Australian Journal of Anthropology最新文献

Drawing on recent participant observation-based data from the Northern Territory's Victoria River region, I propose that the coercive and custodial arms of the settler state are predominant features of, and constant and permanent forces of rupture in, remote Aboriginal life. I use the term ‘carceral spectres’ to describe the ways hyperincarceration and hyperpolicing shape, disturb and, in particular, ‘haunt’ Aboriginal life, people, places and things. This framework has implications for the ways we might think about the multi-faceted impacts of the radical incarceration rates of Indigenous people in Australia, and the experience of life in the context of ongoing colonial occupation and pervasive carcerality.

In November 2019, members of Willowra community marched on the local police station in protest against the police shooting of Kumunjayi Walker at Yuendumu. Expressing solidarity with family at Yuendumu, individuals breached the barbwire fence of the vacant police compound. Unlike settlements such as Yuendumu, which have had resident police for decades, Willowra police station is 1 of 18 Northern Territory ‘Taskforce Themis’ stations set up as a temporary measure during the 2007 Intervention. Although the police presence is recent and inconstant, Lander Warlpiri Anmatyerr people have long experienced the agonistic effects of police authority in their region—beginning in 1928 with the gunning down of their relatives by Constable Murray and his accomplices during the Coniston Massacre. No charges were laid against these murderers, a reflection of the moral economy and ‘politics of life’ of settler society at the time. Although policies have changed, the past reverberates in the present, as people find creative ways to survive the effects of totalising state institutions and punitive regimes. Furthermore, while locals might back a police presence at Willowra, they continue to assert the importance of Warlpiri Law. This paper reflects upon narratives and events that illuminate local perceptions of police and their role in the community over time. In the course of this account, the focus shifts from policing to people's hopes that unbearable situations might improve, as they use shields both as object and metaphor to deflect the weapons of the state and maintain the Warlpiri socio-moral order.

This afterword reflects upon the not guilty verdict and the media reportage that followed the conclusion of the murder trial of Constable Zachary Rolfe. After the lifting of media embargoes, a plethora of new material was delivered into the public domain. Much of this material was forensic and voyeuristic in approach, dedicated to expanding the narrative of endemic physical violence in Kumunjayi Walker's background while humanizing and heroising the police officer acquitted of his murder. Rendered invisible were the long and brutal history of colonial policing, as well as more recent and particular shifts in the culture and intensity of carceral practice in the Northern Territory. Kumunjayi Walker's shooting occurred at the culmination of the systematic displacement of Warlpiri authority by an endless horizon of securitised governance.

In this paper, I argue that the rhetoric and discharge of state mental health care provisions in the wake of the police shooting of Kumunjayi Walker reflect the logic of elimination that underpins settler-colonial societies. Firstly, the use of emotional politics and the diplomacy of sympathy transform the police shooting of an Aboriginal man into a simple loss of life. Secondly, the deployment of psychological services to the community specifically and only for secondary trauma victims not only erased Warlpiri trauma and foregrounded non-Indigenous trauma, it also positioned Warlpiri people as the cause of non-Indigenous trauma. Lastly, I explore how narratives in the mental health care sector regarding the state response simultaneously critique and reproduce settler-colonial elimination. As an arm of the settler-colonial state, the sector cannot help but be complicit in the ongoing elimination of indigeneity and is not exceptional as a sector in this way. Settler-colonial attempts at care are inherently characterised by this conflict of interest, which, if there is any way to resolve it, requires a depth of critical reflection beyond politically progressive narratives.

This article is an ethnographic exploration of the construction of far-right rhetoric in Brazil. It begins with a description of events on the final day of the 2018 election, when Jair Messias Bolsonaro won the presidency. To contextualise this scene, I analyse how far-right rhetoric was articulated in the Brazilian public sphere from June 2013 until 2018, specifically in the state of Rio de Janeiro, through a series of key events that were fundamental in constructing far-right identity claims and collective mobilisation into an anti-corruption and militarised rhetoric in the electoral campaign. The article shows the importance of these specific events in developing what became the ‘Bolsonarist rhetoric’—or Bolsonarismo—as part of a broader international politics of disaffection.

This paper tackles the concept of alterity through an embodied perspective. By questioning my lived experience of cancer and how illness—as a disruptive event (Carel, 2008, 2016, 2021)—enables philosophical reflection and the exploration of ‘other’ ways of being-in-the-world (Merleau-Ponty  2012 [1945]), I ask if an embodied ‘chimeric-thinking’ can be used to question established notions of alterity and reshape our relationship with ‘otherness’ (Leistle 2015, 2016b). Building on a phenomenological approach to illness (Carel 2012, 2014, 2016, 2021), and a feminist post-humanist approach (Haraway 1990, 1991, 2016), I present a case in which an autoethnographic and phenomenological approach focused on embodied experience may help revise dominant perspectives, providing access to understanding and engaging with profound biopsychosocial and somatic transformations.