Australian Journal of Anthropology最新文献

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.

Koori Radio was founded in Redfern in 1993 as an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander radio station. Its aim was to give a voice to these communities, acting as a counterpoint to their stereotyped representation in mainstream media and promoting their creative practices (especially music). Rather than ‘thinking only Aboriginal’, it has increasingly embraced the ongoing multicultural diversity of modern Sydney, as well as re-articulating Aboriginality with transnational Indigeneity and Blackness. A Koori Radio worker explained this change as ‘a Black thing of people of colour who have the same struggles and understand each other’. This approach has not been without controversy, with many activists calling for greater emphasis on Aboriginal identity and specific struggles. Ethnographic research at Koori Radio shows, however, that the connections made between different communities have enhanced, rather than diminished, the capacity of Koori Radio to fulfill its objectives.

This paper is drawn from ethnographically informed research undertaken in 2016‒2017 pertaining to the planned modernisation of two large-scale irrigation schemes in Bangladesh, funded by the Asian Development Bank. The research confirms existing critical irrigation anthropology on the politics and power of large-scale irrigation modernisation and related drive to privatisation. The modernisation of the scheme aimed to increase water, energy and agricultural productivity and to include a new higher-level irrigation management service. Irrigation, it is argued, also has considerable social consequences because it defines specific patterns of cooperation and conflict in serviced agricultural areas. The modernisation of the scheme overlooked socio-cultural, political and ethnoecological considerations largely due to complex institutional constraints and the existing social modalities of power. In the field, using the anthropological method, information was generated in order to better understand the various stakeholder perceptions of the modernisation program and advise on practical implementations. In particular, the research noted how and in what manner dominant and influential social and political alliances control these complex waterscapes.