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  3. Sessions

Session Themes

Session 1: 09:00 – 10:30
The limits of and on anthropological practice

Jeremy Maling and Alexandra Lyneham - Challenging the limits in heritage anthropology
Western Australia (WA) is experiencing unrelenting pressure to exploit land for non-indigenous interests which impacts detrimentally on Indigenous people and their sites of significance
Anthropological practice undertaken for the Aboriginal Heritage Industry in WA is tightly constrained by the legislative and institutional structures and procedures related to Aboriginal Heritage, and further limited by predetermined terms of reference defined by the ‘client.’ The structures dictate that the Anthropology undertaken is of the Aboriginal people (downwards) with little or no provision for anthropology to be undertaken, let alone written about those structures above. The views and interests of the Indigenous people involved are thereby subjectified and marginalised with little real opportunity for effective input in the decision making process. The entire political context needs to be subject to anthropological scrutiny and analysis if the Anthropology undertaken during the heritage process is to achieve meaningful and positive outcomes for Indigenous people and not just serve the procedural requirements of ‘clients’.
The presentation will draw on our experiences of undertaking anthropological fieldwork in the Pilbara region of WA.

Sarah Holcombe (CAEPR, ANU) - The limits of anthropologists as agents for change

This paper reflects on the role of research and the boundaries to researchers acting as change agents. Research is fundamentally concerned with constructing a credible and authoritative knowledge base about an issue. However, when working with a marginalised group is this enough? By exploring what has happened to the knowledge produced in the context of a governance project with the Anmatjere Community Government Council about a fringe camp within the Ti Tree township (NT), the tensions between advocacy and impartiality are explored. This fringe camp is without any basic servicing, although there has been an ongoing Aboriginal population there since settlement of the town from the late 1880s.  The conundrum raised by this research project was that although we found pathways to change, in our discussions with government, our suggestions were not taken up by the Anmatjere Council. Considering why this was the case leads to an examination of power relationships between Aboriginal people and the State, as mediated through the Council. Thus, the challenges of operating within this environment suggest that “making a difference” is constrained by the limits to collaboration and the partial knowledges developed, and the deeper local constraining history of colonialism.   

Panel presentation: David Trigger, Lee Sackett and Wendy Asche

Anthropology & Aboriginal land issues: strategies for future engagements

This panel will raise issues including:

Three short presentations will be made by followed by discussion.

 

Session 2: 11:00 – 12:30
“Making a difference” – intentions and effects

Sally Babidge (University of Queensland) - Writing ‘true history’: local remembering and recognition

This paper reflects on a collaborative project informed by ethnographic methodology, which culminated in a local history book: ‘Written true, not gammon: A history of Aboriginal Charters Towers’. Two Aboriginal elder women and I stated the purpose for our project as ‘recognition for the history of Aboriginal people in and around Charters Towers’. Many local people who were involved recounted events and stories to us in ways that sought recognition of Indigenous selves and society in terms of cultural difference. Other contributions included in the text might better be understood as instances of recall, of personal or family memories ‘popping up’, during conversations or in response to various research props (e.g. photographs). Overall the text seeks to represent a diversity of Aboriginal lived experience, from that which is particular and personal, to performed narratives of shared and ‘cultural’ history.
On the basis of these memories as well as archival research, the book title heralds our objective for a kind of textual restitution for the structural violence of being erased, or at best tokenised, in the many other local histories of the town. In addition, there is an underlying narrative about the socio-historical basis of racism, divisiveness and social inequalities that pervade this and many other Australian rural towns. But do such textual representations result in better cross-cultural understandings; in ‘recognition’? I examine our methods in collaboration and some initial responses to the book.

Emma Kowal (University of Melbourne) -The meaning of ‘Making a difference’: an ethnography of white antiracism

Applied anthropologists are motivated by the chance of helping the Indigenous people they work with. This paper takes us beyond the debate as to whether anthropologists should or should not try to help Indigenous people, and instead invites us to understand instrumentality itself. What does it mean for twenty-first century anthropologists to want to ‘make a difference’ to Indigenous lives?
The desire of progressive white people to further social justice and reduce disadvantage is a general feature of late modernity which takes specific forms in settler-colonial nations. Anthropologies of development have provided important insights, however this paper reports on the first ethnographic study of white antiracism in a developed country. The study centred on white, middle-class, left-wing professionals (some of which were anthropologists) engaged in the task of improving the health of Indigenous people in northern Australia. It explores the political and affective landscapes that create the subjectivity of the white antiracist, and the knowledge system that they share, which is called postcolonial logic. I argue that postcolonial logic is based on remediable difference, a difference that is amenable to improvement. This central concept is threatened by the possibility of radical difference. Once the fragile construction of remediable difference comes undone, the underlying dilemmas of the postcolony are revealed to white antiracists, who must then learn to live without the ethical certainty that postcolonial logic provided. The paper explores the implications of this research for applied anthropology, and encourages reflection on the project of postcolonial justice at this current dramatic moment in Indigenous affairs.

Panel presentation: Christine Royan (Project Officer); Margarita Escartin (Lawyer); Averil Ginn and Mark Winters (Anthropologists), Gurang Land Council, Qld
Addressing Disadvantage: Mediation from the ‘Inside’ - Team Based, ‘Pathway’ Approaches to Mediation in Native Title Conflicts
Over the past ten years in the settled areas of Central Queensland the native title landscape has been characterised by overlapping claims and conflicts which have been subject to court ordered mediation.  The usual approach to mediation is to engage ‘outside’ specialist mediators with no knowledge of the particulars of the claim and whose methodology is grounded in broad formulaic concepts of conflict resolution. We took the approach that the conflicts arose out of misinformation and lack of information and to address these issues we put together a multi-disciplinary team of two anthropologists, a project officer and a lawyer and included the claimants as co-producers of this team based Native Title Pathways’ approach.
Our intention, as a multi-disciplinary team of specialists ‘inside’ the native title process, was to impart specific professional knowledge within the context of the particular claim we were working on. This we were able to do in series of workshops leading up to a re-authorisation meeting. The meetings covered in detail the following areas: native title and Aboriginal identity; native title as a legal process; research and the role of anthropologists; the authorisation process, the role of the Applicant and code of conduct.
This presentation argues that anthropologists can make a difference and that in native title claims this is best achieved through a co-operative approach with other professionals and with claimants themselves as co-producers.

Session 3: 13:30 – 15:00
Communicating anthropology

Helen Wilmot and Rebecca Koser (Central Land Council) - Applied Anthropology and Contemporary Arrernte Perceptions of Connection to Country
For decades anthropologists working in the Northern Territory have prepared written materials that form evidence in Land Claim and Native Title proceedings. Increasingly, traditional owners and native title holders are aware of the significance attached to anthropological materials created during the claims processes. 
Our paper discusses the trend, among Arrernte people in Central Australia, to ‘prove’ their connection to land with reference to written materials; and the ways in which these demonstrations of ‘proof’ arise. As anthropologists working for CLC, we frequently find ourselves managing disputes over competing claims that purport to be ‘proved’ with reference to anthropological materials, including genealogies and /or signed certificates of title. Names, lists and signatures – and other written records generated at “meetings” – maybe seen as forms of objectified, quasi-traditional authority. This paper asks: what are the appropriate conditions under which anthropological materials are provided to Arrernte landowners? What are the current social and political implications of reifying this documentation among Arrernte communities? 

Communication Soapbox

John Morton, Julie Finlayson; Kati Ferro, Jennifer Deger, David Martin
Most anthropologists working in Indigenous Australia do so outside universities, in contexts where the specialist technical languages, theoretical paradigms, and communication styles appropriate to academe may be potentially opaque and even alienating. This session aims to explore questions concerning who are, or might be, anthropology’s audiences and the challenges faced in communicating with them.
This part of Session 3 comprises a small number of short (3-5 minutes), pithy and challenging presentations by anthropologists who have worked in diverse areas – e.g. the academy, government, private enterprise, and as consultants.

Session 4: 15:30 – 17:00

Can anthropology speak to the Indigenous condition? In what contexts? And to whom?

Tiffany McComsey (University of Manchester)
‘I am not here to ‘solve’ ‘problems’’: examining re-development practices in Redfern and Waterloo
‘If you really want to get to know the community then you need to spend time in it, do some volunteer work.’
‘So is it ok if I come in tomorrow, say in the morning, 9ish?’
‘Yeah, that’s fine we’ll be here.’
‘We never thought you would really stick around. You came one day and never left! So many students say they want to volunteer and start but then just don’t come back, you never see them again.’
The experience of being a ‘volunteer’ in the community – including work in organisations, help at events, and support in children and youth activities – were ways in which I became involved in the community. These experiences were, to varying degrees, interconnected in the discourses and practices surrounding the re-development of Redfern and Waterloo, and specifically the redevelopment as it related to the ‘Aboriginal Community.’ The constant circulation of ‘what do we have here’, ‘what is the problem’ ‘what can be done’ and ‘what is the future’ defined a level of social interaction which intermingled with an other ‘reality’, where time, space being and meaning worked differently. This paper will work around the notion of volunteering during fieldwork – in order to give back to the community while it shares with you what it wants – and how re-development practices in terms of social being creates a hidden voice repeatedly asking ‘how can you solve this problem?’

Nic Peterson (ANU) - Other people’s lives: cultural transitions and moral dilemmas

The question I will address here is whether anthropologists have anything to contribute to policy directed at helping Aboriginal people improve their circumstances, and if so whether there are limitations on the nature of their contribution.  This is, of course, a very different question from whether anthropology as a discipline has any useful and distinctive insights into the present situation, its origins and regional variation. I will contrast the positions of anthropologists with rightward leanings versus those with leftwards leanings to explore the moral dilemmas posed for both by when speaking to the improvement of the Indigenous condition and how these vary with the audience they are addressing.

Anthony Redmond (VRF, CAEPR) - “Sex, shame and violence: anthropological understanding and the sexual abuse issue in the Kimberley and beyond”.
The federal government’s recent military interventions in indigenous communities in northern Australia have been publicly rationalized as stemming from the government’s duty of care to protect children and women from abusive indigenous adult men. The public responses from many professionals working in the field have mostly been confined to a real politik critique of the military intervention as “land-grab” and the related issue of chronic under-funding of indigenous community infrastructure.  The rare appearances of genuine anthropological knowledge in the public debates surrounding this issue have been mostly second-hand references from public intellectuals such as Robert Manne (2007) and Noel Pearson ( 2006,2007 ) and the playwright, Louis Nowra (2005). A few years ago, Roy Wagner (2001) suggested that anthropologists are constantly “playing chicken with the culture concept”, and anthropology’s culturally relativising methodology has never been quite so tentatively applied as to this fraught issue. In this paper I venture beyond a liberal-economic critique of the sexual abuse furore by drawing together some contemporary indigenous interpretations of the intervention with some of the existing ethnography on sexuality and violence in Aboriginal Australia.