Double Binds

Introduction

Double Binds GILLIAN COWLISHAW, EMMA KOWAL AND TESS LEA

The downfall of Aboriginal people occurred 30 to 40 years ago… Welfare is a sacred cow. We can’t tell people how to spend their income supports. But we should (Pearson 2005). I smelt the unmistakable smell of petrol fumes wafting across. Now I wanted to help that boy. I thought about getting up and going over to him to take away the can of petrol. But no one—not me, not the white lawyers, not the police, or the Aboriginal men did anything. Of course it’s not illegal for him to do what he did. Indeed I would have committed an offence myself if I had walked over to take the can away. It’s been suggested that I was distressed. I wasn’t distressed but I was angry at myself at my impotence to stop what was going on (Northern Territory Coroner Greg Cavanagh commenting on his decision to stop court proceedings because of the presence of a boy sniffing petrol).1

The opening years of the twenty-first century have seen profound shifts in the discourse of Indigenous affairs. Ideas that would once only have been heard in the public arena from the mouths of white conservative politicians are now being produced by prominent Indigenous leaders. When an Indigenous elder calls for the welfare payments of remote community members living in the Darwin ‘long grass’ to be cut, it is not analytically adequate to dismiss this as some kind of false consciousness, even if we might cringe at the alacrity with which such opinions are gleefully reported (Dyer 2005). Critiques of a range of policies, from income support to child protection, to education, to customary law and human rights have emerged, questioning the orthodoxies of the self-determination era, and the left-liberal discourses that have dominated at least the language of Indigenous affairs since the late 1960s. It is too easy to attribute this discursive change to a prolonged era of conservative federal government. Alternatively, it could be argued that we are at the end of another cycle of Indigenous policy.2 Such diagnoses tend to obviate

our responsibility to analyse the history that has brought us to this point, in particular, the perceived failures of ‘progressivism’. The opening quotes express frustration at the double bind of ‘self-determination’: the tension between the need to maximise personal autonomy and the impetus to control destructive behaviours, which appear to have flourished in some Indigenous communities in the last thirty years (Sutton 2001). Paradigm change is a crucial time for anthropological analysis. However, this is often a politically hazardous exercise, containing a double bind of its own. Critical thinking must be able to engage with ideas that are currently unpopular with the academy, though in doing so one risks being labelled as right wing or theoretically naive and promptly dismissed. But it is precisely this liminal moment of paradigm shift, before the ‘self-determination’ era comes to be firmly understood and dismissed as perhaps well-meaning but ultimately destructive (just like the assimilation and protection eras), that critiques may have an impact by changing the way we think about a familiar problem. With Noel Pearson and others challenging left-wing or progressive orthodoxies, the least we can do is respond with a willingness to examine the conditions which are seen as so corrupting, and to analyse the conceptual basis of our own progressivism (Pearson 2001). This collection of essays reaches for new insights, initially by redirecting our ethnographic attention from a separable Indigenous realm where culture is the operant term, to arenas of interaction and change, where culture inflects everything. It began as a conference session entitled ‘Moved Interveners and Moving Indigenes’, which led to a movement away from some old formulations toward what we are terming critical Indigenous studies. All our aspirations for this volume cannot possibly be realised, and its limits will be confessed below. But first, let us indulge our desires by spelling out some ambitions for a critical Indigenous studies agenda. This outline is deliberately polemical in order to make the distinctive elements of our approach particularly clear.3 Critical Indigenous studies is characterised foremost by the recognition of relationality. The traditional approach of an anthropology that studies Indigenous people in isolation is no longer tenable for a number of reasons. Indigeneity and non-Indigeneity are products of each other and the conditions of life of each ‘group’, or socially reinvented category, can only be understood in relation to the other (Gupta & Ferguson 1997). Critical Indigenous studies aims at an analysis that is distanced from remedialism and from the pathologies of binarism. Both of these are habits of thought entailing moral and political positions that are deeply entrenched in the discourses surrounding Indigenous issues. The chapters in this collection vary in theme and theory, but all attempt to disrupt existing discourses of the Indigenous arena. In a somewhat accidental alignment of critical thinkers, we find various articulations of problems in the social sciences concerned with Indigenous issues. The significance of the shared dissatisfaction is illustrated in 2

GILLIAN COWLISHAW, EMMA KOWAL AND TESS LEA

Australian Aboriginal anthropology, which we see as often mired in a desire to act as a broker or mediator between the concerned national community and marginal, culturally distinct populations. It has thus come to play a somewhat toothless advocacy role.4 There is a public perception that this is anthropology’s function, which is one reason for the discipline’s very restricted purview in this country. We do not claim that the authors writing here are the only critical thinkers around; but it is a sad fact that innovative and creative work does not determine how anthropology is institutionally organised in the academy, nor how it is externally understood in the media and by Indigenous scholars who appear quite uninterested in the nuances of anthropological conference debates (see Moreton-Robinson, this volume). Perhaps it is also because many hard-working anthropologists have been trying to make native title mean something, while they bemoan governments and legal processes which have so diminished it, that the discipline has been less attentive to the shifting social conditions in which native title is being played out (c.f. Edmond 2004). In adopting a critical perspective, we depart from two common positions, the alleged malfunctioning of Indigenous communities and the past and present failings of colonial and neo-colonial governance. The chapters are situated within a wider debate in Australia that has emerged since the established assumptions behind thirty years of policies and practices have come under scrutiny. Savage critiques of the policies of self-determination are increasingly voiced, and alarmed voices from the left respond defensively. The left’s dismissal of current policy shifts as simply ‘right-wing’ represents an inadequate analysis of a changing political environment. Old ‘left/right’ political implications can no longer be simply read off particular expressions and ideas, positions or identities (McKnight 2005). Nor can political positions be read off racial identities.5 What is right and wrong, as well as what is right and left, are not so comfortably asserted these days, and radical rethinking is required to make sense of contemporary events and of current debates.6 Take the formerly powerful term ‘assimilation’, once a remediation or betterment so widely approved that governments of all political persuasions were forthright in asserting their assimilative aims that were, in part, the result of Indigenous lobbying for full inclusion in Australian society. Having promulgated forceful forms of assimilation, the policy attracted such opprobrium that the term now induces a habitual shudder. However, while the self-determination policy that succeeded it saw huge changes in the conditions of Indigenous communities, the inexorable process of assimilation has arguably not been reversed.7 It is now possible to see that the tide which swept us all into a condition of modernity and into ever more global processes is not a tide which Indigenous people want to avoid at all costs, even were that possible. It ill behoves outsiders to burden others with their own nostalgia for more stable cultural practices, more secure community life or for the warm embrace

DOUBLE BINDS

3

of family traditions, each of which is imagined to belong to the past. Dangerous though it may seem, it is important to recognise the many hints that Aboriginal men and women who gained a good education at missions or even at homes for stolen children, have a bittersweet appreciation of the advantages that skills in the modern world have bestowed on them. This observation underlines, rather than undermines, the tragedy of stolen children. The very idea of trying to weigh up the loss of family belonging and identity against the opportunity to operate successfully in the modern world is surely an example of Sophie’s choice. Why did Indigenous people have to pay such a high price for institutionally conferred education? Our point is that progressivism’s formula of ‘assimilation = evil’ is inadequate for understanding contemporary Indigenous life. Recent reporting of the coroner’s hearing of petrol sniffing at Mutitjulu provides another case in point of the limits of progressivism. A white community development worker based at Mutitjulu was widely quoted as saying ‘What they’ve been doing probably for about the last thirty years is providing grant funding and then walking away’.8 The historical specificity in this observation leaves no doubt that the referent is ‘self-determination’. This community is materially rich: ‘Witnesses at the inquest have talked of huge sums of money at Mutitjulu wasted on grog, drugs and motor cars. About 20 per cent of the gate fees at Uluru National Park goes back to traditional owners in royalties’.9 And it could be seen as culturally rich: the people live on country and speak their own languages. The self-determination era has seen them acquire ownership (albeit conditional) over one of the most recognisable icons on earth, Uluru, as well as land rights, a tourist income, a host of targeted government services and support for community structures. Despite this (or, some fear, because of it), social pathology flourishes. When self-determination is increasingly depicted as benign neglect, and alarm, even horror dawns about its destructive consequences, we see a paradigm shift underway. White supporters of self-determination are admitting that uncritical support for Indigenous people has characterised white left-wing politics for some time, and is now detrimental to clear debate (Land & Vincent 2005).10 Rather than replace failed forms of remediation with new ones, critical Indigenous studies is prepared to disengage from the endless cycle of anxiously diagnosing problems in the abstract and to reflect both on the terms of analysis and on some material conditions which are not so easily diagnosed. Let us admit that Aboriginal people do present problems for a white Australia that must maintain its hegemony while trying to overcome a moral embarrassment and a sense of shame about the past (Povinelli 2002). The problems that white Australians present for Aboriginal people are now readily admitted, but in a generalised way which tells us little of the why and how in the present.

4

GILLIAN COWLISHAW, EMMA KOWAL AND TESS LEA

Remedialism

With increasing interest in notions of relationality or the ‘intercultural’ as a means to understand contemporary race relations, calls have been made for more nuanced analyses of the white domain (Hinkson & Smith 2005; Kowal & Paradies 2005). We offer ‘remedialism’ as a key concept in understanding the dominant official stance towards Indigenous people. The material we provide here is intended to challenge knowledge and ways of thinking that pervade the public sphere. That is, we want to deal with political epistemology, the sources of knowledge on which both the general public, the public servants and the politicians rely in order to pronounce on questions of Indigenous governance. We see the dominant form of public discourse concerning Indigenous people over the last thirty years as a form of liberal multiculturalism that seeks to extend all the advantages of our society to Indigenous people, without harming their cultural distinctiveness, through carefully composed and directed interventions.11 This liberalism is characterised by the ever burgeoning desire to fix things up, based on the unqualified conviction that it is possible and necessary for the more knowing and better equipped ‘us’ to do so. Here we are naming a very deeply held faith that everything in the social world is available for remediation. If this characteristic conviction is a central feature of modern liberal culture, then it requires the same kind of analysis that we anthropologists habitually offer in relation to Aboriginal beliefs—for instance totemism or kinship. Notions of betterment, deeply imbued with a particular morality, also invade anthropology, so that an unadmitted subtext is often ‘what should be done about the Aboriginal people whose culture is our business’. But, as declared above, in our critique of remedialism we do not offer remediation. The flaws of liberal sentiment and action are not identified in order to usher in a more authentic liberalism waiting in the wings. Rather, by playing with the theme of movement, we identify some techniques of liberal governance, from the role of cars in Indigenous relations with the state, to the construction of itinerancy and mobility, to the urge to relocate Indigenous sacred objects, rewrite and purify our history and practice what is ‘culturally appropriate’ in health, education, musical expression and other spheres. The attempt to analyse the cultural domain of governance, such as the liberal convictions just described, replaces the old habit of speaking of ‘the state’ as a given entity, to be contrasted with a ‘grass roots’ authenticity. The ‘state’ is not a looming fortress, irreducible and unanswerable. We humanise it, loosening its constituent stones from the concept of a rampart, and look to the way the state moves freely, embodied within all our practices. The state is also a mirage, appearing like an ample pool at which to slake our thirst for explanation. It evaporates with proximity to be replaced by the familiar lives of people we know, including our colleagues and our very selves.

DOUBLE BINDS

5

An example of the way the ethnographer can perceive and analyse the pitfalls of liberal sentiment, is the decoding of the practice of ‘culturally appropriate’. Several authors here interrogate the sympathetic, enlightened, progressive idea that institutions should be ‘culturally appropriate’ (see also Lea 2005a). Speaking of schools, Noel Pearson has asserted that the idea of ‘culturally appropriate’ has become an alibi, signalling the absence of good professional practice (Pearson 2004). Note the term alibi. There is no ‘excuse’ for poor practice, but there is an ‘alibi’. The professional persona and professional standards can be absent, elsewhere, replaced by gestures of deference to Indigenous authority, with the concerned bleeding heart kindly providing assistance, but not useful expertise, to the remnant social order.12

Binarisms Most of our authors address the realm of social dynamics that is sometimes called cross-, trans-, or inter-cultural, where people, who are thought of as either black or white and who occupy different positions inside the nation, rub together in their strange familiarity. But we do not believe that the correct concept (either cross-, trans- or inter-cultural, much less hybridity) will solve the problems we envisage, for they are not merely problems thrown up by faulty identity analysis. As the world changes, the defects and inadequacies of earlier understandings become starkly apparent to critical theorists. At the same time, quotidian and popular concepts are stubborn and continue to reproduce the social world in their own image. An example is the black/white, Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal binary, an enduring, crude, inadequate construct, yet one which is self-perpetuating because it aligns with powerful features of social and political experience. It refers both to categories of people, to subjective identities and to abstract conceptions, and in one form or another it is a pervasive way of thinking. Indigenous people have long argued that they are always-already seen as Indigenous first, regardless of their other roles and skills (Moreton-Robinson, this volume). When seen through the prism of remedialism, these categories are often glued to firm moral positions—white positions are suspected of exploitation and assimilation, Indigenous positions are assumed true and immune from critical analysis. However, this thorough racialisation of the contemporary world is not easily defused by calls for ‘hybridity’ or ‘planetary humanism’ (Bhabha 1994; Gilroy 2000). The ubiquitous reality and power of the black/white binary is evident when those who inadvertently or deliberately flout the categories have to continually explain themselves to one or another constituency. Rather than seeking new terminology and risk reinstating old moral and social categories, this volume considers some less familiar elements of the realm of black/white relations. The theme of movement covers a range of different phenomena; movement of people as an issue in governance and as a practice of those who govern, movement of things as signs of cultural shifts, movement of 6

GILLIAN COWLISHAW, EMMA KOWAL AND TESS LEA

ideas that create political challenges such as questions about what is good politics and progressive thought. We throw into the ring evidence about roads, music, medical discourse, travel, four-wheel-drives (4WDs), churingas, shame, profit and intimate slices of social life. These are not simply empirical descriptions of this or that condition or enumerations of social difficulties nor yet a mere exposure of the self-interest behind assertions of government goodwill. What several chapters offer instead are specific close-grained studies of relationships between Indigenous peoples and others where we allow the minutiae of ethnographic encounters to tell us something different from what we all already know to know. Our discursive register is the taken for granted shifting between institutional and unwalled spaces, treating different forms of artefact (maps, mining agreements, sacred objects) as worthy of anthropological treatment. ‘Race’ is the nexus of another set of ubiquitous and awkward terms. The impetus to challenge genetic determinism of what are, in fact, social divisions is a noble one, but to avoid using this terminology in favour of the conventional ‘ethnic relations’ or the problematic ‘intercultural’, supports the erasure of raced bodies from consideration. Raced bodies are salient, emotive yet unspoken phenomena that must be acknowledged. Our concern with the ethnographic particular provides a means to create an anthropology of social change that is racially aware. These aims are pursued, not through abstract theoretical critique but through close-grained empirical work and attention to the interpretation of specific events and circumstances.

Our style and our limits The collection is intended to mark a moment in Australian anthropology. Not all, but most of the authors are anthropologists—a discipline with a distinctive, experientially based, epistemology. And like anthropology itself, our ambitions reach in several directions, touching on psychology and philosophy, history and sociology, political science, cultural studies and human geography. We are striving towards a social analysis that includes attention to the subjectivities of social actors and common psychosocial dynamics across cultural gulfs, real and imagined. Reversing the old feminist maxim, we are looking at the political as personal. Thus, rather than simply rejecting the usual categories, we are exploring the way they work in our minds and our lives. There is much happening in the world that exceeds the boundaries of concepts such as ‘the state’, ‘the community’, ‘the bureaucracy’, ‘service delivery’, ‘remote communities’. The anthropological flavour in most of the essays supports the editors’ sense that anthropology offers the most profound and comprehensive way to analyse diverse fields of interaction within one general framing. What gives this collection its freshness and relevance is the direct engagement, ethnographic

DOUBLE BINDS

7

and otherwise, that the authors have in the situations they describe. In some cases, they study their own cultural arena. The bureaucratic tribe, the medical language, museum discourses and the academic realm, are subjected to the scrutiny of ‘native ethnographers’. There is a maverick quality here because authors are not driven by agendas laid down by the editors, not obeying the strictures of their disciplines and not dancing to the same drum beat. As well as anthropology, the contributors come from backgrounds as diverse as political science, medicine, phenomenology, women’s studies, native title work, music performance, science studies, museum curation and archaeology. Admittedly, our hope to model a new approach to understanding a particular kind of social relations is frustrated by our limitations. Our primary ambition is to provide fresh ways of thinking about some old problems, but, whilst being pioneers, we are also heirs, entangled in the habits of the past whilst talking about social and discursive processes that ensnare us all (cf. Olivier de Sardan 2005). Thus, in trying to head off a familiar interpretation we often find ourselves only halfway to where we were headed. In laying down some epistemological, political and professional challenges we are aware that our own epistemology frequently proves inadequate to the task. However, if this eclectic volume provides fertile ground from which new kinds of research and new lines of thought can spring, we will be content. This is an unfinished project.13 So which chapters address these concerns in what ways? The chapters are arranged to move from the more particular and personal engagement to the general and public domain. It is ironic that anthropology, where the primary methodology explores difference through a subjective involvement with others, is habitually coy about disclosing the relationships on which its knowledge is built. Presumably a hang-over from the scientism which sees some contradiction between personal involvement and authoritative knowledge; this erasure or denial of the personal is a profound silence within a body of knowledge that has been built on interpersonal experience, trust and intimacy. This is what Franca Tamisari (this volume) calls ‘the encounter’ which, she insists, is not between categories of persons representing some wider collectivity, whether racial, governmental or whatever, but between specific individuals. That is, to speak of relationships between white people and black, bureaucrats and Indigenous community members, anthropologists and Aborigines, is to undervalue the complex encounters between people with particular experiences and unique personalities. This is a profoundly unsettling idea for the social habit of ‘recognising’ others from the outside, and it begins to undermine the ‘category thinking’ that otherwise inflects this volume. Franca Tamisari provides an original version of a ‘first contact’ story, based on her own difficult meeting with a family at Milingimbi to whom she subsequently became close. This examination of personal relationships, which are the metaphorical basis of what we call race relations, provides the ground from which we begin to try to unsettle accepted beliefs about their nature. 8

GILLIAN COWLISHAW, EMMA KOWAL AND TESS LEA

Tess Lea examines roads in relation to race. She interrupts our familiar sense that roads are simply functional, physical structures funded by governments to transport people and things in the pursuit of progress, otherwise known as national or private wealth. The meaning of roads becomes clear when they are perceived to be misused in some way. Are roads there to enhance the flourishing of Aboriginal ceremonial life? And does such flourishing interfere with the project of governing Aborigines? Here the anthropological practice of attending to the cultural meaning of things that have not previously been represented gives an unsettling take on social relations. Lea shows how economic and professional activity in the North is sustained by an invisible dependency of the state and state-supported business enterprises on Aboriginal people. The reverse dependency identified by Lea is echoed in Kowal, Redmond, and Batty. Philip Batty describes his involvement in the repatriation of sacred objects from a metropolitan museum to remote communities, where objects with a somewhat ambiguous history encountered contemporary community politics in a ‘white redemption ritual’. Batty argues that these fraught processes of ‘repatriation’ are pervaded by a sense of moral virtue in answering to Indigenous demands, yet are driven by the passions and preferences of white officials and public discourse. They genuflect to Indigenous wishes and whims, but cannot deal with the complex reality of Indigenous people’s relationship with the churingas.14 Both Kowal and Batty describe the fraught nature of different attempts to manufacture distance between contemporary progressivists and past sinners. Emma Kowal demonstrates reverse dependency at work and exposes the workings of ‘culturally appropriate’. She examines the contradictory modes of ‘culture’ discourse—cultural loss, cultural maladaptation and cultural rigidity—and shows how they all share the discursive function of protecting ‘interveners’ from accusations of assimilation. Honouring Indigenous peoples and their knowledge is surely a gesture of goodwill, but in practice it operates as an ideological positioning which satisfies the intervenors rather than the subjects of intervention. Kowal’s description of ‘culture talk’ and Batty’s ‘white redemptive ritual’, are examples of a certain form of recognition with little shift in political power, and arguably little benefit to Indigenous people. Kowal employs culture as an analytic concept to examine how the notion of culture is in fact an artefact of western culture. Sarah Holcombe provides another example of the corruption of gestures of cultural appropriateness. This is in relation to the benefit packages offered by mining companies to Traditional Owners, TOs as they are known locally. She shows how agreements she has been involved in may claim to respond to the desires of Indigenous people, but inevitably channel communities towards engagement with the mainstream economy, and away

DOUBLE BINDS

9

from local or community economies. Drawing on development studies, Holcombe analyses the stark differences in the expectations of TOs and the mining companies they negotiated with. She suggests that ‘pluralism’ offers theoretical possibilities that can move beyond the discourses of ‘culture clash’ commonly drawn on. She further exposes the ways in which policies deemed beneficial to Indigenous people are not so innocent. In this case, they actually shape Aboriginal responses and regulate the communities in unexamined ways. The historical background to Tony Redmond’s essay is the intricate and changing interdependencies between pastoralists, state officials and their goods, and Indigenous people in the Kimberley. Aboriginal workers moved directly from the status of indentured labour to universal rights to welfare payments in the 1970s. They had never fully participated in the wages/prices nexus, which so significantly shapes contemporary non-Indigenous economic and social expectations. Redmond suggests that a service/gift economy has retained a powerful hold amongst these Indigenous people and continues to collide in unpredictable ways with government policy. Local negotiations around the 4WD ‘community’ murtaka, one of the necessities of remote Indigenous settlements, illustrate this condition. Outstation residents attempt to assert their autonomy both from a local ethos of interdependency and from the facile notions of ‘community’ embedded in government policy, thus complicating the ‘unitary consuming identity’ that government grants assume. In the ubiquitous expressive culture of popular music making in Indigenous Central Australia, Åse Ottosson reveals complex and ambiguous entanglements between Indigenous musicians and music educators, artist managers and producers. Through these music workers, the Indigenous musicians engage with governmental and mainstream discourses of ‘culturally appropriate’ development of musical skills, but in ways that are quite at odds with the intentions of governments and the demands of a mainstream music industry. Ottosson illustrates the idea that the social relations in the realm of expressive culture are political relations. The opening up of Australian history has not been simply liberating for Indigenous communities as Gillian Cowlishaw shows. Rather, a version of the history wars is vigorously debated in communities whose ideas about what should be hidden and what exposed differ from those of urban intellectuals. There is an attempt here to apply critical inquiry symmetrically to situations that are currently thought of as either morally correct or morally repugnant. That is, the historical continuity with our predecessors needs to be confronted, rather than interrupted by a stern repudiation of their morals. The practice of quoting our white forebears to show how unenlightened they were is another kind of alibi, a disavowal of what we have inherited. Elizabeth Povinelli explores how incommensurability works within and between Indigenous and legal worlds. Focusing on the changing status of a sacred site over fifteen years, she shows how the indeterminacy of Indigenous 10

GILLIAN COWLISHAW, EMMA KOWAL AND TESS LEA

social worlds collides with the equally indeterminate maze of legislation and bureaucratic process surrounding Indigenous rights and access to land. She argues against a hierarchical approach that denies complexity and attempts to order criss-crossing and shifting social, commercial, legal and bureaucratic interests, particularly where the ‘social’ and ‘historical’ are stripped away from ‘traditional’ Indigenous beliefs. She beckons us instead to ask different kinds of questions about the role of incommensurability, and to imagine a world that dared to accommodate it. This chapter has topical significance in relation to the government’s proposed changes to communal title. Tim Rowse subjects recent Indigenous policy to scrutiny. Current shifts in policy discourse are partly a response to what is widely spoken of as ‘the failure of self-determination’. By tracing the continuities and discontinuities through policies of assimilation, self-determination and since, he shows a more complex condition than simply seeing Howard’s fourth-term policies as a ‘return to assimilation’. He argues that the institutional legacy of the self-determination era, namely the thousands of Indigenous organisations and the statistical archive of Indigenous disadvantage, are irreversible concessions to ‘difference’. He also considers the possibilities and limits of the concept of ‘responsibility’ which frames the current policy turn. Rowse’s essay contrasts with those of Lea and Povinelli, being less a cultural take on politics than a political take on the politics of culture. In a play on the original theme of movement, David Turnbull focuses on the role of geographical boundaries and the way they prescribe and proscribe movement and rationality in western and Indigenous ontologies. He explores the anomaly of the shared border of Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory, and how it was shaped through bureaucratic practice and colonial history. He reveals the instability of the boundaries that legal processes believe to be unambiguous, and the awkward implications of this for the securing of native title land claims. Contrasting understandings underpin incommensurable practices in relation to ownership, country, governance and knowledge. Andrew Lattas examines a series of reviews of Elizabeth Povinelli’s book, The Cunning of Recognition (2002), an original work that represents new directions in Australian Aboriginal anthropology. Lattas argues that the opportunity to take up Povinelli’s challenging ideas is in danger of being lost because of the ungenerous and sometimes misleading reviews that echo earlier dismissals of other new directions in Aboriginal anthropology. It is not that Povinelli’s book is without flaws, but that significant arguments are repeatedly bypassed in favour of minor or less significant aspects, so that the possibility of serious engagement with fresh ideas is lost. Lattas broadens this analysis to describe the way significant theoretical developments in the social sciences have been largely ignored in the analysis of Australian conditions, exemplifying the

DOUBLE BINDS

11

unfortunate way a disciplinary area protects its habits and practices from interlopers, refusing to be moved. This collection complicates the politics of binary constructions like black/white, state/subordinate, or dominant/subaltern. All too easy to enunciate, these categories standardise complex social relationships and freeze them in time. They also invoke a predictable politics. We want history to be taken more seriously in order to recognise the significance of the diachronic, the continuing working of secreted or cloaked elements of the past in the present, the resurgence of the palimpsest and its resistance. Old conceptual categories mould experience by creating frameworks for social relation, through policy, through the law, and through a plethora of institutional practices. Thus we are not just clearing the decks, trying to throw away useless concepts; we also want to see how the power of these concepts to make the world is reproduced. As many contributors to this collection show, adopting a critical Indigenous studies approach makes it possible to shift the analysis to the oscillating power relationship between intervenors (the classically defined realm of power) and the recipients of intervention (the realm where, classically, power intrudes) and thus destabilise the moral and political weightings habitually associated with these terms. Notes 1 2

3

4

5

6

12

http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2005/s1435711.htm, ABC PM program, Thursday, 11 August 2005. Such an argument would pose this moment as merely the end of another thirty-year cycle of Indigenous policy, as new directions are tried and lead to disappointment—protection (1910-1940), assimilation (1940-1970), self-determination (1970-2000). As a consequence this introduction does not attempt to review the relevant literature where there has been a history of attempts to grapple with some of the problems we are focussing on (e.g. Beckett 1988; Collmann 1988; Morris 1989), to extend anthropology’s reach in other ways (e.g. Sansom 2001; Rose 2004) as well as recent efforts to change the terms of analysis (e.g. Austin-Broos 2001; Hinkson & Smith 2005). For example, even Hinkson and Smith’s (2005) recent special issue, that aims to overcome many analytical shortcomings of Australian anthropology, adopts an advocacy stance in its concluding hope that such analyses as they prescribe will help to snuff ideas that Indigenous social problems are in any way related to self-determination policies. For example, the opening quotes are from a prominent Indigenous leader and a non-Indigenous progressive Northern Territory magistrate known for defending Indigenous rights and publicly opposing mandatory detention (Macdonald 2001). Many express fears that if the ‘human right’ to consume alcohol and receive social service benefits is to be modified so that those who abuse these rights lose them, an earlier repressive era will be reinstituted. These fears are real and need answering. However, such critics usually ignore how far these arrangements are responses to community requests (e.g. that destructive community members be controlled by some outside authority), and sometimes deliberately misread what is proposed (e.g. the specific circumstance where parents could lose their benefits). Many urban lawyers and human rights activists, whose fears have a historical source, seem to be trying to protect Indigenous communities GILLIAN COWLISHAW, EMMA KOWAL AND TESS LEA

7

8

9 10

11

12

13

14

from their own ignorance, when the ignorance goes both ways. Members of Indigenous communities express concern over the way current circumstances deny their ‘rights’, but they do not often relate this to human rights law. Many are astonished that the government continues to ‘pay’ people whose destructive behaviour is damaging family, community members and government institutions. It could reasonably be suggested that ideas and practices known as mutual obligation will enhance many people’s human rights—or at least the conditions under which they can claim them—precisely through the diminution of the rights of a few. Rowse (2005) argues that self-determination is the end-point of assimilation, and not its opposite. Self-determination in the 1970s was perceived as a radical liberation from an earlier paternalism, and the associated ideas invaded multiple arenas of Indigenous affairs, from art to academia, from bureaucracies to the business world, including Indigenous bureaucracies and businesses. A plethora of Aboriginal organisations were established; there was formal recognition of Aboriginal culture and rights to land. Targeted education, health and legal services were established. But to be self-determining, Indigenous communities were required to reproduce the symbolic forms of the bureaucratic order, such as representative bodies, committees, local organisations and the subjective allegiance to the principles on which they depend (Cowlishaw 1999). [http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2005/s1435263.htm] This is one of a series of cases where conditions in remote communities have come to the attention of the media and are reported as alarming and intolerable. In this case the magistrate quoted in the preamble was hearing an inquest into the deaths of four petrol sniffers in the one community where parents were begging for outside assistance to stem what appears to be an epidemic of substance abuse. Peter Sutton (2001) has also vigorously drawn attention to the urgency of these problems (c.f. Cowlishaw 2003). [http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2005/s1435263.htm]. It seems easier for those outside the academy to recognise and begin to address these new conditions in books such as Rosemary Neill’s (2002) Whiteout, Ralph Folds’ (2001) Crossed Purposes, Mary Ellen Jordan’s (2005) Balanda, Kim Mahood’s (2000) Craft for a Dry Lake, and Gary Johns’ (2001) Waking up to the Dreamtime. This is not to deny the continual presence of oppositional, ‘right-wing’ discourses that might attribute Indigenous malaise to cultural or genetic inferiority, but (at least for thirty years) these discourses have not been the dominant forces behind policy or public opinion. As it is, the label ‘culturally appropriate’ does not necessarily ensure better practice, but rather, can mean inferior aspirations. Forced to a remedial point, perhaps we should be arguing that schools would do better if they concentrated on their known and familiar purposes rather than adopt some simulacrum of Indigenous cultural practices without altering their underlying cultural/institutional orderings (Lea 2005b). Or alternately, that the ‘right’ of compulsory schooling should be suspended altogether in the absence of guaranteed quality of delivery (see also Holcombe, this volume). There are two ways in which this volume is embarrassingly skewed. Most of the ethnographic material is from the Northern Territory, risking the danger of perpetuating assumptions that Aborigines only exist in the north. We also have called upon Aileen Moreton-Robinson, a critic of white scholarship, to cast an afterword. Her contribution calls attention to the lack of Indigenous scholars in this collection. Indeed, the fact that Indigenous people are markedly absent from anthropology conferences, where this collection had its origin, is something we could usefully think about. His analysis suggests that Barry Hill should not perhaps have taken Strehlow’s account of the Churingas quite so literally (Hill 2002).

DOUBLE BINDS

13

References

Austin-Broos D. 2001, ‘Whose ethics? Which cultural contract? Imagining Arrernte traditions today’, Oceania, 71(3):189-200. Beckett J. 1988, Past and Present: The Construction of Aboriginality, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra. Bhabha H.K. 1994, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London and New York. Collmann J. 1988, Fringe-dwellers and Welfare: The Aboriginal Response to Bureaucracy, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia. Cowlishaw G. 1999, Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas: A Study of Racial Power and Intimacy in Australia, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Cowlishaw G. 2003, ‘Disappointing Indigenous people: violence and the refusal of help’, Public Culture, 15(1):103-25. Dyer P. 2005, ‘Call to Stop Long-grassers' Dole’, Northern Territory News, Thursday, 16 June, p. 5. Edmond G. 2004, ‘Thick decisions: expertise, advocacy and reasonableness in the Federal Court of Australia’, Oceania, 74(3):190-230. Folds R. 2001, Crossed Purposes: The Pintupi and Australia’s Indigenous Policy, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney. Gilroy P. 2000, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Gupta A. and Ferguson J. eds. 1997, ‘Beyond “culture”: space, identity and the politics of difference’, in Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, Duke University Press, Durham, pp. 33-51. Hill B. 2002, Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession, Knopf, Sydney. Hinkson M. and Smith B. eds. 2005, ‘Figuring the intercultural in Aboriginal Australia’, Oceania, 75(3):183-94. Johns G. ed. 2001, Waking up to Dreamtime: The Illusion of Aboriginal Self-Determination, Media Masters, Singapore. Jordan M.E. 2005, Balanda: My Year in Arnhem Land, Allen and Unwin, Sydney. Kowal E. and Paradies Y. 2005, ‘Ambivalent helpers and unhealthy choices: public health practitioners’ narratives of Indigenous ill-health’, Social Science and Medicine, 60(6):1347-57. Land C. and Vincent E. 2005, ‘Thinking for ourselves’, New Matilda Magazine, Wednesday, 29 June (44). [24 November 2005]. Lea T. 2005a, ‘The work of forgetting: germs, Aborigines and postcolonial expertise in the Northern Territory of Australia’, Social Science and Medicine, 61(6):1310-9. Lea T. 2005b, ‘Learning lessons: a retrospective’, in Culture, Economy and Governance in Aboriginal Australia, eds D. Austin-Broos and G. MacDonald, Sydney University Press, Sydney. Macdonald J. 2001, ‘Judges blast sentence law’, The Age, 17 February, p. 1.

14

GILLIAN COWLISHAW, EMMA KOWAL AND TESS LEA

Mahood K. 2000, Craft for a Dry Lake, Anchor, Sydney. McKnight D. 2005, Beyond Left and Right, Allen and Unwin, Sydney. Morris B. 1989, Domesticating Resistance: The Dhangadi Aborigines and the Australian State, Berg, Oxford. Neill R. 2002, White Out: How Politics is Killing Black Australia , Allen and Unwin, Sydney. Olivier de Sardan, J.-P. 2005, Anthropology and Development: Understanding Contemporary Cultural Change, Zed Books, London and New York. Pearson N. 2001, ‘Rebuilding indigenous communities’, in The Enabling State: People Before Bureaucracy, eds P. Botsman and M. Latham, Pluto Press, Sydney, pp. 132-47. Pearson N. 2004, ‘Bending to dysfunction, bending to the problems’, 11 February, Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership, Cairns. [19 November 2005]. Pearson N. 2005, ‘A blunt message: Pearson states his case in Dubbo’, Koori Mail, interview by Steve Hodder, Wednesday July 13, p. 19. Povinelli E. 2002, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism, Duke University Press, Durham. Rose D.B. 2004, Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney. Rowse T. 2005, ‘Introduction. Contesting assimilation’, in Contesting Assimilation, ed T. Rowse, API Network, Perth, pp. 1-24. Sansom B. 2001, ‘Irruptions of the dreamings in post-colonial Australia’, Oceania, 72(1):1-32. Sutton P. 2001, ‘The politics of suffering: Indigenous policy in Australia since the 1970s’, Anthropological Forum, 11(2):125-73.

DOUBLE BINDS

15