Going Native in the Bureaucracy
Tess Lea, Charles Darwin University
The paper draws from sustained fieldwork in a range of policy domains in the north of Australia. It concerns the conduct of ethnography among predominantly white, left-liberal ‘progressives’ who spend their working lives trying to amend the world for the betterment of Indigenous people. The sites vary: my work draws from the time with educators worrying about inequalities in school outcomes; from work with engineers and architects redesigning public housing and amenity in Aboriginal households; through to the worlds of public health, where the gaps in Indigenous life expectancy and the horrendous burden of chronic disease focus the long hours of concerned professionals. It concerns the experiential dimensions of being a helping white, and the ways this has forced me to confront the meanings of the claim: I have met the state, and she is me. One consequence of borrowing from the field one lives in is that notions of work-not work are more difficult to sustain. Moreover, in a post-colonial setting where the work of welfare bureaucracies is the ‘development’ and capacity building of the Indigenous population, subalternity is no longer the clear moral point for realigning one’s theoretical object. When the state is no longer outside one’s self but is the self, when the task is not to be a spy but to comprehend the cultural creation of policy around and within, who does the anthropologist champion? Or does the question reveal its redundancy in the asking? Arguing for the importance of ethnographic work from within bureaucratic and institutional spaces, this paper suggests that the bad faith of anthropology when it comes to studying its own cultural forms borrows from and mirrors the cultural habits of institutional fields in unexpected ways.
