What Does it Mean to be ‘Aboriginal’ in Southwestern Sydney?: Urban Aboriginal Experience of Community and Identity Negotiation
Yuriko Yamanouchi, Anthropology, University of Sydney
In this paper, I would like to discuss the entangled relationship between the people’s experience of ‘community’ and identity through the case of Aboriginal people in southwestern Sydney. The idea of community and identity have almost always been associated with each other, especially after the shift of the argument of community to symbolism. However, the relationship between these two concepts has not been thoroughly discussed. In southwestern Sydney, the sense of community is entangled with the complicated processes of identity negotiation. In this low socio-economic working class suburb, where people are residentially dispersed in ethnic terms, I have encountered a lot of confusion and frequent argument about ‘Aboriginality’. There are various flexible and dynamic relationships between Aboriginal people themselves and also with non-Aboriginal people. There are various ways people refer to ‘community’, contingent on the context. In southwestern Sydney, in addition to people born and raised in all-Aboriginal communities of rural Australia, there are many of those who have only recently identified as Aboriginal people. Here, various ways of ‘being Aboriginal’ are jostling. Aboriginal organizations and events are ‘sites’ in which these contestations and affirmations are played out.
