Australian Journal of Anthropology最新文献

Anthropologists have been assisting in the identification of ‘traditional owners’ in Northern Territory land claims for 50 years. This is becoming a lesser part of their workload as most outstanding claims have now been resolved. A key element of traditional ownership as statutorily defined is the ‘local descent group’. This phrase arose in anthropological analyses of Aboriginal society, but was introduced as a criterion of traditional ownership into the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. This paper considers the importance for applied anthropology of recognising the differences as well as links between statutorily recognised local descent groups and Indigenous understandings of relationships to land, especially as we move further in time from the land claims in which particular groups were originally described. Throughout history, abstract categories for people (such as ‘local descent group’) have been used in ways that direct the physical flow of populations through institutions, leading to what Anderson (1991, p. 169) has termed ‘traffic-habits’ that ‘gave real social life to the state's earlier fantasies’. Based on my direct experience as a land council anthropologist, I argue that the contemporary form of many of the local descent groups with which the land councils consult is at least partially the result of ‘traffic-habits’ that reify the ‘demographic topographies’ that exist in claim documents and meeting reports. In this context, ethnographic analysis of the political and institutional aspects of Aboriginal lives is required for applied anthropologists to deliver sound advice as to how local descent groups operate.

My studies in the Northern Territory/Queensland border region of Australia's Gulf Country indicate continuing tense negotiations among Waanyi/Garawa people concerning the inclusion/exclusion of particular persons as traditional owners and recipients of benefits from various economic ventures. Despite commonly expressed Indigenous views that stress the importance of sustaining continuity of traditional ‘law’, this points to the importance of addressing change, as assuming that the model of traditional ownership articulated in a land claim 40 years ago will not undergo modification would be naïve. Subsequent generations have come to define connections to Country more flexibly than the earlier documented system of inheritance through patrilines and mother's patrilines. Native title, land claims, and mining negotiations on the Queensland side of the border have influenced this outcome. I address risks of legal rigidification of customary law driven by the practical availability of the original Northern Territory land rights research. That earlier completed work has become a focus for appeals to cultural authenticity and strategic traditionalism among Indigenous protagonists fuelled in part by competition for money and related resources. While research such as mine from the 1980s remains essential in decision-making, it needs to be updated and approached with a methodology open to the significance of cultural change. This difficult area of anthropological work deserves more analytical attention, recognition, and support.

Indigenous communities and Australian state museums appear to have settled into a truce that might best be described by Hennessy et al.'s (2013) notion of a ‘philosophy of repatriation’. This means that, after failed repatriation arguments, distance remains at the heart of the dynamic between descendant communities and their museum-stored artefacts. In the following paper, I present two stories of North Queensland Indigenous people who visited their rainforest artefacts in state museums. I conceptualise ancestralised objects as wild artefacts, where wild is invoked in two related senses. Primarily, artefacts are like wild Country: unvisited and unstable. Moreover, they are wild as in the Aboriginal English sense of wild: angry at an injustice and potentially dangerous. Artefacts might simply remain wild. Yet if North Queensland artefacts can be kept closer to Country, in regional museums for instance, this would assist the descendant community to achieve ameliorating contact and care.

Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic research in Bangladesh, I analyse how the COVID-19 pandemic intersected with the global and local healthcare markets in 2020 to shape public health governance affecting public health interests, needs, and lives. In the early phase, misuse of administrative power and corruption among bureaucrats, local government representatives, and political leaders became apparent in Bangladesh. It fostered public and private health catastrophes, exposing some of the fraudulence in medical equipment provision and the treatment of COVID-19 disease. Due to the state's denial, citizens were deprived of local low-cost solutions (e.g. rapid antigen test kits) for early infection detection. Engaging the concept of disaster capitalism, I argue that the elusive role of the state, the politicised ground of health governance, and the medicine market combined with corruption in public and private sectors ultimately benefited private corporations rather than the urgent health needs of Bangladeshis.

In Australia, people seeking refuge receive differing material and financial support depending on their status as an asylum seeker or refugee. Aside from statutory support, other community-based support is delivered mostly by non-government organisations and is typically funded by government grants. Securing funding is critical for the ongoing sustainability and survival of many organisations. However, much funding in the refugee and asylum seeker support sector is only available for services adhering to donor-determined funding agreements and narrowly defined programs with measurable criteria and strict reporting requirements. This paper examines the effects of these workplace technologies of governmentality, audit, and compliance, on workers within government-funded community-based support organisations in South Australia, drawing on ethnographic research undertaken during 2019 and 2020. This paper argues that significant transactional and moral burdens arise from funding and workplace governmentality, impacting organisational legitimacy and mission. Support organisations must be attuned to this and factor this knowledge into choices about their funding mix and operations.

This paper focuses on how land and trees are ‘rendered technical’ in Suau, Papua New Guinea through the Central Suau Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation Pilot Project and Save the Forest conservation projects. These climate change mitigation interventions apply tools—such as Incorporated Land Groups, maps, and satellite imagery—to make environments measurable and valuable, thereby generating ‘frictions’ between different ways of being and knowing. Through ethnographic accounts of land disputes, we highlight how these tools conflict with the ways that people in Suau relate to and look after their environments. As processes of rendering technical work to recognise and exclude certain forest uses and users, this produces frictions that impact on local livelihoods and matrilineal land tenure systems. Employing the concepts of rendering technical and friction together provides a situated framework for extending attention from distributional and procedural elements of land disputes to consider ethical and ontological layers.

Australia has made no treaties with its Indigenous peoples. Despite that, over the past five decades (the ‘land rights era’ of the title), Australia has granted proportionally more land area to Indigenous interests than have other, treaty-making Anglo settler colonies (Canada, the United States, New Zealand). Despite complexities of comparison by area, an order of difference is clearly discernible. After comparing these countries, this article examines legal and political changes involved in the transformation from no ‘Indigenous estate’ in Australia to a comparatively large one, and sketches the role anthropologists have played in land and native title claims which has enlarged the Indigenous estate. Subsequent articles in this issue treat the kinds of change that anthropologists, in their commitment to close ethnographic work, have been observing at this intersection of law and anthropology. This article concludes by considering directions in which land and native title claims seem to be moving.