abstraction, is an error of theory which is influenced by an attachment to metaphors of the material world, usually ‘Euclidean’. Finally, the paper explores ways that analyses of cultural interrelation, such as those in this Special Issue, can proceed without imagining a resulting ‘culture’, and what this may do for the political landscape of localised cultural rights.

Australian Indigenous Studies: A Question of Discipline

Martin Nakata

265-275

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.

The Walls Came Tumbling Up: The Production of Culture, Class and Native American Societies

Gerald Sider                                                                                                                 

276-290

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.

Rethinking Indigenous Place: Igorot Identity and Locality in the Philippines

Deirdre McKay                                                                                                            

291-306

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.

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

Marcia Langton, Odette Mazel and Lisa Palmer                                                        

307-321

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.

Nations and Tribes ‘Within’: Emerging Aboriginal Nationalisms in Katherine

Toni Bauman                                                                                                               

322-335

 Throughout Australia, many Aboriginal responses to the legislative and administrative pressures of the native title regime have been couched in a nation-building idiom expressed through legally incorporated Aboriginal associations. The membership criteria of these umbrella associations are often derived from definitions of the ‘tribe’ or ‘language group’. Yet, in a kind of Balkanisation, those who see themselves as marginalised to positions of uncertainty on the peripheries of the nation often seek to establish their own independent corporations on the basis of exclusive ties to specific areas of land within it, in search of greater recognition and in competition for scarce resources. In Katherine, in the Northern Territory of Australia, the administrative and legislative gaze of the State, particularly the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, brought into focus a Jawoyn ‘tribe’, soon to express itself in the idiom of nationhood, closely followed by a Wardaman ‘tribe’ and ‘nation’. More recently, a native title gaze has now brought into focus ‘new’ configurations of kindred clusters, apparently located on the ‘peripheries’ of the Jawoyn and Wardaman nations, and named and valued them as Dagoman. This paper discusses the processes associated with an emerging, but seemingly already fragmenting, Dagoman nation. It argues that divergent and changing Aboriginal subjectivities disrupt what might be seen as mimetic processes as Aboriginal people employ strategies of transforming essentialist representations of their collective selves in changing conditions of possibility.

The Reconstitution of Aboriginal Sociality Through the Identification
of Traditional Owners in New South Wales

Simon Correy                                                                                                             

336-347

This paper argues that native title determination applications, facilitated by the Commonwealth Native Title Act 1993, constitute a modern social phenomenon. A characteristic of these applications is that they contain processes associated with demonstrating traditional modes of land ownership, which compel claimants to engage in critically reflexive projects that contain the potential to problematise fundamental dimensions of their intersubjective-accord, including the very concept of indigenous relatedness. With particular reference to situations in New South Wales, this paper suggests that the identification of traditional owners and the definition of claimant groups actively contribute to the reconstitution of contemporary Aboriginal sociality. In this process, ideas of relatedness are converted into ideas of descent and concomitantly notions of kinship, personhood and identity are reconstructed. Early anthropological research regarding descent, kinship and the relevance of groups to descriptions of society has alerted us to some of the problems highlighted in this paper, but they appear to have been largely forgotten in native title processes.

Obituary: Robyn Wood, 1941-2006
Michael Allen                                                                                                             

348-349

Obituary: Malcolm Crick, 1948-2006
Roy Hay and George Silberbauer                                                                              

350-352

Obituary: Kay O’Connor, 1938-2006
Sandy Toussaint                                                                                                          

353-354

Letterbox
Elizabeth Wood-Ellem                                                                                                      

355

Book Reviews

Alan Barnard (ed.) Hunter-Gatherers in History, Archaeology and Anthropology. [Christer Norström]      

356

Jeremy Beckett A Study of Aborigines in the Pastoral West of New South Wales: 1958 MA Thesis with New Introduction and Preface. [Raymond Nichol]                       

357

Roy Ellen On the Edge of the Banda Zone. Past and Present in the Social Organization of a Moluccan Trading Network. [Phillip Winn]                               

359

Thomas Gibson And the Sun Pursued the Moon: Symbolic Knowledge and Traditional Authority among the Makassar. [David Bulbeck]                                      

361

Michael Goddard The Unseen City: Anthropological Perspectives on Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. [Deborah Gewertz]                                                   

362

Lynne Hume and Jane Mulcock (eds) Anthropologists in the Field: Cases in Participant Observation. [Jennifer Deger]          

364

Bruce Rigsby and Nicolas Peterson (eds) Donald Thomson: The Man and Scholar. [Lee Sackett]                                                    

366

Joel Robbins Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. [Andrew Lattas]                                                                   

367

Rowena Robinson Christians of India. [William H. Newell]                                                                          

370

Gerald Sider Living Indian Histories: Lumbee and Tuscarora People in North Carolina. [Barry Morris]                                                                                          

371

Monique Skidmore Karaoke Fascism: Burma and the Politics of Fear.[Helen James]                                   

373

Jenny B. White Money Makes Us Relatives: Women’s Labor in Urban Turkey. [Julie Marcus]                

374

Katharine L. Wiegele Investing in Miracles: El Shaddai and the Transformation of Popular Catholicism in the Philippines.[Michael Allen]                                                           

376